This tree begins where it all ends. The base sleeps in perpetual autumn: yellowed and browned and half sunken through the ground. The tree — barren, riddled with decay, carved out by termites — bends over to kiss the ground. Crumbs of bark set the bed for its grave, spreading out and disappearing under blankets of moss. Monkey cups and sassafras and chinquapins stand, expressionless, and listen to the wind’s lullaby.

Shattered branches rise, uncurling to claw at the waking sun. Sticks taper into a dense system of veins that compress into capillaries cut by abscission scars. Rot washes away as day becomes night then day again. From trickle to downpour, leaf and petal rain upward from beneath soil. They pool into a dense canopy. These leaves, once scattered and brittle, bounce back into life. Hanging golden spires fall from the foliage, showered in sunlight, the only warm color in an ocean of emerald and wood.

Colonies of termites fade as unwinding hours fill the holes carved beneath bark. The surrounding forest sheds its years. Buds tighten into blossoms and fold back into buds. Leaves curl and condense; branches follow suit. Sun bears collect their footprints as they retrace their steps. Hornbills deliver fruit to brush, bugs to soil, bugs that sink to replace the droplets collected by passing clouds. Nearby, trees appear paler than before the rain. Elsewhere, thousands of spiders converge and bundle into a silk sphere. A river flows up the valley, carrying songs from the sea. It braids cobbled stone into a scarf reflecting a patchwork sky. The current returns earth to the land, bridging the gap between eroded banks. Creatures enter wet and leave dry. They rest their lips on water to become parched. It won’t be long before the mountain dries, water stops flowing, and the earth thirsts.

The noises of a distant orangutan changes tune with age, from a flat echoed vibrato at death to a sharp squeaky pitch at birth. Outside of time’s constraints, they all sound the same: silent.

Time erases the perennial lines etched in pith. The tree forgets the stories written on its growth rings, stories of thick floods and thin droughts, and dark scars from fires that taint years of memory. Cambium absorbs xylem and phloem. Roots retract roots as water returns deep beneath the surface. Buds tighten into blossoms and fold back into buds. An endless cycle that persists until the first germination, existing regardless of any presence to bear witness. This tree loses its spent time unnoticed, where frogs breathe through skin and leopard cubs learn to hunt.

Cassia fistula, golden shower, purging cassia, Indian laburnum. Blooming blonde hues, fruiting contradicting flavors, growing and dying but never dying. They live until they cease —

Years and years and the surrounding cloud forest sinks into the moss, dissolving into fresh soil. Soot and rubble rises to displace it. Leaf and petal wilt; each sear to yellow with rigid brown outlines. Weeds lie charred, discarded on the floor. Graves are marked by charcoal stumps.

A setting western sun is met by the mourning song of a lone bird. A distinct aria rings out as the horizon snuffs out all light. The world falls into nothingness as embers begin to smolder.

Water soars as the freshly dead forest blares with bright new life. A serenade of crackling roars in the rhythmic pounding of water. Flames whip the air. Grassy kindling sizzles green. Through an orchestra of fire, the forest burns with floral colors and smoke. Snaps and growls fill the warm black sky. Beneath this, a light drumming, a pattering pitter that develops as the inferno moves eastward, as raindrops flash up and down — thrumming and tapping — as they dive through air and the water cures the leafage back to a refined jade. A cymbal crashes, and the world flashes olive with lightning.

No applause follows the crescendos. A chorus of whining chicks picks up after the fading drums, mouths to the sky, a plea for their mother to return home.

The chicks go silent as the ground dries. The symphony ends.

Many days, many nights, many deaths, many lives. The tree fades into its youth. More rains rise, falling upward until the tree finally ages into a sapling. It tucks itself under mossy covers, tears away from mycelium, and sinks into its shell as other lives float in. The seed lies in the earth. The trickling river and mosquitoes produce an impenetrable white noise. The sea is calm and the sky is autumn. Emerald and wood, stagnant. The world goes silent. With that, the song can finally begin.

The post FICTION: Elise – A Letter to a Setting Sun appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Jesus sucked our sins from the world like venom from a snakebite. He puckered up and prepared to love, ingesting our evil in the process. He carried it to the tomb and let it rupture his insides. David was trying to remember this. He stood behind the station turnstile, trying to scan his Oyster. He laid the card down, and the light stayed red. He tapped it again, and nothing changed. He set all his weight against the turnstile’s walls and struggled to stay calm—thinking about the Lord; thinking about his word, about James and John and all of Jesus’s men who wrote the story of his life before he was around to read it. 

The light went green. David fell through. Standing up, he straightened his tie and repositioned his bag. He was surrounded by people leaving for the world. They sped past him to catch their trains. Some went left, others went right, the brave brushed him aside, but David felt that all were watching, and he hated the weight of a gaze. He hated their eyes rummaging through his soul, looking for something to snatch at. If it was up to David, he’d relinquish his body, his skin, his fat, the moments they held, and become a spirit that ran through London’s streets. He’d still knock on doors and speak of damnation, but he’d do it free of the flesh. He’d be living proof—he felt you could call that living—that the Lord existed beyond the bones. But this body was his. The stubby fingers that worked at his collar were his. The eyes that, looking up, met the face of his companion Terry belonged to him. And only him. 

Terry was a beautiful boy—not your typical Mormon. He had ragged black hair and a perfectly straight spine, and when he smiled you felt the world was all joy. It had been a long time since David had seen that smile. 

The two men went everywhere together; Christ demanded it. They ate together and toiled together, they prayed together and slept together. When Terry used the bathroom, David stood outside and told Terry about his day. When David used the bathroom, Terry wandered off, and the piss rang out in silence. 

They had been paired at the end of their training, stitched together by the Lord. It had been three months of fliers in bags, thirteen weeks of the Word on their tongues, ninety-one days of dismissive waves from people who couldn’t stand the sight of salvation. David was sure Terry had sighed the whole time. He could hear it now, that eternal groan, rushing out of Terry’s mouth.  

David: “We’re a declining society. Aren’t we, mate?” 

Terry turned away from the question and moved towards the platform’s stairs.

“Even our barriers are stuck.”

It was the middle of summer. The heat swallowed David. Pools of sweat colored his shirt. His soot black pants stuck to his skin. He writhed, subtly, unsuccessfully, before going Terry’s way. Terry knew him. Terry knew that he had found religion the same way he found anything, by letting someone else’s idea become his. Terry knew that David was 40 but balding, lonely but looking, ready to join the church but afraid of starting behind—yet he refused to show David grace. Terry was 19, the appropriate age to begin the mission. He hadn’t signed up to play caretaker. David had missed the boat. One was raised in the house. One didn’t move in late. One knew the rules—they were all one had. Though Terry was stuck with David now, he’d be sure to avoid him in Paradise. 

Standing atop the stairs, David looked out. Here was the middle class: clutching their briefcases, pushing their prams. Here was Barnet: a town of quiet streets and lowered gazes. The bus ran 24/7,  but the conductor drove most of its route alone. Strangers and friends walked past you alike. This was not a place where you were meant to meet. This was the end of the Northern line, a place you left. Leaving, David felt sorry for those who stayed. He wanted to pull the fliers out of his bag and throw them into their faces. He wanted them to know about Armageddon and be ready for it, but he knew, he had been told, that the real battle was to be fought in the big city, in Central London and Leicester Square, under electronic billboards and neon lights, near Shakespeare busts and giant clocks, at 5:01 and 5:02, over piles of litter and sleeping drunks, around people, moving, watching, performing people with places to be and things to do, lives to live and lessons to learn, people who would stop if you could change things for them, people David felt he could save. 

 He kept his fliers in his bag, and turned his eyes to the tracks, and followed Terry down the stairs. 

Stepping onto the platform, David watched a train depart. The next Embankment-bound trip wasn’t for another seven minutes. Terry scowled at him as if he’d wished for this. The platform’s occupancy grew and grew, and with this David shrank. Each time an elbow grazed his arm or a knee rubbed his leg, he receded further into himself. The platform was full of happy people, smiling people, people with families, and people on phones, people with purpose who were on their way to find it, people he could not touch. Always, he felt soiled, stained. He did not want that for them. Opening up his bag, he grabbed his thermos and rubbed it against his forehead. Forcing a laugh, he whispered, “The old Herbal tea.” He put heat on heat as he continued to sweat, and murmured as the shame dripped down.

When one really got down to it, the body was the body. It was not a vessel, not something to be tamed. It was a thinking, living, entirely independent thing. It wrapped itself around the mind and pulled at the strands. Freedom from the body was death. One could not escape: not on this earth, not on this platform. Try as David might. He rolled his thermos over his head to remind his body that there was warmth in the world. He drank hot tea to burn the terror out. But this domestication was temporary. The body will not be tricked. 

David, ever forlorn, was a man who had watched his life go by. He spent thirty years dreaming of success and ten years acting on it. Allowing a preoccupation to become a profession, he took the herbal tea his mother raised him on and started selling it for profit. The health-crazed elite bought his boxes by the dozen. The Mormons bought them when they could. Herbal tea was the only warmth the Word approved of, so the Saved spent their winters between the aisles of David’s store. It was how he met Terry. It was how he found the Lord. It was why he turned towards the Light when his tea began to sour.

Still whining, still hazy, with the thermos against his neck, David stumbled through the crowd and found himself on the platform’s edge. It was time to come to. He spotted Terry, now wearing his namecard, watching from a few steps back. He followed suit. He dropped the thermos into his bag and pulled out his badge. Working the pin through his shirt, he sighed as he remembered:

Elder Hillburn.

The Church of 

JESUS CHRIST 

of Latter-Day Saints

Wearing the badge was like advertising his fraudulence. He’d joined their team of missionaries after the deadline, so his order was placed separately. The budget printer David commissioned was untrained in the art of font. When the badge arrived, it appeared that David’s title had become a superscript and that his name was Jesus Christ. 

Terry’s name was Elder Derstill. Terry’s badge was fine. Terry prayed that David would fail. David longed to forget.

 He grabbed a stale biscuit out of his bag and chewed the thoughts apart. The voice on the loudspeaker reminded the crowd to stand behind the yellow line. David complied. Something brushed against his side, and spinning around he watched a crook-backed woman with fraying grey hair move through the masses. She whispered and wailed as she walked, sending a shiver of unease down David’s spine. There was a tugging at his ankle, and, quickly looking down, he saw a child, wearing strap-on fairy wings, wrapped around his leg. He grinned, lopsidedly, awkwardly, and let out a chuckle. “Bicky!” the fairy-winged girl said. And just as David reached down to give her a piece, the girl’s mother pulled her away. It was the badge, he thought, standing back up, creeping towards the yellow line. They knew that wasn’t his name. 

Their ride was two minutes away. David wiped the crumbs off his face. A few groups to his left, the girl made a whooshing sound as she ran in circles around her mother. Accustomed to this game, the mother whirled around too. She spun and spun and begged her child to stay near, stay safe, stay away from strange strangers and stranger ideas. David huffed like the oncoming train. 

Totteridge & Whetstone. The cart was packed. David had managed to secure a seat. One stop later, Terry slid onto another, directly across from him. They rode in silence. The train screeched underneath. The sound shot straight through David’s skull, and into his brain, making it difficult to complete a thought. He stared at himself across the aisle, watching as the window’s curve reflected his body over the axis of his featureless face. He was an hourglass: a body above, a body below, and an empty head in the middle. 

When the train came to a stop at Woodside Park, the man to David’s left spilled coffee on his pants. He frowned, and David mirrored him. 

“Got a tissue, mate?” 

“I know the feeling.” 

“But have you got a tissue?” 

West Finchley. Terry’s eyes were on him. Finchley Central. The gaze would not budge. If it were possible, David would want to know exactly what others thought of him. Life would be easier if a bell went off each time his name crossed someone’s mind. Given the chance, he’d pull on his rubber gloves on and catalog the brains of those closest to him. He’d parse through the muck and pull out the cabinets until he came to the file that held his name. DAVID. 

DAVID → DAVID_Impression → DAVID_Impression_Poor. 

DAVID → DAVID_Youth → DAVID_Youth_Rough.

DAVID → DAVID_Interests → DAVID_Interests_Blank. 

Well, no, perhaps that was unfair. He had interests, he felt he did, only people might not see them that way. He was interested in what interested others about him. He quite liked tea. And more recently he’d found himself passionate about the Word. 

Take Jonah, for example.They’d read his book last week: A man so afraid of his life’s purpose that he threw himself into the ocean to avoid it. How fascinating. David loved the heroics of it all. No matter how loudly the thunder clapped and the waves came crashing down, God’s children would be saved, because the Bible was the book of redemption. Jonah was swallowed by a whale, a real-life whale, and still he survived and prayed and gave thanks to the Lord.  He dragged the Word out of the beast and threw it into the world. This interested David—more than he could believe. 

Arriving at East Finchley, the fairied girl began to laugh. The train had come up from underground and it would be nothing but light for the next few stops. She lunged over her mother’s shoulder and pressed her hands against the glass. Off, off, off the train went, and the girl flapped her wings along with it. 

Terry pulled at his smile. He turned away from the girl and looked to David. David’s eyes met Terry’s and then quickly found the girl. 

He felt far from her. Years away. He had nothing to laugh about. Nowhere to fly to. Only: envy. How was it, he wondered, that, even with her hands pressed against the world, she could stay clean. He’d rolled out of the womb all sticky, and it took him thirty-nine years to realize he’d been catching dust. 

They had to know, all of them. David felt that they had to know. He had ticked his life away, and the regret was all over him. They knew his story. They were reading it now. “Lost,” on his arms. “Waste,” on his neck. “Hopeless,” across his forehead. He was thrown into life without a sense of direction. He had spent his early years inflating the world, and it was only a matter of time before it popped. Earth was hollow. It was empty. It had been made far too large to appreciate alone. He couldn’t say it in so many words–and who would listen if he could–but he’d felt he needed Terry, even in silence, to prove that the world was still there.

 The whispering woman made her way down the cart. She was quiet now and pulling at her hair. Seeing her face-on, David thought she looked a little like his mother. She had the same wide green eyes, which tried to hold you, which tried to hold everything at once. They bounced around the train, and David tried to follow them. They bounced from window to window: David’s eyes bounced too. They bounced from advert to advert: David’s eyes continued. They landed on David, and, trying to meet his own gaze, he shut his eyes and suddenly saw his mother. She stood in the darkness of his mind, looking far younger than he’d ever remembered her. Only recognizable because even in her youth she had those same green eyes. She smiled. Her eyes called for him. He wanted to run into her arms, but he had no way to place himself inside of his mind, so he kept his eyes closed and watched. Realizing that he would not come, her smile broke. Her eyes moved this way then the next, but all darkness was the same. Her eyes shut, then shrank, then disappeared, and she began to age. She aged thirty years in thirty seconds, and died just as she did the first time. An old woman, collapsing in the dark, in front of a son who could not save her.

Highgate. David opened his eyes.

