Rainie Tsai Learns to Suspend Her Disbelief, Which Is Impressive, Given the Immense Weight of It, and Anita Hsia Presents Her Skeletal Assumptions

Rainie passed the empty lots where stray dogs steeped in their shadows, asleep. She hid her wrists in her sleeves. Once, Anita told her that getting bitten by an animal meant you were chosen by its species and would transform into one of its own. Since then, Rainie decided to shy from teeth and shelter her current shape. She preferred her borders not be breached. As she passed the shade of the sycamore, she did not step into its shadow, though she knew its shadow contained restorative properties, which she discovered once when she and Anita fell asleep with their legs knitted through its raised roots. They woke up hours later with perfectly exfoliated skin and no eczema on their knuckles.

Still, Rainie avoided walking alone to any part of the tree, ethereal or physical. She walked up to the lot instead, pretending that she was not stargazing at the strays, indulging her fear of fangs. She told herself she was walking in a straight line to the grocery store to buy a pair of new flip-flops for her mother, who insisted on the sanctity of clean feet, which had been violated by Rainie’s hourly regurgitation of sand onto their carpet. Rainie’s mother disapproved of her eating sand, even after Rainie said (in truth, she was repeating Anita) that eating sand was actually good for certain birds, since it provided important friction in their digestive system. Maybe in the next life you’ll be birds, but not this one, her mother said. In this one, you have a bad chin and good manners. Buy flip-flops only.

Before Rainie was allowed to go to the store by herself, before she was accompanied by the weapon of red thread around her neck, she used to go with her mother and brothers on certain free evenings. One of her mother’s favorite stories, which were few—she tended to accumulate stories like seeds, but never planted any—took place when Rainie was little and used to sit in the shopping cart as her mother pushed her through the seafood section. The whole back of the store was bright with displays of fish, some filleted and some still zipped into their skins, others gargling in tanks. According to her mother,

Rainie had pointed at every fluorescent display and mumbled, Working. Not working. Working. Not working. It took seven trips before Rainie’s mother realized this was a precise system of classification: All the foil-bright fish swimming in tanks were Working, and all the fish flayed on banks of ice were Not Working.

Working, Not Working. Rainie didn’t have a word for living. Whenever she saw Anita greet the sycamore by rubbing her haunches on its trunk, Rainie wanted to turn away. Even now, walking past the tree for the third time this evening, she wondered if the sycamore was Working or Not Working. She decided she didn’t know the tree personally enough to label it anything. Another time, Anita asked her to classify their own bodies as Working or Not Working, and Rainie hadn’t answered.

I don’t know, Rainie would respond now, how I would sort us. She only knew that Anita was alive in a way that watered everything else around her, alive with such generosity that she gave it away without knowing, resuscitating the sycamore and the sidewalk and the walls of the duplex that cleaved them apart, and a part of Rainie wanted to not be touched by it. Wanted to function without feeling everything, feeding its history. Anita wanted to tackle those fish tanks to the ground, release the fish, and render the hallways into rivers, but Rainie was relieved to walk away from those shallow fish-eyes, their foggy jelly. Those fish-eyes gaped at her, pickled and unknowing, forever static in their tanks, safe where she stranded them. When Rainie left the seafood section first, threading herself through the dairy aisle, Anita stayed behind with the aquatic species, circling the same lobster tank, waiting for Rainie to return. Since they’d decided to be dogs, Rainie was at least comforted by the knowledge that Anita was waiting for her. Every morning by the door, just like a stray, her mother said. Waiting to be fed or pet.

Last week, Anita tugged her to the lot when the dogs were sleeping off the heat and curdling on the surface of the blacktop. Yards away, the sycamore cast its shadow over them like a tent. Grabbing Rainie’s wrist, Anita dragged her to the chain-link fence, pointing at their rusted mouths and claiming that she saw a boy pissing through the fence, his penis slotted through the hexagonal hole. He was following your rule, Anita said. He was doing it in the lot, just like the dogs! Anita sounded impressed, but Rainie said it sounded like a recipe for tetanus. Skin was thinnest on your private parts, she said; it was what her mother told her: Scrub the folds of yourself gently and silently, and don’t linger too long in your own shadow. Don’t press your own pleats. Touch was only a tool.

But Anita laughed and said it was true, she’d seen it, and even better than that, she’d spotted a red dog squatting on the other side of the fence, catching the arc of piss in its open mouth, bathing in it, rolling pearls of it down its spine. When Rainie said again that this was a lie—she’d never seen one of those dogs catch anything, and she’d thrown plenty of sticks and pebbles at them through that very fence— Anita shook her head and said, You lack self-belief. Rainie rolled this statement down her spine, but somehow it lodged itself, and even now, as Rainie walked past the fence yet again, she thought of what Anita said next: Let’s try it. Let’s try being the boy and the fence and the dog. Rainie asked which she was supposed to be, and Anita said, You choose. It felt like a test, so Rainie said she would be the boy, since he had amazed Anita first, delighting her with his ability to pierce the fence and stitch himself into it. She was relieved when Anita seemed pleased by this answer. Try it, Anita said, but when Rainie pressed the whole front of her body to the chain-link fence, which was neon-hot as a grill, she found that she had nothing to fit inside the holes of the fence except her fists, her wrists. Anita observed her posture, walking around her a few times, then tapped her own nose and said, You need a boner first. That’s what you need.

As Anita continued to pace behind Rainie, stepping on her shadow until it was ragged, Rainie finally asked what a boner was and how to become one. You don’t become a boner, you own one, Anita said, standing directly behind her. Or is it that you carry one? I forget. Rainie turned her face so that her other cheek hissed against the fence, bearing its share of the heat. She imagined herself patterned now, like those mottled dogs in the lot beyond her, who had no word for ownership, who craved it all the same. Until Anita released her, Rainie thought, she would not move. Okay, Anita said, since we don’t have a bone between our legs like raccoons do—she’d once found a severed raccoon tail beneath a parked car, and inside its sleeve of fur was a bone, broken in several places and knuckled like a finger—we will just have our shadows act it out.

Standing beside Rainie, her legs a stray’s length apart, Anita pressed her heels into the concrete and faced the fence. To her left, her shadow slanted across the sidewalk, slashing it in half. Copy me, Anita said, and extended her hand as if she was going to shake someone else’s. She lowered her hand so that it seemed like a stalk jutting from her crotch, her fingers nudging through the hole in the fence. When Rainie glanced down, she saw that Anita had limbed her shadow, amending the body written on concrete. See, Anita said. If you just looked at my shadow, you wouldn’t even know that’s my hand. I could call it anything. Rainie, despite her instinct to dispute everything, couldn’t help but agree. If you considered only the pavement, you might think Anita owned a beak instead of a crotch, that her three- dimensional body matched her shadow’s flat anatomy. Later, Anita would use this as so-called proof that she could invent anything. For now, Rainie opened her mouth in wonder. For now, Rainie was not sick of Anita staring down at her shadow when they walked on the street or the sidewalk, hooking her fingers behind Rainie’s ears to impersonate horns, or instructing her to lift her skirt so that their shadow could have wings, despite the risk of attracting perverts.

But when Anita’s fingers pushed deeper into the fence, the dogs woke. Their tails snapped up like antennae, tuned in to the sky’s bad mood. Rainie grabbed Anita’s wrist and pulled her back. Dragging her home by the elbow, Rainie ignored Anita’s protests about how she wasn’t ready to leave, how she hadn’t even finished peeing yet. You know you couldn’t actually have peed through that fence, Rainie said, unless your fingers are faucets and your palms are bladders. Anita studied her hands so closely that Rainie regretted saying this, and when they were home, Anita asked if her palms could be bladders, or storage containers for prayers. All skin is just a bottle, Anita said, so what can’t I contain?

