Author: creativewriting

M.M. Kaufman

The itching came with the sun one morning. I had torn open my slip from scratching in my sleep. Standing naked in front of the full-length mirror, all I could see was a patch of red, raw skin stretched across my left side. I winced when I put my fingertips to it. Taking a deep breath, I pushed on it. My body gave where it shouldn’t and pushed back in unexpected places. My lower left rib felt larger and softer than bone ever should.

I wasn’t worried then. I’d lived in the country my whole life and had enough sense not to panic over one itchy spot. I slathered on calamine and threw on my loosest housedress. As it fell over my head, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and gasped.

I’d taken the mirror, tall and stark in the corner of the room, for a person. But there was no one here but myself.

As I headed downstairs to make coffee, I swayed in the doorway, off balance. A wave of nausea hit me. I shook my head and hung it between my knees.

My hands traveled back to my side. I scratched harder and harder. I pulled my hands away. Red crescents bloomed under my nails.

            My parents raised me in this house I now call my own. I clean it that way, too. Four bedrooms may seem like a lot for one woman, but I think it’s right. Each room cleaned like the last. There is nothing spare about my life here.

My parents died the day of our high school graduation. They made it to the ceremony all right but got hit by a truck hauling eggs on their way back home for the party. My brother, J-boy, and I were riding with friends to guide them down the tree-lined roads that lead to our farmhouse. We found our parents crushed at the last bend—a mix of egg, blood, and dirt.

J-boy cleared out with the dust from the wake. He visited a handful of times over the next year. Showed up on the front porch with a ham or a basket of peaches—a request for casserole or cobbler disguised as a gift. After a week or so, he left to sell tires or fix toilets, whatever filled his gas tank and kept him driving back and forth across the Southeast.

I stayed behind. I was a solitary girl, and now I am a solitary woman. The house is old but paid off. I work as an online transcriptionist to cover the few bills. I never could find a reason to leave this house except for groceries and books.

As a child, I dreamed of traveling the world, but it hardly crosses my mind anymore. I experience the world fine in the stacks of the Appleby Library every Sunday at eleven. I return what books I’d gotten the week before and pick out enough books for the week ahead. My church—a visit about as long as a service and more interesting.

Once I finished hanging the linens, I threw on a pair of my mother’s overalls. The calamine lotion hadn’t done anything to quell the itching, but the spot looked less menacing. I cut off a leaf from an aloe vera plant on the kitchen windowsill, prepared it, and slathered some on. As I rode my bike into town, I let the overalls hang open on the left side so the wind could hit against the aloe patch.

At Appleby, I nodded to Nancy, the weekend librarian. She mumbled a distracted, “Morning, Marigold,” from behind her Cast Iron Cooking magazine.

I set down her coffee, the bag of donuts, and my old books and then walked into the stacks.

With my eyes closed, I took slow steps and fingered the book spines. What comfort books gave me. The solidness of them, the tight binding, the weight of them in my hands.

Fifteen minutes into my survey of Science and Civilization, pain shot across my side. I braced myself against the shelves and breathed until it passed. I unhooked my overalls and pulled them down. There was now a large, dark-pink welt where, an hour ago, there was only a scratch.

I pressed my fingertips to it, and it burned them as if it were a lit stovetop.

“Lord almighty!” I hissed.

I wiped my damp forehead with the tail of my shirt and stuffed it back into the overalls. When had I started sweating? This wasn’t like any spider bite I’d had before. Whatever it was, it felt like it was taking me for a ride.

I left the books I had pulled off the shelf on the floor and walked back to Nancy’s desk.

She dropped her gold beaded chain connected to her glasses onto her bosom.

“That was fast.” Nancy stopped when she saw I was empty handed. “Something out of place again?”

I lifted up my shirt. “No, I— it’s nothing.”

“Pretty nasty wound there.”

“Did you say womb?” I asked, louder than intended.
Nancy shh’ed me and spelled, “W-O-U-N-D.”

I nodded and tucked the shirt back in. My eyes focused and unfocused across the myriad pictures taped around Nancy’s desk. They were all pictures of her daughter with her many sticky-faced children.

“Have you seen my newest?” Nancy pulled out her phone and flicked through shot after shot. “Here’s Lolee with the twins at the trampoline park. It’s a little out of focus ‘cause Presley-Ann was taking the picture.”

Lolee, or Tupelo Lee, was Nancy’s daughter, named after Elvis Presley’s hometown. She had been in my class all through school. Nancy had another child, Aaron, but I never heard much about him. Whatever he was doing somewhere up east, it wasn’t making babies.

Lolee had been as listless as I was when we graduated. Where I locked up my listlessness in my parents’ house, she took hers out for a joyride. She tried on different boyfriends, part-time jobs, and drug habits. I remember how, a few years ago, Nancy railed against Lolee’s latest bender on a given Sunday morning. She questioned why she ever had Lolee, why she hadn’t kicked her out.  

But then Lolee got pregnant. Everything changed. The world rotated around Lolee and her precious gift to the world. The unexpected fetus, named at what I estimate was 20 minutes old, was Gracelyn Mae. The name was embroidered and hashtagged on everything. Gracelyn Mae somehow turned Lolee into the Virgin Mary.

I was jealous of the respect and admiration. I hadn’t ever planned on having children. But my mother would have loved to be a grandmother. She would have been like Nancy here, showing pictures to anyone who walked by.

It made me hate Nancy.

She broke off into giggles at the next picture. “This was when Gracelyn Mae ate some of my face cream thinking it was frosting!”

I took the phone and looked at the toddler with the pained, beet-red expression. I handed the phone back and came up with my fifth iteration of the sound, “Ahh.”