Carrying a clipboard, a single commuter entered the cart. She wore a Nirvana shirt and a fully-studded face. She stood in the middle of the carriage and looked around: at the elderly woman tugging at her locs and Terry losing to sleep and David looking at her looking at him looking at her: they held this for a moment, the train departed, and the Cobain fan began: 

“Right! There’s a national crisis, and national means that you’re all affected. Even you, dude,” she said to Terry, whose eyes were now completely shut, “Sunak! Your Prime Minister doesn’t give a hoot about you. He doesn’t care if you’re on this train or under it. He spends his mornings doing photo-ops with firemen, nurses, schoolchildren, people he calls heroes, and his afternoons killing them. Rolling back climate agreements, signing shady deals. Fossil Fuels has a hand up his ass and they’re fiddling around in there like he’s a fucking puppet.” Archway. “Sign a petition. The future is now. Remove the man. Remove the man. Take our future out the can!”

At Tufnell Park David waved away her clipboard.

At Kentish Town she climbed off the train. 

Now was here, it was there, it was gone, it was fleeting, running, slipping through his hands, it was crushing, a weight on a weight on a weight on a weight, all of which looked like air. It had David, it held David, it was all David had, so it was never, it could never, it would never be the moment when he let the Devil in. 

Prime ministers. Petitions. It was all the same thing. It all wanted to turn his bodily years into something to be controlled. David knew that England had gone to the dogs, but his signature wouldn’t change that. If anything, he felt it was best to get life out of the way. To resign themselves to the world they created, and wait for it to devour itself. 

Camden Town: again, darkness. 

David lifted his head and began to scour the train’s ads: a weight loss pill called Fat(e), a new Starbucks size called Grandést. His eyes landed on an image of a woman and her children at the beach, captioned “Travelong: You can have it all.” She wore a seashell necklace that was more string than shell, and was staring, almost gloomily, at something out of the frame. David squinted. There was something she was trying to tell him. He pictured the inside of his brain and scratched through it for answers. It was easier this way, the whole thinking thing. He remembered that his early life had been characterized by feeling bad amongst the good. His mother’s love turned all things gold, but nothing felt like enough. The world was beautiful—palm trees and coconuts and their metaphorical equivalents—but the conditions of his life were barren, and there weren’t enough budget getaways in the world to change that. Now, saved, he was the good stuck in the bad. The world was ending, and all he could do was smile and try to pull people out of it. He gave his eyes a break, and the woman’s sadness reappeared. He couldn’t say which of them had it worse. 

Somewhere between Mornington Crescent and Euston Terry had woken up. Rested now, on the way to city life, he was itching to get things started. He shuffled through his fliers like a pack of cards and greeted the train with a smile. David, for reasons he couldn’t scratch, felt less prepared to go. Looking at Terry, he itched inside: here was everything he could have been. Charismatic. Christened. Comfortable in the world. At 19, David’s only God was Success. He’d chased a dream, labored through life, clutched the spirit of the age. But when he opened his hands to survey the spoils, it appeared he’d held nothing but ash.

He sat and studied his trembling fingers. They were wrinkling. Old age would soon be here. He felt it, working its way into his joints. He saw it, right in front of him. He remembered his mother’s final days. How small she’d been. How often she’d ask for moments of his time, and how few he had to give. She’d say, “That’s my tea. That’s my tea. At least sit and drink it with me.” But he hadn’t a second to spend on a woman who was barely there.

David grabbed the thermos—cooler now—and pressed it to his face. 

Jonah had to leave. 

Warren Street.

The woman tugging her hair grew more and more violent. She opened her eyes and propelled them at David. They struck a nerve, and he was jolted back. Mutters began to spew from her mouth, whispers of Leicester Square and a past returned. David felt that she was cursing him. He felt that had to stop: 

“A penny for your thoughts?”

“I’ve not got any change.” 

“Have you lost your marbles?”

“They’re on thin ice.”

Staring at David, with her marbles long gone, the old woman tried to smile. She wore a butterfly brooch on her coat and the story of her woes in her eyes. She was mixing her metaphors, and mixing them well. She was going to Leicester Square so it would come back to her. She was marching to the sound of her own splitting hairs. The cats and dogs would be on her soon. She had no money; she held no change. She was a dime a dozen. She hit the nail on the head. She was bent out of shape. She felt under David, under the weather, under the weight of His words. She must be going now: control was heaven in a wrapper.

At Goodge Street, she ran off, stumbling into the wrong station. 

The train moved on. 

There was something about the way Terry smiled that made David hot in the head. It was an act. He moved like a celebrity: shaking hands and holding gazes. As though he was the one who wrote the Word. David had done all he could to impress the boy who radiated salvation. But seeing Terry now—bright white teeth framed between quivering lips—he was sure that the Light was the Lord’s.

The little girl with the little wings stood in the middle of the aisle swinging around a grab pole. Across the cart, she watched as David worked at his thermos and poured himself a cup. She flew towards him to ask for a sip but was intercepted by her mother’s aggravated hand. This time it heralded another: a palm right across the girl’s face. The woman pulled her daughter onto her lap and unleashed her words on her.

David wanted to give the woman a piece of his mind, to let her take it, keep it, be forced to live with it. He’d stuff it in her bag, and wait for her to find it. She’d be looking for a number or searching for a pen; she’d empty her bag onto the counter; she’d find him there, jiggling away, cold, pink, wet. Her husband would come home and, loosening his tie, declare that “there was a brain in the kitchen.” “That’s David,” she’d say. “Ah,” he’d reply, “and what exactly is David doing on our counter?” She’d explain that they met on the train; that he’d followed her home; that he’d come to point out her cruelty; that it was his mission to enlighten the world but some days it felt hard and most days he felt tired. He wanted her to know what he thought, and he didn’t want her to escape it. She’d have to deal with the mess.

But the world would stay clean, and David would stay still, and the woman, pulling her daughter by the ear, would step off at Tottenham Court Road, taking any chance at change with her.

He lifted his thermos to his head and groaned like they would understand. 

There would come a day when all this was gone. The mothers, the teas, the Terrys would all face the eyes of God. Fire would rain down from the sky, and only the devout would be saved. Until then, trains would crash and angels would suffer and evil would wash over the world. They were drowning, and no one seemed to care. They stripped him with their eyes and dissected his soul. But could they account for theirs? He was saving others when he could barely swim himself. He was nothing. Nothing to Sunak to England to the world—Jesus Christ—he was nothing to the world.

He pressed the thermos down harder and thought of salvation. He pressed down some more; perhaps this battle was not his. He rolled the metal down his arms, up his chest, against his neck, and began to wheeze. Closing his eyes, falling into himself, he shrank, and writhed, and prayed the world would disappear.

 He had taken his life and wasted it, but he had walked in the Light at the end. At Armageddon, he would be spared. A beautiful bright hand would reach through the flames, and carry him into the house of the Lord. The choirs would sing, and the devout would applaud, and the hand’s fingers would wipe him clean. Gently. Caringly. They would hold his hands, and still them with love. He was the saved. Not the savior. Someone else could deliver the Word. Leicester Square.

When he returned to his body, the tea had spilled on his lap and Terry was outside of the train. He watched as his companion called his name to the closing doors. 

The post FICTION: The Earl of Grey appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This piece received an honorable mention in the fiction category of the 2o24 Wallace Prize.

Here’s Lisa May, in late-night lamplight, crying on the edge of her bed. 

Not long ago, the boy was in her room. He stumbled through his speech: eight months of sun, they had a good run, but now, things just weren’t working out. He let this hang and ran his tongue along his teeth. Then he left. 

Lisa May is studying the way her toes can hide themselves in the shag carpet. She alternates between sob and screech. Her nails are restless and dig into various patches of the bedspread. She notices this and forces herself to be still for just two seconds. One Miss-iss-ip-pi Two, and now she’s back to fidgeting, fingers here, fingers there, combing through her hair until she finds it: a cold metal zipper at the back of her head. 

It’s a strange feeling—sitting, reaching back, pinching this zipper between thumb and forefinger—but Lisa May knew this was coming. 

The house is quiet. Across town, Lisa May’s parents clink glasses with gowned strangers.

The zipper warms between her fingers. 

Now: Lisa May stands and unzips herself. (This is tricky, because it’s hard to reach the center of your back.) She steps out of her skin and studies its puddled mass, lumped like dirty laundry on the floor. Her old self is a deflated cage of flesh and hair and sundress. It looks as though it’s been melted. What were once bony arms are now rumpled empty sleeves. Her face, looking up at her, sags like a cheap Halloween mask. 

She should be horrified, and she is horrified, but more than that, Lisa May is awe-struck. So that’s what her hair looked like, all this time? Her eyebrows always looked fine in the mirror and in photos, but here, now, seeing them on the floor…

She’s tempted to take a picture. (She decides not to.)

What should a girl do with her old skin, anyway? Keeping it under the bed is creepy. Hanging it in the closet beside her clothes is a no. And you can’t just put something like that in the trash! That would be disrespectful.

So Lisa May scoops up her skin and goes downstairs to bury it in the backyard. With a scuffed white shoe she drives a shovel-head into the ground. Dropping the skin into the hole makes no sound. 

Back inside, the deed done, she washes her hands and looks at her naked self in the mirror. She is red. She is bone and sinew. Last year, in her biology class, an anatomical model sat in the corner. It had eyeballs instead of eyes and there were tubes in all sorts of places. One day, some kid took the heart out of the model’s chest, held it up to the fluorescent light, and announced that henceforth, the model would be named Greg. Lisa May looks in her mirror and thinks of Greg. 

She isn’t in pain but feels like she should be, so she takes a painkiller. She puts on a t-shirt and underwear (she just realized she was unclothed) and climbs into bed, turns off her light. Sleep will fix this. 

In the morning, her mother fries bacon, her father attacks a crossword with a pencil, and when Lisa May comes down the stairs in sweatpants and a hoodie, with a face red and hollowed, eyes protruding, completely skinless, her parents quietly stop their activities and embrace their daughter. This three-person hug is maintained for some time. Lisa May’s mother cries, assures the okay-ness of things. Lisa May blinks big, wide blinks. 

“Was it the boy?” asks the father.

Lisa May nods.

“What’d you do with the skin?” 

“Buried it. In the backyard.”

Her father beams with pride. “A proper burial! Good for you. Did you give a eulogy?”

She cracks a smile. “No. No eulogy.”

Lisa May receives a talk about skin-shedding. Even though it’s taboo, skin-shedding is perfectly natural and healthy. It can happen at any point in life. It will probably happen multiple times in her life. Her father first shed his skin when he was eighteen, too. A girl dumped him. He tossed his skin in a lake, he can’t remember the name, but it was the lake down by Egret Park, and his skin floated and bobbed like a plastic grocery bag. Her mother’s first shedding came in third grade: her family moved across the country, she forgot a favorite teddy bear, and that was enough to make the zipper appear. 

“So, honey, there are two ways you can go,” Lisa May’s mother says. “You can wait a few days, maybe a week, until a new skin starts to develop. Or, if you’d like, your father and I are perfectly willing to take you to a shop. There’s a new one downtown, isn’t there, David? What’s it called? The Skin Shed?”

“The Skin Shed, yeah. Very clever.”

The mother looks at Lisa May’s featureless red face. “It’s up to you, honey.”

“Mom, aren’t those, like, super expensive?”

“Helping you move on is worth any cost.”

“Some kids at school say those places are immoral. You reject the natural course of growth.”

Her dad grunts. “You take drugs when you’re sick, don’t you?”

“Think it over,” her mom says. “We’re happy to drive you there.”

One more look in the bathroom mirror and Lisa May makes her decision. The family car rolls downtown and stops between a pet supply store and WE BUY GOLD 4 LE$$, where a narrow, easily-missable shop displays a simple sign: The Skin Shed.

“Do you want us in there with you?” Lisa May’s dad asks, looking over his shoulder into the backseat.

“I think I’d rather be alone.”

“Alright. We’ll be just around the corner. Call us if you need anything.”

A bell dings when Lisa May enters. She approaches a front desk, behind which sits a woman with short gray hair. The woman could be very old or very young. It’s hard to tell. She gives Lisa May a smileless smile and speaks like winter: crisp and short and bitter. 

“How can I help you.”

“Hi, um, I’m looking to get fitted for a n-new skin?” Lisa May whispers from within her hoodie.

“No need to whisper, doll. Don’t be ashamed. Skin loss is the reason we’re in business. Just go through that door and back to the waiting room. Someone will be with you shortly.”

“Oh. Thanks. There’s no paperwork or anything?”

“Here at The Skin Shed, we don’t believe in wasting your time.”

The waiting room is more of a waiting hallway. Five folding chairs face posters on the opposite wall. One reads “Starting Over After A Divorce?” and shows three panels: woman with ruined mascara studying used tissue; woman without skin standing before bonfire; woman with new skin sitting on barstool and laughing a beautiful laugh.

Two chairs down from Lisa May, a skinless man in a sleeveless shirt picks at his fat, red arms and mumbles. “Hiding, hiding, everyone shed skin hiding, hiding from world like burn victims. Victims of so many house fires. House f-aye-errs! Hah!” He lifts his hands and pats different parts of his skull, patpatpat, the way one pats pockets when looking for lost keys. 

A lab-coated man appears at the end of the hall. “Mr. Curtis?” The skinless man stops his patting and turns. To the extent that he can emote, he looks pleasantly surprised. “You can follow me now, Mr. Curtis.” 

Twenty minutes later, the two men return. Mr. Curtis has skin. He’s an older gentleman with full cheeks and slicked silver hair. “Really, I can’t thank you enough,” he is saying to the man in the lab-coat. “If she could see me today—well, I’m sure she can see me from up there, and I can guarantee you she’s smiling.” Before he leaves, Mr. Curtis addresses Lisa May. “Young lady, it does get better. Just you know that.”

After walking the older man out of the shop, the professional introduces himself to Lisa May as Dr. Link. He invites her to follow him, and the two walk into a room with three mirrors and a stepstool.

“Now, Lisa May, I’ll have you step up here. I’m going to ask you just a few questions while I take your measurements.”

Dr. Link smells like a clean bathroom. He looks down his nose at a white measuring tape.

“Lisa May, when did you shed?”

“Yesterday.”

“Your first time?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Link smirks. “Congratulations.”

Lisa May doesn’t know whether to thank him.

“And what was the cause?”

“Cause?”

“Surely there must have been some inciting incident.”

“There was a boy.”

“Ah, yes. Always a boy.” Dr. Link measures her arms, her legs, the circumference of her neck. 

“Doctor, can I ask what happened to that older gentleman? Mr. Curtis?”

“I’m afraid information about clients is strictly confidential.” Dr. Link comically looks over both his shoulders, then whispers, “Mrs. Curtis died last week.”

“Oh.”

“They were married forty-one years. You can imagine what that would do to a person. How long the natural recovery time would take.”

Lisa May watches three bone-and-muscle selves be measured by three Dr. Links in the room’s mirrors. 

“Alright, now for the fun part,” Dr. Link says. “Hold out your hand.”

Lisa May does as instructed and feels a pinch on her pointer finger. “What was that?”

Dr. Link holds up a white device the size of a lighter. “Finger prick. Blood sample. We extrapolate from your DNA to compose your new skin. Do you have any photos you would want considered for the design?”

“Can I scroll through my phone?”

“Please. Take your time.”

After some scrolling and squinting, Lisa May turns her phone to Dr. Link. “This is when I was happiest, I think.”

On the phone screen: Lisa May has her arms around friends. It’s a group photo from prom. Everyone smiles. Lisa May’s sequined dress catches every fragment of the scattered dance-hall light.

“A beautiful choice,” Dr. Link says. “We can work with this. Send it to the number taped above the mirror. I’ll be back in less than half an hour.”

