Prose

Matthew Bauman

Ossify

During the first trimester, my wife would stand sideways in front of me and slouch along the S of her spine. “Look at this,” she’d say, as if the small bump in her belly was showing more than it was. But really she wanted me to look with my imagination, to see what the pictures show us in the book about the pregnant body. The changes happening inside, invisible to the naked eye—clusters of cells forming into spine, brain, heart, organs; thoughts and dreams electrifying to life. At week sixteen, she said, “The bones have started to ossify.” I understood the word in context: hardening, bone becoming bone, becoming what it is, what it will be.

At the previous ultrasound, we witnessed our developing fetus punching and kicking against the walls of my wife’s uterus, not that she could feel it, this little leap of imagination from her belly to the overhead monitor, almost ghost-like as the form appeared and disappeared under the roving wand. And then the watery heartbeat started pulsing through the speakers: wow-wow-wow-wow, one hundred-sixty beats per minute. The heart’s drum—firm, rhythmic, becoming convinced of itself.

My wife and I married late in life and were in our early forties when we began to discuss having a child and the health risks of what the doctors called a geriatric pregnancy. I had had doubts about having a child in the first place—largely ambivalent but leaning toward not—though I knew my wife wanted to be a mother. My biggest fear was what kind of world our child would inhabit: rising oceans, megastorms, heat waves, wildfires, drought, food insecurity, water shortages, the sixth extinction. What kind of person would I be to bring someone into a world so bleak, so desperate, even horrendous.

But to look at only the last hundred years, people bore children during the grisly first world war, through the hardscrabble Great Depression, into another heinous war, on the brink of nuclear annihilation, into the rise of international terrorism, and now with global climate change. The future has looked grim for generations, yet people kept having children. We’re all proof of it. So rather than surrender to the inevitability of climate change and live the rest of my years in the yoke of despair, I acquiesced to my wife’s wishes with the prospect that our child doesn’t have to be a passive victim of circumstances—a future statistic of the burgeoning climate crisis—but instead, with the right upbringing, can grow and develop into someone who cares for the planet and defends the environment. In the second month of trying, we took a test. I had wanted a girl even before I saw the two pink lines. 

Our daughter will begin life in the Black Hills in western South Dakota, a place held sacred by Native Americans across the Great Plains. Before she can even crawl, I’ll take her hiking in the woods, dip her ankles in the mountain creeks, and lay her down to rake the dirt and grass between her fingers. Among the blanket of pines and the granite spires, I want her to learn love and respect and humility, pebble by pebble, tree by tree, until one day her heart and mind might be big enough to see the world as one interconnected body.

As our daughter’s bones ossified, when our hearts and minds were still soft and numb at the magic of cells and bones and organs, my wife and I arose early one morning to the news that environmental activist Greta Thunberg would be marching for the climate later that day in nearby Rapid City. Just two weeks before, the sixteen-year-old girl led millions of people across the globe in the largest environmental march in history. What was she doing in South Dakota, we wondered. Nothing made sense. Maybe the universe sent her for me, for my daughter, for all of us in need of a livable future.

We arrived early with large, colorful signs we had made that morning. People shifted in the public park, nodding at each other’s painted messages. Polite smiles and tender glances quietly acknowledged one another as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and elders in the fight for climate action. Enough blue sky broke through the clouds to take the bite off the October air.

Several hundred people soon packed close to the stage. My wife and I stood in the middle, three bodies from the front. Local Indigenous leaders sang prayers of thanks and goodwill, followed by a drum circle to synchronize our beating hearts. And after an hour of song, prayer, dance, and unity, Thunberg appeared at the back of the bandshell. From the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos to the assembly hall at the United Nations in Brussels to a small stage in a public park in the Black Hills, she stood like a hazy dream twenty feet in front of me, tight-lipped, stoic, eyes roving toward an uncertain future. The crowd murmured and floated to their toes. Apparition-like, she had been an idea, an inspiration I knew only from digital screens. And here she was before me, even more real than the girl developing in the womb next to me.

Thunberg stood short, narrow in the shoulders, and entirely unassuming. She wore her hair pulled back into a single braid and was dressed in gray sweatpants and a loose-fitting royal blue hoody that matched her similarly second-hand sneakers. Thunberg spoke only briefly, her voice and passion already known across the world, notably from her excoriating “How Dare You” speech given just a month prior at the 2019 UN Climate Summit in New York. Next to her stood another sixteen-year-old, Tokata Iron Eyes, a Lakota girl of the Oceti Sakowin. The two of them rallied the crowd in defense of clean water, indigenous rights, and a future free from climate catastrophe. They decried political inaction, the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, and the fossil fuel economy. 

Under that perfect bluebird sky, two sixteen-year-old girls renewed my hope for the future, for the potential multiplying within the sixteen-week-old fetus beside me. I see the conviction of cells becoming bodies becoming girls becoming leaders. The future is indeed female. And I must have hope—blind audacious hope against any and all odds—because if I didn’t, I’d break into pieces for bringing my daughter into the world at all.

I turned around to see the myriad faces glowing in righteousness. Fanning out in a wide arc behind us, people lifted their handmade signs: “There is no Planet B,” “I Stand with Science,” “Water is Life,” “Protect Mother Earth,” and on and on. And on the edge of this sacred land, on the edge of life itself, hearing the pulse of the drums, feeling the rhythm of our marching feet, our daughter lay in utero and continued to punch and kick and ossify and become.

Matthew Bauman grew up a free-range, forest-traipsing kind of kid. Now in midlife, he still loves hiking, biking, camping, skiing, and generally being outside, where, in nature, he finds solace and inspiration. He’s grateful for his wife and daughter, who have filled his life with tremendous hope and love and creativity. His work has previously been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Black Hills State University in South Dakota.

Dave Wheeler

Rash

In the dull winter light of Seattle's early dusk, Lloyd would brush the new infection’s fiery valence. He stood at the window of a hotel room that wasn’t his own, observing straight couples link arms against the cold, in the queue for the Ferris wheel on Pier 57. Below him, they solved the slow rope labyrinth before boarding the festively lit cycle, which would let them off exactly where they got on, wandering souls compelled by small, circuitous thrills. He could not decide if they inspired his envy or his pity, before the married man, who belonged in this room, reemerged from the bathroom. Leaning over Lloyd’s shoulder, tucking his chin against Lloyd’s neck, arms tight around his waist, nestling the half-hard pouch of a jockstrap into the seat of Lloyd’s trousers, the man asked, “What are you looking at?” 

“Nothing,” Lloyd replied. Their rendezvous had come after rapidly laying out everything but their names on the app before he arrived. Their seduction was easy. They’d negotiated frankly about their desires and expectations. They’d exchanged information about testing history and decolonizing hygiene. So that now, picking up once again with flattery and dirty talk they’d said to others and heard again and again, the words, as before, weren’t there for their novelty. They were a tuning fork.

Striking harmony, they found their way to the bed. It must have been an hour before they stopped to catch their breath, legs entwined. Body hair tickled between them as Lloyd’s mind rode its own cycle of desire. With his chest pressed into the back of the man he knew only as M., he studied the imperfections, moles, and vitiligo flecked across broad shoulders. The skin had lost most of its youthful elasticity from age, alcohol and sun exposure. His own showed years in much the same way, a development he now took collagen supplements to combat. He started buying them in January, on his standing lunch date with his friend Darly, when the two refilled their HIV prescriptions. Upon seeing the supplements with their bright labels in Lloyd’s basket, Darly had waved a hand over them and then at Lloyd. “You’re sixty-three,” he remarked, “a supplement isn’t going to undo all that.” But they weren’t a vain grab for youthful looks. Just like the capsaicin rub he applied twice daily, they were supposed to help his rheumy joints—both methods which Darly referred to as “anti-science homeopathic snake oil.” But Lloyd hadn’t said a word when Darly cleared out the store’s inventory of chlorhexidine that day. 

M.’s hips shifted against Lloyd’s, and Lloyd nibbled M’s shoulder, salty with sweat. This much closeness would also provoke an impatient flick of Darly’s wrist. Public health officials had decided that skin-to-skin contact should be minimal to keep individuals from becoming colonized, and they encouraged everyone to wash with a topical disinfectant regularly, naming chlorhexidine specifically, to contain bacterial spread. Lloyd didn’t know what to make of the new conscientiousness that had sprung up in recent weeks, but there would be plenty of time to shower fastidiously after leaving M.’s. For now, he was content in this roost of physical intimacy, using the tender skin of his wrist to caress M.’s thigh, to graze M’s tired but not entirely soft cock. How lucky this man’s wife, back in Chicago, was to have him, Lloyd thought. How lucky for him that they were open. Or at least that’s what M. said. Hotels were only the half-truth of anyone’s life, and Lloyd didn’t want more than fragments. From these he could conjure an idyll, connecting and reconnecting every so often, as lovers for a night or two, watching the rain blow over the Olympic Mountains as they nested in a warm comfortable room, before departing again separately. All of the desire with none of the complications. The thought sent a warm pulse to his cock, which stirred in the cleft of M.’s ass. 

“The fuck?” Every muscle tensed and M. was suddenly on his feet. He brushed both legs with alarming vigor, continuing to curse before he fixed a furious gaze at Lloyd.

“What’s wrong?”

In the bathroom, the hiss of the shower head pierced a thickening silence as M. slathered the skin of his inner thighs, knees, calves, in antiseptic.

“What happened?” Lloyd asked again. M.’s face red, eyes wild, peered around the door.

“You have it, don’t you.” His skin was burning, he said. With a wince, he indicated the pink heat blossoming furiously on his brown thighs.

“No, I don’t have anything!” Lloyd’s appeals floundered in a volley of accusations. “I was just tested. You’re the first since.” Perhaps the man’s pinching and squeezing had brought his blood to ruddy the surface of his skin. Couldn’t this burning be a phantom pang of dread about a new health scare? 

Then Lloyd realized something about the area M. was fussing over. “Capsaicin!” he blurted. “It’s capsaicin ointment, for my knees. I have osteoarthritis and it helps with the pain.” His doctor recommended rubbing his aching joints with the fiery salve twice a day, a small mind-game to play on one’s body. Teach the brain to ignore low-grade pain in those areas and reduce the discomfort of the original ailment. It was also the reason Lloyd remained so diligent with a fitness plan, despite the difficulty in finding an open gym since the outbreak. 

Leaning over the tub, Lloyd tried to help M. scrub away the oily residue, now mixed with lube and sweat, but the combination of soap and water intensified M.’s reaction. He cursed. He was allergic to chili peppers, he said, and Lloyd’s knee gave out. He slipped until his bare ass settled against the cold tile. 

The day had started out okay, unlike the mornings he woke up stiff, barely able to shuffle himself into a hot shower, where he’d piss down the drain to save himself the trouble of an extra three feet to the toilet. No, today the grind progressed slowly into an ache that penetrated muscle. He’d lifted weights and tried to outpace it on the stationary bike, wearing gloves, careful to wipe machines and benches twice before and afterward, in accordance with the posted advisory at The Fit Nest, which included no sharing equipment and no exposed skin below the collar. Steadily, and with moderate weight, he focused on breath as he mentally journeyed to the center of his pain, to commune with it. He’d applied capsaicin ointment when he got back to his apartment on Capitol Hill, then changed into soft pants, and fiddled with his phone, lazily searching to commune with pleasure. 

Feebly offering support now in a losing battle, Lloyd could only apologize to the sensitive pits of M’s radiating knees. He explained how he hadn’t thought twice about the flush of heat he felt when he arrived. “I walk fast when I’m horny.”

“Stop,” M. said finally. “I can manage without you.” He turned off the shower and stood there dripping, a sorry but stern look on his face. It was the expression of broken trust, the indelible furrow of a suspicious mind. They had built this evening on an illusion of transparency afforded by an app, a luxury, a prophylactic in these uncertain times. But the connection was now lost, with no way to refresh this moment of tension into relief, a sigh and laughter over a near miss. It might have been different if they were both single, but this man had someone to protect, a partner who generously allowed him to pursue pleasure despite the looming risks. Someone like that must be shielded from recklessness, a flaw M. seemed to locate near Lloyd’s hip as he grew sullen and silent again. “There doesn’t seem to be any swelling—yet. So you should go.”

Lloyd couldn’t make eye contact either, and looked up from the floor to find the open chlorhexidine bottle left dangerously close to the counter’s edge in haste. Beyond it he saw the tidy caps of a small infantry of toothpaste, moisturizer, deodorant, beard oil, contact lens solution, pomade, and cologne, each in sizes complying with air travel guidelines. M., if truly the fifty-two he claimed, seemed to have no need of remedies for osteoarthritis, or their unsightly cousin of varicose veins, like Lloyd, who was now an inconvenience. He couldn’t find it in himself to defend his dignity. He’d tried to be honest. He’d tried to be smart. But now the shadow of a threat was enough to unravel whatever their fucking had sewn up. His need for release, and to fall freely into another’s embrace, which seemed continuously to purr beneath his ribs, pressed through that burst seam and wandered directly into the new infection's incinerator. Nothing he said could salvage tonight, so he lifted himself gingerly to his feet, dressed quickly, apologizing again, and left.

*

“I’m thinking about celibacy,” Lloyd told Darly during their next lunch date, a pho restaurant across the street from their drug store. April wind whipped misty air across Third Ave.

Darly, an interior designer, pinched a slice of fresh jalapeño with his chopsticks and dropped it in his soup, completing a culinary presentation that deserved to be photographed, to replace the sun-bleached menu in the window. “That’s a sensible choice.”

Boils manifested first in patients already hospitalized with other concerns, their cause being a drug resistant strain of Staphylococcus that developed greater virulence with each new antibiotic treatment. Then they began appearing on people who hadn’t been hospitalized prior to discovering the lesions. These community–acquired cases were a more contagious form of the bacteria, although they didn’t have nearly the resistance of the hospital–acquired strains. Until the two breeds converged: the combined virulence and transmissability only increased from there, and a going concern proceeded into a full-on panic.

“I hate it. Sex was supposed to be about connection, but it’s become impossible.” Lloyd tore three basil leaves and added them to his bowl, then swirled concentric circles of hoisin over them. In the bullseye he squeezed a dollop of Sriracha. 

Surviving the eighties and nineties had been brutal, losing lovers, friends, chosen family, acquaintances, in a long agonizing funeral procession. He tested positive on May 21, 1996, a year and five months after Darly, who comforted him as he sobbed into the cushions of a couch. His friend insisted they were lucky, because the protease inhibitors were here now and seemed to be working. Yet, living with HIV limited his sense of connection within a 21st-century gay community which slid, over the next generation or two, from the solidarity of Chicken Soup Brigades to neg-only wariness again. Weathering late middle age, too, made things worse. The wrinkles and the sagging, yes, but also the arthritis that restricted his movement; a back injury which threatened excruciating spasms after vigorous nights and made erections difficult to achieve as well as maintain without a cock ring; not to mention the varicose veins that were both ugly and painful. As the new epidemic escalated, the threshold for sexual pleasure was approaching an insurmountable summit for him. 

“Connection sounds lovely,” Darly blew on a spoonful of broth, “if idealistic, considering the sex you’re talking about.”

“Meaning?” 

“Meaning that it’s easy to mistake chemistry for connection and get carried away with yourself. Showing up for a moment is a lot easier than connecting day in and out.” 

“Maybe all we need is a moment.” Lloyd wrapped a slice of beef around a jalapeño. “In a continuing series of moments.”

“Serial Mom—” Darly said with coy self-satisfaction “—ments”

“Not that it matters now,” Lloyd blustered on. “People would rather masturbate to webcams and shut you off when they’re finished. Everyone’s too afraid.”

“You say that like you aren’t afraid of anything.” Darly lifted his spoon with a curiously ominous toast. “May going to the gym and setting your skin on fire—may fighting pain with more pain—give you the high-minded balance you once sought in meaningless sex.”

“I didn’t say any of that. I’m afraid of things.”

“But you’re afraid of the right things, right? Conservatives. Big Pharma.” 

Lloyd studied Darly’s smiling brown eyes. There were more things on that list but Darly wouldn’t mention them here, not in this restaurant, not in the light of day. While most people were afraid of letting unwanted things in, Lloyd was more worried about unwanted things getting pushed out. They didn’t bring up addiction anymore, not since they both got clean. Not since opioids took the mutual friends that other, older nightmares hadn’t.

“This fear you’re talking about won’t last. Once medicine catches up to this infection, we’ll come out of hiding.” Darly slurped, then dabbed his beard with his napkin, before adding, “It’s happened before.” 

“But that could be years. Assuming anyone still looks for cures anymore. We’re how many years into HIV? And our best solution is complete dependence on an outrageously expensive pill we have to take daily or we die.”

“It’s better than the alternative. And if that’s all we can do for this new thing, too, you can catch me first in line for that treatment as well.”

“Meanwhile, we will baptize ourselves in chlorhexidine and swear the oaths of monks.” He nodded at the paper sack on the floor beside him. “Thank you for that, by the way. You’re not very sneaky.”

Darly flourished his hands before his face, like Kira realizing she’s alive in Xanadu. For the first time that day,Lloyd smiled. It wasn’t the first time Darly had slipped one of his bottles into Lloyd’s bag. “Maybe robes will be the new kink!”