Rainie reminisced on all this, as she was prone to do. Anita is action, Rainie is reflection, Rainie thought, though she knew Anita would snort at this and say, What’s the difference? Why sort us? But Rainie had been doing it since she was a toddler in the seafood section, and it was difficult for her to stop. Giving up on the grocery store, she circled the lot three times each and then went home, counting the sidewalk cracks and crossing them out with her feet. At home, Rainie told her mother it had looked like it was going to rain, so she decided to turn back. Her mother didn’t say anything about how it was clearly not going to rain, as it had not rained in years and the TV was contemplating the possibility of importing clouds. Rainie had no excuse for returning with empty hands, except that every time she neared the sycamore, no matter if she was walking sideways or forward, its shadow always seeped into her mind and redirected her intentions.

That night on the middle bunk of her bed, Rainie looked up at the slats of the top bunk where her brother slept, his toes tapping on the end of the bedframe like the percussion of rain. For as long as Rainie had lived here, she remembered only one rain. It had happened when she was very little. She felt no affinity for the wet, and though her mother said it was a relief to finally have rain after centuries of drought, Rainie threaded her head through the doorway and immediately retracted it: The rain was mouth-warm, and it felt like being relentlessly pelted by her brothers’ spit, except the sky had no forearm she could bite in retaliation. But what she remembered best was the aftermath of the rain.

The next day, she and Anita stomped through the gutters and plucked earthworms, writhing like intestines, off the silver pavement. The sidewalk was veined with golden water, everywhere a mottled mirror. There was one puddle near the lot that was deep as a sleeve, wide as their torsos, and when they kneeled and reached their arms into it, they couldn’t feel a bottom.

The puddle was so bright that Rainie believed she could pocket it like a penny. But Anita warned her not to remove it. I’ll investigate further, Anita said, slipping her leg into the puddle’s mouth, and it swallowed her to the socket. When Rainie asked her how it was possible, since there had never been a meteor crater here, no explanation for why the water gathered here so endlessly, Anita said it was clearly a portal. Something was waiting to emerge, to breach the skin of this sea. She made Rainie wait with her under the sycamore tree, and when it was afternoon, the puddle alert as an eye, Anita dragged her over to the water and pointed down.

When they looked in—even now, Rainie wondered if this was some prank of the rain—they saw the faces of dogs. Rainie turned her head to catch the dogs craning over them, but they were not there. They existed only inside the sidewalk, their faces surfacing in the puddle. Their fur was patchy from years of licking one another roughly, and their ears were perfect corners. Water dribbled from their chins, a miniature rain. The skin of the puddle shivered, though Rainie was not stepping in it at all, despite her desire to smear those faces away, to turn from whatever fate was revealed. Anita didn’t seem startled at all to see those dogs and instead wrapped her hand around Rainie’s elbow and tugged her gently, as if to give them some privacy. As they backed away, their heels numb against the sidewalk, the surface of the puddle vibrated like a drum skin, and a paw punctured the membrane, then several paws, then dozens of paws, dogs bursting out of the water, a whole pack of them, streaming out onto the sidewalk, shaking out their fur like capes, water spattering everywhere. They nosed at the chain-link fence or lunged down the street. The pavement beneath Rainie’s feet vibrated for miles, bruising her soles, and she resisted the urge to run toward the sycamore and climb its branches.

Anita stood her ground. There are more about to be born, she said. Kneeling, she pressed her palms to the ground and memorized the rhythm of the dogs as they ran along the underside of the pavement and gushed from the hole, hundreds more. Their paws clapped against Anita’s feet through the concrete, meeting in applause, while Rainie felt them muffled, a distant stampede. Rainwater surged up from the puddle, cresting over them as the dogs geysered out.

The next day, when the world was once again crowded with overlapping droughts, the dogs gathered in the lot, bathing in saliva instead of rain. That was the beginning of their kinship with the strays. Rainie asked what the dogs were doing inside concrete in the first place, and Anita said it wasn’t their choice to fossilize. They had to wait for the rain to make a door, for this world to grow pores.

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Excerpted from Organ Meats copyright © 2023 by K-Ming Chang. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

While my mama had weapons for hands, could coax or demand, Safi is all tenderness. She fusses over her mama when we return to my sire’s house every morning, smoothing her mother’s hair, pushing her to eat, bringing her more water than she needs. Me and Safi clean the house together, walk side by side through the rooms, the doorways, so closely our arms bump, and I get used to the feel of her long, slender, hairless arms, her wrists thin as a bird’s bones. She is a comfort, but she cannot soothe all.

*

I know I’m not meeting Safi right, not rising to her tenderness, so when the rice grows tall and rigid in the fields and the moonlight shines through the cabin’s cracks, I grab Safi’s wrist.

“Come,” I say.

In the chalky light of the moon, Safi is beautiful: her cheeks like plums, her mouth full as purple figs. A hot flower blooms in my chest, and I squeeze Safi’s hand, but it is so much smaller than my mother’s. The flower folds. I shrug against it.

“I want to show you something,” I say.

Safi follows me as I lead her out of the shallow valley and into the low hills where my mother taught me to forage for mushrooms, for greens and roots and herbs, to our clearing, our tree. I wrap gauze I filched from my sire’s house around her puzzled face, her long, lean arms and legs, until she is shrouded, protected from the sting of the bees. A wolf yips, and I turn, swear I see a mirage of another white-shrouded woman in the clearing, but there is no one there but me and Safi and my bees. The tutor said bees are still at night, but my bees are alive, humming and flying from their amber pyramid, riveted between the bones of the tree. The bees, my bees, are awake. Safi and I stand in the moonlit night, pinkies hooked, while my bees greet us, flush with summer. They land in kisses, busking touches, on our shoulders, the crowns of our heads, our palms. Her finger: a living link. I could weep with the sweetness of it, of knowing that there are others in this terrible world who will touch me with kindness. But all the while I know that the carved spears lie buried at the edge of the clearing charging the air as before a lightning strike. My mother. I step behind Safi’s smaller frame, drape my arms over her shoulders, and stand like that, back to front. I try to blink away the missing of my mama. Feel what it might be to feel, to love again.

I let that ribbon of feeling carry me beyond the sunrise of the next day. Let it buoy me up so that after me and Safi scrubbed and rinsed and hung laundry, after we dusted and mended and bent together, I linger outside the schoolroom door. The tutor’s voice, the same; my sisters’ reading, still as slow and halting. The tutor is telling a story of a man, an ancient Italian, who is walking down into hell. The hell he travels has levels like my father’s house. The tutor says: “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world,’” and his words echo through me. I hear the sighs: the summer wind pushing slant at the house, the wood groaning, but instead of the Italian poet descending into hell, I see my mother toiling in the hell of this house. Walking down from a hot, crate-choked attic to a second floor clustered with bedrooms where my sire’s children cried through keyholes after their mother died, after my mother became their nursemaid and pulled them from her breast, down to the first floor, where my mother grew sere over a burning stove, to the potato-and-onion-rank basement, cool and rat infested, down and down, to deeper basements, root cellar opening to root cellar. More hell. “‘I shall go first. Then you come close behind,’ ” the tutor says. “‘Through me you go to the grief-racked city,’ ” he says, his voice like the soft buzz of velvet.

“Grief-racked city,” I whisper, wondering what the spirits might look like in that place. I asked my mother about spirit once, after we were done practicing in the clearing. The sweat cooling on us under the drench of the far starlight, while mosquitoes shredded my feet.

“They don’t know,” my mama said. “Them got to open a door, walk through a cave, go down into a valley or up a mountain to find spirit.” My mama looked up to the wind tossing the trees. “This world seething with it.”

“Seething?” I asked.

“It’s everywhere.” Mama hummed and rolled her eyes, and then frowned, serious. “When you ask, spirit answer, Arese,” she said.

I am still thinking about spirit, about hell, when I meet up with Safi in my sire’s room to dust and change his bedding. I want that ribbon, that buoy. My sire is never here during the day, always out, supervising the bent in the fields, visiting neighbors. I think my dirt, my grime I wore through the summer and into the winter, drove him away. For once, I am glad for my grief, but I want more than that now.