Dr. Link disappears, and Lisa May sits on the stepstool, sends the photo, and stares at her alien reflection long enough to drown out any suspicion. 

“Have you ever been scuba diving?” Dr. Link asks when he returns. He carries a clothes-hanger cloaked with a black trash bag. 

Lisa May stands. “No, I haven’t.”

“Well, putting one of these on is exactly like putting on a wetsuit. You step in, pull it up over your foot and ankle, then your other foot and ankle, then your knees, and keep going from there. It can be frustrating. And remember, there’s a zipper. The zipper will dissolve after a couple days. It’s there to help you get dressed.” Dr. Link pulls off the trash bag, tosses the hanger to the floor, and sets a circular tan-white-blue thing on the stepstool. It looks like an abstract rug. 

Lisa May steps onto the circular mat. Her toes wriggle until they find their homes. Her feet become fleshy-white once again. She rolls her new skin up her calves, her thighs. Her eyeballs scan left, right, up, down, and she flails her red, bony arms like some prehistoric beast. She finds the armholes. She feels complete.

Dr. Link helps bring the zipper to the back of Lisa May’s head and looks with her into the mirrors. “Well, what do we think?” 

Lisa May laughs as she comes through the front door of her house. She does a little dance, enjoys making her new skin move. 

“They really did an incredible job,” her dad is saying. 

“I’m so proud of you,” says her mom. 

After the three eat dinner, Lisa May is presented with a cake. “Did you get this while I was being fitted in the shop? You did, didn’t you!” 

Her mom lights a candle and smiles. Her dad jokes that he feels they should sing. The icing reads: New Skin, New Me, Finally Free!

Upstairs, Lisa May showers and prepares for bed. For the first time, she can scrutinize her new features in the familiar bathroom light. Nothing is out of place. Her eyebrows have kept their parenthetical shapes. Her hair is the color of wheat, as always. She has kept her favorite mole on her left cheek. If that boy could see her now, he’d know what a mistake he’d made. Her skin looks healthier than ever, and her nose looks— 

An itch. Probably nothing. Itches are natural with new skins, she thinks.

Her nose is slender and straight until it curls up just at the tip. Her eyes are still gray-blue. Her lips move—

It’s the zipper. The zipper itches. There’s a space the size of a thumbnail on the back of her skull and it beckons for her awareness. She fiddles with the zipper and looks at herself and now she’s crying and wiping her eyes on forearms that are new to her, that she was given, no, not given, purchased, she purchased new forearms and a new face and new hair and all this newness but those same sad eyes, broken and alive, and now she rips the zipper down her back but it’s cheap and it snags on freshly-made skin and she screams from the pain and scrapes herself away and runs down the stairs with her face and neck deflated and shredded into strands, strands that hang in scraps from her collar and make plushy noises as she runs and enters that hot humid garage and she’s getting light-headed and she grasps the shovel her hand grabs the handle a hand with a foreign back she does not know the backs of her own hands the freckles and scars should be there but aren’t and the garage door opens (opens, opens) to darkness and she wipes at lidless eyes and hobbles outside and once she finds that old skin she can rinse it and wear it again. 

Now she is stabbing the ground, now here, now there, stabbing and stabbing and where, where, where did she bury her body?

The post FICTION: The Skin Shed appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This piece received third place in the fiction category of the 2024 Wallace Prize.

When the girl named Lucy Tatum was found just outside town she was thin and dead and the color of old teeth. 

Before they found her body, though, the Tatum girl was missing, and the library was printing flyers of her face in black and white. The image was so over-exposed that Lucy could have been anyone, so the librarians (knowing colored ink was a luxury the library budget could not accommodate, not even for a missing girl) gave the after-school group left to their care all the red and orange crayons that could be found and, after brief instructions, told the kids to go to town. Lucy’s hair was a family of flames; Lucy’s hair was a red parabola atop her head; Lucy’s hair was a curly orange waterfall. The Lucy variations were posted on telephone poles and windows and cash registers. You could walk down any street and she would follow like the sun. Go for a run, and you’d experience a flipbook effect: Lucy’s hair flickers, grows, evolves. 

There was a Lucy posted under the stop sign at the end of our lane. My little brother Pat and I were walking our bikes to the main road when we first saw it. I had only that day heard she was missing. There was a big assembly at school. They brought out the state flag for the occasion. 

“What’s with her hair?” Pat said. He squinted at the poster like it was a museum piece. “And what’s with her eyes?” There were black caverns where there should have been eyes. I hate to admit that, combined with the hair, this made Lucy look a bit like a demon. 

Pat turned to me and giggled. “That’s what you look like when you’re late to breakfast in the morning.” His hair bounced as he laughed.

I punched Pat’s arm. We mounted our bikes and rode into the dusk. 

*** 

“They’re holding a candlelight vigil later tonight,” our father said at dinner the next day, chewing his chicken. “We should go. To show our support.” 

“What’s a candlelight vigil?” Pat asked. 

Our mother was doing a juggling act with pans and hot pads in the kitchen. “It’s a night event,” she said over the clanging of various kitchen instruments, “where people come together with candles to show the heavens their support for a cause.” These were the days when Mom was getting in touch with her spiritual side. Her nightstand had been turned into a shrine for some sort of river goddess, much to our father’s dismay. “Ohhh,” Pat said. “Like in that movie.” 

“What movie?” Dad asked. 

“I don’t remember the name.” 

“Gone Girl,” I said. 

“Yeah, that’s it! Gone Girl!” 

“Gone Girl?” Dad asked. “Why have you seen Gone Girl?” 

Pat, never missing a chance to throw blame on me: “Christopher was watching it with his friends.” 

“And you were watching it with them? Isn’t it rated R?” Dad turned to me. “Why did you allow this?” 

“What was I supposed to do?” I said. “Tell him to leave? It’s not even that graphic or anything.”

“No, yeah, it’s not that bad,” Pat said. “The only graphic thing is when that guy is on top of the Gone Girl and she slits his throat and he dies, right there on the bed!” Pat looked at me. Mom looked at me. Dad looked at me. I looked at Pat. “Why would you tell him that?” 

“You let Pat watch that? He’s in elementary school, Christopher!” 

“Next year I’ll be in middle school.” 

“It’s just a movie, Dad!” 

“No, that’s not a movie, you know what that is, that’s junk food for your brain—no, worse than junk food, it’s like drugs for your brain—” 

“—oh my, no, drugs are drugs for your brain! Movies are movies!” 

Mom did some aggressive pan-clanging to silence the argument. We swiveled our heads to the kitchen. 

“We can talk about this later,” she said. “You boys should get dressed for tonight.” 

“Dressed?” I said. “What do we have to wear?” 

“Something that looks nicer than what you have on.” 

I opened my mouth, but she pointed a spatula at me before I could say anything else. 

*** 

In the grassy area in the middle of town, everyone was slowly everywhere. People carried paper lanterns, lighters, flashlights. Some carried small candles that fit in their palms, and some carried tall candles that dripped wax onto silver trays. For some reason, everyone was whispering. Lucy’s face watched from streetlamps and store windows. 

Teachers and neighbors and adults we didn’t know asked Pat and I how we were holding up. Neither of us really knew Lucy Tatum. She was younger than me and older than Pat. Mr. Tatum ran the hardware store by school, and when we would go there with Dad, a redheaded girl would sometimes bring us the screws or brackets we were looking for. Other than that, we never saw her. We said we were holding up fine. We were told we were strong boys. 

Pat, perhaps out of some protest toward our mother, had buttoned his one good dress shirt all the way up so that it squeezed the color out of his neck. Untucked, without a belt or a tie, this looked ridiculous. I told him I liked his fashion sense. He stuck his tongue out at me. We held our candles and longed for music. 

We turned at the sound of some commotion. Mr. and Mrs. Tatum were swimming through the crowd. Old ladies would take Mrs. Tatum’s hands and say that they were so terribly sorry, that no one should have to go through this. The men would tell Mr. Tatum that the authorities, being so hard at work, would surely find Lucy soon. But the Tatums were visitors from another world. Mrs. Tatum would let her hands be taken and blink and nod. Mr. Tatum’s head mumbled at the ground. 

I was watching when the change occurred. Pat’s math teacher tapped Mr. Tatum’s shoulder and Mr. Tatum snapped up, turning to look over each shoulder, trying to locate himself as if he had just awoken from some terrible nap. 

“Where is she?” He turned to someone. “Where is she?” Another turn. “Where is she?” 

And then, turning again, his gaze fell on Pat. Pat froze. Mr. Tatum hurried to my brother. 

“Where is she? Where is she? Do you know where she is?” 

Pat swallowed. Mom and Dad and I were frozen.

Pat spoke through a tight throat. “I don’t know.” 

Mr. Tatum seized Pat’s shoulders. Something happened in the air between them. “You have to find her,” he begged. “You have to find my girl. You have to find my Lucy. I know she’s out there. I know she’s out there. You have to find my girl.” Pat was a mannequin in a button-down. Mr. Tatum let him go and shuffled away, mumbling. My parents flocked to Pat and, not knowing what to say, hugged him. People slowly began to roam again. A woman in an I Love Lucy shirt set her candle on the ground and started to pray. 

*** 

“I have to find her,” Pat said. It was late and we were both in our beds. These were the first words anyone had said since the vigil. 

I turned to my other side to face Pat’s bed across the room. “He was just saying that, Pat. Mr. Tatum’s really scared and stressed, you know.” 

“I know.” 

“But he wasn’t choosing you specifically. He doesn’t expect you to be Sherlock Holmes or something. You just happened to be in his sight, that’s all.” 

“Maybe.” 

“Try not to worry about it and get some sleep,” I said. I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. I heard Pat reposition himself under his covers. We tried to watch our eyelids, to follow the pools of neon as they appeared and sucked themselves up and appeared again. 

“I’m going to find her,” Pat said. “And you have to help me.” He knew that recently updated, post-disappearance family rules required me to follow him around.

I mumbled an okay and thought about candles, and red hair, and the girl being somewhere and everywhere in the night. 

*** 

Pat shook me awake in the morning. 

“Chris! Chris! We gotta go!” 

“What?” 

“We gotta go find Lucy!” 

He was wearing a tan vest covered with Cub Scout patches. I had never seen this vest before and to this day have no idea where it came from. The straps of his Star Wars backpack were clipped together across his chest. He stood there in his hiking boots and sucked on the straw of his water bottle. 

“What the hell time is it, Pat?” 

Pat looked at his wrist, at a toy spy-gadget watch with lots of buttons. He pressed some of these buttons and furrowed his brow and gave up. 

“I don’t know. Probably seven. We’re not gonna find her if we spend all morning in bed.” 

“It’s too early, Pat. We can look for her later.” 

“Actually, I just got this watch to work, and it’s seven-thirty-seven. So.”

I groaned.

Pat started handing me things—jeans, backpack, first aid kit, duct tape, binoculars, notebook, Oreos—and soon we were out the door, marching into the morning air. Under our stop sign, Lucy was sagging. Her red hair leaked past her shoulders. She had been hit by a sprinkler in the night.

“We’re going to find you,” Pat told the poster. He studied some kind of map he had drawn, a mess of geometric shapes on yellow construction paper. “Don’t you worry, Lucy.” 

*** 

Lucy Tatum was not in any of the main shops in town. Lucy Tatum was not off the side of the path in the park. Lucy Tatum was not behind the arcade. Lucy Tatum was not in the wooded area behind the school. Lucy Tatum was not in the front yards of the Samuelsons or the Franklins or the Delgatos. Lucy Tatum was not under the bleachers at the old baseball field, or under any cars at the gas station, or in any dumpsters by the power plant. 

“Pat.” 

“Yeah.” 

“You know the police have been looking for Lucy, right?” 

“Yeah.” 

“And you know they’ve been looking pretty hard.” 

“Yeah.” 

“So why are we looking?” 

“Because maybe she’s somewhere they wouldn’t think to look,” Pat said. “Some place only a kid could find.” 

We walked down bike trails and under power lines and along a creek that spit us out across town. No Lucy. Pat offered me half a KitKat and crossed locations off his map.

“So we’ve been behind the school.” 

“Pat.” 

“Did we check by the old chapel?” 

“Pat, listen to me.” 

“And we looked around the baseball field.” 

“Look, Pat, the girl’s probably dead.” 

Pat stopped putting check marks on the map. 

“In all honesty,” I said, “Some creep from out of town probably snatched her up, and now she’s on the side of a road somewhere—somewhere far from here—and it’s only a matter of time before we hear about it.” 

Pat tried to kill me with his eyes. He unleashed upon me what was, in his world, the worst insult imaginable: “That’s something a grown-up would say.” 

We kept looking. 

*** 

We were walking on the sidewalk, heading home, when Pat stopped. 

“Hey,” he said, “let’s stop here.” He turned to a light blue house with peeling paint and a sign on the porch that read: BARTHOLOMEW LARKIN — SOOTHSAYER EXTRAORDINAIRE. 

“My god, Pat, we are not gonna ask that old hippie if he knows where Lucy is.” 

“Why not? The police probably haven’t thought to ask him. He might know something we don’t.” 

“Oh, what, like who the stars say you should marry? Mom’s started up on that shit, you know. That’s why she’s been so bossy lately.” 

“His name’s Bartholomew. Like a wizard.” 

I snorted as Pat went to knock on the door. Knock knock knock. There was no answer.

“Too bad, Pat. Guess we’ll just have to head home.” 

Pat pressed watch-buttons that made defeated beeps. We turned away from the door and stepped off the porch. 

“We’ll try again tomorrow,” Pat said, and then the door swung open behind us. A man with quiet eyes and thinning gray hair stood in the doorframe. He wore a robe that looked like something you’d find in a costume shop; the inside lining, I could see, was patterned with five-pointed stars and white-tipped magic wands. A jack-o-lantern smile sprouted on his face. 

“You boys look like you’re on an adventure.” 

Pat and I exchanged looks. 

“I’m terribly sorry to say that I am closed for the day, but if you’d like a tarot reading, palm reading, divination, you come back tomorrow.” 

“No thanks,” I called out with a wave, and the old man went to close the door, and Pat blurted: “We’re looking for Lucy Tatum.” 

Bartholomew Larkin took his hand off the doorknob. He looked past Pat, scanning the horizon like a stormwatcher. 

“Oh my,” he said. 

“The missing girl.” 

“Yes.” 

“And we were wondering if you might be able to help us.” Pat fiddled with the straps of his backpack. “We thought with all your divinations and stuff you might know something the cops don’t. Like where to look.”

I rubbed at my eyes with my palm. Bartholomew kept looking at things we couldn’t see in the distance. 

“I read symbols on cards and creases in skin. I’m afraid looking for a missing girl is a job for the police. It’s certainly not a job for me, and it is most certainly not a job for young boys like yourselves.” 

I was stunned. The most agreeable thing I had heard all day, coming from a man who believes in bird-omens. I tugged on Pat’s sleeve to go. 

“However,” he continued, looking at us now, “there is a place, past the bend in Robin Road, that I find most helpful when I need to connect with what is lost.” I tried to think of where Robin Road was. I had never heard of it. 

Pat gasped. “The Spirit House!” 