“You know what I mean.” Lloyd talked around a mouthful of noodles. “Plenty of guys have already serosorted and chronosorted us out of the picture.”

“Even though we’re more experienced in every way,” Darly summoned from memory.

“Even though it’s been proven we can’t transmit the virus when treated. The risk is so low it’s non-existent, and yet, poof! Ghosted. Because once upon a time people like us were a known risk. This new infection, though, it’s an unknown. A known unknown. And people fear what they know they don’t know even more.”

“Listen to you, ‘known unknown.’” Darly waved his chopsticks in the air, but his expression softened as he brought them back to his bowl. In addition to a wealth of camp, he had a relentless wit that could tangle anyone up in their own words, and it won him a legion of loyal followers on for-pay social media platforms he used to drum up extra spending money. But when he made his voice level and firm, as he did now, the tone pricked Lloyd like hypodermic. “I’m not going to apologize for where I stand. Like you, HIV fucked with my life and my mind in a lot of ways. So, hear me when I say, I survived that and I plan to survive this, too.”

“I hear you. It’s just,” Lloyd had trouble admitting that an epidemic had ripped his sexuality from him in his younger years, and he was afraid to let another one wipe out his final ones. “I need to feel some kind of agency here.”

“I know, dear. I’m just not convinced it’s connection that you’re looking for.”

“Okay, Mr. Solo Sex. What is it I’m looking for?”

“You tell me.” Darly shrugged away what momentarily appeared to be embarrassment about his online life spilling into his real life. “Casual sex has always been about convenience over connection.”

“Oh yes.” Lloyd twirled more noodles. A part of him, buried deep, suspected that Darly had never forgiven him for contracting the virus, too. “I forgot how convenient it was to be tear-gassed by police in a public toilet.”

Darly laughed suddenly. “You weren’t even there for that!” He was a classic but obnoxious style of handsome, mercurial but gentle. He had built his personal brand online as your dream daddy.

“I could have been!” Lloyd felt foolish for how defensive he got.

“We were, what, high schoolers in the mid-seventies?”

Lloyd turned up his nose. “I started cruising very young.”

“So, then you know that the restrooms at Broadway Playfield were a helluva lot more convenient than your neighbors or landlord or your parents catching you sneaking in strange men. You just come and go. Disappear into the night, no strings attached.”

“There are always strings—”

“You just don’t want someone tugging on yours.” 

“—sometimes syphilis or handcuffs. But sometimes it’s hope and satisfaction, too. You can’t get that through a screen.”

Darly regarded his friend through narrowed eyes. “Antibiotics actually did something back then, and a lot has changed since. We have to calculate the risks of the times, not weigh them against a few memories of the past, or some idealization of the future we hoped for back then.” 

Lloyd peered into his soup. “It may be casual, but it isn’t meaningless,” he said finally. “Not to me. I care about the men I fuck. Even if I never see them again, I want them to be happy and satisfied.” He paused. “And healthy.”

Darly chewed a piece of meat. “This is about that asshole from Chicago, isn’t it.”

Lloyd regretted mentioning M.’s string of texts to Darly, who took them oddly personal. The abscess had appeared after about two weeks. M. sent pictures. Gruesome, painful close-ups of a hot, angry boil. The messages woven between the photos were equally livid. It could have started with an ingrown hair, a pimple. It could start anywhere, on skin previously colonized, just waiting for an innocent cut. But the intimate location was incriminating. That Lloyd had no abscess himself proved nothing, only that bacteria hadn’t yet slipped under his vulnerable surface. Nobody knew how long colonies survived on the epidermis alone. What everyone did know was that a boil needed to be lanced within five days of appearing or affected limbs might need amputation; it wasn’t worth risking the infection entering the bloodstream. The drained abscess, then, required close care and an ordnance of antibiotics to stem further flesh decay, which meant regular outpatient visits to a wound care specialist and weeks of diarrhea. The last images Lloyd saw before M. blocked him focused on a putrid divot the width of a quarter and the depth of a thimble. A gangrenous mucous clung to one wall, and an oily black spill sluiced over top another. M.’s boil had been lanced after two days, and the prognosis suggested that recovery might take four months.

“I fully support your interest in celibacy, Lloyd, but not if you’re motivated out of some vague misplaced guilt, because you’ll just brood the whole time and I won’t put up with that. It wasn’t your fault. We both know it, and so does he. It’s bullshit of him to make you the scapegoat when he could have picked up that bug anywhere. Did he visit a bathhouse? Did he sanitize the toilet seat of his damn hotel room?”

“It was the Four Seasons, not some roadside dump.”

Darly leaned forward. “I read this article on Epsom about immigrant housekeeping staff at high-end hotels around the country, who are purposely leaving surfaces unsanitized, so that the rich clientele is more likely to become infected.”

“Now listen to you! That website is bullshit. You know that, right?”

Darly tilted his voice upward, as if offering a flower. “I thought you’d like that.”

“You’re talking about a bioterrorist conspiracy cooked up by a bunch of third-rate journalists who use leftist language to spew what is actually some pretty xenophobic nonsense. Now, drop it.” There was something urgent in his voice, as if he suddenly needed to feed the meter, despite not owning a car. “Listen to all the fear–mongering about this thing nobody understands yet, if you want. Hole up at home, put on your cam shows, but don’t come to me looking for a shoulder to cry on when I’m the only person left who’s willing to meet you in real life.”

Darly smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of crying on you.” He crunched into the jalapeño he’d saved for last. He let it burn for a moment before taking a sip of water and wiping the beaded sweat from his bald head with a napkin. “I love you too much. I want us both to be here for the cure.” As they pulled on their peacoats to leave, Darly, as he always did, gripped Lloyd’s shoulders and kissed the air three inches away from each cheek. “Maybe celibacy is the answer. Or maybe all you need is a closed circuit.” Then, recalling Lloyd’s last throuple, Darly added, “One with less drama.”

*

He’d typically appreciated Darly’s ornery analysis of Lloyd’s break up with Dan and Trent since it happened last December, even if his friend mostly just saw them as decent housing for a wild tomcat. He had needs, but where could he take them now? This new infection was cause for concern. The easy route would be to log off unceremoniously, but he couldn’t just disappear either, could he? He valued those relationships, having shared so much of themselves. A hospitality of bodies.

For the next year, then, he tried to commit himself to abstinence. He continued meeting Darly for lunch and drugs, and he’d cross town to The Fit Nest four times a week, because working out was one of the only times he felt right in his body. He performed calisthenics at home when he didn’t get to the gym, because he noticed a small dissociation fell upon him on sedentary days. He blamed osteoarthritis, cursing the glitchy delay between his brain and his body as he rubbed on another layer of ointment. Soon he thought it might be his mind freezing up, mimicking the grinding of his joints. A few dozen push-ups and sit-ups later, endorphins smoothed things out a little. He masturbated, too, but what began as a daily habit slacked off to weekly, then monthly. He lost interest in what the Internet could show him. It all looked the same, sounded the same; his hands always felt the same. 

He logged hours for corporate from home, video chatted with family and a few friends, and altogether settled into a sexless routine. He watched television less and read more, accumulating five or ten books at a time from the library, classics he had never read but thought he should, by E.M. Forster, Sarah Waters, Virginia Woolf, Glenway Wescott. 

When he first received the symphony’s summer promotional mailing, offering four performances for one hundred dollars, he nearly recycled it, as he usually did with glossy flyers addressed to Current Resident. He was no cultural devotee. But something about its quiet desperation, a full seventy-five percent off the ticket price if bought in a bundle, made him stop. By then it had been weeks since he’d been downtown. Darly had canceled a coffee date on account of how busy he’d become with design clients. Lloyd remembered his comment about being the only person to return his friend’s texts. He could afford two bundles, but buying them would admit that he needed Darly more than Darly needed him. True as it may be, he wasn’t ready to use a promotional mailing to say so. He selected several performances by composers he knew and one he’d never heard of, to remind himself he could still be spontaneous.

The symphony actually felt decadent after so much solitude. The first event, a sweet night in August when the sun was still smoldering on the horizon outside the magnificent windows of Benaroya Hall’s crowded lobby, was Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F. Familiar though Lloyd was with the music, the crispness of its jazz movements and its aching crescendos when performed by a live orchestra lured him someplace new. It made him imagine a romantic life as a post-Prohibition barkeeper at Second Avenue and Washington, running a tavern for the rowdy denizens below the Deadline, staving off police raids by plying one strong-jawed vice detective with back-alley trysts or blowjobs in the sex arcades up on First. Threads of a story he’d overheard from an old queen the first night he snuck into Shelly’s Leg as a teen, woven into a life Sarah Waters might have given him, if he were a lesbian, and if she wrote about Seattle, decadent days transpiring between dusk and dawn on the old mudflats. The music moved him, and Lloyd would not have noticed brushing his arm against his neighbor’s, except for the short hiss the other man inhaled. 

It must have been a reflex, because he gave Lloyd an apologetic look after remembering the shirtsleeves protecting the skin of their arms. Cute in the eyes but rugged everywhere else, the man wore paisley and had a gray horseshoe mustache. He also appeared to be attending alone. Lloyd hoped they’d have a chance for small talk during intermission, but the man slipped out during the applause and didn’t return for the second performance. It didn’t matter, because as the conductor returned to the stage, Lloyd noticed his ex-boyfriend Dan sitting in the section across the aisle, with Trent and another man. The horseshoe mustache slipped from his mind. Dan’s head turned slightly in his direction but looked right through him. In the weeks to come, Lloyd would pull up Gershwin as background music while he worked, and try to reenter the fantasy it first conjured, but his lustful vice detective in paisley would invariably transform into an expressionless Dan, then a disapproving Darly.

He hoped he would see the man again in September, for Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Subscribers tend to stick to the same seats. But that early autumn night, sun setting at intermission this time, Lloyd sat next to a ginger-bearded man accompanied by a bespectacled boyfriend. They hardly replied to his hello as he settled in, consumed with their own conversation about their latest friends who’d decided to get married, the announcement glowing on their phones. “So regressive,” one called it, while the other argued, “It’s sweet.” They were young and probably didn’t think much yet about getting older, getting lonely, losing people to death and progress. He wouldn’t interject his perspective that they should be lucky to have each other as company late into life, when others might drift away, because he knew that kind of bond didn’t require marriage. And because he knew an overly familiar rejoinder like that would read as eavesdropping, at best, and a come-on at worst. He was not interested in these boys, just hungry for light conversation in the warm acoustics of this massive concert hall, where he was surrounded by people and yet still alone. He had a triad once, and they had dispatched him. He now wanted to cultivate a rich interior life; some people vowed silence to achieve it. They were called monks and were, like him, celibate, he reminded himself.

The conductor emerged to applause and, after bowing, indicated a male soloist about Lloyd’s age who held a microphone, unusual for an orchestral piece. A bassist thrummed a line, and the soloist spoke softly, If while reading the menu, you have the feeling that you’ve read it before, the best thing to do is not to order anything. His warm cadence eased into the bassline like a sigh into a sofa. Several phrases in, violinists began to pluck along with his more staccato syllables. Even as the spoken observations remained mundane, the music rose around the voice to induce a potency that resonated against Lloyd’s diaphragm. He quietly leafed through the Encore program he was handed at the door. This performance was uncommon, even by the standards set by introductory pieces at the symphony, which were often premieres of less familiar and sometimes experimental composers. The piece was called “An Open Cage,” composed by Florent Ghys using the text of John Cage’s diary, one the iconic composer kept for years and years, and eventually published as How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). The title was a sentiment that made Lloyd sigh with recognition before a familiar purr fluttered suddenly inside his ribs. He read on to learn that Cage met the dancer Merce Cunningham, who would become his longtime partner and muse, here at the Cornish College of the Arts in the ‘30s, when the composer was still married to a woman. 

Soon the orchestra swelled into a crashing wave of music that overpowered the single voice, then receded to reveal a chorus of others chanting along with the final lines: As a New York senior citizen, I get public transportation half-price, except during rush hours…. If I take the subway, I must buy two trips at once in opposite directions, round-trip. With the bus, I am free to go wherever I wish. When Lloyd looked up, a blur of blue light caught his eye. The young couple beside him still poked at their phones. He gave a standing ovation and didn’t glance their way again once the horns section heralded the beginning of “Promenade I.”

*

“A closed circuit” is what Trent and Dan had called it, what they wanted. He met them at a sex and spirituality retreat, during a session on intimacy, nearly a year before the bacterial outbreak changed everything and made all-nude events untenable. Participants led one another through a series of exercises, alternating which one of them was blindfolded. The room was bright and spacious, with tall windows, hardwood floors and exposed brick walls, making their quiet instructions to one another echo. While the meditation guide swirled a Tibetan singing bowl, blindfolded lovers had to listen carefully to hear their partners amid the swirl of voices. The couple’s warm welcome to work together evolved into a substantial bond for the rest of the weekend, then shifted into a more serious entanglement. The promise of sensuous touch and erotic enlightenment had brought Lloyd there to reconnect with the body he felt increasingly at odds with; nobody had planned this. There was no prior interest in polyamory for any of them, yet they clicked into sync. 

And with little warning, they clicked right back out. “The worrisome thing—” Trent explained after ten months of a passionate but lopsided arrangement, as the final argument slouched toward denouement. “And I mean this about any relationship—is that you become so comfortable around someone else that you treat them as thoughtlessly as you treat yourself.” Dan had a penile discharge, and they were still waiting for test results, but it magnified a distrust already fraying the group. The couple assumed Lloyd was a promiscuousness pore in the barrier method of their sex life. To Lloyd, they would always be two against one. That the tests came back as non-gonococcal urethritis was beside the point. There could be no path forward if Lloyd turned scapegoat every time Dan neglected to piss after topping. 

The next week Lloyd had his quarterly check-up—bloodwork, throat and rectal swabs, urine sample—to which his doctor added a cursory swab of both arms, the tender undersides most likely to contact other skin in an embrace. “We’re starting to test for bacterial colonies present on the skin,” Dr. Cassara explained, sealing this third swab in a designated plastic tube. “The skin is our bodies’ largest organ, and we hope to develop a more thorough testing strategy in time, without being overbearing about it. But for now, it’s at least something. Easy as that.” A month later, Lloyd met a married man from Chicago.

Trent had a point, though. Love brought another person deep into your personal gravity, to the point that he’d become collateral in your good and bad habits alike. Lloyd was never comfortable with that level of intimacy, where someone he cared about bore the immediate consequences of his actions. It was why he only barebacked when he was single. He fucked boyfriends—back when he took boyfriends—with a condom. When they begged him not to, he could rarely stay hard enough, in spite of his cock ring.

Darly made an issue out of how Trent and Dan ended things. “You weren’t the promiscuity problem in that mix, if you ask me. I’ve seen how he gloms onto twinks at Pony.” It was an uncharitable thing for him to say, having practiced a similarly stringent barrier method of sexual health since 1995—and because it wasn’t exactly true in the way he meant it. Dan maintained friendships with a lot of the young drag performers and gogo boys on Capitol Hill, but in Lloyd’s estimation, Dan acted more like their mother than their Daddy.

Still, he felt a twist of bitterness after the final ovation for Pictures at an Exhibition, as he watched Dan usher his two partners through the crowded foyer. His fluttery sense of vague self-confidence, which had returned so briefly during the concert, faltered. Dan’s glasses, a striking pair of white athletic frames that wrapped around his stylish gray buzzcut, looked ridiculous outside a squash court. But his sturdy hips and broad shoulders from years of weightlifting had never moved more fluidly than they did in his provocative black mesh shirt and rayon skirt with a slit up the left side, showing off his bulky high-heel boots and chiseled calf muscle. When Dan stopped to let an elderly straight couple proceed out of the building before them, Trent, in a smart brown corduroy suit, held the door, and a young queer in a trim blue sport coat and white heels—whom Lloyd almost didn’t recognize as Lavender Scare out of drag—wrapped her arm through Dan’s. Her white-blonde hair tufted in front, a downy cloud on which Dan rested his scruffy cheek lovingly before they proceeded out to Third Avenue.

Lloyd left them nine months ago, and they already had a boy.

*

“I know it makes me sound like a prick,” Darly said, “but work’s been an onslaught lately and the cam shows—well I’ve been on a hot streak.” Lloyd only saw Darly at the drugstore that winter. It was rare he had time for lunch beforehand. This time he was running late to his next appointment.

“Or maybe it’s the weather,” Lloyd said, aiming for shade but shooting in the dark. A howling wet January was rolling over Seattle and it seemed like years since the sun had broken through his dull gray mood. The weather and fear of colonization made limited social contact de rigueur, so why wouldn’t everyone stay home and masturbate? “No,” he corrected himself, determined to shake off the torpor. “You’re good at what you do.”

Darly looked surprised. “You’ve watched?”

“I was curious.” Lloyd lowered his voice. The line at the pharmacy counter wound through toothpastes, where they stood, all the way back to laxatives. Most people wore gloves. Several wore surgical masks. He could tell Darly was trying to figure out his screen name.

“Did you tip?”

“What I thought was fair.”

They stepped forward.