I step near to Safi when she rises from smoothing a bedspread and put my palm under her elbow, my lips to her downy neck, long and elegant as a crane’s. She does not step away. This spirit, here, I think, in this blind world. She turns to me, kisses my forehead, and I hum until a thump sounds at the doorway, and Safi and I lurch away from each other, lips still wet and warm, to see my sire, his mouth wide and pink, his red hair splaying away from his head like a fan. Panic beats through me, and it rises up and out of me in a laugh, high and jagged. Safi folds her hands, looks down at her feet, bows. My laugh saws away. This hell.

Let us descend, I think, and follow Safi out of the room.

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From Let Us Descend: A Novel. Copyright 2023 by Jesmyn Ward. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

There are two Santa Monicas. One is a fairytale of spangled gowns and improbable breasts and faces from the tabloids, of big money and fixed noses and strung-out voice teachers and heiresses on skateboards and even bigger big money; of movie stars you thought were dead and look dead; of terraced apartment buildings cascading down perilous yellow bluffs toward the sea; of Olympic swimmers and hip-hop hit men and impresarios of salvation and twenty-six-year-old agents backing out of deals in the lounge bar at Shutters; of yoga masters and street magicians; of porn kings and fast cars and microdosing prophets and shuck-and-jive evangelists and tattooed tycoons and considerably bigger big money; of Sudanese busboys with capped teeth and eight-by-ten glossies in their back pockets; of Ivy League panhandlers, teenage has-beens, home-run kings in diamonds and fur coats, daughters of sultans, sons of felons, widows of the silver screen, and the kind of meaningless big money that has forgotten what money is.

There is that.

But start at the pier and head southeast until you reach a neighborhood of tidy, more or less identical stucco houses separated by fourteen feet of scorched grass. In a number of these homes, you will find families, or the descendants of families, who have lived here since the mid-to-late forties. For them, upscale was a Chevy in the driveway. Mom mixed up Kool-Aid at ten cents a gallon, Pop pushed used cars at a dealership off Wilshire Boulevard, Junior had a paper route, Sis did some weekend babysitting. Nowadays, the house Pop bought for $37,000 will fetch just under two million in a sluggish market, but as Pop loved to say, secretly proud, “What kind of house do you buy with the profit? A pup tent? A toolshed in Laguna?” Sis drowned in 1995. Pop’s heart ticked erratically until fifteen minutes into the twenty-first century—or so Junior would later claim. Mom kept chugging away, fat but indestructible, fortified by milkshakes and late-night Cyd Charisse movies and a well-mannered suitor whose aspect compared favorably with an aging Cesar Romero.

As for Junior—whose name was not yet Boyd Halverson but soon would be—he did well for himself. An ambitious window-shopper of a child, a Peeping Tom just outside the magic kingdom, Junior dreamed a boy’s glamorous dreams, reading hungrily, faking what he had to fake. He shilled his way through three semesters at USC, dropped out, vanished for two years, showed up again in Santa Monica with a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, slept for a month, and then awakened to find himself on the metro desk of a newspaper for which he had once been a twelve-year-old delivery boy. Still a window-shopper, yes, but in journalism, Junior—now Boyd—discovered a calling. After all, since boyhood he’d had practice ogling other people’s lives. And thus over time this led to that: Pasadena, Sacramento, a botched marriage, Mexico City, Manila, almost a Pulitzer, Evelyn, wedding bells again, a year in Hong Kong, nearly two years in Jakarta, Teddy’s arrival, then eventually back to L.A., where at last he collided with the sudden, brutal, and well-earned catastrophe he’d been patiently anticipating for decades. In a single afternoon, Junior’s fortunes spun upside down. “You’re a liar, man, and a rotten human being,” said a ponytailed copyboy, for which there was no reply but to shrug and step aboard a downward-bound elevator. Liar? For sure. Rotten? Pretty obviously. Outside, standing unemployed on a blindingly white California sidewalk, Junior was struck by the apprehension that he had dropped something—a small watermelon, say, or his life, which lay pulpy and putrefying at his feet—after which came excessive booze, lethargy, and a glorious romance on the rocks. One humid evening, gazing into the wary eyes of a barmaid he’d twice bedded, Junior found himself startled by the discovery that he had slipped into the sour melancholy of his thirty-ninth year. “You kind of depress me,” said the barmaid, who nonetheless continued filling his glass for another month or so.

Drifting north, Junior washed up in small-town Fulda, twelve miles off the Oregon border.

He signed on with JCPenney.

He expected nothing and the world delivered. A whiskey at breakfast, a whiskey at lunch, a double at day’s end.

To recognize one’s own life as a breathtaking failure was an experience Junior would recommend to all. Relieved of illusion, he was relieved of disappointment. There was, in fact, a harsh cleansing effect that accompanied the knowledge that he could do no worse than he had already done. Dry goods demanded little of him, and for close to a decade Junior was content to erase himself amid the bustle of returned sweaters and a four o’clock golf league. The years did not speed by. But they did pass. He wasn’t happy and he wasn’t sad. Having grown up on the slow side of some extremely fast tracks, he now surrendered to the becalmed world of mediocre-anywhere—a triumph for a man who had once played fetch with Robert Stack’s dog outside an ice cream parlor on Ocean Avenue. He boiled his eggs for three and a half minutes. He smiled at people and dressed neatly. On occasion he wrote poetry. Some of the poems were about dropping things; some were about make-believe sappers and concertina wire; some were about Evelyn; and a good many were about the .38 caliber Temptation Special he kept in a Kleenex box on the top shelf of his bedroom closet.

There were few inquiries about his past. There were none he couldn’t graciously dodge.

He mowed his grass, paid his bills, prepared his meals, dressed up as a clown for Krazy Days sales, and casually wondered if he would ever find the desire to dive back into the disaster of his own reckless creation. And then in July of his ninth year in Fulda, Junior began having trouble sleeping at night. He roamed the house and talked to himself. He contemplated suicide. A great deal. Constantly. He imagined holding up Community National Bank. His mother had finally died, which was part of it, but he’d also come to recognize that even the manager of a JCPenney store might have felony in his heart.

He didn’t plan much—just the basics.

Boyd would rob the bank on a Saturday, leave a false trail into Mexico, then head home to attend to things he should have attended to long ago.

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From America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien. Used with permission of the publisher, Mariner Books. Copyright © 2023 by Tim O’Brien.

 My nose is bleeding
Should I go see my Sex and the City doctor.
She’d be like, did you move here for a man or a job.
I’m walking in Midtown,
I’m like, good for you in your colorful outfit.
Sad for a sea of black.
I went to California with a youthful aching in my heart
and I left it there / didn’t.
My sister’s and my text relationship is so I do this, I do that.
I text her, I washed my new bra and it’s so tightI keep gasping for air in my cubicle.
She writes back, I fell asleep on the train
and when I woke up a spider was dangling in front of my eyes.

My cartoon world where I live with you.
Where I float across the ocean.
Where I miss my stop every day
but it doesn’t matter / girl power.
Sometimes I post the things in my head
onto the Internet for a certain few.
For those to whom I’m like “good for you,”
your pastel dress in a sea of black
Maybe I’m like, hungry.
Gluten free Oreos. Can’t hear myself think.
I’m listening to “Free Fallin'” on my Walkman.
I go into the grocery store and they’re playing it too.
Cause I forgot the line & Tom Petty reminded me.
I wanna fly down over Mulholland /
wanna collapse on the grocery store floor.
The universe told me to go into the grocery store
and buy just cookies and milk.
D would’ve called it a “heroic purchase.”
My therapist was like, maybe you’re not over it.
The taste of the milk bored my tongue.

I’m walking around the grocery store.
“Epic” by Faith No More.
I’m running on the treadmill listening to
Lady Gaga and thinking about my sister.
And my sister calls and leaves a message
that she was listening to Lady Gaga
on the treadmill and thinking of me.
I text her two girls and two crystal ball emojis.
What if D dies.
And I’m like, how could you not need poetry?
Walking home w/ my grocery bag on my arm,
it feels like a tourniquet.
Use my computer as an extension cord.
Exercise or sleep.
You emptied the laundry all over the bed
and I screamed like a bomb exploded.
All the things that I’m interested in.
Will I take a selfie at the end of the world.