I looked at Pat, looked at the old man. The old man nodded his approval. “Over the years I have known men who swear that this factory or that hotel is haunted—a terrible, insensitive word, haunted, don’t you think?—just because they heard noises and were too slow to catch sight of the source. But The Spirit House, well, I can confidently say that, in all my years, I have never known a more popular rest stop for those on their way to higher places.” 

I pictured a ghost on a bench, blowing on a cup of hot chocolate and kicking her feet, waiting for the bus to the afterlife. My brother beamed. “Thank you, Mister Larkin!”

“Be safe, boys,” the man said. The door closed, and the robed man was swallowed by the blue house, and Pat was dragging me down the sidewalk in the direction that wasn’t home. 

***

In the last of the day’s light we passed a Lucy with hair like yellowed weeds, a Lucy with cartoonish slanted eyebrows, a Lucy whose mouth had been ripped by the wind, leaving a paper flap drooping below her nose. 

“The Spirit House is where all the ghosts go to live,” Pat was explaining to me in fast rushes of words between breaths. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it! And I can’t believe you never knew about it when you were in fifth grade. Me and my friends talk about it all the time.” 

“We’re talking about that abandoned house, right? Out past where we took piano lessons? That’s just a party spot. It’s where Don Parker was thinking of throwing the homecoming afterparty.” 

“I thought you weren’t cool enough for parties.” 

“I go to parties. I go to more parties than you.” 

“I’m eleven.” 

“Look, even though I’ve never been to that house, I’m pretty sure I would’ve heard by now if that place was full of ghosts.” 

Pat stopped listening. As he walked he scribbled in the notebook he had packed, sketching little blobs with eyes. 

“And because I did a research project on township planning for history class last year, I know for a fact there’s no road anywhere near here called Robin Road, so whatever you and your friends and that old man—” 

Pat’s hiking boots stopped. He was pointing. I followed his finger. 

We had found ourselves at a dead end. The words K  EP OUT were painted on a sad wooden barricade sitting at the end of the street. Beyond, things sloped into a ditch. To the left of the barricade was a narrow gravel path cutting through patches of bare dirt. My eyes found a long metal pole, driven into a splotch of dead grass beside the path, on top of which sat an egg-blue box with a perch like a tiny diving board. A birdhouse. “Robin Road,” Pat said. 

When I look back now, I can remember having the feeling that I was in a moment I might have dreamt—or maybe a moment Pat had dreamt—and in that dream world, ghosts stirring in the party house was a reality as obvious and irrefutable as air. As I lifted my head to see that birdhouse, I somehow knew this would be my last real adventure, my last chance to be an explorer of the essence of things, and I can see now that the best days of my remembered summers are compressed into that one final breath of childhood, taken on a road known only to construction paper cartographers and old men who think they can read the stars. 

And suddenly Pat and I were the same age, racing at the running speed known only to children, down the path and through the brush and finding ourselves in the field with the abandoned house. 

*** 

It was a small single-story. Vines had taken custody of the walls, and the porch covering folded over itself to touch the warped boards below. Corpses of shutters peppered the perimeter, fallen the short distance from their former heights. What windows remained were cracked—lines snaked across their bodies like veins. 

Inside, there were only a few rooms, all branching off a main hallway. A desk lamp and a collection of empty picture frames claimed the floor of one room. In another, bugs crawled between the threads of the rugs, and rust flaked off an old file cabinet, its drawers littered with crushed beer cans. Mold dripped down all the archways, yellowing the corners and seams, making the edges of the house like those of an old paperback. I smiled at Pat. “Are you ready to solve a mystery, Sherlock?” He smiled back. We looked in cabinets and cupboards, in the bedrooms and the bathroom, under bed frames and under coffee tables, and then we saw a door unlike the others, slightly ajar, with light crawling under it. A shadow swept by. 

Pat poked me. “Look.” 

I’m not sure what we were expecting to find. It was just a broom closet, with a hole in its back wall that opened up to the field outside. The shadow had come from a rat pacing in its pool of moonlight. It scurried when we saw it, but not before giving us a look of pity, as if to say, I’m sorry I’m not a missing girl. 

Pat and I looked at each other, willing new ideas, before the lock between our eyes was broken by dust, snowing down between us. We heard a creak from above.

“Mister Larkin called this place ‘a stop on the way to higher places,’” Pat said. “Do you think he was trying to tell us there’s an attic?” 

We roamed with our heads tilted up until Pat found it: a pull for the attic steps. He jumped to reach the string, and jumped again, and on his third jump he caught it, and a hatch opened, and a ladder accordioned down to my feet. I grabbed Pat’s wrist and held a finger to my lips. We crept upward, tensing with each uncooperative creak. 

At the top, I helped Pat up into the long A-shaped space. On the other end, shadows of trees spilled through a window frame, shuffling around on the wooden floor. A short curtain riddled with holes rippled in the breeze, shifting its weight in a dance with the night. The girl was not there.

Pat hugged my waist and let soft slow sobs into my stomach. Pat’s other adventures, I realized, had all been imaginary; dancing between trees with cartoon characters, waving branches in battles with invisible enemies. For the first time in his young life he had lost. I scratched his hair and looked out the window frame. 

“We’re never going to find her, are we,” he said, wiping at his eyes. I wasn’t sure if this was a question or a statement. I took his shoulders and prepared myself to be a big brother, to lie and say that everything would be okay. I made him face me and noticed he was holding a crumpled piece of paper. He let me take it from his hand. It was one of the posters: Lucy Tatum wearing waxy, crayon-drawn, sunset hair. 

“I was going to give it to her when we found her,” Pat said. “I was going to tell her she was famous.”

The post FICTION: Poster Child appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This piece received second place in the fiction category of the 2024 Wallace Prize.

Dr. David Rosen had lived in Lubbock long enough to know how to survive. He knew when to introduce himself as Dave Rose (almost always) and when to introduce himself as David Rosen (almost never). He knew to drive over to the nearest wet county to buy a bottle of red wine for the Sabbath. It didn’t matter much. They all knew he was a Jew, anyway. In some ways, it protected his career as only one of three obstetricians in all of Lubbock County. The men weren’t worried about him chatting up their wives while he saw them naked, sliced them open, sat between their legs. He was an undesirable, an outcast, and therefore not a threat. 

He had other secrets. When he wanted to read about the latest European fashions, he knew to hide McCall’s Magazine within his copy of The Saturday Evening Post or Life Magazine, as he did now in line at the deli. 

Behind him waited a pregnant woman and her young son. He peered over at the woman’s magazine. Pierre Balmain’s spring collection, available now, displays the artist’s–– David had read the same article moments before. He folded his sandwiched magazines closed. The boy behind David wore a cowboy hat and clutched a stuffed horse under his chubby arm. The clothespin of his diaper was visible above his toy holster. The horse dropped to the ground with a lifeless thump. The boy began to cry. He turned to wipe his face on his mother’s skirt, but she whisked the hem away. 

“Don’t you muss my clothes, now,” she said, not looking up from her magazine. 

“What happened, cowboy?” David said. 

“Sport got hurt,” the boy sobbed. A snot bubble inflated above his lip. 

“Well son, I have treated many cases like Sport’s before. Let me take his pulse.” David dropped to one knee and the boy held Sport toward him with a shaking arm. David tipped his right ear to the horse’s side and nodded his head in pace with an imagined heartbeat. “Just what I thought. What I hear is nothing but pure equine diastolic and systolic homeostasis.”

The boy stared in fascination. The woman looked up from her magazine. 

“In other words, Sport is fit for the Kentucky Derby.” 

The boy wiped his nose on the back of his hand and hugged the horse to his chest. David offered him a square of peach-colored taffy from his coat pocket. The boy accepted it with a slobbery smile. The woman made a show of cleaning the boy’s face with a handkerchief and beamed. “My word, you must have a little one!” she said. 

“Not yet, ma’am,” he said. 

“I’ll pray for you to have a child,” she declared. 

“I’ll pray for a wife first,” he responded good-naturedly, sending both the woman and the cashier into peals of charmed laughter. 

“Well Timmy, say thank you to the nice gentleman,” the woman fluttered. 

“Thanks, mister,” Timmy mumbled to the floor. 

David leaned down to shake the boy’s hand, but with this movement, McCall’s slipped out of Life and landed on the floor, pages splayed suggestively. 

The cashier looked away quickly and the woman’s eyebrows shot up her face. David grabbed it quickly. 

“For my wife,” he said too quickly, then, “I mean, it’s not mine––” 

“You’re sick,” spat the woman. She dragged Timmy out of the store by his armpit. He wailed. Through the glass door, David and the cashier watched the woman stick her fingers into Timmy’s crying mouth. She pulled out the piece of taffy and flung it away as if it were a poisonous insect. It stuck to the sidewalk like shame. 

David took his sandwich and placed two quarters on the counter so softly they didn’t make a sound. He didn’t turn around when the cashier shouted after him that he needn’t return. He kept walking to the hospital, where he’d save the lives of other women who feared and hated him. ***

“You must have a little one!” 

The woman’s words burrowed into David’s mind. He agreed with her: he must. He had always thought so since he held his baby sister. But in this, he felt unusual. 

It seemed to David that the wives were the ones who wanted the babies. The men were the ones who sighed and obliged, rolling and grunting on top of their wives until the wives were made women (the men were already men). The women took up the babies and made the house into a nest. The men took up golf and shooting and automobiles and football to keep them out of the nest until cocktail hour. 

In his free time, David thought about the fathers of literature. King Lear misunderstood his children. Mr. Bennett neglected his. Agamemnon traded Iphigenia for good fortune. Pap Finn tried to kill Huck. 

Meanwhile, Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon to avenge her daughter. Marcel’s mother kissed him goodnight without fail. Marmee still found time to feed the paupers after feeding Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. 

Less virtuous women appeared in literature, of course. There was Emma Bovary. And Anna Karenina. But Emma and Anna never beat their children, molested them, or demeaned them. They simply refused to let their offspring disturb their quest for pleasure. In this sense, they were bad mothers, or relatively good fathers. 

The problem seemed rooted in older books, David thought, in his own and in that of his neighbors. 

Abraham held Isaac’s bound body over the flames, hearing a voice in his mind drone out the terror of the boy. 

God let them strip Jesus naked, let the thorns bite his scalp, let them drive nails through the palms of his son.

It could have been a fable, but David once saw his neighbor, Mr. Cullins, watch the neighborhood boys make fun of young Cathy Rae Cullins when a spot of menstrual blood bloomed onto her skirt and Mr. Cullins did nothing to stop them. The way David saw it, the events were connected. 

So he dreamed. He would be the protagonist of a yet unwritten book in which the father was willing to insult a god or commit treason or climb the cross himself to keep his baby alive. 

*** 

David made it through the day. He delivered one baby and prescribed penicillin to one woman who tore. 

He drove home from the hospital. He parked in the gravel driveway of the yellow ranch house he was paying off. He sighed every time he saw it. He never thought he’d buy a house here, here where he could see Park Avenue Baptist Church from the kitchen and First Baptist Church from the bedroom. “The things we do,” he muttered. He had nailed the mezuzah on the inside of the door frame, rather than the outside. It didn’t matter. Some neighborhood boys put a block of bacon in his mailbox last week. They were probably the same ones who tormented Cathy Rae. Maybe they were the sons of the boys who socked him on the playground in junior high. Cruelty was hereditary. 

He entered and paid Mrs. Jenkins, the maid. He ate a plate of roast beef that she left in the oven for him. She always overcooked it, but he never told her. On some mornings when he picked her up from the bus stop, she sported a fading bruise on one eye or the other. He noticed things like this. He wouldn’t add to her troubles. 

Now he lay on his back. Richie’s head lay on his chest. A cylinder of hot ash fell on David’s bare stomach. He fought the urge to flinch while the ash curled into a gray feather and left a tiny welt. He didn’t want to disturb Richie. 

This Richie was Kenny’s boy Richie. His name wasn’t Richie Matthew, singular, but Richie Matthews, plural. 

“Like there are two of you,” David would say, a smile lifting his face.

“No sir, my daddy would’n’a made the same mistake twice,” Richie would laugh bitterly. 

“If there were two of you, I’d go out and find you both,” David would respond. 

But David knew what Richie meant. Kenny Matthews had been the mayor of Lubbock for nineteen years. He owned four stores downtown. He was on the board of the bank. “I led this town straight through the war and back,” Kenny Matthews would say as if the dusty drugstores of the Panhandle were the beaches of Normandy. 

Kenny would have considered his son a mistake if he knew what Richie did. He wouldn’t have set up Richie with the job at the bank. He wouldn’t have bought Richie the Buick Skylark that the whole town envied. He wouldn’t announce to the world that Richie was his. 

Richie was praying. He always prayed, afterward. 

David watched Richie. His face in prayer did not look so different from his face in pleasure. This was the type of observation that would offend Richie, that would remind Richie that he was, in his own head, damned. 

“Amen,” Richie muttered and lit a cigarette of his own. 

The two men exhaled in hazy silence. 

David tilted his head from one side to the other. He waited for Richie to speak. After his prayers, usually, Richie would talk his ear off about his day at the office. 

But today, Richie was quiet. He studied his cigarette intently between draws. How small it looked in his hands, ribboned with veins and muscle. Richie was proud that his physique now looked the same as it did the day the town carried him out of the stadium on their shoulders. It was his last game of the senior season. Team Captain of Texas Tech Football was closer to a royal title in Lubbock than Mayor. With a touchdown, he shared his father’s crown. 

“Well, have you given it some thought?” David asked at last. 

“Sure,” said Richie.

“And?” 

“Dallas is far.” 

“And? You like driving.” 

“Not for five hours.” 

“Look, I have to go down to Dallas for the conference anyhow. No one would know us there. Don’t you want to eat with me in a restaurant, Richie? Don’t you want to see what my face looks like in the daytime?” 

“You know I do,” Richie responded, quietly. 

*** 

Richie walked to David’s house at 5 am, before the light came. (People would have seen the Skylark in David’s driveway.) 

Dallas announced itself when the lone ranch houses began to huddle into neighborhoods. The city center rose up in brick buildings painted white and yellow and pink. Richie insisted on staying in the car while David sat through an hour-long presentation from the other physicians. 

“I phoned for a lunch reservation at the Adolphus Hotel,” David said excitedly. He pulled the car up to a line of valets wearing gloves. A valet stepped forward and opened the door for David, then Richie. Richie stared openly. 

“Cuidelo bien, señor,” David instructed the man, handing him a nickel. 

“A su servicio,” he responded, taking the keys. 

After the man drove off, Richie turned to David and asked under his breath, “Did you tell him we’re brothers?” 

“No Richie, I told him to take care of the car.” 

“Well I couldn’t understand,” Richie retorted. 

“Well now brother, let’s go on in,” David said soothingly. He put a hand on Richie’s shoulder and tried not to notice when Richie shivered like a horse shaking off a fly.

The two men walked through the oak doors. When they stepped inside, Richie drew in a breath. The ground had a thick red carpet and a glass chandelier sent light shifting across the paneled walls. “David, you shoulda told me. I’m not dressed right for this thing.” 

“It’s fine, Richie, we’re just having lunch.” 

The maitre d’ greeted them. 

“Please wait while we prepare the table, gentleman,” he said. 

“We wouldn’t have to wait at home,” Richie grumbled. 

“Stop grumbling,” David chided. 

The maitre d’ returned and led them to their seats. He handed them leather-bound menus. “Can I offer either of you a cocktail to start with?” he asked. 