Lloyd resisted telling Darly that the last four times he’d come were while watching Darly’s show. Not because he was embarrassed, but because he would feel obligated to explain that he wasn’t looking for more from their friendship. He told himself he was just curious. They’d been naked together at beaches, but until several weeks ago, Lloyd had never seen Darly act particularly sexual. He was charismatic and outgoing, but in a measured way, compared to Lloyd, who understood himself best through the lens of sexual habits. Sure, Darly made occasional allusions to hookups before the outbreak, but he rarely elaborated and always seemed above the animal nature of it. That he regularly performed solo sex acts for tips online seemed wildly out of character, and Lloyd told himself that his voyeuristic curiosity to see that side of Darly was the only thing he found erotic about the shows. To witness how someone he knew so well otherwise did something he’d recently lost touch with himself.

Maybe he was just worried. He remembered the days when anyone you knew might disappear. “Moved back home,” someone might say if they were tired of words like dead. But the words never really mattered because their face always said it first. It was worse still to watch someone wither away before your eyes. So, when Lloyd felt lonely, at home, and even several sets of push-ups and body squats couldn’t snap him back into place; when skin felt like fire but he couldn’t find the center; when he’d gone days with messages to Darly on read, he logged on and watched. He tipped a substantial amount every time.

At the counter, they received refills for their HIV treatments. Lloyd bought capsaicin and collagen, and Darly bought his allotted two bottles of chlorhexidine. He stuffed one in Lloyd’s bag.

The topical antiseptic was a runny gel that wouldn’t lather. It was the only way known thus far to limit the spread of the superbug. After parting ways with Darly on the sidewalk, Lloyd transferred the smuggled bottle into his gym bag to use after his workout, although it hardly made him feel clean, more like sterile. Skin dry, smelling astringent. It was difficult to know how much to use, how fast acting its chemicals were, where to concentrate application, when to rinse. The public health advisory suggested washing with it daily, but there weren’t enough rations to go around if that was the case. So, Lloyd kept it to the shower caddy in his gym bag, next to the aerosol disinfectant intended for the stall itself, and used it four times a week, when he believed he was most likely to be exposed.

He kept thinking about Darly offline compared to Darly online during his workout, a full body circuit of controlled movements mindful of today’s moderate pain. There were other men in the weight room, but nobody looked to find anymore, just to avoid. Lloyd was so lost in thought he nearly missed the lingering gaze of a young, fit South Asian man below the pull-up bar. He hesitated for a second and a split-second after that: direct eye contact that means you’ve seen and been seen in a way certain men have recognized for decades.

Twenty-five minutes later, that humid empty locker room grew fidgety under a stream of clean water after Lloyd and his nameless companion moved like muscle memory to the last shower stall. Lloyd hardly had time to sanitize it before the other turned on the nozzle. From their first touch, he had no difficulty achieving or maintaining his erection. When had he last felt this aggressive warmth, this tender hunger? The man’s dark skin pressed against Lloyd’s pale flesh, a danger to one another that went ignored for the several minutes it took to entwine their tongues and grip each other’s cocks, rubbing with the furtive madness of men as eager to indulge as they are afraid of getting caught. Bacteria were a merciless informant, and shower curtains, a known breeding ground, had been removed long ago. But there they were, renegades of their day.

The residue semen leaves after contact with hot water can be difficult to remove. In Lloyd’s opinion, it’s better to let it dry and brush it away with a towel. But he rarely minded when it glued his body hair into knots, pinching and pulling as a reminder of pleasure, transgression, connection, release. It was proof of life. So when they came, they pressed their bodies together as if to trap the endorphins radiating between them, squeezing their shared cum into intimate crevices and thatches of leg and pubic hair. Out of breath, the other man patted Lloyd’s ass and without a word slipped into another stall. Lloyd soaped up, but failed to undo one tangle of semen near his hip. He knew what Darly would say if the tight smudge on his hip turned iridescent and putrid next week. 

As they dressed afterward, the man looked smaller somehow. He was sinewy but narrow as he pulled on scrubby clothes. His black hair and brown skin were impeccably kept, fingernails filed, thick eyebrows groomed, face closely shaved. Yet, acid–washed jeans swallowed his firm round ass and clung to his waist with scrunchy elastic. Not a modern throwback but a holdover from an outdated wardrobe. Perhaps this man didn’t live much of his life in street clothes, a businessman or medical professional on an off-day. And maybe with his smooth dark complexion he wasn’t as young as Lloyd first thought. The dissonance between finely tuned figure and ill-fitted clothing made him smile with sadness. When else could he appreciate a beautiful body firsthand? 

Darly, like most realists, would consider them reckless. Now was not the time for rash behavior. Lloyd wouldn’t deny that. He knew himself, better now after much solitude, better at hearing the harmonies sung by risk and security, pain and paradise. When he left, the man held Lloyd’s gaze as he had in the weight room. What they shared might never be more than a quickie in a dank shower stall. Any more and they would be obliged to one another: names, numbers, talk of any kind meant a follow-up if bad news surfaced. Bad news Lloyd would keep from Darly, until it became impossible to hide, because he loved him.

Dave Wheeler is an associate editor for the book industry news source Shelf Awareness, and he is the author of Contingency Plans: Poems. He has written for Fatal Flaw, The Seattle Times, Catapult, The Stranger, and INTO. Find more of his work at www.daviewheeler.com

Julie Nelson

Story & Clark

Brock is busy dying, but I am thinking of Reggie this morning and the way he played piano.

He played and played all winter. First, scales. Hours on end. Taught himself, tentative at first. He played with an index finger, long and slender, reaching down and pressing with a light and hesitant touch. Tender, like. Soft, as is his nature. He rested his whole hand on the ivory, measured the length of his fingers by the black keys. Learned the sound of the notes. Natural, like that, he was—feeling the basic sounds as if in his bones, trying out different rhythms and octaves. Relating to sound. As if sound was a person.

I said, used to be a stack of sheet music around here. Reggie went looking. Found some in the shed, boxed up long ago by Aunt Lilian whose piano it was Reggie now was playing. Story & Clark. Upright and stiff-backed like Lilian, that piano. Been here for generations, but Lilian was the only one could play. After she died of cancer, silence. The piano sat in the front room by the window. Dust felting the keys. Until my boy Reggie picked up where Lilian left off.

Reggie is like Lilian. Music hums in his bones. Never expected him to learn how to play much less read sheet music, but he did. He has troubles reading schoolbooks. But music, now. That’s something else.

“Play some,” Brock said on a day he was feeling better.

“Don’t know anything,” Reggie said.

“Naw, you’re fine,” Brock said. “Won’t matter if you play with one finger.”

I thought, or play out of tune. Needed tuning.

Reggie nodded. His eight-year-old legs hardly brushed the pedals, but he knew just how to enrich the sound with his feet, expand his range beyond the keyboard, create a bold tone. He turned to a hymn, vintage Lilian. Tapped out “Nearer My God to Thee” with his index fingers up top, his feet on the pedals below. Played without hitches.

“That’s right,” Brock said, dozing off.

Brock is no more religious than I am. But listening to Reggie, Brock thought of Lilian. Ten years older than Brock. Her face was like a lake with a storm sweeping in, churning and changeable, moods brewing on her furrowed brow. Never could tell how deep her waters ran. Reggie’s like that but without the tempest.

*

By July Brock had a major downturn. 

Cancer. Chemo, not working. Vomiting. Sat by the open window. Found comfort in fresh air, so we killed the A/C and sweltered. Let him drift away in his La-Z-Boy, the curtain fluttering atop his bald head. Ninety-nine in the shade, but Brock was freezing with the chemo flowing through his veins like an icy cold river, him sat there with fuzzy socks and a sweater, shivering. Chemo. Blood infusions. Caught the MRSA super bug for his troubles. Everything got worse.

Reggie sat by him. Swung his legs under the folding chair, looking down at his hands. My boy is quiet. Not like me, not talky. Gentle. Calm. Thoughtful.

“Reggie, play,” Brock’d say.

Reggie played and played. Lullabies. “Turkey in the Straw.” “Greensleeves.” He stopped when he got to the Mozart concertos, all those black notes crammed up, tangled together. Not able to, and me not able to afford lessons. Not able to find a job. 

Reggie sat there on the round, swirling piano stool, varnishing the Story & Clark with his shirtsleeves until it gleamed. Until he could see his reflection in the warm, brown wood.

*

Summer went by. 

With September, a choice: go to hospice or have hospice come to him. He wanted to be home. 

Reggie dragged a hospital bed into the front room. Cut flowers from the garden. Set them on top the piano. Found a cot to sleep in the hallway, near Brock. Planned on giving round-the-clock care. 

I knew better. I remembered Lilian. Blood came out of her ears and nose. She lost consciousness. I saw the strain on Brock when he tried doing home care. Meals. Linens.

One day I collapsed.

“I need help,” I said. “Cannot go on like this.”

Thought Brock didn’t hear me. 

Reggie said, “I’ll do the sheets, mom.”

“We need hospice, now, honey,” I said. “Nursing care.”

But everything costs money. Said so aloud.

Brock said, from his day bed, “We don’t have it.” Money. No insurance, no work.

“Home Hospice has a sliding scale,” I said.

Even though we all knew we were at this point, saying hospice out loud made everyone quiet.

“How much?” Brock said.

“Like $150 per day,” I said.

“Maya, where you getting that from?” Brock said.

Hurt my heart to hear him talk of money in that state. Wit’s end, I was.

“We could sell the piano,” Reggie said. 

All along he was just sitting there, listening. Sat there, hanging his head. So tranquil I forgot he was in the room.

Brock moaned. “Anything but that.” He begged us not to.

*

Reggie and me, we knew we had to. Sell the piano. Cash money to live on. Hospice, yes; also, food. Money for bills. Something to live on until I found work.

Rudy’s Piano Haul Away came. Set a ramp on the porch. Reggie left while they covered the piano in tarp and glided it down the ramp on rolling casters. Workers secured it with ropes before clicking the metal sliding door in place.

Got $15,000. Lilian’s restoration had increased the value, we found out. Mint condition, Rudy’s agent told us. No Steinway, the man said. But, worth something these days.

Still.

Silence took over the house. I let Reggie be. Brock turned away. Faced the wall.

Died three months later. 

At the wake, Reggie’s cousin Charlotte asked, what happened to the piano?

Reggie shook his head. “Sold it.”

“How much?” Charlotte said. Hardheaded to the core.

“Enough,” Reggie said, tapping his fingers on the table, his feet on the ground. All that music inside him.

Julie Nelson has been a freelance writer, academic advisor, teacher, and published author. She has hiked in the Green Mountains of Vermont, swam in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, lived in five states, and trained as a counselor. She and her partner live in southeastern Michigan with their two dogs.

HW Walker

Uptown Necromancer

 He was at a Big Book study three blocks from the hospital. Another one of those unchanging and omni-present church basements. He was sitting in the corner, hoping to go unnoticed, when a skinny kid with parlor-green sunglasses and a gold tooth sat next to him and started talking about time travel.

“First thing you do,” this kid said, “is buy a plane ticket to Japan.”

The rest of the group was still milling about the coffee pots and boxes of stale donuts. They looked ghoulish, thin and droopy and jaundiced, like facsimiles of humans, approximates of what they had been sometime before. Burton wished for a fire or a bomb threat. He couldn’t take the shame of leaving by his own volition. Knowing how they would talk.

“Once you get there,” the kid with the gold tooth and the parlor-green glasses said, “you gotta get on a boat and haul ass out to a place called Kiribati. This is the first place in the world to see a new day. You get it. This is the place where time starts.”

Burton was formulating his own recipe for time travel:

            1.     One (1) quart of Evan Williams.
            2.     Three milligrams (3mg) Xanax, or equivalent.
            3.     Some good tunes. Maybe Third Eye Blind.

Mix and consume. Re-apply as needed. Wake up in your late-twenties, married to a stranger almost spectral in her detachment, and a dying toddler laid up in a hospital bed not half a mile from here.

“You go to Kiribati,” the kid with the glasses and the tooth said, “and you watch the sunrise. Then you get back in your boat and you haul ass again, this time back to Japan, away from the sun. You get it. You gotta see if you can outrun the sunrise, to see if yesterday is still there.”

The kid was talking about ticket prices and optimal weather patterns when Burton’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at the kid evenly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He stood and walked for the exit. He took his phone out and looked at it. An unsaved number. He answered, put on his best impression of a level voice.

“Hello.”

There was a pause. Then, “Burt?”

Burton stepped out into a late fall night touched with the rumor of a coming winter. He felt goosebumps break out on his arms. “Graham,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you deleted my number again.”

“Of course not,” Burton said. He had. It was part of his amends. His sponsor had demanded it. All the people from his former life. But he hadn’t blocked the number, and he wasn’t sure what to make of that. He climbed the metal stairs that brought him back to street level. He was enveloped by city sounds and smells as if he had been dumped in a pool of them. “It’s just been a while,” he said.

“Yes it has, buddy. Too long in fact. Ed and I were just talking about it the other night. What are you doing?”

“I’m walking.”

“I meant what are you doing tonight.”

Burton stopped at a crosswalk. He could see the slick glass windows of the hospital looming over the darkened city like a beacon, calling men just like him or maybe just him alone. “Not much,” he said. “Hanging out with my son.”

“We should get together, man. Hit the town a little bit. Catch a buzz.”

“I don’t drink anymore,” Burton said. “Right now.” He reached for a cigarette but the pack was not in his pocket. He hoped he had not left it back there with the kid. He would not escape twice.

“Is that right,” Graham said. “You sound bitter about it.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Burton crossed the street, head bent. JA cab swerved around him lazily without honking. He was bitter. But he would feel better tomorrow.

“Well,” Graham said. “We don’t have to drink. We probably shouldn’t. We can just hang out. It’s been too long.”

Burton rounded onto College Ave. and cut through the parking lot to the hospital. “Yeah,” he said absently. “We should. Soon.”

“Alright,” Graham said. “Call me, man.” There was a pause as if they were each waiting for the other to speak but no one did. Burton hung up the phone as he stepped into the hospital. There was a small crowd in the ER waiting room. A crying mother with a family huddled around her in support. Something had happened. She was wailing.

He watched them as he waited for the elevator. When the doors opened, he got on and pushed the button for the eleventh floor and when it stopped he made his way through the network of quiet hallways to his son’s room.

She was inside, absently flicking at her phone. The boy was asleep in bed. When he came in she looked at him surprisedly and then stood and started grabbing her things and piling them over a bent arm. 

“You’re here early,” she said.

“Yeah. Meeting got canceled.”

She eyed him suspiciously but then looked away without speaking. “I’ll be back after my shift.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Then she was gone and he was left standing alone in grim silence. The room seemed false in some strange way, arranged, like a stage set or an exhibit in a museum. There was something representative there, the room configured in such a way as to expose him to something. This is what slow grief looks like. His coffee cup was still on the table by Jack’s bed. Crumpled blanket on the floor by the cheap recliner the nurse had brought in for him. His makeshift bed. He’d slowly started living here, his wife coming to visit in the daytime while Burton was gone. They had not spoken of it, but he and Kate had seemingly both landed on the same idea at the same time: this was a kind of perverse opportunity to separate without having to spend money on a hotel or a new apartment. His cigarettes were in the seat of the recliner. Burton went over and pocketed them.

He stood over his sleeping son’s bed, looking at him. Eggshell skin, baby blond hair. The boy sucked absently at a thumb. He’d never outgrow it. Burton wasn’t sure how, but he knew. The doctors had told them there could still be a miracle, it was not likely but it could happen, and Kate still held onto that, but Burton felt that without an abundance of horror there could be no miracles. His son would not leave this hospital. He saw this room as a kind of outpost at the edge of life, a staging area for the soon-to-be-dead. And then what? Without Jack, he and Kate were strangers, no longer moored to each other by responsibility and resentment. And without Kate, the carefully laid tracks that led his life over the horizon had suddenly collapsed before him. He could do anything. It was frightening, he supposed, but the fear was thin, disguising a dread longing, that impetus toward death that afflicted all addicts or maybe just him.

But he was not being honest with himself, and he knew it. There could be a miracle. The boy could be spared. The track rebuilt. Life restored. And to him that was more frightening than anything else. A known end. A long march over a tall cliff. That was the truth. In that innermost place of blinding-white shame he had to admit: he hoped for a different miracle, a different horror. He hated himself for it, but he had fantasized of his son’s death since the diagnosis. All his talk of mercy and grace had been what his sponsor had called bullshit.

Burton turned away from his son, took the coffee cup and drank the dregs without waiting for the taste. That’s enough of that for one day. He picked up the blanket from the floor, sat in the recliner, covered himself. He leaned his head against the chair and closed his eyes. His son had blue eyes, like his. He tried not to think about it. But he did. He sat up.

He took out his phone and dialed Graham. It rang twice.

“What’s up? Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

“Yeah,” Burton said. “Well. About that drink.”

*

They met at the Rabbit Trap. The tables looked to be in the exact arrangement they had been however many years ago, the TVs at the same volume, the same cigarette-over-piss smell. The clientele looked familiar, but the faces were older, more afraid-looking, dressed in business casual. Graham had his pink Ralph Lauren shirt cuffed at the elbows.