I felt another sharp pain like a crack of lightning. A wave of intense pressure across my side followed it. “Christ on a cracker!”

“Get yourself home, girl. Have a bath.”

I nodded and walked out with my empty bag slung over one shoulder and both hands pressed to my side. There was hardly traffic in town to interfere with organ music as it drifted out of the church and across the two-lane road.

I rolled my bike over and peered through one of the stained-glass windows. I couldn’t see anything but the blue-and-green marbled shapes of the people as they stood to sing. I waved goodbye knowing no one could see me. I peddled up the hill until my calves burned and the asphalt sputtered into the sandy-red dirt that led to home.

           For some reason I imagined the pain would stop, or at least subside, when I got back to the house. Or that the solace I felt each time I came home would blot out any discomfort. But it didn’t. I felt the pain pulse like a racing heartbeat as I took the steps.

“Damnit all,” I cursed when I noticed I’d left my bag in the bike’s basket. I walked back down the steps, keeping pressure off my left leg. Something like an ice pick pierced my side. I sank to my knees and knocked the bike over into the bird fountain. Concrete smashed and slimy water ran down my chest.

“What in the actual fuck?”
No one but the birds answered.

The red rash had spread into a much wider circle. I called it a rash, but, it looked like a galaxy, like constellations made from blood drawn to the surface. And the mass, the wound, whatever it was, had grown so that it protruded farther than my fist. Lavender-colored veins threaded through it. It was strange and beautiful.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t call a doctor. I didn’t want to, and that had always been a good enough reason in the past.

Hours later, I woke up in bed exhausted as I had never been before. It was dark outside. I hung my legs off the wrought-iron bed frame and smiled to myself as my dream came back to me. In the dream the itch on my side had grown and grown until—

Another shooting pain rocked my body. I sat up, gasping for air.

I lifted my shirt to see that the spot had grown. As in my dream, it was the shape of a cantaloupe. I traced my finger around its edges, amazed that it seemed to be a perfect circle. It didn’t hurt when I touched it now. My touch felt like a feather. I traced the veins of deep purple.

I took off my clothes and stood naked in front of the mirror. I strained to see the spot in the moonlight through the window. I never felt so alone as I did in moonlight. I closed the curtains on the moon, put my clothes back on, and lay back down. I picked one of the blades on the slow-turning ceiling fan and watched it spin.

I hadn’t felt alone in my dream. I felt that my rib really was a something. It was growing and moving beneath the surface of my skin.

The spot itched worse than ever and burned like fire. I put socks on my hands to soften the scratching and pressed a cold rag to my side, but nothing helped. The itching wasn’t coming from the surface of my skin, but underneath it. Something was scratching back.

I made my way down the stairs. Walking was slow and painful. I don’t know what I wanted with going downstairs, but it felt like the right thing to do.

I kept walking to the front door, to the porch, to the clothesline. It was pitch black except for the moonlight. I used the scent of the tea olive tree to guide me. To what, other than the tree itself, I don’t know.

I sank down to my knees and tore my clothes off. I could feel the spot radiating heat. It grew away from my body. It grew until I could feel it pull my center of gravity. I held the mass protruding from my ribs in my hands as it grew, twisted, and took form.

The pain felt surreal and necessary. I needed this. It was tearing my body apart but fortifying my spirit. There was something guiding me, a kind of fire both in my rib and in my head. It told me to hold the spot gently but with firm hands, to lie down on my unencumbered side and take deep breaths. I inhaled so deeply I felt like I was bringing the tea olive’s small white blooms into my body. I gritted my teeth, got a strong grip on what felt like appendages, and pulled hard and fast. Whatever it was came away from my body so fast I almost let it fly.

Then I heard it: the first cry. I brought it close to my chest, pushed myself up to my feet and stumbled from the dark side of the house to the moonlight. I felt the absence at my side, felt the hollow of my missing rib. As fast as my fingertips had found the wound, the flesh had already together. My body was whole.

In the flooding moonlight, I made out that the wriggling something I held against my chest was a newborn baby. It was wet with the slime and blood of birthing. She cried to make herself known.

I was once a solitary woman. Then, there was you.

Tess Gunty

i.

All this death and I’m just fluttering a scented trash bag. I’m just feeding the cat. Usually, I’m going somewhere. Meanwhile, I feel fine. I Instagram alibis like everyone, post excuses like: I can’t find my fire hose or my diploma, I can’t find my time maker or my policy machine. What’s the first-person plural? I’m so little. I’m no king. Meanwhile, I live like one—even leave the lights on, even get pedicures. Do you have macadamia milk? Degrade me, Mr. Internet. It is important to remember that millennials did not invent the internet—we just took it and ran with it.

Meanwhile, the world is killing itself. We are the world, but not exactly. We are not smart or sellable or lush enough. Meanwhile, I just scream, “Frighten me!” at the mailbox in the lobby, at the walruses on the screen, the calculators at the bank, the podcasts in the kitchen, the algorithms in my pocket, his percussive pulse on the mattress. I want to feel the end. I want the end to feel me.

ii.

Meanwhile, we “fall in love.” We think this will help. It is a pleasure to lift a barbell of tandem neuroses, to soften my hardware and debug his software, to clock no hours of this pink work. We forget that romance is a hospital and so is this epoch, but the teenagers know it. In love, we get plump off a meal plan we can’t afford. Can I just have another? When we feel like being explicit, we say, “Immortality.”

When I don’t like my pasta, Anthony trades me his and I take it. He escorts me to the edge of my body in a canoe, in a garden, in a forest. On a hot night in Key West, we drink a bottle of Prosecco and accidentally browse engagement rings. Ocean salt on our lips. His hand beneath my sundress in the alley. Free cookies in a downpour of fluorescence. The jewelers can tell we aren’t going to purchase anything, but they’re nice to us anyway.

