Alissa Nutting

UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

For Shawn—loving me is an unclean job

I stand… with the urgency that saying I creates, a facing up to sheer presence, death and responsibility, the potential for blowing away all the gauze.

– Alice Notley, “The Poetics of Disobedience”

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

I gave a sidelong glance

--I couldn’t look any higher--

at shadowy gray knees,

trousers and skirts and boots

and different pairs of hands

lying under the lamps.

I knew that nothing stranger

had ever happened, that nothing

stranger could ever happen.

– Elizabeth Bishop, “In The Waiting Room”

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

DINNER

I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound and our intestines and mouths are stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.

The guy next to me resembles Elvis because of his fluffy, vaguely-pubic black hairdo. It may be the humidity.

Across the kettle a man is trying to cry, but his tears keep mixing with his sweat and instead of looking sad he just seems extra warm. For a moment, I have the romantic thought that maybe we are actually boiling in tears, hundreds of thousands of them, the sweetest-true tears of infants and children instead of a yellowy, chickenish broth.

I am the only woman in the kettle, which strikes me as odd. I’m voluptuous and curvy; I can understand why someone would want to gobble me up. The men do not look so delicious. One, a very old man across the kettle from me, keeps drifting in and out of a semi-conscious state. His head droops down towards the broth then suddenly, just as the tip of his nose touches one of the surface’s bubbles, he snaps upright and utters a name. “Stanley” is the first. The second, “David.” We think he is saying the names of his children; we even continue to humor him after he gets to the fifteenth (perhaps he’s moved on to grandchildren?), but as he yells his fortieth name it’s clear that he is not poignant but nuts.

“He isn’t crazy,” the crying man sobs. “These are the last few moments of our lives. Shouldn’t we all be calling out the names of everyone we’ve ever met? Ever known? Ever loved?”

“Uh-huh,” agrees Elvis.

But the man to Elvis’ left is not as fond of this idea. A series of teardrop tattoos on his upper cheek indicate victories in multiple prison-kills. Ironically, he is tied up right next to the crying man. “I like quiet,” the tattooed man says.

The man directly next to me on the right, he isn’t really my type. His features are youthful and feminine in a way that makes him resemble a boyish Peter Pan. But he’s smiling at me through the spices and trimmings shoved into his mouth; undeterred by them he manages a nice, soft look.

Since we’re about to be eaten, I lower my standards and choose to be bold.

“I love you,” I say. It’s coming from a good-pretend place. I just want to pack as much into these last few moments as I can.

Yet when I watch the impact my words have on his face, the effect is very real. Maybe, I figure, since we are all cooking towards the finish line, things are kind of fast-forwarding. Maybe what I’d just said could actually be true.

And then it is. Seconds pass and love for him grows suddenly, like ice crystals or sea monkeys, all over my body.

We stare at one another and he scoots towards me as much as our fetters will allow, enough that our fingertips can touch. “I love you too,” he says. “If we weren’t tied up, I’d give you the softest kiss you’ve ever felt in your life, right on your steamy lips.”

From the corner of my eye, I notice the tattooed man, who up until this point hasn’t been very chatty, is suddenly showing variegated upper teeth. His lips pull back wide in order to verbalize the list of things he would do to me, were we not tied up. They are not romantic or legal.

“You’re a monster,” my lover says to him. “The rest of us shouldn’t have to boil in your juices.”

“Uh-huh,” agrees Elvis.

“We’re dying just like this criminal,” weeps the crying man. “It isn’t fair.”

Suddenly the old man raises his head. A drop of yellow broth falls from his chin. “Amanda,” he rasps, then his eyes roll back and his head falls down. I smile.

“That’s my name!” Glee fills me though I don’t know why. “He just spoke my name,” I tell my new lover, whose fingertips squeeze my own.

“Amanda.” My lover whispers my name into the hot mist.

“What if it’s some kind of death list,” the crying man snivels. “What if that old codger has been here for ages, been in pots with hundreds of people who’ve all been eaten, but he always gets left behind because he’s so old. It would drive a person crazy. It might make him repeat over and over again the names of people he’s had to watch die in a half-hearted attempt to bring them back.” After pondering this, the crying man lets out a long, shrill sob that is chirp-like. It reminds me of a parakeet I had when I was young. I try to remember its name.

“Dan,” the old man says.

“That’s my name,” my lover laughs, bouncing a little in the water. “He just said our names back-to-back. It’s like our love planted them in his head!”

The tattooed man makes a gagging noise.

For fun, I ask everyone to please mouth his name, just to see if the old man will say it next. I encourage them to hurry up and do it while the old man’s head is flaccid beneath a layer of broth.

“Hector,” whimpers the crying man.

“Sam,” sings Elvis.

“Fuck off,” mutters the tattooed man.

Dan and I watch the old man with anticipation. Finally his aged face surfaces, and he gums the taste of the broth droplets on his cheeks before saying “Lancelot.”

“See,” my lover coos. “Our names before; it was magic.”

I want this moment to stay. I want it to multiply on and on with the unnatural growth of things just before death, speeding off the pure fat of life’s last moments. I want the feeling of our brushing fingertips to breed like cancerous cells.

When the steel door opens, even the old man sits up and blinks his wet lashes. A chef walks in sharpening a long knife against a stone. “Who first?” he barks. We’re all silent, though I think I hear the old man whisper “Daisy.”

“Alright then.” The chef points his knife at me and moves it a little like he’s writing his name in the air. “I’ll take you, since you’re the meatiest.”

I give my lover a farewell glance but suddenly his screams fill the room. “No!” he cries, thrashing madly and fish-like. “Take me in her place. Please, I beg you, make her the very last one.”

“Okay,” agrees the chef. But first he twirls his knife at me a little more, like he’s casting a spell, just so I know who’s in charge.

Two men wearing long oven gloves come over and cut my lover’s ropes. He stretches his lips out to kiss me, but is too soon pulled away and carried from the room like a ladder—one man at his shoulders, one man at his feet. “Please,” he begs, “one kiss,” but the two men aren’t as permissive as the cook. They possibly do not speak English, or any language.

“That was so beautiful,” sobs the crying man. “Such love.”

Despite my grief, I try to live in the moment. “Do you sing?” I ask Elvis-Sam.

“There’s a moon out, tonight,” he croons. The garlic cloves really muffle his vibrato.

When the chef and his goons reenter, the tattooed man speaks up.

“Take me,” he says, “I hate these people.”

So they take him. As he’s pulled from the water, we see that he also has a tattoo on his arm that reads, MOTHER. This makes Crying-Hector cry even harder. “I should’ve called my mother more,” he laments. “Told her I love her and appreciate her cooking.”

“This one’s for Mother,” says Elvis-Sam. He begins singing again. “You are the sunshine of my life.”

Crying-Hector’s sobs are uncontrollable. His emotion touches me. I watch the ripples in the broth move from his torso over to mine, lapping at my stomach like a soft current. “It will be okay, Hector,” I assure him. I want to extend my foot across our little bullion pond and wipe his tears with my brothy toes, but my legs are bound together at the ankles.

When the door opens, four men, increasingly sour from the first to the fourth, enter with the chef. “I need two,” he orders. The men grab Elvis-Sam and Crying-Hector, who continue singing and weeping respectively as they are carried away.

Alone with the old man it is very quiet, and I realize how loud the boiling noises have become. He lifts his head and says, “Heidi.”

I knew a Heidi once. From ballet class in high school. I imagine being taken from the kettle and laid onto a silver platter next to a giant cake, and on top of that cake is Heidi, posed in a graceful pirouette.

When they lift the old man from the broth, I’m surprised to see he is missing a leg. I wonder if he arrived with it missing, or if they’d eaten his leg and then put him back.

With the others all gone, the boiling bubbles feel far more scalding than before. I am bad at science and uncertain if before we had all somehow shared the heat but now I alone bear its brunt. It seems so. I miss my lover, and my willingness to suffer perhaps makes the broth feel hotter as well.

As the footsteps come, I wonder if there will be anything after death. Perhaps Dan will be waiting for me on the other side and our new and budding love will be allowed to blossom from the beyond. Then, although morbid, I try to prepare myself for what it will feel like when they cut me up. “There are worse ways to die,” I tell myself, “than being boiled then sliced with a knife.” But it takes me awhile to think of one.

Finally I imagine being carried out the door to a table where all five of my kettle-mates are waiting, forks and knives in their hands, skins still pink from the boiling broth. I imagine Dan saying he has dibs on my heart, and the others laughing; Elvis singing “Goodnight, sweetheart,” as my carving starts and I lose consciousness to the sounds of battling forks and knives. This daydream dampens the horror of my fate like a bowl placed over a candle. You can bear anything, I tell myself, if you know you’re not alone, and the cold air stings my cooked skin as the men lift me into their arms. Their fingers are strong with knowledge; I’m only going where the others have already been.

MODEL’S ASSISTANT

My best friend Garla is a model from somewhere Swedishy; if you try to pin down where, like what town, or if actually Sweden, she just yells, “Vodka,” or if she’s in a better mood, “Vodka, you know?” which seems like she’s maybe saying she’s Russian, but really she just wants to drink. Garla hates particulars, and is actually able to avoid them because where she actually lives is model-land. I wish I lived in model-land too, but the closest I can come to that is hanging out with Garla, which is like going on vacation to a model-land timeshare.

We met at a party in Chelsea that I pond-skipped to. I definitely wasn’t invited. I’d gone with a real friend to a not-so-hot party, and then left with her friend to go to a better party where I met someone new who took me to a quite hot party. It was there that I made out with the photographer who took me to the party of Garla. She wasn’t hosting it but she was present, and anywhere Garla goes is Garla’s party.

I think the only reason I ever saw Garla again was because I was drunk enough to tell her the truth. She was trying on bizarre clothes—there was a shroud that looked fiercely spacelike yet medical, like a gown one might wear to get a pap smear on Mars. Then Garla put on a dress whose pleating created the suggestion of a displaced goiter somewhere to the left of her neck and she sashayed towards me. I was holding my head onto my body, carefully and by the window, so that its breeze might sober me up enough to walk to the end of the room where I might then become sober enough to walk to the toilet and land on the floor. There, hopefully, the pressure from my cheek against my cell phone could call someone who knew me and liked me and wanted to get me a cab and make sure this night was not where my life’s journey would end. But for all I knew it was, and when I saw Garla I held on to my head just a little bit tighter, because she appeared to be strutting over to grab it and rip it off.

“You,” she said, and I straightened up grammar-school style. I puked in my mouth but absolutely did not open my lips and let it fall on the floor. “Do you like this?” She did a turn that was so beautiful and practiced and impossible but to Garla was something that accidentally slipped out of her like a tiny fart.

“It makes you look like you’re pregnant in the back,” I said, and used the nose of my beer bottle to itch the middle of my back where the seam of her dress magically globed out. She scowled and pranced off. I assumed she was offended until she brought over a silver-plated bowl filled with the car keys of various guests.

“Use for vomit,” she said, and then, “have phone,” and slipped a miniature crystallized computer-wallet into my purse. I think at that point two large, gray wolfhounds walked up to either side of her and the three of them then headed towards the kitchen. “You love dogs and have a tendency to hallucinate them,” I told myself as I stumbled towards the bathroom. Various refined guests were staring at me with horror as I pawed around Helen Keller-style, groping everything in sight to stabilize my journey into a small room housing cold linoleum and a sink. “Why am I always the nerd at the party?” I thought. “I am in my thirties and by now I should at least know how to pretend.”

The thing about bathrooms in parties is they don’t always stay bathrooms; they start out as such but then become make-out rooms or coke rooms or shower-bubble-madness rooms. When I burst through the door holding my abdomen, a slight and waify couple seemed to be using it as a get-to know-one-another room; they were drinking very red wine, sitting on the side of the bathtub and giggling, drawing simple pictures with fingertips of wine onto the white tile. The “braap” sound I made while becoming sick intrigued them a little bit. They were children nearly, perhaps nineteen. I could feel them looking at me with something real and concentrated. I don’t think it was pity as much as curiosity; they seemed to wonder very much what it might be like to be so uncomposed. “I don’t get when people use puking in art,” said the boy, and the girl said, “Well it’s not like that, when they do,” meaning not like me but like Garla throwing up pink paint onto a teal ceramic raccoon.

“I need a cab,” I mumbled, and the boy was sympathetic but firm.

“I won’t touch you,” he told me.

“Of course not,” I said, “Heavens no. Just call one and I’ll get myself down to the door.”

It took a great while to do this. At some point I wondered if I should try to find Garla and give her the phone back, but then I saw a great flash and there she was, the camera’s light bouncing off her translucent thigh, her foot inside the host’s tropical aquarium. Everyone wanted a shot of her leather bondage shoe surrounded by fake coral: people were holding up cell phones and professional equipment and thin digital cameras, “Tickle fish,” Garla was saying to everyone, and there was simply no way I could have that amount of attention suddenly focus over to my own body, even if I was waving a phone that belonged to the darling of their affections. I was like a turd inside someone who’d accidentally swallowed an engagement ring: I was nothing, yet I carried something uniquely special.

I fell easily down the stairs and by the time I was able to stand, to my great surprise, a cab had come. “Thank you,” I called up to the beautiful children in the bathroom, but it was a gurgle and I knew they weren’t listening.

I kept the phone on my desk for several days wondering what to do about it. There was something wrong with the phone; it didn’t ring. Garla’s phone would ring, wouldn’t it?

It didn’t ring until the fourth day.

“Hi Womun.” It was Garla. I began explaining how I’d meant to give it back, etc., but she stopped me quite quickly, “It your phone for me. I call you with it,” she said, to which I could’ve said a lot of things, like how I already have a phone, or that I was very afraid of getting killed for this jewel-phone, should someone see me talking on it in my neighborhood, because I don’t have a lot of money and neither does anyone else who lives here, but oftentimes people badly need money, for personal reasons, and desperate times/desperate measures.

“I get you for fashion show,” she said, “tonight at the seven-thirty.”

Out of some type of pride I wanted to make sure that she didn’t mean I would be in the fashion show, that it wasn’t an ironic thing where the beautifuls each try to snag themselves an ugly, and whoever snags the ugliest ugly and dresses it up is the winner. “You mean go watch one with you?” I asked, and she said “Ha,” then lit a cigarette and said, “Ha. Ha. I mean this,” and told me where to meet her.

Since that night my life has changed in a myriad of ways. I’m still no one, unless I am with Garla, and then I become With Garla, a new and exciting identity that makes nearly everything possible, except being a model myself. And except being someone when I am not with Garla.

At the oxygen bar, Garla gives my face three firm slaps on the cheek. She is always taking grandmotherly liberties such as these. “Put you in special coffin,” she says, which is a term of endearment on her part but I don’t know what it means exactly. I like to think that it’s a sort of Snow White reference, that I’m dear to her in some way that entails it would be pleasant for her to have me on her nightstand forever asleep in a glass box. Though I guess it could also mean she wants to say goodnight and close me inside an iron maiden.

Garla is sitting in front of a laptop with a solar charger plugged into it, although it is raining outside and we are in a darkened room. Garla doesn’t have opinions on things; she’s not really the pro or con type. Right now she is into global warming because she knows that global warming is chic. Things are either chic or they aren’t, and if they’re chic then they’re for Garla. “The web won’t come,” Garla says.

“Solar charger,” I point out. “There’s no sun.”

“Global warming,” Garla says. She will often randomly say the media titles of controversial topics, such as “Crisis in Darfur,” then take a drink and be silent for a few more hours.

A woman wearing a unisex hemp robe enters with two tanks and two breathing masks, hooking Garla in first. With the mask on Garla appears to be a pilot from the future, possibly a computer-generated one. Her perfect skin looks like a plasma screen.

“I love your accent,” the smocked woman says. “Where are you from?”

“Vodka, you know?” says Garla, and the woman’s eyes frown; perhaps she has just Botoxed because I can tell she really wants to frown but her eyes simply flutter a little.

“Could she get a glass of vodka,” I translate, and the woman mentions that alcohol is not usually consumed during the treatment. She is already on the way to get it though, and when she returns there’s also a glass for me.

It gets a little overwhelming in the mask when the pure oxygen starts to hit us at the same time as the vodka. Garla takes my hand. I don’t know if I’m attracted to her or if she’s just beautiful. I think it’s the latter because she doesn’t say much, and what she does say doesn’t make much sense. But people don’t have to talk a lot or make sense for others to love them. Just look at dogs and babies.

“Cloud of vodka!” Garla screams. I decide she wants another glass because I want another glass, so I hold two fingers up at the woman in hemp while pointing down to our melted ice. Garla, I think, you are a magic swan with Tourette’s. My fingers stay in an upright “peace” position; with our masks I imagine that Garla and I are on some kind of extreme rollercoaster that goes into the stratosphere, and we’re passing the camera that takes a picture for us to buy at the end, and I am saying, “This is me and Garla. Peace.”

She has made me the best-dressed party nerd of all time. Once, she put these chain link pants on me and I couldn’t move, not even like a robot. Garla—wearing six-inch stiletto heels—actually picked me up, carried me up the stairs to the party, and planted me by yet another fish tank, either so I’d have something to watch or because she knew that at some point, a part of her body would be posing inside of it and she very much wanted for me to be there to say, “Now Garla has to go home” when it started to get boring for her.

There was never a conversation where Garla hired me to be her assistant. I just started speaking up when it made sense to, like when people asked if they could cut her arm a tiny bit with a sword in order to drink a drop of it off the blade’s tip and she answered them with “Special coffin,” in a very tiny voice. “We have to go, Garla,” I used to say, but I soon learned that “Garla has to go” is a better way to phrase it, because then it seems like it’s entirely out of her control and she doesn’t have a choice. Garla does not like choices.

Tonight we go to another fashion show. Garla’s walking in it so I wait backstage in the chair where her makeup was done, and at several points people inquire as to why I’m there. Very few actually want me to leave; they’re just genuinely trying to understand.

Afterwards we go to the home of a fellow model where I watch Garla drink herself into a deep sea. She is a metronomcial drinker. I can count the glasses she drinks per hour, like a time signature, and know exactly how drunk she is at any given moment. With me it’s the opposite; the drunk is that mystery wedding guest who may show up early, late, or not at all. By four a.m. Garla is lying on an island countertop in the kitchen. Some guy has dumped a miniature Buddhist sand garden out on her abdomen, and he’s swirling the sand around over her stomach with a tiny bamboo rake. Her head is not on the counter; it’s flipped back like a Pez dispenser, and I walk over and we have this intoxicated moment.

“I know you’re more,” my drunken eyes say. They say this in a breathy, hesitant manner that insists it has taken a lot of time for them to work up the courage to say such a thing, without words nonetheless.

“Yes,” answer Garla’s eyes, and like all of Garla’s answers it is a mysterious pearl whose full value I begin to appraise immediately. I walk over to her and lift her head up with my hands so it is level with the counter, holding it. I look down at her like a surgeon.

“Some type of sausage,” Garla says; she likes the cured meats.

It is hard not to drop her head, not to toss it away like a shell that seemed of greater worth from a distance, beneath the water.

I keep wondering if Garla will ask me to quit my regular job copyediting and join her full-time in model-land. Her agency is very good to her, but I know she needs me, or at least could really use me, more than she does, which leads me to wonder two things: Does Garla have others like Me? If so, how many Mes are there? Does she really need Me at all? The thing about Garla is that it’s always okay for Garla. No matter what happens, Garla will be okay. I just speed the okayness up a little bit for her so that okay is sure to happen in real time.

Although my life has so many more great things in it now than before I met Garla, I’m still beginning to feel used. And—how can I deny this—I want more of Garla. She is a rare substance, if only because of the role and power she has in our society and not anything she holds innately. Rare substances make people feel selfish and greedy, and Garla is no exception. Neither am I.

I am also getting a little sick of my special Garla-phone, but it’s really expensive and the only thing Garla will call me on. I got rid of my other phone and now have only the phone Garla gave me, perhaps because I know she intended it to only be used when she called me, and this is a small rebellion on my part. Garla doesn’t pick up on rebellions though, big or small. She has no need for them.

I decide to ask if I can be her paid assistant, because she probably will not say yes or no, and I can just interpret it as yes. If anything, by quitting my job and hanging out with her more I will get additional goodies I can eBay, and Garla’s schwag pays several times more than my current employer.

I strike when we are in the back of a town car on the way to a designer’s private shoot. Garla is stretched out on my lap with her muss of blond hair hanging down over my knees. Her hair is softer than my shaved legs.

“Garla,” I say, “I’m going to quit my job and be your assistant. You don’t have to pay me hardly anything. I don’t make very much as it is.” There’s a pause and she hands up a tiny golden comb to me, I presume for me to begin brushing her hair with. I also presume this means “yes,” is a quid pro quo gesture. I call my boss right then on the Garla-phone and quit as loudly as I can without seeming hostile, just to try to burn the event a little deeper into the ether of Garla’s memory.

The shoot goes well. Afterwards I take her glasses of chilled vodka that look like refreshing water and we have a look at the pictures, which are beautiful. We leave with giant bags of expensive clothing that we didn’t pay or ask for.

I am feeling more visible by the second. Perhaps, I think, I should move into Garla’s apartment. That way I’d always be there to do whatever she needed, and there wouldn’t be all the Garla-phone calls in the middle of the night; she could just yell or do a special grunt. Although Garla never needs to yell. Everyone is already paying attention.

Except the next morning, she doesn’t answer my calls, and she doesn’t call me. This goes on for another week and a half. I sulk like a real model. I don’t eat and I drink lots of vodka and I cut my own hair in the bathroom with dull scissors and then regret it, and the next morning I think about going to a really expensive salon and having it fixed except I don’t have the money for that, especially now that I have no job. For that, I need Garla.

This is the root of my pain. I had convinced myself that she needed me, when really, anyone could and would do what I did: follow around a gorgeous person and get gifts and call outrages by name for what they are. How did I lend any type of panache to that role? Looking in the mirror at my botched home haircut, I realize that my new expensive clothes still look nerdy because they don’t fit me right. They never will.

When the Garla-phone finally lights up and makes its synthetic music, it’s like an air-raid siren. I’m paralyzed with fear but angst-ridden from loneliness and desperation. “Where have you been?” I scream. “We agreed I’d be your assistant. I quit my job! I haven’t seen you for like ten days!”

“Vodka head,” Garla explains. I want to pretend like nothing is wrong. “I’m not a bad assistant. I’m a good assistant, which means I need to be where you are, and help you with things.”

“Later, a party,” she says. I can hear happy screams in the background and their shrillness stabs into me. I know those screams belong to completely impractical people, and I hate them for it. “When?” I ask, “How do I get there?”

I stop by a nearby bar to have a few drinks alone before going up to the party. It feels good to sulk over a glass in public. How could I have let my guard down so badly? Before Garla, I had been all-guard. Before Garla, I would’ve seen Garla coming. My pre-Garla life suddenly seems like an amazing thing; I hadn’t even known what I was missing. As I walk out of the bar and look up near the balcony I’m headed to, I can actually see Garla. It makes me feel creepy but I stand there and watch for a while anyway, until the two of us seem like strangers. Under the streetlamp and despite our distance, I notice her bone structure dazzle in the candlelight.

Compared to her, I am like a sandwich. I am completely inhuman and benign. I try to remember a sandwich I’d eaten in the fourth grade and cannot. I can’t even really remember one I’d eaten a month ago. We all must be like fourth grade sandwiches to Garla.

It’s not until I get inside the suite and look around that I realize it’s the same residence where I first met Garla. This makes my hands and feet sweat rapidly; the line is suddenly becoming a circle.

But circles are infinite too. It’s not just lines that go on forever.

As the night moves on, it’s like going back in time. When I enter, Garla gives me a soft embrace and kisses my cheek, but I want restitution. I quit my job and had the week from hell, and she isn’t going to flash a quick smile and reenter my life. Maybe I’m replaceable, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

I take my old seat by the window and start rapidly boozing. The lights change colors in ways that suggest I’m going too fast, and that is the speed I want to go. It’s a rush, like skydiving. I keep giving Garla a scowl that says, “Hey, you. I’m not holding on. See my empty hands.”

She’s rubbing pieces of chocolate over her lips like Chap Stick and men are helplessly pulled to her side of the room. Garla’s face is a centrifuge that separates the confident from the weak and the jealous, and I have been spun away.

Stumbling to the bathroom, I get out my jeweled Garla-phone. Part of me wants to put it into the toilet, or at least try to see if it will fit through the hole in the bottom of the bowl. I want to puke on it but it is so shiny that with its jeweled crystals and my drunken compound fly-eye vision, I couldn’t aim if I wanted to. Instead the puke falls into the water and the phone falls on the ground, and when I’m finished and my cheek hits the floor the phone looks like a store of riches behind the plunger. I grab the phone and open it, kind of bumping it around, hoping it will call a friend who will come pick me up.

But it’s Garla’s phone, so it calls Garla. I hang up but a few minutes later she’s standing over me in an Amazonian manner, one leg on either side of my body. “Put you in tiny coffin,” she says, rolling out some toilet paper and batting it against my wet cheek.

“I wish you would.”

She doesn’t appreciate my display of self-pity. I watch her toss her martini glass out the window onto the patio where it breaks. “You go home and rest doctor-television.”

After she leaves, a bodyguard enters and picks me up with a disgusted look, like he’s emptying a full bedpan. He helps me into the taxi. Motoring away, I watch the colored streaks of Garla on the patio upstairs.

With panic I check my purse to make sure I still have it: the Garla-phone, the jewel. The cursed treasure that brought distress alongside fortune. Glistening in my lap it is too beautiful to be trusted. As the cab nears my apartment, I have the urge to leave the phone behind on the seat for someone else to find and answer. But I won’t. Instead I’ll go home and wait for her to call me and turn me into something special for however long she wants, and this time I won’t forget to be grateful.

PORN STAR

I’m expected to have anal sex with the winning contestant on the moon. I work on an Adult Network reality show called Eat It, where male contestants eat all they can of a given substance in order to win some level of fornication with the program’s hostesses. Our show’s executives decided to do a space episode for the season finale to keep up with the current trend of filming in extreme and sensational locations.

I found out that I got the space bid at a surprise luncheon in my honor. They gave me champagne and several helium-filled balloons with silver moons on the sides. I began to recall a documentary on the Discovery Channel about bathrooms on spaceships. Apparently the toilet sucks it in. It is like a pee-vacuum.

“Space itself is one big vacuum,” said Dick, the show’s host. He handed me a cupcake decorated with a frosting rocket ship. Dick is responsible for overseeing the eating contests and judging the line between an acceptable gag and a disqualifying vomit.

Throughout the party I smiled at the bad puns, the jokes about “reentry.” As I left, my coworker Priscilla told me how lucky I was.

“Space is like … hot right now, you know? An exclusive club.”