They found a couple of empty stools at the bar and sat. After a moment the bartender slank her way over to them like a cat.

“Whatcha having,” she said without looking at them.

“What’s on tap?” Graham said.

“We got Coors Yuengling Budweiser and Guinness,” she said.

They each ordered a Budweiser and as she left, Graham waved her down and ordered shots to go with it. The bar was crowded. She was gone for a while. Burton and Graham exchanged awkward pleasantries while they waited, like two exes passing in the street. They covered familiar ground, as if testing the other to be sure he was not an imposter. They had been buddies since the fifth grade, both were only children of single mothers and they’d lived in the same complex, them and Ed Byrd. Inseparable three. All named Edward, so they took their fathers’ names. Grown up together, gone to school together. Got high together, got laid together, almost got arrested together that one time in the tenth grade. Grown apart somehow, without fanfare, the kind of thing you don’t notice unless you look back.

The conversation started to cool. By the time the bartender came back, Graham was excited. He took two shots off the tray she was holding and threw them back one after the other. He waited for her to put his third down before he drank it.

Burton looked at the drinks all spread before him as if he still had some choice to make, then drank and breathed and squinted his eyes against the burn before he took a gulp of the beer.

“Well, how long was it?” Graham said. He pointed at the empty shot glass.

“How long was what?”

“That you were sober for this time.”

“Oh,” Burton said. He took a second shot, sipped the beer. “Almost two years.”

“Not bad.” Graham sipped his beer, looked for the bartender. “Since you had the kid?”

“No,” Burton said. He put his head in his hands. He did not want to talk about his son.

“You know I was sober for six months once,” Graham said. 

A group of men behind them shouted something at the television. Burton looked up. “Is that right,” he said.

“Yep.” Graham waved at the bartender. “I still smoked weed, though.”

He ordered another round of shots and prodded Burton to finish his.

“Was married there, too,” Graham said.

“Now you’re playing with me.”

“Nope. Married. Vegas-style. But in Atlanta. They got one of those in-and-out deals.”

“Where is she?”

“Oh,” Graham said, slightly shocked, as if he was totally unprepared to answer a question so dumb. “She’s long gone, man. She was gone in the morning.” 

“No shit.”

“None. Only reason I even know it happened was because I had the paperwork and the crappy ring they gave you in the motel room. But you can get those things annulled pretty easily nowadays. Like it never happened.”

“Like it never happened,” Burton said.          

*

Another three shots like it never happened. Between drinks, like a swimmer surfacing for air, Graham made a call and one of his friends came by and they all went to the bathroom to do key bumps in a stall. The guy was a goofy Englishman named Sebastien, and he said Burton owed him forty dollars.

“I’ll get the tab,” Graham said. Burton took out his cash.

They made trips from the bar to the bathroom and back for a couple of hours until someone leaned in and said, “Hey, if you’re gonna do drugs you gotta get the fuck out,” and they came piling out the stall like clowns and the busser escorted them through the bar into the street. They ducked around the block out of sight.

 Burton took out a cigarette and gave one to Graham and lit one himself. They stood there smoking slowly, cherries like dying stars in the dark.

“Where are you going now?” Graham said.

Burton thought of the hospital looming in the dark. “Nowhere.”

“Good.” Graham flicked his cigarette into the street. “I’m all up now.”

“Well,” Burton said. “Let’s go. I don’t want them finding us out here.”

Graham’s car was parked in a deck two blocks away. They scurried there like overgrown possums. They set about driving the city in no particular direction at all. Graham fiddled with the radio and yammered on. He’d always been a talker. He talked about sports, about cars, about his job in IT. Burton asked what exactly his job was but didn’t understand the response, so he rode quietly slumped in his seat while Graham talked, marveling at the quickly shifting galaxy of lights that rolled across the windshield, buildings in the distance keeping silent watch. He’d begun to spin when there was an explosion of red and blue light through the car, the windshield now full of color, high beams reflected in through the mirrors. Graham, fumbling at his seatbelt, said, “Shit! Oh shit!”

 The familiar chirp of a police siren and Burton knew. “What did you do?” he said.

“I didn’t do anything,” Graham said. “I was stopped at a light, man. Don’t be an asshole.”

They were somewhere on the edge of the city. They pulled into an empty surface lot. There looked to be an old grocery store but it was long abandoned. The light posts in the parking lot kept grave watch, unchanging and unaware, faithfully casting their orange glow across the splintered blacktop. Graham parked the car.

“Act sober,” Graham said. “Maybe he won’t notice.”

Burton wondered if Kate would pay his bail. If they even had the money.

A car door closed behind them. The cop’s lights were still strobing but he could see they were coming from a thin lightbar inside the cop’s windshield, and in their dim interim Burton could only make out the shape of the officer coming towards them, the white gorgon-eye of a mag light flicking this way and that.

The officer walked up to the driver’s door casually and flung it open. Burton and Graham shrank away in their seats, stunned like deer in the mag light. Burton thought he could hear the ringing tone of a flat-line.

“How you boys doing tonight?” the officer said.

Instantly Graham started kicking and thrashing at the officer. Burton was horrified, coming to the certainty that they were about to be shot when he registered them both laughing.

Burton found himself unable to sort his thoughts. He put his hands up and shouted at no one at all, “Who, who, who.”

The officer stepped back and clicked off the light. After a moment Burton’s eyes adjusted and he saw the officer standing there, a big tall bald man with a thin mustache, leaning against the open door, smiling and chewing gum.

“Who?” Burton said.

“Oh, come on,” the officer said in mock anguish. “I don’t look that different do I?” He clicked the mag light and pointed at a name tag on his breast. It said BYRD. He straightened. 

“Ed?” Burton looked around as if to verify he was still where he thought he was. 

“Graham texted while y’all were at the bar.”

“Jesus Christ, man.” He leaned back, let out his breath, and then he kicked open his door and vomited onto the pavement.

“Uh oh,” Ed said. “Man down.” He and Graham shared their laugh. 

Graham got out of the car and they hugged. Burton clawed at his breast pocket with shivering hands for a cigarette. The world looked smeared like wet paint, the sounds far away and the smell of bile crowding his nostrils. Ed came around to Burton’s side, grimacing at the spreading pool of vomit. He stuck out a hand.

“Come on,” he said. “Come give me a hug.”

Burton took his hand and Ed pulled him up and hugged him hard. The jostle made him feel like he might vomit again. His vision bobbed. Ed was making ridiculous cooing noises in his ear.

“Ok,” Burton said. “Ok. Get off me.”

Ed released him. “Jeez, what’s got you so uptight?”

“You ruined his high,” Graham said. He sat on the hood of the car and lit a cigarette of his own. He looked to be deeply pondering the state of the abandoned grocery store.

“Y'all were getting high without me?” Ed said.

Burton leaned against the car. Fanned his shirt. His pores felt to be the size of nickels and his pants were plastered to his ass. He tried breathing normally. He could see a tiny shining slice of the hospital ahead through a tangle of buildings battling for light.

“I wanna do drugs too,” Ed was complaining.

“I can call Sebastien,” Graham said.

“Hold up, hold up,” Burton said, turning. “You’re a cop?”

“Not right now I’m not,” Ed said. He already had his shirt unbuttoned and was fiddling with his belt. Burton saw that he had on sweatpants and sneakers below.

“Not a cop,” Burton said dreamily.

“Off duty, slowpoke.” He flicked Burton on the nose. He went over to his car and put the shirt and the belt into the trunk. He clipped his badge on his waistband and tucked his pistol in next to it. He came around and put a hand on Burton’s shoulder lovingly. “Listen,” he said. “I know it’s been a while, and I know you’ve had some bad experiences with cops. I remember. Seriously. I’m sorry that happened to you. But I want you to know I’m not like that. We’re not all good cops.”

This sent both Ed and Graham into another fit of laughter. “Alright,” Ed said, clapping his hands. “Let’s hit the road. Gimme the keys. Can’t let you drink and drive.”

*

They made their way back into the city, the car moving measuredly in the dark like a predator just awoken from a yearslong hibernation. They stopped on the way at a liquor store and Ed went in and came out with two half-gallon jugs of vodka. They took turns passing one around before they got back on the road.

Sebastien had a nice two-story house in an affluent neighborhood by the river. “He sells to everyone at the bank,” Graham said. “Stock traders keep him busy.” He tapped his nose. The neighborhood was dark and cloistered in ancient elm trees. The house had white siding and a modest yard and a red door. They parked and got out.

“Might want to leave the badge here,” Graham said.

“No sir,” Ed said. “Just tell the guy to be cool. Here, I’ll put it in my pocket.”

“Alright. But leave the gun.”

“No.”

Graham eyed him. “Seriously. Who are you shooting here?”

“You said the guy is French?”

“English.”

“Then I’ll be the only one carrying,” Ed said, smiling.

They marched up to the house in line like school children. There were a couple of stone statues of naked men set beside the door, thin wisps of dark moss growing in the creases of their perfect musculature. Graham pointed at them and said, “Can you arrest him for those?”

“I can arrest him for anything.”

They rang the doorbell and Sebastien answered and greeted Graham and the other two as if they were dear friends. He was wearing an absurd smoking jacket, which reminded Burton that he was English. When he spoke Burton remembered the man’s absurd accent. He led them into the house and through a hallway to a small room in the back. Wood-paneled and no windows. There was a counter with a sink that ran the length of the far wall. The sink was full of what appeared to be ancient soil and a riot of dead leaves and twigs. There was a coffee table in the center of the room with several ratty chairs set around it. Sebastien told them to take a seat.

“Where’s Trina?” Graham said.

“Oh, she’s here somewhere,” Sebastien said. He was packing a glass bowl and he lit it and passed it to Graham.

“Who’s Trina?” Burton said.

“My wife,” Sebastien said.

“She’s perfect,” Graham said, exhaling. “You should see her forge signatures. It’s like a superpower.”

Burton took the bowl from Graham and hit it. Passed it on to Ed as Sebastien removed a small cellophane bundle from a drawer in the table. He dumped the contents onto a small black plate and cut lines and passed the plate. Ed left and returned with the vodka and added that to the rotation, and Burton watched this strange procession almost clinically, his mind able to observe itself and others with the kind of self-critical clarity that seems to be borne only out of extreme drunkenness. Who knows how long this lasted. He’d forgotten how it was when they got together. How quickly things tended to escalate. He was stunned by his own actions, but he knew he should not have been. Escalation seemed to be his only constant. Everything to extremes. He couldn’t even get a couple of quick lays without knocking Kate up, and now look what’s happened. Something half himself was dying alone in a hospital room, and here he was getting high. He felt dizzy. He felt sick. He wished to be in his recliner at the hospital, listening to the grating, repetitive sounds coming from the rooms around him. But that wasn’t a choice now. His choice had already been made, and he had to ride it out.

Graham was arguing with Sebastien about the statues out front. “I’m not being prudish,” he was saying. “I just think they’re tacky.”

“And I think you’re a boor,” Sebastien said, although there was no thinking in his voice. He declared Graham’s boorishness like an aged professor declaring one of his many theses. “But I don’t go around talking about it, do I? They’re symbolic. I wouldn’t have expected you to know that.”

“Symbolic of what?” Graham said.

“It’s the statue of Asclepius, Roman god of herbs and healing plants.”

“You mean drug dealers.”

Sebastien clapped his hands. “Exactly!” he said. “There’s this story where he beats the shit out of a snake, and then this other snake comes up and puts some herbs on the dead snake’s head, and it comes back to life and they both fuck off. Then Asclepius goes and finds some of that herb, and he brings it back to the village and discovers it brings people back to life. And then Zeus or whatever makes him into a god.”

“And that fine herb he found is weed, I assume,” Graham said.

“I don’t think so. It could be. But I don’t know of any strains that bring people back to life. I don’t think it has resurrective properties. What I think is that it was a special plant. Like weed and coke and dope in one super plant.”

“I think that would be more likely to kill you than bring you back.”

Sebastien put a finger up. “You’d think. But I believe that’s the ticket to immortality right there. All of the drugs in one. I’ve been trying to cross breed marijuana with an opium poppy for a year now. I think I’m getting close.”

He pointed to the sink in the back with the dirt and crumbling leaves. They all turned and looked solemnly.

“Still working on it, though.”

Burton could see that Ed was getting antsy, growing on agitated. The muscles in his jaw were clenched and warped into small mountains. His eyes were clear but wide, and they flicked this way and that as if connected inside to some rusted clockwork. There were many ways you could compare Ed to a shark, but the most apt comparisons would be his viciousness and his inability to keep still. It was time to go.

Burton said something, he was not sure what, to interrupt Graham and Sebastien. They looked at him. “I’m out of smokes,” he said.

Ed was up instantly, his legs working like a child’s. “Me too, me too,” he said. 

Graham knew the routine. He paid Sebastien and Sebastien gave him a couple of cellophane bundles and he pocketed them. “Let me know when you get your plant going,” he said.

*

Back to the car. Ed driving, Burton in the rear. They were cruising along the river, the final demarcation between the warmth of city light and nothingness on the opposite shore. The night partially clouded and the water stark-black and uniform looking. They hadn’t discussed where exactly they were going. Burton had fallen into the old paradigm, taking his place in the back seat without question, riding Ed’s momentum wherever that went.

They passed through an old chain-link fence, the KEEP OUT sign hanging and faded beyond recognition. Burton could only read it by memory. They were headed down towards a ruin of their childhoods, the decomposing remains of an old apartment complex, built too close to the river, flooded and abandoned before completion. The builders had gone to the top of the bluff and built the complex that Burton and the others would later grow up in. The bones of this first iteration left to be forgotten like a shameful family secret. They cut back along the length of the bluff, headed down towards the river, the sides of the thin road grown high with a tangle of weeds and scrub. They seemed to be traveling through a tunnel of complete darkness, and Burton wondered if the world would be the same when they came out. 

“I can’t believe this place is still here,” Graham said.

“Oh yeah,” Ed said. “I’ve come down a couple of times and run off a bunch of hobos.”

“Why?” Burton said.

Ed looked back at him in the mirror. “What do you mean why? This is our spot. We practically grew up down here. Can’t let someone else come and take it.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?” Graham said.

Ed looked betrayed, like a Shakespearean character set upon by his friends. “I’m not being the least bit dramatic,” he said. “You might’ve forgotten what all happened here. This place is important to us.”

They came out of the scrub into a flattened clearing where the collapsed concrete remains of the old apartment’s skeleton lay askew and pathetic. Ed was listing all the cool shit that’d happened here.

“You lost your virginity here,” he said, pointing right in Graham’s face.

“Alright,” Graham said. He slapped the hand away. “You got me. When you’re right you’re right.” 

They parked at the edge of the clearing where the ground descended into darkness, looking out over the river. A barge crept by in the distance, red lights blinking in a thin fog that seemed to herald the coming morning. Graham took out one of the bundles and dumped its contents onto the center console. He took out his wallet. “License and registration,” he joked. With his license he cut the little pile into three smaller mounds. “Gentlemen,” he said.

Burton got out of the car. The other two did not protest. He walked over to the edge of the clearing, looked down. The drop was steep into darkness, and through the brush he could hear the hungry, lapping sounds of the river on the bank. He wondered how strong the current was right here.

Graham and Ed got out of the car. “Hey,” Graham said. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Burton said. He turned back to them. 

“Do you think our signatures are still in there?” Ed said, not looking at the other men.

“I don’t see why not,” Graham said. “Let’s go look.”

They walked across the clearing to the dilapidated shell of the old apartment building. The concrete slab was cracked and two of the stairwells had collapsed. The second floor had fallen through somewhere, and the whole thing was leaning dangerously. Burton figured that the clearing would eventually break away and topple unceremoniously into the river.

They stepped into the building through a doorway or a window, Burton couldn’t tell which. The exposed slab was wet and littered. There were some discarded clothes and loaded trash bags and broken bottles and a million cigarette butts. At one point Graham stepped on a condom. What had been a wide open space was now labyrinthine with crumbled bits of concrete and makeshift tarp walls. They moved carefully to the far side of the building, Ed leading, to the fallen remains of one of the exterior stairwells. Inside, under the stairs that were miraculously still intact, the found their triplet of initials scrawled in red spray paint. Ed squatted, took out his phone and shined his light on them. “Looky there,” he said.

“Hardly even faded,” Graham said. He reached out and touched them.

They clustered around the graffiti, like archaeologists of their own past. They’d only been kids when they did this. This was their hideout, the place they came because there was no other place to go. Ed had slept here for two weeks in tenth grade, nursing his wounds after his dad had stopped by to beat him and his mother. Graham had snuck to this spot to study on nights when his mother had men over, something he hid until years later. Burton thought of those boys, alive now in the writing on the wall and in the men huddled about in the dark. In those sloppy lines he could see the trajectory of his life laid bare, proof that new days don’t bring new men. He felt a sudden rushing disconnection from himself, from the continuous self that lived both in him and his name, the many selves he’d abandoned and killed. The strokes of his name written on the wall seemed to bulge and swell, a vessel for his single, crushing failure.

There was a clattering on the floor as Ed’s pistol fell from his waistband.

