Category: Reckoning 8

Monica Wendel

Of course the planes weren’t going to explode on their way to JFK. But we liked watching them just in case.

“Don’t you remember on 9-11, how they said that the buildings were bombed?” King asked.

“You remember 9-11?” King had that look in his green eyes, dreamy yet determined, that I’d known since high school. The look when he declared that mushrooms were fertilized by dead fish, and therefore were not vegetarian, much less vegan. Or the look when he announced that the Ant Liberation Front (ALF) was responsible for the release of Mr. Murphy’s ant colonies.

King turned to face me, leaning on his side. “I remember 9-11. I remember tons of stuff from that age. When I was two I fell down the stairs and peed blood in my diaper. I remember my mom changing it.”

I didn’t believe him, but I liked pretending. “There’s another one,” I said, pointing at the sky.

The plane was low, and in the early morning light its belly looked soft and pink as a puppy’s. King took my hand as I lifted it, and pinned it gently to the roof. The black tar held April’s warmth. I knew what he wanted: he wanted to fuck one more time before the sun came up. He liked racing against time, running late, and he liked almost being caught.

But King didn’t ask me to have sex. He held my hand and looked at me for a long time as we listened to an ambulance call down Flushing Ave on the way to Woodhull Hospital. We had been up all night together, and his eyes were as pink as the bellies of the planes. I listened to the unguarded silence the siren left behind, and wondered what he was seeing. Then King spoke. “Belle, do you want to come to Marion with me?”

That was the thing about King. On the J train he put his hands up my skirt, and in the Chicken Hut he wanted me to touch him by the wall while everyone else danced to Big Freida. And when I didn’t want to he told me about the girls who did want to, who had done it, at some point in college or high school, way before we started: Katie and Olivia, Meredith and the other Belle. He liked telling me how good it was with them. Which was why he wanted to do it with me. “Who’s Marion?”

“Illinois. Where Darius is,” he said, his face hardening at the sound of his brother’s name.

“The jail?”

“The prison.”

“Oh,” I said, searching his face and trying to understand why he was asking me. “Umm, I don’t know. When?”

King leaned over me and checked his phone. “He’s being released in six weeks, and it’s a two-day drive. We’d leave on May 20th.”

“I can’t,” I said, relieved. “I have my final teaching practicum then.”

“So do it online,” King said, loosening his grip on my hand.

“The schools will be open by then,” I said. “Right? I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go in. Do you want to ask, like, Tatiana?” Tatiana was my roommate, and besides being prettier than me, she was also much, much smarter.

“Maybe, Belle.” He checked something on his phone. “It could be, you know. Kind of an adventure.”

I took a breath and tried to connect myself to him. My head never worked right around King; I was too swept up in the ocean of him. We’d met in high school and orbited each other for years, never quite part of the same friend group. I’d see his green eyes across a flood of people in the cafeteria and something deep inside me would bend; water shaping itself over the continental shelf. “Maybe,” I said. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be weird?”

“Why would it be weird?” King pulled his shirt on. “I should get going.”

“Okay.” Another siren sang down Flushing. It felt like they never stopped. “I’ll see you later.”

 

King left, and I logged onto Google Classroom. My students didn’t have the resources to log on to the classroom at certain times, so everything was asynchronous.

There wasn’t much to do. Yesterday, in the bitterness of isolation, I had made a week’s worth of worksheets and uploaded them. I’d also made a video about how to make an abstract drawing and uploaded it to YouTube and Google Classroom. It wasn’t clear if any of them had watched it. If they even could watch it.

How long would this last? I looked out the window onto the driveway, feeling inside me the loneliness that only the classroom took away. There was a buzzing warmth to elementary schools, to kids, that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

And so I missed the kids—not just missed them, but missed them, physically. I missed their skinny arms and the way their bellies paunched out. I missed the way they couldn’t say “R”s, and I missed the way they talked while they ate, with their hands pinwheeling and their eyes growing huge with concentration.

But I didn’t have any theory to back up my feelings. King, Tatiana, the people they introduced me to—they all stood for something. They all had purpose. They believed in anarchofeminism, and ecoprimitivism; they knew the intricacies of squatting. They could tell you what was wrong, and their theories could explain why, and then they had a solution. Meanwhile, I was scrounging for new markers and debating the best size of crayons for three-year-old fingers. I was wiping muffin crumbs off sticky faces and giving hugs. I didn’t know if I was fixing any problems or making them worse; I didn’t know if I was showing kids love or teaching them how to obey a fucked-up institution.

The closest I came to believing in something was believing in King. Following him into dumpsters. Helping him organize fundraisers for his brother. Serving drinks at the performance space at the John Bosch House.

Tatiana interrupted my wallowing. “Hey,” she said, leaning against the door. “You working right now?”

I looked at the screen. The cursor blinked on an empty Google Doc. My whole fucking life depended on Google. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking about making a podcast that the kids could listen to.”

“Come to my office with me,” Tatiana said, her Russian accent as crisp as my parents’. “I’m going to 3D print masks.”

I stared at her for a second. She wore all black and dyed her dirty blonde hair black, too. But you wouldn’t know that unless you lived with her. I was the only one who saw her roots. “Seriously?”

She nodded. “Hammer is providing us with the supplies. You can use his bike because it has a trailer. We’ll ride the plastics there, print them using the code, and give them to Woodhull.”

I looked at her and blinked, wondering, for a moment, what it would be like to be heroic. To be Hammer and know how to steal from Home Depot. To be Tatiana and know how to 3D print masks. To be King and drive across the continent to pick up Darius. To be anyone, anybody, but myself. “Are we taking the Williamsburg Bridge or the Manhattan?”

“Williamsburg,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, closing out of the Google Doc. “Just let me get dressed.”

We called our house the John Bosch House because of some tiled lettering on the front stoop, but it was really two houses. The main house had seven bedrooms over three floors, a classic Brooklyn brownstone. We lived in the garage behind and to the side of it, Tatiana and I upstairs, and Hammer downstairs, next to the performance space. Before the pandemic, it had felt like one house. In the mornings, I would leave my door open before leaving to student teach, and Hammer would come in at 6 am, just as he was coming home. We took turns bringing home dumpstered juice and Whole Foods treats.

But with the pandemic, we had cleaved. Or maybe I had.

Tatiana and I unlocked our bikes from the performance space and pushed off down Willoughby Avenue. We rode slowly, pacing ourselves, pulling the heavy supplies on trailers on our bikes. The Williamsburg Bridge crested, and without speaking, we nodded at each other and stopped at the top.

The J train passed by, rattling the bridge. I hoped no one else would be riding near us. What if someone came too close and we breathed in their air? Below, the water was choppy and green; above, the sky gray and damp.

Tatiana took out a water bottle, and I checked my phone. We had one downhill to get to Delancey, then it was flat crosstown, then the hills of the Upper West Side, then Tatiana’s office at Columbia. Tatiana noticed me looking at my phone. “Did you see what King posted?” she asked.

“No,” I said, my stomach sinking. I opened up Instagram. Photo dump, his caption read. I scrolled through the ten photos. There were the bare branches of the tree you could see from outside my window, not filtered black-and-white, but looking desaturated in a cloudy sky. Empty Times Square.

And Tatiana.

Tatiana on the other side of a dumpster, their hands reaching for the same apple. Tatiana on our roof, staring up at the planes. A screenshot of Tatiana facilitating a prison support Zoom meeting. I swiped right, and right again. Finally, I appeared on the last slide—our ankles, tangled together. “When did you guys hang out on the roof?”

Tatiana put her phone away and closed her water bottle. “I’m not sure. It might have been when you were in Florida.”

Fucking Florida. I had my cousin’s wedding in West Palm Beach in February, during midwinter break. “Oh, that’s cool.” My hands were shaking. I rubbed them on my shorts and stared at the holes in my black tights.

“Is it, though?” Tatiana laughed. “We went to the fundraiser at the Knockdown Center. It took forever to get back. The bus never came, and we had to walk the whole way home.”

I looked down at the East River. King must have slept over; where else would he have slept? But did he sleep on the floor, or in Tatiana’s bed?