“Don’t do it!” yell the frat boys on the sidewalk.

“Do it,” smiles the man in his 50s.

All this death and my finger’s a size four.

We’re staying with a dying billionaire who likes to shoot the iguanas on his property. The groundskeeper offers to shoot them for him, but he insists. He made his fortune buying and selling companies, and when I learn this, I also learn that wealth will forever remain a tautological language to me. The billionaire’s face is purple, pitted from time and rage and melanoma surgeries. His real kids never visit him although he’s had their names engraved on the doorways of the bedrooms in the guest house, and that’s one of the reasons we’re here. I, specifically, am here because I am in a relationship with someone who is related to someone who works for this man. The billionaire is mean to the toddlers who are with us and has trouble enjoying life.

At dinner, he says that on this island, many people live in boats. “When there’s a hurricane, they just party,” he tells us.

By they, he means everyone who facilitates the hedonism we are here to indulge. I blush. Try to recall the last time I paid for anything.

“And you?” Anthony’s father asks. “What do you do when there’s a hurricane?”

The billionaire pauses over a forkful of salmon, imported from Scotland. Involuntarily, I picture him in a tuxedo, snatching this fish from the paws of a grizzly bear, then pushing the bear in the water. “I go up,” he finally says, absolutely nothing in his eyes.

It takes me couple minutes to understand that when the billionaire says this, he means he rises in a private helicopter, not into the afterlife. When I think about the end, I think about that.

iii.

Meanwhile, I listen to the cyanide inside the mouse and the canary inside the Paris Accord. Meanwhile, facedown on the shag rug, I read the gossip in the Twitter thread. I grip the cash, print the science, phone a friend. Health insurance evades me. I work a lot of jobs and make bafflingly little money. Avoid the dentist, invest in floss. Days of this and then I’m 30, watching a docuseries on all the species I never knew we were cancelling. The scientists publish their findings in dire language. Repost. Repost. Report. It’s a lump in our planet. It’s the fatal mass. We like to watch. Koalas on fire, kid bellies ballooned, grandparents paddling down the street. We like the post.

“Can’t be sure,” announce the whitened teeth on television.

“What’s it gonna take?” we ask each other.

Then we order flutes of feminist champagne and slices of feminist cake. Chocolate frosting mudding our mouths. Glare of sprinkles, hard on teeth. Can I just have. Meanwhile, everything tastes holy. All this death and I’m just licking my lips.

iv.

Who’s the first-person plural? On the backroads, in my hometown, I remark, “It’s fucking hot.” In the passenger seat, Anthony nods. We pass many worlds of corn as I drive. Over here, the eschaton is painless as suburbia, smooth as an engine gurgling gasoline, sweet as steak.

“Lately,” he says, “I see all politicians as hamsters in crowns.”

I know what he means. Me, I call the macho autocrats Junior in my head. We want to shrink our fear. The year she lost to the dumbest megalomaniac was the year I stopped wearing a bra; we all have coping mechanisms, and we use them to furnish our Meanwhile.

“Was it always this hot in October?” I ask. I accelerate at a yellow and blast public radio. Anthony feeds me a fry. A billboard asks us: WHO IS YOUR KING?

v.

Downtown Los Angeles flares like a bouquet of knives around me. Earbuds dispense an interview to my brain, nobody looks at me, I look at everybody. I am walking up Broadway, on my way to the city law library, whole streets blinded by yoga studios and juice bars and human suffering. In the interview, Elon says we ought to use the sun. He says the sun is our friend, says the sun shows up every day, calls this ball of fusion good, says solar can foot the bill—yes, the whole wide bill. I’m paraphrasing. As I walk, I notice that light is everywhere, accompanied by heat, as Elon promised. A hundred and ten degrees, worst air quality in 30 years, and pollution crowds every lung in town. I pass a man sitting against an abandoned theater. He appears to be looking directly at the sun. When he turns to me, it’s like the sky has deposited itself in his irises—they are an impossible shade of blue. All this heat and I’m just offering a bottle of water.

“Lucky me,” he says as he accepts it. “God bless.”

I wonder if the sun can really do all that Elon says it can. It sounds like a lot of work, but I don’t know; math makes me nervous. Some demand exceeds supply—some demands are not to be supplied. Can we just have. And even if solar can power everything, must we ask it to?

 When I reach a crosswalk, I glance back and see the man opening his bottle of water. He takes one small sip, then stows the rest in the shade.

vi.

In college, I noticed an epidemic of the word just when young women ordered coffee, even when their orders were complex. I noticed I was one of these women. The world wants us to atone for our requests, soften our consumption with the language of apology—that’s nothing new. We learned this from folktale and mother, from leatherbound men with fish-hooking grins, from online statistics and history textbooks. When I noticed, I vowed to stop.

But recently, I’ve changed my mind. I sit at the beach, surrounded by plastic, my toes obscured in blazing sand, and watch people I love dive and splash in the turbulent Pacific, heat raging in our skulls. As I chat with a friend, I find just all over my speech, and I keep it there, because I think lots of Americans should start atoning for coffee, I think maybe all those apologetic women in campus cafés were on to something, and I think embarrassment is an appropriate national reaction, all things considered. We have been coughing all week. Our phones tell us to stay inside, but we’re coughing there, too. California is on fire, and I just need some caffeine. I tell my friend I will be right back and ask if she wants anything. She doesn’t.