“Jesus Christ,” Graham shouted. His voice was explosive in the cramped stairwell. “Can you not leave that thing in the car, please? There’s no one here to shoot.”

“You never know,” Ed said. He picked the gun up and turned it over, inspecting it. The light from the phone reflected off the gun’s oiled surfaces in strange patterns.

“What caliber is it?” Burton said.

Ed looked up at him, delighted. “It’s a nine-millimeter. It’s American so you know it’s reliable.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.” Ed offered it to Burton. 

Burton took his hand away. “Is it loaded?”

“The safety is on,” Ed said and held it out again. When that answer did not seem to satisfy Burton, Ed removed the magazine. He put it in his pocket. “Better?”

Burton took the pistol carefully. He moved it this way and that, ran his thumbs over the rugged surface.

“Be careful with that thing,” Graham said.

Burton was not paying attention to him. He was trying to understand the simple power he held right then. The power to change trajectories. To keep what he had left of himself. To put his name to something other than paint on a wall. How quickly things had escalated.

When the gun went off the sound filled the air in an instant, a great popping that seemed to catch and vibrate in the foundations of their tower. A spark of angry light. The bullet hit Burton somewhere just below the right eye. His face collapsed around that point, pushing inward and inward and then spraying outward in a thin pink jet, like a stone dropped in still water. Blood fanned the wall behind him. The body rocketed to the floor as if yanked on a wire. The gun lay impotently, the slide locked back.

Graham and Ed were not sure how long they stood frozen in their poses of horror and disgust, but by the time either spoke their ears had stopped ringing and the dark stairwell was filled with sounds of their ragged breaths.

*

Someday years from now she will pick up the boy at school and he will ask her where his daddy is. He will say that Sarah Yates’ daddy writes checks, and he wants to know what his daddy does. She will tell him the truth. She does not know where his daddy is. Not exactly. And she will stop there. She will leave that little kernel of falsehood where it lay, the lie left behind when the truth is told. When the boy fantasizes that his daddy is a fireman or maybe a chicken hunter she will not speak up with what she knows, even if she is not certain: that the boy’s father is dead, somewhere, probably somewhere he would be alone. Probably did so many drugs his bones are still high. She will think he is too young for that.

She will watch this lie fester, watch the boy build his life around this little simple untruth. It’s not a lie, she will think. Not that big of one. But she will know better. When the boy comes to her, many years later, just a little drunk, talking about a gap year and a motorcycle and trip out west, she will bear the weight of her lie. She will keep it, though. She may cry at night when she is alone, but she will keep it. She will keep what she owns.

And in the swimming depths of her depressed half-sleep, she will one day come upon the conclusion that her lie, while maybe not good for the boy, had been the best thing she could have ever done for Burton. She’d granted him second life in the mind of his son, and was that not kindness enough? She will lie there in the hot dark and drift off to sleep thinking of resurrection and miracles.

HW Walker is a teacher and writer based out of Oakland, FL. His stories have been published in print and online at Flock Lit, Five:2:One, and Likely Red Press, amongst others. He is currently working toward a PhD in English at the University of Mississippi.

Allen Kesten

Curses Circle the World

Peri was the afternoon custodian at a Boston youth center going on twenty years.  There was a storage room off the afterschool program’s main space.  It contained shelves of bruised instruments and a brigade of creaky music stands leaning against each other like old soldiers.  In recent years, boys mostly played basketball in the gym, and the few girls in the program huddled around the computers searching for fashions and celebrity feuds.

On Monday, there was a pizza party at the center.  One of the boys had won a local chess championship.  The staff and all the other kids cheered and applauded for the boy.  He received their congratulations with cast down eyes, hands tugging at his oversized hoodie.  Peri took in the boy’s modesty and the singular, communal kindness of the group.  Her skin flushed, tears formed, and she escaped into the storage room.  She crouched by a shelf of violin cases and kneaded her hands.  Sometimes, her spirit was vulnerable in ways she couldn’t predict, like a compromised immune system.

A few weeks before, Peri shared a story with a jazz drummer who was visiting the program.  While he set up his kit, she told him:

I sang when I was young.  There’s an old home movie of me at five years old standing in the curve of the piano, my mother accompanying me.  Little Peri makes gestures to match the words of the song.  Elbows at her sides, palms up and open, she sings, “How I wonder what you are?”  That was me, dumbfounded by a star.  You can hear people clapping when the song ends.  And you can see moats of lunar dust in the lamplight aimed at me.

The drummer let Peri brush the snare before the kids came in for his demonstration.

*

After the pizza party, Peri carried the boxes to the dumpster, the discarded crusts rattling inside like bones in flat coffins.  

Many years ago, Peri told a therapist:  

When I was thirteen, I found a baby bird in our back yard.  It was alone and frail, but not broken.  I took it in and cared for it, ruffling its soft pinfeathers while I hummed.  The sparrow became my pet and grew strong.  She flew off into the trees around our house but returned to my shoulder or soared through the backdoor into her cage.  After flight, she chirped little songs.

I didn’t sleep well, even back then.  One night I retrieved the compass I used for geometry class from my school bag and walked into the living room.  I took the binder from the piano and set it down on the bench.  All those songs for the young soprano that my mother made me sing.  Kneeling over the opened binder, I poked a hole in the first note of “Linden Lea” and felt the resistance of the pages beneath as the point of the compass pushed into them.  I looked over at the sparrow in her cage.  She was jerking and tucking her head as if to question what she was witnessing.  I continued mutilating the music, measure after measure.

The next day, my mother called me to practice.  When she opened the binder, she cried, “What have you done?”  The sparrow flew from her cage and said, “I did it.  I pecked holes in the music.”    

My mother went into the kitchen and returned with a pair of scissors.  “That will be the last false confession you ever make,” she said to the sparrow.  She took my little bird in hand and cut her tongue out.  Then the sparrow flew at the window and died on the floor.  

*

On Tuesday morning, Peri went out to breakfast and portents were revealed to her.  They made her think her life might change in ways she couldn’t foresee.  

First, the man who asked for spare change in front of the convenience store on the corner wasn’t there.  For months, she’d watched his hair and beard grow as hard as a helmet with dirt and debris.  To be consigned to the streets, she thought, was a terrible way to live.  Sometimes, seeing him made her want to return to her small apartment, to be reassured it was still hers, that the keys still worked.  Peri was crocheting an afghan to keep the man warm now that the weather had turned cold.  The afghan was folded in a basket by her chair, almost done, a ball of ombre yarn in twilight colors on top.  And now the man was gone.  

Some years ago, during a sleepless night, Peri told a hotline worker: 

My parents sent my brother away to be cured or punished or some combination of the two.  He was eighteen and I was ten.

Joel returned seemingly under a curse, thin and shivering.  I knitted him a sweater; my small hands holding the needles so tightly that it was days before my fingers straightened back out.  Such had been my determination and haste to finish the sweater.  When it was done, Joel pulled the sweater over his head and stopped shaking.  But soon he was plucking at a loose stitch, and by the next day, the left sleeve had unraveled.  His exposed arm was white and glowing, like a fluorescent tube hanging from the socket. 

Joel’s memory was very poor for months after he returned.  Often, he whispered to me the same story of the first time he kissed a boy, as if I hadn’t heard it before.  “We held the kiss, and I was out of the world, only existing in the exchange of breath.”  Each time, I nodded my head and tried to smile.  Then his cracked fingertips edged up the sweater from his lap towards his heart, like baby turtles tracking towards the sea.  

 *

The second sign came as Peri walked through a small park.  A crow landed in front of her and blocked her way.  The bird stared at her as it folded in its sharp-feathered wings.  A pink ribbon hung from its beak.  Then the crow left the path and marched through patches of snow toward a bench.  More crows mobbed in the gray trees.  Beside the bench lay a dead bird, small and speckled.  The crow laid the ribbon on the dead bird.  

The third and fourth portents revealed themselves at breakfast.  The cook who stood watching over the grill turned around as if he knew Peri was staring from her seat at the counter.  There was a sleeve of tattoos on his arm: a phoenix, griffins, and other winged beasts.  One of the tattoos must have been fresh, for his forearm was wrapped in clear plastic.  Peri wandered if the wrap was flammable. 

 She ate her eggs and toast, looking up at the door the few times it opened as if expecting someone she knew or might want to know.  When she lifted her water glass from the astrological placement, stars around the border, she found her zodiac sign had been cut out by a ring of condensation.  It stuck to the bottom of the glass, a crab with claws that didn’t let go.

What she’d learned about exploding stars in high school came back to Peri as she paid the check.  A white-dwarf star may end its life as a supernova if it has a close companion star.  The star takes on gas from the companion's surface.  When the gas piles up on the white dwarf, its mass is compressed to the limit and the star explodes, vanishing from the galaxy. 

Last week, Peri told the HVAC technician who came to fix the heat at the youth center:  

When I was sixteen, every night before bed, I went down into the basement.  My brother was living there instead of in his room.  Joel spent most of his time sleeping, his bed close by the furnace.  When I visited, he’d sit up and let me hug him.  I told him about all the kisses I collected in parks and at the mall when I was supposed to be at music lessons.  My mother insisted that playing an instrument as well as studying voice would improve my college prospects, the fine conservatory she dreamed of.  I carried my violin case to all my rendezvous, like a gangster shaking down boys for kisses with a Tommy gun. 

I swore my brother to secrecy although he was mostly mute by then, the sweaters I knit for him, which never seemed warm enough, pulled up over his mouth whenever my mother‘s footsteps were heard overhead.  Sometimes, frosty crystals appeared as he breathed through the yarn.  And like coal into a stove, I shoveled my complaints about our mother, hoping they would stoke Joel’s fury and rouse him from his bed.  

Joel vanished one night and never returned.  For days after, Peri sat on her bed afterschool and hugged her pillow, the way she’d seen lovelorn girls do in movies.  Although she thought she’d suffered a loss more profound, she didn’t know how else to grieve.  Her parents were no help.  Engaged in some private battle, they were as pressurized and abrasive as pumice when together, two volcanic rocks wearing each other down.  During this time, Peri’s father abruptly sold the piano out from under his wife.  He patted Peri on the head when the men came to take it away and asked if she felt better now.  Talk of applying to music conservatories quieted, and Peri was left to make her own decisions or none at all.  

A year later, Peri’s mother started a home childcare business to keep herself occupied: tiny tables and chairs around an alphabet rug in Joel’s old room, toddlers trying with clumsy hands to fit wooden pieces into farm and zoo puzzles while Peri’s mother towered above them.

Curses circle the world waiting for chances to inflict new harm, thought Peri as she left for the mall one day, the sound of children crying behind her. 

*

After breakfast, Peri walked back through the park.  The dead bird was covered by a mound of colorful debris.  

Peri waited for the light to cross the street.  She wondered if more signs would reveal themselves even though she hadn’t made sense of the ones so far.  

An old woman carrying two shopping bags and talking to herself came toward the corner.  As she teetered closer, Peri thought that the woman’s dark brown face looked like a quilt, wrinkles like crisscrossed stitching, wiry white hairs resembling loose threads.  Seemingly from out of nowhere, a football struck the woman and she fell forward onto the sidewalk.  There was a roar of laughter from a half a block down, and Peri saw three white teenage boys pointing before running away.  

A young woman in a puffy jacket called in the emergency on her phone.  People gathered around the old woman and asked her if she was all right.  “Tolerantly well,” she replied.  No one picked up the cans and bottles that had rolled out of one of her fallen shopping bags, so Peri did.  “Have a blessed day,” the woman said as Peri placed the bag beside her.  More people gathered.  They tried to decide if they should lift the woman or let her be.  Peri excused herself and started across the street.  The football was still rocking in the gutter where it had landed.  

Peri had seen reports on television about the brain damage caused by football.  One player even killed someone and then himself.  They carved up the player’s brain and saw the pathology.  Boston must have a great many damaged boys and men, Peri thought.  Its team was always playing, always winning, thousands of susceptible males watching.  

Peri stepped in a slushy puddle before gaining the sidewalk on the other side.  Cold water seeped into her shoe.  I want to be home, right now, she thought.  But her apartment was still three blocks away.  And in realizing that it was impossible to be immediately where she wanted to be, she understood that time and space are the dual masters of everyone.

She looked for the man in front of the store as she rushed past and wondered what she’d do with the afghan if he never returned.

She hurried up the staircase to her single room.  Once inside, she was blasted by heat, the uncontrollable radiator clanking.  As she changed her socks, sweat gathered around her hairline.  She waited until the chill was gone from her feet before she opened the window.  A pigeon feather came in on the wind and scuttled across her floor.  Peri couldn’t be bothered with another possible sign, be it about the past or the future.

Because she’d be at work at sundown, Peri lighted the yahrtzeit candle for her grandmother early.  Seven years tomorrow since she’d died.  There was a blue Star of David on the glass that contained the candle.  Peri placed a saucer under the glass in case it cracked from the heat as the candle burned down, something she’d learned to do from her grandmother.   

Last winter, Peri told a stranger on a city bus:  

When I was five or six, our family went to Miami to visit my father’s mother.  On the plane, my mother called my grandmother a “snowbird.”  She met us at the airport, but to my consternation, she was featherless, shiny and smelled of citrus.  Our first morning on the beach, Joel wore a big T-shirt that covered him up.  I scooped sand into a pail, disappointed at the lack of shells.  From his towel next to me, Joel watched a group of tan young men in small bathing suits go in and out of the water.  While the grownups talked to each other, Joel said to me “I’ll never be that beautiful,” and pulled his shirt over his knees.  When my mother noticed him looking at the young men, she scolded, “Don’t stare.  It’s embarrassing.”  Joel flinched.  Then I turned away; I couldn’t bear the sight of his bowed head.

An octopus came out of the ocean and attached its arms to me.  Like a hot air balloon, the octopus rose into the air with me hanging from the cables of its arms.  My brother’s tears scurried along the beach like crabs as he sank into the sand.  Still I ascended, my hands hanging by my side, useless, not even managing a wave goodbye.  

In November, the man Peri had dated for a year decided to spend the winter in Florida with “flamingos, palm trees, and the constant sun.”  After he left, she talked to him a few times, but mostly he didn’t answer her calls or texts.  Two weeks later, Peri saw him going into his building.  Snow was falling in Boston and he bore no trace of a tan.  He was back before he said he’d be – if he’d ever gone – and hadn’t let her know.  She watched the snow filling in his footprints and then continued home.  

Later, in front of her mirror, she blamed being dumped on the deep crease that split her right cheek and the grey hairs she’d failed to cover.  Then she thought, I am more than wrinkles and a few white hairs, and he’s rejected all of me.  

*

Peri sat in her chair and turned on the 12:00 News.  She shook her head at the lead story: again, the football team. Then there was a report about a fire.  The anchor introduced a video from the scene last night.  A reporter stood in the street, strobing red lights around her.  She said a man returning home had rushed into the burning building, past the firefighters, to save his cat.  The camera showed the man holding the cat, her body wrapped in a towel.  “I couldn’t let her go,” he said to the reporter.  Other people on the street applauded when the man, still clutching the cat, climbed into the back of an ambulance.  The anchor said the man and cat were doing fine and that the cause of the fire was under investigation. 

Who or what have I saved, Peri asked and turned off the TV with the remote.  Suddenly, all the regrets trapped within her were released, a dark swarm of bats flying from a cave.  She stood, arms open, and tried to gather them back as they filled her room with their maddening echolocation; taunts and shaming bounced off the walls.  But her arms failed to contain anything.  Her hands, finding themselves empty, clapped together and her fingers bonded.  

Peri stared at her clasped hands.  The memory of a childhood poem came to her.  “Here is the church,” she recited, “and here is the steeple.”  She had to stop because she couldn’t form the tower.  Her index fingers remained locked down with the rest.

Eventually she thought, I should be leaving for work.  But whatever was happening to her hands drained her of any energy she had in reserve, like a new leaf starving the rest of the plant.  Maybe if I rest, relax, they will come undone, she thought.  She shuffled to her bed at the other side of the room and sat on the edge.  Her fastened hands sat in her lap.  She twisted, turned, and flopped until she was lying completely on the bed, face up to the ceiling.  An hour, maybe three dripped by while her bed grew larger.

No one called from work to find out where she was.

By dusk, Peri knew her hands had completely merged.  Blood coursed from one arm into the other, pumped through the valves and chambers of her hands, a second heart.  She imagined the new heart as the start of another being.  It would share her organs and blood but not her guilt and regrets.  

Peri had seen a doctor on TV who described trying to separate conjoined twins.  He said, “In the end, one was sacrificed so the other might live more fully.”  

*

While Peri lay in bed underneath a galaxy of stories, a beast on two legs climbed up the fire escape and in through the window.  He hugged the walls of the room as he prowled.  Peri shuddered as she observed the beast.  He paused and batted the ball of yarn out of the knitting basket before continuing toward her.

The potential for the beast to do her harm seemed abstract, vague, like planes falling out of the sky onto the city, something Peri did think about from time to time.  

When the beast was close enough for Peri to look into his eyes, she spied the distant light of kindness.

On the news a few days ago, Peri saw a report about a tiger in a California zoo that had escaped its enclosure and attacked three young men who had most likely taunted it.  The tiger killed the one who was believed to have dangled his leg over the wall.  The police shot and killed the animal.  As the reporter talked to people on the street, it seemed the city didn’t know who to feel sorry for, the boy or the tiger. 