It always felt easy to distance myself from my body while having sex with King. It felt better that way. He was attentive, but also precise; I couldn’t help feeling, while we were having sex, that I could be anyone; that the basic anatomy was the same from person to person, and what he was doing wasn’t so different.

But sleeping in bed together felt different. That was when I could look at him and see him vulnerable, his eyelids turning purple-ish. The moments when he didn’t have to be King of anything. It took a long time before he fell asleep with me. I loved the gentleness of his breathing, and how he slept with his arms crossed, as though he were covering himself.

The thought of him having sex with Tatiana was not so bad. I had already accepted it. But the thought of him sleeping in bed with her felt like a betrayal.

I kicked the pedal of Hammer’s bike and watched it spin in the air, moving but going nowhere. “I might go to Illinois with him. To pick up his brother from prison.”

Tatiana nodded slowly. “You better prepare yourself. Prison is another world.”

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t.

She leaned over the bridge. “What about your students?”

I laughed an empty laugh. It sounded more like a cough, which then, of course, freaked me out. “I didn’t just cough,” I said. The waters lapped at the feet of the bridge. “I haven’t really been able to get in touch with them. They’re too young to have laptops or phones. Some of them have tablets. There’s not really much you can do through a screen.”

“You just seem so happy when you’re teaching.” For some reason her accent kicked in strong, and each syllable was musical. “Is there any other way you can connect with them?”

“I don’t know.” And it felt, then, like my students had sailed off somewhere, had been abandoned. That I had abandoned them. I shook my head. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll try to figure something out.” I put my foot on the pedal. “Wanna keep riding?”

 

“The world won’t end,” said King. “Humans will end.”

We were in a lush Pennsylvania hollow, one of those places where the Allegheny mountains dip into valley. “You don’t think that humans will destroy the earth?” I asked. The green outside was encompassing but fragile, a mist that might dissolve at any moment.

King scoffed at this. “With any luck, humans will kill each other and the dolphins will take over.”

“Unless we kill all the dolphins first.” I gazed at his profile. “Wait, really? You think the world will be okay?”

“If you were on a life raft, and it was you and a cow and two other people, who would you throw off the life raft?”

I knew this was a trick question. “The cow.”

“See?” He thumped the steering wheel with his hand. “But the cow won’t kill anyone. The people on the life raft would kill animals. The cow wouldn’t.”

“That’s true,” I said. “So do you not like people?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think their lives are worth more than any other lives.”

The rolling hills were making me nauseated—that, and I was expecting my period. Today, or if not today, tomorrow. We’d been on the road now for five hours and we were making terrible time. First, King was late picking me up. Then he wanted to see the field hospital set up in Central Park. Then we hit construction outside of Harrisburg. “I have to puke.”

“Again?”

Right. That was the other thing making us late.

The car rumbled to the side of the road, and I sprinted out to the tree line. Only bile was left in my stomach. I sat down, dizzy, and took a sip of ginger ale. Tears came to my eyes, but I brushed them away. I was supposed to be helping King, not having him take care of me.

My hands shook. I felt like shit.

“You okay?” King asked when I made it back to the car.

I nodded. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said, but his voice was flat.

He pulled out onto I-76, and I willed my stomach to calm down. “What were we talking about?”

“I dunno,” he said, chewing his lip, suddenly looking worried.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It’s just—I haven’t been in a car in a long time—and—”

“It’s not that.” He took his hat off and put it on the dashboard.

“Oh,” I said, wondering, then what it was.

“Did you know that Darius has a job already?”

It was weird to hear King call his brother Darius. This whole time, he’d existed as part of King, like one of King’s limbs—or a phantom limb. Missing but felt. Always present, but invisible. “Wasn’t that part of his release? Like the condition of release?”

King’s face was tight and twisted. “He’s doing PR for the ACLU.”

“Isn’t that—isn’t that—” I took a sip of ginger ale. “I mean, isn’t that a good thing?”

“It’s not fair,” said King.

“Of course not,” I said, reassuringly. “He should never have been in prison.”

“Not that.” King sped up and passed a double tractor trailer. “That now he has a job. And I’m still stuck in the same place I’ve always been.”

“You want a job?”

“He’s coming out of prison and he’s got a support network, he’s got people rooting for him, he’s got me coming to pick him up. And I’ve spent the last three years making all that happen. What do I have to show for it? Nothing.”

I thought back to the benefit show I had helped King put on in the performance space. Booking bands, buying alcohol, counting bills at the end of the night. And that was on top of King’s GoFundMe. “You’ve done so much for him.”

“My parents’ house is double mortgaged to pay for his lawyer. They do everything for him. And I’m expected to do more.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, lamely.

“Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if it had been me in prison.”

“Are you . . . jealous? That he’s in jail?”

I didn’t mean for my tone to sound accusatory, but King grew silent, a silence I could only read as anger. Finally he spoke. “I thought you’d understand, Belle.” We rolled over more hills. “And it’s prison, not jail.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. There was nothing to say. I looked out for a signpost, any sign, besides mile markers. I remembered when the feds were first investigating Darius. They subpoenaed all the electronics in King’s house, so he lost his laptop our senior year of high school. He had to write his papers in the library. He never told me that; I found it out through friends.

And that was how all the information came. Rumors, drips, texts. Sometimes facts drifted to the surface: an article in NPR about Darius’s case and what it meant for the Earth First! movement, or King quoted in the New York Times about his brother’s gentle nature.

“If I had been in prison instead of him, what would we be?”

“What would . . . who be?”

“Us,” said King. “Would we be together?”

I stared out the window, but the mountains gave me no answers. Were we together now? But I knew what he meant. He wasn’t my partner, but he wasn’t my nothing, either. We were something, even if we hadn’t defined it. I tried to picture myself organizing a GoFundMe, planning a concert fundraiser, posting pictures and updates from prison. I tried to picture myself being that person—King’s person. I tried to picture myself and King together without his physical presence. Without sleeping in bed together, and waking up together. Without his fingers on my thigh, and my hands reaching.

Would I have waited for him? For how long?

Would I go three years without sex? Would I schedule my life around his phone calls? Would I go to Marion, IL every other month to see him for a few hours two days in a row?

I glanced over at King, his olive skin and strong features. His parents were outsiders in Belle Harbor, Persian Jews who somehow didn’t make it over the Gil Hodges Bridge to Brooklyn. My parents, the few times they saw him, asked me if he was an Arab. I decided to lie. “Yeah,” I said. “You’d be getting sick of me sending you letters,” I joked. “And books.”

King relaxed into the seat cushions. Then he reached out and took my hand as I asked him to pull over, once again.

 

That night, King wanted to have sex in the hotel room, but I was spotting. “It’s light,” I said, relieved.

“I don’t care,” he said.

And then he was bloody, and I pretended it was my first time.

 

King fell asleep, and I touched the blood that had flowed out from me when we had sex. It didn’t look like normal period blood. Have my period but the blood looks weird, I googled. Nothing about pregnancy came up. So I was probably not pregnant. I put my phone away and looked at King’s face.

The first time I slipped into a dumpster with King, I couldn’t believe the sense of possibility. Here was capitalism, wealth; here were $8 juices still sealed. And just beyond, I could make out the Manhattan skyline.

If he had been in prison, not Darius, then I would have a sense of purpose, I thought. I would know what was right and what was wrong. Because right now, I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t an ecoprimitivist; I didn’t want a world where kids died from cancer because we were against technology. And I wasn’t an anarchist; hadn’t Occupy Wall Street dissolved? Some of the older activists had been part of that, and when they talked about it, I wondered, if it was so wonderful, so powerful, why it hadn’t changed anything. Why we weren’t doing it again.

And I wasn’t a socialist, either. Because the services that were supposed to help my students hurt them—like the homeless shelters, and ACS. In Bed-Stuy, when I saw those wheat pasted black signs that said they separate kids from their parents in Brooklyn, too—I found myself nodding. Fuck liberalism. Fuck the idea that the government is going to help you.

But who was I if I didn’t believe in anything? It made me nothing. A shadow of King. A sidekick. A housewife in training decorating a Pinterest-ready classroom.