______________________________

A previous version of this poem appeared in Blush Lit. Diary by Marisa Crawford is available via Spuyten Duyvil Press.

Iva’s family wanted to see a Neanderthal, but the weather had them stuck in the cabin. Her brother-in-law suggested a hike in the rain, but Iva refused on account of her five-month-old. “She’ll be fine!” said Vinod. “She’s one of us—she’s a Pagidipati!” The last time Iva went along with that logic, she found herself hunched in a raft of Pagidipatis, the only one singing herself hoarse to a screaming infant in a life jacket.

The cabin sat in the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains outside Luray, Virginia. Until a few years ago, Vinod had had trouble renting it out year-round, but that was before a pair of Neanderthals were discovered along the banks of the Shenandoah River. They were sisters, billed on Nightline as “the product of a bizarre and illegal in-vitro experiment.” Nature magazine took a more compassionate stance, referring to them as “endlings,” the last of their kind.

Tourists descended overnight. The bids on Vinod’s cabin spiked. The guest book was filled with testimonials from all over the world—Thank you we will never forget this noble species. / Incroyable!—that made no mention of the fire pit or the Carrara marble jacuzzi. People came for a glimpse into the Pleistocene past. They left with T-shirts that read: SURVIVAL OF THE SEXIEST.

“Well,” Iva said, trying not to sound hopeful, “why don’t you all go without me?”

“Z wants to hike, don’t you Z?” Vinod reached for the baby, who whipped around as if interested in the wallpaper.

“Sorry,” said Iva, secretly pleased with Z’s powers of discernment.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Vinod. “Stranger danger.”

While Vinod went to find his rain gear, Iva planted Z on the play mat, under the mobile that would provide about three minutes of entertainment, just enough time for Iva to wolf down a croissant.

Her husband called. Jai had caught the flu the day before they were to leave for Luray; he’d urged Iva to take Z and go without him. At least Iva and Z could enjoy some leisure time and avoid infection, and when was the next time they would get an all-expenses-paid vacation? Vinod ran a thriving urology practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but he was mercurial in his charity—stingy one minute and magnanimous the next. Jai was a middle school principal in downtown DC. Pride kept him from asking his brother for anything.

“Heyyyy,” said Jai, his head filling the screen, his nostrils plugged with twists of tissue. Looking at him made Iva feel fluish. “How’re my girls?”

She caught him up on the morning’s debate, how Vinod’s family was going hiking while Iva and Z would stay put.

“You won’t be lonely?” he asked, using a congested version of his parent-teacher conference voice. “What’ll you do there all alone?”

“I won’t be alone. I have Z.”

“And what’s it called? Moms Love Chocolate?”

“It’s not Moms Love Chocolate. It’s . . .” Iva lowered her voice. “Chocolate Mommy Luv.”

Chocolate Mommy Luv was a WhatsApp group of mothers of color from across the nation, a sisterhood of night owls, an altar upon which to rest their extremes of emotion unless the moderator deemed the offering harmful or off-topic. Chocolate Mommy Luv was unfortunately named.

A month ago, she’d turned to Chocolate Mommy Luv for advice on why Z was waking up every two hours at night. Mama-LlamaDingDong had blamed bed-sharing, saying Iva should never have pulled Z out of the crib, that this practice, in Mama-LlamaDingDong’s experience, had led her baby to graze on her milk all night long. PurpleRain said this was ridiculous, that she’d bed-shared with all four of her babies, concretizing their bonds and reifying their independent spirits. Sometimes, Chocolate Mommy Luv was a confusing place, which was comforting in a way, to know that no one really knew anything for sure, no matter how fiercely they expressed themselves.

“I haven’t posted anything lately,” Iva told Jai. “We’ve been keeping busy.”

“Huntin’ for Neanderthals?” said Jai, in a bad Virginia drawl. “Just kidding. You already told me what you’d do if you found them.”

“What did I say?”

“You don’t remember?” He looked concerned by her poor memory, recent conversations simply frittering away as a result of her perpetual sleep deprivation. “You said you’d break them out somehow.”

“Huh.” She brushed the pastry flakes from her fingers. “What would you do?”

“I don’t know. It’s pretty fucked up what’s happening to them, but I wouldn’t go rogue. That’s not really my style.”

A stampede of feet overhead. Vinod was hollering at his kids to find their rain pants, ponchos, moisture-wicking socks. “I should go help,” Iva said by way of goodbye, though her only intention was to help herself to another croissant.

*

Iva waved from the porch, waiting until Vinod’s SUV had turned the corner at the end of the lane. Then she shifted the baby to her left arm and passed through the galley kitchen, grabbing the leftover plate of pancakes, and followed the paving stones to the coach house.

Iva had volunteered to occupy the coach house so as not to wake the whole family with Z’s nocturnal shrieking sessions. The coach house was about the size of her apartment in DC, with a ceiling that soared over the living room and not one but two chandeliers—a massive wrought iron crown over the dining table and a smaller tiara over the king-size bed.

Z was whimpering by the time they entered the bedroom. As soon as Iva released her to the floor, she sprint-crawled to the walk-in closet. Iva did the secret knock—tap-tap with her fingernail, thud-thud with her knuckle—and cracked open the door. The Neanderthal sisters were huddled by the shoe shelf, glowering up at her. (Were they glowering, Iva wondered, or was the glower produced by their prominent browbones?) At the sight of Z, the younger sister broke into a grin and patted her knees as Z climbed into the nest of her lap.

The older sister was squatting with her back to the full-length mirror, wrapping one of Iva’s elastics around the end of her braid. (Iva’s brush was on the ground, clouded with coppery red hair, evidence that she would have to dispose of.) Both sisters were covered in fur capes and pelts, the costumes they’d been wearing when they escaped their compound. The furs were in fact blankets from West Elm, made to look authentically brutish and matted by their employer, Rustic Adventures LLC.

“They’re gone,” Iva said.

Tossing her braid over her shoulder, the older sister rose to her feet. The younger followed, carrying Z. Iva stepped aside for the three of them to venture into the living area.

“I brought pancakes,” Iva said, pointing to the dining table. Neither sister responded verbally; Iva had read that the sisters could not speak, that their voice boxes were buried down low in the chest, too low to make more than grunting utterances. Their lack of speech, she found, caused her to emote with excessive cheer. “No syrup this time!”

The older sister shuddered at the memory of syrup from their first breakfast together, almost two weeks before. She joined the younger on the rug, rolling the pancake into a tube before biting off the end. Z reached, but the older held it away and wagged a finger.

Watching the sisters eat seemed sort of rude, so Iva tidied her bed. Here and there she snuck a glance, wondering whether their paleontologist mother used to make them pancakes.

The sisters, Iva had read, were taken as adolescents from their mother who had taught them to read and write basic English. After the mother was institutionalized, the court assigned the sisters to a series of guardians. According to the older sister, the most recent guardian had tricked them into signing a ten-year contract with Rustic Adventures. At first, the sisters did as they were told, wearing fake furs, cleaning hides and turning spits of turkey meat while tourists watched from golf carts. The sisters grew to hate both roasted turkey and Rustic Adventures, and the night tours that left them vulnerable to ogling even as they slept under trees.

And so, in early June, the sisters fled their compound, traveling by night from one dark and uninhabited cabin to another until one day, they glimpsed a pair of headlights creeping up the driveway. They raced to the coach house, hoping to hide in a closet until they could flee in the night. The bedroom closet was crammed with suitcases and sleeping bags, but Iva glimpsed them as soon as she opened the door. They were crouched behind a space heater, their eyes the pale hard blue of rock crystal.

Her initial reaction—“Ohmygod shit shit!”—caused Z to cry hysterically. Before Iva could make a move, the younger sister stepped out of the hanging coats, waving her arms, hopping from foot to foot. Z went slack-jawed. The younger sister pulled a face, making Z laugh.

Slowly the older emerged and raised her palms in a pleading way. She mimed writing on her own palm and pointed to the kitchenette. Iva stepped aside, allowing the older to take the magnetized Post-it pad and pencil from the fridge and write in cramped capital letters: I CAN EXPLAIN.