 The beast placed his hairy hands on the foot of her bed and stared at Peri.  Her arms drifted upward, boney angles meeting at the pulsing heart.  Surrender, invitation, bid for pity or wonder, a dream of martyrdom?  She didn’t know, for the new heart seemed to rise of its own will.  

“I’m sorry, and no offense,” said the beast, “but I’m looking for boys to kiss while they sleep.”

Peri’s new heart sank and landed on her stomach.  

The beast sniffed the air and felt his way to the kitchen table.  He picked up the glass with the candle inside and aimed its meager light at the four corners of the room.  “When I was younger, I could hunt in the dark, but now I need some help.”  After a further look around, he set the candle back down on the saucer and said to Peri, “I suppose we’re both disappointed.”

 As the beast stepped up to the windowsill, Peri called out, “Look for my brother.  His name is Joel and he likes kisses.”  The beast nodded and climbed out onto the fire escape.  His feet descending the metal steps were like mallets on a xylophone.  Peri saw the notes entering through the window, riding on a swirling staff like a cartoon song.  The candle, in the eye of the music, wobbled in its saucer, a tilt-a-whirl.    

Would the candle fall over and set fire to the room or would it burn out, the flame drowning in an eddy of wax?  I don’t have a horse in this race, Peri thought, using a phrase her father took to saying about almost everything after his mother died.

While Peri waited for what was to be, the new heart began to pull away, straining her arms, as if it had the will to leave, to beat in support of another life.  

 Author’s Note: The inspirations for two of Peri’s stories were “The Cut Tongue Sparrow,” a Japanese folktale, and “The Six Swans” by the Brothers Grimm.

Allen Kesten is a writer and educator living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His stories have appeared in East by Northeast, The Examined Life Journal, Tiferet, Mount Hope, The Maine Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Sun, and other literary journals. A collection of stories by Allen was a semifinalist for the 2018 BOA Short Fiction Prize.

Thomas Lee

Another Five Yards

We somehow were tied against national powerhouse Bergen Prep. Fourth down with just a few seconds left, and I needed to kick a 49-yard field goal to win. I could rarely hit from that far away in practice, and that was with no pressure or fans. All year, I had tried everything to get more range, but any kick over 45 yards was at best improbable.

Even so, a field goal from my leg was still more likely to succeed than a desperate heave from our quarterback Jesse Chen’s feckless arm. When my coach called for me to take the field one final time, I could see my foggy breath, and feel thousands of eyes in the stands following me. I wasn’t used to pressure. My kicks didn’t used to matter much, because our team, which was mostly comprised of the sons of Asian tech engineers, lost nearly every week. But this year, as schools reopened from COVID lockdowns, the Kim Twins (Leon and Justin), each a 245-pound wrecking ball being recruited by Auburn, moved to our New Jersey suburb.  As the media blasted stories about Asian people being beaten by racists who blamed us for the pandemic, we pulled together a string of wins and proudly started wearing #stopasianhate stickers on our shoulder pads.

I still thought we were going to get crushed by Bergen Prep, but after a fluke interception near the end of the fourth quarter, I was being called on to win our biggest game ever. As I stepped into my kick, I psyched myself up by screaming, “Stop Asian Hate” into a tense, deathly quiet field. I knew I hit the ball true with my right foot, but I still didn’t believe I’d won the game, until I watched it barely careen through the middle of the uprights. As the crowd stormed the field, I shouted into a phone camera, “Stop Asian Hate!” and pointed to the #stopasianhate stickers on my shoulder pads.

The video went viral, getting hundreds of thousands of likes. A local news site posted an article about me with the headline, Local Kicker Wins Game, Has Message for Community. “Matt Chang, a slender young man with a leg like a woke hammer that smashes ignorance, kicked a 49-yarder under pressure to beat Bergen Prep.”

My coach called me into his office a few days later to tell me that the Yale special teams coach Ross Geary had called to see if I was interested in an official visit to campus. I was in disbelief. I was in the top ten percent of my class and scored 96% on the SATs, but an Ivy seemed out of reach. My school had one Ivy acceptance last year, a Malaysian immigrant who played jazz French horn for an ensemble that performed at Carnegie Hall. 

In early November, my mother, wearing a size-two blue pantsuit that she only brought out for important meetings, took a day off work to travel with me to the gothic, monument-filled campus in New Haven. With wavy blonde hair, Coach Ross looked like the kind of guy who raised polo ponies. 

“My name is Jean,” my mom said. Her legal name was Jin-Hee, but she introduced herself as Jean when she wanted to show she was a 100% American single mom. She only introduced herself as Jin-Hee to people she had known for a long time and really trusted. She handed him her business card, which showed that she was a vice president at a prominent web conferencing company, and continued, “It was my late husband’s dream for our son to go to Yale.” I never knew my father, as he died of a heart attack when I was a baby.

After a tour of the undergraduate green, we sat down in Coach’s musty office in a stone cathedral-like building. I asked, “I hear for Division One, I need to be able to do 50 yarders regularly in practice.  Have you seen my video? I’m doubtful after 45.” I had prepared a highlight video of my kicking achievements and sent it to fifty schools last year. Two responded, and Yale was not one of them.

My mom shot me a look. Shut up. I looked towards Coach Ross for an answer, because I wanted to make sure I would be kicking at a place where I would matter.

“You can kick under pressure. Can’t teach that. The range will come,” he said reassuringly. In April, the official acceptance came. My friends, who all had better grades and test scores than me, were headed to schools much lower in the supposedly scientific college rankings. The lone Ivy Leaguer in my class was me, the woke hammer.

*

After a summer of squats and lower leg workouts, I reported to preseason practice, which started a couple of weeks before fall semester. On the bus to the practice field, I saw that not only was I the only Asian on the team, but most guys were twice my weight and didn’t feel the need to acknowledge me. As the new kicker, I thought I would get hazed. I didn’t expect to be invisible.

At the first special teams practice, I watched the first and second stringers take their kicks. Both were just about automatic from 30 to 45 yards, and could nail booming 50 yarders most of the time. When it was my turn, I did okay for the close ones, but after forty yards I started missing, and after forty-five, I was mostly short. I had worked all summer but hadn’t improved at all. Bobby, the gigantic long snapper, watched my kicks and just shook his head with each miss.

“You better get some ‘roids for that leg, freshman,” the hulk said.  I wondered if anyone had bothered to learn my name.

*

As the rest of the students arrived on campus over the next couple of weeks, I hoped to make some friends within the non-jock population. They were all looking for an angle that would make them straight fire in the eyes of their peers. Hip hop dancers, electronic DJs, video game streamers, beauty influencers. Everyone tried so hard to not look like just another high-testing hoop jumper who did an over-inflated passion project to get in, even though that’s what they all were.  No one was impressed that I was a kicker on the football team.

I decided to take Beginning Korean. Since my grandparents taught me Korean while my mother was at work all the time, I thought the class would be a stress-free gut course. Unfortunately, when I walked into the classroom, I saw about twenty Koreans wearing flashy Kpop clothes, and chatting in small circles. If they were all taking the class for the same reason I was, the grading curve was not going to be easy. 

To my surprise, I saw one white girl in leather boots and baggy flannel, fixing her messy blonde ponytail in the back of the room. Her bulbous hazel eyes were cautiously scanning the all-Korean room. The chairs on both sides of her were empty, so I sat next to her, wondering what her story was. Since I went to a mostly Asian high school, I didn’t feel the need to enter another Asian bubble in college.

“Hey, I’m Matt. Mind if I sit here?” I asked. She just shrugged. As I got closer, I saw that she was tiny, a fun-sized grunge girl.

The instructor, a stout thirty-something woman, strode into the room and said cheerfully in English, “Hello, class. My name is Cho sun-saeng-nim. How many of you know some Korean?”

Everyone put a hand up, except the white girl next to me. The teacher smiled at her and asked, “What is your name?”

“Emma,” she said.

“Do you know any Korean?”

“Not one word. Surprising, I know,” Emma said, causing our classmates to chuckle.

“That’s okay. You will learn. How about you?” the teacher pointed at me. “How much Korean do you know?”

Hoping to impress her, I answered in Korean. “My grandparents taught me how to read and write. I can also understand them pretty well.”

The teacher’s expression soured into a mixture of surprise and pity. 

“You have a southern accent. We will fix that,” she said. I only spoke Korean with my family, and had never been to Korea. I didn’t know what I sounded like to a native speaker. Based on how the class was staring at me, I realized that I sounded like a yokel.

As we went over the Korean alphabet, I felt a few amused looks linger in my direction. At the end, the teacher said, “Please find a partner. The two of you will practice conversations in class and perform skits later.”

No one bothered to look back at Emma and me.

“Is it okay if we’re partners?” I asked her.

“Yeah, you have an accent. I don’t know one word. Perfect,” she said.

*

For the next few weeks, I struck upon a pretty soul-crushing daily routine that started with getting snickered at in Korean class, and then daydreaming through liberal arts lectures. The football team kept ignoring their doomed third-string kicker, as I continued to struggle after 40 yards at every practice. I went to football frat parties on Saturday nights, but mostly stood by the keg getting wasted. I wasn’t making any friends, as I couldn’t stand all the virtuosos bragging about how they were going to get rich through some tech magic and then start a world-changing non-profit. Meanwhile, my only goal was to add another five yards to my range so I wouldn’t get cut.

One Thursday afternoon, I met Emma at a bright fluorescent boba tea café a block from campus. We had to prepare the first Korean skit to be performed in the front of our class. Boba was her suggestion, and I didn’t complain, though I hated boba, and hated that every Asian student club had to have those cloying snot ball drinks at every meeting.

“I can’t believe I went eighteen years of my life without boba,” she said. As I pretended to enjoy chewing my tea, she told me she grew up in an all-white Maine town that didn’t have Asian food other than takeout Chinese. We prepared a skit set in a Korean vegetable market. With her toddler-like language skills, she would play a little kid buying cabbage from me, a farmer who spoke like a hick. After we finished the skit, we sat finishing our teas. 

I asked, “Sorry, but why Korean? Everyone else in that class has been speaking since birth. They’re doing it for the easy credit.” 

She smiled shyly. “Don’t laugh, but I’m into acting. Been trying to get on some small stuff, like web commercials, but basically everyone’s given me a hard pass, so I had this idea. You watch K-dramas, right?”

Her question seemed mildly un-woke, assuming a Korean guy watches K-dramas, but I didn’t call her out. I just said, “I’ve seen a couple, but not really my thing.”

“Well, there are always a couple of white actors in those K-dramas, and they’re terrible. I figure I could do better than that, so I thought I’d learn a bit of Korean, go to Seoul for the summer one of these years, and try to find my way into one. It’s completely stupid, I know.”

She sounded pretty naïve, but I liked that she had a plan that didn’t involve a startup, venture capital or cryptocurrency. As we were finishing our teas, I asked, “Hey, there’s this party at Delta this Saturday. Post-game parties can get pretty lit. Wanna go?”

“That’s the football frat?”

“Yeah, I’m on the team.”

“Wait, what? You’re a football player? You’re built like one of those Kpop boys though.” She looked at me quizzically, like I was some curious amateur abstract painting she was trying hard to interpret.

“I’m the kicker.” I left out that I was third-string and soon-to-be-cut.

“Yeah, sorry but I got done with passing out at keggers when I was in high school.”

“Oh, no big deal,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

As I got up, she looked at me a bit hesitantly and asked, “I heard about this Drama School thing tonight. You free?”

I said as I looked at a blank calendar on my phone, “Yeah, should be free. Let me check.”

*

Later that day, I received a video meeting invitation from the assistant to Jean Chang, Vice President. “We look forward to a mutually beneficial discussion,” the message ended. Every message from my mom seemed like it was written by an AI replacement for a human executive.

When I didn’t respond within three hours, my mom’s Jin-Hee Chang personal account messaged me:

“Why didn’t you accept my invitation? You must have seen it on your phone by now. I’m getting worried about you.” Jin-Hee said all the personal things that Jean would not.

I had been too embarrassed to tell my mother how horribly school had been going. I responded, “Just crazy busy. Let’s talk later. How about Saturday after the game, okay?”

Her assistant sent me a meeting invitation for Saturday afternoon two minutes later.

*

The party was at a beach house on Long Island Sound, a few miles southwest of campus. I met Emma by one of the campus gates, so we could get picked up by her friend.  After a few minutes of waiting, a Japanese hybrid car slowly approached us. A bearded guy in a black cardigan flashed us a disappointed smile as he rolled down his window.

“I didn’t know you were bringing someone,” he said as she got in the passenger side and I crawled into the back. I realized that Emma had invited me to cock block the old hipster drama dude.

“Yeah, this is my friend Matt,” she said. Even worse, I’d already been friend-zoned. 

We engaged in an uncomfortably terse conversation during the fifteen-minute drive. I learned that the bearded guy was named Paul, and Emma had met him when she went to a grad school performance with some theater club kids.

After we parked in front of a three-story house, Paul told us he had to go talk to a guy who was smoking on the front porch. He would meet us at the back of house.

“Paul thought you were coming alone,” I said as we walked towards a deck built on top of the rocky beach. It was full of toned, lithe people enjoying a warm October night in their sleek, designer clothes. My hoodie and jeans, which were fine for campus, just seemed wrong. Emma was in flannel, as she perpetually seemed to be, and fit in about as well as I did.

“Yeah, I know. But we’re at a beach house with the Drama School. It’s gonna be lit, right?”

I was hesitant, “That dude is like 35.” 

“He’s 27,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.

When Paul came back, he showed us a few little pink pills in his right hand. 

He said to Emma “Some of us are dropping tonight. You can have one. Your friend too.” Being called “friend” was more offensive coming from him. She nodded, and looked at me inquisitively. 

I had never done molly before, but I needed something to get me through this uncomfortable situation. After we took the pills, Paul walked us to his circle of shiny friends. They were all in their late twenties, had lived in New York, and smiled condescendingly at Emma when she said she wanted to be an actress but didn’t have any credits yet.

After Paul fell into a deep conversation about the latest Yale Rep production with a tall dancer who had glitter all over his tanned skin, Emma gave me a look and tilted her head towards the house.  We walked quietly away as I started to feel a burgeoning wave of happiness, an emotion I hadn’t felt in a while. 

“I feel like we’re the little siblings,” she said as we went inside.

She wanted to dance, so we went to the living room, which had been cleared out to create a makeshift dance floor. There were a few people in a circle bouncing to the pulsating trance blaring from a laptop by the wall. She started hopping around with breathless abandon, and soon became a dazzling kinetic blur that, in my euphoric daze, seemed to embody the karmic perfection of the universe. I was normally a self-conscious dancer, but I managed to keep the beat so she could stay tethered to me instead of flying off.

At one point, I noticed Paul at the edge of the room. When he saw us dancing together, he walked away looking disappointed. When Emma finally stopped to get some water, we explored the various dark rooms filled with laughing people, but no matter where we looked, we didn’t see Paul, which would’ve been great except he was our ride home. 

*

At 2:30 am, we took an Uber back to Yale. The street lights were a dazzling light show that entranced me on the ride back. The campus was still lively at that hour with drunk and high kids loudly roaming around the green, and, though the drugs started to ebb a bit, I wasn’t in the mood to go back to my lonely dorm room.

Emma seemed to be in the same mood as I was. She said, “There’s no way I can sleep. Come over. Let’s listen to some music.”

When we got to her dorm, she told me her roommate was away screwing some guy in New York. I wasn’t sure if I should try anything. I had one girlfriend during high school, a marching band girl who I made out with a few times, but I was still a virgin.

 “This will help us come down,” she said as she put one of her earbuds in her ear, and gave me the other. When I wore it, I heard mellow trance that fit the mood of the dark dorm room that she had decorated with old-time movie posters. She sat back on her twin bed, and scooted over so there was a bit of space for me.  

“So nice to finally have a friend,” she said as she put her head on my shoulder. She sounded so sad when she said finally. I was so lonely that I liked being a generic warm body in someone else’s drama. If she had tilted her face towards mine even slightly, I would have tried for a kiss, but I could only get a view of her scalp. 

As I started to come down, I tried desperately to cling to a fleeting sense of connection to her, but ended up falling dead asleep. When I awoke, Emma was lying on top of me, her frazzled blonde hair sitting across my face like cotton candy that had been picked at by little fingers. I looked at my phone and saw that it was 4 pm. I had missed all of my classes, and practice. 

*

After eating a bland dining hall dinner with Emma, I spent the rest of Friday night in a daze in my dorm. Saturday was game day. After I got to the field, I tried to find a moment to apologize to Coach Ross, but he was too busy to even acknowledge me. I sat silently on the bench until the final whistle.

After a shower I didn’t need, Coach Ross called me into his office.

“You didn’t show up to practice yesterday,” he said, fiddling with some charts behind his desk.

“I got messed up the night before. I’m sorry. I won’t miss any more. I promise.”

“It’s okay. But I’ve been meaning to ask you, how do you think this season is going?” 

I knew he was disappointed by my lack of progress. “I’m not improving. But there’s got to be something I can do. I can work harder.”