King rolled over in his sleep, and I looked at his body. I felt addicted to it, wanting him even as he slept. Was my emptiness how he liked me—why he liked me? Maybe this was the answer. He could fill me, over and over again, and pour me out, and I would fit the shapes that he wanted.

I went to the bathroom. The blood was already gone. I tried not to think about what that meant. If it meant anything at all.

 

“Sir, I cannot let you in.” The prison guard slapped King’s driver’s license down. “This license expired two years ago.” Her mask hung loosely around her chin.

King’s jaw set. I watched a vein pop out of his forehead. “We need to secure his release.”

“Sir.” The word was a whole sentence, saying everything. “I cannot release Inmate 56835 to you without a valid form of identification. If you cannot provide me with identification, there is nothing that I can do.”

“I have something,” I said. “I have ID.”

The guard swung her head slowly. “Ma’am, you are not on the approved list.”

King scrolled through his phone. “Here is a copy of my passport,” he said, holding the phone up to the plexiglass barrier.

The guard’s eyes flickered over the screen. “I cannot accept a copy of a ID. You need the original.”

King’s eyes bored into hers. “We drove two days to get here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” She did not sound sorry.

“Is there any way I can get on the approved list?” I asked. King rolled his eyes. I guess I said something dumb.

The guard almost looked sympathetic. “Ma’am, the list needed to be submitted six weeks in advance in order for the Department of Corrections to run the necessary background check.”

“So what now?” King broke in.

The guard looked at me, and I tried to look as harmless as possible. “If no one is authorized for the release, then Darius will depart today in a prison van for the Greyhound Station and will be provided with a ticket to his destination as well as $40 to cover incidentals.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

King visibly flinched. “Where’s the Greyhound Station?”

“It’s fine,” I said, touching his arm. “I can find it on my phone.”

“You have a blessed day, ma’am,” said the guard. “Next!”

We walked out of the prison into the blistering sunlight. Endless fields stretched around us, the earth made industrial. Monotonous fields of corn and alfalfa. Feed for animals, fertilized by—by what? Some chemical brew from Monsanto. I hated the Midwest. I searched on my phone. “Here,” I said, pushing my phone into King’s hands. “The Greyhound Station is only a ten minute drive. We can go there and wait for your brother.”

King dropped his head into his hands. “Fuck. Fuck!” He kicked a tire.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Look. We’ll go to the bus station. It can’t be that big. We’ll find Darius. We’ll bring him the food we brought. And we’ll drive straight home.”

King spoke through clenched teeth. “You mean drop him off at the halfway house.”

“Yeah. Exactly. And the halfway house is right near my place. So you’ll be able to see him . . . whenever.” I shook the brown bag we had, which unfortunately sounded like I was shaking treats at a dog. “His food is right here. He’ll be really happy to see us.”

“This better work, Belle.”

How is this my fault? “We don’t have another choice.”

At the Greyhound Station, we waited, we waited, we waited. I stood outside, hoping that sunlight killed Covid, trying not to think of the crowded air of the prison van. And then the van appeared, and I ran inside and grabbed King, and he ran out.

The men filed out of the vehicle wearing nondescript clothes. The clothes they came in with—blue jeans, t-shirts, some of them carrying sweatshirts and winter coats, wearing Timberland Boots. They were mixed, some Black, some white, some Hispanic, some looking Middle Eastern. And then King took a step forward, and there was Darius. They hugged, and I glimpsed his face before it disappeared into the warmth of King’s shoulder.

The hug lasted too long. King was supporting Darius.

Darius lifted his face, and King spoke. “Darius, this is my friend, Belle. She drove with me.”

“Hi,” I said, waving one hand a little bit.

Darius nodded at me. His face looked like King’s, but white and gaunt while King’s was olive and filled out. His breathing was shallow, open-mouthed. “I remember you.” His neck strained. It took a moment for him to fill his lungs with air to breathe out his words. “You wrote me letters from the tree.”

“Umm, no,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”

He nodded again, and King steered him towards the car. “Here’s some food, man.”

Darius looked inside approvingly. “This looks great. Thanks.”

But he didn’t eat any. He sat in the car and put the bag by his feet, then leaned his head back.

We drove east. Sometimes Darius coughed. There was a strange energy in the car. I had expected to feel love, warmth, closeness, gratitude—something big, something to fill up the space. Instead the car felt more empty. This was it? This was their reunion?

“Just let me know if you want to stop, man,” said King.

“Thanks,” said Darius. And then they were silent for another five miles, punctuated only by Darius’s coughs.

“We were planning on driving straight through,” King said, breaking the silence.

“Sure,” said Darius.

From the backseat, I tried to see Darius’s breathing. And then I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Darius,” I asked through my mask, “do you have Covid?”

He shrugged. “I got sick about a month ago. The doctor gave me some cough drops. I didn’t take them, though. They contained honey.”

“And—you’ve been sick this whole time?” King was trying to make eye contact with me in the rearview mirror, but I resisted. Darius didn’t say anything. “Darius, can you breathe?”

He gave a depressing chuckle.

Now I found King’s eyes. “King, maybe we should go to the hospital.”

King tightened his grip on the wheel. “No.”

“Why?”

Darius spoke. “Belle, it’s really nice of you.” He paused to breathe. “I don’t have health insurance.”

“So what?” I said. “It’s your life.”

“Hospitals are just there to make money,” said King. “They don’t do anything except watch you die.”

“King, my mom is a doctor.”

He paused, then said icily, “Don’t you think that proves my point?”

I flinched. “Fuck you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do about this,” I said. “Darius, you need help.”

“I’m fine,” he mumbled.

“See?” said King. “He’s fine.”

“He’s not fine.”

Still the fields swooshed past us. My hands were shaking. “King, he can’t breathe. Millions of people are dying from Covid. Okay, maybe not millions. But you’ve heard the sirens. He needs to see a doctor.”

“You think he’s going to see a doctor in the hospital, Belle? No. He’s going to die in the waiting room just like all those other people.”

“Not if we go to the hospital here. If we wait until we get back to the city, yeah, that might happen. But the hospitals here are empty.”

“I’m not going to drop my brother off to die somewhere.”

Darius shook his head back and forth. “Guys, guys. Let’s not fight.”

“Fine. Let’s stop at a CVS.”

“What’s a CVS going to do?”

A pulse oximeter, I thought. A thermometer. A pharmacist who can call an ambulance, and then he’ll have no choice but to go. “I have to puke,” I declared, and the car screeched to the shoulder.

Okay. I actually didn’t, this time. But I walked away from the car towards a field of alfalfa that smelled like burning and leaned down. I waited, hoping that this would work. And eventually it did, because King came out. “You okay, Belle?”

I wiped my face and looked up at him. “Yeah. Are you mad at me?”

“Why do you always think I’m mad at you?” His hand reached for my side; I curved into it. I was watery near him. I leaned into the pressure there, about to apologize, but stopped. We kissed, and I hoped he couldn’t taste my lie. “I love you,” he whispered. His hands moved over my waist and hips, and I looped my fingers around the back of his neck, making a net that would keep him near me. “I love you too,” I whispered.

“Listen. I know you’re worried about Darius. He’s going to be okay.”

I looked towards the car as though I could see something there. Of course I couldn’t. “King, what if we get to the halfway house and they don’t let him in? Then he’ll have to go to Woodhull.”

“That’s not going to happen, Belle.” He hooked a finger between my shirt and jeans, let it rest on the bare skin. If I was water, he was lightning, and together we were an ocean made electric. “Trust me.”

I sometimes hated King, and sometimes loved King, but I always, always wanted to fuck King. I searched his face for the answer to the question I hadn’t asked, the question my body was asking. He closed his eyes and kissed me again. Every time we had sex—no, every time we kissed—no, every time he looked at me—I thought it was going to be the last time. I thought there would never be another moment, ever again. This time, when we kissed, his hand unbuttoned my pants, and I leaned into him, like a ship opening to salt water. Something breaking, something beautiful, and then a storm.

 

We walked back to the car together, hip to hip. Darius was sprawled out in the backseat, his head leaning back against the window. “You okay?” I asked him.

He gave a silent thumbs up.

“Mind if I drive?” I asked King.