“Can I just have two shots of espresso on ice?” I ask the barista on the boardwalk. Smoke blooms in the sky, obscuring the sun. I hear it has made its way to New York, this smoke. You can see it from outer space.

The barista asks me to repeat myself. “Sorry,” she says. “My head’s all cloudy. What did you say?”

vii.

Meanwhile, in Elysian, over tacos, my friends and I excavate the dirt of our adolescence and compare the evidence. The sun sets, and we see three coyotes descend from the hills, their shadows jagged on the picnic lawn, but we aren’t ready to leave. We discover that men have pressed cigarettes into all of our bodies. Boyfriend, stranger, professor, husband, boss, dad. The end is about that.

The end is about addiction, gross domestic product, my fridge, and our passports. Boys in the yard, a game of fire and gasoline. Boys hurling bombs into their suburban lake. Boys napping with dogs in the shade. Boys with cigarettes, looking for ashtrays. Boys with babies. At war. Can I just have. The end is about four flags, two Amazons, and thousands of branded women. The end is about an island of people drowning as one man ascends above them. Where’d you get your jeans?

The coyotes are closer, now, just a few trees away on the indigo grass. Phone light reveals them to be skinny and honey-eyed, with thick tracking collars locked to their necks. “Weird,” someone whispers. “They don’t hunt in packs unless they’re very hungry.”

viii.

Meanwhile, I plug myself into my phone and eat whatever it serves me. I red-yarn the micro to the macro like a conspiracy theorist. I mistake the charming narcissist for late-stage capitalism, I confuse catcalls for nuclear arsenals, I call too many crises biblical. I’m rude about Baby Boomers. I watch Greta cry. Anthony says that The New York Times podcast is radicalizing me. We are the world, but not exactly. All this death and I’m just photographing deer.

Anthony proposes in Sequoia, but I don’t reply for 12 hours, until the wildfires smoke us out. One blaze in the north and another in the south, and none of it is “contained.” I can’t conceptualize a long time. Eternal contracts make me sweat, make me laugh. We enter the rental car as quickly as we can, to keep the smoke out.

“Yes,” I say after we buckle our seatbelts.

Anthony doesn’t hear me at first, but when he does, he kisses me for what might be described as a long time. Then he flicks on the windshield wipers to clear away the ash.

ix.

The math is easy, the greed is easier. The end is about boredom, amplified content, the infinite scroll, and memes. The end is about the euthanizing Meanwhile. Perfumed, Netflixed, waxed, automated—we’ll be fine. All this death and I’m just googling miracles. A wall around Manhattan. State-sized mirrors. No, here’s an idea: We drop canisters of tree-shit from planes. Boom! Death Valley? Flood it. No, listen. What you do is take a huuuuuge umbrella and open it in outer space. What you do is wait for the tech geniuses to upload their consciousnesses to the cloud and multiply. I’ve got it: ice balloons in the stratosphere! Or maybe just—no more cars?  No more cows? No more babies? Almonds? Forget it! Let’s pretend we’re a volcano. Sulfuric acid in the sky. Let’s pretend we’re ice.

I watch the cat chew the shower curtain as I pee on a stick. Not our plan. I don’t even know how to overthrow capitalism. I’m so little, I’m no king. I study my toes. Need a pedicure.

x.

Usually, I’m going somewhere. Meanwhile, I feel nauseated. The end isn’t here yet, but we feel it coming, feel an urge to run. Which is why I’ve boarded a self-driving train, booked a ticket to visit family on a ranch in Tehama County.

Seats away from me, elegant people say, “Weird weather.” They say, “Too much safety abuses its inmates—just ask the fish in the tank, already ideating on his leap out of fluorescence, into absence.” They say, “Extraction economy. Fermi’s Paradox. Fiduciary law. Cognitive lingerie.”

I listen through my hammerhead dreams and the cold, fake air. I wake up and use a lot of demon emojis on the sibling text chain. Chew pistachios, sip decaf from a biodegradable cup. We pass fracking; it looks like Mars. We just need. My friends and I keep finding human ashes at the summits of our hikes. They are chalky, white, thick. Copious. Cracked pottery on rock and wildflower. The body reduces, but what’s left is resistant to erasure, sturdier than you’d expect. And so I am suspicious of biodegradability. And still I can’t conceptualize a long time.

“That’s bananas,” says a man on the train.

Outside my window, cows stand in acres of parched grass, tags punched in their ears, watching us. Their horns are stunning and useless. In my seat, I google prehistoric bottom-dwellers. Degrade me, Mr. Internet, but at least show me things that last. I stare at jawless fish on my phone, their hellish little mouths, until I feel better. I search for images of harpy eagles because they terrify me, and I want to feel something. They eat monkeys.

“Death is not the opposite of fluorescence,” says a woman on the train. “It is the logical end.”

My hand on my belly, I think it would be fun to get lost in all the grapes we pass. Wine, pistachios, coffee—will the life inside me taste them? No one—not even the internet—tells you what do you do, at the end, if you accidentally make a beginning. Meanwhile, I stockpile hearts on my feed. As the self-driving train pulls us up the California coast, the views make it clear that most species are not designed to live in the desert. All this death and I’m just five months pregnant.

“So now what?” the woman asks her group on the train. Someone tells a joke, but I miss the parts that make it funny.

“Stop it,” gasps a man in a gorgeous laugh of donkey brays. “Stop it. You’re killing me.”

We love to bemoan the Algorithm, but the filthier truth is that nothing—absolutely nothing—drives itself.