Iva was mesmerized by their story—told in fragments and hand gestures—about the cruel guardian and the vultures of Rustic Adventures. When she asked where the sisters ultimately wanted to go, the older wrote: MOTHER.

“Yes, but where?” Iva asked, thinking that the older had misunderstood. The older underlined MOTHER. And it was true, Iva realized, a mother was a place as much as a person—in their case, a whole world.

They asked Iva not to tell anyone of their existence—not even the family members in the main house. Iva said nothing at first, still coming to grips with whatever the fuck was taking place in her kitchenette. She was ashamed, too, of screaming at the sight of the sisters, who were really just two orphaned girls of, what— seventeen? eighteen? The same girls she’d claimed she would find a way to save. Guilty, uncertain, she allowed them to stay that night, telling herself that by morning, she’d know what to do. As the days went by and Iva was forced to spend more time with Vinod, she grew convinced that no good would come of telling him about the sisters. He would insist, arms annoyingly akimbo, on notifying the authorities. Iva herself was skeptical of authority. Such skepticism was practically a job requirement at the immigration rights coalition where she used to work, in Maryland. The work had been constant and draining, calling lawyers to take on migrant children, visiting deportation centers, lobbying for stalled legislation. And though she had quit to take care of the baby—daycare being too costly—helping the sisters fired up the old engine of indignation, the sense of purpose that had once given shape to her days.

The sisters showed their gratitude by leaving her little bundles of wildflowers or wineberries on the kitchenette counter and keeping themselves confined to the walk-in closet. At night, Z’s screaming tested all reasonable limits of gratitude. It was the younger who emerged from the closet one night and offered to rock the baby in her arms. Exhausted, zombified, Iva watched as her daughter turned calm in the younger’s arms. Something about the younger’s smell or sway or strangeness had Z entranced, Stranger danger be damned.

*

After the sisters had polished off the pancakes, Iva poured them coffee.

The older held up the notepad: HOW MANY MORE DAYS?

“Till we leave?” Iva asked. “Three, I guess.”

The younger rested her cheek against the top of Z’s head. She seemed saddened by the prospect of parting. The older wrote: WILL U HELP US?

“Do what?”

GET OUT

“Sure. Wait, what do you mean?”

BUY COATS HATS HAIR DYE

“Hair dye? Really?”

DRIVE US TO CULPEPER TRAIN STATION—5:35 TO HOUSTON

“Wow. How’d you figure out the train schedule?”

The older pointed the pencil at the nightstand, where Iva’s phone lay atop a stack of magazines.

“How’d you unlock my phone?”

FACE ID WHEN U WERE SLEEPING

Iva imagined the older holding the screen to her snoozing face, waiting for the device to read her features. “That’s kind of invasive.”

U HAVE MANY OPEN TABS

Iva’s face warmed. Clearly the older had gotten a glimpse of Iva’s Neanderthal obsession, searches to do with clothing, honeygathering, and one about intersexual relationships between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, a theory that explained, in part, the erasure of Neanderthals as a species. A valid question, Iva believed, possibly invalidated by her search query: neanderthals sex homo sapiens?

“Sorry.” Iva winced. “I was trying to learn more about you.”

WHY

“I’m just curious, I guess.”

The younger swatted at the older’s knee and signed something.

The older nodded emphatically.

SAY NOTHING ABT US TO ANYONE PLEASE

“No, of course not.”

4 EVER?

“I won’t. I promise.”

The older wrote down the address of a twenty-four-hour Walmart where Iva could obtain the clothing and hair dye. Tonight, after everyone went to bed. The younger offered to watch Z, but Iva said the baby loved being in motion and would be fine in the car seat. In truth, Iva had no idea how Z would react to being strapped into a car seat at three in the morning, but she preferred gambling on a tantrum than handing her baby over to sitters who were not only untested but another species altogether. She couldn’t exactly check references.

*

A few hours later, Iva was breastfeeding Z when she heard the slamming of car doors. Her breath caught. She’d expected to hear the SUV rumbling up the drive, forgetting it was a hybrid that only purred at low speeds. She darted a look at the sisters. They were already shutting the closet door behind them.

In seconds, Vinod’s twin boys were charging into the coach house—Iva scolded herself for leaving the front door unlocked— while she tried to snap up her nursing top.

“We saw the sisters!” they yelled as they ran to her chair, hopping in place with six-year-old fervor.

“When? Where?”

“On the hike,” said Kush.

“The hike, right.” Iva nodded, relieved. “Cool!”

Z twisted around to look at her cousins, delighted by the interruption. She reached for Luvh, who seemed momentarily hypnotized by Iva’s cleavage.

“So!” Iva said, trying to draw his attention upward. “What were they doing when you saw them?”

After a long vacant pause, Luvh said: “They were naked.”

“Yeah,” said Kush. “Up top.”

“The Neanderthal sisters were naked up top?” Iva said.

“And they had big ones, like yours,” Kush said.

“Okay,” Iva said briskly, “I have an idea: why don’t you guys wash up before dinner?”

“Nah” and “we’re fine,” they said in overlapping voices.

“Well, I have to finish feeding the baby, so.”

Kush asked if they could watch. Iva looked sternly at both boys, who looked sternly back, and said no.

*

In the evening, the adults convened on the deck. The rain had cleared, leaving behind a damp leafy smell that joined with the charcoal smoke of the grill. Vinod was flipping steaks, which he had jovially told Iva were not for her, as if she’d forgotten she was a lifelong vegetarian. Iva was just happy to take up a corner of the hot tub and spread her arms along the marbled sides. Her breasts were drained, her veins running with malbec. Her T-shirt puffing like a windblown sail.

Sitting on the edge of the tub was Myung, Vinod’s wife. She was holding Z, drifting her chubby little feet through the water, which they’d cranked down to a reasonable temperature. At one time, Myung had carried the twins, but years of intermittent fasting had whittled her hips to arrowheads. Her cheekbones glowed with a balm she once shared with Iva called Au Naturel, and that was how Iva thought of her, a natural at everything.

“Z’s loving the water,” said Myung, arching her eyebrows at the baby. “She’s remembering the womb.”

Iva nodded, feeling similarly enwombed. “How was the hike?”

Myung rolled her eyes. “The twins insist they saw the sisters.”

“I wish,” said Vinod. “The last three reviews on TripAdvisor were two out of five stars because apparently it’s my fault they didn’t see a Neanderthal.”

“I just hope they’re safe,” said Myung, beautiful natural Myung. Iva loved her. Iva loved everyone gathered here, maybe even Vinod, until he said, “Once we get them back, we need to build a wall. Not a brick wall. Something with gaps they can see through.”

“You can’t do that,” Iva said. “It’s inhumane.”

“Hello, it’s for their own protection? An eight-lane interstate wraps around the park. I bet they’ve never even seen a car before—”

“What about more security cameras?” Myung suggested.

“We have cameras,” Vinod said. “They keep smashing them. Do you guys have any idea how freakishly strong they are?”

Iva hadn’t considered their physical strength. She’d always assumed them to be fragile, childlike, in part because she was at least six inches taller than both of them.

“I got some new surveillance cameras,” Vinod said. “Spy quality. I’m gonna install them where no one can see.”

“And where’s that?” Iva asked.

“Where no one can see.” He winked at her.

“Well, don’t rig them up during our vacation,” Iva said. “I don’t want to be surveilled.”

“Nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide,” Vinod said.

“He’s joking,” Myung said. “He couldn’t install a nightlight without help.”

Hotly, Vinod listed the many things he had assembled and installed around their house. Iva took the opportunity to side-climb out of the tub.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Think I’ll go back to bed.”

“You okay?” Myung asked.

“I’m fine. Just dehydrated, probably.”

“Have a steak then!” said Vinod. “Just kidding, I have some corn on the cob and baked potato for you.”

Iva said she’d have it all: the corn, the potato, and two steaks.

“For who?” Vin asked.

“Me.”

Iva could feel the spotlight of their surprise. The two times Iva had eaten meat in the past were by accident; once informed, she immediately went to the toilet and threw up. And now here she was with a paper plate practically bleeding into her palm.