“I should probably drive.”

I looked at Darius, but his eyes were closed. “What about your brother?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll drive and you can help him,” I said, getting into the front seat before King could stop me.

I pulled out from the shoulder and onto the road. King dozed in the front seat: like always, I was energized after orgasm, while he was sleepy. There had to be a hospital somewhere. Didn’t farmers get injured all the time? Losing fingers, chemical burns, stuff like that? I wished I knew something, anything.

The road unspooled before us, humming and empty. Straight and flat. We were nowhere. I drove ten, fifteen, twenty miles, waiting for a sign for a hospital, and then, when there was no sign, waiting for a sign for an exit. There was only the humming of the road. And then there was more humming, because my phone was buzzing. “Hey Tatiana,” I said, pressing the buttons on the car’s audio screen. “You’re on speakerphone.”

King shook himself awake.

“How’s it going?” she asked. It was always strange hearing American-isms in her Russian accent, the same way I felt when I heard my father say “like” in a sentence.

King glanced into the backseat. I watched concern flicker over his face—the first moments of remembering where we were and realizing that things might not be okay. “We got Darius,” he said.

“Is it okay for me to post an update for the GoFundMe?” Tatiana asked.

“Sure,” said King.

There was an awkward silence. “What do you want it to say?” Tatiana prodded. I could practically see her in her room in Brooklyn, fingers poised over the keyboard.

“We’re on our way home with Darius,” I said. “Thanks for all your support?”

“Sure,” said Tatiana. “Send a picture over, too.”

New pictures meant more shares, which meant more posts, which meant more funds. I looked in the rearview mirror. Darius had not stirred. “Darius? Darius, are you awake?”

His shoulders lifted as he tried to breathe: a gasping inhale, then exhale.

“Thanks, Tatiana,” King said, then hung up.

“Why’d you hang up?”

“Why’d you try to wake up Darius?”

“He’s not even in good enough shape for us to take a picture of him. And I’m supposed to pretend everything is fine?”

“No one is asking you to pretend anything, Belle. Why do you feel like you always have to pretend?”

I kept my hands steady. “Look, I’m getting off at the next exit. Darius needs help.”

King turned in the passenger’s seat and reached his hand out to Darius. “Darius, how are you doing, man? You okay?”

“Don’t bring me—to the hospital—” Darius exhaled.

The fields moved past, monotonous, green, unnamed. “You’re really sick, Darius,” I said. “We’re trying to help you.”

“Don’t leave me,” he said. I tore my eyes from the road and met his in the rearview mirror and nearly hit a discarded, shredded-up tire.

“Sorry!” I yelped. Uncertainty spun within me as fast as the car’s wheels. “Darius, what about urgent care? They won’t keep you there.”

We passed some white low-slung buildings: egg farming. I tried not to think of the horrors contained within, the birds birthing, over and over again, pushing out almost-life ceaselessly, white moons dropping from their bodies. King spoke. “They can’t cure Covid. They won’t do anything there.”

Straight ahead through the windshield: a brilliant sky, aching with spring. Below: the unceasing green fields that at first glance are beautiful, but, closer, are another factory, industrial corn and alfalfa, poisoned earth, poisoned leaves, poisoned insects, poisoned weeds, poisoned farmers—and us, in the hermetically sealed car, breathing in Darius’s poisoned breath. The unnatural landscape, natural disease. Or was it the other way around?

And suddenly, there it was. I was in danger. King was in danger. And—was there—in me—also in danger—

“We have to go to CVS,” I said. “I need a pregnancy test.”

King leapt up so quickly that the car tilted, his strength unbalancing our metal and rubber ship sailing across the continent. But he said nothing as I took the next exit, pulled to the shoulder, and googled pharmacy locations as the corn waved at us in its loneliness.

 

It turns out you don’t pee on the stick. You’re supposed to pee in a cup and put the stick in it. Just another way the media has lied to us!

While I waited, I checked my texts. Send picture for update when you can, Tatiana wrote. There were also Instagram notifications and an email from my professor confirming that my student teaching practicum was submitted. I hope this email finds you well. In these trying times . . . . I scrolled past it.

I took my phone out and took a picture of the pee cup with the stick in it and sent it to Tatiana. Not for update. 🙁, I wrote.

She called immediately. “Are you pregnant?”

I was sitting on the bathroom floor of a Starbucks while Darius and King waited in the car. Neither stubborn boy would agree to urgent care, but I got them to at least stop at a CVS, where we bought Acetaminophen for Darius’s fever and a humidifier for his cough. A humidifier that could do absolutely nothing in a car. I scooted my butt closer to the cup and tried to peer in. “Yeah,” I said, poking at the stick. “I see a line.” I waited for that feeling to come back, the feeling in the car with the open sky and the knowing, but I didn’t feel anything.

“You’ll be okay,” Tatiana said. “Do they have Plan B there?”

I dumped the pee in the toilet and flushed. “Hold on a sec,” I said, and took a picture of the stick. The line was really pink—more magenta. Did that mean something? Then I threw that out, too. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

“Belle—” I could see her running her hands through her hair, twisting it up, her nervous habit, “whose is it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, turning on the water. “It’s mine.”

A Russian curse on the other end of the line, then laughing. And then I was laughing, too, and crying.

“Belle! This is why you do not use dumpstered condoms. No. More. Dumpster. Condoms.”

I couldn’t tell if I was crying because I was laughing or laughing because I was crying. “Do you really think that King gets his condoms from a dumpster?”

“Probably! From where else would he get them?”

“I don’t know. The store?” I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist. “I guess I always figured that he shoplifted them.”

“And you’re not on birth control.”

It was half a question and half a statement. I thought about trying to explain to Tatiana how precarious all of it felt. My relationship with King. If it was even a relationship. Which it was not. How I was afraid that if I took any step towards him, the whole edifice would shatter. And so going on birth control would have come too close to promising myself that it would happen again. That each time wasn’t the last time. “I just figured that . . . like that it wouldn’t . . . I don’t know. I didn’t know he would still . . . .” I swallowed. “Birth control takes like a month to work.”

“Mmm,” Tatiana murmured. “Well . . . now you’re fucked.”

“I know!” I said, wiping tears from my face. “What the fuck!”

Tatiana dissolved into riotous laughter.

I smiled at the face I saw in the mirror, blurry with tears. “Hold on. I have to wash my face.”

“I’ll get Plan B for you at the pharmacy,” Tatiana said. “You don’t need a prescription.”

“Thanks. Yeah it would be a pain to get it here.” Someone knocked on the door. “I have to get going. I miss you.”

“Wait,” she said. “How many weeks pregnant are you?”

“Umm, I was supposed to get my period yesterday. So that makes me . . . two weeks pregnant?”

“Let me check,” she said. “That doesn’t sound right.” I stared at the door. “Belle, you’re four weeks pregnant.”

“No I’m not,” I said. I pulled up the calendar on my phone. “I had my period four weeks ago.”

“You start counting from the first day of your last period,” she said. “I’m reading it on WebMD.”

I started laughing again. “I hate this,” I said. “Okay. So can I still take PlanB?” I wiped a few more tears from my eyes, and then I started crying a lot.

“Let me look this up. I don’t think so. I’ll call you back.”

“Thanks,” I said, wiping the tears away. I wasn’t sobbing or anything like that. Just a lot of water everywhere, running down my face into my chest and shirt, snot on my sleeves. And then, even though it was so, so, gross, I slid down until I was lying on my back on the tile floor. I put my thumbs in my belly button and pointed my index fingers down to my legs, and I felt my hands on my body and imagined what was growing inside me.

It’s not like I was struggling with a choice. That would mean that I had a decision to make. But there was no decision: I’d have to get rid of it. I just couldn’t put it in the words I knew. It didn’t feel like reproductive freedom. It didn’t feel like control over my own body. It felt, instead, like someone had made the choice for me by ensuring that I wouldn’t be eligible for paid time off until I’d worked a certain amount of months. And that daycare was too expensive. The world I lived in didn’t want me to have a baby, and so I wouldn’t have it. I breathed in and felt my low belly rise and fall, and I cried a little more for the poppy seed inside me, splitting and growing and splitting and growing. “I’m sorry,” I said to it. It didn’t matter if it was alive or not. You can love something that’s not alive. You can love your future.