Joe Baumann

     Matthew Smythe cannot get his father out of the house. Whenever he carts in potential buyers, his father rattles the pots and pans, bangs cabinets, creaks up and down the stairs, leaves hot breath on the master bath’s mirror. He even makes the bedrooms smell like cat pee, despite the fact that he never let Matthew have a pet. His father once dragged all the freshly-laundered sheets from the beds in a fury of linens and tossed them down the stairs. On another occasion, he managed to turn on all the faucets and stopper all the sinks while Matthew was away for a long weekend, flooding the basement, ruining the kitchen floor, and rotting the baseboards. The contractor gave Matthew several raised eyebrows as he walked through the house surveying the damage.

     Matthew loves the house. Whenever he walks in, it is filled with old smells, sights, and sounds—his father’s turntable playing Tom Jones or the dial radio blaring swing while he baked cherry pies. But it has become a burden, the heating and cooling pricy because of the original—albeit gorgeous—windows and the fickle Missouri weather. Matthew has to pay a lawn service to cut the grass and shear back the Boston ivy and Virginia creeper every two weeks, and a month ago a raccoon died in the attic. Real estate has been all ragweed and scutch ever since the economic downturn, and Matthew’s not raking in from commissions. His book royalties have also dried up; the tightness in his purse strings is starting to feel like a noose. Ergo: he’s selling the house himself. No point in tossing the commission share off to someone else. And with his father causing trouble, he can’t bring himself to leave the keys behind in a lockbox so an unsuspecting realtor walks into a ghastly deathtrap.

    Matthew tries to explain himself to his father, constructing arguments at the open throat of the linen closet or standing before the half-bath, pouring out his financial woes. He crosses his fingers that his father will chill out long enough for Matthew to show off the house to young married couples looking for a quaint suburban two-story, even though he knows these pairs piss off his dad the most—the husband some kind of investment banker or accounts manager in mid-thigh khaki shorts, the wife a fitness instructor or graphic designer, and the pair somehow affording a mortgage beyond their means. The last time Matthew showed the house to such a couple, half a dozen cans of green beans and corn came flying out through the kitchen pantry’s door like grenades, leaving the husband with a black eye. Matthew has since emptied the cupboards of all their foodstuffs and glass and china, aside from the wet bar, which looks more impressive lined with wineglasses and bottles of Lagavulin and Grey Goose.

     Matthew hears the noise of car doors thumping shut outside. He watches the Bennetts—tan, lithe, movie-star looks—walk up the concrete steps cut into the front yard. He takes in the way they saunter, her right hand cupped in his left, and watches as they pause, looking at something on the gabled roof. Mrs. Bennett, whose first name is Charlotte or Cheryl or something like that, laughs and leans into her husband. All good signs, Matthew tells himself. Their agent is sick with a stomach bug, but they want to see the house anyway. Another good sign.

     He lets them come all the way to the threshold, Mr. Bennett’s arm reaching out to press the bell. Matthew screams one final silent prayer that his father won’t upend a bookcase or turn on the living room TV halfway through the showing before he yanks open the door. Matthew flashes a gregarious smile and takes in the Bennetts up close. She has the smoothest glowing skin he has ever seen; if she’s wearing makeup, she’s achieved that like-I’m-not-wearing-any-at-all look. He has gone sterling silver at the temples even though he can’t be more than 30, but the lightning strikes wisping through his hair somehow make him even more youthful. The only thing that will keep him from getting carded for booze well into his 40s is the breadth of his shoulders. He must, Matthew thinks, wake up at five in the morning to sweat through CrossFit workouts.

     Matthew is reminded of Leonard, the college swimmer he had an affair with during his short tenure teaching at a marginal liberal arts college in the Midwest. Leonard was a jock, but he bubbled with kindness and an intelligent vulnerability. The stories he wrote in Matthew’s class were sparse in language but rich in subtext, their underbellies wide as caverns. Matthew thinks of him sometimes, jolted awake in the middle of the night by a lucid dream of their sex, the way Leonard’s body seemed to consume his when they lay panting and gyrating. He’s tried googling Leonard’s name now and then, but the results have been inconclusive at best.

     “Hi,” Matthew says, extending a hand toward Mrs. Bennett first. “Good to see you.” He knows that it’s really the wives you have to impress, whether or not they’re the breadwinners. Their desire for breakfast nooks and updated bathrooms always trumps the need for a man cave, a finished basement, or a humongous garage that could double as a refugee camp.

      The tour starts strong. They love the home office, located just off the entryway through a pair of French doors. Mr. oohs over the built-in mahogany, and Mrs. is keen on the deep green paint. They wonder aloud about the possibility of buying the desk—gigantic, its shine matching the shelves—and Matthew is relieved that his father doesn’t rattle any windowpanes or send a Stephen Ambrose volume flying across the room. Matthew waltzes them through the formal dining room with its crown molding and into the open kitchen-living room combo, and he’s pretty sure he hears Mrs. gasp at the size of the granite-topped island with its massive stainless-steel sink. He feels a swell of pride every time the Bennetts gleefully point out another of the house’s features—the bay window overlooking the manicured yard, the brick fireplace, the composite back deck—and Callie Bennett tugs on her husband’s arm (finally, her name revealed when Bradley muses on how much counter space there is for her to bake cookies during the holidays). Throughout, Matthew is clenched just so, wondering if—when—his father will make his presence known.

     Everything is fine until they reach the master bedroom, their last stop on the second floor. Matthew has carefully arranged a vase of calla lilies on the bureau next to his father’s old Timex. Little touches of life help clients imagine themselves living in these intimate spaces. He can see Bradley picturing himself reading the paper on Sunday mornings while sun blots through the generous window, cinching his ties in double Windsors in front of the long vanity mirror in the en suite bathroom, curling up to make love to his wife on Friday nights. Callie stands by the window overlooking the cul-de-sac. Matthew can read her mind; she’s seeing her future children on bikes, wobbling on their first rides without training wheels as they scoop around the circle.