“No,” said Richie, louder than necessary. 

A waiter materialized to take their order. 

“I’ll have the sole meunière, but may I have the beurre blanc on the side?” David asked. “An excellent choice, sir,” responded the waiter. “And you?” 

“I, uh, the tuna… car…paccio,” said Richie, uncertainly. 

“He’s an adventurous eater,” David told the waiter mischievously, and Richie kicked him under the cover of the white tablecloth. 

After the waiter returned with their plates, Richie’s eyes widened. The tuna carpaccio was a tower of fleshy, dull pink bricks. 

“I didn’t order this,” Richie protested. 

“This is indeed the tuna carpaccio, sir,” the waiter responded. 

“Where is the tuna? What’s this pink stuff?” 

“The tuna is the pink stuff, sir. As you know, it is our signature preparation of raw fish.” Richie’s face colored darker than the tuna meat. 

“Can I offer you a different dish to replace it?” offered the waiter.

“Naw, I’m fine,” Richie said. 

“Oh Richie, have something else!” said David. 

“I said, it’s fine!” responded Richie, lighting a cigarette. 

“Sir, may I offer you a cigar in lieu of––” 

“Just go away,” responded Richie. 

David tried to catch his eye, but the smoke obscured him. 

*** 

David and Richie spent the five hours back to Lubbock in silence. 

Richie turned on the radio somewhere near Weatherford. He fiddled with the stations until Elvis Presley’s voice filled the car. 

“I’m sorry,” said Richie. 

“I’m sorry, too.” 

“I know you love this song,” said Richie. 

“I know you love me,” said David, a smile pushing up his face. 

“That’s right,” said Richie. He looked out the window. The prairie spread before them. 

*** 

David was smiling in the post office, which was little more than a dark, cluttered room. He was mailing a letter to his baby sister––well, a baby no longer. She was a Radcliffe girl now. David always looked forward to dropping off his letters and copies of annotated novels. It wouldn’t stop him that Mr. Edward, the postman, was always in a dour mood. 

The elderly woman in front of David was not paying attention. She didn’t realize that she was at the front of the line. Mr. Edward coughed aggressively. The woman spun around and sent a stack of envelopes cartwheeling to the floor.

“Not to worry, ma’am,” David said. He knelt to the floor and began scraping up handfuls of envelopes. 

“What’re you doin’ that for, Rosen?” snapped Mr. Edwards. “Everyone knows Jews can’t go to heaven anyhow.” 

*** 

Back in Ben Jackson’s Motel, David leaned on his back and looked at the ceiling fan he saw twice a week. The ceiling was covered by a floral printed fabric, which had been chewed threadbare by hungry moths. The fan was creaky and plastic. It might have been his favorite view in the world. Richie sat stiffly against the pillows. 

“Want another smoke?” David offered. 

Richie shook his head, then nodded. 

He clamped a cigarette between his teeth and sat back against the headboard once more. He chewed on it, unlit. 

“You’re worrying me, Richie,” David said to the fan. Then, “It’s fine that you didn’t like the lunch. It’s fine. We won’t do it again. We can just stay here. We can figure––” 

“David, I’m engaged.” 

David blinked. 

“But how?” 

“Same way as everyone else.” 

“But… how?” 

“How?” he mocked. “Don’t play stupid, David. By asking her.” 

David felt tears spring to his eyes. The ceiling fan was underwater. Or he was. Richie’s face softened. 

“I proposed. To Georgia Lou Dickinson. She’s a real good girl. She golfs at the club.” “I see.”

“Her momma and mine are friends.” 

“And you like her?” 

“Yes.” 

“Enough to marry her?” 

“Yes.” 

“You’re spitting in my face, Richie.” 

“This ain’t about you, David. Our time’s run out, that’s all. We’re barely living. We only see each other twice a week. We sneak over to the Black side of town. We pay Ben Jackson, more than his rooms cost, to keep his mouth shut, and he asks for fifty cents more every week. We can’t do this forever.” 

“Maybe we could. If we’ve kept it from your all-seeing daddy, I don’t see why we couldn’t keep it from your wife.” 

“Don’t be stupid, David. That would never work here.” 

“So let’s leave! Let’s leave, men can live together in other places, we could go to Europe.” “I know you hate it here, David. But I don’t know where else would be as… comfortable for me. This is my town. These are my people.” 

“But they hate us,” said David. 

“No, Dave,” Richie said, rolling onto his side. “They hate you.” 

*** 

David forked another clump of mashed potatoes into his mouth. They stuck to his palate. They had no taste. Mrs. Jenkins was a poor cook, but David was worse. He had given her the week off during the lead-up to Richie’s wedding. He could barely hold himself together at the hospital, much less at home. He didn’t want her to hear him crying, cursing, throwing a book at a wall in just the next room over. The house was small. One man doesn’t need much space when he has no one else. 

The ceremony would be at First Baptist Church, the one visible from David’s bedroom. He dragged his mattress from the bedframe and slept on the kitchen floor.

“I’ll wake up alone again tomorrow,” David announced to the room, his voice muffled by the potatoes, and no one corrected him. 

He sighed. Dido killed herself when Aeneas left her. In the stories, the forsaken always kill themselves. David thought about it. He would take his razor blade and press the dull side into his wrist, waiting for the courage to flip it. Then he would remember the glass boxes of babies with half-formed lungs, open guts, jaundiced skin. Until the hospital could hire a proper neonatologist, he was the only person in town who knew how to save them. He’d slap himself and put the razor away. 

Richie was the forsaker. Sometimes the forsakers killed themselves, too. Like Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. Cheaters. Adulterers. Sinners, as Richie would say. But both women traded practicality for passion. Richie, on the other hand, traded passion for practicality. If the logic held, he would have a happy ending. 

David looked at the invitation again. It was printed on thick paper, pale pink. He knew Richie didn’t choose it, didn’t have anything to do with planning the ritual that would consecrate his normalcy. He felt angriest when he thought of Richie handing the baby off to Georgia when he went to watch a game. Fatherhood would be an afterthought to Richie. A checkbox, a credential. A degree perhaps, a doctorate in being a normal man with a normal life. 

Maybe it would suit him. The muscles of the town’s football hero would soften into the figure of a father. 

Jealousy knotted with David’s loneliness, and he cried for a while. 

Afterward, he shaved his face and put on his suit. He shined his shoes and combed his hair. Then he walked out the door to watch his lover marry a girl who golfed at the club. *** 

David watched from the back of the church. He sat alone. Afterward, he fought his way to the front of the receiving line. Richie clapped the men on the back as they embraced him. Georgia tossed her head this way and that to accept kisses on the cheek. Her veil followed her like a tail. Her dress was like something out of the Dior book last year. He congratulated Georgia on her taste. They made a good couple, David conceded. She had a sunny, freckled face. Her smile was earnest, like Richie’s. Their child would look like her, he felt with certainty. 

And then they were in front of him, arm and arm and smelling of perfume. The felicitous couple stared at him blankly. Georgia broke the silence. 

“Dr. Rose! You delivered my niece!” she exclaimed. She tugged on her husband’s arm. “Richie, this is the man who saved Caroline’s life!” 

“Congratulations, Richie,” said David, extending his hand. 

“Good to meet you, doctor,” said Richie, shaking it limply. 

*** 

David left the reception early to go to the hospital. He stood up just as the waiters wheeled out the cake, so no one noticed when he left. They probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. For a second, he thought Richie might have noticed because he held up a napkin to his face as if to hide a pained look. Then Richie moved the napkin to the back of his neck and it became clear that he was simply wiping away sweat. 

David drove to the hospital by himself. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in rhythm to the radio music. An Elvis song came on. David switched the radio off. He tried to swallow but found his tongue was as heavy as lead. 

The West Texas Hospital was a single, four-story brick building. David had completed his residency in a hospital with four different buildings. Meanwhile, this hospital had the look of a hypertrophied schoolhouse. The red brick edifice was accentuated by white detailing. Steps led up to the front door. Dual flag poles with the Texan and American flags stuck out of the middle of the roof like television antennae. When he accepted the job, he had planned to stay a year, no more. But Richie was tree sap––no, amber, he thought. And David was an ant. 

There were very few cars parked on the block surrounding the hospital. It was Easter weekend. His own staff was on leave. Half of his nurses had been at the wedding that morning, glowering at Georgia through their congratulatory smiles. 

David checked his watch. 8:27 pm. If the invitation was correct, the reception would be over by now. Everyone would be home, drinking their illegal whiskey in the privacy of their kitchens. “Evening, Alice,” he greeted the woman at the front desk. “Evening,” she responded, not looking up from her book. 

He walked to his small office in the maternity ward. The paper calendar on the wall was still pinned to February. He didn’t want to see the word “April” printed at the top, in the same font that it had been on the wedding invitation. Otherwise, his office was tidy. A folding cot leaned against the wall for overnight shifts. A hanging skeleton model shook when he walked or sneezed. He stacked his medical textbooks in two adjacent towers on his desk. He thought they looked like a ribcage. Behind the stacks stood the framed picture of his sister. A heart behind bone: the metaphor was complete. David did things like this to entertain himself, to keep his artistic mind alive. He didn’t tell Richie about it. Richie wouldn’t have found it clever. 

A knock at the door startled him out of his reverie. 

The voice cleared its throat. David looked up. One of the nurses was standing in the doorway. “She’s ready to push, doctor. Mrs. Ryder. In room 41.” 

“Thanks, Stacy.” 

David read Mrs. Ryder’s chart on the walk to room 41. This was her seventh birth in nine years. She had outstanding hospital bills from the last three. Her hospital gown stretched over her belly. A shabby dress lay on the chair next to her. He walked in and introduced himself. She moaned in pain. “Just not another girl,” she panted.

It was a fast birth, but a hard one. The baby was hard to turn and her shoulder got stuck on the way out. She was frosted in a wax that left David’s hands white. For a millisecond, she was the youngest human alive. 

“A girl,” David told her, holding the baby out to Mrs. Ryder. 

“Tom wanted a boy,” she wailed, not even reaching up. “Now he’s going to reenlist!” “What will you name her?” he asked, trying to redirect her attention. 

“I don’t know yet,” she said glumly, still loopy from the laughing gas. 

The baby made a choking noise but didn’t cry. Her pink skin took on a bluish tint. She looked Otherworldly. 

David rushed her into the empty triage room, brushing against a metal scale and sending it crashing onto the linoleum floor in his haste. She was losing oxygen. This was common among neonates, routine, boring, almost. 

But David would do it himself. He used a syringe to aspirate her tiny throat. The mucus released and the baby screamed. 

The thought of bringing her back to Mrs. Ryder while she was bemoaning the baby’s gender felt cruel. He looked up and down the hallway. The ward was empty. The pink linoleum floors reflected the fluorescent ceiling lights. He darted into his office, the squalling baby held to his chest. He pulled off his white coat and unbuttoned his shirt. He held her to his bare chest. Her body vibrated with the power of her vocal cords. 

He held his index finger above her mouth. She clamped down on his skin with her slippery gums, suckling on it, instinctually searching for milk. She didn’t care who he was, what he was. She was hungry. She trusted him for her survival. 

Affection surged, unbearable in its strength. Perhaps he could feed her. He could make formula. He could treat her colic, her coughs, her fevers. He could read to her. He could buy her pretty dresses when she was old enough — the nice clothes and schoolbooks that her parents couldn’t afford.

Her sticky eyelids blinked once, twice, then settled closed. He carried her back to the triage room and set her into an empty bassinet. He tucked the thin cotton blanket over her and swaddled it under her back. She had known the world for fifteen minutes. No one taught her how to breathe, but still, the blanket rose and fell. 

“You deserve a name,” David told the bundle. 

He backed out of the room, step by step, and closed the heavy door behind him. He walked up the hall, then down the hall, then back again. The grotesque sticking sounds of his rubber-soled shoes against the floor made him nauseous. He felt old. He would only be older tomorrow. He found Nurse Benson at the nurses’ station, folding a stack of diapers. 

“May I have a moment?” he asked. 

“Mrs. Ryder is feeling well,” she said. “She’s used the bathroom and is eating without trouble.” “Thank you.” 

“And the baby?” 

“That’s the thing, Nurse Benson. I – I tried with the syringe. Then forced respiration. I even gave her oxygen.” 

“Oh no––” 

“Nothing would have helped. Her lungs themselves were underdeveloped. She passed.” “Oh Doctor, I’ll pray for that poor baby.” 

“And so will I. Stacy, could you please talk to her? In a gentle way. A way she can understand.” “Of course..” 

The two stood in silence. She continued, 

“And then I’ll fill out the paperwork and––” 

“I took care of all that,” David assured. “I won’t make your job any harder. Not on Easter.” “You’re too good, Dr. Rosen,” she said. 

Dr. Rosen waited until she had walked out of sight.

*** 

Someone else might have asked where the frenzy came from. But he knew what was happening. His adrenal glands had released adrenaline, which diffused into his bloodstream and was transported into his capillaries that were finer than lace. He put on his coat and packed the photo of his sister into his briefcase. He walked into the triage room and lifted her out of her bassinet. She didn’t wake. David took this to be her agreement. She chose him back. And then he walked down the three flights of back stairs and left through the front door. 

“Good night, Alice,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t look up from her book, not for him. And then he was on the road with her, the tiny creature, her body still streaked with the fluids of her birth. She nested in the crook of his left arm. He kept his right hand on the wheel. “I brought you into the world,” he murmured, and it wasn’t even a lie. 

It was a virgin birth. An immaculate conception. David created a daughter without original sin. Sin––that was all those people cared about. They wanted heaven so badly that they made life hell. He was cleaner than all of them.

The post FICTION: Deliverance appeared first on Yale Daily News.

This piece received first place in the fiction category of the 2024 Wallace Prize.

I won’t deny that it did take a while for me to get used to him. The first time I met him was at a dinner party. We were sitting across from one another, which I think may actually have been a strategic choice on the part of Tabitha, my old college roommate and the hostess of the party. She knew I was single.

He was wearing a button-down shirt and knitted vest—very college professor-looking. And of course the glasses, which I only found out later were actually non-prescription; he wears them so that people know where to make eye-contact.

And I’m sure it would be disconcerting for most people looking across the table at their dinner companion and seeing the Monet print on the wall behind them, and watching their utensils move without apparent hands to move them, the fork lifting the chicken off the plate seemingly of its own will.

But the fact of the matter is that, as a nurse, I spend my days with plenty of people who have some part of them about which they are very self-aware—a scar or a malfunctioning limb, for instance. So at that dinner party, I already knew the proper etiquette with such people: look at their eyes; don’t stare when you think they can’t see; engage with them as people, not bodies. In other words, treat them the way they want to be treated, instead of selfishly satisfying your sick human curiosity.

So that’s what I did with Simon. I didn’t even look to see if the chewed food was visible as it slipped down his throat. (It isn’t, by the way. It disappears when it gets past his lips.)

For these reasons, I like to think that he was comfortable with me from the start. I’m not sure, but I think he was giving me looks across the table. I liked the sound of his voice when he talked: mellow, with clearly enunciated “d’s” and “t’s.”

After dinner, Tabitha brought out Pictionary, which she knew was my favorite—we played it all the time in college with the girls on our floor when we were stressed out over exams or presentations. Simon’s glasses were aimed at me as the teams formed. So I took the first leap: “Want to be my partner?”