And then I realized that there was still one life I had left to save. One life, that is, besides my own.

 

I carried some ice water back to the car for King and Darius. “Sorry I took so long,” I said. “It’s positive.”

“Congratulations,” said Darius, at the same time King said “Oh, wow,” and took his hat off.

“Crazy, huh?” I said, plopping next to King, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. “I’ll take care of it when we get back.”

“Do you need me to do anything?” asked King. He looked worried.

“No, that’s okay. Tatiana is going to—” King’s expression froze me. “What?”

“Tatiana?”

The car suddenly felt very hot. It was too much to look at King, so I looked at Darius. “Yeah. Umm. She called while I was in the bathroom. So . . . .”

“You told Tatiana before you told me?”

The pain in King’s voice thudded. “I—” The truth was, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to tell King first. Whose is it? Tatiana had asked, not knowing that I was sleeping with King, and my dumbass answer: It’s mine. “I’m sorry. I’m such a dumbass.”

“Fucking shit, Belle! I’m not calling you a dumbass.”

“It’s yours,” I said. “Like, it’s definitely yours.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it’s mine. Who else’s would it possibly be?”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” I said, desperate to stay in the parking lot, but also desperate to escape. “I’m going to have an abortion as soon as I can.”

“You’re going to kill it?” King got out of the car and walked away. He wiped his face and stared at the sky as though drinking in the blue.

And then the sirens came. Slow at first, far away. They pulled into the parking lot. I climbed out of the car and waved my arms, directing them over. “Here,” I said, when the EMTs came out. “This is Darius Kneiger. He’s having trouble breathing.”

 

King followed behind the ambulance while I stayed at the Starbucks, drinking an oat milk latte and drawing. My pen followed the same instructions I’d given my students, that abstract drawing video I’d posted in another lifetime, and for the first time, I listened to my own voice.

Look: here’s a room of bubbles. A room of poppy seeds. A room of triangles, of rectangles, of squares, of hearts.

I call him King; his parents named him Eric Kneiger. Two names for the same life.

Here’s a shape that has no name. And another, and another.

Here’s a map of my pain. Here is my body, here is my phone. Here is the Communist Manifesto and Adam Smith. A Modest Proposal of tiny bodies. There’s my father’s green card; there’s my mother’s asylum application. The seas rise around Belle Harbor. The virus sweeps the streets of New York City until they empty.

This whole time, I had been thinking that I needed a theory to make sense of the world, thinking that I couldn’t decide anything. But I’d forgotten that existing was an action. The act of living can be a rebellion.

For a long time I sat, letting the pen lead my hand. Letting the ink decide what to draw. I wondered if Darius wanted his life saved. If King did. I touched the drawing. But the only answers there were the ones I created. The only place I would be able to find an answer was the place inside myself.

James Cato

The landlord held out a gun. Shara took it from him. She was doing the mother shtick, which meant playing the protector. The landlord didn’t know she was only six years older than me. He might rescind his offer if he knew I was a homeless orphan.

Next he presented us with an axe. “The rifle is for rats,” he said. He’d spray-tanned his face, drawing a yellow line under his chin. “Hatchet is for the roof. Wait till the water reaches the attic steps, then chop a hole in the ceiling and climb out. I’ll pick you up in the boat.”

It made sense well enough. The house standing behind us was free, so long as we kept watch over it. If kids came around and arsoned the place, it could torpedo the flooding insurance. The ocean was filling homes with seawater, and tycoons like the landlord needed their payouts.

“You have striking eyes,” he told Shara. His own eyes were hidden behind rainbow sunglasses so I wasn’t sure where he was staring. “I always know who I can trust. You have an intensity I like. You’d look good on camera.”

She gave him a long slow smile without showing her teeth. It dawned on me that the landlord wanted to sleep with her and that was why he was giving us this chance. He cocked his head at me, maybe reckoning I was not really her son. Hopefuls on the dunes prayed we’d fumble this and leave the house open for looting.

“The house is like a grave in a sense,” he said, still tilted. “It’s a monument, watching people come and go. The place brings out your inner child. Something about a beach house.”

I took in the grass growing from the gutters, the sideskew shutters, the sea teething on the driveway. The yard was marked by stakes and clothesline, and beyond that, railroad tracks arced into the waves, cutting through the wetlands like a ribbon. I never knew what to say to people like the landlord, so I kept quiet.

“We’ll take the key, please,” Shara said. The landlord dropped a chain into her palm. There were four streaks of makeup on his cheeks covering up something from way back in the day. It looked to me like fingernail scars.

“I’ll check on you,” he said. “Tally your days. Helps with paperwork.”

||||

Four days we scavenged. I dug up a throw rug. The waves delivered glass jars to our front stoop. Shara took a glossy framed painting from the swamp, a still life wrapped in foam. I tallied our days by cutting notches around the frame. Thinking back, these things did seem to appear as if curated for us, but I didn’t think it suspicious at the time.

The still life was of a kitchen table with a ceramic jug, a wine glass half-filled, and an assortment of fruit. The most remarkable feature was the faces painted into the fruit—teeth dug into the skins of apples, winking eyes in the pears, miniature scowls in every grape on the vine. It gave the sense of children lurking out of sight, giggling at their dinner table vandalism.

We hung it in the foyer. The house itself had beautiful wood fixtures, ornate paneling, and stone masonry. The walls had been deveined of wires for copper scrap. Shara found the attic by pulling a hinged hatch in her bedroom so a ladder swung down.

I didn’t know Shara well. She was superstitious. “Vultures and rats take to a cow before the wolves have even finished nowadays,” she said to me once. Strange sounds carried from her room at night and her fingers drew symbols in sand whenever she sat.

She’d adopted me in Cleveland. The city was littered with the skeletons of titan factories. One such factory was full of us orphaned hopefuls, where I spent most of my days on a cot gazing into the swooping beams where I might see a bat. Nobody wanted an adult to adopt us. We knew what they did to children.

But when Shara asked the social workers to line up teenagers for interviews, I volunteered. And when she asked, I told her. My parents had force-fed me nails and glass baked into bread and left me in a basket by the lake when I was a toddler. Thankfully, I passed the sharps without incident and fell asleep. The workers joked I looked like Baby Moses.

Maybe that was why she chose me. Maybe she wanted a companion to run off the men we heard sniffing by our tents like bears. For her part, she provided me a blanket, never tried to mercy-kill me, and we never went hungry. So I didn’t comment when she buried things—coins, a wolf claw, a bronze keychain of the Eiffel—calling them symbols of dead power.

The ocean would cover the Earth. Everyone agreed on that. Millions had migrated to the grasslands, springing metropolises overnight, but not Shara. She brought me to the sea to “ride the wheel of power.” Knowing what adults did to keep us children safe from this cruel, cruel world, her words stood my hairs on end.

|||| ||||

In the hours leading up to our first storm, the ocean receded and boys and girls ran out over the new territory. They climbed sunken chimneys of the landlord’s “Atlantis homes.” A dozen rich surfer children called Shara and I tourists, sneering. They all lived with their robber baron parents in a shared mansion.

The more modest neighbors, keeping the landlord’s other houses, welcomed us. “You’re one of us brackish now,” they said. “Give a shout.” But the nearest of their dwellings were farther away than a scream, huddled across the railroad. None had lived indoors before the landlord’s offer, and all worshiped him for his charity. One family even sculpted his bust in their yard from swamp clay.

The rich children did not mix with the brackish kids. I passed three of them as they circled an eel trapped in a tide pool, poking it with sticks till it was dead. Shara had asked me to find fish for dinner, as we had nothing left but beans. On the tide’s fringes, dying sardines floated in masses looking like steel wool. The ocean had given Shara exactly what she asked for. I filled two buckets and trotted them home.

The landlord visited our porch as we readied for storm’s landing. “I brought wine. Why not talk politics? Have you heard the military abandoned its navy at sea? Let’s drink till our teeth turn red!” We did not let him in. There was too much to do. We placed foam noodles in every room. We rolled our carpets and chucked them upstairs.