That night after a shower I stared down at my nipples and their bumpy, vaguely lunar surface. I checked the show’s online message boards to see what people were saying about my selection. Even though I’ve only been on the show for one season, I’m a hit with viewers.

GoodEatFan from New Jersey wrote, Her breasts have a soft expanding look about them, like rising bread. Most of them talk about my trademark—my hair. It’s really brown and thick and long, and every contestant I’ve ever been assigned to, before we start doing anything, has always turned me around and pushed his member into my hair. It’s the first thing that happens, every time. Of course that won’t be possible on the moon.

Before I even meet the contestants, the show execs and I watch them get interviewed. We spy in on their conversation through a one-way mirror, giving the whole situation a police-sting kind of feel.

The contestants I’ll be doing the show with are Guff, Leo, and Bill. Guff owns his own fertilizer company and is by far the largest of the bunch. His voice is crazy-deep. Dick can’t get over it.

“If James Earl Jones yodeled into the universe’s vagina, Guff’s voice is the noise that would echo back.”

Kevin in HR agrees. “His chest seems supported by some exterior plate that’s masked with hair.”

A hidden camera—they’re everywhere—zooms in on Guff’s face. He is a mouth-breather. His teeth are a variety of sizes in all the wrong places, as if they’d once fallen out and he had to shove them back in a hurry with no regard to their original position. He looks naked without a log of wood beneath his arm, though this is the first time I’ve ever seen him, and he’s logless. I bet he likes waffles.

Leo is physically much smaller than I am. What’s sad is, I can tell he thinks he really dressed up for the audition. He’s a disaster of buttons. Every single button on his shirt is closed and there appears to be an unnatural number of buttons—auxiliary buttons and safety buttons to back up the backup buttons, vestigial buttons that hang at the tops of his sleeves as though, many centuries ago, a pocket may have been there. His hair is too long for his face and it makes him look extra-gaunt. I hear the executives mumble that he should be given a second HIV test, just to be sure, he doesn’t look too good, and they’re right. When I glance at Leo, it’s like seeing a lemon the color of tooth enamel.

Sheila, the only other female in the room, says, “It’s as if he lives in a median between our world and a race of anemic man-lizards. He lives there in his car.” Sheila’s an exec, not a do-er, but she seems to constantly place herself in do-er shoes and ask, Who could ever touch him? She’s asking this question to everyone but me. I’m the answer, though, so I speak up.

“I vote keep him. He won’t be any trouble. It’s more than we can say about Guff.”

A consenting murmur makes its way around the table.

Bill is Bill. Each episode they choose at least one contestant who could be misconstrued, on a good day, as not completely repulsive, and this episode it’s Bill. The fact that he knows this, that he’s receiving “hottie billing,” makes him so much more sleazy and disgusting than the others. He is in no way actually attractive. Someone from casting was probably instructed to go into a PTA meeting, find the one guy there with the smallest boobs and the shortest receding hairline, and to not take any points off if his eyes were far apart. Instead of “for sure,” he keeps saying, “for surely.” The interviewer finally asks if Shirley is someone close to him. He roars. He acts as if he’s met his comical match and tries to give a high-five, which the interviewer does not take him up on.

I meet the contestants in person on the first day of physical training. It’s being taped as bonus footage for the season’s DVD. We’re going to put on the suits and walk around in an underwater tank.

Guff, who apparently developed extraordinary lung capacity by playing the baritone through high school, is requesting he not have to wear the suit or receive oxygen.

“I’ve got heavy boots,” he says. “I’ll just walk with you on the bottom.”

“No showing off,” I tease. I’m supposed to tease. I’m wearing a surfer-style bodysuit that has breast-like gel inserts sewn into the chest pockets. My actual breasts are spilling out the top of the suit, creating the effect that they’re jewels of a much larger crown. Occasionally I remember that I’m the lone woman on the entire set and that everyone is staring at me, but it’s something that only comes back to me every twenty minutes or so, about five minutes after I recall that I’m completely stoned.

“Your beauty is beautiful,” Guff says, and immediately realizes he should’ve spiced the compliment up a bit. Before he starts trying to dig himself out of that hole, I notice he’s eating a package of Lance Peanut Butter Crackers.

“Are those things ever fresh?” I ask.

He looks down at the package as though it will give him the answer. Neon-orange crumbs are furrowed in his beard like lice from another planet.

“I just mean,” I say, “every time I see them in a vending machine, they look like they’ve been sitting there since the seventies. Maybe it’s the wrappers.”

Guff’s chest starts heaving up and down, and I take a few steps back. It’s possible that Lance products from vending machines are the only thing he ever eats and that they are the source of his superhuman size and strength. Maybe before he found Lance products he was as thin as Leo. I suddenly worry that I just insulted his favorite thing in life. I think about how I would feel if someone came up to me and said, “What are Valium addicts thinking? Pills can never make you truly happy!”

But instead he starts laughing, guttural undulations somewhere between the Green Giant and Santa. Leo walks over to the corner of the room, curling to it like it’s his mother. He whispers, “I love those crackers.”

Guff likes this. It doesn’t take long before brains meet brawn and the two of them form a symbiotic relationship, like barnacle and whale. When they stand next to each other, I get the feeling that Leo recently broke out of Guff’s chest, that he started as a tapeworm but fought his way up the evolutionary ladder.

Bill, of course, is too good to talk to anyone but me. I notice that his enormous gold watch doesn’t work.

A medical crew puts us through a series of tests to check our vitals: treadmill running, push-ups, that sort of thing. Bill keeps checking out his own ass in the mirror. I watch him stare at my ass, then his ass, then mine, then his, as though they’re having a conversation with one another and only he can hear it.

Leo has taken this occasion as an opportunity to quit smoking, which is laudable, except the combination of physical exertion and nicotine patches are making him ill. When it’s his turn for the treadmill, he runs over and his shirt is soaked from warm-ups. He peels it off and there are already four patches over his chest, sitting almost exactly where the doctor intends to put the electrodes.

“Are those supposed to be placed directly over the heart?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. A former contestant I had to sleep with wore a patch once. When he said to me, Baby, watch the patch, eh?, I first stared with confusion at his small, triangular goatee. But then he lifted his sleeve and displayed the patch with great pride, the way a fifth grader might show off a temporary tattoo of a cobra. Apparently it hurts if the patches get bumped, which he used as an excuse to not flex for me. As if I’d been looking forward to that.

We wait until Leo is done throwing up then go get into our suits. Once inside, Leo’s arms, which previously looked like blanched string beans, now appear to be relatively the same size as Bill’s. This boosts his confidence.

Guff and Leo solidify their union underwater. Instead of using the reach-claw we’ve been provided with, Guff places Leo on his shoulders and operates him like an extended limb. Bill keeps dropping his claw and cursing into his headset microphone. He is unable to complete his “mission” of using the claw to tighten a loose bolt.

I take a moment and enjoy the secluded world we’ve entered, in addition to my new role as an asexual giant. It’s fun to be individually wrapped and surrounded by water on all sides. Just when I’m starting to feel like one of the guys, Bill lumbers over.

“Wanna see my electric eel?”

He places his fishbowl head against mine, and we clink like crystal glasses toasting.

At lunch Guff devours all the complimentary sandwiches then asks for more, like some steroidal Oliver Twist from the lumber-and-fur orphanage. Leo ended up having to eat activated charcoal. When we were coming up from the water he puked in his suit, specifically inside his face helmet. It covered the entire lens and made it impossible to tell whether he’d gotten sick or his head had exploded. Bill claimed to have lost his appetite over this incident, but after desuiting I saw him walk straight to the catering table.

The rest of the day it’s just Guff, Bill, and me. Leo has taken the afternoon off to recover. Guff keeps giving Bill this odd look out the corner of his eye, like he knows Bill is hiding a cookie in one of his pockets—he just can’t figure out which one.

I still haven’t really thought about what I’m going up to the moon to do. I’m a little afraid of being known as space’s first whore, even though I don’t really feel like a whore. I never have. At least I’m not giving people root canals. At least I’m not putting makeup on the dead.

As the day ends, the show’s executives give us a sneak peak at our real suits. By us, I mean whoever wins and myself. Each suit has a small portal; mine’s in the back and his is in the front. The man who’s explaining it to us wraps their ends around each other, like marching elephants clinging trunks to tails. Once they’re aligned, they open, pressurize, and retract to an acceptable length. This way he can enter me. On the moon.

Because I’ll be in a suit and will look like a hulking male physicist from behind, they’ve outfitted the back of my helmet with a monitor. It’ll show footage of me, doing what we’ll be doing, only un-space-suited.

“Any questions?” the scientist asks.

Bill has one. “Can you like, kneel down and stuff?”

I imagine Bill’s panting coming through my headset in stereo. It’s going to sound like he’s in boot camp fulfilling a midday order to dig a ten-foot latrine. The secret to having sex with people who make disgusting sounds is to out-moan them. It gets them there quicker, too, which is half the battle.

A few days before the launch, the contestants are brought in to sample the eat-off product, which was partially designed by NASA. Because the food must be unable to break off and create airborne crumbs, the execs chose a type of hybrid sausage. It’s a gelatinous, partial-meat substance that won’t flake or fragment.

“Could we make this peanut butterier?” Guff’s vote for a flavor infusion is denied.

“It doesn’t smell like anything,” says Leo. This is true, but Leo says this carefully, as if he knows they’re about to tell him, It smells delicious.

“Actually,” says one scientist, “it should smell like plastic.”

Leo sniffs again. He nods.

Bill is holding a coil of sausage in two fingers, like it’s the world’s longest cigar.

“Uh,” says Bill.

This should be good.

“I mean, do we have to eat something that looks so much like a you-know-what? Once in a while people even say the word ‘sausage’ instead of saying you-know-what.”

“It’s just food,” I tell him. “It’s just meat.”

“Well,” says the scientist, “it’s not just meat.” He goes on to list several items that aren’t normally found in either sausages or you-know-whats.

We’re told that the eat-off contest will be taped and performed when the ship is hovering overtop the moon. The winning contestant and I will then travel in a small capsule to the lunar surface to perform the sex act. The way the executive describes it sounds oddly like a honeymoon, a man and wife being escorted off to more private quarters.

Blast-off is hard. There’s a moment when my mind tells me that we’ve blown up, and it takes a few more seconds to realize that we haven’t. I feel like my bones are being chewed upon by a glacier with really dull teeth.

Then everything stops. The cabin is instantly too still. When I look at my reflection in a chrome panel, the expression on my face seems a thousand years old.

Bill mutters something about being a space cowboy. I’m staring at Dick, the only one here I really know. He’s looking out the window, and he seems horrified. Instead of coming with me and the contestants to train before the launch, he opted to prepare using his own regimen of hypnosis and magnet therapy.

“Dick, are you okay?” My voice sounds weird. I decide I should just have a space persona, and that way I can quit feeling so uncomfortable about nothing being the same. I rename myself Lorna. I roll the r in a Spanish way and bat my eyelashes at the lack of gravity.

Dick is not okay.

He’s very tan, and loves being very tan, and perhaps this explains his sudden preoccupation with the sun.

“Where is the sun?” He keeps screaming this. It’s making Leo unsettled. Guff is looking for the sun inside the cabin.

Bill is trying to recite a list of one-liners from memory and keeps having to look down at the cheat-sheet in his hand. Most of the hottie-billing contestants try to memorize jokes before taping. Once the camera starts rolling, they never remember them. Never.

The medical adviser/cameraman tranquilizes Dick and straps him into a cocoon on the wall. It looks as though some giant spider caught him and hung him there. I keep watching the cargo door for a human-sized space arachnid to enter and devour him whole. I rub Dick’s arm a little bit and drool comes out of his mouth. It’s decided that I’ll host the show on my own.

We take about an hour or so to tumble through the air and get used to weightlessness. Quarters are tight and Bill keeps reaching out to tickle my feet. I can feel my stomach and my crotch in the same place; there is no middle. Just my head and then everything else.

“I really don’t feel like eating,” Leo says as they give him his food-coil. After several debates, the execs decided to wrap it in yet another layer of edible protective casing. If the coil were actually dropped onto the ground on Earth, it would probably bounce.

Bill points to my chest for the camera. “I’ve got all the inspiration I need right there,” he says. I want to remind Bill that even if he wins, he won’t be seeing or touching my breasts at any point in time. But I don’t. I get out my stopwatch for the eat-off. Guff has already opened his mouth wide in a head start.

“Ready… get set… go!”

The first thirty seconds of the race are always the best, showcasing an initial rush of adrenaline. For a moment, it seems like anyone’s game. Guff is by far the biggest, but the problem with large contestants is that they’re used to eating out of hunger. He has already taken in about two feet of sausage (who knows what percentage of that is plastic), and really can’t be too hungry anymore.

Bill is hurting; it’s clear. I know a lot about the gag reflex. Throats are one-way lanes, up or down, and it’s my professional opinion that Bill’s throat has now switched to rising motion.

Leo, skinny dark-horse candidate Leo, is surprising us all. He’s eating in snakelike motions, slithering his coil down like it’s one of his own organs that he coughed up on accident—there’s a place for it, and he knows where it goes, and he’s putting it there.

In the last thirty seconds, Bill has to quit and strap on his puke sack. It Velcros to his face like a giant gray shoe. I watch with pleasure as his abdominal contortions propel him around the cabin.

Guff has almost quit moving and resembles a gargantuan toy that needs to be rewound. Leo finishes ten seconds before the deadline. We declare him the winner, and as he and I get strapped into the craft that will take us down to the moon’s surface, he keeps saying, “I’ve never won anything before.”

As we step out I feel like there’s a tree growing from my abdomen whose leaves weigh fifty pounds each. They keep falling off and floating down to my knees with a heavy thickness.

I’m watching Leo attempt a bouncing sort of walk when the intercom on my helmet beeps. “We’re ready.” It’s one of the show’s executives on Earth; I can’t remember his name but he always wears funny ties. Funny in a bad way. Tiny cans of beer with angel wings.

Something about hearing his voice amidst all the nothingness makes me realize I’m being watched. It’s a sensation that oddly has never occurred before in the past during any close-up, or even times when I had to squat over a toilet bowl that wasn’t a bowl at all but a giant camera. I feel my fake-smile muscles involuntarily flex.

Leo gets behind me, and I give him an encouraging low-gravity pat on the arm. It takes a few moments for our suits’ portals to align. When they open, it sounds like something very important is leaking out. The noise is high-pitched and quick, like wind from the future.

“Um…just a second,” says Leo.

I tell him, “No rush; there isn’t a time limit,” although we’re breathing tanked oxygen and there certainly is. When he finally enters me, I’m staring at Earth, which looks like the circular door of some ancient tomb, like if we could just reach out and slide it aside, the answer to something very important would be revealed.

There’s a hiccup of static and I can hear the execs talking: Why does this look so educational? and Should’ve gone with the body bubble. I moan their voices out.

“Er… just a sec,” Leo says again.

“Take your time,” I say, but I break from my sex-voice to say it.

“Keep it hot,” the intercom reminds me.

I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.

ZOOKEEPER

I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to. I decided to keep my job there, at least for a while, so as not to look suspicious.

Dolores from reptiles almost got me.

“Aren’t those panda droppings?” she asked, pointing to my hair.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I put on a helmet. The panda and I were still working through bathroom and sleeping arrangements.

I named her Lulu. Pandas really like bamboo. That’s not a myth.

At the time I was living in a room of the Sleep-Eeze Inn. All my local calls were free, as was my cable. I put up a DO NOT DISTURB! sign but worried it might fall off, so I taped several others like it to the actual door.

One night I came home from work with some chicken tenders. I figured the two of us could share them. I did not bring enough for all the policemen who were outside my door.

I pretended to be part of the crowd. I pinched a mother of five on her elbow.

“What’s up?” I asked.

She covered the ears of her youngest. “They thought someone was making a pornographic film in that room. There were all these signs up and people heard growling and scratching.”

I saw them carrying out Lulu. She looked at me with her giant panda eyes.

“Mother,” she yelled.

I didn’t know that pandas could talk. It might have been an accident.

While the cops questioned me, Lulu and I tidied up what was left of the continental breakfast in the lounge. I stuck Fruit Loops on the tips of her canine teeth. She seemed to be smiling.

I went to jail. Lulu went to the zoo.

There’s a website, freelulu.com, that has a photo of both of us standing behind our respective bars.

Each month I write the zoo a letter, in cursive, asking them to send me a lock of her hair. They will not. When people ask me why I did it, I tell them, “She was soft.”

BANDLEADER’S GIRLFRIEND

“You are embarrassing yourself on a national level,” Sister yells into the phone. “What about Dead Mom?”

“Dead Mom is not a mellow subject, Sis.” I look over at my dearest lover CT, who is lying on the couch rubbing slices of ripe grapefruit across his chest. He’s watching a television program about sexual behavior in dolphins.

“Such liquid-rubber bodies,” he whispers. CT is the lead singer for Wolf Rainbow. They are a total hit but CT doesn’t measure success in terms of money; true success lies in Worm Vibrations, or wormbrations.

CT stands for Copper Tone. He is into the rays of the sun.

Sister clears her throat. Talking with her makes me feel a little cosmically disturbed. I try to remind myself that she has invested a lot of time in me, that it became quite a habit for her, a passion even, and I think it is important for people to follow their passions. Unless, like Sister’s, they will hinder someone’s enlightenment. Namely mine.

My enlightenment is sparkling pink water and Sister is a levee, but CT allows me to rise up and overwhelm her walls. Sister has never before experienced the unrestricted passion of one as enlightened to the Worm as CT is. She has no idea what to do with such love; it’s like giving a can of food to forest-people who can’t understand its monetary value, or the delicious pleasure that awaits them inside.

A good example of this occurred when I took CT home for Thanksgiving and Sis extended her hand to him.

“Mother of my love-cub, I greet you,” he said, and softly licked her face. After this display of vulnerability Sis’s vibes were very tight and secluded. The corners of her mouth tucked themselves firmly in like hotel bed sheets.

CT and I prefer to sleep outdoors but sometimes we’re forced to stay in really nice hotels. It’s all Management. If it were up to CT we’d just find a field close to our next venue and sleep there, but Management makes some good points: privacy, etc. CT’s nightly rituals, which are not exclusionary of nudity and spiritual vision accelerators for communication with the Worm Eternal, can be wrongly interpreted by people like the authorities.

Grog, the bassist, uses humor to mask his negative thinking when he agrees with the Management about hotels. He says things like “How can I round up babes for bonefests and take them to the middle of a corn field? The hottest babes with the biggest milkbags will not go for this. They want open bars and heart-shaped beds. Such are the desires of those with giant milkbags.” Then he’ll pause, adding, “I can’t believe you sleep in the buff where it is all wild and shit. What if a snake bit your johnson?”

Now Sister gives a loud gasp. She always talks so quickly that what she says seems urgent and true. It is some kind of trick. “You’re on nearly every television station right now! I called you because I need to talk to you about something serious, and now there’s this drama. Do you ever stop to think about how your actions affect others? I mean what if angels get one day to peek down to earth from Heaven and Tuesday was the one day Mom had for all eternity to check up on us and our lives? When she opened the clouds she would’ve been greeted with your… your spectacle.” Sister begins crying.

I know from experience that her tears aren’t clear; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. I always figured they were mixing with her makeup until I realized she didn’t wear any (not to be commercialized but she could use it. Pastel, bare minerals). Her face is kind of gray too because she never goes outside; she fears nature like it’s a rapist or murderer, even though it’s so the opposite—nature is what’s getting raped and murdered! But despite not having sun damage she got wrinkles before her time from watching constant news television and subconsciously reproducing Dan Rather’s facial expressions.

Sister likes to pull back the curtains of her windows then stare out of them and look up at the sky suspiciously.

“What did you want to talk about? Do you need some money?” Of late, Sister has been plagued with a variety of fiscal obligations, something about back taxes. “Listen, Sis, I do understand what you’re saying.” I peek behind my shoulder and watch CT—naked, gentle CT, pink grapefruit juices dripping down his body like cartoon sweat—pretend to plug the blowhole of the dolphin on television with a slice of his grapefruit. His giggles are like heartbeats: steady and seconds apart. “But you just have to realize that we’re on different planes of existence. I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots of colors.”

Sister’s weeping intensifies. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “You’re speaking the drug-talk. I want Claudia back and I want her in English.”

If the spasm that afflicts my back and spine at the mention of my old name “Claudia” could make a sound, a single note, it would be unharmonious beyond this dimension. No one would even be able to hear what a wonky note it would be, because the human ear is not advanced enough. It’s one of those things; the sound is made but does anyone hear it? Was it made? I speak but Sister does not hear me. Do I speak?

“Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhmmnnnngg.” CT lets out a guttural moan to begin his a.m. bowel gyrations. His torso bounces up and down while his hips move like he’s using an invisible hula-hoop.

His is a hula-hoop made of enchantment. It’s built of understanding, spiritual experience, and opium ether, paired with a variety of other things the human eye cannot see and the human ear cannot hear. Most of our senses are completely inadequate and not to be trusted; our true feelings come from our wormholes, often described as “the heart in our stomach between our legs.”

“Think about it,” CT likes to say, “The organ that the wormless refer to as ‘heart’ is like, entirely muscle. Like a body-builder or a worker bee. If bees have muscles.”

Sister does not affect my wormhole, but her disapproval makes my pulse quite irregular.

“Sister,” I say firmly, “Claudia is dead.”

Sis wails. I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor. “We’ve been over this. My name is now Sorcerella Van Crystal. It’s official; I have stationary. Our bathrooms are filled with SVC embroidered towels. You used them to wipe the perspiration from your forehead the last and only time you visited our tree house. Please don’t backpedal. You’ve chosen to remain in my journey, thus my life.”

When Sister is really upset she begins to salivate. Her harsh words shoot out at me through the phone: sleds of anger luging down a hateful mountain. And the thing with mountains is, the higher their altitude, the lower their boiling point.

“Don’t give me this Sorcerella crap, Claudia. Jesus. The court fines I paid when you lived with me during high school. That guy who set your car on fire in our driveway. After everything we’ve been through, some ooga-booga rock weirdo can come along and brainwash you just like that?”

Sister is not receptive to meditative breathing exercises so I decide to suggest something a little more hands-on for her anxiety. “Sister, if I send you some special brownies, will you eat them?”

CT passes by with the walking stick and gives me the thumbs-up, meaning he’s embarking on a defecation-stroll. I wave goodbye. Perhaps sensing my tension, he jiggles his dingy slightly.

“Sweet earth for my loveworm,” he shouts, “I shall return.” Several flies are enjoying the streaks of grapefruit juice that ran down his chest and pooled in his groin and thighs. As he walks past me there is a loud unified buzzing; it is so cosmic, all those individual flies but just one buzz. It strikes me that it’s like my feelings for Sister—all the different harsh emotions could come out in one unified primal scream. I emit this into the receiver once I feel CT has ventured far enough on his defecation stroll that he will not hear me and fear danger has struck my physical person. CT and I do not like to use toilets-we only do this when we have to, like in super-posh hotels and backstage on television programs and concert tours. Sometimes the super posh hotels have double toilets and then he and I sit on them together, stare at each other, and try to predetermine when the other will flush, thereby flushing at the same time without ever looking away from one another’s eyes or communicating a will to do so. We have gotten very, drastically close to simultaneously flushing on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure complete synchronicity is nigh the next time we are at the Plaza.

“You blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”

Sister does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their multiple defects predated my scream by decades.

“Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my business and my right.”

“The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? Did police really have to break into your room?”

The vital fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sister, no harm, no foul.”

“No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! They’re not even attractive. I’m saying this objectively. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”

“It’s not about how we look to other humans, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”

“Ugh, it’s on the TV right now.” There’s a long silence; I can almost hear her eyes squinting. “What the hell is that, a tattoo?”

I decline to answer, as Sister wouldn’t understand. I recently had a bottle of wine tattooed on my mons.

“CT and I got married,” I offer.

Sister hangs up then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is sort of able to speak through the wheezing. I stare at the healing crystals I glue-gunned to my phone in the mirror, a sort of second-line of defense against Sister’s negative energies. Work, I beg them. Glow.

“To that creep,” she sputters, “to that pervert hustler? Did you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his…his…extension near my ankles. His pants were that new kind of denim, the stretchy stuff. I could feel everything.”

“He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”

“I can’t do this right now,” she says, and then hangs up.

I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.

I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mother died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother” whenever she was overbearing—a perfect combination of sister and mother.

“Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.

We came to the designer in order to get fitted full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zem, sex en zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.

CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.

CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks it in with his cheeks so the wine glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms. He looks like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different planet, one where the environment is harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.

It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live here without a nectar appendage-bottle.

The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.

The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of sting rays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.

“It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.

The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.

But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.

CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”

And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”

As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and he gives a half-hearted protest, “Don’t spill, ze suit, ze suit,” but CT gently moves Gustav’s head back downward, the way a parent might guide the cheek of a child who has just had a nightmare back down to the pillow.

“How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?” asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical, and the bloody wine pouring over their green night-vision bodies looks completely black. I feel more powerful than ever, like a superhero who has shadow-juice as one of her many weapons. I streak their bodies with the unseen.

When my phone rings there’s about a fourth of the bottle left. I tap the opening at CT’s mouth and drizzle the rest of it inside until he makes a happy noise.

My phone’s screen is so green that beneath the goggles it seems interactive. I speak to it for some time before realizing that I need to open the phone in order to answer the call. Luckily it’s just Sister, who calls again and again and again until I answer. Once, when I had a few squares of acid beneath my eyelids, I finally distinguished the source of the music but then mistook the phone for a fetal orb—not an orb from the beginning of time but a baby orb, one that has only been alive for a few million years—so I sang children’s songs to it and told it bedtime stories hoping that its musical electronic crying would please, please stop. I later got distracted by CT leading me to a hammock that had been stretched over top a hot tub at his request by the really expensive hotel’s staff, but the next morning I saw that I had eighty-seven missed calls, all from Sister.

“Hello,” I say. I am unsure of the duration of time it takes me to complete the word. The bat blood wine—at least our particular serving, I am beginning to realize—has another complication to its chemical makeup besides alcohol and blood.

“Oh Lord. Are you on drugs right now? I can call you back later, when it wears off. This is important.” I can hear sliding window blinds in the background and I know that she is staring out at the sky with a deep frown on her face. Even though the sound is distorted (it sounds like the opening of the world’s largest tin can) another part of my brain knows those blinds well enough to recognize the sound they make even when it’s camouflaged by drugs.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just sleepy. Just terribly awake.” I hear Sister’s nervous fingers tapping on the glass of the windowpane, or maybe someone knocking on a really thick foam door. “Sister?” I ask, because it is so quiet except for the rustling of the bats and the gentle sounds of Gustav’s mouth that I can’t remember whether the conversation has ended and she has already hung up or not.