“I would like that,” he said.

We won before any of the other teams could even make it past the first corner of the board. Clearly, we were on the same wavelength.

Simon walked me to the Subway that night. I remember it was a little disconcerting, standing with him in the dark, his voice and the flash of the street-light on his button-down the only indication that he was there beside me. He moved silently. I couldn’t even hear him breathing, really. I wondered how hard it must be to live like him—to walk down a street at night hardly noticeable—and then, if someone did notice you, to be stared at relentlessly until you were out of sight, to feel their eyes on you, searching for your neck or hair and finding only jacket, pants, shoes, and glasses. And then during the day, only those stares, endlessly, people whispering as you walk by, maybe little children even daring each other to go up and see if their hand would pass through you. Some people look at you and scream. Others faint dead away. And they only know you’re there in the first place because you put on clothes that morning like everyone else, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy, when going outside with nothing on would maybe allow you to walk down the sidewalk blissfully anonymous like every other person in New York City.

When he asked me for my number, I gave it to him.

We met in the corners of cafes, in dimly-lit bars, in parks on the very edge of Manhattan, the swings at the bottom of the pier on the Lower East Side. He liked to go to places without many people and I accommodated him. We talked for hours on end over the littlest things: my feelings on scrubs, a slide he loved as a kid, our mutual love of Ethiopian food.

Our relationship wasn’t physical at first, just shared company. I had a hard time initiating anything since I didn’t want to grab the wrong thing or touch the wrong place. And I hated that I couldn’t give him physical pleasure—he had likely gone so long without it, and he deserved it from someone. It didn’t have to be me, just someone. But it was me, and I was willing to give it to him. I didn’t know how to approach him about it. Luckily I didn’t have to; one night after sitting on the couch for a few hours and reading together, I felt him touch my cheek. I turned my head and he kissed me.

That night, in the bedroom, I wasn’t sure what to do. When he took his clothes and his glasses off, I had a horrible moment where I felt like I was just sitting in the middle of my bed, naked and alone, illuminated by the wall lamp, aroused for no real discernible reason, and yet fiercely perceived by something I couldn’t see. It felt like every wall in the room was looking at me with lust. And then I saw the impression of his knee in the blanket, felt the mattress shift beneath me and his body stretch over me, his hands lifting my arms over my head.

The secret to having sex with an invisible man is closing your eyes.

Our first apartment was on the Upper West Side. It was small—only just affordable between our two salaries. We shared an eclectic taste in decor: he liked busy, consuming patterns, and I liked Art Deco. The apartment became a wonderland of furniture and art. The biggest room in the apartment was the living room; we filled it with asymmetrical plant stands and a white and blue seersucker couch and, best of all, we covered the walls in stick-on wallpaper—angular gold lines zigzagged across the white background ambitiously, darting up and down the length of the wall. My mother lent us a carpet she had bought in India, a mixture of light yellows. Somehow the room worked. I liked to sit on the carpet the morning after a night shift and lean my head back against the couch, my eyes closed, letting the sunshine paint the inside of my eyelids red, listening to Simon make a delicious breakfast that I likely would not taste before I fell asleep.

There were occasional fights. I wanted children, he didn’t. We compromised and bought a fish tank for the living room. Simon didn’t care much for the fish. We would squabble over dishes.

Our largest fight took place at our favorite Italian restaurant a few blocks away from our apartment. I believe in God and Simon doesn’t, but before that night it was one of the few things we had avoided really talking about. Simon said some pretty atheistical things in the middle of his meatball and I got mad and stormed out, which meant he had to pay the bill himself and run after me and he absolutely hated drawing attention to himself and his condition in that way. I did feel bad later, after we’d made up and were lying in bed, thinking about how awful it must have been for him to run through the streets, people leaping out of his way in terror. I thought that if I was different from everyone else in a deeply irrefutable way, I might not believe in God either.

“To tell you the truth, sometimes I feel like God,” he said when we were lying in bed.

“That’s blasphemous,” I told him.
“I know,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
Then a few minutes later he said, “Because nobody can see God.”

“Okay, stop now,” I said and he really did stop.

But it was something I had wondered about occasionally. That maybe God’s biggest power—or his only power—was that nobody could see him. Would that make him the wind? Or just a bunch of atoms, something visible but invisible to us? When I really thought about it, I realized Simon’s existence was in some ways a proof of God’s existence. Simon was real, a person who thought and felt. And yet, if you weren’t looking for him, you wouldn’t find him. God was much the same way. Although that was true for God all the time and only true for Simon when Simon was fully naked.

But other than that, we got along well. Simon worked at his law firm, I spent long hours at the hospital, and at night we played board games and watched movies and talked. Simon seemed happier than he ever was when we first started dating, and I liked to think it was because he finally had someone to understand him, to appreciate him, even with the one big thing that made him different.

I started to wonder about marriage. Did I want more than our apartment, our committed monogamy? I came from a traditional family—I didn’t have a single unmarried cousin. But maybe Simon wasn’t ready for that. Yet, I wanted him to be the one to propose. 

I spoke with Jeanine about it. She was a nurse on my floor and one of my good friends at the hospital. We played good cop, bad cop with patients. I was the one who politely told you to take your medicine, who gave you a hug if you asked for it, who told you it was okay to feel so overwhelmed that you didn’t do any of the things the doctor told you to do.

There was nothing polite or affectionate about Jeanine. Her charges were disgruntled but healthy.

I knew Jeanine would give me her honest opinion on marriage, so I asked her about it when we took our lunch break together on a Thursday.

“Consider why you dated him in the first place,” she said. We were sitting together on a bench in Central Park, eating our Halal cart lunches.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you want to start a relationship with him? What drew you to him?”
I thought back to Tabitha’s dinner party. “I thought he was smart. His jokes were funny. And he was interesting.”
Jeanine speared some falafel with her fork. “Is that all?”
“I remember wondering if he’d ever been in a relationship. Given his condition.”

“Ah,” she said, pointing the falafel at me. “So you pitied him.”

“I didn’t pity him. I felt for him. There’s a difference.”

She shrugged. “There’s a fine line between empathy and pity.”

I tried to remind myself that Jeanine’s bluntness was the reason I had started this conversation in the first place. “I wanted your opinion on whether or not Simon and I should get married. I didn’t ask you about Simon as a person.”

“And what I’m saying to you is you need to make sure Simon is the right person before you even start thinking about marriage.”

“Simon is the right person,” I said.

She put down her fork and gave me a supremely patient look, one I’d seen her use on tough-customer charges but never on me.

“Okay, what?” I asked.

“I don’t mean this in an offensive way,” Jeanine said, “but you are a carer. You care about people, you care for people. That is the reason you are in this line of work. But when you care for someone—I mean in the sense of taking care of them, not in having feelings for them—there is something implicit in the relationship between the caregiver and the care-receiver where the caregiver has the most power. The caregiver is not the one who needs help, who needs kindness. Rather the caregiver is so able that they have the capacity to help the care-receiver. And again, I don’t mean this in an offensive way, but I have known you for a long time, and I know that you get a high off of caring for people because it makes you feel good about yourself. It’s one of the things that makes you such a good nurse. But the reason you started dating Simon is that, in a subconscious way, his condition makes you feel superior to him, and you like that. And I don’t think that makes him the right person for you to marry. It would be like marrying a patient.”

She closed her styrofoam container and stood up. “I had to get it off my chest,” she said. “You’ll thank me later.”

She began walking away toward the exit to the park. I wanted to say something to make her realize how much she had hurt me, to make her turn around and come back and apologize or say that everything she had said was a joke. Instead all that I managed to yell after her was: “I am not a carer.” It sounded pathetic even to my own ears.

Jeanine had created a twisted version of reality in which my entire career and personality was built upon my need to feel above everyone else, a world in which my self-aggrandizement drove everything I did. She made it seem like I became a nurse to feel better about myself, instead of helping people. All I’d ever wanted to do was help people for their own sakes. And giving me such a motive overlooked all the hard work I’d put into becoming a nurse: my long nights of studying for tests in nursing school, my weeks spent volunteering in hospitals to fulfill my “field” requirements, the hours I spent explaining systems and procedures to other nursing candidates who didn’t understand the material as well as I did. My night shifts, my day shifts, patients yelling at me for simply being in the room—Jeanine hadn’t considered any of that.

Not to mention this apparently completely selfish part of me that had caused me to form a relationship with Simon out of supposed pity. Pity! What about love? What about romance? Yes, Simon was different. Yes, people sometimes ran away when they saw him coming down the street. And yes, maybe there were moments in which I found pleasure that I was the one holding his hand when all those people were running away. But that was because of how much I loved him, not because I wanted to be his caregiver.

I switched my shifts for a week to avoid Jeanine. The patients suffered for it; it meant they either got good cop or bad cop. It took another two weeks for me to forgive her enough to speak with her again, and another month before we resumed our friendship—albeit a slightly less intimate one. I did not bring up marriage again.

Nor did I bring it up with Simon. I became distracted by a strange thing that started happening at our apartment. It was only strange when one understands my nighttime routine. Usually when I came home after a day shift, I would drop my bag by the front door, wash my hands in the kitchen, and then sit for a moment in a white wicker chair placed at the entrance of the living room. After catching my breath, I would stand up and head to the bathroom for a quick shower before heading across the hall into the bedroom. Simon was almost always sitting on the bed reading a book when I got home. Our bedroom was his quiet space. Then we would have dinner together.

The strange thing was that, about once a week, when I came in and sat down on the wicker chair, stretching my legs out and letting the aches and complaints of the day fall from me, I began to feel a tingling sensation all over my body. It was as though I had just emerged from an ice cold bath. Shivers would run up and down my spine, light and awful like spiders’ legs. My brain felt claustrophobic, trapped in my skull. The sensation was thoroughly and singularly unpleasant and would last until I got into the shower.

Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t stop sitting in the living room after work. But what I have to remember is that most of the time, everything was normal—the wicker chair was still the relaxing refuge that I was so used to. Most of the week I thought I was just imagining it, but I would get home one night and the sensation would come back just as strongly as before.

I hated complaining about physical or mental problems like this to Simon. Nothing that happened to me even seemed bad enough to complain about in comparison to what Simon had to go through just by walking down the street. The only person I did describe the sensation to was Tabitha, who told me she had felt something similar when she was pregnant. She recommended I take a pregnancy test. I assured her it was extremely unlikely that I was pregnant, but I took a test anyway. It came up negative.

I considered asking Jeanine, but decided against it.

But I did start to feel a little bit like I was going crazy. While riding the bus home, I would become anxious about whether or not I would feel the sensation. Would it happen today? Nursing was a stressful job, and I was tired of that stress remaining until I was in my apartment’s bathroom, feeling safe knowing that Simon was in the bedroom waiting for me. On the bus, I would try to imagine the moment I would come into our bedroom, fresh and clean, my hair still damp, and then Simon looking at me, taking off his glasses, pulling me down onto the mattress and making love to me before cooking dinner for us both.

The paranoia built regardless. One Thursday, as I sat on the wicker chair watching the light fade out the window, my skin prickling, the hair on the back of my neck standing up, feeling like I was being stuck with one thousand tiny needles, I realized I had had enough. I didn’t care if it made me seem crazy, but I was going to get to the bottom of this.

I looked all over the room. Nothing. I stood up and walked to the bathroom. I closed the door almost all the way, leaving it open just a half inch. I turned on the shower, and, still standing on the bathroom floor, I pulled the shower curtain along its rail, the curtain rings squeaking their metallic protests. And then I wedged myself between the sink and the door and looked through the crack.

For a minute, nothing happened. I began to seriously consider booking an appointment with a psychiatrist. And then I saw the bedroom door across the hallway open and close by itself, which meant that Simon had left the bedroom, naked for some reason.

Except then I heard the telltale groaning of the springs beneath our bed, which meant that Simon had just clambered onto the bed. Which meant that he had not in fact been leaving the bedroom; he had been entering it. Which meant that he had been standing naked in either the kitchen or the living room, because this was, as I stated before, a small apartment.

I turned, heart beating, undressed, and stepped into the shower. I leaned my head against the cool tiles and let the water run over me.

Could it be true that the entire time this sensation had been because, somehow, my body unconsciously was aware that Simon was in the room with me, naked, silent, watching me, without letting me know that he was there? Of course the feeling that someone’s eyes are on you always carries with it a vague unpleasantness. But the awful sensation I’d been feeling in the living room was more than that.

I remembered the atmosphere in the room the first time we had sex—that terrible, aching loneliness, feeling like my very presence on a bed was an excuse for everything around me to look at me lasciviously. Feeling helpless, trapped, weak. The sensation I had been feeling in the living room was very similar to how I felt then. And Simon had been in the room with me then, even if it didn’t feel like it, about to join me on the bed. So was it really him in the living room? And if it was him… why had he been doing it?

I tried to assure myself that I was overthinking things, that today was a fluke. Maybe Simon had been in bed waiting for me, naked, and then decided to take an Advil in the kitchen. But then why hadn’t he told me he was in the kitchen when I came in? And really, why would he be completely naked? His feet got cold easily; wouldn’t he at least put on socks?

It seemed impossible to me that Simon would use his condition to do something that he knew was wrong. After all, he tried so hard to be normal, to maintain friendships and go to work and get exercise and watch movies in an actual movie theater. Though he had never told me so explicitly, I was sure that he had thought to himself many times that if someone gave him the opportunity to wake up one day and be visible, he would take it in a heartbeat. His condition was his weakness, his medical problem. Wasn’t it?

My stomach was churning, my head throbbing. I grabbed onto the curtain railing for support. I needed to get out of the shower before I slipped and hurt myself. I turned the water off, got out, and toweled myself dry, taking deep breaths and trying to clear my head. There was only one thing to do in this situation.

I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and entered our bedroom, my discarded clothes held loosely in my arms.

Simon was sitting on the bed in a T-shirt and sweatpants, reading the food section of The New York Times. His glasses were on. When I came into the room, he put down his newspaper and said, “Hello, my love. How was the hospital?”

“Simon,” I said. “I want to ask you something. And I want you to tell me the truth. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” he said.

I put my clothes in the hamper, then crawled onto the bed and toward him, sitting cross- legged in front of him and putting my hands on either side of his face so that I could feel his cheeks, his mouth, his forehead.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Do you sometimes stand naked in the living room and watch me when I get home from work without letting me know you’re there?”

His eyebrows twitched beneath my fingertips. It was a few moments before he replied. “Of course not,” he said, holding my hands and moving them away from his face. “Why would you say that?”

And then, only because I was so close to him, I heard him swallow.

“I think you’re lying,” I said.

He let out a choked sound. “Oh really?”

“We’ve been together for two and a half years,” I told him. “Do you think I don’t know by now what you sound like when you lie?”

“I think you’re paranoid. I think my invisibility is starting to burrow inside your brain.”

I glared at the wall behind his glasses. “I have been perfectly comfortable with your condition the entire time we’ve been together. You know that. I have respected you and seen you as a normal human being, despite all the struggles that you have to face.”

The coverlet undulated as he moved restlessly. “Why do you always treat it that way? Like my invisibility is some sort of health defect.”

“What do you mean?”

“I love you, but you always talk about the fact that I’m invisible as though it’s something that holds me back.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No!”

“Simon, you can’t even walk down the street without people screaming.”