But he didn’t leave. Wherever Shara moved, the landlord’s eyes followed, as if he could see straight through the stone. She gestured for me to hand her a chair. “What does he want?” I whispered, peering over the sill as he tracked Shara down the steps.

“Your most terrible fear is inadequate,” she said. She tucked hair behind her ear, pausing, and his head snapped still. “When old powers fall, new powers rise to take their place, like crabs moving into empty shells. His power has come from crushing others, and for decades he has thrived. But the wheel no longer rolls his way.”

I nodded, watching the silver army of raindrops marching over the sea toward us. I never knew what to make of Shara’s words. She pulled the chair down the stairs, bam-bam-bam. Then she wedged it under the doorknob as the landlord gazed at her.

“I will tell a story,” he called out. “There are three things coming with the ocean. The first is a man who stole power from the gods. By the time they caught him, he’d nabbed their talents of oppression, violence, and eternal life. To punish him, the gods lit his skin with endless fire, melting it to ribbons.

“But the man was no fool. He dove into the sea, where the water quenched the flames quick as they could catch—turning the ocean to his prison. Now, he wanders the floor with the fishes, unable to leave except to die. His ruined skin billows out behind him as he walks alone, waiting for the water to rise—”

The first waves rushed up the driveway. A key slid into the front door’s socket.

“It’s MINE!” cried the landlord. “I’ll come in if I want!”

The bolt turned. There was silence, then splashing. We waited, curled into contours of shadows, but no other sound or movement came from the door. In the morning, beside the landlord’s prints, tar-black tracks small as bird feet escorted his retreat.

|||| |||| |

Buoys had caught in the porch banisters, and we left them there. The storm was no worse than expected, but it did turn our basement to a lagoon. Lizards hugged the cellar walls, but in the water below crabs thrived. Shara speared them patiently while I shot rats out the window, hoping to reduce our pest load.

Today I scored bigger game. A woodchuck sniffed railroad spikes, unaware of my profile in the window. I lined the notch on the barrel up to its throat. When I fired, the rodent ran, leaping in a great show toward a pile of car parts. I fired again, and it began running awkwardly, twisted. After the third pop, it relaxed with complaining shudders.

“Got one?” Shara asked, startling me. She leaned into my bedroom with a green crab, holding it by the shell. There were always little things about her I didn’t understand. Today she wore long brown socks and had managed to keep them dry in the basement, as if the crab had given itself to her.

“Three rats and a woodchuck.”

She nodded, letting the claw pinch her thumb. “Anything else?”

“No, but the landlord placed traps in our yard. Big steel-jaw traps.” I rubbed the little gun, a new nervous tic. “I don’t know why.”

“I think I know. During the storm, I saw . . . friends in the swamp. They resembled children but were not. They walked on their hands. The wheel is turning fast; we must make peace with trodden things. All those who have wielded power will be ground beneath the wheel. Nail the dead rats around the perimeter, kill no more, and bury anything with power you find.”

This is how I found myself hammering dead rats to trees around our property. You could pinch the limp things by the nape like you would a kitten and drive the nail through their hides. I collected tins of shark teeth, jawbones and plastic—all met by Shara’s approving nod—to bury. It seemed gifts simply tumbled out of the tide for Shara.

Others had worse luck. MISSING signs fluttered on telephone poles. The group of wealthy children had gone surfing during the storm and vanished. I’d seen so many children euthanized by poor parents that the disappearance of trust-fund brats felt closer to justice than tragedy.

“Hurricane coming,” came a voice from the swamp. I turned, clutching my final rat to nail around the property. The landlord clambered through cattails with a tote bag. “Your second storm is always easier than your first. You know, if your mother hoped to frighten looters, you could have asked for something bigger than a rat gun. I’ve got traps rated for bears.”

I shrugged, easing toward the porch, squeezing the hank of hair in my hand in case I needed to throw it at him. The landlord’s face rotated away from mine, pointing at Shara through the stones. We had taken planks of driftwood and nailed them rudely over the windows. “I had a son before,” the landlord said. “Not like you. A real son. You’re more like insurance.”

His wide mouth trembled. Without sunglasses, his eyes glittered like little mouths—cataracts were growing up in stalagmite shapes. “When the ocean rises, we’ll grow close. I’ll rescue you from the roof. There are things coming. I told you about the burning man. How about this: a lobster, caught in a trap on the seafloor. Nutrients drift by. The lobster grows, a huddled, huge thing, alone. Nothing can reach it.”

His arm rose suddenly, ripping something putrid from his bag. My woodchuck dangled by a leg—rather, some of my woodchuck. Its head and shoulders had been sliced away cleanly as a paper doll. But the carving didn’t end there. Empty tendrils in the shape of humanlike legs continued into the torso, as if a tiny man had been whittled from the carcass. “What is this?” the landlord hissed. I dropped the rat and fled.

|||| |||| ||||

The hurricane raised the water to ground level. Outside, a gale howled, but inside, Shara and I were snug. We took mugs of steam to the cellar steps and watched the lagoon rise. By nighttime, lobsters rippled across the kitchen.

“We envelop ourselves with trodden things like armor,” Shara said. “We invite them into our home. Leave some beans out for the rats in the kitchen.” She leaned so close to my face that our noses touched.

The landlord pulled at our barriers, asking sweetly for Shara to let him in. “A little company while I dry?” he chanted. “C’mon, sweetheart. I’d like to inspect the damage.”

We looked to the door. An arm slithered through a gap in the pallet we’d hammered over a window, fishing for purchase. His eye locked on us through a slit as we edged upstairs.

“The third thing coming with the ocean is a boxcar,” he said. His voice took on an ecumenical lilt, as if he were preaching through the hole. “Coming soon now. Very soon. It was pushed into the sea. Nobody knew what was inside, but they stayed well away.”

Through the window, I watched the tide undermine the robber baron mansion on the cliff and carry it off. It sailed into the bay as if nudged by a million fish. The landlord’s eyes rose with Shara’s legs, step by step. Originally, I had thought this X-Ray vision was a power of his, but understood it now as a power of hers. She made his danger predictable.

This time, when he ran, I heard the patter of feet behind him. Out the attic porthole, a figure no taller than a toddler turned to catch my eye in the grass, falling behind others of its build. It was a patchwork of things, dismembered silhouettes making a little man. Boneless legs ended in blackened meat where belly had been cut into the shape of limbs. When I saw the black grin of the woodchuck I shrunk away.

|||| |||| |||| |||| |||

“The landlord is in danger,” I said.

Shara’s towel-wrapped body twisted to face me. Most people would shout after being surprised straight out of the shower these days, but she merely nodded.

I pressed on. “Something—many somethings—chased him. One of them was wearing the face of the woodchuck.”

Shara glanced at me then looked away as if she’d stumbled upon something private. “Why do you think people murder their own children?” she asked at last. “If this world is too awful for the young, why not for their parents?”

I wasn’t sure. “People say parents love their children more than themselves.”

Shara’s eyes softened as she wrung out her hair. Her towel dropped and she strolled over to the wardrobe filled with all the clothes that had swirled into our home for her. “No, that is not why. Parents mercy-kill their children because their inner child was killed in a far more terrible way. Children are the most trodden things of all.”

I averted my eyes as she approached nude. “So what I saw you would call children,” I said. “Spirits of children. Friends of ours because we’ve fed rats in the kitchen and stopped eating meat. Is this why you’ve kept me around? A trodden son to use for armor?”

She touched my chin and kissed me then. “You are not my son. But you are right about this: you are a terribly trodden thing. Keep the landlord out of your mind. Until everything is upside down he will try to claw his way back to power any way he can. Beard the devil.”

I wanted to take her advice. The typhoon had changed everything. As I waded through our yard, I found a raccoon hugging a tree, mummified with silver eyes, preserved by the stinging taste of the air. The marsh had become a sea forest, the trees turned mangroves, all bones no leaves. The nailed rats had teeny men carved out of their bodies as if by cookie cutter.

I splashed down what was once our driveway and saw the mansion. It had stranded on a sand bar, inhabited now only by birds. Ahead, translucent faces glided between the mangroves, soupy fog swirling during warm breezes. Unrecognizable limbs swung by moonlight.