“You work very hard. No one doubts that. But you should ask yourself if you’re focusing on the right thing at this time.”

“Are you telling me to quit?” I was shocked. The season wasn’t even half over.

“Not at all. But consider that even if football is not for you, you can stay at Yale. Have you talked to your mother about this? Jin-Hee may have some thoughts about what to do.”

Jin-Hee. I distinctly heard the second syllable, said with a hard “h.” He called her by her Korean name, which she only gave to people she trusted. As far as I knew, he had only met my mother once, during our campus visit, when she introduced herself as Jean.

* 

Later that day, Emma texted me to tell me she was in my dorm to finish a project with a woman in her theater club. She wanted to swing by, maybe check out the new downtown boba place. Since I still had not told her how much I hated boba, I wrote back, “Sure any time after five.”

I remembered that I had scheduled a video conference with my mom. Though it was Saturday, she was in her power suit when I logged on, clearly having finished some work meetings. 

“Are you okay at school?” she asked, looking intently into the screen.

“Actually, no.” I rambled for a while about classes not going well and being unable to improve my range. The best thing that had happened to me thus far was getting drooled on by Emma, but I left that out.

When I finally finished, she said with concern, “Maybe you have too many things going on.”

“I don’t know what to focus on.”

“It’s probably not football. You aren’t going to the NFL.”

“I’m here because of football though.”

“Yes, but things change. Even if football is not right for you, you can stay at Yale.”

Those were nearly the exact words Coach Ross had said. I started to feel numb as a suspicion came over me. Somehow, my mom had become Jin-Hee to Coach Ross, and both had shared the same questionable advice with me. Quit.

After I said goodbye to my mother, I closed my laptop with shaky hands. I had heard many stories about parents doing crazy things to get their kids into Ivy League schools, so a disturbing scenario shot through my brain. Jean contacted Coach Ross after my game-winning field goal, and made him an offer to get him to recommend a mediocre kicker for the Yale team. Since I was the “woke hammer” and a decent student, my admission wouldn’t be too questionable. In the process, Jean would have many secret interactions with Coach Ross, and eventually become Jin-Hee to him. Once I was at school, all they needed to do was convince me to quit early, so there would be no damage to the team. 

As I obsessively replayed that all-too-plausible scenario over and over again in my head, I heard a knock on my door. When I opened it, I saw Emma in a baseball cap.

She looked at me with concerned, wide eyes, “Oh my God. You look awful. What’s wrong?”

I couldn’t tell her what was really wrong, the suspicion that had taken over my mind, because I didn’t want her to think less of me. I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. 

“My cat died.” What in the actual…holy fuck, why did I say that? 

She pouted. “Oh no. I’m so sorry. You need a hug or something?”

“Yeah. That’d be cool.” She moved into me. She was tiny, comforting and warm. The hug was unearned, based on an absurd improvised lie, but it still felt good. At that moment, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. 

“What was its name?” she asked with her head in my chest.

“Boba,” I replied.

Thomas Lee is a writer and technology lawyer who lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and son. His short stories have been published in many literary journals including Ploughshares, The Sun Magazine, American Literary Review, Asia Literary Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. In 2011, he was awarded the first annual Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award for Fiction. He writes about people of Korean descent who struggle and thrive in America.

Leora Rajak

To Find a Child

To protect the privacy of certain individuals, some names and identifying details have been changed.

The police officer escorted me to room 708-B. He pointed to a set of steel filing cabinets, about six of them, lining the wall. 

“You’ll have to dig around, nothing’s catalogued,” he said. “You better put everything back when you’re done. No documents leave here, okay?”

I assured him I’d return everything to its rightful place. I thanked him, and he left me, alone, in the Records Repository in Police Headquarters. Its carpet was browned by spills and cigarette burns. The florescent light flickered and buzzed. Dead flies were scattered along the windowsill. 

I extracted a handful of manila folders from an arbitrarily selected drawer, placed them on the desk, and skimmed through their contents. Each had a photograph pinned to the top right corner. Each photograph was a child, each child was missing, and, judging by the state of this room, each child was long forgotten by the authorities tasked with finding them. I was soon to learn what that meant for the families who had reported their children missing.

I was a television journalist at the time, a 26-year-old white woman producing a segment in my home country, South Africa, for the local equivalent of 60 Minutes. Baby Micaela Hunter, only seventeen hours old, had been abducted from Marymount Hospital. A woman dressed in a Red Cross uniform had entered the room where Alison Hunter was nursing her newborn, informed the mother that her baby was needed for a bathing demonstration, and vanished with the child. 

The story captured headlines and hearts across the country. I was instructed to cover it, but I did not want to.

It was May 1994. South Africa had just held its first ever democratic election. Freedom and jubilation had been raining down on the streets, flowing across the country, collecting in puddles in which people sang and danced. The new South African flag, black for the people, green for the land, now adorned street poles and buildings, occasionally hung upside down—out of ignorance, not malice. The recently christened “Rainbow Nation” proved that miracles do happen as it threw Apartheid onto the trash heap of tyrannies past. Nelson Mandela was about to become the country’s first ever Black president.

We were euphoric; a long, hard battle had been won. But everyday still presented new challenges, new conflict, and new celebrations. We speculated about Inauguration Day; theorized about the content of Mandela’s speech; ignored the bomb threats; considered the dignitaries and the dynamics. We wondered if Fidel Castro or Yasser Arafat would sidle too close to Hilary Clinton and Al Gore, if the new cabinet would be announced, if a mob of Apartheid stalwarts would storm the gathering. Those were the stories that inspired my career choice.

But I couldn’t report on them. I couldn’t join, or cover, the celebrations in the streets anymore, dance to the beat of the toyi-toyi, sing Zulu and Xhosa freedom songs with comrades from the trenches. Instead, I found myself sniffing around in a police building in downtown Johannesburg. This concrete relic of Apartheid housed the Child Protection Unit. 

I had been instructed to report on Micaela Hunter. I worked for a subscription TV channel. Its viewers were affluent and, in 1994, most of them were white, just like the missing baby they had become obsessed with.  

But my focus was elsewhere. I cared about the big picture of what was going on in my country, on the politics, the president, the people - on change - and trying to master that narrative on the small screen. I didn’t want to delve into families and reflect on what it meant to have a child and then lose one. I wasn’t a mother then; I didn’t know if I even wanted kids. I didn’t know, and wasn’t interested in exploring, what those bonds felt like. And I didn’t know that this would be the story that would be bury itself deep inside; that the pain of missing children and the agony of their families would keep burning, slowly, silently; that they’d sit, like tiny red embers, and ultimately, spark the stories, both real and fiction, I would end up writing. 

I arrived at the home of Alison and Bruce Hunter two days after their daughter had been snatched. They knew the media could help and allowed us to recap events and dissect their pain. We interviewed them in the unused nursery, filmed them next to the empty crib. We cut-away to unopened diaper boxes and neat piles of untouched baby clothes, grabbing the tearjerker visuals my viewers craved. Alison didn’t realize moist smudges were forming on each breast. There was no baby to nurture.

My next stop was an interview with the Child Protection Unit head, Major Botha. He knew every detail of the Micaela Hunter case. He promised her parents, all parents, me, anyone who would listen, that there would be no stone left unturned. I knew he meant it. And my viewers expected nothing less. 

*

He told me this in John Voster Square, a notorious building where anti-apartheid activists, including some of my friends, had been detained without trial. I knew some who were eventually released—scarred, and decimated, having been tortured and interrogated—but alive. Others never made it out at all. Their deaths were explained away as suicides due to hangings from belts or leaps out of tenth floor windows. But that wasn’t the story I was there to report on.

Major Botha was white. His grey hair and the polished lapel stars on his shoulders reminded me how long he’d been around. He had risen through the ranks of the police force responsible for committing atrocities against fellow South Africans—many worse than those that took place in his building—and lying about it. 

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said to the major as I was leaving, my cameraman already dismantling his gear. “How often does this happen? How many other kids are missing? Who else should we be reminding our viewers to look for?”

“Too many,” he replied, shaking his head, his eyes softening with a sadness that seemed genuine. “No clues, no leads, their cases are cold.”

"Anything I can film about these other missing kids? Their files or photographs? I’d like to show the faces behind the statistics.” 

I needed visuals and texture for my story. The major agreed. And that is how I ended up in the neglected Room 708-B. 

Almost all of the children in those files were Black. None of their parents had been interviewed for TV next to unused diapers and empty cribs. None of their names had been broadcast, none of their stories told. I was there because I was reporting on Micaela Hunter. Those other children were background, I never sought them out before that day either.

My cameraman grumped when I told him we needed to film a bunch of tiny photographs in that dark, dusty room. Our day had started at five a.m., I shouldn’t have had to convince him, but he was my boss’s husband. He didn’t like long days, he didn’t like me, and he didn’t like the way I always sought political angles to what he considered simple stories.

 “I need about thirty faces,” I told him. 

Shown at two seconds an image, I could create a one-minute montage with some apt commentary about unfair resource allocation. 

I scoured through the files. I was thinking visually. I wanted a spread: boys and girls, babies and toddlers, some teenagers. I avoided photos that were too faded or too scratched. I moved fast, I didn’t take notes. I placed each photograph on the table for the cameraman. He filmed it, I reattached it to its form, placed it in its folder, its drawer, its tomb. We did that thirty times. Then we left.

My Micaela Hunter story aired on the Sunday night. 

Mondays were catch-up days used to attack administration and invoices and recover from a weekend spent in the edit suite. That Tuesday was special. It was May 10, 1994; the day South Africans bussed, en masse, to the capital, Pretoria. Army tanks that once rolled over burning barricades as soldiers fired at protestors, now lined the streets to welcome us. The soldiers allowed us to hop onto those tanks, to dance on them. We had Mandela’s face emblazoned on our t-shirts; the soldiers had the new flag pinned onto their caps. 

We marched to the Union Buildings, a modern-day acropolis of red sandstone. Once a symbol of hatred, like everything else, they had become imbued with new meaning. That was where Nelson Mandela would take office. 

He pledged the oath while, overhead, planes painted the skies in the country’s new colors. The song we used to sing at protest rallies and mass funerals, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica, had become our national anthem, and 150 000 voices sung it with gusto. We had so much to celebrate. I didn’t think about Alison and Bruce Hunter or their missing baby. I didn’t think about the kids buried in the filing cabinets in Room 708-B. “You can’t do this job if you take each story home,” I was told when I was hired. So, I didn’t. Or at least I thought I didn’t.

When I arrived at work the next day, I found a pink slip with a telephone message written on it. A Mevrou Strydom wanted me to call regarding Sunday’s show. Mevrou is Afrikaans for Mrs. She was expecting to be spoken to in her language. I never paid attention in the mandatory Afrikaans lessons in school, a personal rebellion against the language associated with Apartheid. The word itself is Afrikaans for separateness. 

 “You wanted to talk about Sunday’s program?” I asked in English when I returned her call.

“Yes. The photos of the missing Black kids,” she replied, matching my English. “I can’t be sure.  It went by so fast, but I think I know one of those boys.”

“Excuse me?” 

“Jabu, if it’s him, is here. On the farm.”

I didn’t know who she was talking about. I never recorded the names of the children, or the families, attached to the photos. 

Mevrou Strydom explained that a boy had come to their farm about four years prior with one of the laborers, a Mozambican man. They had lived in the workers’ compound. The man had suddenly taken off about three years prior, leaving the child behind. 

“Laborers come and go. But this man left a child with no one to care for him. I had to take him in. He’s been with me since. Here at the farmhouse.”

“How old is he?”

“Eight. I think.”

“You’re aware we used this photo because someone reported him missing?”

“We told the police about the child at the time, but we’re near the border. They assumed the man we thought was his father went back to Mozambique. They couldn’t do anything.”

I called Major Botha. 

“You weren’t fair to us,” he said. “We were trying to help Micaela Hunter. Why make us look bad on TV with those missing Black children like we never did anything for them?”

I had expected this. I had been critical of his Child Protection Unit. I had asked, over the montage of photographs, why these children’s lives and families were not valued as much as baby Micaela’s. I offered neither an explanation nor an apology. I told him, instead, about Mevrou Strydom. He was cautious but intrigued enough to grant me access to Room 708-B again. I needed to dig for the file that matched the photo that may have been the boy who was abandoned on a farm near South Africa’s eastern border by a Mozambican man.

I searched for boys born between 1982 and 1988 and matched them with photos shown on the program. I ended up with five options. I numbered and photocopied their images and faxed them to a store near Mevrou Strydom’s farm. I didn’t have a cell phone then, barely anyone did in South Africa in 1994, so I gave her my home number. She called me that night. I expected her to say she had made a mistake previously when she thought she’d recognized the boy in the photo. 

“Nommer drie, hy is Jabu,” she told me. Number three, he’s Jabu.

According to the file, number three was Sello Legang, reported missing by his parents four years prior at a police station in Witbank, a coal mining town 120 miles east of Johannesburg. They suspected he was taken by a tenant who rented a shanty in their backyard. Sello was four at the time. 

It would still take ten years before DNA testing became available in South Africa. There was nothing to work with other than what I learned from Mevrou Strydom, and the scant detail in the police file. I had a degree in political science, not criminology or forensics. I didn’t know where to start. I had to rely on the police. 

Major Botha contacted a Sergeant Mangope, who was in charge of missing persons in Witbank and briefed him. I drove the four hours from Johannesburg to Witbank. Sergeant Mangope welcomed me to his office where he had laid out a tray with a government issue stainless steel milk jug, teapot, a sugar bowl, and cookies. This was not how the police typically treated journalists. I feared he had concluded too early that this case would give him his fifteen minutes of fame. I suspected he was also desperate to gain credibility in his community. Black policemen were considered traitors then, some having collaborated in identifying, arresting, and torturing anti-Apartheid activists. Some suffered retaliation when their houses were burnt down, or their vehicles stoned. Judging by his age and rank, this man would have been labelled a Judas. Now he had a chance to become a savior.

“I looked over the case notes,” he told me. “The parents said their tenant took him. A Mozambican. He probably crossed the border. There was nothing we could do.” 

*

During Apartheid, the porous border between South Africa and Mozambique was a popular route for smuggling cadres and arms into South Africa. Apartheid’s border-patrols cared only about who was entering the country, not leaving it. They would not have been interested in a Mozambican migrant worker heading home after a stint on a local farm. 

I asked Sergeant Mangope what he could do to establish if the missing boy, Sello Legang from Witbank, was Jabu at the farm in Komatiepoort. 

 “We’ll ask the boy’s parents,” he said. “They’re expecting us at their house.”

“We have nothing other than one woman’s conclusions based on a faded photograph. How can you raise their hopes?” 

“The man was from Mozambique,” he snapped, irritated that I was questioning him. 

I accompanied Sergeant Mangope to the home of Petronella and Bongani Legang. We drove for twenty-five minutes. A pungentsmell of sulphur, and thick, grey smog, reminded me we were in mining territory. Coal lay beneath those roads. But the wealth underground had never benefited those who lived above it, people like Bongani Legang, Sello’s dad, who drilled and chiseled in the subterranean tunnels each day. 

The Legangs lived in a Witbank township designated for Black people. It was in the blustery, treeless section of town. Tin shacks crammed into the yards of small houses. Shared outdoor toilets and communal water taps masqueraded as infrastructure, loose wires overhead leeched electricity via illegal connections. The billboards from the recent elections made bold promises: “Services for all!” “Peace! Freedom! Jobs!” “Towards a brighter future!” The black, green, and gold of Mandela’s populist party, the African National Congress, draped walls and doors. Hope was ubiquitous. Nowhere as much as in the Legang household. 

The couple waited for us outside their home, a standard two room unit painted a light shade of pink. I was easily identified: the mhlungu, Zulu for white person. 

“Siyabonga, siyabonga,” thank you, thank you, Petronella said, her lips quivering. I stretched out my hand to greet her, she looked down, and I noticed she was clasping her one hand in the other, unsure how to respond. She looked older than I expected. Her shoulders sagged, as if weights dragged at her arms. 

 Bongani, who had held back initially, stepped forward to greet me. He was tall, muscular, had scars on his forehead that up across his shaven head. He led us inside, invited us to sit. Petronella vanished behind a curtain sectioning off the kitchen, returning with mugs of tea.

That was a tough process of expectation management. Everything I said elicited a grateful nod and a “yes, yes” reply, but I knew I was not being heard. Four years of desperation drowned out all words of caution. Petronella and Bongani couldn’t afford a subscription to the TV channel I worked for. They never saw my program with the grainy two second image, they hadn’t been told of the precariousness of the whole escapade. Sergeant Mangope had informed them that their son has been found. He had spun a fairytale in which he was the hero, I was the white knight, the child in Komatiepoort was their Sello, and everyone would live happily ever after. 

The sergeant inserted himself into the middle of every conversation. His hubris was noxious. His banter with little Lindiwe, the Legang’s five-year-old daughter, included comments about how pretty she was, and if she wanted to sit on his lap. I battled to steer the conversation to events four years back.