     Then the door to the walk-in closet yawns open.

     Matthew lets out a dry, mirthless chuckle and walks to the door, prepared to at least shut it and draw their attention back to the jacuzzi jets in the bathtub. But then come the shoes.

     He made the mistake of leaving all of his father’s things. Matthew had nowhere else to keep them—his apartment was too small, and he couldn’t afford a storage facility, and those corrugated steel rooms felt so funereal to him anyway, black holes of lost, forgotten, hated things—so he left almost everything as it had been when his father died. Until now, the idea of selling or donating them has felt too painful, the roots of dread and grief too tender for yanking. But now shoes are flying out at him, a cavalcade of Oxfords, brogues, chukka boots, and white nubucks. They clip him in the ribs, smack his shinbones, dash him at the temples. Several tumble into the bedroom.

     Matthew turns to the Bennetts. He slams the closet door and then gathers up the shoes, cradling them like a litter of pups. The Bennetts stare at him, mouths open in dark, wet caves. He has spewed out excuses for his father’s misbehaving during previous showings: poorly hung shelving in the pantry, groaning pipes that need to be refitted in the walls, floorboards creaky with age. He can maybe excuse the closet door with some notion that the room is slightly slanted, or maybe that the door is a tad too small for its frame.

     Matthew’s eyes hurt. His arms feel heavy, as though the shoes are made of lead.

    He drops them and sighs. “It’s my father. He doesn’t want to leave.”

     The Bennetts both raise their eyebrows, as if they’ve synchronized this move through practice.

     “He’s haunting the place.” Matthew bends over and takes up one of the shoes, a simple loafer. He remembers these shoes. He bought them for his father as a Christmas present many years ago. They were a half-size too small, but his father wore them anyway, probably ignoring a crunchy pinch in his toes. He kept them at the front of his shoe rack. Now they have become a projectile weapon.

     A look passes between the Bennetts. Callie approaches him, avoiding the remaining shoes like they’re land mines, and, to Matthew’s surprise, gathers him in a hug. The toe of his father’s shoe jabs at the space between her breasts.

     “You poor man,” she says. “We have the same problem with my mother-in-law.”

     “You what?”

     She sets him free. “That’s why we’re looking for a new place. She’s destroying ours.”

     “She sprays me with the sink hose just about every day,” Bradley says. “Usually while I’m drinking coffee in the morning. My own mother.”

     “And don’t get me started on what she’s been doing to my dresses.” Callie gives herself the once-over, flattening the material along her sides. “This is about the only one that isn’t in tatters.”

     Matthew stares at them. Callie bends down and takes up the other shoes.

     “Let’s put these away and see if we can’t talk some sense into him.”  She pries the loafer from Matthew’s hands and nudges him to move out of the way. Balancing the shoes in one crooked elbow, she pulls open the closet door and peers inside. Matthew expects his father’s Geoffrey Beane ties to slither out and choke her, but nothing happens.

     “There a light in here?” she asks.

     “Oh, yes. Of course.” He reaches in and flicks the switch.

     “This is really spacious.” She turns back toward them. “Bradley, we could probably actually fit all of our clothes in here.”

     “I keep my suits in our hall closet at the moment,” Bradley explains.

     “It does have good storage room,” Matthew says.

     “Okay,” Callie says, dropping the shoes on the closet floor. “What’s your dad’s name?”

     “Jonathan.”

     “Jonathan, look. I know you love this house. But homes are just spaces we occupy for a short time. They’re meant to be let go of, eventually, no matter how much we care about them.”

      Matthew turns to Bradley, an eyebrow raised.

     “She’s good at this kind of thing. She works with abused dogs. Similar skill set.”

     Callie pushes her way into the closet, her shoulder brushing against his father’s plaids and Oxfords, his moleskin trousers and twill pants. Matthew catches his breath, praying his father doesn’t deluge her with his panama hats or belt buckles.

     “Jonathan,” she says, voice muffled by stacked sweaters. “You love your son. And I know you love your home. But haven’t you seen what you’re doing to him?”

     She looks back at Matthew, who smiles sheepishly.

     “He needs to move on, too. The dead are meant to help us do that, not stop us.”

     Matthew’s father, if he’s listening, makes no response. The walls do not rattle. The sinks in the bathroom don’t splash on. The sports jackets are silent. Matthew thinks of the day he told his father that yes, he liked dating women, but men too. His father had stared at him with a puzzled look on his face until something behind his eyes clicked into understanding. They stared at one another, wordless. Eventually, his father nodded dumbly. They’d never spoken about it again.

     Callie looks at Matthew. “Is the silence agreement or a tantrum?”

     “I have no idea.”

     Taking the lead, she hauls them down into the kitchen and flings open the pantry.

     “I love how spacious this is. Do you hear me, Jonathan?  I love your house.”

     Matthew glances at Bradley, who shrugs, his muscular shoulders slightly stooped.

     “So,” Callie continues, “if I’m going to buy it, I need to know that you’re not going to fast-pitch cans of peaches at me. Because—and you can ask my husband for confirmation—I love my canned peaches.”

     “She does. Even though the syrup is bad for you.”

     “That’s what wind sprints are for.” She smiles at her husband, a mooning, smack-dab-in-the-midst-of-love grin. Matthew wonders how long they’ve been married. She turns back to him. “I want it.”

     “You want it?”

     “The house. Yes.”

     “We wanted something move-in ready,” Bradley says.

     “Oh, we can move in.”