“Listen,” she says. “I want the rest of your share of Mother’s estate money. All of the little that’s left. I want you to sign your half over to me. CT is rich and you don’t need it. The real reason I call you all the time and ask for money is because I’m not in good health and you’ve been paying my doctor’s bills. Sometimes I need medications badly and quickly but I feel like I have to ask you every damn time I use some of your money from the trust, and you’re usually impossible to get a hold of. How can I put this delicately? I want you to give me the money so I don’t have to talk to you ever again.”

The electronic vacuum cleaners, perhaps detecting CT’s new emission on the floor, all rush over to CT and Gustav, encircling them. It’s very cute, like the two of them are surrounded by a hungry brood of flat Maltese puppies. “Mine sweet bitter fruit,” Gustav is saying to CT, licking the stains of wine on CT’s suit of leather.

“Sister,” I say worriedly, “you are hurt? Your health is failing? We shall heal you together! We shall sail through the air like spores from a fern of renewal, a pollen containing life and promise, a seedling that blossoms into substance where before there was void!”

Sister’s words take on a strained, metal colander tone; her voice is so tight that it will hardly even strum. “You don’t know anything about life or trying to live,” she says. “Would you like to call my insurance company and ask if they accept ferns of renewal or…wait, why am I still participating in this conversation? Tell me where you are right now and I’ll bring the paperwork and a few things of Mother’s for you to have, and that will be it for us, OK? You have no idea how long I have wished for this peace. To be able to turn on the TV and see you walking down Rodeo drive leading a goat that you painted to look like a giraffe and hear the gossip police screech about what a lunatic you are, and simply agree and change the channel. I can’t do that now. I can’t do that with you in my life; instead I have to call and try and tell you to hurry up and get the damn goat into a van or a limo or what-the-hell-ever and move away from the cameras.”

“It was actually CT who painted the goat—”

“I DON’T CARE,” she yells. “WHERE ARE YOU? THAT IS ALL I NEED TO KNOW.”

I pause. I’m fearful that Sister will not be satisfied with my location.

“We are in a bat cave inside of a cave-mansion somewhere in Nevada,” I say. Gustav looks up at me and waves a chiding finger. “No partiez, sweezheart. I have to be up early tomorrow. My friend in Milan is getting circumcised for his fortieth birthday and he commissioned ze codpiece you saw in my studio. Zat sort of ting, you deliver zat sort of ting in person.”

I am impressed; I had no idea it was a codpiece. “It’s so beautiful, Gustav. I thought it was perhaps a jeweled urn for the ashes of someone really special, like your father maybe.”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT,” cries Sis, and then she hangs up.

“Ze ashes of mine father, zat is a sad story.” Gustav points to the electric vacuums. “Zees hungry suckers, I love zhem, I have zem swarming in every room. But when my friend knocked over zee father, zey ate him before I could find zee remote to make zem stop.”

The next morning, Sister calls back. “Let’s try this again,” she says. “Where are you?”

“We’re on the bus,” I tell her. I don’t remember how or why, but I know that we are. The bus-bed CT and I have is so exceptional; it looks like a large clamshell and can even shut. It’s not good to shut it for the entire night, though, because then the oxygen we breathe starts to get a little recycled and we wake up with bad headaches.

“Okay,” she says. Her tone implies that I am completely useless. This makes me sad, so I stare into the pearly whiteness of CT’s teeth. He consciously sleeps with his mouth very open. There is a complicated reason why he does this but we’ve both forgotten what it is. “Where is the bus headed to?”

“I will have to let you speak to the driver, Sister.” She makes a ‘tsk’ing sound. “Thank God,” she says.

“Sister,” I beg her, “please listen. Tell me what has stricken your body. There are so many things we can do to detoxify you.”

“No,” she snaps. “You are a spoiled brat with no grip on reality. We don’t all have rich rock-star boyfriends. The hardest part of your day is figuring out what substance you’re on and deciding what is real and what is imaginary.” She sighs, and it is a loaded sigh; I hear leaves stirring inside of it, very dead, very dried leaves. They scare me, these leaves inside my sister’s voice.

“Let me get you the driver,” I whisper.

Usually Sister’s words do not trouble my eternal waters, but this news about her health has weakened my immunity. I make a mental note that later on, I should put on the crystal helmet and get inside of the sensory depravation unit. Once Wolf Rainbow got sued because a fan in Idaho climbed aboard the bus without our knowledge, got inside of the sensory depravation unit, and was not discovered until we were in Atlanta one week later. It took him a few months to speak but when he did all he could talk about was how totally grateful he was, so his family finally dropped the suit.

“Here,” I tell her, “here you go.”

“Finally,” she exclaims, “someone sane.”

“Here, his name is Fractyl Clymber, Clymber with a y.” I tap him on the shoulder and he gives a jump and spills a large thermos of purple tea. Because he is somewhat small, his arms have to stretch wide to hold onto the bus’s large steering wheel. This combined with the fact that his eyes aren’t very open makes him look like a sleepy bird.

“Sorry,” he stutters, “I thought you were something else.”

“This is my sister,” I say, pointing to my phone.

“My brother,” he nods, pointing to his phone on the dashboard. He lets out a short giggle, then looks rather distraught.

“No I mean my sister’s on the phone.”

“Cool,” he nods.

“She wants to talk to you.”

The phone is down at my side, but I can hear a sound coming from it, a scream-noise.

“If it’s about that,” he emphasizes, “I don’t know anything about that. Whoever did that, I’m sure…like I’m sure that was a total accident.”

“No, she wants to know where we’re going.”

“Oh.” He searches the many dials of the bus’s control panel for a moment. “A sign should be coming up soon or something. These roads are totally filled with signs.”

I feel Perry, CT’s Press Agent, put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to her,” he says. I nod and hand him the phone.

It’s daytime but the bus has heavy black curtains and tinted windows, so it always seems like the sun hasn’t come up yet. I trod back to our bedroom. The bus’s thick, shaggy carpeting is soothing on my bare feet. At almost every stop we get the carpet shampooed because none of us wear shoes when we walk around inside. It feels amazing.

I crack the clamshell open a little wider to get in then lower its lid back down to where there’s still a safe amount of sliver. When I nuzzle up to CT, his leather wine suit smells like bread. In his sleep his fingers find my hair and kind of party a little.

Moments later, there’s a light knock on the clamshell. Perry slides my phone through its crack. “We’re meeting her in Dallas,” he tells me. I whisper thanks.

“Listen,” he says.

The cracked-open clamshell bed has a crescendo effect on sound, it’s even shaped like a crescendo, so when I’m inside I barely hear the first few words in someone’s sentence but then the last few words are quite loud. “If you want me to deal with her for you, thAT’S FINE, SHE SEEMS REALLY ANGRY AND MAYBE…”

“No,” I whisper. “The Worm Eternal values fortitude. I must pursue a final attempt to bring Sister enlightenment and prove my spiritual strength to the Worm Eternal.” Perry pats the top of the clam.

“OK, kiddo.”

Our conversation rousts CT. He turns and puts his lips on my neck. His lips are soft as olive oil; he decorates them like attractive women do. “I was having this dream that you were a starfish and I was feeding you tempeh bacon,” he says, and I shut the clam bed and we love each other; I let the whole thing with Sister be like grains of sand that just polish the softness of CT’s lips even softer.

There was a slight delay in meeting the sister.

After eating some pumpkin flax brittle, CT’s stomach was getting a little torn up and he requested Fractyl Clymber stop the bus for a defecation walk.

“Not here man,” said Fractyl, “right here is too close to that,” but after about twenty minutes Fractyl did pull over.

We all got out and practiced yoga behind the bus while CT walked ahead. Shortly after he squatted, a sports car screeched up and a man inside the car jumped out pointing a gun.

On CT’s defecation walks, he wanders until the universe gives him a sign that he is in the right place to go. Unfortunately, this time the universe had directed CT to relieve himself in the same place where the man from the car’s mother and sister had been hit and killed by a drunk driver. The man kept pointing the gun at two white crosses with “MOTHER” and “SISTER” written on them, and a large plastic floral bouquet with pictures and ribbons.

CT was trying to explain himself. “Like, I detected that this was a sacred place, man. That’s why I stopped here; it was like, the earth was saying Here, Worship Here, I mean this is like a shrine.”

“You were shitting on it!” the man with the gun screamed.

“Do you hierarchize organic matter?” asked CT. “Because I don’t think that’s the right way to go about things.”

Just then a policeman pulled up, and several minutes later a lot of photographers showed up too. Perry walked over to me while CT was educating the cop regarding the back-and-forth of earth and man.

“You should probably call your sister,” Perry said. “I don’t even know if we’re going to make it to Dallas on time for the show.”

I decided to go ahead and dial her number then figure out exactly what to say while the phone was ringing, but Sister picked up on the first ring.

“Sister,” I began, “there has been an unfortunate detour. You’ll have to meet us at the arena. Tell them “HASHISH420” when you go to the backstage area. That’s our code phrase. They’ll totally let you in.”

“I’m not going to your boyfriend’s concert and I’m not saying that phrase. What do you mean, detour?”

When the police showed up, everyone except Perry and CT, who were already talking to the man with the gun, had been forced to run back inside the bus and ingest any and all products that might complicate an already precarious situation. We divided them equally according to body mass, meaning Fractyl Clymber and I took the least, but it was still a pretty heavy load. Grog was already freaking out and had locked himself in the bus’s closet to masturbate.

The words coming out of my mouth were like a canoe at the tip of a waterfall. I saw what was ahead but was unable to stop it. I am always for truth but with Sister sometimes the truth has to be dressed up a little bit, not hidden but wrapped up in a way that makes it better, like a Christmas present. I was feeling very chatty though, and the sweat on my tongue didn’t help. Everything just poured out.

“CT accidentally relieved himself on this grave, and now a lot of people are taking my picture.” The flashes from the paparazzi’s light bulbs were bright and painful but I couldn’t stop staring at them. I moved closer to the flash. “I’m like a moth or something right now,” I told her. She started crying and then Perry grabbed the phone and told me to get a full-body cape for CT from the bus closet. CT was so into sharing the truth of the Worm Eternal that he had not yet proceeded to tie up the bottom and fly of his leather suit.

“Grog’s in the closet masturbating,” I told Perry. “He’s really freaked.”

Perry sighed and nodded. “You stay put. I’ll get it.”

When we finally arrive at the arena, the noise of the crowd doing the Howl of the Wolf is deafening. Their pack call drowns out the opening band, an experimental metal group utilizing electric bongos.

The arena’s head of security approaches us. He’s shivering with fear. “You’ve got to get out there,” he pleads to CT, his voice trembling, “I’ve never seen a crowd get this crazy, and I’ve worked this arena for almost thirty years.”

CT throws off his cape and uses his arm to make a sweeping motion, like he’s violently clearing a table. “No problemo,” he says, “this is my gig, man. Don’t even worry about it.” The fly of his leather suit is still open as he walks onstage; he tends to forget about things like that, but there is no time. Also, since the crowd is already worked into such a manic rage, what better to satiate them than the sight of CT’s loveworm? It is like his music: hard yet soft.

CT’s voice bleeds through the loudspeaker.

“People of earth: I come to you as an ambassador…from the planet of ROCK!”

With that, Grog slams the bass and the drums are off and running like a wild, hungry dog.

Let me tell you about the sound of Wolf Rainbow.

It is loud but it is a harmonious loudness. It is like the most beautiful woman in the world beating you up with her hair.

At the concerts of Wolf Rainbow, I curl up in a little ball like I’m trying to keep myself from vomiting. But what I’m really trying to do is hold on. When I hear CT’s voice going up through the clouds and then back down and up again at a dizzying rate, like an airplane showing off, I can’t help but feel that I’m suspended on the edge of a cliff or somewhere similar where the beauty before me comes with the price of danger. A lot of people who know about the view from the tip-top of a bridge or tall building are dead, because they climbed up in order to jump off. But sometimes I wonder if they truly planned on jumping or if the view was just so beautiful that they realized what a wide big net beauty is, and then wanted so badly to be caught by it. That’s how I feel about Wolf Rainbow–I’m afraid of falling into it, becoming the music and then losing myself there.

At this moment I feel a short kick at my ribs. Sister. She must have said HASHISH420.

“Look at your pupils. Do you need a doctor?”

I shake my head and get up, attempting to hug her.

She steps backwards and covers her torso protectively. “Please stay away. Let’s just get this done. What a complete nightmare. Do you know that reporters get a hold of my cell phone number? No matter how many times I change it? Normally I only pick up for people I know, which is, well, you, and doctors’ offices, but this time I answered every call. “Yes,” I told them, “I do have a comment on the latest fiasco: you and your boyfriend are crazy and I am publicly disowning you.”

“We got married,” I said. “Remember?” I would’ve invited Sister to the wedding if there had been time, but I didn’t actually become aware of the ceremony until it had already happened. Mescaline is crazy that way. Grog showed me a video, though. CT and I were slathered with divine jelly and rebirthed together as twins from the Womb of the Worm.

Sister stretches out her arm, handing me a manila folder with a pen attached. “I’ll show you where to sign.” Suddenly she cringes and rubs her temples. The band is starting in on a particularly heavy number titled “Reign of the Pig Women.” “My God,” she whimpers, “Do you have some aspirin, some water?”

The Worm Eternal is wise and sneaky. He will leave you all alone on auto-pilot and then suddenly come back to help you when you’re least expecting it. “Yes, one second,” the Worm Eternal tells me to say to Sis, and then I go over to Zapruder (one of the road crew) and ask him does he have anything. I’m in luck because he just scored five minutes ago, a great score since our entire stash had to be replaced due to the cop incident.

Deep down, I suppose I hadn’t really been dealing with the fact that Sister wanted to break contact at all; in fact I was in denial right until the second the Worm Eternal slid into my brain. “This is your last chance,” it told me. “You might never see her again if you don’t do something drastic.”

I return a few minutes later with a glass of cold water. “Here Sister,” I say, trying to seem nonchalant. I’m worried my voice sounds robotic since I’m being so careful with my words. I drop two pills into her hand. She’s still holding her temple and cringing but when she sees the pills she cringes even more.

“Are these aspirin p.m. or something? I just want regular aspirin; I don’t want to feel drowsy.”

“It’s regular,” I tell her, “it’s just from Europe. Most generic pills in Europe are neon green with a pagan star in the center.”

She swallows them and opens the folder and clicks the pen above the line where I need to sign.

“OK,” I nod. “I just want to read it first.”

She scowls. “That’s an oddly responsible thing for you to do.”

I pretend to look at the words for several minutes until she leaps up off the couch, a very high leap. “Is it warm in here?” she asks. Her face and body have flushed to an alarming but expected bright orange and her pupils look like giant Kalamata olives. “It is,” I reply, and she removes her shirt.

That’s when I see that she is only wearing one breast.

I open my mouth to say something, something loving that also expresses my utter grief at her loss, but she’s staring up at the loudspeakers. “This is a really great song,” she yells, which is not what I was expecting Sister to say.

“It is,” I reply gingerly, “this drum solo will last for approximately forty minutes.” Sister suddenly seems so changed; I’m not sure whether to talk to her in the careful way I’m used to or to just open up.

“Lets go watch them,” she says. It is almost a squeal, and is total confirmation that she’s most certainly in a Wormhole and I need to jump in with her. So we go to the curtain and I yell to Zapruder that she is my sister, and he checks out the still-inflated side of her bra and gives me a thumbs up.

A few hours later we are back on the bus driving to California, and Sister is more talkative than ever. She has told us all about her breast cancer and the mastectomy, and when Grog says she is still totally doable they start flirting and take off her bra so Grog can draw a nipple over her scar tissue with a Sharpe marker. She thinks it’s hilarious. It’s so good to see Sister smile.

When the curtain on Grog’s bunk finally reopens and the two of them come out, she’s still in great spirits, which for Sister means that she is in a completely altered state.

“Sis,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her half-bosom. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.

“What were Mom’s last words?” she asks. I was only four at the time but I remember them easily.

“Mother looked at me and said, ‘I’m doing this because of you. You drove me to this.’”

Sis completely cracks up. CT and Grog start laughing too, and before I know it tears are pouring down my face because I can’t stop laughing either. “That’s ridiculous!” Sister says through her laughter. I nod.

“What’s this?” Sister asks Grog as he hands her the tube to a hookah, but then before he can answer she sticks it into the side of her mouth like it’s that spit-sucky thing at the dentist and lets it hang out there while she continues to talk.

“You know, no offense, but I didn’t want you to live with me. I felt like I had to take you in, because Mom was such a horrible person, and I didn’t want to seem like a horrible person too. But it ruined so many things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up right then and be a parent, things would be way better for me now I think, much much better.”

I have been in the stomach of the Worm Eternal long enough to know that Sister doesn’t mean this in a personal way, that in fact the Worm Eternal has itself entered her ear and is speaking to me through her so that I will have Greater Understanding. CT gently squeezes my hand and whispers “W-I-E” into my ear, which means Wriggle-In-Effect, as in, the Worm is actively present and working.

Suddenly, the bus stops and Fractyl Clymber runs back wearing a headdress of swan feathers. “Dudes, the sun is coming up and there are all these flat rocks and I think it’s really cleansing. Like, I sort of took an accidental detour; I mean it’s totally cool, I totally know where we are, in relative terms. But I think it was like, meant to be, because it is so fucking pure out there right now, and I think if we all just go out there and sit it’ll be great, like I might even be able to forget that that ever happened, I mean.”

When we file out of the bus, the light of dawn seems to sober Sister up a little bit. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is a sort of intoxicant itself. As we walk out onto the rocks Sister looks down at the light shining on her scar tissue and begins to cry.

But Grog is not about to let this happen. “Lie down, beautiful woman,” he says. “Bloom like a flower.” He walks to her and parts her legs with his hands and tells her to say it. “I’m a blooming flower, say those words.”

And she does. The sun is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and it is all hitting Sister, her scarred parts and her whole parts, everything. And Grog’s face moves into her bloom like a hummingbird, and CT walks over with his erection peeking tall and shadowy from his still-untied leather suit, and he moves his face into her bloom like a hummingbird too, and I stretch out on a nearby rock like I do backstage at the concerts. Sister’s noises are a lot like the music of Wolf Rainbow, except this time I do jump into the noise, I get lost in the sounds and become them totally. My ears eat every drop of her pleasure.

When we get back on the bus we’re all pretty tired. CT and I retire to the clam bed. Sister hugs me and I hug her too and it’s cosmic. When we hug, my boob fits into her boob-hole.

Several state lines later when CT and I wake up, Fractyl Clymber tells me that Sis asked him to let her out at the Reno airport. She left me a note saying she was going to a hospital in Arizona, and that Grog gave her a lot of money in the form of gold coins (Grog refuses to be paid in any other type of currency). She also wrote that she would call me sometime soon, or that I could call her when I was ABLE to talk. The word “able” was bolded and underlined.

The biggest surprise was that she’d left me a white leotard. I knew with one look that it had been Mother’s. I smelled it, hoping that it would somehow still smell like her, even though she’d been dead for over two decades and was mostly a horrible mother. But it smelled like the bus’s incense-laden air. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though, and pretty soon because of rubbing on the leather all day the leotard acquired a very comfortable smell, like a drowsy horse.

A few weeks later we were able to stay in the hospital with Sister for a week. It was weird-Worm Eternal-serendipity because we’d long ago been scheduled to go to the desert to film a new video for the upcoming album La Muerte es Suerte. Then, during filming, the python wrapped around Grog’s shoulders totally bit him on the johnson, just like Grog is always worried will happen to CT when we go sleep in fields. The snake’s handler didn’t understand it at all; she said there was no reason in the whole world why a well-fed python would want to bite a human in that physical region, and asked Grog what kind of cologne he used and questions of that nature as he and the snake were being taken away to the hospital on a stretcher, which ended up being the very same hospital Sister was staying at.

So we cancelled some tour dates and I got to sit by Sister and hold her hand during and after treatment, sometimes holding her as she got sick and left drops on my leather suit that were a nice type of reminder stain. And beneath the suit I always wore Mother’s leotard. Late at night when the cable got boring and Sister was asleep and CT and the rest of the gang were doing opium in the bus parked in the hospital lot (“We can do as much of anything as we want, you know? We’re in the parking lot of a fucking hospital” Fractyl Clymber happily declared) I often thought about how family and Mother and Sister were like my suit and my leotard, skin under skin under skin, this onion whose layers can be peeled back for the Worm Eternal to help me understand. And understanding is beautiful. In fact, its beauty is dizzying in fast, airplane-stunt ways: the beauty of CT’s locks spiraled in a hurricane of rock, the beauty of my sister so strong while her body is weak, the beauty of Mother’s white leotard becoming the color of camels and tea and milk beneath my leather suit. “The beauty beneath”; it is something I know. I say it to CT all the time now, and of course he understands. CT has always understood.

ANT COLONY

When space on earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies. Many people chose something noninvasive, such as barnacles or wig-voles. Some women had breast operations that allowed them to accommodate small aquatic life within implants. But because I was already perfectly-breasted (and, admittedly, vain) I sought out a doctor who, for several thousands of dollars, drilled holes into my bones to make room for an ant colony.

After being turned down by every surgeon in the book, I finally found my doctor. Actually he’s a dentist. I had to lead him on in order to get what I wanted—he only agreed to do the procedure because he is in love with me.

“I have all your movies,” the doctor told me during our first consultation. “I think you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”

Since bone ants had never been attempted, I was a study trial. My participation in the experiment had a lot of parallels to modeling, which I used to do before commercial acting. Once a month I went into a laboratory and removed all my clothing. This latter step probably wasn’t necessary, but I did it because I was grateful, and also because it was interesting to feel someone looking at my outsides and my insides at the same time. When I lay down onto an imaging machine and certain buttons were pushed, the doctor could see all the ants moving around in my body, using their mandibles to pick up what he said were synthetic calcium deposits. The ants were first implanted within my spine, where their food supply was injected monthly, but they quickly moved throughout the other various pathways that had been drilled into my limbs and even my skull.

The ants’ mandibles were the only part of the insects that disgusted me; they reminded me of the headgear I’d had to wear with my braces in grades six through eight. I’d refused to wear it to school or even walk around the house when I had it on. Instead I wore it for two hours each night before bed, and I spent this time reading fashion magazines in my closet. I wouldn’t allow anyone, even my mother, to see me. She used to stand at the door and beg for a kiss goodnight. This was of course before the cancer—she had already been dead for several years by the time the organism hosting movement started. When she began dying I didn’t want to watch; I usually grew angry when she’d ask me to come see her in the hospital. The cancer overtook her body until she looked parasitic herself. Near the end, if I felt her lips on my cheek while I was hugging her I’d pull away—I knew it was ridiculous, but I was afraid she was somehow going to suck out my beauty.

“Can you feel them inside you?” As he watched the scan from an outside control room, the doctor would whisper into a microphone that I could hear through a headset earpiece. His voice sounded sweaty. “Does it seem like your blood is crawling? Does it tickle? Are you ticklish?” He’d ask me questions the entire time, but even if I were to answer, there was no way for him to hear my response.

In truth I didn’t feel a thing; it was hard to believe they were even there. On my first follow-up visit I made the doctor show me footage of myself in the large ant-imaging machine to prove they were actually inside me. But after awhile I got used to the thought of their presence and even started speaking to them throughout the day. The doctor said this was healthy.

“It’s not uncommon to feel a shift of identity,” he assured me. “It’s okay to talk to your organism, and to feel like it understands you. It’s a part of your self. We could talk about this more over dinner?” But I never crossed the line into dating.

Then one day I received a frantic call.

“Come in immediately. Where are you right now?”

At the moment, I was in the middle of shooting a commercial for a water company.

“Leave the minute you hang up the phone. What we have to discuss is far more important.”

I was very used to people feeling like they were more important than me, but less beautiful. I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.

Defying these orders, I finished the water shoot. “Refreshing,” I said. It was my only line in the commercial, and I’d been practicing all day.

I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful. Earlier that month, the doctor had given me a videotape of several ants feasting on the corpse of an ant that had died in my femur. This cannibalism was an aberration, he’d pointed out: ants do not normally eat other ants from their own colony. The doctor said he’d worked with an entomologist to specifically breed a contained bone ant species that would eat the dead, lay the eggs in the dead, and make the dead a part of the living.

When I finally arrived at the doctor’s he was very upset—he’d cancelled everything and had been waiting in his office, which is covered with wall-to-wall pictures of me, for hours.

“Your left wrist.”

I slipped off my glove and held it out to him in a vulnerable way. My wrist was smooth and fragrant and pale and had a nicotine patch on it; the doctor had suggested I quit smoking for the health of the ants. I squeezed my eyes to look beneath my skin for them. “It’s like they’re not even there,” I muttered.

“Grip my fingers,” he said, holding two of his own upon my pulse. It was a little difficult to do.

“Oh,” he said. Even though his voice sounded worried, he seemed a little pleased. “Goodness.”

He ran from the room, face flushed. And there I sat alone, or not alone truly.

“We seem to be in crisis,” I muttered to them, and put my glove back on.

Since the ants, I have started gloving my arms. I buy the longest gloves I can find. It feels like putting the ants to bed, the way one might place a blanket over the cage of a bird.

“We are all certain this can be resolved.” Around the table sat several new doctors I’d never met, or maybe they were dentists. I spotted a magazine that I was in—mascara ad, page seven—lying on an end table in the conference room. Somehow this made me feel safer, more of a majority. There were two of me in the room and only one of everybody else.

My doctor passed me a glossy picture: its subject was an engorged ant that was either eating or vomiting—I couldn’t tell which. The ant was surrounded by small piles of powder that, when magnified, looked like crumbs of bread. I gagged a bit. “Why are you showing me this?”

“This is their queen,” he said. The doctor’s pupils had dilated to a width universally associated with insanity. “She wants you gone.” His fingertip moved from pile to pile on the glossy photo, leaving a print upon each one. “These are piles of your bone. You are being devoured by the ants that live inside you.”

“Eaten from within.” A dull woman at the very end of the table repeated this in a parrot-like manner. She wore a large dome cap, the obvious fashion of one hosting an organism on her head. Hers appeared tall and slightly conical; I was very interested in what type of creature it might be, but it is considered rude to ask about other peoples’ organisms—they are ultimately too much of a bodily function.

“But we feed the ants so they don’t have to eat me. I come here once a month so you can put their food inside.”

An authoritarian doctor whispered something to my doctor, who whispered to me. “They’re not eating it anymore.”

I whispered back to him. “Can we start feeding them something more enticing? A different bone-substitute? Ground bones from animals? Or maybe even dead people?” I knew it was a tasteless suggestion, but I did have money and my life was apparently in danger. The authoritarian doctor scooted back in his rolling chair and looked at his shoes.