“Yeah,” Iva said, trying to sound tired. “I’ve been feeling weak from all the breast-feeding.”

“You could have low blood pressure,” Vinod said. “Steak would definitely help with that. I bet it even helps with milk, you know, stimulation. Rare or medium rare?”

Iva gambled on rare.

“Attagirl,” said Vinod, draping two glistening slabs on her plate alongside a foil-wrapped potato and corn on the cob.

“Should Vin take your blood pressure?” Myung asked, watching her with concern.

“No one is taking my anything,” Iva said. “I’m just going to watch some TV and eat in bed. But I’ll come back for the baby.”

Iva strode away, her jaw tight. A fucking wall? Had everyone lost their minds? She stood on the porch of the coach house for a moment, breathing deeply against competing waves of anger and worry. She wondered if she should call one of her former colleagues, someone she trusted, to offer the sisters legal counsel. Iva wasn’t a lawyer. She was just a mom in the middle of nowhere, bearing a paper plate of steak. Then again she knew the sisters would refuse any offer of outside help. Homo sapiens, they believed, were not to be trusted.

YOU ARE DIFFERENT, the older had written. NOT LIKE YOUR KIND.

Conferring with her sister, the older added: MORE LIKE MOTHER.

Iva knew they’d meant this as a compliment, but being compared to a woman under psychiatric surveillance—well, it troubled her.

*

Only later that night could Iva relax again, after returning from Walmart with several boxes of hair dye in French Roast. Each sister held her head over the sink, a towel draped over her shoulders, as Iva worked the dye through their coppery roots. The younger applied the rest of the dye to Iva’s head, though Iva knew the brown wouldn’t show up in her black hair. She enjoyed the scalp massage, their strange little sorority of stained towels and oil-slicked heads.

While waiting for the dye to set, they tried on their new clothes: cheap jeans, bucket hats, fleece coats. WHY MOM JEANS? the older asked, after reading the tag. Because the waistline is so forgiving, Iva had said. Because of all they hide. Because they were half off. Fully dressed, the older sashayed across the rug, then paused to swipe a finger across her palm. They all shared a laugh. After rinsing and drying their hair, the three of them went to bed. No sooner had Iva fallen asleep than Z began to whimper. Only half-awake, Iva heard the younger pick up the baby, making a little grunting sound as she jostled and rocked her. Soon Z had drifted off again, and Iva mumbled something by way of thank you or how’d you do that, before descending back into a dream that was remarkably anxiety-free, in which Patrick Swayze was begging her to leave her life behind and run away with him into some sexy, sweaty beyond.

*

The next morning, while Vinod was out kayaking, Myung and Iva took the kids to Luray Caverns. Iva volunteered to drive so she had some excuse for holding onto the keys. At dawn, she would load the sisters and Z into the SUV and drive to the Culpeper train station. Just in case, she’d leave a Post-it on the fridge: took car, driving Z to get her to sleep.

The prior night’s slumber party had Iva buzzy and exhausted, but she managed to take note of the highway signs, including the exit that led toward Culpeper.

“You okay?” Myung asked warily when Iva’s mouth fell open again.

“Oh. Yeah.” Iva shivered. “I was up all night.”

“Z give you a hard time?”

“No, it was just me. Couldn’t sleep for some reason.”

“Do you think,” Myung ventured, “that you might be spending too much time on your phone? I know that Chocolate Mom group means a lot to you, but you can also call me or your mom if you want to chat.”

Calling her mother rarely ended well. Every conversation led back to the same Nike-inflected statement motto: “You all”— meaning the entirety of Iva’s generation—“think too much. We just did it.”

Fighting a yawn, Iva said, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

A silence ensued, the kind that usually precedes some sort of emotional bloodletting. Iva decided to cut to the quick. “I used to talk to my colleagues,” she said. “I miss them. I miss my job.”

“But, Iva, being a mom is the most important job there is.” Iva glanced at Myung, who gave a brain-dead grin.

“See, that’s called acting,” Myung said. “Did I tell you I’m trying out for a play next week?”

They talked about the community theater in Chevy Chase, the upcoming adaptation of Steel Magnolias. Four Southern women, but multicultural this time. Myung would be trying out for the Darryl Hannah character, a born-again Christian.

“I didn’t know you could act,” said Iva.

“I used to, in college. That’s how Vinod and I met, doing Pygmalion.”

“Vinod was in Pygmalion?”

“He did the lights. So he says. To be honest, I don’t remember meeting him at all—isn’t that terrible?”

“It’s weird,” Iva said. “Vinod is pretty memorable.”

“I know,” Myung sighed. “To be honest I barely remember anything from college, from yesterday even.”

“Yeah, the other day, I forgot my cell phone number.” “That’s nothing. I’ve forgotten my kids’ names.”

They named other outlandish things they’d forgotten: the lead singer of Queen, half the lyrics to the national anthem, how to spell “banana.” They laughed at how dumb they’d become, how functional they made themselves seem.

Just as Iva was beginning to relax, Myung tilted her head and asked, “Did you color your hair?”

Iva tucked a lock behind her ear. She’d thought her black hair would subsume all signs of French Roast. “Maybe a week ago? Before we came to Luray?”

Myung nodded. “It’s subtle.”

Iva curled her fingers around the steering wheel to hide her dye-stained fingertips.

*

In the caverns Iva forgot her own exhaustion, as awestruck as the first spelunker to worm down a hole in a Virginia hill and find himself on another planet entirely. Pleats and drapes of glistening flowstone. Ceilings bristling with stalactites, practically glowing as they narrowed to meet the stalagmites. The tour guide called the ones that merged in the middle “a marriage.”

“See that?” Iva said to Z, who was strapped to her chest. “A marriage. It takes hundreds and thousands of years to form.” Subdued by the shadows, Z was already nodding off.

Iva fell in step with the tour guide, a well-tanned young man with a pleasant drawl. He stopped the group by a chasm where, he said, a Neanderthal woman’s remains had been discovered two decades ago, her skullcap so perfectly pickled in a pool of water that a paleogeneticist was able to extract its DNA, which was then inserted into a hollowed-out human egg cell, which in turn was implanted in the womb of the paleogeneticist. That single fertilized egg split in two, resulting in the birth of the Neanderthal twins, whom the paleogeneticist raised until they were discovered and turned over to the State, which allowed them to remain in their native habitat under park supervision, while their mother was in a mental health facility somewhere in California. “So although Dr. Collier displayed some questionable medical ethics, thanks to her, we have the sisters.”

Rustlings of unrest. A man behind Iva declared that he hadn’t seen the sisters, separately or together, during the entirety of his ten-day stay. “You guys should advertise when it’s low season,” he said. “That’s why we came down here in the first place.”

“I bought a special camera for this,” said a woman.

“Actually,” said the tour guide, “photography of the sisters is prohibited. In the past it’s led to some violent confrontations.” The woman insisted that it was a telephoto lens, the kind that nature photographers use to capture wildlife from far away.

The sisters had told Iva about certain VIP tour groups that had been allowed to get uncomfortably close, so close that the older once heard a donor talking about her ass. She gave him the middle finger, earning herself a sharp rebuke from Rustic Adventures. The sisters were not to respond to tourists, forbidden from letting onto the fact that they were equal parts Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, the latter half inherited from their mother. This was not what modern man wanted to hear, said Rustic Adventures. Modern man wanted the authentic experience of stalking another species of human—familiar and yet essentially, impossibly, different.

But that was hardly a violent confrontation, Iva thought, annoyed at the tour guide for making the sisters sound so savage. Unless there was some other incident they hadn’t told her about.

*

At the cabin, in bed, Iva nursed until Z dozed off with the nipple still in her mouth. Transferring Z into the travel crib would only cause her to gasp awake—some primal fear of falling that kicked in no matter how gently Iva lowered her onto her back. Soon Iva had surrendered to her own fatigue, and the harmonic rhythm of their breathing, and fell asleep.

In the seconds before Iva opened her eyes, she could hear the steady breathing of someone standing close by.