“Thank you so much for reminding me. Actually, and I know this might shock you, but I don’t think of my invisibility as a curse. It’s a gift. It allows me to do things nobody else on Earth can do.”

“Like spy on your significant other while you’re naked?”

He let out a long sigh and dropped his head. The sleeve of his T-shirt lifted—he was scratching his head. “It was just once, my love.”

The words floated between us, almost physical.

“It wasn’t just once, was it?” I asked him, but it came out as more of a declarative sentence than a question.

Slowly, his glasses shook back and forth.

My heart was beating so loudly that I could feel my pulse in the soles of my feet. All this time it had been him. And all I could think was… “Why?”

He turned to face me more fully, mimicking my cross-legged position. He took my hands in his. “I want to preface this,” he said, “by saying that I love you. I love you so much, and you have been so good to me. So I want you to understand what I’m about to tell you.

“When I take off my clothes and I’m just standing there in my body, it feels… I wish I could make you understand how it feels. Like I’ve become nothing, but nothing in a good way. Have you ever felt that? Being nothing?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. Like I’m the air, or like whatever is in me is also in everything around me. Like I am everything around me. It makes me feel like I could go anywhere in the world… walk over the Atlantic, go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Nothing feels impossible. I know you think I feel powerless because of my invisibility. But it’s really just the opposite. Being invisible is a deep kind of satisfying, like stepping on a leaf and hearing it crunch.”

“But why did you spy on me?”

He squeezed my hands. “The first time I watched you in the living room was an accident, I swear.”

“Spied on me.”

“Spied on you. Whatever you want to call it. It was an accident. Ever since I was a little boy, sometimes I just feel like I’m going to go crazy if I don’t lie down with nothing on and just become nothing and full of the air and so I took off my clothes and I went into the living room and I lay down on the carpet. And then you came in. And I watched you sit down in your favorite chair, and the wicker was creaking beneath you. And I watched you close your eyes and kind of loll your head to one side. I remember your hair had come out of its bun and you pushed it back and one of your eyes twitched a little. And the way your thighs filled the seat and your toes dug into the carpet near my head.

“And suddenly I had this feeling like I was the chair beneath you, or the hair on your head. And I loved you so strongly in that moment, and I think it was partly because it felt like you were mine. Like something about the fact that I could see you and you had no clue I was even there meant that you were mine in a way beyond relationships and friendship, something deeper than any of that. I know I sound insane to you. Like a creep. But I just became hooked on it, that feeling. I knew you wouldn’t like it but I… well, every so often I did it again.

“I am sorry that I abused your trust, and I’m sorry that I spied on you. And I’d also like to apologize if this whole confession has disabused you of the notion that I never take advantage of my invisibility. I don’t know that I can promise to never be naked again just to capture that feeling of nothingness, but I will promise to never do it in front of you without you knowing. I’m sure you’re very angry. It might take you time. But I love you, and I want you to forgive me.”

I sat there, reeling, his invisible hands and my own love tethering me to him. The whole room seemed to be spinning.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said. 

“Can what?”

“Forgive you.”

“Oh.”

He gently let go of my hands and got off the bed. “I’ll go make us dinner,” he said. “What do you want? I’ll make anything you want.”

“I think I’m just going to go to sleep,” I said.

“Okay.”

I listened to him open the door.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, and then there was the sound of the door gently closing.
I lay there on my side of the bed, barely thinking, just listening to the clinking of pots in the kitchen and the sound of somebody’s air conditioner in the air shaft outside the bedroom window. And then, unbidden, it came to me—once again I was sitting next to Jeanine on a bench in Central Park, chicken and rice on my lap, and she was telling me that I had started dating Simon because I felt superior to him.

Jeanine had been right, of course. I saw that now. When I looked at Simon across Tabitha’s dining room table, I had seen someone uncomfortable in his own unseen skin, someone who wanted to be more like me: normal, able, content, accepted, secure. And I had gotten some sort of intrinsic, primitive satisfaction from the belief that I was superior to him, that I could give him the normal relationship he’d always dreamed of. In my head, I had held the power in our relationship, a power born in cloying pity and pretended understanding.

But it was Simon who had held the power all along. It was Simon who had spied on me again and again, watching me possessively, near predatorily—and aroused, no doubt. I thought to myself that it must feel marvelous to do that to someone, to look through the one-way mirror of your body and watch someone shiver. My anger was replaced with a sizzling curiosity as I imagined the feeling of that power, a curiosity that remained even after Simon returned and lay down beside me. It kept me tossing and turning while he snored gently by my ear.

In the morning, I lay still and listened to him dress and make coffee. Before he departed he came back into the bedroom to kiss me softly on the cheek and murmur another apology.

Once I heard the front door close, I got up, dressed, and called my shift coordinator to tell them I was sick and would not be able to go to work. Then I left the apartment and went to the local hardware store and bought three small cans of non-toxic white and gold and gray paint.

At home, I undressed in the living room. The window was curtained but open and the cool air caressed my skin as I uncovered myself, removing layer after layer until it was just me— organic me—standing there in the middle of the carpet. I put down some newspaper and got to work, drawing the paintbrush dipped in white up one arm and down the other, along my legs and breasts and back. And then waiting for it to dry before applying the gold in strips, bending the lines around my elbows, slashing a streak of gold across my stomach. Touches of gray to mimic the natural shadows in the room. And finally, the last, delicate applications. A thin coat of white on my eyelids, on the insides of my ears, on the outsides of my nostrils.

The hours that remained before he came home were really hours to practice. I stood against the wall by the couch and stilled myself, inch by inch, learning how to freeze a body that longed to stretch and scratch, learning how to blend in, Galatea choosing to return to stone.

I began to feel it; the thing he had described. As though I was the room, or the breeze from the window. Less human and more a collection of textures, or even less than that. Losing myself to grow larger than myself.

And when he finally did come home, the door opening and his suit entering, briefcase dropped by the door, I closed my eyes and let him sweep his unsuspecting gaze over the living room before sitting hunched on the couch and pulling a pen and Hallmark card out of his inside blazer pocket. He began writing a letter,

My love, allow me again to tell you how sorry I am…

I stood next to him, chameleonized. Today, I was God in the room. Tomorrow, maybe he would be. And wasn’t that equality?

The post FICTION: Camouflage appeared first on Yale Daily News.

My father had come into my room earlier that morning, and pulled a hunting cap onto my head while I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Wear two pairs of socks, he whispered. And lace those boots nice and tight. In the kitchen, I watched him fill a canteen from the sink. He turned to me and said, We’re gonna shoot ourselves a deer. I fought to hide my smile. My father crossed the kitchen and pulled my cap down over my eyes. You’ve got a mean look about you. It’s a bad day to be a deer. I laughed then, and the smile remained.

Once we left, I faded in and out of sleep as the headlights of my father’s truck cut a bright path through the dark. He woke me to watch the sunrise. We looked out in silent awe as the truck cabin filled with orange light. You were up before the sun, he told me. I slept once more and awoke to my father closing the driver’s side door. Around us, tall trees were steeped in pale light. I hopped out while my father drew his gun from a long green bag. Then he slung it over his shoulder and we trudged deeper into the woods.

With a furrowed brow, my father tracked us a deer while I collected sensuous facts; he inspected the trees, and I caressed them. After an hour of walking, we reached the edge of a clearing. Golden sunlight illuminated the morning fog which hung just above the grass. My father knelt and I did the same. He extended a finger down towards a mound of black pellets. Deer droppings. He then brought that finger to his lips. I nodded. He rose from his knee but remained crouched, sliding the gun from his shoulder into his hands. We crept along slowly, eyes peeled for a deer.

After a moment of hushed prowling, my boot fell upon something with a crunch. Lifting my foot, I shrieked and quickly covered my mouth. Amidst the clearing, a deer’s head lifted above the grass. It turned to face us and vanished in three bounds. Between my boots, there lay a twitching little bird, its wings cracked and jagged. My father approached. Ah, just a baby. He lifted my chin with his hand. My eyes met his, but he kept on lifting. I followed his other hand, which pointed towards a nest in a nearby tree. Three chicks sat with their small beaks open towards the sky. Above them stood a larger bird looking down. Must have fallen from there. Go and grab me a rock. I looked to him in terror; he set his jaw and nodded. I fetched a rock and turned my back as he took it from me. I felt his hand fall gently on my shoulder. I was taught this is merciful. You may disagree, but it makes no difference unless you’ve seen for yourself. I turned back around slowly.

He raised the rock overhead. The little bird twitched below. He brought it down hard with a grunt. I winced. A limp wing protruded from beneath the stone, utterly still. Peace in exchange for life. Though the peace was ours to enjoy, which disgusted me. I heard chirps and squeaks from the nest above. Did you see where the deer ran off? I pointed in the direction I had watched it flee. My father hoisted his gun back onto his shoulder and we continued tracking.

Moving for some time through the woods, we came upon the freshly mauled carcass of a deer. It was laid haphazardly to rest against a mossy tree. I retched on my hands and knees at the sight of it. My father stood at my side until it ceased. I looked at his face; even then, his jaw was set and his eyes stared straight ahead. How about we head home? Today isn’t our day. I nodded, feeling my shirt wet with cold sweat against my back. He handed me the canteen and I drank greedily, still on my knees. I’ve got some food in the truck. Should make you feel a little better.

We retraced our steps, and I watched my father looking around as we walked. He moved with subdued haste, so I had no time to touch the trees. I only remained at his heels with great effort. The morning haze waned now, and the forest stretched itself awake. Animals rustled in the brush beside us and birds sang in the trees above. The day was kind to me and offered many sensations to distract from thoughts of the deer. Sunlight reached us with greater conviction, illuminating the once shaded path we had walked. In places where the ground was soft, I could see our footprints pointing opposite the way we now went.

I lagged at the sight of our own tracks. My boot prints looked so small next to my father’s. I found it odd how big I felt in my own body. I moved to continue walking and saw my father many strides ahead. I hastened to catch up. Hearing my footsteps, he looked back over his shoulder. Our eyes met for an instant. Then out from the trees, a hulking brown mass swept my father to the ground. His gun fired as he landed, causing the beast to flee. I ran to my father, who lay sprawled on the ground—a red mound atop a bed of lush green. I forced my eyes to meet his. They were open and frantically alive. His face was as I had never seen it, wrought into a look of pure, desperate terror. I crumpled to the ground. He made shaky wet gasps for air. I listened to that sound, until I could take it no more.

My father’s rifle laid beside him. I crawled to it and clutched the woodgrain tight. Rising to my feet, I reloaded the gun as I had seen him do many times. I leveled it to his face and looked down the sight. Not even a wince from the barrel leveled between his eyes. I looked once more at his mangled torso, then back to his face. I shut my eyes tight and pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing. I tried again. Click, click. It wouldn’t work. I threw the rifle to the ground. My pulse beat deafeningly loud in my ears. Falling to my knees beside my father, I took his blood-soaked hand in mine. While the sun crept across the sky and his grip became faint, I stared into his fear-stricken eyes. When the strain had left his face, I released my father’s hand and stood. Following our path through the woods, I walked back to the truck. 

The post FICTION: Morning Walk appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“And if you don’t pay me next week? No. Now.” 

We’d begun betting a few months ago, when the sweat of summer labor cooled and our fathers left for one of two places after working the fields: the bars, or the races. None of us were ever brought along, probably to save face when they lost a buck, but we always knew what had gone down by the fury that returned home. A ten-dollars-richer man is a happy one, I had learned. Any the poorer, it’s best not to find out. Most of us bet against our fathers so we’d cut a win either way the coin flipped.

“I just told you, I don’t got it.” 

If only that damned stallion hadn’t cowed to pressure, last minute. Usually we’d hash this all out over chips, but things changed. All the boys had become cheap. They wanted their debts paid, and they wanted them at recess. There were three of us. Mike, Pig, and me, Bird. 

Michael was the lucky kind of beautiful. Tall, ginger, and freckled. He played every sport at Fresno Middle School—soccer, football, and sometimes hockey—so he was all bruised everywhere, all the time. You’d have to think those injuries damaged past the skull. His habits made him a little sticky, like he’d woken up late and was just getting to wherever he was supposed to be, spitting into his palm to smooth down his hair. His bones gnarled, at a few junctures, but it inexplicably made him more charming and got me red it was so unfair. 

None of his clothes fit his bulk, and he was too poor to ever size up so the leather of his shoes stretched at each of the toes and his pants cut off at the ankles. His left ear stuck out, the other tucked below his cowlicks. He had a short neck. When he smiled, his lips would thin too much. Nothing about him was exceptional except in its totality, like a piano with all its keys. His father was a carpenter, his mother cleaned houses, and he did nothing. It was all he was good for. 

“What if I pay three now, and then another next week, and we call the last one even?” I haggled, “Let’s play this cool.” 

Pig wanted to help. He came from a legacy of negotiators, mostly Spanish-speaking devils, my father intuited. With black curls and dirty fingernails, Pig never convinced anyone of his intentions. His family arrived at Ellis Island, cut the line, came out West, and never stopped swindling after. My mother called his mother a tart. I thought her sweet. 

Pig tried to mediate. “Pay half now, and he’ll give you a two-dollar discount. You can pay him back in G.I. Joe collector’s editions.” 

“That works.” I chimed, eyeing Mike to see if he bought it. 

“No.” 

“What if I gave you my cap gun and paid you five next week?” 

“No.” 

“And I threw in a Rubik’s?”

“I’ll kill you.” 

“Try it.” 

“Go fuck yourself.”

Mike lived a few houses down, in a smaller place. Shabby, my mother would say, so sad. We are so lucky, just so lucky, aren’t we, Henry? And my father would grunt. Our family wasn’t much better off than Mike’s but we were richer in our minds, it gave us peace. My father hated Mike because he was better than me. I just couldn’t make any of the teams, even when I slaved over weights, weeks before tryouts. I didn’t have it in me. Sometimes my father would see Mike playing flag football on our block, or just kicking around with the high school kids, and opened our window, enraged.

“GET TO THE FUCKING PARK! GET OUTTA HERE!” 

Then, to me, 

“LEAVE THE FUCKING BOOKS! GET OUTTA HERE!” 

After the Depression my father had taken to philosophizing ethnicity, as a way of explaining the whole thing, my mother told me. Why he lost his work in the mines. How dust managed to coat the insides of closets, unopened cereal boxes, cans of tuna or sardines, eggs they cracked at breakfast. Why he moved to California, restarted without his family, broke. Why he married my mother and not a lady. My father wanted me to know that All Things Happen This Way and there wasn’t much to do about it, but wait the curse out. The good would return eventually. Us People always got the good, in the end. By that point in the sermon he would buzz into sleep on the couch. 

If he saw me with the boys he’d make sure to remind me how shit they were, how shit I was. He liked to mention Mike’s stink, a key characteristic of the Polish, he said. Mike was too brown and too red and too hairy. Mike was big-boned and that gave him an advantage in sports, it was so unfair. Mike had no clue. I was ashamed of my father and his jealousy. I knew Mike was made of something, whereas I was cheap and plastic. Everyone knew it.

Mike shoved me. 

“Yeah? I can push too, fatass!” 

Now I’d gotten him. 

“Take it back,” he said, stepping closer.

His hair and face blended in one. The big ear grew, it quivered. It became big and purple and throbbed with fury. I knew I didn’t look much in comparison. I was too small. Impish skin, dimples, and little hands. What wasn’t a lovely shade of pink on my body was just sparrow brown. Like sapling wood, my mother told me. Like pigeon crap, my father would say.