“No,” my doctor said, and then he stood. His hands lifted slightly above his head. “This is not about consumption. It is an act of interspecies war!”

In the following weeks, my strength and health deteriorated until I was finally admitted to a very special hospital ward. It was a room my doctor had built onto his existing home just for me.

Around this time, the doctor also started wearing a large sack around his waist—to conceal his organism, I assumed, whatever it might be. It must’ve grown larger since when I’d first met him. I was grateful my organism wasn’t making me wear a sack around my waist, even if it was eating me alive. The sack made a swish noise when he walked; in motion the doctor sounded like a giant broom.

This swishing became more and more of a comfort as I gradually lost my vision. The doctor reminded me that when one door closes another opens, and this was true; I did seem to be gaining a sort of ant-sight. My ears began to turn away from human sounds as well, but soon I could pick up more ant noises. Around the third week I requested that my room’s television be taken away. When my eyes were closed I could see various dark caves and swarming ant-limbs, and these images gradually started to feel preferential to anything I might view of the outer world.

“I’m becoming them,” I said one night when I heard my doctor swish in. “I’m becoming the ants.”

I heard him pull up a chair and sit down next to me. “It is wonderful, isn’t it? My swan, my pet?”

He hadn’t called me those things before, but I was in no condition to disagree. My arms and legs could no longer move—I could only move through the ants. It was like having hundreds of different hands. I could make them go anywhere and do anything inside my body; I’d even started eating with them. Though I didn’t necessarily want to devour my own bone, I had an insatiable hunger, and there was a commanding voice, Eat, Walk, Lift, Chomp. It was my own voice but much deeper, not exactly masculine but echoing and confident, like my home was a large cave and I firmly believed in everything I said. I seemed able to express only one word at a time, but this felt more liberating than restrictive—suddenly every word could be a full representation of myself.

I lost all track of time. Eventually I was certain of only two things: the appetite was getting out of control, and my old eyes were completely gone.

“The rest of the world thinks that you’ve died,” the doctor told me. As he swished into the room, there was the sound of yards and yards of material being unwrapped and lifted. His words seemed round with satisfaction. “You cannot see it, but I have just unveiled the portal.”

I would’ve answered him, but I was no longer sure if my voice still made a sound or if words even came out when I felt like I was talking.

“It’s right here on my waist; I’ve been making paths inside of me just as there are paths inside of you. After you first came to see me, I reported to the government that I, too, hold ants inside my body, but I don’t. Not yet. It is your ants I’m after. You have become the ants who ate you; your consciousness is united with theirs. And when you all crawl inside of me, we will all be one forever.” As his voice continued I could feel the ants rallying, see their legs beginning kick with heightened motion. “I never actually fed the ants you’ve become; I simply allowed them to eat you whole. But you will not eat me. I will feed you properly so that you don’t. We will share my stomach—I’ve inserted a tube whereby everything I swallow will also be accessible to your minions, your thousands of minions that are now you entirely and do your bidding. I have always loved you, and when you came to my office, I knew this was my chance to make you mine.”

And then I smelled something irresistible and began to crawl towards it, into the new pink-grey cave that must be the doctor. If what he said was true, I was somewhat grateful to get inside of him—if I was now just thousands of swarming ants I certainly did not wish to be seen.

Once we had transferred, I was pleased to realize that I could see through the doctor’s eyes as well as those of my ants. It is calming to look through the eyes of another person. It stills your own thoughts almost to a halt.

“Do you love me?”

The doctor likes to ask this; he does so almost every hour. Although I cannot speak, he always smiles afterwards and says that he loves me too.

Throughout the day I have all types of sensations. Some are good, others worry me, but my fears can’t grow so big that they reach outside of his body. Nothing can move beyond this body, so in a way I feel like I am the world, and he is the world, the same way that lovers feel. “How strange,” I often think, though I try not to let him hear me thinking it, “to have so much in common with an unattractive man.”

And then there is the evening, when sunlight pours into the window like nectar. He sits down to the dinner table in front of a large mirror—I think so that I can see him, though maybe he has figured out a way to see me. Then he carefully opens the bag of sugar with a knife. When I hear this sound, each of my ants jump and he smiles, his legs and arms contract whether he likes it or not. And though they are his own, I feel as if I guide his fingertips, that the tiniest of my workers go down into the marrow of his thumb and help to grip the teaspoon.

I love watching him eat. Teaspoon after teaspoon disappears into his mouth; his saliva coats the spoon’s surface with stuck granules that change its color from silver to a crusty white. I cannot decide if he did me a favor or if I’m a victim. When I try to think, all I can feel is the sugary fluid, and a rage that comes when after our feedings I find myself hungry.

KNIFE THROWER

“The ghost is friendly,” says Grandmother. She pushes me inside, throws in a loaf of bread, and locks the vent.

There is a strange ghost in the air-conditioning duct and it’s my job to find and tame it. I did not volunteer. It is more of an assigned position.

“Hello?” I call softly. Hopefully, the ghost is Mother. Grandmother killed her a few years ago and has feared her haunting return ever since.

Both Mother and Grandmother were knife-throwers by trade. Grandmother trained Mother from an early age, as Mother trained me, as Grandmother continues to train me now that Mother is gone.

“Just you wait,” Grandmother warned the day we lugged Mother’s burlap-wrapped body out to the woods. I kept hitting up against rocks in the dark and collecting large bruises. “She’ll come back and give me my what-for. I won’t know a moment of peace until I die.”

I dug and dug until the sun began to appear, when Grandmother’s head finally peered over the hole’s rim. Her normally tight bun was loose and wild; wisps of hair floated around her face like thin smoke. “Come up,” she said, lowering down a rope for me to grab so I wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Once I filled the hole back in, Grandma’s composure returned.

It was not how I had pictured my mother’s funeral.

Afterwards Grandma handed me a large, glowing cigar and patted my thigh. She has a scar on her thigh from when Mother dared her to put a lit cigar there for a whole minute. I worried it was my time to receive a matching scar, but she said nothing more, so I sat by her and tried to puff until I got sick and vomited.

“Hello?” The ghost does not answer my hellos, so I try something personal. “Madre?” I take out a piece of bread and try to shape it like a ghost, then lay it in my lap like a type of sign. Ghosts Welcome. Ghost Spoken Here.

There is banging as Grandma hits the vent with a broom-handle. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “You must wrestle the ghost and win.” There is more banging and then she goes to boil tea.

The ghost has been making rattle-noises that sound like music for people who have never heard music, or people who are very lonely for sound. Grandma suspected vermin—she has caught hundreds of raccoons in her lifetime—but then one night she saw a blue glow coming from the vent.

From the sounds of the television drifting into the vent from the living room below, I can tell that it is evening. When ghosts come.

There is a saying Grandma has, “Fit in or else you’ll be sorry.” All I really know about ghosts is “Boo.” I whisper it at first; I want to fit in but I’m also not sure what this word means to ghosts. Then I say it a little louder.

Suddenly a wind takes up all my different hairs. The hair on my head starts orbiting in whips that seem very much like snakes, so much like them that I grow afraid of my own hair. My eyebrows and the soft hairs on my cheeks begin to tickle. On my arms and legs, the hairs stand straight up and prick out into my clothing. The hairs bruise and balloon. One hair in the back of my head swells out too much and pops. Injured hair is a strange sensation.

As the wind grows stronger, I start to worry: what if saying “Boo” is like swimmers cutting themselves in a sea of sharks? Maybe ghosts smell sounds, and “Boo” is the strongest scent they know. Large dust bunnies fly past me, now and again a small roach, then just one very fearful old mouse that probably came up into the vent to die and did not count on this at all. He whirls past so quickly that I barely get to see his expression, his lint-covered whiskers, but he looks tired and terrified.

I close my eyes when tiny particles of dust in the fast wind begin to sting. I can no longer hear the television, just the wrapper-top on the loaf of bread buckled between my knees whipping back and forth. I try to think about my bed, which is soft and has a canopy that Grandmother makes fun of. Lying beneath it I feel like a doll who someone loves.

The wind stops suddenly. Afterwards, I squint for several minutes in case it starts up again. Whenever something bad happens in my life, it’s best if I don’t feel relieved when I think it’s over. Like how we buried my mother, and now the house is haunted.

Then I feel her breath on my eyelids.

Mother. She’s not as beautiful as I remember; her skin is gray and a tooth is missing. Mother’s stab wounds trickle blood continuously. They are the only part of her that appears to be alive.

I forget everything I’ve said to her in the quiet beneath my bed’s canopy since she’s been gone. Our hands try to come together but they are like the ends of magnets. I cry a little and Mother starts crying too, but this makes her blood fountain much swifter so we stop.

“Grandma did this to you.”

“We had a disagreement. Don’t hold it against her. When I think about it, she was right.”

I remember that night. They were fighting over tequila.

“It’s been you then? Haunting the house?”

“Of course. Did I scare you, my lamb? When you’re a ghost, not haunting is like trying not to laugh. It tickles and pushes until it hurts. Of course there are a lot of boring ghosts who find it easy not to haunt. In the afterlife, so much is boring.” She tilts her head and looks at my neck, my chin. “You’re getting beautiful. Hector would be proud.”

Hector is my father. I remember him running away from our home when I was very little, and Mother running after him, throwing knives. I wonder if knives exist where Mother lives now.

We stare at one another. It’s nice to have her in front of my eyes. It doesn’t make me hurt inside the way photographs of her do.

“Dear, how about we scare Grandmother together? That way you’ll be in on it, and you won’t get frightened.”

I shrug. Grandmother is already grumpy. “You’re not the one who has to live with her,” I say.

Mother smiles. “You always were very good.”

The running blood bothers me. I take a piece of bread and hold it against her belly like a sponge. There is no magnet-force this time; I can feel the warmth of Mother’s blood beneath the bread.

“I miss you,” I tell her. I hold up another piece of bread and she pushes her face into it like it’s a mask until her imprint appears. The bread begins to take on the smell of Mother’s perfume. We hold hands through the bread. I put a piece of bread over her chest and then put my face to it and listen for a heartbeat. Her chest sounds like the inside of a giant shell. We do this until all the bread grows thin and falls apart, then I mash its crumbs into a thick ball that smells like Mother and dough.

When Mother disappears, the vent goes very dark. I tuck the dough ball into my shirt pocket and feel for the vent. Its door must have blown open in the wind.

Grandmother is asleep in her chair next to a lit candle. “Hello,” I say, and Grandmother gives a frightened gasp and opens her eyes.

“Your hair.” She makes a big circle motion around her head. “It is ghost-blown.”

After I nod, she asks if it was Mother. “No telling,” I say. “I passed out from fear.” Motioning me off to bed, her eyes move towards the vent as she lights a cigar. I run up the stairs so the smoke won’t interfere with Mother’s smell on my hands or the bread in my pocket.

DELIVERY WOMAN

It has been a long day of intergalactic delivery, and I’m feeling a little boxed-in. Though I like the homey atmosphere of my ship’s small confines, about a week into a mission the air starts to smell like recycled sock.

When my Message Station Board lights up pink, I know it’s Brady, WordCalling. I’ve never met him, but he says he’s forty-three, and early on in our talks he sent a very promising five-second video of himself flexing his back muscles. Like me, Brady is an independent outer space cargo transporter. We are the truckers of the galaxy.

Yet our connection runs much deeper than this. The very first time he messaged me on SingleMingle (initially, it was a bit of a debate whether or not to look past his screen name of FluidTransfer69 and try to get to know the man within), I felt that Brady had to be a Sagittarius. That’s how well we clicked. And lo and behold, when I told him my suspicion, he admitted that while his birth month technically made him a Scorpio (my astrological enemy), he was born prematurely. His true sign is indeed the keeper of my star-charted soul.

Tonight we wax intellectual for a bit before getting flirty.

FluidTransfer69: Do u think that when we die, we will be together forever, in a type of paradise? How old do u think ur dead eternal body will look? Probably younger than u actually are, right? A hot thirty? Supple 27?

As always, I open myself to him completely.

CargoBabe: Brady, I’ve thought about this a lot.

CargoBabe: I think, and I honestly believe this, Brady, that in the afterlife, everyone will be so extremely beautiful. Perhaps even more beautiful than it is possible to be on earth.

FluidTransfer69: If u were here right now, what would u suck first?

With Brady clearly turned on by the parallel between our love and eternity, we talk until our conversation culminates physically, at which point Brady writes,

FluidTransfer69: Got 2 kleen keys, bye!

We’ve been chatting back and forth for several weeks now, although it seems like years because the cultivation of Our Love has been so rapid. He tells me that his face is badly scarred from a fuselage accident, and that because of this he fears my disappointment and is reluctant to meet me in person. I constantly assure him his appearance doesn’t matter, but he hasn’t yet been able to summon up the courage. Brady’s back and buttocks, however, are a source of self-pride—additional photo stills, he promises, are coming my way.

It’s always hard to wake from dreams where the universe has instated a monarchy consisting of myself as Queen and Brady as King. In my dreams Brady closely resembles a cut, muscular Jesus.

I roll out of bed to find that the frozen waste extrication unit has broken and the waste has melted. I begin my day by mopping the thaw. Because my mop sponge is fiercely rectangular, it cannot get around the tighter edges of the file cabinet and I must reserve that job for Q-tips.

Yet it is a brighter afternoon when I sit down to find that amongst various junk email pyramid schemes there is also a message from Brady. I open it and see a forwarded news release.

Hey Babe,

You reading this in a towel? Check out the second story. Apes can do everything. Ha-ha!

Luv you. B

The story, indeed impressive, involves an ape both calling for help and pumping his owner’s stomach with charcoal after watching her attempt suicide for the third time. He is a helper-ape, assigned by the state in the absence of family funds for a more human in-home caretaker. The woman is ninety-four and deathly afraid of primates.

Yet what truly catches my eye is the story just below it. Justice Freeze, a cryogenic contractor largely employed by the government’s penal system, is going belly-up and holding a large auction. Several criminals whose permacapsules are programmed to not unlock for centuries are up on the auction block.

I am interested in one in particular. Below the notorious big-font names that will no doubt go into the home foyers of heavy-rock musicians, there is a smaller one, barely visible, ending a long string of nobodies.

My mother, Debbie “The Destroyer” Harlow.

Mother led a life of crime. Her real screw-up, the one that landed her 450 years, involved a large Guatemalan daycare facility and a hidden boon of cocaine. Either her instinct or information was off. The footage was replayed over and over again on universal broadcast the October of my ninth year of life: Mother, discharging a machine gun clip into a row of cribs. In court she claimed the cribs were empty, but the Guatemalan police said otherwise, and this was yet another strike in a long string of transgressions.

She also killed my father. He was a good man, but too talkative.

As I stare at the monitor, an antsy feeling begins to overtake me. Finally, against my better judgment, I sigh and program my ship towards the auction city’s coordinates.

Upon arrival I’m given a numeric paddle. I find it eerie the way the prisoners’ capsules are intermixed with used and defunct science equipment. Each capsule has a large number with a minimum bid written across the icy window in grease pen.

Lucky for me, Mother’s starting bid is quite low. Freelance outer space cargo running is a hit-or-miss trade, and this year in particular has been quite difficult. In September I contracted an antibiotic-resistant strain of trichomoniasis from a toilet seat in Goron, a dome community where I dropped off a payload of refurbished filtration equipment. A few months later my fuel gauge malfunctioned and I was stalled out in the middle of nowhere for several weeks until another ship happened by. The subsequent weight-loss that occurred during this time of hardship followed by my celebratory feasting upon rescue resulted in a bad case of the gout. Luckily, this final blow was tempered with meeting Brady. My empty glass became half-full.

I’m no delicate rose, but looking at all the frozen criminals, I start to wonder if this is such a good idea. The capsules are especially frightening. They’re dimly lit and humming like vending machines.

All the high-end infamous criminals were frozen, bearing menacing expressions. I wonder if they made these poses intentionally, like a funny face for a driver’s license photo. When people are frozen alive it becomes pretty clear what their true personality is. Most of the white-collar criminals have pained expressions, anywhere from discomfort to agony. A few look almost peaceful; one woman in particular has an extreme glow about her. I check the paperwork and see she’s been frozen for multiple homicides.

When I finally reach Mother, I’m a little taken aback. The frozen years have not been good to her. Technically, one doesn’t age while frozen, but she has clearly been through a lot. Her expression is wincing and concentrated, as if she’d been paused while taking an ardent dump. She also has what appear to be freezer-burn patches decorating her cheeks and forehead. These are especially prominent along her scalp, and look as though an irritating home-perm solution was left on far too long. Does hair freeze? Her mashed up hair resembles a matted pompadour. Overall it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, but now and then I see a wisp quiver beneath the gust of the capsule’s internal fan.

The auction begins with the most expensive items, and I realize I’m in for a long day. I decide to check the mobile WordCall terminals to see if Brady is logged into the system. I’m quite nervous so I eat a few double-fudge squares and pray that he’s on—only his virtual presence could give me the strength to abstain from polishing off an additional 12-pak of Galaxy Bars.

As I see his screen name I sigh with relief, so hard that I fog up the screen and have to use my sweaty palm to remove condensation with more condensation. I marvel again at how quickly we were able to fall in love. It’s true—when I found “the one,” I just knew it.

FluidTransfer69: Hey, where u at? Missed our a.m. freak sesh.

Don’t get me wrong; Brady and I have discussed many profound topics, including capital punishment (he’s against), global warming, and slavery. But when it comes to the finer details of our personal lives, we just haven’t gotten there yet. Ours is an intense and steamy courtship with little room for conversation that doesn’t make at least minimal strides towards climax.

I lie.

CargoBabe: Sorry, I was feeling ill. Better now though. Now that you’re here.

Yet I underestimate Brady’s working knowledge of my psyche, his Sagittarius command of honesty that detects when something is amiss, especially with one he truly holds dear.

FluidTransfer69: Is there someone else?

The pupils of his frown emoticon are like painful daggers to my heart. Here I am, deceiving the one I love, only to cause him agony. I decide I must come clean.

CargoBabe: Brady, I’m not an orphan as my profile states.

FluidTransfer69: R u married?

CargoBabe: No, Brady. My secret is unrelated to our love.

FluidTransfer69: R U A MAN??

Clearly, any further delay of information is not possible. Brady needs the truth and only the truth, and as my job motto states, I Shall Deliver.

CargoBabe: Today I’m at an auction to buy my frozen convict mother.

As I press “Enter,” I imagine this information beaming through light-years of distance to reach Brady. It’s a short but hard wait before I know relief.

FluidTransfer69: Oh. Want 2 get dirty b4 bed?

By the time Mother is put onto the block, the more upright bidding citizens have long left the building. The man to my left smells vaguely of urine and keeps lifting his wig and scratching his scalp with the end of his paddle.

I am the first to call Mother’s bid at its minimum, and am challenged only once by an awkward but well-dressed teenager who has been making the second bid on everything and accumulating an impressive frozen army. As I raise him, anxiety floods me. In my head I’ve already accepted a projected scenario where he bids my mother up to an unaffordable price and I leave defeated, only to be arrested five years later for breaking into his pool house in an attempt, likely drunken, to reclaim her. Then his shiny cell phone goes off and he leaves.

I get my mother for minimal mark-up, about the cost of three days of work. That is, when there’s cargo work to be had, and when misfortune does not follow my delivery mission like a love-drunk puppy.

I decide I cannot just dive in and yell to Mother’s capsule Everything I’ve Been Wanting To Say. The comfort level has to raise, familiarity must be reestablished and achieved. As evening sets in, I boil an insta-broth and sip it in front of her.

Although it wasn’t easy to fit her capsule, 15x6 feet, into the 30x20 interior of my ship, I believe that ultimately it will prove to be a healing experience. I think, sometimes, that my whole life, this wandering around the universe, is really just an attempt to try and outrun her and my past. But now here she is—consuming a large amount of electricity and frozen solid just inches away from wherever I am to roam about the cabin.

The heat from my insta-broth melts the frost away from her digital lock, informing me that she has over 414 years left on her sentence. When (or if) she does finally wake, I will be so dead, and she will most likely have no idea that the majority of my adult life was spent in cohabitation with her physical being. Perhaps I’m fooling myself thinking that this is any kind of personal breakthrough. To say that she is emotionally unavailable is a bit of an understatement. But really, it’s my life I should concern myself with. Our relationship doesn’t have to be a two-way street.

When it’s time to meet Brady online, I throw a blanket over Mother’s capsule like it’s a parrot’s cage. My personal life should remain private. It’s been a long day, and I’m ready to lose myself to the gaping void of lust. At times I worry my relationship with Brady is too heavily dependent on the sexual, but tonight I’m grateful for its numbing opiate. Afterwards, when I’m about to sign off, Brady brings up Mother.

FluidTransfer69: So what did she do, anyway?

I fear disclosing this information may cause him to worry about a genetic bias towards psychosis on my end, but then I remember our previous bonding experience that day.

CargoBabe: A lot of things. She has a strong thirst for money and blood.

FluidTransfer69: O? Sounds like a feisty one.

CargoBabe: She is fierce.

FluidTransfer69: So have u unthawed her yet?

Naïve as this question is, I can’t help but wonder if this is his way of telling me that he soon wants to meet not only myself but also the family, to take our relationship to the next level.

CargoBabe: That won’t happen in my lifetime. She has over four more centuries on her sentence.

I pause, pondering how much I should express to him. It’s healthy, I decide, to just say what I feel.

CargoBabe: It’s kind of a shame that I’ll only get to make amends on my end. There’s so much I wish I could say and have her hear.

FluidTransfer69: Huh.

And suddenly, I see that it’s OK. That it will all be OK because I’m not in this alone. My feelings for Brady swell and I decide to express them in a humorous pun.

CargoBabe: Thank you for listening. I feel like our love is now light-years past what it was this a.m.

FluidTransfer69: Pierre is happy 2 hear that! Babe?

Pierre is Brady’s name for his penis.

CargoBabe: Yes?

FluidTransfer69: Is ur mom’s capsule a Digilock? Cause it’s all over the Internet how to open those.

And with that, Brady demonstrates his technical prowess by cutting and pasting a series of step-by-step instructions that could have Mother room-temperature by morning.

I strap into my sleepsak with a heavy dilemma. I, and perhaps I alone, am in a unique position to understand that Mother is, on many levels, a monster of unthinkable proportions.

Yet I’m also her daughter. Her daughter and her only child. If I were frozen, wouldn’t I want her to unthaw me if I were so capable? And what of second chances? What of personal growth and change? What of her realizing that it’s me, her little daughter, but arson, drug trafficking, homicide, sexual battery, and a variety of other mistakes caused her to miss my childhood and adolescence?

I leave the blanket on her capsule all through the night. The next morning, I meet Brady online, but I’m not interested in the hot-n-heavy. I have hard-hitting questions that need answers.

CargoBabe: Brady, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m thinking of dethawing my mother.

FluidTransfer69: Isn’t that why you got her?

CargoBabe: I didn’t think it was.

FluidTransfer69: Then what’s the point?

Was Brady right? Had I subconsciously been hoping that I would be able to bring her back to life all along?

CargoBabe: She’s done some very bad things.

FluidTransfer69: Well, nobody’s perfect.

I’m inclined to agree with him, although I’m not sure that using her command of martial arts to force a wooden spoon handle into my father’s jugular could rightly be labeled an imperfection.

CargoBabe: I’ve got to go, Brady. You many not hear from me tonight.

FluidTransfer69: I’ll b thinking of u!

We give each other kissing icons; I impulsively touch the screen when his name disappears.

I remember, kind of, the movie Frankenstein. Or maybe I’m making this up. But I think that when the creature comes to life, there are lots of subhuman moans and groans. Perhaps some running around and crashing into things.

There is no technical support hotline I can call for assistance with illegally opening my mother’s prison capsule, and we’re a few hours away from any medi-port. My greatest fear is that she’ll wake up startled and instinctually lash out at the first organic thing she senses, which will be me.

Simply opening the capsule is easy. When the door lifts up it’s quite theatrical due to the frozen smoke. I wonder if I should be recording this. It seems like something my mother, the new mellowed-out one that will take to bridge and cardigans, might want to watch alone and get a bit misty-eyed to on nights when Brady and I have gone somewhere romantic and timeless: here is where my daughter pulled me from the fog of purgatory. Here is where I achieved room temperature.

Mother’s expression and skin texture looked unseemly even through the frosted glass, but without any kind of cloudy filter, she is very, very grizzled. The veins in her face are prominent and green, with a slight purple tinge I can only describe as zombieish.

Suddenly a vague memory hits me of a time she made me siphon gasoline as a child—she dismissed my resultant oral sores, saying if I really wanted to feel some pain, I’d close an eleven inch knife wound up with gunpowder and a cigarette (she had done this in São Paulo, though I can’t remember the circumstances). Waking her up might be quite a mistake. My panic deepens as my eyes move towards her sharpened teeth. At least, I’ve always assumed she had them sharpened. Nature doesn’t seem fond of mixing 45° enamel inclines with mammary glands.

As the ship’s control panel lights glimmer and flick across the shiny arrowheads of her incisors, it’s hard not to feel like everything about her emanates a strong Do Not Touch vibe.

The reanimation directions are far more involved than just popping the door open, which I’m sure often had to be done for routine maintenance. Though I don’t know how much routine maintenance was given to my mother, seeing as her T-Zone appears to be blistered yellow with a thick layer of permafrost. A wave of pity overtakes me, and I know what I must do. This time, things will be different: I’m an adult, I have a wonderful boyfriend, and Mother will have to be grateful that I saved her from her sentence.

I proceed with caution, first tying her body up with a series of athletic tube socks, which I have an abundance of. Though I’m no slave to the work-out (in fact I don’t think I’ve ever, really, engaged in any type of cardiovascular activity beyond scrubbing) I love elastic. Perhaps due to the fact that I was not hugged or encased in warmth nearly enough as a child. Perhaps due to the fact that my non-sociopath parent was murdered by the non-non.

Eventually, the fluids start kicking. I do mean this literally. Restraining her was a good idea.

The legs are the first to return, followed by the upper-torso. There are lots of bubbles. The gases that came out of her have a smell somewhere between Clorox and broccoli. At first her body appears to be dancing, hippie-style in reckless abandon, too drugged out to allow for symmetry of movement and timing. These seizures then pick up the pace with chest undulations. There’s a small window of time when I become afraid she will short-circuit and leave me with only the smell of burnt hair and some additional emotional baggage.

She vomits several liters of a gelatinous maroon substance before speaking.

“You double-crossing prick,” she belches. “Give me back my magazine.”

By magazine, I know she is not referring to any sort of home interior journal.

“Mother,” I say, “it’s me. You’re safe. You don’t need any bullets. The year is 2045.”