“Weird . . .”

Iva opened her eyes: it was Luvh, kneeling by her bedside, head cocked to examine the juncture where Z’s mouth met Iva’s nipple.

“It’s not weird,” Iva said groggily, deciding to turn this awkward moment into an even more awkward teaching opportunity. She explained that the milk was coming out of her breast, and that Luvh had also drunk from his mother’s breast for a very, very long time. Luvh tried to process this information, but it was clear that milk flowing from a breast was about as logical to him as Kool-Aid pouring from a doorknob. Meanwhile Z’s gaze was awake but unfocused, on the verge of a postlude Iva called “singing into the mic.”

“Can we talk later?” Iva asked Luvh, snapping up her nursing top.

“But I have to tell you a secret,” he said. “You can’t tell anyone.”

Iva assured him his secret was safe. They went through the motions of double and triple-promising before he confessed: “We didn’t see the sisters on our hike. We lied.”

“That’s okay.” With a pat on the shoulder, Iva asked him to keep Z from rolling off the bed and went to look for a fresh nursing top. The cups on her current top were stiff as papier-mâché. “I mean lying isn’t great.” She sniffed a bra. “But your lie didn’t hurt anyone, so it’s fine.”

When Luvh didn’t reply, Iva turned. He was letting Z grasp his finger and wag it up and down, a worried look on his face.

“I did see her though,” he said quietly. “I came down to drink grape juice in the night and I saw her. She was in the kitchen, going through drawers. But then this morning I thought maybe it wasn’t her. Cause she was wearing jeans and Neanderthals don’t wear jeans. I told Mommy what I saw but then she got mad at me for making things up and also for drinking grape juice at night. She says that’s why I have cavities but I just get so thirsty . . .”

Iva released the breath she’d been holding throughout Luvh’s testimony. “It was probably just a dream, sweetheart.”

“It wasn’t!” he shouted tearfully, dropping Z’s hand. “I’m telling you, I saw her!” He ran away, slamming the coach house door behind him.

Iva turned the lock and watched through the blinds as he stormed across the lawn, his hands buried in his pockets. Once he was safely out of sight, she put Z in the travel crib and charged into the walk-in closet. The sisters were passing a stick of string cheese between them. “What were you doing in the main house?” Iva said.

The younger bowed her head. The older chewed in defiance, swallowing before taking up her notepad.

NEED $$$

“So you tried to steal it? I told you I’d give you money.”

HOW MUCH

“I don’t know . . . a hundred and fifty dollars. It’s the max I can withdraw from the ATM.”

The sisters looked disappointed.

“I already bought the hair dye, the clothes, all of that . . .” Iva watched the younger pick at the hem of her distressed mom jeans. She imagined them wandering around Houston with their bucket hats pulled low. Where would they live, what would they eat? “Okay, look, I’ll get you a hundred and fifty more when we get to the train depot. There’s probably an ATM around there. Just promise me you won’t take anything from the house. Agreed?”

The younger nodded. The older offered her sister the rest of the string cheese, but the younger shook her head, as if she’d lost her appetite. The older shrugged and shoved the rest into her mouth before lying down with her back to Iva.

*

After dinner and a movie with the family, Iva retired to the coach house with Z, carrying a bag of soup cans and ramen cups. All day she’d been hoarding non-perishable pantry foods for the sisters to take on their trip. Halfway down the paving stones,

Myung caught up to her.

“Need me to watch Z?” she asked. “Or I can help you pack.”

“I have to feed her,” Iva lied.

“You just fed her, I thought.”

“Not much,” said Iva. “I can tell she’s hungry.”

Z smiled at Myung in the least hungry-looking way possible. “Just let me keep you company for a while,” said Myung, and took the baby into her arms.

Leading the way to the coach house, Iva braced the bag against her body to keep the cans from clanking. “Here we are!” she sang out as they entered, hoping her falsetto would reach the sisters.

Myung wandered around the sitting area with Z on her hip. “I almost forgot how cute this place is. I think it used to be where the horses were kept—not by us,” she added quickly. “The original owners.”

If Iva was supposed to take offense, she’d missed the opportunity, too busy trying to shove the bag of cans into a cabinet. “Yeah, I’ve loved staying here.”

“Oh, you wanna show me your crib?” Myung said as Z lunged toward the bedroom threshold.

“What’s there to show?” Iva asked, but Myung and Z had already crossed over, and she could hear Myung naming the crib, the window, the bed, the closet.

“Yes, that’s the closet,” said Myung. “What’s up, baby? You wanna look inside?”

Iva closed her fists, sickened by the squeak of the door hinges, the flick of a light switch. She waited for Myung to scream.

Iva screamed first. “Myung! Myung!”

Myung rushed out of the bedroom with Z. “What—what is it?” “You should leave,” Iva said. Myung looked bewildered and annoyed. “I think I have a sore throat.”

“Why are you screaming if you have a sore throat?”

“I just remembered—don’t you have that audition coming up?” Myung’s face fell. “Oh shit. I mean shoot.” She returned the baby to Iva’s arms and took several steps back. “Do you think you have what Jai has?”

“Possibly. Probably.”

Iva watched Myung rewind over all the time they’d spent together, the entire car ride of shared infected air. “And you’re only telling me now?”

Iva began to apologize but Myung waved her off. “It’s okay, I should go. I’ll make us some golden milk and leave it on the stove.”

Iva thanked Myung and locked the door, then hurried to the walk-in closet, Z on her arm.

The door was open, the sisters nowhere to be found.

“Hello?” Iva called, her voice cracking. The sisters were gone. They’d left without telling her. Had she done something to upset them? Was it the money discussion?

Z gave a grown-up sigh and rubbed her ear, a tired sign. Time for a nap. Time to get back to life as Iva had known it, taking care of her child, just the two of them again.

One of the suitcases, lying on the floor, moved slightly. Iva’s heart leapt. She flipped back the lid, and there was the younger, barely able to sit up before Iva had embraced her.

*

It was midnight. The younger had gotten Z to sleep in the travel crib where she would probably stay for the next three hours, until Iva would have to feed her before the journey to Culpeper. For now the sisters were asleep in the closet. Iva should have been sleeping too. Instead she was in bed with her phone, catching up on Chocolate Mommy Luv threads, trying to make up for her silence by remarking on old comments. BlueLotus lamented the fact that she was still pureeing foods for her LO (Little One) who refused to chew his food, leading her to wonder if she should accept the gastroenterologist’s advice and subject her LO to a scope. Iva joined the twenty-one other mothers who gave this idea a thumbs-down. (Your LO will figure out how to chew eventually, wrote MamaLlamaDingDong. He won’t be drinking his food in college!) Iva treaded gently into the perennial bed-sharing debate. She offered her vocal support of paid leave for new parents and her neutral comfort to SailorMoon75, whose husband had maybe slept with the housekeeper.

Immediately Iva received some private messages: Glad you’re back! . . . We missed you! . . . Where ya been? Vague as they were, these messages lifted her up.

Sorry to be out of touch, Iva wrote back. We’re on a vacation . . . She changed “vacation” to in the mountains with in-laws.

Some of these women were deep in the sleepless trenches and in no state to hear about other people’s getaways.

Has it been fun? BlueLotus wrote back. Ready to say goodbye?

No, not ready, Iva thought. Not ready at all.

And here Iva paused, struggling to find the words, just as she struggled whenever she tried to describe her interactions on Chocolate Mommy Luv to Jai. He always nodded, slightly tuned out. This was the loneliness of having a life online. To everyone else, it was a mirage.

And now Iva had gone a level deeper into unreality. She couldn’t even explain to her Chocolate Mommy Luv friends how meaningful the last two weeks had been, how unexpected and exhilarating. How could it be coming so quickly to an end?

She closed the app and lay for a long time listening to the white noise machine. It swallowed sound the way her mind would swallow memory in the weeks to come, when the nights would unfold as they had before, unending, inevitable. Sometimes it seemed that the only memories she could claim were the ones captured by her phone.

And then she had an idea.

Switching the phone to silent, she stepped softly to the walk-in closet and opened the door, the hinges mercifully quiet.