Things had changed. Brackish children splashed through mist. The wheel that Shara spoke about was spinning, I believed in it, this ocean inverting all in its path. There was a rise and wane to everything.

“Hey!” shouted a shrill voice, startling me. “Look!”

A brackish boy knelt, nudging something washed up on the tracks. “Get away from that,” I barked, voice raspy. It was a body, a wealthy person from the mansion, still wearing shiny dress shoes. A smaller person had been sliced out of the larger one, the absent head oversized for the gaping silhouette left in the torso.

“Want to play underwater? There’s treasure.” The brackish boy turned his waxen face on mine—the ruddy frown of a grown man—and I noticed his jerked meat arms before I screamed and he dove into the tumbling wake with a gleeful cry.

|||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||

Shara kicked a clogged carpet downstairs. It slapped the water and scattered a school of red squid along with a predatory fish that made a V on the surface. “Open the front door,” she said. “At this point it’s holding water. Let’s chase the fish back into the cellar.”

We collaborated to herd fish, lobsters, squid, crabs, and eels toward the basement. Shara paddled the water sternly with a broom. Then she guarded the door while I scooped up starfish and sea cucumbers to toss into the lagoon below.

A great wave would hit us tonight. An underwater earthquake had cut a wall of water reaching the sky, so the word went. Shara’s radio buzzed with hopefuls packing up their tents and trudging inland. The other brackish held steady, beholden to the landlord.

“I hope this wave turns out to be exaggerated,” Shara murmured, nuzzling my shoulder. “If the house goes, we have no way out but the landlord.”

“Let me scavenge,” I said. “Maybe a canoe stranded.”

She nodded, fastening a hat on my head. “Don’t take long.”

I promised to be quick. When I opened the door, water rushed out over the softened boards on the porch. The ocean had retreated in anticipation of the great wave. I could see it on the horizon—a blue mountain blending into the clouds.

I followed the railroad down to the exposed seafloor. A few vessels had sunken here, smashed to bones on Atlantis homes, but none were useable. Sagging anemones waited for their gods. Under an abandoned motorway, a barnacled railcar sat alone on the tracks, topped with a mop of seaweed. It was here I encountered the landlord.

“I told you,” he murmured, not surprised to see me. “A train holding something precious is coming with the ocean. Here is my lobster, trapped on the seafloor, safe in the prison I made for him. Have you seen those fucking things in the night?”

I approached carefully, noticing a busted lock in one of his hands and a hammer in the other. The sliding door to the train carriage was open. “Yes. The children, we call them,” I said. “I don’t know what you did in life to deserve their attention, but you should leave. Let Shara alone and make for higher ground.”

He looked at me sideways. “Shara . . . .” he said. I could see the unbidden images flashing through his mind of kissing her nipples or whatever it was he desired. Perhaps he wanted insight into the mysterious wheel. “They called me slumlord. They lived here in these Atlantis homes and I owned the whole beach. For my son, I bled them for every dollar.”

I crept closer, peering over his shoulder. There was a dark shape sitting in the box.

“I didn’t care when my tenants stopped having babies; they couldn’t afford to feed them,” he sighed. “Then I saw the first child run across the road. Next came the letters under my door. Photos of sleeping kids, rolled up in carpets, slumped over at the table, though of course they weren’t asleep. Those letters were threats. No way would I let them take my son’s birthright.”

There were tears guttered in his cheeks. Now I could see the red scars and had no doubt they had come from the fingers of a tiny person. The skeleton in the train was frozen in a yawn; it had not been dissected like the other bodies, locked away as it was. “You did it,” I realized. “You locked your son inside and pushed him into the sea.”

“He was a divine creature,” the landlord said. “Too soft for this business. He wouldn’t have protected our fortune and so I protected him. Now I start over—I take a new wife and make a new son. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.”

I didn’t have time to react as his hammer whistled through the air onto my head, but a black pit opened and the ground rushed to meet my chin. The hammer came down again and I saw my legs insect-jerking. My mind went warm, swamped with flickers before emptiness surrounded my final confused thought.

|||| |||| |||| |||| |||| |||| ||||

My body lay over the salty stones.

The landlord didn’t bother to hide his crime.

The tsunami would wipe the place clean and he could ride into the future with Shara.

Uncanny figures peered around seaweed mats and from behind the wheels of the railcar. Children walking on the heels of their hands approached and touched me all over. A serrated saw rubbed my shoulders—a haunted object, the edge of a bone with holes drilled along its length.

First, they cut my head away from my arms in a straight line down toward my waist, leaving strips from my chest for arms and legs. I hardly cared about the tweaks of pain. The overwhelming sensation was of weight sloughing away, the stress of years gone. Like a snake peeling off a silvery sock of skin, it was the opposite of shedding, really, of losing something, because as strips of me fell away I gained in clarity.

With a final snap of sinew separating whittle from wood, I could see again. A jubilant, mischievous energy seized me. My limbs were ropey and light. We ran, all of us children, toward the wave. I recognized some—the rich kids who had vanished surfing. Others must have come from the Atlantis homes.

The wave will deliver something beautiful. The thought came to me unbidden as the other children, undead mouths stretching with wicked delight, raised their arms in thanks. A ship large as a town floated on the wave’s crest, carried for miles. Its shape made a leviathan shadow. We would board and let it drift us over the world twice over.

I stopped suddenly, watching the other children plink into the wall of water. I no longer wanted to dive into the tsunami. What I wanted was—

The great wave swept my legs away, swirling me toward Shara, blasting bubbles through my rubber limbs which hooked on shingles and concrete chunks and car frames and other debris. I could pump my legs along the seafloor, and when I sucked in water I jetted forward by a hole in my cratered back.

My watery talents didn’t end there. As I flew above the sand, I saw a wispy trail at head level, bubbles too fine for a normal eye to detect. When I extended an arm into this stream, I spun, caught by a current. Delighted, I leaned into the trail, shooting forward with the full force of the wave. A geyser of comfort warmed my chest when I neared the edge of our property. The feeling radiated from the mound where I had buried a tin of shark teeth days ago.

When I erupted from of the water, Shara was hoisting herself through a hole in the roof. The wave had blown out the windows and doors. She heaved up the still life, wrapped in paper to protect it from spray. The sight of her evoked a sensation I had never felt before—a mix of scent and gravity, pleasant but intense, drawing me toward her—I could only describe it as UP. I wanted to help her. She noticed me and smiled as if my carved body was of no concern.

“We need to leave,” I said. “There’s a safe place.” Indeed, not far, the gunmetal ship loomed. It may have once housed planes for military operations, but now trees grew on its deck and ferns spilled over its side. But Shara had no way to get there.

“Look at this!” howled the landlord. He was weaving the motorboat toward us, wearing sunglasses and a painted grin. He’d dabbed concealer on the gouges left by his son. If Shara emitted UP, he emitted DOWN, and the air rippled around him—fire wicked his skin. I wanted to drag him into the water. He kept one hand on the wheel but the other hovered lower. He was concealing something behind the dashboard. He had passed three other tenants without picking them up. They yelled and waved in the distance.

“Go,” Shara said sharply. “I don’t know what happens if he catches you.”

I scampered up the weathervane, desperate to find a piece of debris large enough to carry Shara. Nothing but a chair caught my eye, which wouldn’t outrun a boat.

“Lucky girl,” said the landlord, yards away. “You never gave me time of day, but here I am to rescue you. You won’t be saying no to my company, not after a couple nights at sea.”

He grasped for Shara. Then I saw them—the children, once inheritors of fortunes, gliding toward us, pushing surfboards. They’d retained their vessels after they’d died, delivering one final gift for Shara. I sprung from my perch, wrapping soaked arms around the landlord’s head.

He tore at my back. I hung on with rodeo joy. Shara knelt on a surfboard and paddled for her life. A dozen underwater hands shoved the landlord’s motorboat aboard the roof, where the propeller shattered. He was stranded.