*

“We’ve always had tenants,” Bongani explained, showing me the shacks in their miniscule backyard, where walls of corrugated iron were supported by discarded bedframes and ladders. “One of the tenants back then, was home a lot. He would play with Sello, there was some grass here then.” He pointed to a corner of the yard now occupied by another tenant’s home. “One day we came back from work and Sello was gone. So was the man. He was Mozambican.”

The memory brought with it a change of mood. Bongani fell silent. Petronella covered her face with her hands, tilted her head down. 

Komatiepoort, located 200 miles east of Witbank, was another world. I’d left behind the flatness, the dryness, the dust. I was now surrounded by lush, rolling hills and big blue skies. I turned down a dirt road at the stone gatepost indicating I’d arrived at the Strydom’s property. I drove through fields filled with neat lines of mango and pawpaw trees and then reached a clearing, which revealed clusters of concrete huts with thatch roofs. The huts were separated by small crops of corn; pumpkin plants crept along pathways where kids played with homemade wire toys. Some women swept their yards, others walked along the road balancing firewood or buckets on their heads. This was where the laborers lived. 

I eventually reached the electrified fence and security gate that marked the entrance to the farmer’s residence. It was framed by purples and pinks of bougainvillea and hydrangeas. As the dogs announced my arrival, a buxom woman in her fifties emerged from the house. I expected a stereotype, and I got one. Her hair was in a bun, she wore a handsewn green dress with pink floral trimming. She was tall, broad, and commanding. Mevrou Strydom. The lady of the manor. 

She invited me to sit on heavy wooden chairs under the jacaranda tree. 

“The girl will bring us tea,” she said. The girl was an adult woman, probably a wife or daughter of one of the farm workers. 

Mevrou Strydom and I did small talk—the drive, the farm, the fruit. Then I encouraged her to get to the story of the boy she called Jabu.

“I didn’t know about him when he first arrived here,” she said. “We don’t get close to them in the compound. The foreman hires the workers, some have family. Some have been here for years, some come and go. They sort themselves out. One day, the girl who works in the house told me that one of the laborers had left and hadn’t taken his son with him They first thought the father might return. They said he drank a lot; anything could have happened.”

“Did you report it?”

“Yes. At the police station. They made me fill in forms. We knew nothing about the boy, so there was nothing they could do.”

“Did you ever hear back from the police? From anyone?”

She shook her head. “Eventually we took him in. Here,” she says, indicating her house. “He’s lived with us ever since.”

That’s the thing about South Africa that gets you every time. The stereotype turns on its head. White Afrikaans farmers, particularly in that part of the country, were assumed to be racist; they were raised believing Apartheid had a religious justification. At that time, Apartheid’s demise was being celebrated worldwide. TV screens were filled with groups of Black people dancing the toyi toyi, chanting “kill the boer, kill the farmer.” Some of those farmers armed themselves and formed mini-militias; some imagined Armageddon, stockpiling water, candles, batteries, and tinned food, ready to retreat into bunkers, believing angry mobs would massacre them in their sleep. 

Peace-loving, democracy-welcoming people were scared, too. Scores of my white friends and relatives immigrated, some telling me I was naïve thinking the new South Africa would succeed. Conversation focused on the unknown. Would the currency and the markets crash? Would there be civil war? Could Mandela really deliver on his promise of unity and reconciliation?

But Election Day revealed a different story. South Africans of all hues turned up for democracy. They joined mile-long lines snaking up and down the streets as they waited to vote. Black and white people stood together in those lines, fist pumping and hugging strangers, excited for their turn to reach the ballot box, all heeding the call to start anew, together. 

The bombings, the massacres, and the bloodbaths never materialized. But the true feelings of a group that felt betrayed by their leaders and forsaken by their god remained hidden. Those people were assumed to be white, Afrikaans, and living in farming areas like Komatiepoort, where the Strydoms were.

“Here he comes,” proclaimed Mevrou, interrupting my silent political pontification.

“Hello Tannie,” hello Aunt, said the eight-year-old boy, known to Mevrou Strydom as Jabu. He gave me a shy smile and waited to be offered a cookie before he took one, and then sat on the grass at her feet, playing with a toy car. 

I was desperate to see a resemblance to the four-year-old child in the four-year-old photograph. I couldn’t tell if he had Petronella’s eyes or Bongani’s jaw. But whoever that once abandoned child was, he looked content, settled, and at home. I didn’t know what was going to happen to him. I did know that if it didn’t work out, it had all started with me seeking visual texture for thirty seconds of commentary, poking around those steel cabinets in Room 708-B.

Back in Johannesburg, I waited for the police to establish if Jabu and Sello were the same person. Sergeant Mangope’s team in Witbank needed to liaise with the team in Komatiepoort. Petronella and Bongani Legang believed their son had been found and were desperate to get him back. I tried to move the process along, but the country, and its bureaucracy, were transitioning. Police structures, municipal districts, protocols, and places were all changing. No one knew who was in charge anymore, what procedures should be followed, or whose rights needed to be protected.

The police took their time. My attempts to intervene were unsuccessful. I was just a journalist reporting a story, not making it. But I was already haunted by its characters. Memories of Petronella in the yard, how she couldn’t look at the spot where her son used to play, kept prodding at me. I despaired over what may have happened to Sello over those past four years. I didn’t know what to do with the thousands of other faces attached to the missing persons reports in the Records Repository in downtown Johannesburg. I was running out of budget and had a production schedule to follow. 

Two weeks passed before I heard from Sergeant Mangope.

“We’ve concluded there is a match,” he announced over the phone. “Police business” was all I was offered when I asked how. 

I returned to his office in Witbank to plan the next steps. No tea-tray and cookies that time, just cokes from the vending machine that I had to spring for. He claimed the case and the victory. I was only there to report it. 

“Sergeant, there’s something I don’t get,” I said. “When a report is filed at a police-station somewhere else, in this case Komatiepoort, a report like the one from Mevrou Strydom, that a child has been abandoned, what happens to it?”

“It comes here, we’re the HQ of the province.” He waved his hand around indicating the building we were in is where it all happens. “We assess it and then put it in the system.”

I asked to see the files on missing and abandoned children currently in the system. In 1994, everything was still paper based. “Good for visuals,” I told him.

He escorted me to their records room. That one was spotless—no burnt carpets, no dirty cups or cigarette stubs lying around. The surfaces glistened, free of the miniscule coal particles that floated around the rest of that mining town. Stunned the Sergeant hadn’t done this himself, I searched for the report made by Mevrou Strydom in 1992 about a boy found abandoned in a farm in Komatiepoort. I was deep in the documents, my back to the door, when a gentle knock followed by a woman’s voice interrupted me.

“Can I come in, Madam?” 

It was Petronella, dressed in her cleaner’s uniform. I was surprised to see her. 

“Please, call me Leora,” I reminded her. The promise of democracy and equality had not washed away years of taught subservience. “Has Sergeant Mangope explained what’s going on? That they need to be sure it’s Sello before we can do anything further?”

“What can I do?” she shrugged, her shoulders sinking further. Generations of powerlessness were not easily washed away either. 

“How come you’re here? I thought you worked at the council?” 

Petronella was a cleaner at the provincial government’s offices.

“They’ve changed the names of the departments, but the buildings are all the same,” she said. “I’ve worked here since 1989, March.”

That meant she was working there in 1992, in that very room, dusting those very cabinets, inside which, the report of a boy having been found in Komatiepoort, was lodged. The boy matched her missing son’s description. Everything Petronella longed for had been sitting in a room she cleaned daily. 

I went cold when I realized this, determined to confront Sergeant Mangope and demand an explanation. But my indignation had no place in that room while Petronella was waiting politely for an update about her missing son. And it wouldn’t help her one bit.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I had just learned. Instead, I focused on the process. I explained that we’d arranged for a counsellor to help Mevrou Strydom break the news to Sello. He had no recollection of his life before the farm, of his parents or of his home. He was confused. He needed time. Sergeant Mangope hadn’t shared any of this with Petronella. Or he had and she grasped what he had told her—because all she could do was thank me for finding her son.

It took a few more days to finalize logistics. We agreed that Mevrou Strydom would accompany Sello to his family in Witbank. She said she felt sad to see him go but believed he should return to “his people.” When I asked if he ever told her anything about the Mozambican, she said, “some things you just don’t talk about.” I had researched child abduction cases; I knew the extremes. I tried not to jump to conclusions. And my executive producer was clear that the channel didn’t want a story about the abuse of a child, nor one about neglect by the authorities. The viewers needed feel-good stuff. 

“Make sure you get the reunion on film,” she said.

To capture something like that on film meant the event should play out in service of the cameras and the story, not the people in it. It meant I needed to direct Petronella and Bongani to stand here, wait there, do this, do that. It meant that Sello, who until now had thought he was Jabu, would meet the people he’d been told were his parents under glaring lights. Our anchor would interrupt authentic moments with planned questions. The cameraman would prowl between them, and the sound engineer’s fluffy boom-mike would lurk in their faces. It would be invasive and cruel, and it was my job to make it happen.

Reunion Day arrived. My crew was stationed at the Legang’s home in Witbank. Petronella, Bongani and Sello’s little sister, Lindiwe, waited in their Sunday best. News of the event and the presence of TV cameras attracted a crowd. Friends, neighbors, strangers and members of the Witbank Police Department, the department that failed this family, all vied for space.  

While we waited, I directed Rita, our anchor, to do an on-camera piece explaining who was who. Eventually the Strydom’s car turned into the street, making its way past broken electricity pilons and tin shacks. I wondered what was going through the mind of the little boy seated at the back who only knew mango trees and lush green hills. 

Our cameraman turned to capture their arrival. When he indicated he was ready, I, in turn, indicated to Mevrou Strydom that she could step out the vehicle. She encouraged Sello to join her. The uninvited onlookers cascaded forward. Sello cowered in his seat. There was no space for Petronella and Bongani, who had to fight their way through to their son. The police seemed to care more about being in on the action than helping. 

Mevrou Strydom tried to coax Sello out the car. He had barely put his foot down when Petronella broke through the crowd and leapt onto him, frightening him with her tears and embrace. He recoiled and buried himself in the bosom and familiarity of Tannie Strydom. 

I caught a glimpse of Lindiwe as she watched her mother collapse to her knees. The little girl bolted into the house, skirting around the hoards who blocked the path to her refuge. Bongani looked on, stunned. Should he be caring for his collapsed wife, his retreating daughter, his traumatized son, himself?

Sergeant Mangope was not having any of it. The cameras were rolling, but this moment was anything but glorious. He stepped in, tugged at Sello, shouted at him in Zulu that he needed to let go of the farm lady and behave like a good boy for his parents. But Sello didn’t know who his parents were. He didn’t know why he couldn’t be with his Tannie. He didn’t know why the policeman was shouting at him, and he had forgotten his native tongue. 

Rita, the face and voice of our show, who was meant to take the lead in front of the camera while the rest of us worked behind it, broke down. She shouted something to me about what a disaster it was, that she—or did she say we—couldn’t be part of it. She walked off “set.” I wanted to run. But I was responsible for all of this. I was the producer. I had the budget; I had the contract. And I had a prime-time slot to fill on Sunday night.

Then I noticed a shift in the crowd. It was Bongani. He appeared to have found himself, to understand what was needed in the moment. He stepped forward and inserted himself between his slumped over wife and Tannie Strydom, who Sello still clung to. Bongani placed an arm around each woman. Yes, a Black man, a coal miner, a man who would call Mevrou Strydom “Madam,” and would, in turn, be referred to as “Boy,” placed his arm around the Afrikaaner. He guided the two women and his son towards the house. 

The crowd parted, the policemen hung back, and little Lindiwe, who had been hiding inside, opened the door, so that her father could lead her mother, her long lost brother, and this strange white woman, into their home. Lindiwe shut the door, leaving the rest of us in the street. 

I had just plunged this family into chaos, subjected them to a whole new round of trauma. I wanted to go inside and apologize, to see how to make things right. But the door was closed. I didn’t belong.

Hours passed. The door remained shut, the curtains drawn. The crowd dispersed. 

My cameraman packed up his gear. He wanted us to leave. He didn’t think it was safe to be in a Black township that late, and his camera batteries needed charging. I went knocking on doors to find an electricity point, we had to be ready for the Legangs when they were ready for us. If they would ever be ready for us. I was desperate to know how Sello was, how Petronella was. And of course, my story needed an ending. 

The sound technician reminded me they’d already hit the ten hour limit for their shift. I think I yelled at him about the need to get his priorities straight.

It was dark when Mevrou Strydom emerged. I went to greet her.

“He’s okay,” she told me. “He’s asleep. It was too much. But he’s okay. I need to get home. It’s a long drive. My husband will be worried.” 

“Does Sello understand what’s going on?”

“He was in shock. And shy. But then he relaxed a little. The mother prepared a fancy meal. I’m not used to that kind of food, but we sat together, and we ate. Then he played with the sister. They went to the other room. The parents and I had a chance to talk. When I went to tell him I had to leave, he was asleep.”

“Will he be okay when he wakes up, and you’re not there?”

“I told him yesterday that he will have to get used to them. We can visit each other, he can phone me, but he must be back with his people.”

Bongani came out, invited us in. Sergeant Mangope appeared from the shadows, followed us into the house, seated himself at the table, waiting for Petronella to serve him. She had prepared a celebratory meal—oat meat, pap, and spinach morogo style, which he tucked into.

The family struggled to express themselves. It wasn’t language they needed; no lexicon could capture what they were feeling. The boy we found was their Sello, they had no doubt. They said they knew it would be a tough adjustment for him, but they never thought the day would come that he would be back with them. They would take whatever came with it.

Petronella led me to the doorway of the shared family bedroom. She showed me Sello and his sister, sleeping, side by side. Tears flowed down Petronella’s face. She bit her hand, perhaps to silence the sobs so she wouldn’t wake her son and daughter. 

My cameraman squeezed past us, he set up low lighting and filmed what looked like two peaceful children sleeping—a soft ending, a gentle visual, some calm. 

Petronella turned to hug me, repeating her mantra, siyabonga, siyabonga, thank you, thank you, and squeezed me, oh so tight. The chugging in her lungs and the thumping in her heart sent shudders right through me. I wasn’t a mother then; I couldn’t know what she was feeling. I couldn’t begin to grasp emotion of that magnitude. Like a bad burn, it scarred, imprinted itself. I was changed forever. When you experience other people’s pain up close and feel responsible for it, you wonder about all the ways you could have prevented it. It becomes your pain too.

I received a call from Petronella the next day, after I had returned to Johannesburg.

“You won’t believe it,” I could hear the smile in her voice. “He woke up, and looked at me and said, ‘Mama, I remember you now.’ He said it in Zulu, and he got up and went to play with his sister.”

I was angry with myself for wondering if this really happened. I was worried about what lay ahead, the complexities of recovering and reintegrating. But my job at their home was done. My job in the edit suite wasn’t. I had a program to complete, a story to tell. 

I reviewed the material and tried to figure out the narrative. Was this about the random moments that led to finding a missing child? Was it about how change really happens in South Africa, and the small acts of kindness that disprove racial stereotypes? I wanted to do an exposé on Sergeant Mangope and his office’s neglect; my antipathy towards that man was almost violent. But this was bigger than him. What happened to the Legang family was one of the many consequences of policing and resources having been focused on keeping Black people down, and not on their needs as human beings and citizens. But that wasn’t the story I had been commissioned to tell.

A child went missing, a child was found. I met the people who lived through the ordeal, I put their story on public display, and I tied a neat bow around in the form of that final image of Sello and his sister sleeping side by side in the family bed. Leave them in peace, I thought, leave them to rebuild their lives. 

I stayed in touch with Petronella for a few months after the story aired. I would call on a phone at her work and wait about thirty minutes till someone found her. She continued to tell me things were okay, Sello was doing well. She was grateful for gifts received from compassionate viewers, some of whom approached me to find out what the family needed. 

“A fridge, please, just a small one,” she said when I asked. 

And Bongani – he requested a goat, one they could slaughter in a traditional ceremony to thank the ancestors for their good fortune. 

Twenty-two months later, a man, suspicious that his fiancé couldn’t produce her daughter’s birth certificate in support of his bid to adopt the child, called in the police. The child was Micaela Hunter. She was returned to her parents. The South African media went wild. 

And now? It’s easy to find out what happened to Micaela Hunter, her parents, her abductor, the fiancée – it’s all over the internet, it’s the stuff of True Crime podcasts and glossy magazine covers. But of the Lekwezi family, there is no trace. I buried them amongst other stories and jobs I was busy with in the 90s. Then years passed. Then decades. I can’t find any information about them. They don’t exist on Google or Linked-In or other social media platforms. Not even Sello, who would be 37 now. It’s impossible to track down a miner and a cleaner in jobs that don’t last. And I couldn’t find their house if I tried, it’s located in a place where so much has changed, even the town got a new name. It’s no longer Witbank. It’s now called Emalahleni, the place of coal. 

Following exciting careers in television production and entrepreneurial businesses, Leora has now succumbed to her love for writing. She recently completed an MFA at Mountainview, is making the finishing touches to her first novel, and continues to write shorter pieces of fiction and non-fiction. She makes sure she has time to watch her son play soccer, visit her daughter in college, travel and kayak with her husband, and make frequent visits to friends and family in Johannesburg.