Her eyes, perhaps, still have some ice crystals passing over the retina. Maybe all she can see is blurry light. She might even think that this is the afterlife, and I an angel.

Suddenly I feel her gaze lock upon me like the scope of a long rifle.

“It’s you? Jesus, you turned out homely. Let me see your rack.”

“Mother—”

With that she reaches out to physically explore my bosom. Realizing she’s restrained, she quickly bites through her cotton fetters with rodential flair.

“This place is a shithole.”

I can feel the age-old resentment beginning to boil as I watch her rooting around my tiny cabin, no doubt searching for instruments to fashion crude weapons from. When she opens my utensil drawer, she lets out a judgmental “tsk.”

“Maybe, Mom, I would live in a nicer place if I hadn’t gone to a government work-orphanage at the age of nine when you were incarcerated. Not just incarcerated, frozen. Beyond writing letters, even. Did you know that they didn’t even tell me you’d been frozen? For the longest time, I left mail for you on my nightstand, thinking the supervisors picked it up during our morning chemical showers. I’d get long letters back and it wasn’t until you started coming on to me in them and asking me to meet you in the boiler room that I realized Robby the Janitor had been stealing my outgoing mail and taking on your share of the correspondence.”

Mother has found my only pair of pantyhose (admittedly, I don’t dress to the nines much) and placed padlocks into each foot. She begins spiraling these around like nun chucks.

“Mother, no weapons. I mean it. I didn’t have to bring you back to life.”

This gets her attention. She comes over and places her fingers along my throat in a way that brings instant and absolute pain, along with the inability to move. “You’re getting too big for your britches.”

She then opens the refrigerator and eats for three hours straight. Around hour two I decide to go to bed. I don’t say a word about how the distracting light, the wasted power, and the flatulent sounds of plastic condiment containers spurting their last drops are keeping me from pleasant dreams. What I do say in my head—a telepathic whisper of sorts that I hope she will hear, considering the possibility that maybe being not dead but frozen for several years opened some window of her mind to the supernatural—is this: my britches are indeed so big, Mother. I’m a forty-three year old woman with a weakness for reconstituted fudge.

I wake to Mother (nude) holding a loofah scrub (mine) looking not so happy. She was frozen before the hydrogen ration card mandate and does not understand why the shower won’t operate. Since I cannot ask for additional ration cards to support a prematurely thawed felon, I’m forced to dip into my meager stash of them. She asks how long they’re for.

“Three minutes,” I warn. “Don’t get caught in the dry with a head full of bubbles.”

She hoists up an arm that appears to be covered with sawdust. “I’ve got more dead skin than you’ve got ugly. Give me another one of those things. Three minutes isn’t even long enough to sand my forehead.”

I tell her, “just this once,” then when I hear the water start I put all my remaining ration cards into a front-zip stomach purse designed to prohibit pick pocketing. I bought the purse for travel, specifically for when Brady and I will honeymoon in Rome.

While Mother’s in the shower, I sign on to let Brady know that I’ve unfrozen her.

FluidTransfer69: U guys catching up?

I’m a sucker for simplicity and would rather not explain that since waking, all Mother has really done is fully deplete my living quarters and put me in a choke-hold.

CargoBabe: Yes.

That night I decide that if things are going to move forward emotionally with Mother, it is I who will need to instigate the healing process. I watch on as she uses my fold-down dinette table to practice punching through wood.

She needs no practice.

“Mother, when you killed Father, that really hurt me. Especially the having to watch it.”

“I didn’t tie you up and glue your eyes open.”

This is true. Mother has a way of making everyone else seem in the wrong.

“Did you miss me? All those years you were frozen?”

Mother’s left cheek is somewhat illuminated by the moon, which is visible across the windshield. She’s sweaty and her cheeks are pink with exertion. I watch as her expression remains unchanged while her fist sails through four solid inches of oak.

It occurs to me that we’re now the same age. In fact, she might be a little younger. Despite her discoloration from freezing, I have to admit that her features are beautiful. It’s not something she passed on.

“Mother? Because I missed you. Sometimes I was so mad at you that I told myself I didn’t miss you. I even swore that I hated you, but inside I knew that was never true, no matter how much I wanted it to be.”

“I was frozen, nitwit. You can’t miss people while you’re frozen.”

In my bunk I pull the covers up over my head and wonder if my relationship with Brady is strong enough to accelerate—to the point of me seeing his face, but also to us meeting and perhaps cohabitating.

Mother could maybe not come with me.

The next morning I pop the question to Brady.

Cargobabe: I know this is sudden, but I’ve been through a lot in the past four days and it has really made me realize what’s important in life. And that’s loving and being loved. I love you, Brady. I want to marry you and be with you forever. I want us to live together and to end each day in your arms. Please say you will?

FluidTransfer69: Get married in person?

Cargobabe: I know you’re ashamed of your scars, but there’s no shame with me Brady. I don’t care if your face looks like it’s been melted by acid. Just as long as you’re nice to me, like you have been. What we have together is something I’ve never known before.

FluidTransfer69: Will ur mom come too? I think I have room.

I quickly peer over my shoulder to make sure Mother is still finishing her home tattoo. She’s deep in concentration over an electric toothbrush motor and a Bic pen.

Cargobabe: Mother will not be attending the ceremony.

We discuss logistics. Although I want to leave this afternoon, Brady has a biohazard run to finish and only one radioactive suit. We decide on Friday.

The truth is, good things do happen to good people; sometimes it just takes awhile. And bad people do get punished. Mother already got hers, sort of. She should’ve gotten it for longer but I wanted to give her a second chance.

The rest of the week proved to be quite a struggle. I managed to get through it only because I knew it would all be over soon, I in Brady’s protective embrace.

On Tuesday, incredulous that I wasn’t holding any hard drugs, Mother burnt my vinyl curtains to create a tar-like mixture she could huff. Once high, she insisted we have a series of home-Olympic strength competitions that included arm wrestling, leg locking, and kickboxing. These were followed by a medal ceremony in which Mother awarded herself the two remaining tin cans of food on board. I went to bed hungry. This was probably for the best because my stomach was already so full of swallowed blood.

Bored on Wednesday, Mother dislodged a ceiling panel and went up into the cabin’s airshaft. She emerged adorned with several pieces of apocalyptic jewelry she had fashioned from living rats.

Thursday was a delight of secret packing. Although most of my sparse possessions had been transformed into some type of weapon, I had been able to hold onto one pair of decent underwear, elastic still relatively sturdy, for my first meeting with Brady. That night I decided to set things as right with Mother as I could.

“Mother, I want you to know that despite all that’s happened, you’ll always be my mother, and I love you.”

She seemed to possibly absorb this. Her fingers fidgeted with her rattail necklace. “I can’t believe they did away with television ten years ago,” she said. “I really didn’t see that coming at all.”

I get up in the early hours of morning, dress, and start towards the exit pod. Suddenly the shadow of the doorway takes form and I feel a grave disruption in my breathing that gives way to unmistakable pain. Mother, wearing an eye patch donned for purely aesthetic reasons, is holding a homemade knife. As she pulls the blade from my chest, I see that it has been whittled from a tin pork-n-beans can. Its label is still partially on.

Knowing I have just minutes, perhaps seconds to live, I don’t dabble in the muck of blame or anger. Circle of life, I decide. Mother giveth, Mother taketh away. But I can’t live with Brady thinking that perhaps I’d gotten cold feet, or worse, never loved him at all. I use my last remaining strength to scrape towards the WordCall console.

To my surprise, it is already lit up. There is a message between us, except the words are not my own.

Fluidtransfer69: You better hurry up and do it. Good ‘ol Tons-of-Fun is ready to bolt.

Cargobabe: Consider it done. I love you, ‘Brady.’

Fluidtransfer69: I love you, Sicko.

“Sorry to burst your bubble.” Mother hoists me over her shoulder and begins walking. “He’s a steady I met back in the pen, pre-freeze. Been in wait ever since for an opportunity to spring me. As a former felon, he wasn’t be allowed to buy my permacapusle, so when he found out I’d be going up for auction he decided to get to me through you.”

The room is starting to turn a dark shade of magenta, waving at the edges like a flag of silk. Mother hoists me down and then latches something around my wrists and neck. I realize I’m in the prison capsule.

Before closing the lid, she unzips the purse on my waist and removes all my shower ration cards. From the inside of the capsule, her voice sounds echoey and god-like.

“Don’t worry, I’m freezing you, not leaving you to die. It’s just a flesh wound. Albeit a deep one. I’m going to have to dump you somewhere that no one will find you for fifty years or so, long enough for me and Skinner, or Brady, or whatever you called him, to have a nice life together without you showing up to blow the whistle.”

With that, the cold smoke starts. It burns in a surprising way. The fact that this should not be happening to me, that Mother and my pretend boyfriend formerly known as Brady are bad people and I am not, doesn’t provide quite as much insulation from the pain as I might like. In fact, I am very cold, so cold that no one thing can be any different from another. My thoughts and my left arm are equal-sized chunks of ice. The small window of the capsule begins to frost over and I know this is my chance: this where I get to make the face that I will have until I wake. I decide to stick out my tongue. As if this painful freeze is just a snowflake I can catch and eat, as if my mother is just a bad medicine I can swallow.

CORPSE SMOKER

My friend Gizmo who works at the funeral home occasionally smokes the hair of the embalmed dead. The smell does not bother him; he is used to horrible smells. He claims that after a few minutes of inhaling, moments from the corpses’ lives flood his head like a movie. He won’t smoke the locks of children. “I did that once,” he tells me, “and I watched a dog die over and over for two days.”

“What happens if you smoke the hair of the living?” I’m a little intoxicated. I like Gizmo romantically, and I wonder if rather than having to tell him he could just smoke my bangs and figure it out.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe then I’m just breathing burnt hair. Or maybe then I’d steal their memories and they’d never get them back.”

Memory theft is a pleasant concept to me. I’ve just been through a horrible breakup with my ex-boyfriend. As it dragged itself out, I often called Gizmo late at night while he was at work. In between tokes of hair he gave me really great advice.

The next day I decide to go to the salon and get the past fourteen months of hair chopped off. “I want the hair back,” I say, holding up a Ziploc bag. Since I knew I would feel strange requesting this, I decided to go to the Save-N-Snip where there is a large hand-drawn sign near the register that says IF WE FIND LICE WE CANNOT CUT YOU; the wording is sinister and when I leave with my hair bagged I don’t feel like the oddest animal they’ve ever seen.

At home I worry that strands of other peoples’ hair got swept in with mine. Who knows what memories of other people he could accidentally smoke and attribute to me? To be safe, I go through the baggie and take out anything even remotely straight. I am miles of curls.

The next night when I show up at the morgue with a bag of hair and a lighter, Gizmo is a bit skeptical.

“What if I take the wrong memories?” he asks. “What if I smoke this and then you don’t even remember your name?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, “you’d need toddler hair for that. This hair is all memories I can stand to lose.”

For a moment I ponder tricking him and pretending not to know anything right after he inhales. I could ask Where am I? then grab his hand with confused doe eyes.

Suddenly he gets a suspicious look on his face and lowers the joint. “Have you ever owned a dog who died a slow and painful death,” Gizmo asks, “and if so, did you stand by its side the whole time in constant vigil?” His expression is filled with caution.

“No dogs,” I report, “goldfish.” I make the sound of a toilet flushing.

Assured, he nods and takes a deep inhale. My head begins to feel warm and maneuvered, like certain parts of it are getting massaged. He coughs a little. “Is it working?” I ask.

“Truffles,” he says, putting his hand to his forehead like a fake psychic. “You really like truffles.” I nod; they are my favorite tuber. The contents of my head begin to fill with motion, like water is bubbling up in my ears. Tiny popping noises start coming from a place in my skull and grow crunchier. Suddenly, Gizmo’s eyes change.

“Your ex is a jerk,” he says. This seems right too, but when I try to come up with a specific example I’m left with a vague and unscratchable tickle deep in my brain. “You’re too vulnerable,” he says. “That moron could never have given you what you really want.”

All of a sudden, one of the dead bodies shakes and its hand rises up on the table. I scream and hold my bubbling head. “Don’t worry,” Gizmo says, “it’s just a death-rattle.”

“Just a death-rattle?” I laugh. “Do you even know how disturbing that sounds?”

Gizmo puffs more of my hair. I suppose he is used to the disturbing.

When we walk over to the rattling body, it looks vaguely familiar. “This isn’t him, is it?” I ask. “My ex?”

“No. But I can see the resemblance.” Gizmo turns his head a little and stares at the corpse. “Same chin.” As I admire Gizmo’s hands, they take a small clump of the body’s hair between two fingers. He gives me an inquisitive look. “Want to see what this guy’s life was like?”

I decline, for superstitious reasons. I figure I now have a memory hole in my head that might take a few days—weeks, even—to fill. I fear I might decide some other person’s memories are my own.

When I look over at Gizmo, he’s done with my hair joint and staring at me in a funny way.

“What,” I ask, “spill it.” We move towards a corner with a bench, and suddenly the sour smell in the air grows stronger.

“It’s wrong how we postpone bodies from rotting,” I say. “I can smell how wrong it is.”

“That’s what happened with you and the ex. It was going badly, but you kept holding on.” His gloved hands move under my shirt a little and around my bare waist. Knowing he has just handled dead flesh creeps me out at first, but then I move closer. Maybe, I decide, it is a nice contrast for him. After touching a dead person, my skin must seem quite special and alive. “You know,” he says, “I’ve smoked up many memories of bad relationships.” He takes off a glove so he can press his bare hand to my face. “I know what not to do.”

The body behind us gives another death-rattle. It startles me and I jump, but his hand stays on my face and I do not look away. “I’ve seen good memories too, though,” he continues. “I know how to be very romantic.”

I expect his breath to smell awful, like burnt hair, but instead it smells like Lilac Rain shampoo. I watch the fine layer of talc the rubber glove left on his hand glitter magically in the light, and the memory-hole in my brain turns hungry then hungrier.

Eat him with kisses, the hole says; it needs to snack on a new memory right away. So we kiss, and the weird smells of the morgue suddenly turn into something tame and slippery, something our lungs can slide over like jelly, something that can hold our hearts steady through our own quiet death-rattle.

CAT OWNER

I invited Eddie over for dinner as a first date. I am bad at dating, which is to say, I am bad at waiting for people to fall in love with me. What is the hold up? Where is the kink in the hose?

Tonight, I’ve prepared mashed sweet potatoes. I’m nervous because they look like the diarrhea of a clown.

When Eddie knocks, Baxter begins to growl. Baxter is my obese cat. His thyroid condition and back paw deformity prevent exercise. Baxter’s growl is low when he initially spies danger, then it gets very high if the offender does not flee. Your cat sounds like a Hank Williams song, an old boyfriend once said, but he said it while quickly leaving so it wasn’t a compliment they way it could’ve been.

Tonight when I open the door, Baxter slowly crawls over to Eddie’s foot and bites.

During dinner, Eddie tells me all about his job as a claims adjuster. I could care less. I don’t even eat because I’m planning on sex, and I don’t want any sloshing in my stomach or for my mouth to taste like food instead of sex. The tricky part about having sex at my apartment is Baxter, who watches on and growls while slowly crawling towards the bed, then slowly climbing up the woolly cat ramp he uses to get onto and off of the bed when I’m not home. Once he gets to the top, he approaches me and my partner and begins with the fangs. I’m so used to the biting that it doesn’t bother me any more, not even in really sensitive areas, but past partners have freaked out at Baxter’s intimidating 27 lb. figure and his sideways tongue combined with the biting and growling. I should note that by the time Baxter has finally reached the top of the bed he’s exhausted and his mouth is foamy. Maybe it has mad cow disease, an old fling once said, a one-night stand from the bowling alley. He’s not a cow, I replied, but the man was adamant, other things get it, goats and people and all kind of creatures, and when Baxter bit him the man sent me a bill for several expensive precautionary vaccinations he requested at the ER after leaving my apartment. Baxter kind of looks like the cat that’s printed on my checks, only much larger. My checks say, “WHAT’S WITH MONDAYS?” and the thin Baxter printed on them is very confused-looking. I sent the man the check for his medical expenses on a Saturday, specifically so he’d get it on a Monday, and maybe like the joke enough to get back with me. He might call one day.

“This gravy is awesome,” says Eddie. That’s good news. Awesome enough to sleep with me? I want to ask, although people who have the haircut I have and wear the beige vest I wear don’t say such things. My haircut looks like the wigs men don when they want to pretend they are living in the era of Shakespeare. The bangs are totally harsh. I have wanted to tell cashiers, Slit your wrists on my bangs, harlot!” when they are rude to me, especially when they give me an amused look as I’m buying prophylactics. I know what they’re thinking: that I have no use for them.

But I do. I’ve even moved Baxter’s on-ramp away from the bed in preparation. He will not bite Eddie again. I might but Baxter won’t.

Except after dinner, Eddie stands and thanks me for a lovely evening, and says how much he’s really enjoying getting to know me. He will not accept drink or dessert. Turns out that Eddie does not imbibe alcohol. That’s okay with me I guess, all the better for his sexual performance. Finally, I come out with it.

“I’d like you to spend the night,” I say. “If you’re afraid the cat will be an issue, don’t worry. I’ve planned around him. He will not be crawling up on the bed and biting you during intercourse.” I feel like showing Eddie my breasts. I want to show them to someone so badly; even lifting up my shirt in front of a stranger who makes an awful face afterwards would be okay, would be better than this covered feeling that I have.

But Eddie itches his neck and says things are moving a little fast for him. He’d like to call it a night. You’re a coward, Eddie, I want to say, but instead I follow him to the door and wrap my arms around his back as he continues walking out until finally he’s moving so fast that I can’t keep up and have to let go.

I put on my pajamas and call a pizza delivery service and ask if they’ll please bring the pizza to me in my bed. Now that I know I probably won’t be having sex, I’m famished. I make up a story for the pizza man about being injured and bed-ridden, and the weary order-taker finally agrees to bring it inside and deliver it right to me.

When the pizza man comes, I flirt but he is not a bait-taker. I craftily lift up the sheets, acting shocked when my breasts ‘accidentally’ expose themselves. But he exits the room before I have a chance to find my wallet. I get the pizza free of charge.

There’s a pulling sound, quiet but slow, and I turn to see Baxter’s ramp moving back towards the bed. He is scooting it using his wide forehead. He stops once to vomit but then starts again. It is the most exercise I have ever seen him get. When he finally reaches the top of the bed, his mouth is a white sea of foam. He appears to be smiling; he lumbers to the outer crust of the pizza and we both eat until we are satisfied.

TEENAGER

I am sixteen years old and I cannot have Luke Gunter’s baby. I have seen my older cousin’s deflated football breasts. They have weird marks and lines that make them seem like optical illusions, like how pencils placed into glasses of water appear broken.

Vaginal elasticity is a secondary concern. I do not want to suffer the fate of many a cute sweater, suddenly stretched too large for proper wear. My vag must stay like the glove in the infamous OJ Simpson trial: too small to fit unless the wearer really, really wants it to.

I have a lot on my mind even before Kristi removes her left shoe.

You’re missing half a toe?

Kristi is a risk-taker. She explains that one night she and her former boyfriend (his real name is something like Brian but he goes by Goober instead, or “The Goob”) each made a pact to cut off a piece. Kristi, of course, went first. Goober has a small machete collection thanks to the Citrus Park Flea Market, and after icing down her pinky toe she hooked it over a wooden stool. The real pain apparently came in the hours that followed. The actual moment of separation was only a pinch, like the guns they use to pierce your ears in the mall.

Goober chickened out, but that isn’t why she dumped him. “He started working at the gag-gift store next to Cookie Time. It was just too weird to hang out there. Every time I’d go in Goober and his co-workers were playing with a giant glow-in-the-dark body condom, all stoned and giggling. He seemed so seventh grade all of a sudden.”

We are painting our nails. Kristi’s bedspread is a cow skin rug that she’s very protective of; she keeps making little “tsk” noises at me when my foot gets too close to the edge of the towel.

“I beat you,” she says. With only 9 toenails Kristi has an unfair advantage. “It’s sort of why I never wear flip-flops. I mean I care what people think but I don’t.”

This is true. When Kristi was fourteen she got pregnant (pre-Goober) and paid Laura Fitch’s older brother Steve forty dollars to drive her to Orlando for an abortion. Rumor has it that Steve went to an arcade while it was being done and was problematically late in picking her back up.

I started hanging out with Kristi a few months later, when she got an iguana, but recently our friendship has taken an intimate and critical turn since I, too, am with-fetus. “Think of it as fat and you’re going to get lypo,” she says.

I’m not going to just stop in at the first clinic I pass; that’s what Kristi did and they vacuumed her. Maybe she was farther along. I don’t know the specifics. I want to go to The Blooming Rose.

Procedures at The Blooming Rose are naturally a bit more costly than those at clinics whose walls are cement blocks bearing STD posters. There’s one such poster at our school where each STD has an illustrated, anthropomorphized version of what that STD might look like, were it a grumpy cartoon character, drawn next to it.

The Rose has Georgia O’Keefe paintings.

Though if I put it on my credit card, my parents might get involved. As in possible hymen reconstruction surgery followed by an armored truck driving me to Barnard College post-graduation.

Too bad I didn’t get knocked up by Chet or another student with an American Express. I’m feeling the realized danger of sleeping with scholarship recipients like Luke, even though he’s totally hot and athletic, and he did get $500 for being a semi-finalist when I sent his photo into the YM secondary school Campus Crawl contest. But that money is gone. He bought me a purse.

When I get home, I decide the best thing to do is borrow Grandma’s credit card. She moved in with us after Grandpa died, five months before her tracheotomy. She was a model in her twenties, but she smoked like crazy and no part of her is beautiful anymore. I only smoke cigarettes occasionally at parties because I don’t want to end up sounding like an old robot.

“Gammy, can I see your wallet a second? In Driver’s Ed today they were talking about the different kinds of licenses, and how if you can’t drive, they just give you an ID card. I was thinking that must be what you have. You know how you can’t drive because of all the pills you take? How you hit that boy and they said no more wheels?” She sits up and tries unsuccessfully to straighten her wig. “It was funny when you called the arresting officer a pauper in court.”

She reaches for her microphone wand. It used to bother me a lot, especially since before the operation her voice was so soft and pretty. But now when she talks I just think of it as a sample in a rap song and it isn’t as weird. Kristi and I once told Gammy to say the word “homie” and she did. It was hilarious.

“M-y w-a-l-l-e-t? S-h-o-o-t. M-y p-u-r-s-e i-s a-r-o-u-n-d h-e-r-e s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e. D-a-m-n a-l-l t-h-e-s-e K-l-e-e-n-e-x w-a-d-s. Y-o-u-r m-a-i-d t-h-i-n-k-s s-h-e-s t-o-o g-o-o-d t-o p-i-c-k t-h-e-m u-p. T-e-l-l y-o-u-r f-a-t-h-e-r t-h-a-t.”

When I see her purse, I find the card and write down its numbers. She’s doing something to her lap dog that seems like a tumor-search, carefully rubbing little spots on his stomach.

“Thanks, Gammy. That’s interesting. Your hair looks good in that picture.”

“C-a-n y-o-u c-h-a-n-g-e m-y s-o-c-k-s? T-h-e-y a-r-e w-e-t a-g-a-i-n.”

She always thinks her socks are wet. I go over and pretend I’m feeling them without actually touching her feet.

Tonight Luke and I are watching television and doing a position called “reverse jackhammer.” We saw it in a magazine.

“I can really feel the blood rushing to my head!” I say. In the mirror I watch Luke’s testicles bounce to and fro like a rubber cat toy. I want to reach out and bat at them playfully, except then I’d land on my skull.

When Luke’s finished he always sucks in a mass of air like he just got the world’s biggest paper cut. It sounds painful. The moment he relaxes, I push off his body and land back on all fours.

“That was excellent,” he says. “Since we got together, I don’t think I’ve been on the Internet.”

I nod, bringing his head to my chest like he’s a giant infant. He tells me all about the upcoming football game this Friday and his tactics as quarterback, who he thinks is ready and who isn’t. I completely drown out the actual meaning of his words and just listen to the sound, the depth of it, like his voice is one of those CDs of whale calls they sell in the nature store.

Later I change into a sundress and go with Luke to get vitamin supplements. He’s way too concerned about his body to drink or do drugs, but he doesn’t seem to care that I do. I’m a little paranoid about this. In my worst nightmares, Luke is disqualified from a critical game because he got a contact high from my vaginal secretions and failed a pee-test.

“You have got to tell him. You really have to.”

Kristi and I are watching a home video of her performing fellatio on Chet. She has this idea to make instructional tapes and sell them to the younger girls at school. We’re trying to write notes for the voice-over narration.

“Does he do something to his pubes or are they just like that?” I can’t decide whether or not Chet is attractive in the throws of pleasure. His upper lip peels back from the gum line in an equine fashion. It’s all very Mister Ed.

“Dunno. Maybe henna. What is so hard about telling him?”

“But I’m taking care of it.” Every thirty seconds or so in the video, Kristi looks back at the camera like she’s worried things aren’t being recorded properly.

“Hey, was this on a tripod? Who taped this?”

“Levi. Look, you just should tell him. Why go through all this alone? Plus it’s way weird if he finds out afterwards. Awkward.”

“Levi? Your brother Levi?”

“What. I gave him ten bucks.”

“Oh, gross.”

I watch Chet’s hands grip her head with a numb type of violence, like she’s electrocuting him but he can’t let go. Kristi has taped nearly every sexual deed from the past year and a half. Anything involving communal acts with myself or another girl has the base title of “Sister Act” followed by a roman numeral.

Kristi sighs. “Luke’s body is so athletic. I wish Chet looked like that.”

This comment makes my stomach feel bad, like I’ve eaten too much. “Luke’s my boyfriend,” I want to say.

Instead I excuse myself and go throw up. I guess it’s morning sickness.

When I meet with the on-site counselor at “The Blooming Rose,” I’m given a clipboard and a pencil with an acronym on its side: Abstinence Is Definitely Safe.

“AIDS,” I say out loud. Everyone in the waiting room looks up overtop their magazines at me.

I’m led to a tiny office where another woman enters and takes my questionnaire. She doesn’t tell me her name but it’s definitely something unisex. She is sow-ish and baggy. Her eyes shoot me a look that says, “I’d love to be your friend if I didn’t feel so sorry for you and you weren’t so irresponsible.”

“I’m here to tell you about all your choices,” she smiles.

I nod but really I’m picturing the post-delivery butt of my cousin. She had just one kid and now her whole backside looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

“Have you thought about having the baby and putting it up for adoption?”

I begin to take on a false, considerate persona but stop before I even begin. I’m going to have to break her heart sometime, and it might as well be sooner.

“Isn’t that like buying the cow and not even getting the milk?”