With a pop, I had lost: he held me helpless in his arms. Milky eyes fixed on the face of the boy he had killed once already. They grew shiny till they dribbled down his cheeks, settling in his scars. “I didn’t want her to leave,” he wept. In the belly of the boat, I saw what he’d been hiding—a leghold trap.

“My son, I flew too close to the sun,” he said. “I’m sorry. I burn while I look for a way out of this ocean of grief. I deserve this. Go ahead—kill me! Turn me child as they did you!”

I twisted out of his hands and slithered into the water without a word. I cast a look back and caught his mournful gaze disappearing in a blaze. It was true he’d earned his fate. He’d spend his days trodden as an insect, and nobody would give him the gift they’d given me.

I caught Shara easily and crawled onto her craft. She balanced the painting on her hip as she rowed. “The still life is to remember you by,” she told me. “You’ve changed. But what you’ve become is still life. More life than you ever had before. We must remember that.”

She was right. My back was free from tension. When I gazed over our churning world, I only felt a sense of endless time for watching clams tuck themselves into sand, the freedom to pluck salted berries from the swamp, reliance on the beautiful sun. The thing about the canvas in Shara’s arms was that though the faces had been carved into apples, those children were no less present than if they’d been hanging on our surfboard. I’d be there too.

Sage Tyrtle

1.

The year 2067 is an endless Water War. I am standing in front of what used to be a Pizza Pizza on the corner of Queen and Bathurst, fighting alongside my family, because of course my family is there. I am toothless and my partner’s glasses are so scratched they’re almost useless and our son has made us armour from old license plates. I am defending my ancient sloshing Aquafina water bottle, blocking a knife thrust with M3F 949 MISSOURI.

2.

The year 2067 is finding the raspberries the deer missed. The deer, who make such harrumphs when startled I have named them Aunt Hortense, Aunt Bertha, Nosy Gladys. I cut the raspberries in half to make them last longer and they are somehow better than the brown sugar pavlova I can still remember eating in an actual restaurant with spotless tablecloths. Walls. A ceiling. But mostly human beings. Human beings inhabiting their warm and glorious skin, breathing, walking, words spilling with such careless ease out of their mouths, and I didn’t know then to catch them. To keep them safe.

3.

The year 2067 is underwater. Everyone is a pirate but no one is very good at it.

4.

The year 2067 is when Dorinda Clifton is crowned Tesla Reincarnate of the Celestial Followers of the Lightbulb and on October 5th when New Jersey does not light up light up like thousands upon thousands of stars but instead remains a stubborn pit of darkness where wolves roam without fear, Dorinda is suffocated in mud, quartered, and—it’s rumoured—eaten.

5.

The year 2067 is other people. I’ve been gone a long time.

6.

The year 2067 is made of concrete and everywhere I look there are brutalist buildings where brutalist authorities are brutal and the too-hot rain never stops and I am scrabbling in the gray gutters with the people I love to find enough coins for a two-hour shelter pod and we are all keeping our heads down, down.

7.

The year 2067 is the year the government is definitely going to do something about climate change.

8.

The year 2067 is dreaming of trees, of oak, of spruce, of hickory. Of the rustle leaves make in a storm. Wandering a chimeric forest of beech, of maple, of chestnut, of bumpy bark as I trail my fingers along the trunk and listen to the sparrows sing to the sky. Of kneeling to watch saplings learning the wonders of sunlight and how to drink the rain. And waking, weeping, to the ceaseless sound of wind moving sand. Whish. Wish. Whish.

9.

The year 2067 is the Dorchester Library. I lead murmuring patrons by candlelight into the open centre and urge them to look up to see the five floors lined with glorious walls of words. The computers, useless now, have been carried away and gutted, turned into goldfish bowls and cat beds. I am dressed in layers and layers of wool to guard against the always-cold and at lunch I go outside. In the weak sunlight the park is covered with readers. Wandering through places that don’t exist anymore, telling each other the stories of how to repair. To mend. To leave, this time, nothing but footprints.

David Holloway

I moved to Florida from Wisconsin when I was ten, but Curtis “Wild Hair” Kensington had been born there. I remember him running across the vacant lots, shirtless with his chaotic hair flying, his skin red from the sun in those pre-sunscreen days. His feet were so tough from going barefoot that the sandspurs that pained the rest of us bounced from the callused soles of his Floridized feet.

We grew up as neighbors in a Florida suburb built over a bulldozed orange grove. The grove itself had been planted over a razed thicket of sandspurs and slash pine. Possums, frogs, the occasional alligator, and snakes never got the suburb memo. Whenever it rained, wild creatures showed up on porches and in garages.

These included the impressive eastern diamondback I found in my garage. Hissing at one end and buzzing at the other, thick as a bicycle tire, it turned to look at me with an air of boredom. As if to say, “I was here long before you and I’ll be here long after you’ve gone.”

By the time I found a shovel to kill it, the snake had disappeared. That snake or his cousins would show up in driveways, swimming pools, and manicured lawns throughout my years in Florida, reminding me who really owned the place.

When we were in sixth grade, we joined the junior sailing club and splashed around the bay in little sailing dinghies. They called the tiny boats Optimist Prams. Once when I was a hundred yards from everyone else, an enormous creature, longer than my boat, swam up next to me. He rolled on his side to look me in the eye and showed me his sharp white teeth. People gush over the dolphin’s cute smile, but I recognized it as a warning, not a welcome.

Senior year all of us on the football team gathered magic mushrooms from a local cow pasture and ate them after losing the last game. We passed out in Matheson Hammock Park and woke in a single huge cocoon of chigger-infested Spanish moss. We crawled out covered in red swollen chigger bites, itching, and moaning. Curtis blamed a vividly remembered alien abduction.

The state decided to expand our little town’s perfect beach by dredging up rough coral stones from the bottom of the gulf and throwing them onto the smooth sugar sand, trying for more of a good thing. They ran out of funds before covering the acres of sharp, rough stones with sand, and the prized beach resembled a blasted moonscape for decades.

Curtis loved weird Florida and took me to visit Spook Hill in Lake Wales to watch my car roll uphill. He took the ghost tour at the Riddle House in Palm Beach and swore that he once saw the elusive Florida Skunk-Ape, the state’s favorite cryptid.

Curtis attended Seances in Cassadaga, home to more active spiritualists per capita than anywhere else on earth. His favorite medium, Nika, had moved to Florida from Dubrovnik as a child. Nika had a spirit guide named Tiger Miccosukee, a Seminole Indian in life. At the last séance Curtis attended, Nika asked Tiger about the future of Florida. The spirit’s sobs were deafening.

By the time I went to college in South Carolina, high tides had begun to cover the sidewalks, lawns, and roads in my little Florida town. During one visit home, Curtis drove my car through a puddle that turned out to be a deep-flowing stream. It pushed my old Honda Civic off the road and into a canal. Curtis waded out laughing, drunk with relief at his escape. His joy washed away my anger as quickly as the flood had swept my car away.

Curtis called me to say that the beefalo herd escaped their ranch in Ft. Lauderdale again, causing havoc by wandering out onto I-95. He said that they were the perfect livestock for Florida. Ridiculously tough and too dumb to understand fences.

I got a job in Charlotte, North Carolina, and my friend stayed in Florida. The last time I talked to him, he described his house. “Right on the mouth of the river. I can smell the stink of low tide from the screened porch.” Three weeks later, Hurricane William roared through with a thirty-foot storm surge, washing Curtis and his house away. They never found his body.

I visited for my 25th high school reunion. I drove out to the beach for old times’ sake, planning to drink rum and enjoy the psychedelic sunset. Florida gives great sky. I hadn’t heard about the latest red tide. The stench hit me like a pro linebacker. Hundreds of dead fish of all types and sizes, along with the bloated body of a huge dead manatee, rocked back and forth in the gentle surf. Even the gulls wouldn’t scavenge their too-noxious flesh. Florida had signed a suicide pact.

I keep a football-sized horse conch shell that I found on Clearwater Beach on the coffee table in my living room. Visitors insist on holding it up to the side of their heads and listening for the sound of the ocean. When I listen, I hear Florida whispering, calling, cursing. I don’t hear the hiss of waves, but a fat snake’s belly scraping along the concrete floor of my garage.