     Matthew feels a raw tingle on the back of his neck and wonders if it’s his phantasmal father stroking his hair, or maybe preparing to garrote him with his ghostly fingers. But the tingle passes, settling as a dazzling excitement in his lower gut. He nods at Callie and Bradley. She winks at her husband, who looks like he needs to pass a kidney stone.

     “I guess the location is great,” Bradley concedes. “Features are what we’re after. Minus the complimentary angry spirit. Which we already have now.”

     “Not like this,” Callie says. “This is fixable.” She reaches out and snatches Matthew’s hand. “Write up the paperwork. Call our agent. We’re ready to make a deal.”

     When they’re gone, arrangements for faxing of documents sorted out, Matthew slumps down on a barstool, elbows propped on the kitchen island. He lets out a deep, sour breath.

     He’s about to pour himself a drink from one of his father’s luminescent amber bottles of liquor when the shaking starts. The drinking glasses cry from their shelf; he hears wine bottles bumping on the wet bar. For a moment he’s frozen, unsure of what to do as the linoleum rumbles under his feet. He’s not even sure if he should stay inside or run out into the yard. He could be hit by a falling support beam if he stays put, but a fissure could open up and swallow him if he dashes outside.

     Matthew looks out the kitchen window and is puzzled. The trees are calm and unmoving. The old swing set still tucked into the grass isn’t wobbling.

     ““Really, Dad?” he yells, hands gripping the kitchen island.

     The shaking intensifies. Thick wood moans. A wrenching noise. At first Matthew can’t place it, until he realizes it’s the groaning pain of the house’s foundation.

     “Come on,” he says. He starts for the front door, but the rumbling has gotten so bad he nearly falls, ping-ponging back and forth against the walls like he’s blotto off his ass. He hears the first window—those gorgeous, original windows—shatter somewhere upstairs. The French doors leading into the office blast out shards of glass like they’re spitting at him. Matthew covers his face with his arms and dashes, crunching noises beneath his feet.

     “Okay, Dad,” Matthew says, placing his hand on the front doorknob. “Dad.” He starts yelling, voice growing throaty and harsh as he tries to out-volume the sounds of the house falling apart: bone china chittering to pieces in the dining room, the chandelier swooping down in a bursting arc, drywall whining and cracking.

     “It’s over,” he says.

     He tugs on the front doorknob and is hardly surprised when it refuses to open.

     “Is this how it’s going to be, Dad? You’re going to knock the house down and bury me with it?”

     Matthew releases the knob and leans against the door. He rubs his eyeballs at the inner corners, trails his fingers down his nose and wipes his philtrum; there’s nothing there but an ant-crawl itchy feeling. The house rumbles, a series of tiny shockwaves that burst through his bones. Matthew can almost feel his father’s hands beating through the I-beams and joists and then into the plank of the door, ramming across his back and shoulder blades. When he would get sick as a child, his dad would lie him on the couch and tap on his tiny boy muscles with the fatty sides of his hands. Matthew would let out a tiny hiss of noise, a miniature whine that warbled up and down in pitch as his father moved his hands like he was pounding weirdly on a piano. This would always jostle something in Matthew, and he would feel better, if even for just a few hours, before snot or nausea or stuffy sinuses came rolling back in.

     This feels different. But he shuts his eyes and tries to imagine that all his father wants is for things to be better.

     Not that Matthew knows what that means. Two years ago, he left his teaching job, denied tenure thanks to his lack of publishing—despite the fact that he came into the position with a well-regarded book—and the rumbled (true) rumors that he’d been romantically involved with a student. He never found out how word of his affair with Leonard spread; they’d both been careful during, but when it ended, they didn’t speak again. Leonard’s name never appeared on the department honor rolls, nor did he show up at any of the pre-graduation parties the department hosted for those completing their degrees. Maybe Leonard changed his major to business or sports management. Matthew took his lumps when he was gently nudged by his department chair to try something else with his life. He packed up his tiny office, which reeked of old incense thanks to the philosophy professor next door, and, in lieu of anything else on the horizon, studied for and passed the realtors’ exam. He loved houses but couldn’t imagine studying architecture, so why not invade people’s spaces to see what they held, show them off, and make money doing it?  And maybe, he’d thought, he’d come up with stories to tell, something he hadn’t managed in ages.

     But less than a year into Matthew’s new salesman life, his father’s lungs shriveled, filled with grape-sized beads. He was gone in months.

     But not quite gone.

     Aside from the slosh and gurgle of water somewhere in its bowels, the house has gone silent. The floors are covered in glass. When he stands up straight, Matthew feels his pulse all over.

     “Now what, Dad?” he asks, voice rattling up the stairs.

     He doesn’t expect an answer, and he doesn’t get one. His father has dialed things back to zero. The air ticks like a car engine popping after a drive. Matthew wanders the house, imagining what he would say to a prospective buyer looking at it now. See how spacious the dining room is without that ugly chandelier? The kitchen, with its broken sink and off-kilter oven attachments, is in perfect condition for a gut job. That large crack in the living room wall? Just knock the whole thing down and gobble up the study for more living space. The flooded basement?  What flooded basement?  I see an in-home swimming pool!

     By the time he’s reached the master bedroom, he’s laughing at the absurdity of it all. Family photos have fallen in the hallway, many of their frames shattered. He plants a hand on each blank space as he passes.

     The bedroom is largely untouched. His father’s watch and loose change are still tossed on the top of his bureau in the same reckless pattern. In the bathroom, the tub has not dislodged itself from the wall. The tiled floor is dry.