She starts writing furiously behind a manila folder. When she finally stops, she gives me a look of unfettered hate.

“Are you saying the baby is the cow? Or the baby is the milk.”

I lean forward a little in my chair. I want whatever is inside of me to hear my words and be crystal clear about the fact that it will not be staying long. I plan on throwing it a large goodbye party attended only by myself and lots of champagne.

“I don’t want this thing. There’s really no point in talking about it.”

She takes off her glasses and I realize that her eyes are two different colors. I can’t decide if it’s natural or if a contact fell out. If she were cooler it would make me think of David Bowie, but instead it just splits her personality further into Good Cop/Bad Cop. I focus on the eye I decide represents her more sympathetic half.

“Young lady, I’m going to tell you something and you can believe it or disbelieve it. But later on down the road, and it may be months or even years, you might really have a problem with the decision you made.”

“Okay?”

Obviously, there is a certain level of warmth or tragedy that she’s used to getting from these meetings, and she doesn’t feel like ours is complete enough to let me leave.

“I know that at your age, it’s hard to understand the concept of something being permanent. But later on you may feel…an emptiness.”

“Having a baby is just as permanent as not having a baby.”

“But it’s different,” she says. “You can’t see that?”

And then I start crying in order to please the sow. To get it over and be done with it. “I just need to do this,” I say. I keep repeating it until she comes over and hugs me, until her sandbag breasts are covered in my tears.

Kristi sent a balloon arrangement to my room in the clinic. One says, “You’re a Star!” and is actually shaped like a star. Another, “Congratulations.” My parents think we’re having a sleep over.

The doctors here are all male and seem to regard me as a liability, like at any moment I’m going to come on to them in a provocative underage way. They always leave a door open and call a female nurse before touching me.

I can actually feel The Mistake drizzling out. It’s time, I decide, to call Luke.

“Are you drunk, Babe?” he asks. “You sound kind of messed up.”

Even though I want to tell him, I panic. I cannot believe how hard I am chickening out. “I’m fine,” I say. “Just a little sleepy.” He begins telling me about football practice, and I put the phone down onto the pillow and listen. A documentary about America’s heartland is showing fields of sweeping wheat and grain on TV. When Luke says goodbye I make a very thoughtful noise on accident, the sound a homeless cat might make should a prospective adoptee decide against him.

“My guy wouldn’t come with me either. Said he wanted go to this car show.”

I look over at my roommate. She has brought along a series of framed photographs and placed them on her nightstand; several include her with babies.

“This is my oldest,” she says, smiling.

I try to change the subject. “Do they have that movie Training Day?” I ask. I’m tired of watching wheat.

The next morning when I check out, I have a weird surge of nostalgia for Luke. I almost can’t wait to see him. In the cab I call him and say that I need to stop by, then I imagine him holding me and the way his low whale-calls will resonate with the uneasiness in the bottom of my stomach. They will cancel each other out. They’ll dissolve everything sad.

“Sure thing Babe. Wanna watch the Packers? In the den?”

“I do,” I say. I mean it.

People are always working on their lawns in Luke’s neighborhood. I guess because they don’t have people that work on their lawns for them. When we pull up to his house his father is outside on a riding mower that’s making his surface flesh jiggle. They say you can tell what women will look like when they’re older because of their mothers, but I’ve never really heard that logic applied to men and dads. This is a good thing, I think.

I give Luke a huge hug and decide that when the time is right, I’ll know it. I wait until he is upright and celebrating a touchdown, then I give a little clap as well.

“Luke, you got me pregnant, but I took care of it for us.” I pause a little. “I know you don’t have a lot of money and stuff.”

His touchdown arms drop and his face contorts into a horrified teddy bear impersonation. “You mean you killed it?” he asks. His eyes have gone pained and watery.

I suddenly feel like a parent who’s telling a child a family pet died. “Come here,” I say, but he steps back.

“I’ve got to think,” he mumbles, which I know is bad.

Thinking is not a part of Luke Gunter, and not a part of feeling good. In fact it’s almost the opposite.

When I get home I take some of Grandmother’s Marinol. I’m feeling nauseous.

“Gammy,” I ask, reaching into her nightstand, “can I have some of those pills? The ones that make you eat ice cream? I think I got car sick.”

She’s asleep so I help myself. Her neck-hole is breathing and making a sputtery, flapping sound. I imagine a scenario where she’ll only awaken if the right man puts his finger into that hole and keeps it there, like a reverse King Arthur and Excalibur.

Gammy? I can’t hear you. Use the mic.

When Grandma first wakes up she often forgets she can’t talk. It’s sad. It looks like she’s trying to blow out thousands of candles on a birthday cake.

I t-h-i-n-k I s-m-e-l-l c-h-i-c-k-e-n. I-t w-o-k-e m-e up.

There’s no chicken, Gammy. She dozes back off violently, lots of elbows, as if she’s being escorted to sleep against her will.

I can’t help staring at her. She seems to be continually deflating from her neck hole, wrinkled and losing the battle for air. Her hole is like a withered pit that used to hold a large seed, but one day it fell out and she wilted.

It is so gross how we are born and so gross how we die.

Luke broke up with me in a text message. It said: I feel nothing 4 U.

After I scrapped our DNA craft project, he started dating Kristi. Apparently she is no longer using Chet as a human lollipop.

“Luke feels nothing ‘four’ me,” I said to sleeping Grandma.

Ironically, Kristi is the tallest flag on Piedmont Academy’s Mt. Abortion. She scaled it before the rest of her classmates had even started climbing. I think of how the number four could describe either me and the dead coffee-bean and Kristi and her dead who-knows-what (they vacuumed. It had to have been more like a quarter); or it could describe me and Luke and our dead coffee bean and Kristi. Or it could describe the number of Gammy’s sedatives I will have to take after receiving this distressing news.

But first, the message. Positive that they are involved in an act of fornication at this very moment, I call Kristi’s phone (knowing she will not answer) in order to get her machine (knowing they will hear it). My rage will be the soundtrack of this particular Kristi home pornography session.

I leave a mean tirade about how I know they’re naked and on camera, and she picks up in the middle of it,

“You stupid bi—”

but I snap my phone shut. My phone is a tightly shut clam and all the badness that happened inside is going to irritate itself into a pearl. It will just take a bit of time. My phone vibrates again and again, filling, no doubt, with venomous messages I will never listen to, but the thought of never hearing them somehow makes me sad. I get even sadder as I think of Luke and Kristi together, and me alone, and this oily kind of sweetness starts to crawl up my throat and then melt back down again over and over, like something I ate long ago but am just now tasting.

ICE MELTER

I work at a small business that makes ice sculptures for gay pool parties. I answered the job ad because I’m diabetic and they offered health insurance. When I showed up for the interview, they were thrilled.

“You’re perfection!” exclaimed my bosses, a male couple who were looking for someone who would not easily distract or be distracted. “Not only are you a woman, but you are also a very plain one.”

At the end of each party, I have the saddest job: to melt down the ice creation into nothingness. This makes the hose in my hand somehow feel like a gun. I try to at least be humane about it. If the sculpture is an animal, say a dolphin, I always do the head first. That way it will no longer be able to feel anything and the rest of its death can be painless.

One night the ice sculpture for the party was a giant hypodermic needle. It was some LA heroin-chic thing, but being diabetic and humorless, I didn’t think it was funny.

“You know,” I said in a heavy tone to my bosses, “some people have to use needles every day.”

“Honey,” they chided, “we’re not catering a rehab graduation. It’s a joke.” I told them I wasn’t laughing and they gave me this look that said they felt sorry for me, the same one they’d given me when I asked if they liked my new outfit.

That night, as the partygoers passed the sculpture pointing and laughing, I stood next to it with my chisel and politely scowled. Whenever someone asked for a piece, I gave him one that was far too big, overfilling the cup and spilling the drink.

“There’s more where that came from,” I’d mention.

Later, when one of the waiters offered me a glass of champagne on a tray, I took it.

“Look who’s letting loose,” one of my bosses teased, passing me. He was naked except for a strategic piece of animal print silk.

I decided to have another glass. Eventually, a man came up and asked why I looked so glum. I never drink, being as alcohol turns straight into sugar, so I was feeling a deep, meaty warmth that I’m not used to, especially not when standing next to a block of ice.

“I have to inject myself with insulin every day.” I was speaking in a volume and tone not socially appropriate for the hired help. “I don’t think this symbol should be used as a novelty.”

The man took a slow sip of his drink. The drink was probably warm, seeing as he’d walked over to me to get ice. His movements were universally calm; even his blinks seemed to take longer than they should.

“That’s the thing about symbols,” he said, “they mean different things to different people.”

I chopped off a large piece of needle and plunked it into the man’s cup. He did not say thanks, but “Huh.”

I began to look him over. I was suddenly very lonely, and hoped that this man, who had now been standing with me longer than any guest at any party ever had, maybe wasn’t gay. I think the man somehow picked up on it, my sudden ache for physical affection.

“I think it would be therapeutic,” he said, “if you gave the needle a big hug and a kiss. You clearly have some resentment towards needles, and resentment is just not healthy.” He took another one of the slowest sips in the world, even slower now that he had such a large piece of ice in his cup.

Had I drank four glasses of champagne? Five?

I wrapped my arms around it. I’ve never had a lover, so it was an awkward embrace.

The sculpture felt slimy but cleansing, like my wrists were being covered in very cold perfume. I puckered up my lips and closed my eyes, but before I started to move in the man stopped me. His face had slowly gotten very close to mine.

“You’ve got to give it a real kiss,” he said. “The kind that make people forgive things.” Then, slowly, he kissed me. It started with his tongue poking soft and flat into my mouth. Both our lips were warm and burning with alcohol. When it was over, I gave him that look that asks for more, but he pointed me towards the ice needle. “I am gay,” he said, also slowly, as though I’d had more than enough time to figure it out.

I stuck out my tongue that still tasted of his booze, which was a more grown-up booze than I had been drinking, and pushed it right against the needle at its very base. I channeled warm and loving thoughts. For a moment I felt at peace.

Then I realized I was stuck.

The slow man broke his trademark and quickly left. I stood there for awhile, watching the guests stare at me, laugh, and then take the pick from my arm, which was still wrapped around the needle, and help themselves to some less-gigantic pieces of ice. Since I was attached to the sculpture, when they chiseled it I felt like they were breaking off a piece of me too, and I protested in grunts and wrapped it more tightly around myself. The chiseling made everything vibrate in a threatening way. I wanted it to stop.

I grunted louder and mounted the sculpture fully, like it was a tree and I a koala. I was wearing a thin dress and the ice numbed my skin.

Finally my bosses approached. They’d never touched me before, but somehow their hands felt familiar. They chiseled off the piece of ice around my tongue and then told me go to a sink and hold it under warm water. “You’re not the first person this has happened to,” they kept saying, but they weren’t reassuring about it. As we walked towards the bathroom, I looked back at the needle. All the places where I’d been pressed against it had melted smooth; its calibrated numbers had disappeared, and the handle now curved inward in places.

As the hot water began to flow, I couldn’t help but notice my bosses looked sad, a bit like me when I have to kill the ice sculptures.

“We thought you would work out so nicely,” they lamented. The stream of faucet water was big and roaring in my ear. The water was so hot that I imagined I was traveling into a volcano, that my tongue was made of lava, and my hair. I let the water run all over my head and neck, staying under the stream as I heard my ex-bosses leave the bathroom.

Beneath the faucet, I pictured myself in another, similar universe on a night much like tonight, finishing out the party then hosing the sculpture down needle-first. As my drunken warmth returned I stayed with the small relief of that image, the still absence that comes when the head melts clean of its body.

HELLION

I never had breasts until I went to Hell. When I died at the age of thirty-nine I was barely an A-cup. I often used to purchase bras from the preteen section. The bra I died in had tiny unicorns patterned across one nipple and tiny rainbows patterned across the other.

At first I thought it was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for type deal. All my life I had wanted a bigger chest, and now I was going to be saddled with one and learn all the ways that it’s inconvenient—back pain, unwanted attention, etc. But as I walked around I began to notice that all the females had them. I was looking down my shirt when another woman patted me on the back. “They’re for defense,” she winked. I didn’t understand until later that day when a fellow Hellion began hitting on me, a real know-it-all. The kind of person who always has a toothpick in his mouth. When I first got to Hell, I was shocked they’d let people have sharp objects like toothpicks; I expected the rules of prison. But that is lesson #1. Hell is not the same as prison.

As I grew angry with the guy, my breasts began to make a percolating sound. It felt like they were being forcibly tickled. My nipples hardened into nozzles and a bubbling green liquid that smelled like motor oil shot out of them. It sprayed all over the man’s face and his skin began to smoke and blister.

I watched him run over to the lava pond and look at his reflection. “I’m a mutant for eternity!” he screamed.

A giant man named Ben walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. Ben is intimidating at first: he is covered from head-to-toe with eye implants. “Sorry about that,” he muttered. A bat poked its head out of Ben’s beard. The bat was wearing an eye patch.

Some people in Hell are nice. They just happened to have done a very reprehensible thing at one point. I killed my husband once, for instance. But I felt bad enough about it to also kill myself.

Hell isn’t that awful, but it does smell. People often ask, “What died in here?”

The answer is complicated. It could be a lot of things. Our currency is little coins made of hair and liver that we have to spend before they rot. We get a weekly allowance, enough to keep most people entertained, but if we want more money we can mop the floors, etc. It’s common for people to start a collection as a hobby. For example, Ben collects eyes and surgically embeds them all over his body. His best eye is in his belly button. He wears little high-rise t-shirts so that his belly-eye can see and be seen at all times.

I expected a lot of axe murderers to be running around, licking bloody knives and looking sinister. But Hell really isn’t that violent. Something about the heat. Everyone is lazy and sluggish except the Caribbean pirates —they were already used to high temperatures. But now they can’t ravage women because of the bosom-acid, so they try to catch their flies with honey and are really quite chivalrous. If someone accidentally drops her purse into a lava river, they’ll use their peg legs to fetch it out. Wild serial killers are totally the minority down here. Hell is mainly full of people with tempers, or people like Thor.

“I still feel bad about Thor.” I heard the devil mumble this one night at the bar and inquired around. Apparently every few millennia Hell gets a case like Thor’s. He lived during the 1600s and was a brain-eater in both his real and after-lives. Normally Hell’s heat encourages people to slow down, but in Thor’s case it seemed to give him momentum. It became quite problematic, Thor running around brain-eating, so the devil turned Thor into a large rhesus monkey whose brain had already been eaten out.

But the change was too dramatic. It was like a father yelling at an irritating kid who then becomes completely quiet and joyless, so much so that the father feels remorseful. Prior to the change Thor was known for his relentless war chants, but after the metamorphosis he forgot all their words. He did nothing but silently pick insects from his fur, and the devil felt this silence as guilt. To make amends he gave Thor a sort-of brain, something similar to the motor from an electric pencil sharpener. Now everyone in Hell treats Thor with kid gloves.

Hell also has an incredible number of nurses, so many that it’s ridiculous. I don’t know why, but the bar is always full of them, guzzling fake beer and talking about how they wish they could go back to earth for just a second and pull someone’s catheter out really fast. There is only one small bar in Hell but everyone manages to hang out inside. The beer is nonalcoholic.

I was complaining about this the first time I actually got to talk to the devil one-on-one.

“You’d get dehydrated,” he mumbled. “Alcohol is a great idea if everyone wants a headache.”

The devil’s voice sounds like that of a leprechaun who’s been smoking for centuries. He wants to quit, or so he says. He began telling me how he once put on a trench coat and went into an earthly gas station to buy nicotine gum.

“I never had any luck with it,” I commiserated. I think that’s when he took a shine to me.

Newcomers experience a placebo effect in the bar during their first couple visits, and I was no exception. As the night progressed, I started to feel intoxicated and my conversation with the devil took a turn for the worse.

“And what’s up with the ceiling?” I added. “It’s like the inside of the biggest dead animal in the universe.” The walls are all bones and stretchy tendon.

The devil put out his cigar and stood up. “It’s worked for a long time,” he argued. “Why change it now?” But from his expression I could tell he was hurt.

A few days later there was a knock on my door, and it was none other than the devil.

“You were right,” he nodded, “what you said the other night.”

“I was drunk,” I offered. His eyebrows rose. “Though not technically.”

“No, some things could be updated.” We began to gaze at one another. His eyes turned a fiery red that didn’t exactly scare me but was hypnotizing in an assertive way.

I thought for a moment. “You could build a roller coaster?” I described my favorite ride ever, the Demon Drop, which plummeted straight down and made my stomach feel insane every time I rode it.

He thought for a while and agreed it would be a good thing to try. “Thor could operate it,” he suggested.

We had a raffle contest to decide what the ride would be called. The winner was Betty, a former Wisconsin housewife, who chose the name of SKULLKRUSH.

As the ride was being built, the nurses wanted to know if they could set up a triage hospital next to SKULLKRUSH. “No one will get hurt,” I said. I put a supportive arm around Thor. The devil and I had outfitted him with a SKULLKRUSH uniform and nametag in preparation, just to get him into the role. As I looked to Thor for reassurance, he grabbed the devil’s lit cigar and crammed it up his nose.

“Just in case,” they insisted.

The hospital turned out to be very beneficial—Thor has his good days and his bad days. They’re actually the same day. He likes to ignite and smoke his own tail, and have seizures. Sometimes Thor will appear to be safely stopping the ride, but then at the last moment he’ll defecate into his paw instead and throw it at the riders just before they’re pulverized. Of course no one can die, but there is no shortage of mangling, reconstruction, and extreme transformation. The whole concept that energy can never be destroyed really works out in Hell. Physics, etc. Examples of this abound.

There is Varmint Man, who lost a rib in a poker game. The hole it left was annoying, because Hell varmints waste no time packing up inside of cavities. I accepted an invitation from Varmint Man to try his yoga class, which wasn’t the best because of the twelve baby raccoons romping around in his chest hole. They were cute, but were demon raccoons, so they had green green buckteeth and puss flowing freely from their eyes.

After a wonderful date riding SKULLKRUSH with the devil (it was nice to feel the crazy stomach feeling while holding his giant claw), I spoke to him about Varmint Man and he was more than happy to help. He suggested we take Varmint Man dumpster diving to find something to seal up the chest hole. The dumpsters in Hell have unbelievable finds. I always thought I was hot stuff on earth, wading through the old éclair piles behind Dough Knots. I had no idea. We ended up outfitting Varmint Man with an elaborate series of copper piping: resistant to rodent teeth. I also found an intestine that had been stuffed with rat poison and fashioned into a noose. I decided to hang the whole thing from my chandelier. “You’re becoming more comfortable with entrails,” the devil commented. I liked the way he took notice of my growth.

SKULLKRUSH turned out to be a very lucrative venture. The best part was how the devil and I had succeeded in it together. I’d always wanted to be someone’s right-hand go-to girl, and there I was.

We were keeping the bags of profit from SKULLCRUSH in my house, but soon it started rotting. “Our money is beginning to smell,” I told him. He stared at me for a while, weighing whether or not to say what was on his mind. Finally he sighed and took my hand and said to get all the money together. His hands in mine give me that great feeling of dating someone my father would completely not approve of.

We walked the bags down a long tunnel that was like an everlasting gobstopper of horrible smells: first dead cats then dead dogs then dead cows then dead whales until I couldn’t even take it. “This stinks,” I managed. The walls were boiling with blood.

“We’re almost there.” He picked me up and put me inside a pouch in his stomach that I didn’t even know he had. Actually I’m positive he just tore his flesh open and let me hang out inside so I wouldn’t have to walk anymore.

The inside of the pouch was wet and oozy and took me back to when I was little. Each time my family had to go on a long car ride, my grandma first sat me down on the toilet and poured warm water between my legs to make me pee. It’s something I was trained to do from the earliest age onward, and suddenly I found myself sitting in a warm blood-organ puddle. “Whatever you do,” I thought, “don’t pee inside the devil.” I think he felt it before I did, but suddenly we both got really quiet and it was the most awkward moment of my life. Or it would’ve been, if I weren’t already dead.

I defensively took my boobs into my hands before confessing, just in case he was sore about the whole thing. “Sorry.” After it was still quiet for a moment I added, “I didn’t mean to.” For a second I thought I was going to faint from embarrassment but then he started laughing and so did I; I started laughing so hard that I cried. My tears were acidy and smelled like motor oil. I think my new boob ducts are connected to my tear ducts.

Finally we arrived at the end of the tunnel, where the dead smell seemed to disappear. I wriggled out of his pouch then he reached down and did a squeegee-like wringing motion; all sorts of things splashed onto the ground and then the flap was instantly gone. It’s cute how he doesn’t make a big deal out of his ability to do such amazing things. Although he tells me I do amazing things that I don’t think are amazing at all, like have hair on my head.

“Do you feel the air?” I asked, but he was already smiling. This was his coup de grâce.

We’d arrived at a cave where cold air was literally blasting. Feeling cold after being hot for so long hurt somewhat; it made me realize that it probably was painful to breathe for the first time when I was born. I kept breathing the cold air and soon it started to feel pleasant, like stretching a muscle that’s sore.

He flipped on a light switch. In front of us there were hundreds and thousands of rows of frozen liver and hair. After stacking the bags of money in the back, he nervously put one of his arm hooves against the other and locked their grooves together. “I’ve never shown anyone this place before.” He paused. “You can imagine how popular it would be.”

“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” I stretched out on a liver strip near the lip of the cave so only the top half of my body was in the freezer. I wanted to bask in the difference.

“I know you won’t tell,” he said. “If I think about things in the future hard enough, I can see what will happen, and you don’t tell anyone.”

This pleased me. To be honest, I’ve never been able to keep secret.

We stayed there breathing cold air for quite awhile. It reminded me of the first time I smoked a cigarette. How strange it was to just breathe and feel better.

“I should be getting back,” he said finally. “If I’m gone for too long, it’s not good.”

I nodded. Usually in Hell it’s so hot that my skin is bright pink. But when I looked down I saw a very pale chest, and for the first time ever, the purple-green veins running through my acid boobs.

“You can stay if you want,” he offered. “I can come get you later.”

“No,” I said, “I’m ready.” It wasn’t true. I figured he’d know that I was lying to be polite. Hopefully, this would let him know how much I liked him.

He grew wings and giant claws to hold me so the journey back would be faster.

“I love this,” I said. “We should fly more often.” He seemed unsure. I pressed the issue until he admitted that he doesn’t like to grow wings and talons. He thinks they make his head look disproportionate. I had been pinching my nose because of the smell, but I let it go before speaking. I didn’t want to sound like some annoying mother-in-law from New Jersey.

“I think you look really terrific,” I whispered, and his claw tightened just a little.

Later that week he and I had such a good afternoon that we decided to go ahead and make a night of it. I tried to bake him some scones, but we got to talking and I forgot the oven and they burned. I’m horrible at baking and cooking. It was a point of contention between my husband and me before I killed him.

“Let’s go back to my place,” he said.

In my old life (we’re encouraged to do that, to call it an “old life” rather than “life,” as though it was left behind rather than taken), I did not do many exciting things. I never went on a real vacation, for instance. And I only remember swimming once when I was young. I certainly did not have sex with the devil.

“Sex with the devil,” I said flirtatiously. I thought he’d like that but instead he completely clammed up.

Maybe because his house is not an evil dungeon. I expected, as many women might, a type of Transylvanian sex-lair. This is not to say I wanted to be tortured, but pain is different and more relative in Hell, less “ouch” and more “I guess I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

But his bedroom was plain and ancient. There was the usual smell of rot, which in Hell is not a visceral, unbearably fresh smell. Instead it’s like something died a while ago on its own and had never been found or cleaned up. It made me think of my husband. I imagined how much I’d freak out if the devil dragged my husband’s corpse out from behind the bed, or worse, if my husband was actually in Hell at that very moment, still bearing all the death-stains I’d given him, and he’d been following me and was going to jump out at us in the middle of our intimate evening and ruin everything.

“I’m glad he’s not here, but why didn’t my husband go to Hell? I asked. “I just always thought it would be the other way around, that he’d be in Hell and I’d be somewhere else.”

We walked into a small cave that had a single torch and a bed, and the devil lay down and then gazed at me. I took the cue and curled up next to him.

It’s amazing how perspectives can change. I was always on my husband to cut his fingernails, but the devil has the longest ones I’ve ever seen and they don’t bother me. They’re thick and very yellow—their color is very unimposing, like blood that has sat for several centuries whose weight has left only a quiet stain. They remind me a little of paper in a really old book.

“Your husband was mean, but he wasn’t evil.” The devil’s breath on my neck was hot and brothy. He kissed me, and it was like being kissed by a pot of soup.

“Are you saying I’m evil?” I was curious, not upset. Hell also has a Prozac effect—regarding nearly everything, I both care and don’t care at the same time. When you know you have an eternity to get over things, you tend to just go ahead and get over them.

“You did an evil thing,” he said in a fatherly and chiding way that I liked beyond words. “Everyone’s capable of doing evil things.”

When I took off my shirt his eyes grew panicked. For a moment I thought it was my weapon-breasts. “Will they shoot you?” I asked. “Or do they only do that when I’m angry?”

He got up and pulled a curtain across the opening of the cave, then moved towards the torch. “Devil,” I whispered, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t you want the lights out?” The way he said it, it wasn’t really a question.

“I want to see you,” I whined. In a way, this was the biggest part of the excitement. The devil is millions of folds that I know somehow unfold. He is the largest insect in the universe, and a dragon and a goat and a man and a beard and skin that has been burnt clean.

“I can’t,” he said. “Right now, I can’t.”

I thought Hell would be all give or all take. But there’s just not enough room to plunder. We’re all here; we all have to go to the same small bar.

Most importantly, we have to learn that we are wrong sometimes. That there was at least one time, in our old lives, when we were very wrong.

I nodded and he blew out the torch. I couldn’t see him but I could feel him swelling, becoming fifty shadows almost as big as the room. My hand had been on his chest when the torch blew out, and now I felt his skin begin to slide up under my palm like he was a magic plant growing and growing; soon my hand was on his hip.

I began to explore his bones with my hand; I felt far more bones than legs or wings. I tried to count with my fingers their hundreds of knobs and ends. He lay back down, though he hardly fit upon the bed, and coaxed me up onto him. His warm breath was coming from every direction at once.

“This part is a little normal,” he said. But it wasn’t true.

Afterwards he fell asleep quickly. I felt him shrinking back, his entire body receding and folding, everything tucking neatly into place. I listened to the deep years of his lungs and decided to have a cigarette. We are smokers, he and I.

It’s true, the lighter was cheating. “Respect his wishes,” I told myself, “haven’t you learned anything?” But I was too excited to learn.