“I won’t. Suck my cock, pol–” 

Mike shoved me. “I AIN’T Polish!” 

“My ass you ain’t.” 

“Guys please, please,” begged Pig, “we can’t solve this before Science, just leave it for after school!” 

I spat on him. Mike followed. We didn’t give a shit, we were ready to really problem solve. Pig sat with his fingernails in his mouth. He didn’t want trouble, he didn’t want me or Mike. He was afraid and I wanted to sock it out of him.

I raised a fist. “Quit thumb-sucking!” 

“I’m not sucking my thumb…” said Pig. 

“I’m watching you!” 

“Oh yeah? How about I thumb you?” 

Pig was thick, with a gut and whiskers at ten years old, I knew I couldn’t take him. I was worried. I was sad. The guys had never gotten this bad. 

I lunged at him. “I’ll smash your skull in! I’ll jerk you! I’ll bitch you!” 

I went to swing but Mike held me back. Jared from the class above, walked over. 

“Hey, hey! Alright! Bird, Pig, quit it!”

Jared’s shoes had no laces and were four sizes too big because they were hand-me-downs from his father, as were his glasses, pants, shirt, and socks. Jared would tie his shoe-laces into a rope-belt that fell every time we played Cowboys and Indians. When he got pantsed we’d titter after where he got his underwear, but that he wouldn’t admit to. He had moles splattered across his chin which he told us grew hair, and meant he was the first to grow a beard. Jared was the son of a veteran and desperately wanted to kill Africans someday. Or the entire country of Japan. Jared was smart and would probably go to college instead. 

He wanted us to reason through the thing: “One talks first, while the other holds his breath, and then he can respond once the first is done. NO interruptions! NO insults.” 

“But what if the first one’s wrong?” I prompted. 

“You wait.” 

“And if he’s stupid?” Mike asked. 

“You gotta prove it. Otherwise you’d just fight again. It’s called de-escalation.” He reminded us his father had been in the army, and had taught Jared about conflict resolution. I told him his daddy had taken it up the ass in that case, and the whole crowd fell to the floor. 

“Cock-sucker!” he yelled, oblivious, as he moved towards me

Now Mike was with me. We escaped, Pig was left behind. The sacrifices we make in battle are the scars we carry, Jared’s dad would’ve reflected. Jared was screeching too loud to care for our dash to the slide. 

We laid flat on our guts, underneath the spout, which must’ve been the position Jared’s father took in the trenches. 

“Ywant?” Mike offered gum. 

“Yeah.” 

“Whabout this?” 

I watched, my mouth slotted open, as Mike pulled out treasure.

“How?” 

“My dad’s lazy. Leaves these Newports and naked women all over the house. My mom hates him.” 

“Do they work?”

“Yeah, you can eat it. Does the same thing as smoking.” 

“No shot. You got a light?” 

He reached back down, into his pants, and into his underwear. His fingers dallied and I got suspicious until he pulled out just an empty hand. 

“I ran out.” 

“Oh.” 

“It’s O.K., we can smoke later. If you want.” 

“Yeah, maybe.” 

A truce. 

“Shit!” 

We heard vulgarities, the horrid cries of eighth graders. We were really in for it: their recess had overlapped with ours. Jared was cheap shit now. 

“I won’t look,” Mike said, turning to me. “You first.” 

I couldn’t refuse. Being the second coward, that’s always worse than being the first. “O.K.” 

I let my fingers creep out. We were hiding at the base of the slide, at the lip, and I could fit my head just underneath it to peek. God, they were animals. Big and thick, even the girls. Everyone was hairy. Everyone was monstrous. I liked the short skirts girls wore, with pink and pretty pantylines, but really they were a freakshow all the same and I couldn’t appreciate it. I  could vaguely figure a hoard of them squealing. Next to the monkey bars, in leaves and grit, two squirrels screwed. 

“Mikey, I dunno what we’ll do. It’s them.” 

He turned to me and craned his neck to disfigure his forehead on the steel. We both knew what’d happened to the boy who’d knocked his head sliding down and ended up in a hospital, later a home for imbeciles. It was better to take risks you cared for. I turned too. 

“If we give it up, they’ll take us. If we hide, they’ll sniff us. There’s no game here.” 

The end of the world was approaching, and I was in tatters. 

“Bird, this isn’t about the guys. It’s about honor.” 

Well, he didn’t have to go and do that. 

“What if I don’t have it in me to die?” . 

“You know it’s coming, might as well make it a big bang.” 

I tallied all the noble reasons I had to remain among the living. Playboy. Horses. Smokes. 

“But, my show comes on in an hour,” 

“And?” Mike rolled his eyes. 

“And my mom might make apple pie if I ask her…” 

“So?” 

“So I’ll have my apple pie and I’ll watch Popeye and things might be good again.”

 “My father told me to never get soft. He said dysfunction decapitates you later in life.” Mike was getting angry, his big ear grew.

“Your head falls off?” 

“What?” 

“Decapitation?” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” 

The end was nearer, now. Shouts, cheap earrings glinting in the yellow afternoon like bullets. I saw a Mary Jane skip past my fingernails and shuddered. 

“Forget it.” 

Our noses touched and we tried not to blush at the femininity of doom. We were men with brave faces. 

“We have to go out,” he said. 

“Face them?” I shivered. 

“Yeah.” 

“Alone?” 

“No.” 

Mike and I got along fine, mostly. I wondered why he wouldn’t settle the bet, earlier, why he always pitched fights with me. I had to ask if he knew it was my father who threw bottles, who’d gotten Mike demoted from class president because of his “egregious commitments elsewhere,” who’d rumored at the watering hole that Mike’s family stank like their sausages. I wanted to say I didn’t know much about that, but I’d exchange a comic book for dinner with meat, and that I was sorry. I didn’t take my chance. I wanted freedom. 

“Alright. Let’s shoot.”

“Get ready.”

We bent our knees into crouches. 

“Mikey?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we call it even?”

The bell rang. Saved by a cunthair.

The post FICTION: What Money Won’t Cover appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Maybe if the rest of the room wasn’t so goddamn boring, she could bear it. Her fireplace is the only piece of decor worth looking at—no eye candy for the eye candy, just two mismatched armchairs, rug here, rug there, dead plant. There’s a grandfather clock out in the hallway—she tries talking to it every hour or so. 

Another day, huh? She’ll say.

Dong, dong, dong, it’ll respond.

Most days, she just holds her breath and waits for the pain to pass. Hums songs to herself. Counts floorboards.

But today, today is a gorgeous day. Someone kneels over the hearth. If she strains her eyes down, she can see the logs breaking, burning. Yes, yes, she can feel the flames rising as the fire, the fire, crackles below her. 

A deep sigh presses against her sealed lips while she looks on. They’re ugly pieces of oak, the logs—their bark isn’t even stripped, pathetic, really, termite food. But the fire can’t get enough of them. Splinters soften to black as the blaze licks them up, up, up. The timber turns to gold, and she witnesses the alchemy: from those cheap chop-ups, so many embers start to rise. There’s nothing more beautiful than this, she knows, these thousand sparks, these fireflies. Even stars stand still, but the embers pirouette in the air, weightless, twirling to music she can’t hear, a dance she doesn’t know.

Another shot of pain snaps her back, stabs her in the side. She can’t even wince. She wants to throw out her stiff spine, her rigid tail, its neat rows of fingernail notches for fish scales. She wants to shout—no, she wants to dance—no, she wants to be charred, burned, she wants to be splintered and sparked in the darkness, set alight, anew, away, but she’s stuck here with the acorns and the ivy and the man, that shriveled bag of a man, always asleep and snoring in front of her. He’s there now, for God’s sake. She glares at him, melting into his armchair, dozing into his double neck, turkey stuffing in a sweaty bathrobe, dead bird bloating in an oven—

She hears jangling. The old man’s old dog shakes its way into the living room, hauling in a stick twice its size, more like a tree limb, one that fought the fall. It drags the branch over to the armchair, but the man can’t play, turkey that he is, out cold. Only the mermaid sees it, that stick between its teeth, that limb, that lighter. Thorns scratch her as she tries to pull an arm out of the polished vines and reach out. Come closer, come here. The dog waddles over to the fireplace, the stick dragging behind it. Put a match to me. Down below, she hears a log crumble, and it sends another tumbling down to the edge of the hearth, sizzling. The dog brings the stick closer. The mermaid’s eyes start glinting bright.

The post FICTION: Mermaids Worship the Fire appeared first on Yale Daily News.

He’d always had the feeling that his mother would die for him. It still came as a surprise when she actually did—a foot in the dark expecting one more step. Now he was alive and she wasn’t. That had never been true before. He vomited three times on the way to the hospital. They checked for concussion but all was clear.

Claire didn’t know him. She never really would. Usually she wouldn’t answer an unknown call, but it was a slow day in the office and any distraction was something. The paramedic on the other end of the line told her the facts and she said she’d be right there. Wrong numbers rarely offered the chance to be a hero, or to clock out early.

It took 28 minutes to reach the ward, and in that time the boy had fallen asleep. He was older than she’d expected—at least fifteen. She could still remember being fifteen with the sort of discomfort that meant she hadn’t quite recovered. But a boy was a boy and she’d answered the call, so she sat by his bed and thought of comforting things to say. She looked at his hands, palms red with the crescent moons of fingernail marks, and placed one of hers on top. He woke in the morning. She said what she’d prepared.

“What do you need?”

“Nothing.”

Claire had no reply to that. They sat in unquestioning silence. When the forms were signed for his release she offered again to help. He refused and they parted, each to their own lives.

Call Number 2:

It was too late for hospice. The paramedic’s disembodied voice hung somewhere between bored and judgmental as she described the 89-year-old woman’s solitary suffering. It had been days. Not just hours. Days alone in the pit of her shower, living off the water that dripped from the faucet. Days that would be her last, or almost her last. She had a few hours left, at least, and Claire might like to say her goodbyes.

Two absences from work in less than a month would hardly be treated kindly. The job was still boring, though, and perhaps this time she would be needed. Any surprise she felt at this second wrong number was quelled by some sense that she was, at least, prepared. She made it to the hospital in just 24 minutes. It was a different ward and a different patient, but the same white walls and white smell and background noise of panic. Already the routine felt familiar, the first sketches of a habit.

She found the woman laughing. To make matters worse it was in response to nothing more than a weather report on the outdated TV. The patient in the bed was shrunken and looked, Claire thought, like a mildewed drowning victim who hadn’t yet bloated. The ocean-green of the covers bunched around her seemed to tint her thin hair. Her lips opened and closed like breathing learned from a manual. This was the sort of old age that was fought for and came at a cost.

“You aren’t dying.” Claire tried to regret her words. The woman coughed out another laugh.

“Like hell I’m not. Just give it time.”

Claire didn’t have time. Not if she wanted to get paid. Still, she wasn’t the one in the bed. She breathed, willing herself to be the calm one—the caring one.

“What do you need?”

“Oh, nothing. Unless you think you could swipe some juice from the nurses’ lounge—I’ve heard they have pineapple. Us poor wretches in the hospital beds get saddled with orange.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Claire turned, choosing not to wonder how this woman could know about some secret pineapple stash. She was alive, at least, and well enough to come up with busy work. Claire knew she should feel glad. Instead, all she could think was that the paramedic had a vindictive streak and she could have stayed at work after all.

Call Number 7:

Noise was almost always a good thing. A patient bawling in the background of a call meant that they had lungs and minds intact enough to scream. That didn’t make it any less annoying.

The man in front of her had a convincingly stupid goatee. It made it easy to imagine the sort of situation that would cause him to be stabbed in the upper thigh with a fork. His well-tailored suit was ruined, but nothing else seemed to be.

“What do you need?” She asked. The man looked up in surprise, then assessment. His blotchy skin blotched more.

“You could lend a hand pulling this out, if it won’t make you vom all over me.” He gestured down to his leg. There was blood on the hospital sheet, but not much.

“I could, but I’m not a nurse. The fork could be stemming an artery, I shouldn’t risk letting you bleed out.” She imagined doing just that—imagined watching his smirk drip off his face like sweat.

Either her fantasies weren’t visible in her expression, or he wasn’t looking. Now granted an audience, he seemed to have forgotten his previous performance of pain.

“Weren’t doing anything else, I hope?” He asked, flashing what he no doubt called his ‘winning smile’.

“No,” Claire ground out, lying.

“Good good. Fancy getting a new nurse, then? This lot are hardly the attentive sort.”

Claire spun on the heels of her smartest, most uncomfortable shoes—the ones she always wore for important meetings. It had been a last chance, a token of trust. She hadn’t deserved it. Behind her the man pulled the fork from his leg. Blood fountained and nurses were there in a beat.

Call Number 15:

“Zara?”

This patient seemed determined to mistake her for someone else. It was the only word he’d managed since she’d arrived at his bedside. A dreary hospital pamphlet with a picture of a dreary blue balloon in a dreary blue sky had told her that his rasping was the result of fluid buildup in the throat and upper airways. Towards the end a dying person loses the ability to swallow or cough. The excess saliva then begins to block airflow, some mix between drowning and suffocation.

“I’m not Zara. I’m Claire. I’m here to help. Would you like me to look for Zara?”

The man tried and failed to reply. Claire thought he would likely die soon. She adjusted the morphine the way she had seen the nurses do and hoped it would be enough. Nothing much happened. The day stretched on. Horror shifted to boredom. She looked at the clock and tried to calculate how much longer propriety demanded. Her landlord and credit cards didn’t care much about propriety, and temp-agencies didn’t compensate sick days.

He moaned when she left, but it could have just been a rasp. It didn’t matter much, he couldn’t even get her name right.

Call Number 22:

Claire waited two hours for the 60-something-year-old heart attack victim to show up. She forgot to check the morgue. The only saving grace of the experience was that she successfully evaded the landlord who had decided to bring the rent notice to her apartment in person.

Call Number 30:

When she was fourteen, Claire had spent all of ten minutes thinking she was a murderer. She hadn’t checked the box’s ingredients list for allergens and hadn’t known her brother could be saved.

Whether the man in front of her would live seemed as uncertain as she had been in the kitchen that day—too frozen even to call for help. Now, she knew better. She held his swollen hand and counted his breaths, waiting for the medicine to either take effect or fail.

He eventually woke with the groan of a hangover and not a hint of surprise. He’d found himself here before.

“How can I help?”

“What?”

“How can I help? What is it you need?”

“Well, let me think,” he paused to rasp, “maybe a cashew?”

Claire paused, recalling his notes. She scowled.

“That’s what you did?”

“They taste good!”

“Enough to—fine. How are you even alive?”

“Beats me.”

Claire waited, then gave in to curiosity, asking “Was it worth it?”

“I never want it said that I turned down any worldly experience. No one can say I didn’t give it a go.”

“Give what a go?”

“Life.”

Claire paused again, considering. This time it was the man who spoke.

“I’ll be discharged soon, I expect. You can go if you want.”

Claire thought of where else she could be. She came to a blank.

“It’s fine. You might find another cashew if I leave.”

Claire readjusted in her seat, checked her pocket for her phone. She wouldn’t want to miss it if it rang.

The post FICTION: Duty Bound appeared first on Yale Daily News.