     He lies down on his father’s side of the bed, where he used to curl as a child after waking from nightmares and finding the night too terrifying for solo sleep. His dad would wrap a bare arm around him, and Matthew would drip to sleep washed in the sweet-sour aroma drifting from his father’s armpits. When he was 17 and left home alone for a weekend, Matthew snuck a girl into the house, and they had sex here. His first time, clumsy and brief and full of awkward laughter and a trio of poorly-used condoms that filled the room with a sterile, institutional odor. He washed the sheets the next day, convinced his father would still be able to smell out what his son had done. But not a word was ever said.

     Matthew stares at the ceiling, where a long crack has cut from one corner to the other. He shuts his eyes and takes in deep breaths. In the blackness he can feel his father squirming around every inch of the house, like a battalion of noiseless mice. Matthew sits up, opens his eyes.

     Standing before him at the foot of the bed is a child, or something shaped like one, made of plaster and water, crown molding and light fixtures. It doesn’t have eyes, but it does have little hollows where eyes should be, thumb-sized depressions pushed into its lopsided head in a familiar shape.

     “Dad.”

     The child raises a hand, wiggles fingers made out of fused-together nails and screws. Matthew wonders which wall will crumble first without them.

     “You’re not going to leave, are you?”

     The child shakes its head, drywall flaking off.

     “Alright. I get it. Or, well, I don’t. But it doesn’t matter.”

     The non-eyes squeeze closed and then widen again.

     “What can I do for you?” Matthew asks. When the child doesn’t answer, he adds, “Tell you a story?”

     The child nods.

     “Okay,” Matthew says. “Come here.”

     As the child bounds toward the bed, smelling like a stuffy attic, Matthew shuffles to create a pocket where it can nestle. He’s not sure what kind of story to tell. Maybe one from his book, which his father never, to Matthew’s knowledge, read. Or he could tell him about Leonard. Or about Eddie, a new part in Matthew’s busted life, who is still out there somewhere, waiting for him to show up for dinner. A date Matthew knows he will miss. Because, in just a second, he’ll scoop up this father-child, hold his crumbling body in his arms, and find himself coated and caught, pulled into the busted walls and uneven floor, enmeshed in his childhood home for the rest of his adult life.

Brian Okwesili

It is a cold Wednesday morning. The harmattan breeze settles over the city like the heavens have come to meet the Earth. Everything is brown and dry and cold and more brown. It is mid-November, but the people on the streets have begun to talk about Christmas, its merry moments, and how everything skips past with each bottle of beer. You want Christmas, too. Your mother says Christmas has a distinct smell, and that fried beef tastes better then. You inhale, but dust fills your nostrils. You put a palm over your nose and quicken your steps. You must meet God and tell everything.

The church is a warm embrace when you enter. It is like heaven doesn’t touch here. A statue of a bleeding Jesus stares down at you, its eyes sullen from pain. The pews shimmer under the tiny bright lights on the ceiling. At a dim corner is the confessional, a space where trapped sins roam. You walk up to it, your heart clinging to your throat, ready to jump out. 

You cross yourself, and then you kneel. There is a purple curtain before you, keeping you from seeing the priest. You wonder if he can see you, if he has the same clenching tightness in his stomach.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is three months since my last confession.” You pause. You cannot feel your tongue. “I am a student of biology at the university. This is my confession.”

You take few minutes going over trivial acts you know won’t count as sin—a mild quarrel, a swear, a midnight erection—but you say them anyway, because the things you truly wish to say are broken vowels, refusing to stick back together.

“Is that all?” An airy baritone arrests you. 

The church is suddenly hot. You can feel beads of sweat running down your thighs. You remember your holiday in Kano last year and how the sun there was always a boiling orange. When your mother asked you if you would like to visit there again, you told her that Kano felt like hell, but a busy hell. She laughed.

“Can you know a thing and never speak of it?” you ask, peering into the curtain.

A chuckle sieves through. 

“I am under oath,” he says.

You bite your lips. Of course, he is under oath. You have heard about the seal of confession. You drag in air, a little too much, and as quickly as you blink, you say, “I lust after a boy.”

There is silence from the other side.

You can feel air leaving your body through your ears. “Father, I look at him same way I look at girls, and I think of us entangled in bed, naked.”

More silence.

“Tell me what I should do to stop this. I know this is not of God. It is the devil, Father. It is him.” 

You try not to cry. You want him to say something. Anything.

The last time you touched yourself, you were alone in the bathroom, trying to hold a mental picture of him in your head. You saw his face, then his lips, and when his butt swayed in your head, you stopped and let the soap slip. That night, you invited your girlfriend over, and while you were inside her, you told her you would write a poem about slippery spiders. She stared at you; for a moment, you thought she would scream and run out. The next day, she told you that you were weird. It was not a compliment.

“I once loved a boy in the way one loves a girl, too,” the priest says, finally.

Your heart skips, a painful thud. You want to snatch the curtain away and slap the priest. You do not know why. 

“How did you overcome it? How did you beat the devil?” you ask.

He chuckles again. “There is no devil. It is natural. One can only manage it, for love is of God. And God is love.”  

“How do I manage it, this love?” 

Right. Wrong. Just. Evil. The priest is saying so many things you do not understand. You nod. Love is a thing with faces—this is how you would write it in your diary. Or perhaps in a poem.

As you step outside the church, the sun sits in the sky blurred by the harmattan fog. The Earth is now warm; heaven ascends slowly. You can see the full stretch of palm trees in the distance. 

You walk to a corner beside the ixora hedges in the churchyard and remove your phone from your pocket to call your mother. You tell her that you can smell Christmas and that you can’t wait to see her again. Then, you begin to cry.

She doesn’t tell you to stop. She says only that she understands.

You cry the more, knowing that you cannot know a thing and never speak of it.