When I clicked the lighter, years seemed to pass. I could see through all the parts of him. His skin now looked like a clear bat’s. In his wings, cells were beating far faster than I could see; behind his lids his pink eyes were spinning. His long tongue flickered in his mouth and his stomach was full of small limbs. He was a machine, a riddle. Looking at him, I felt that I was growing smarter every second. I was able to watch him like children watch fish.

Then he woke up and caught me peeking.

“I’ve been in love before,” I told him, meaning the other time was not one bit like this. I felt my ribs and my stomach begin to grow and unfold like his skin.

He shot me a smile. Don’t go getting swept away, it said, a grounding look to tell me that Hell is different from my old life, but not as different as all that. Not so different that I couldn’t get hurt, or hurt him. He let me look on just a moment more, then the flame was blown out by a wind that came from nowhere.

ALCOHOLIC

Although we broke up two months ago, I agree to be his class reunion date anyway. I buy a dress I can’t fill and stuff it. Upon picking me up, my breasts are the first thing he comments on. They look frighteningly geometric and remind him of earmuffs, or Princess Leia.

I had cut a tennis ball in half and put one side into each bra cup. More natural-looking materials were available in my apartment, but I’d had a vision: he and I at the end of the night, drunk and reenamored. I’d take off my shirt and they’d practically glow in the dark. “Let me squeeze those fuzzy lemons,” he’d say, and I’d laugh and he’d toss them across the room; we’d make love to the sounds of their bouncing.

Already it seemed that probably wouldn’t happen.

When I wake up it’s 3,000 degrees and morning. I vaguely remember being in a large punch bowl and the DJ saying something about me over the microphone. I’m in a hot car, his, covered in a film of fruit punch and grapefruit vodka. One of the tennis ball halves is gone from my dress. I look over and see it on the driver’s seat, filled with quarters and a napkin note in microscopic print:

Here is some change. Go wash the puke from my backseat. Its more prominent aspects will have to be vacuumed up—use the foam brush. The one that leaves steam lines. Everyone at the reunion asked if I’d met you that night at an AA meeting.

I mean to do everything he suggests but realize I’m so sleepy, so I find a flowerbed a few blocks over and crash. No one invited the ants. They like the dried ice cream punch on my skin, and don’t stop biting if I only crush half of their bodies.

Unfortunately their carcasses stick to the punch film so I appear to have a flesh-eating disease. When I return to the car, he is standing there with a very clean woman. She is looking in at the pile of puke on the backseat with a glare of recollection and pain, as though it used to be her dog but her pet somehow got liquefied and his remains were then sprinkled with parsley (on the way to the reunion last night we’d stopped for some Italian. The waiter kept checking out my tennis balls).

“What are you covered in?” he asks.

“I’m Beth,” the girl offers reluctantly. She can’t look at me without scratching herself. I would scratch too, but my fingernails are already filled with dead ants.

“Is that your cousin?” she whispers to him.

I then realize clean Beth couldn’t attend the reunion, so he told her he’d take his cousin and called me.

When I walk up to him, Beth steps back. My one tennis boob has fallen down somewhere in the front of my dress, poking out like the tiniest pregnancy in the world.

“Cousin,” I report. I put my hand on his inner thigh. I realize my clothes are wet; maybe I had peed myself, or maybe the flowerbed had sprinklers.

The girl makes a squeak and leaves immediately on foot. I’m ready for him to run after her—to walk myself home, wash off the dead insects and grow very, very bored.

But instead he stares. I’m itchy, squirmy; he presses me back. His leg pins me against the car right in the ball-stomach. “I’m deciding if you’re too much,” he says, and I meet his stare fondly. I refuse to blink while I wait.

GARDENER

It began during an unconscionably dry spell in lovemaking for Robert and me. I’d gone to the bathroom to cry in my robe, which is big and towellike and cloaks my large and lonely breasts that hang from age. I kept pulling my robe in tighter to swaddle them; in my head I could hear them screaming for attention and I tried to muffle the noise by drawing my robe in even tighter. I was pondering going into the guest room and smothering them with a pillow when I saw the gnomes.

They appeared to be necking, a female and a male gnome. I squinted at them through my bathroom window. “You’ve gone crazy,” I told myself, “that frigid man has made you nuts.” Yet there they were in front of me, clearly rubbing against one another by the bushes. Then, simply and effortlessly, the plastic deer that sits in front of our hydrangeas got up and walked over towards them, stilted on thin plastic legs, to lick the salt from their skin.

Of course shame followed. I already felt guilty about wanting to be satisfied by my husband, who had now turned me down every night for an entire month. I kept telling myself that it wouldn’t, simply could not last four whole weeks, but each day drew closer to that horrible terminus, the point at which, I felt, I must accept the fact that Robert was either cheating on me or had fallen deeply out of love with my physical person.

But now there was a newer, more velvet shame, one soft with complete insanity. I cannot describe how hypnotic it was to watch the gnomes, the deer with the sandpapery-plastic tongue. It seemed wrong, like getting turned on at the zoo. I had opened my towel robe and pressed my flesh to the cold, dark window. Panted. Made steam.

When I went back to bed, I stared at Robert, who had a pie-slice-sized ray of light over his turned-up chin. My skin was flushed and my towel robe hung open, slowly absorbing the sweat from my body. Wake up and look at me, I thought, I’m presenting you with all that I have. My feet stopped at the lit bar from the streetlamp that fell upon the carpet, a boundary of the night-world where gnomes and deer lived and played on one side and Robert snored soundly on the other. How good it would feel to take Robert inside that light, to have both our bodies squeeze together somehow, for our particles to jump into a shared space and stay.

That night I had a Lilliputian dream about the gnomes binding me to my bed. It culminated with the male gnome riding in atop the large plastic deer to demonstrate his prowess over creatures several times his own size.

I gasped as I woke, but Robert was nowhere to be found; he’d left for work and I was stuck playing detective: searching for traces of his aftershave on the carpet in front of his dresser, looking for new stray hairs around the sink. I felt like maybe I’d invented the person I’d always assumed my husband to be, and now, at sixty-two, it was perhaps time to grow up and let him go.

“Well we’re not teenagers anymore,” he tells me that night, when I bring up how it has been a full month of abstinence. I am dressed like a cheerleader, albeit a fat, wrinkled one. I purchased the uniform from a costume shop. The fabric is cheap and the initials of the school it touts are a dubious “FU.”

“Do you think I should get a breast lift?” I ask, though he’s already turned over and has shut off the light by his bed stand.

“Why would you do something like that?” he mumbles. Seeds of what soon will be gentle snores are already pollinating in the back of his throat.

Against my better judgment, I creep out into the garage in my uniform. It’s exciting to think of how awful it would be should someone see me, a neighbor or one of the subdivision’s night security officers. Robert’s car is a long Cadillac and I lie down across the hood and the windshield, stretching myself. From here I can see the backyard out the garage’s side window, and once again the femme gnome and the male have taken up one another’s company. The lust inside the male gnome’s sturdy brow makes his cherubic face seem dangerous and a little thrilling. His white beard has a silvery hue; its shine is modern, like clothes the young people wear into nightclubs. He seems to be in some kind of race against himself; his frown reminds me of a depression-era work mural, a depiction of unyielding strength that cannot be slowed down by the whims of economic fate.

Spying on them, I have the strangest sensation that the car beneath me is going to start up, turn on its lights and bust through the garage door carrying me splayed upon it in my failed costume. Would the gnomes stop what they were doing and hide then, I wondered? Would they erotically harden in place?

On the night marking a sexless forty days and forty nights, I decided this is it. I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and left the bedroom. “What?” Robert called halfheartedly. “Have I been snoring?” I went to the guest room and told myself that from now on, I was sleeping there. I’d had enough of pretense.

The guest room is right next to the garden, so close that I feared they might see me watching. I carefully lit a single match and hid below the windowsill. Peeking through the mini blinds, I watched my gnome in the throws of passion with the yard’s plumpest female milkmaid gnome. I decided that she might have to have a horrible ceramic accident soon.

But oh, his buttocks, the worker-bee industry of their contractions as they squeezed up and out! The muscles of his tiny back as he ran his fingers through her hair! I lit match after match as they burned down to my fingers, letting the pain linger slightly longer with each one. It stung: how could I die without knowing such passion? Why should I be deprived while some statue got her fill?

They finished and she fell backwards into his arms, her Dutch bonnet slightly askew. He helped her step into her wooden clogs and sat back down to pack his pipe. I watched lustfully as he hitched his overalls back up. Then, suddenly, he started patting his pockets and cursing, scanning over the ground around him. It hit me: he needed a light for his pipe.

As I slid up the windowsill, I heard the collective gasp of the gnomes and other ornaments, all except my gnome, who looked at me with steady eyes. I lit a new match and held it out towards him. “I love you,” I whispered as he took tiny steps nearer. “Are you real?”

When he stepped into the light of the flame, a tight grip washed through me and I felt the vertigo of six decades falling away. My mind seemed new and just-born—I could only stare at him and make heavy breaths of wonder. The creases in his forehead were so small and delicate; all his skin seemed like a soft dried fruit.

I lit his pipe but then made the mistake of grazing his forehead with my hand. He instantly turned still and cold; the fire of his pipe went to ash.

I heard them at night, each night, working and toiling, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it until it actually happened. I woke up to the guest bedroom bathed in a soft, pink glow. When I got out of bed and saw his cone hat rising slowly from the ground like an emerging missile, I knew I’d been right in determining the cause of all the noise: they’d been digging a tunnel into my bedroom floor.

They began coming in each evening to perform for me, all of them: the animals and the swans and the gnomes and even the flamingos. Of course I didn’t get close or touch—I didn’t want a repeat of the last time, where it all disappeared and they hardened. It had made me feel like a cross between Midas and Medusa. And how awkward it would be to have to parade them all out from my bedroom back into the yard in the middle of the night, perhaps running into Robert as he headed to the bathroom with bowel trouble.

I grew and grew my collection, stopping almost daily to pick out new friends to meet in the flesh that evening. And understanding that My Gnome could not physically be mine, my jealousy faded; instead we became a team. I tried to choose the most beautiful and artfully sculpted female gnomes for him, knowing that he would trace them back to me as the root of his pleasure.

How he watched me when he was with them, and how I watched him. At first I only watched; I felt like such a simple old woman. But after a while, I began to touch myself while they played, and I watched them watch me. Often I’d cry because their miniature world was just so beautiful. I felt like my love was a giant blanket, the top of a tent, and each night they all came inside of it to move around and make me warm.

For Valentine’s Day, I cooked Robert a steak to keep him busy and then told him I wasn’t feeling so well. “Do you mind if I turn in a little early?” I asked. He did not look up from his potatoes, which were mashed. He was giving them a secondary mashing with his fork.

“Think I’ll be asleep pretty soon too,” he said.

With that, I put my dishes in the sink and ran to my bedroom. I’d gotten up early and painted togas onto all the gnomes and creatures with washable white paint—I wanted a Roman theme, and they did not disappoint.

Around three in the morning I was waving goodbye as they all crawled back down into the hole, everyone except my darling. He and I had held eyes the whole night, throughout everything. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded. His rosy, tulip-bud cheeks glistened in the lamplight. Then he pointed at my braid.

My braid is long and gray; I’ve been letting it grow since my thirties. “You want to touch it?” I asked. “Is that a good idea?” I didn’t want him to harden, though I thought of bringing him into bed in his statue form, even if he would feel like a cold doll. At least I could put my cheek to his and sleep throughout the night.

He shook his head and made a scissor motion, then posed his hands as though he had a shovel in them, digging up invisible earth and throwing it over his back.

“You want me to cut it off and bury it?”

He nodded. His large knuckles went to his lips as he blew me a kiss, then he disappeared down the magic rabbit hole they’d dug.

I didn’t get much sleep after they left. Was this a kind of power trip on My Gnome’s part? Did I really want to cut away thirty years of hair? Could he somehow enjoy my hair more if it was buried in the ground?

For days I thought it over, hoping each evening he would come to answer my questions. But no one came, not a single one of them. At nights when I’d look out my window he’d be there facing me, making the same scissor-shovel motions over and over. The rest of the ornaments stood behind him like disciples; with his large hat he seemed like a cult leader. They all nodded silently, appearing brainwashed.

By the fourth morning I was broken. Robert was playing solitaire on the computer and generating loud low-tech noises of victory and defeat. Fiery tears began to surge and I bounced up. I cannot live in the suburbs another day without him, I told myself, and I ran to the garage and shut my eyes and used wire cutters to snip the whole braid off below its rubber band.

When I dangled it out before me it looked impressively magic, like the long wiry skin of a snake I’d never want to meet.

I buried it at the male gnome’s feet, a shallow grave, and ran back inside. Robert glanced away from the computer screen momentarily. “Did you get a haircut?”

“I did, Robert.” I went into my bedroom and placed my pillow over my face and cried, and when I woke up it was already morning. My Gnome hadn’t come at all.

Manic, I went to every garden center in the tri-state area. I found each imaginable temptation: donkeys, centaurs, the prettiest and most apple-pie female gnomes available. When it was nine o’clock at night and all the stores were closing, I made my last purchase and handed the bills to the cashier. Unable to stop myself, I blurted out: “He has to love me. Or else I don’t know what.” She was young, perhaps sixteen, and chewing gum.

“I do not know anything about men,” she said.

As I pulled into my subdivision, my foot hit the gas when I saw a group of people had congregated across the street from my house. Some were pointing, others snickering. “Oh,” I exclaimed when I saw it. There was a life-sized marble statue of a heavyset middle-aged man in my garden.

I ran past everyone, ignoring all the calls of my name. A miniature giraffe fell to the ground from my arms and shattered. I ran inside yelling “Robert, Robert”: of course an answer didn’t come. There were deer grazing around the computer where Robert had been sitting, small chipmunks outside his bedroom door.

“Oh,” I cried, “oh, my.” There inside my bedroom sat my real dwarf in the flesh. I wish the whole world could’ve seen his rosy cheeks, the bed sheets turned down, his beard braided into a long braid the color and length of my former hair. I touched his bare skin and watched as it flushed and stayed soft.

DANCING RAT

I don’t know if I’m able to have children myself. Because we haven’t been able to conceive, my boyfriend calls our sex “free sex.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the cost we save on contraceptives, the funds it takes to raise a child, what. If I ask, “What do you mean, free sex?” he says, “You know. No consequences.”

Kyle and I have a lot of free sex. Working on a children’s show, I almost feel bad about how very much sex I have.

Whisker-Bop! is a musical dance program that’s big on counting, manners, and going green. I am one of the primary characters (a mouse). I gallivant around with a raccoon and a bat, although this would never happen in nature, in addition to a small team of children. Due to their extraordinary length, our whiskers often comically get in the way of our counting/singing/dancing/morality-teaching. My name is Sneezoid because I have bad allergies; why this isn’t a concern I’m not sure. Every episode requires that I atch-hoo in a high-pitched voice and giggle afterwards. This prompts everyone else to giggle. During the interview for the job, I was asked to do little more than showcase my fake sneezing ability. I had a whole speech planned: how much I love kids, my work in an inner-city children’s community theater. It didn’t come up.

I think I took the job as a sadistic decision-making tool: do I want a child, really, and if so do I want one badly enough to leave Kyle if he won’t go along with the process? Kyle is low-key and has expressed no desire to drive to a medical plaza and ejaculate in a cup.

But the longer I’m on Whisker-Bop!, the less I seem to worry about whether or not to have a child, because the young “actors” I work with are horrible. My costume includes a set of felt rodent teeth that are on my facial mask around my chin, and I often wish these teeth were real so I could gnaw the golden ponytail off my young costar Missy. She calls me Ratty, though I am obviously a mouse.

Like many lesser mammals, Missy can detect fear. She reminds me a lot of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, asking questions that insist she already knows more than she should.

“When you have a daughter, you won’t make her do homework when she already has sooooooo many lines to memorize, will you Ratty?”

After our initial meeting (she asked me if I had any children and I said “Not yet”), Missy’s favorite game is asking questions about my hypothetical future child that relate to Missy’s own life.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. She then runs over to her mother yelling about how Ratty said it’s unfair to make her do homework on set, and her stage-tyrant parent shoots me a laser-glare.

I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her sonic white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood.

The show’s writers have sensed the obsessive link between Missy and me. At first I was free: a free mouse. But as the episodes progressed and the show got renewed for a second season, it was decided that Missy would adopt me so I would no longer “have to sleep in the cold, cold fields. Brrrrr!” That was Missy’s line, then the two of us had a song and dance number called “I’ve Found My Live-In Friend.”

The other children, two boys who are a bit sweeter than Missy but already vain at age seven, sometimes hear Missy call me Sneezy and try to use this name as well. I snap at them, “I’m not one of the seven dwarves.”

“But Missy calls you…” they protest. And I just stare at them vacantly, as if to say, “Don’t you get it? I’m Missy’s grown-up zombie-slave.”

Sometimes Kyle watches the show, even though I beg him not to. “Oh right,” he says, “like you wouldn’t watch me if I was singing on television in a dancing mouse costume?”

There are moments on the show when I can actually be seen glaring at Missy, killing her slowly with my gigantic fake eyes. Like the scene last week when she was explaining how stealing is bad: it is wrong to borrow things from mommy’s purse and daddy’s wallet, even if one plans on returning them. At the time, I was enraged at how purely incredible Missy smelled—like flowers but softer, without the alcohol of perfume. Her smell makes me want to kiss her satin head.

Of course the home audience doesn’t notice my disdain. But Kyle sees all.

“Man,” laughed Kyle. “Look at your posture. You want to teach that kid a lesson.”

But I do not. I want her reborn. I want her mine, without any knowledge of show business, bleached teeth, or interview skills.

Missy isn’t very kind or gentle. At work it’s common for her to greet me by jamming her tiny fingers between my ribs and insisting she shouldn’t feed her rat any more this week because I’m getting fatter. Something about Missy takes me back to high school, even though she is only six years old. Perhaps I project her popularity: she will no doubt be popular. This automatically makes her better than me, who was not even popular for a day.

Today she and I are doing a song called “Leave It Alone (If It’s Under the Sink).” The dancing is strenuous, especially in the suit, where I have no sensation as to what my true range of motion is. I accidentally bounce my giant mouse midriff against her when we’re doing a series of twirls.

“CUT!” Missy loves to yell this. The director and the producers have repeatedly told her that whether or not taping should halt is not her decision, but to no avail. “Fatty Ratty bumped into me!”

I give a few humble apologies through my mask, which makes a large, distorted echo inside and allows me to hear the way I might sound to others if I had learned to speak although deaf.

“Take your mask off when you talk,” Missy yells, “I can’t understand you.”

She says this despite knowing that I cannot take my mask off unassisted. It is a very heavy mask with ceramic veneer on the upper face. Similar to a spacesuit, it screws on so that it will stay firmly in place throughout rigorous musical routines.

I put my arms up and shrug in a type of “oh well” expression. Like an abusive lover, Missy can sense when she’s pushed me to the breaking point and needs to reel me back in.

“Silly mousie,” she says, and then hugs me a little. I pat her tiny back with my oversized mouse paw.

“Draino? Oh noooooooo…” I place my paw to my forehead and spin around several times in front of a blue screen. Animated, I will appear to be swirled down an oversized sink pipe. Everything is oversized on Whisker Bop! except for the children. For some reason, this makes them seem infinitely smarter.

Kyle has brought me lunch, which is our excuse to go have sex in my dressing room. I’m embarrassed that we do this near the set of a children’s show, but we kind of love it and cannot pinpoint why. It’s not like it even feels naughty, just creepy and a little bit pathetic.

Today though, there are kids running through the hallway, shrieking their shrieks and banging on doors with their limbs as they pass. Though Kyle feels good, I can’t help but have the children’s screams redirect my thoughts to the why of sex, the primal reason he and I have been programmed and physically engineered to engage in this behavior. There is more to life I tell the part of my brain that wants so badly to know which one of us, if not both, is the reproductively defective one. I suppose if I found out that it was him and not me, this same part of my brain would then ask: what is the real point of having sex with Kyle?

I try to reign in my thoughts. Children are not the only reason for sex, I remind myself. They are just one reason. A very loud reason that feels entitled to run around all over the backstage area yelling and laughing at things that aren’t funny.

But in this one moment it suddenly becomes way too much that we aren’t trying to make a child. I love Kyle; at least I love a lot of him. There is enough to love there to be passed on. I want to distill us both down into seven little pounds that will grow as needed, both him and me but also someone who’s free of us, free to ignore the ways that we’re crazy and not valid. It seems like a baby would save us, not our relationship but literally us: half of us both could have a new chance.

“Sorry,” Kyle mumbles, nuzzling his face into my chest. He’s finished. I pet his damp forehead and his curly hair.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “Sometimes it’s weird for me at work.”

Going back on set when I know I have semen inside of me reminds me of that urban myth about a chemical that will turn all the water around people’s legs purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.

Kyle very sweetly helps redo my ponytail and screw my mask back on. The inside of the mask is disgusting; it almost looks like the hide from a real animal. I’ve never asked what it is. I can imagine the producer looking me straight in the eye and saying, “We recycled some old Nazi lampshades.” It smells kind of like a cellar, if the cellar were filled with the musk of adolescent deer.

Kyle gives me a kiss on my mouse cheek and turns to leave when Missy appears out of nowhere like something from The Shining. Before she even opens her mouth I know that it is going to be horrible; I can feel the psychic energy she’s drawing from my brain being sucked out the left side of my head underneath my ear.

“Why won’t you give Ratty a baby? Is something wrong with your seeds?”

Kyle shoots me a betrayed look at first, and I shake my giant mouse head “No,” as if to say, I never told a child that your sperm might be deficient, but then reason seems to soften into him—he does know Missy, after all.

Kyle puts on a horrific fake smile that is so scary; it’s like he’s wearing invisible clown paint. He squats down to be eye-level with the demon. “That’s none of your business, is it cutie?”

I decide it’s best to intervene. “Bye, Kyle,” I smile, motioning for Missy to follow me as we leave my dressing room. Missy grabs my tail a little too tightly and uses it to pull me to our start positions for the “Goodbye Should Just Be Called Catch You Later!” dance.

“What do you see in him anyway?” asks Missy. Then she giggles.

When Missy’s mother called me for help, she caught me at a weak moment. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and around three a.m. I got up and watched a horrific birthing show on television. They showed babies coming out of crotches and then big jellyfish afterbabies, again coming out of crotches. The odd part was how I was more jealous than disgusted. I wanted to be the one screaming inside of a hot tub while Kyle rubbed my back and my cartoon stomach morphed and dropped out our very own child. Suddenly it was six a.m.; I’d been secretly crying since about four.

“Hello?”

Even as I picked up the phone, I wondered why I was picking up the phone; it was six in the morning. The answer, of course, was that I hoped it would be a tiny fetus calling on some human tissue receiver, asking if it could please leave its mommy and crawl into me.

“Hello?” There was a pause and then the strained voice added, “Blessed day.”

“I don’t go to church.” I started to hang up, but there was the sound of protest.

“No, wait—this is Mrs. Gowers, Missy’s mom. I’m sorry to call so early but I have a bit of an emergency.”

Apparently two of her other star children (she has three, Missy and a set of twin boys, all of them on television, all Village of the Damned genetically engineered-looking) had a callback and Missy’s nanny was sick. “When I told Missy that I didn’t know what to do with her, she specifically asked to spend the day with you.” Mrs. Gowers paused. “She likes working with you I suppose.”

Mrs. Gowers does not like me. I’m not beautiful and therefore am not a good role model for Missy.

“Sure,” I agreed. At first I thought we could spend the day like her siliconeasaurus mother would want us to: get mani/pedis, buy some pink things with ruffles, practice walking. But when Missy arrived she was very curious about the size of our house (“Are you poor? How poor are you? Are you ever, like, hungry but you can’t eat because food costs a lot to you?”), and these questions gave me a better idea.

Munchkin Burger touts itself as “the finest mini-burger palace in the land.” Missy was the only child there who wasn’t morbidly obese.

“Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew I was here,” Missy giggled. The skin around her mouth had taken on a greasy sheen.

“It’s called pigging out,” I said. This was Missy’s good side. Even though I knew she would tell her mother all about it later, pretend she hated it and make me out to be a total villain, here she was: my partner in crime. Eater of the forbidden fruit.

As the day went on, my urge to defile her perfection grew extreme. I had the thought of driving her down to some cantinas in Mexico to see if they’d let me drink free in exchange for Missy washing dishes.

“What now?” I asked. “Television?” Missy’s mouth dropped open. I suddenly realized that even though Missy is on television, she’s not allowed to watch it.

“I don’t want to get fat,” she said. “Do you think I’m fat?”

“Do you think I’m fat?”

Missy didn’t respond.

We did watch television. During each commercial, she immediately began to critique aspects of the actor’s performance and physical appearance, which I deeply appreciated. She is completely brutal. If someone’s right eye is even slightly higher than the left, she will not let this slide.

When her mother came to pick her up, Missy gave me a mini-hug, but then she ran screaming to the backseat of their deluxe SUV to see if her brothers were hired for the part. “My whole week will be ruined if they got it,” she told me. Apparently the Gowers children have a competitive streak.

I watched as they drove away down the road. When her mother finds out about Munchkin Burger, she will probably make Missy get a colonic.

A few hours later when Kyle got home, the contrast was nice. Adult World. It seemed a little amusement parky—sex, alcohol, swear words. I tried to take in the sudden quiet. It was so quiet. I told myself that there was something furious and wrong about the constant sound, color, and stimulation that children crave, their habitual need to celebrate and have a party. Life is not a party. I actually said this to Kyle: “Life is not a party.” I took it back as soon as I said it. It made him look sad.

“I don’t get people who have children as a move towards immortality. So that they can feel better about death or something.” He sipped his drink.

I made Kyle take me to a romantic restaurant to talk about the subject. It seemed more theoretical that way, like we were making conversation rather than having a conversation. Plus, if I felt myself starting to get upset, I could take a sip of martini in a slow, calculated manner, like a robot mannequin in a commercial about robot mannequins who enjoy martinis the way real, elegant people do.

“I would like to feel better about death though,” I admit.

“It’s just death. You’re not going to care when you’re dead.”

I want to write Kyle off as a simple person, but I know him and he is not simple. It’s unfair though, how he can have so much clarity about difficult things. Why have children? Why fear death? “I mean you and I certainly don’t have to have a child for the sake of our species. I think mankind is pretty set.”

“Well, Kyle, I wouldn’t want to have a child to benefit mankind. That would take all the fun out of it.” My hand finds my martini carefully, straightened, like a mission payload specialist guided it there. Grip. Sip.

“What, do you want it to give your life some kind of purpose?” He lingers on the word purpose and his garlicky breath finds my nose. It’s a little sexy, how he smells like garlic and doesn’t need a purpose. I suppose I find garlic-scented rebels somewhat nice.

“Well what is life’s purpose?”

I think I had this conversation on one of my first dates at a coffee shop; both my date and I were wearing black and brooding and my date’s attempted-suicide wrist scars were displayed frequently—he revealed them often, as if they helped to back up his argument.

Kyle leans into me, close enough to kiss. His buttery garlic lips, which are larger than mine and I am jealous of, hold a wry smile. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispers. “There is no purpose. Purpose is a concept someone made up to feel better about how weird everything is.”

But the thought of becoming a mother is a weirdness I want to feel out a little more. I will live with it for a while longer as if it were truly a baby; I will let it grow and see what shape it takes before I decide what to do with it. Until then, I can go on living each day as Missy’s secondary mother, a giant rodent who is slightly repulsed by her human offspring.

He and I make a toast to ourselves, to purposelessness lives and our candlelit table; dinner is expensive but the sex afterwards will be free.

SHE-MAN

My boyfriend Ginno is a pro-bowler. It is not as glamorous as it doesn’t sound. I was on the streets for a long time so I took the first chance I got to settle down. Ginno doesn’t know I’m really a man, but other than that we’re completely honest with one another.

I keep saying I don’t want to get married because “Honey, it’s a piece of paper. Know what else is a piece of paper? A dry-cleaning receipt.” Luckily Ginno isn’t much of a detective. He doesn’t dig too deep. He just goes to the alley and rolls the balls.

That was where he and I first met. Ginno was breaking the house record and a big crowd had gathered around him, so I put down my Sea Breeze and went to go see what the fuss was all about. My Tuesday night regular had been a no-show. This was fine by me; the guy’s cologne was suffocating. He liked to wear a captain’s hat and made me pretend the botched anchor tattoo on his arm didn’t look like a green worm.

I knocked my way up to the front of the crowd and there he was: trim moustache, thin-rimmed glasses, white bowling shoes that made him look kind of disabled. I don’t know, Ginno saw my breast implants and makeup and big hair and just fell for me. I do it up 80’s style or I don’t do it at all, go big or go home. That kind of thing.

He took me home that very night. When we got back to his place, I looked around and just decided this is it: I will become the queen of kitsch. Cuckoo clocks, red dice napkin holders, all of it. It was a gamble but it paid out almost instantly. The first week I moved in he won a regional that paid $10,000 and he split it with me 50/50.

I didn’t do what you’re thinking, drugs or whatnot. I put it back into us. I gave half of it back to Ginno to help with a down payment on a conversion van and spent the rest on gear for tournament travel—an eight-piece set of rolling luggage and a handful of velvet pantsuits. We also got a little dog named Gogo that I could take to all the practices and the games for company. I’m really in this thing with Ginno, committed. I go to every game, every time.

He practices weekdays at Pins and Pockkkets, an alley right down the street from our condo that opens at 9 a.m. It’s run by white supremacists. Ginno somehow hasn’t caught onto that. Please don’t get me wrong, that’s not my belief system—I’m a minority too, my upstairs vs. my downstairs. But it’s right next door and they just love Ginno so I turn a blind eye. I take Gogo (Chinese Crested, ugly as a newborn) there with me, and she and I sit at the gaming machine for most of the morning and the afternoon. I keep my fingernails long to tap cards on the screen with. It hardly takes any energy.

And they let me drink for free, because Ginno’s such a wiz. Their well vodka tastes awful but it’s not bad with 8oz of Clamato mixed in. All day long I get my vegetables. They let me play the claw machine for free too; I just have to give back all the stuffed animals I win before I leave because I’m so damn good.

Sometimes they talk about “queers” and throw around the n-word. It’s hard to keep my peace, but I don’t really like to open my mouth when I’m at the alley anyway—my breath smells like tomato and clam and Virginia Slim Menthols. When I see Ginno start to walk over towards me, I shove Altoids into my cheek pockets like I’m a hamster.

“You’ve given me a whole new life,” Ginno tells me every time I blow him. I don’t think that he was a virgin or anything before we got together–maybe he was; he doesn’t ever move during it, he just lies there frozen like he’s witnessing an earthquake. He certainly has never been with someone as experienced and in-tune to the cravings of the male organ as me. Few have. Less than eight hundred, I’d guess, if you count clients as well.

Supportive as I wanted to be, life at the alley got a little dull. So I found a hobby I could take to the lanes while Ginno practiced: bejeweling and sequencing holiday-theme sweatshirts. I began rolling my whole setup with me to the alley in the little suitcase from our new 8-piece luggage set. It took me a while to learn how to keep from gluing things on crooked when my buzz creeped up, but I adapted. Whatever I am, I’m nothing if not adaptable.

The sweatshirts got better and better. One day Ginno said, “Babe, those are good enough to sell.” So I went to a few boutiques and started consigning them. Things were rosy for our whole little family: just picture us in the living room after dinner, Gogo running around in a mini jewel-sequins bowler shirt, myself in a human-sized matching one, she and I literally the sparkling light of Ginno’s life.

Thank God, his mother is all the way across the country in a Montana nursing home, something about her spine. His sister lives there too. He doesn’t talk about his mother or his sister much, but I get the feeling that growing up they bossed him around. Even though he’s getting to be quite a big-name bowler, I hear them treat him like a nobody on the phone.

They didn’t even call when we were on ESPN with Gogo. Ginno placed second in Nationals–$30,000! Of course I ran from the stands with Gogo and we both planted kisses all over his face and the brushy inchworm of his moustache, “Jesus I’m SOMEONE!” I wanted to scream. Both of us, we were finally really somebody.

But the sad thing is, everybody is always somebody, even when he’s nobody. And I used to be a nobody’s somebody. I used to belong to a pimp named Daddy Valentine.

A few weeks after the win Gogo and I were multi-tasking: taking instructions off the TV on how to cook a roast and painting our nails at the same time. My toes were all stretched out with cotton balls and polish, the same color as Gogo’s. She’s a princess in pink.

When the doorbell rang I was a little baffled—Ginno wasn’t due home from the lanes for hours and it’s not like we have friends. But the vodka had made me cordial—vodka before cooking; vodka so that if and when I start another grease fire I don’t get overly agitated.

When I opened the door, a large zebra-print shoe landed on my toes and I yipped. “It’s your man, it’s Daddy V.” He took off his sunglasses, looked around the condo and whistled.

Daddy had been flipping through channels during Ginno’s bowling game and he’d recognized me on ESPN.

Gogo offered a small growl but was afraid of Daddy’s fur coat.

“Get out of here, Daddy. The person you knew is long dead. I mean it; leave or I’ll call the cops.” The estrogen has done such a great number on my voice. Despite feelings of terror stinging me all over like jellyfish tentacles, I couldn’t help but savor how much I sounded like a distressed heroine.

“Well now see,” and then Daddy reached into the purple silk lining of his leather jacket and pulled out a folder. I realized: I’m totally sunk. “I don’t think you’d want the police here, because then your lover man would find out he has a lover man.”

I paused. “What do you want?”

He wants the money. All of it, the whole pot of Ginno’s winnings. Daddy didn’t change the channel until he saw Ginno receive an oversized $30,000 check.

The terrible part is that I know I could invent some story that makes it seem like I really need the money and Ginno would have no problem giving it to me. Somehow that means there is no way that I could ever bring myself to do it. He’s the first and only decent man I’ve ever been with. And that makes me a decent woman.

But I wouldn’t be anymore. Not if I did this.

“Ginno already spent it,” I lied. “He owed some people big and used the money to square things up with them.”

Daddy popped a switchblade knife open. I followed as he walked over to our novelty calendar hanging above the dinette in the kitchen. It’s one of those calendars where the month rips off but the picture never changes. In this case it isn’t a picture at all but a giant bowling pin that says 12 MONTHS OF ROLLIN’ right beneath the pin’s stripe.

He used his knife to slice off months and stopped at March. He then stabbed the third Thursday. March 24th.

“Tell me, what happened on this glorious day?”

“It’s your birthday,” I muttered.

“So if this is my birthday, all these months away from now, there’s no way I could’ve been born yesterday, is there?”

I didn’t know what to do. My first thought was to run out to the van with Gogo, but that plan would be a battle of my vodka buzz vs. my 6-inch heels. My secondary concern was that even if we ran, Daddy would find us or find Ginno and tell him everything. I know how Daddy works: if he didn’t come away with something, I would lose everything.

“I’ll get your damn money,” I yelled. “Now get out of my condo.” Of course, Daddy took his time sauntering out the door, looking at pictures of Ginno and making moustache jokes.

The second he left, Gogo whimpered. She knew as well as I did that trouble lay ahead.

Damn him! I wept for hours until my eyelash glue began to run and sting. I attempted the roast and poured way too much cooking wine into the pan. Ginno arrived home to the oven smoking and me coughing, trying to get the roast out of the oven. I forgot a potholder and burned my hand.

“Oh, whoa. What is going on here?” Ginno’s voice was sympathetic but confident. He put on an oven mitt, delivered the roast from the oven, and chucked the entire smoking pan from our balcony into the novelty pond out back. I ran to him crying, “You are my hero,” I gushed, and I meant it.

Why did things get always complicated? Complications had made finally getting off the streets so difficult, and now complications were threatening to send me back. Ginno and I clung to one another in the smoky-hot kitchen like survivors of a brush fire. I gripped him knuckle-white.

“Hey, let’s just go out for dinner, right? To a buffet.” He likes the ones that have soft serve ice cream machines for dessert.

“I don’t want to go out, Ginno. I just want to stay here and be next to you.” I led him to the bedroom and tried to earn it, the way he’s made me an honest woman.

The next morning I decided there had to be another way. Maybe I could hire someone part-time to help make my jewel-T’s and sweats; maybe I could open a store online. I vamped it up and worked my fake nails off and at the end of the week had $600 from consignments, which I Western Unioned to Daddy. Even though our number is unlisted, I got a call from him the next day.

“Oh no you didn’t, caketrain baby.” He was upset.

“$600 every week will add up, Daddy.”

“I want $10,000 by the end of the month or your bubble is boiled.”

Over the next few weeks, my mind went into overdrive. I began to get so desperate that I even started tossing around ideas for stories I could tell Ginno to get the money: that a relative was sick and I’d pay him back; someone needed chemo maybe. I thought about waking him up in the middle of the night and saying I’d just had a dream where God told me to donate $10,000 to charity. And then over the next few months, maybe God could visit me again and tell me to donate $20,000 more.

Each idea was a total stinkbucket. I used to take money from men all the time, but that was because I had to, and I didn’t love them. Things were different with Ginno. He and I were making a life.

I kept sending Daddy my weekly consignment earnings and trying to figure out what to do. I guess the days snuck up on me because one night after the lanes Ginno and I came home to find Gogo strangled to death on the kitchen floor with a large chain lying several inches next to her body. “PAY UP, SUCKERS,” read a note attached to the wall with a switchblade knife. I was crying too hard to tell Ginno not to call the cops and the next thing I knew they were there asking all kinds of things—my name, my birthday, basically everything that was a tell on my gender. I just cried and said I didn’t know where my driver’s license was (it’s fake) and finally they stepped off. I was obviously in the throws of grief.

Ginno told them we had no enemies and we didn’t owe anyone money. They left, assuming it was a case of mistaken identity, and encouraged us to get a security system. Which we did.

Over the next couple of weeks I became a hostage in my own condo. Every time I ran to the store for craft supplies or vodka there were threatening messages on the answering machine when I got back. It was a harsh thing to have to look upon the peaceful life I’d finally built and realize that people from my past could just come in and destroy it for no good reason. My days were filled with drinking and bejeweling—dropping off sweatshirts and picking up consignment checks and going to Winn Dixie to have the money transferred to Daddy. One afternoon I was so out of it that I almost picked up Ginno with just a single eyebrow drawn on. Sure, I was quite a ways away from $30,000—I wasn’t even halfway to $10,000 yet. I was sending steady money though, and making progress. But that wasn’t good enough for Daddy.

He finally did the unthinkable. He took it to the alley.

That day I pulled into the parking lot at four like usual, but Ginno was already outside, sitting over to the left behind the patio. I found this strange because everyone knows that’s where the teenagers throw up on Friday nights. He was squatting down like a dog—I thought of Gogo for a moment, subconsciously—and then I pulled up closer and saw that he was crying. He finally got in the van but wouldn’t let me lay a finger on him. Then he unzipped his bowling bag and pulled out a manila folder.

“This guy with diamonds on his teeth came in and gave me this,” he said. I took it and looked even though I knew what was inside. Pretend to be shocked, I coached myself, but once I opened it up I didn’t even have to act. It was all so far away, really, those years. To have them in front of my face at a moment’s notice was just a lot.

You could say that I met Daddy at the start of my transformation. He had pictures from every step of the way. They were regular photos—they hadn’t been taken to document the change or anything. We’d just had a life with one another, even though it was brutal, and he was cruel.

Ginno was broken. He really didn’t understand. The poor thing dealt with it the best way he knew how, talking about God and Jesus and the whole bible show. He told me that as soon as we got home, I was kicked out. “At least you had the decency to let me drive you home first,” I said, which was kind of mean and cheap, but I loved him. I had made up my mind to love him and I did; if there were parts about him I didn’t know about, I was pretty sure I could make up my mind to love those too. I’d been telling myself the whole time that he felt the same way, and now that it was clear he didn’t, it hurt more than I knew how to deal with.

I packed up our new 8-piece luggage set because it’s pink and I figured he wouldn’t want to use it without me. Then I went out to the deep freeze in the garage and got the shoebox I was keeping Gogo’s body in until I had some free time to bejewel a tiny dog coffin. If I had to leave, Gogo was coming with me.

“Goodbye, Ginno,” I said.

His face seized up a little. He looked like he was about to say something deep but then decided against it. He settled for the obvious. “You’re a man.”

“If you say so.” I was crying and they were womanly tears. My sobs sounded nothing if not womanly. “You know, the man who came into the alley wanted me to take your money and give it to him and I wouldn’t do it. That’s why he blackmailed me. If I’d just lied to you and had you give me the money, we’d be in bed together right now.” I hoped this confession would stir something inside him, but he just sat there glaring at my crotch.

“I think you should go,” he said. So I went out to the van and left.

My short-term plan was to reside in the conversion van. I didn’t make a long-term plan because I figured Ginno would come around. He’d miss me; he’d have to. I parked the van in front of the alley so Ginno would know where to find me when he changed his mind. The next day I watched him pull up to the alley and walk inside. He saw me but made no sign of acknowledgment.

I began a new schedule where I slept in the van during the day, when it was safer, and woke up just in time to see Ginno leave the alley and head home. Then I’d go to a dive bar, grab a back booth, and bedazzle and drink all night.

By the fourth night of doing this, depression had really set in. I stayed in the parking lot even after the alley closed. When I finally saw the little high school boy come throw that night’s unsold fried foods into the dumpster, I knew it was time to say goodbye to Gogo. The ice required to keep her body below thaw-temperature in my small beach cooler was an expense I would not be able to maintain for long. I took her shoebox into my arms; my hands were shaking as I walked up to the dumpster. To lose so much in just a week!

The newly discarded fried food made steam pour from the dumpster like fog in a horror movie.

“Gogo,” I said, “you were a great dog, for great times.” When Ginno kicked me out, I had taken his headlamp from the garage on my way. It was the kind of lamp that people wear when mountain climbing or going underneath the crawlspace of a house to investigate a smell. I wore it inside the dark bars as I bedazzled, and I wore it now. It shone down on the shoebox like a light from heaven. I felt like if there were ever a moment where I could open up and talk to God, this was it.

Let me have a second chance, I thought. Let Ginno come riding up out of the mist. Let him be in the matching pajama set I bought him; let him tell me he can’t sleep at night without me by his side. I sealed this wish by tossing Gogo into the dumpster like a penny into a well.

Ginno didn’t come. I broke my rule of not spending the night in the parking lot and drank myself into a stupor.

The next morning was very sunny and when I woke up all the gems and glitter filigree on the sweatshirts inside of the van were dazzling like a 9 a.m. disco.

I made my usual round of consignment boutiques but because of the van-living I didn’t look as put together as I normally do. I felt like a few of them could maybe tell my secret. I made it just fine through the first sad song that came on the radio. “So I have to be the woman who lives in her van and sells sweatshirts for awhile,” I thought, “but soon enough I will be the woman who lives in her apartment and sells sweatshirts, and it will only go up from there.”

Then tears came and I had to pull the van over. My life was worse than a blues album, losing my man and my tiny dog and my new life all at once. I ran to the first gas station I saw that would probably have just one little bathroom with a lock and I took my entire make-up bag inside. It was the first stroke of luck I’d had since Ginno kicked me out: there was one wood-paneled door that said “Restroom” instead of “Women” or “Men.”

Inside, I was instantly calmer. I knew I’d have to return the conversion van. I couldn’t just keep driving it, following Ginno across the US to all his tournaments like the lost ghost of a former soccer mom. No, I could not haunt Ginno. I could only keep the van for a while. A couple hundred miles, a week at the most.

After I got fixed up, I went to the bar to try and drink Ginno away. But a few too many Sea Breezes went down the hatch and I made the mistake of returning to the bowling alley parking lot on karaoke night. Sometimes Ginno will sing, and the way his timing isn’t quite right makes me realize that things don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful, like how his crooked teeth are somehow crooked in a nice way.

I could hear the people singing inside, and I sat in the van and sang along. I closed my eyes to a couple doing a bad country duet and fell asleep for a little while.

When I woke up there was a great cloud of fire soaring from the dumpster next to me. In my drunken dream-state, all I knew was to be scared. It looked as though a portal to Hell had opened next to the conversion van.

And in a way it had. A bottle hit the glass of the driver’s-side window, which shattered to reveal them: the KKK boys, the same ones that used to smile at me and comp me vodka.

Tonight they did not look so friendly. Ginno must have told them.

They were lined up in a triangle-formation, looking a bit like bowling pins themselves with their bald heads. Several had brought bats.

Then, in the background, I saw him. Ginno was standing near the entrance of the alley, watching with a distant look that let me know right away he wasn’t going to intervene. I pleaded with the boys first, then finally to Ginno. When I called his name he turned around and went inside. This seemed like a small act of kindness on his part—to not watch, to spare me having to look up and see him in the distance and know that he could ask them to stop if he wanted to. When I saw the door to the ally shut, I decided to accept this last gift from him and surrender.

“I guess you strong boys are going to kill me now,” I said. “You know you’ll kill me just dead as a real dead woman.” I laughed, mainly frightened but maybe a little bit relieved. “As dead as your wife or your mother or your sister.”

But then there was silence. Their shouting died down, their thumping bats suddenly rested in their palms. So I opened my eyes again—I still had a little hope. I looked them right in their human eyes, these boys standing in the dumpster’s firelight. Then they killed me. Their mothers and sisters, of course, are alive.

MAGICIAN

After my older brother Keith lost his arm in a car accident, I bought him a bird. I thought it might be nice, the company and its bright color. He and I go to the same college and live down the hall from one another in the same apartment complex. We’re very different, though. We did not hang out much before his accident. Keith was an athlete and an alcoholic; I prefer chemistry and yarn.

Most of the girls he and his friends hung around with were beautiful. I’m not beautiful, although he told me once that I was. “Jean,” he said, “you just aren’t beautiful in a way that people notice. It’s comfortable, the way you’re beautiful. Your face always reminds me of home.” I don’t think home was what any of his friends were looking for. They wanted excitement. My face does not remind anyone of that.

When I take the bird into Keith’s apartment, it’s so dark that the bird stops chirping. “It is not nighttime yet,” I tell the bird, but it stays quiet and does not believe me. “I brought you a bird. It will cheer you up and make you feel better,” I tell Keith, but he stays quiet and does not believe me. Keith’s living room is like a reverse sundial; shadows shift to tell that time does not pass.

Whenever I go over to his place since the accident, I can feel my heart breathing and my lungs beating. Things are all messed up. The pulse of my breath makes a thin white cloud in the air. The room is too cold for a bird.

When I turn on the heater, its loud ticks sound like the restoration of life, and I set the bird down by it and put a towel over its cage. “It will be under there, when you’re ready,” I tell him. “Please do not kill it.”

Keith stares at me and I realize he’s looking at my sweater. “I knitted it,” I tell him.

He’s quiet for a second and then he laughs a little. “You should knit me something to go over the end of my arm where my hand used to be.” He smiles at my discomfort. “You should knit me a fake hand.” I want to laugh too, but laughing around Keith is like a foreign word I’ve forgotten the meaning of; I want to use it but worry it might be offensive.

Keith itches the air where his arm used to be, and he and I stare at the space for a long time. Sometimes I get the feeling that everything could be okay if I could make myself touch the new end of his arm. I sit down next to him but he folds his arm into his lap. “I hate birds,” he mutters.

“It’s colorful.” I sound assertive when I say this, but I’m not. “I’ll be able to hear it in my apartment down the hall, so we’ll kind of be sharing it that way.”

“Will you take care of it?” Keith asks.

His arm’s end is a dome of gauze. Touching it would be like patting the stomach of a soft doll. It would be like telling my brother, “This is you. It is different but it is you because I’m holding it right now.”

“For a while,” I say. We sit together until the shadows get darker but time does not pass, and eventually I take him by the upper arm. Its end now rests so close to me that I feel like it is listening to my heartbeat, and after more shadows I whisper, “I’m going to touch it now” and I do. Though it is soft and motionless, the feeling of it makes me want to run. My whole stomach turns. I stare across the room at the towel-covered cage and imagine it is all a trick: the towel will fall off the cage and inside will sit my brother’s hand and forearm. The gauze on Keith’s arm will shift until a tiny bird pokes its way out and flies down the hall, past my apartment, off far away to where all spent illusions return.

Personal Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thank you to Ted Pelton and Ben Marcus—for fighting the good fight, for writing and championing innovative literature, and for helping to protect the spaces where it can flourish.

To all the Editors who selected these works for inclusion, particularly Michael Czyzniejewski, Gavin Grant, Ander Monson, Rick Moody, Danielle Pafunda, Sophia Seidner, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and John Woods, for your ongoing support and encouragement. Thanks also to Rebecca Maslen for your incredible talent in designing this book.

To my MFA thesis director Kate Bernheimer, under whose guidance this book took shape. There are not enough thanks or words; you are a Giving Tree. If a language were created to describe you, ninety-nine percent of its words would be synonyms for generosity. Thank you for the fabulous sprouting branches.

I am deeply indebted to Joel Brouwer, Dave Hickey, Michael Martone, Joyelle McSweeney, Wendy Rawlings, Josh Russell, Douglas Unger, and Richard Wiley: incredible teachers, incredible writers, incredible people. I also wish to express deep gratitude to Glenn Schaeffer and Jon Cobain for the generous UNLV fellowships which have allowed me to continue my writing.

For my fellow workshoppers Sarah Blackman, C. Bard Cole, Tim Croft, Andrew Farkas, Jonathan Hall, Laura Hendrix, Brian Oliu, Carl Peterson, and David Welch, who edited in and outside of the classroom. I am so grateful for your time, your gifts, and your writing. Thank you especially to my travel soulmate Tara Goedjen, who is always lightning-quick to help me back up on the horse, and to Stacy Gnall, Jeremy Allen Hawkins, and Nick Parker, who gave me a home and a writing family while this manuscript was coming into being.

For Xia, when she is older. Would this book have been possible had I not gotten to dress up and laugh and shriek and paint and search for acorns between the writing? You gave me fresh and wondering eyes. Watching you discover your world was such a gift; it felt like something I should have to steal.

Thank you to Leah Bailly, Mark & Beverly Baumgartner, Jason Coley, Andrew Kiraly, Joshua Kryah, Juan Martinez, Matt Swetnam, Vu Tran, and Amber Withycombe for filling my Vegas life with riches, literary and otherwise. Thank you to Maile Chapman for being an incredible resource in every way, from proofreading to encyclopedic knowledge to kindness.

To the following writers who have been exceptionally motivational both on the page and in person: Steve Almond, Brock Clarke, Rikki Ducornet, Michael Griffith, Yiyun Li, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, Lance Olsen, Danielle Pafunda, Stacey Richter, and Kellie Wells.

For the artists in my life who have had more of an impact on my work than they could know: Montana Atwater, Doug & Elizabeth Sargent Currier, Emily Dwyer, Walter Flowers, Ashley Hudson, Burke Miles, and the resplendent Laura Shill. To Becky Hector, co-creator of the magical worlds that I preferred to reality throughout childhood and beyond. To all My Dear Friends, both human and animal, whose names belong Here. I cherish you.

To my family, both immediate and extended, for working around my weirdness.

And to Shawn, for loving me on to the next adventure.

About the Author

Alissa Nutting was born in rural Michigan. She received a BA degree from the University of Florida and an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where she served as Editor for the Black Warrior Review. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Fence, BOMB, the fairy tale anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, as well as many other journals. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has received Cobain and Schaeffer Fellowships in Fiction. She is fiction editor of the literary journal Witness and managing editor of Fairy Tale Review.

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Nina Shope, Hangings: Three Novellas

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express deep gratitude to the editors and readers of the following publications where the chapters below first appeared:

Apostrophe Cast, July 2008: “Teenager”

Denver Quarterly: Vol. 43.3, 2009: “Magician”

Diagram: Vol. 10.2, 2010: “She-Man”

Eleven Eleven: Vol. 9, 2010: “Ant Colony”

La Petite Zine, Vol. 21, 2008: “Bandleader’s Girlfriend”

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Vol. 24, 2009: “Corpse Smoker”

Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Vol. 7, 2008: “Deliverywoman”

Mid-American Review, Vol. 29.2, 2009: “Model’s Assistant”

No Contest, October 2009: “Dancing Rat”

The Southeast Review, Vol. 25.1, 2006: “Zookeeper”

Swink, Vol. 3, 2007: “Porn Star”

Tin House Vol. 33, 2007: “Dinner”

Versal, Vol. 5, 2007: “Alcoholic”

Quarterly West, Vol. 70, 2010: “Knife Thrower”

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Alissa Nutting

Editor: Ted Pelton

Graphic arts editor: Rebecca Maslen

Proofreader: Dean Goranites

Cover Art: “Waterlove” by Catrin Welz-Stein, http://www.redbubble.com/people/catrinarno

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Content

Alissa Nutting
UNCLEAN JOBS FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS

DINNER

MODEL’S ASSISTANT

PORN STAR

ZOOKEEPER

BANDLEADER’S GIRLFRIEND

ANT COLONY

KNIFE THROWER

DELIVERY WOMAN

CORPSE SMOKER

CAT OWNER

TEENAGER

ICE MELTER

HELLION

ALCOHOLIC

GARDENER

DANCING RAT

SHE-MAN

MAGICIAN

Personal Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also available from Starcherone Books

The Dzanc Books eBook Club

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

About Open Road Integrated Media