Moonglow fell through the skylight, washing the sisters in blue. They lay on their sides, the older’s arm over the younger’s waist. Iva raised the phone, opened the camera app, and centered the sisters in the crosshairs. Three taps. She stepped back and closed the door.

As she returned to her bed, guilt gave way to a little burst of joy. She had them now. She would always have them.

Iva was still staring at the photo when she felt a tap on her shoulder and wheeled around.

There was the older sister, holding Z.

Iva stiffened. Shoving the phone in her back pocket, she gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry, was she fussing?”

The older didn’t move. Z was deep asleep against the crook of her neck, emitting a wheezy snore that Iva could almost feel caressing her own throat.

Iva reached for her baby. The older twisted away, angling herself so that Z was just beyond Iva’s grasp.

Slowly Iva’s arms fell to her sides. She understood the threat, could feel it in her womb, where sometimes a movement ghosted through her as if the baby had never left her body.

Now the older held out a hand, palm up. Her fingers made a summoning motion.

Shaking, Iva tried not to drop the phone as she placed it in the older’s hand. Once more Iva reached out her arms, she and Z falling into each other.

She watched the older swipe through photos. One picture, presumably of the sisters, made the older look up at Iva with a peculiar expression, as though Iva had turned into an object of curiosity, a stranger of uncanny likeness.

After deleting the photos, the older set the phone on the nightstand and went back to the closet, shutting the door behind her. Iva swayed from side to side. She dipped her nose into Z’s neck, the baby’s pulse flitting against her lips as she whispered words of comfort the baby didn’t need, so primal was her trust in the arms that kept her from falling. Iva herself wouldn’t sleep tonight. She would be counting the minutes until she could drive the sisters to the train station, where she would tell them to ride to the end of the line, then get off and keep going and never come back.

__________________________________

From FREEMAN’S: Conclusions. Used with permission of FREEMAN’S. Copyright © 2023 by Tania James.

Evelyn watched Robert sleep on the chaise longue, his face buried in the tufting. Suddenly squeamish about getting too close to him, she tossed the silk throw in his direction and withdrew to the hallway, where she stood with her back pressed against the staircase. What was she supposed to do? Telephone for a doctor? A minister? His hair had been cut that morning, and it was a little too short. It made his cheeks seem overly full, lending him the smug air of someone who’d recently placed a winning bet on a horse. But still, he looked normal; he didn’t look like a man who had just announced that he could speak to the spirits of the dead.

The reflection of her face stared back from the windowpane on the far side of the parlour. Her lips were almost white, a smudge of grease on the collar of her blouse. As she put a finger to the stain, the curtain fluttered, and Evelyn jumped, pressing herself even harder against the staircase. Robert had always been open-minded, the type to chat to a peddler at a tram stop, to accept a leaflet from a street-corner fakir, but this? She pictured Robert’s expression of hectic excitement, the dampness gleaming at his temples.

“And the voices give me messages,” he had said, his eyes jittering. Evelyn was waiting for a joke that hadn’t arrived. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, they aren’t really voices. More like a sort of swirl.”

“A swirl?”

“A swirl of suggestions, symbols. At first, I thought I was losing my mind!” He laughed, and Evelyn shrank back. “But it’s not so unusual after all. There’s lots of ways spirits communicate—returning lost items, butterflies, special numbers. I’ve been researching.”

“What do you mean, researching?” Evelyn’s voice was strained, the back of her neck prickling.

“Researching my gift.”

“Gift?”

“The gift of understanding the spirits.” He turned to stare at the curtains. “The spirits of those who have died.”

And now there he was, spent and snoring. For Evelyn, it felt like the disorientation after an accident. With a before and an after and no way to go back. Robert was the one who always knew how to make things right, to think practically, to be rational, reasonable. He was an accountant, for heaven’s sake! Evelyn peered across the room. The window on the far side was fixed at the latch, and yet the curtain was moving, the peacock pattern rippling, all by itself. She felt her panic growing, a zeppelin inflating in her throat. Grabbing the first coat that came to her hand in the hallway, she let herself out of the house.

It was dark outside, the streetlamps smudgy baubles of light in the misty evening. Not until she was halfway along the front path, did Evelyn realise the coat she had seized was, in fact, a summer gabardine cloak she’d intended to donate to the Salvation Army. On the other side of the road, Mrs. Wrigley’s housemaid was walking her beagle, and she nodded politely. Evelyn swallowed—what if the housemaid could already sense the peculiarity, pulsing out of her? Now aware she was hatless, Evelyn bunched up her cloak and began to run. Breathless, she arrived at Kitty’s house and pounded on the door.

Jeanie, Kitty’s maid, answered. “Mrs. Hazard, good evening,” she said, her eyes travelling over Evelyn’s attire.

Without waiting for an invitation, Evelyn pushed past her into the hallway. “Where is Kitty? Upstairs?”

“No, Mrs. Hazard.” Jeanie licked her lips. “Mr. and Mrs. Fraser are in the dining room.”

Evelyn marched along the corridor and stopped at the dining room door. From outside, she heard conversation, and through the gap in the hinge, silver candlesticks glittered. Kitty never used the Mairibank silver unless she was entertaining.

“Who else is here?” she hissed at Jeanie.

“Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler are dining here tonight,” Jeanie said. “Shall I let Mrs. Fraser know you are expecting her?”

“Yes.” Evelyn stepped from foot to foot, and dared to put her face around the door. The wallpaper was red-and-black velvet damask, which Evelyn had always found far too heavy, and in the dim light, it took Evelyn a precious two seconds to locate Kitty at the far end of the table. She was wearing her pink Callot Soeurs evening dress, the pearls around her neck shining in the glow from the polished candlesticks.

Jeanie cleared her throat, and Evelyn pulled back.

“Mrs. Hazard? The parlour is available, if you like.”

“Fine.” Evelyn hurried next door where a fire was burning in the grate, and a card table and four folding chairs had been pulled into the middle of the room, ready for a game of bridge. She paced the narrow aisle between the sofa and the table.

“Evie?” came Kitty’s voice.

Evelyn flung herself at her sister so violently she almost bowled her over. Kitty patted her on the back, and then gently levered her away. “What’s wrong? Your coat—your shoes!”

Looking down, Evelyn now saw that she was still wearing her Turkish house slippers. “It’s Robert,” she said, and began to cry. “He’s gone insane.”

Kitty’s hand flew to her pearls, and even through Evelyn’s dis-tress, the primness of the action chimed in a way she would later identify as funny. Kitty glanced over her shoulder to the doorway, where Jeanie was wearing a practised blank expression. “Fetch Dr. Greitzer,” Kitty said.

Jeanie nodded with the indecent haste of someone thrilled to find themselves perpendicular to a drama.

Kitty gestured to the sofa. “Tell me what’s happened. What do you mean, insane?”

Evelyn sniffed into a handkerchief she had recovered from the cloak pocket. “He called me into the parlour, and I thought he was going to complain about the purse I bought for your Christmas present—” Evelyn stopped. “Oh, and now the surprise is ruined.”

“Never mind that. What has he done? Has he . . .” Kitty’s face flushed. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Has he struck you?”

Evelyn bristled. Even insane, her husband wasn’t that insane. “No, it’s nothing like that.” She wiped her face with the handkerchief; now realising it wasn’t at all clean. She swallowed. “He thinks he’s hearing voices, whispers in the house.”

Evelyn could see Kitty was working hard to compose her expression. “Like Mrs. McFlitt?” she said eventually.

Mrs. McFlitt had been their neighbour back in the old days, when they lived at Mairibank, before what Papa referred to, euphemistically, as the “big move.” She had begun knocking on the delivery side door, demanding access to documents in the cellar about the soldiers who were “hounding” her.

“I don’t think so,” Evelyn said. “He doesn’t seem forgetful. He says he’s been performing, performing”—she took a deep breath—“investigations into voices of the dead.” Evelyn sobbed into the handkerchief. Somewhere outside of her body she was both amazed and appalled that she was making such a scene.

“Katherine?” Alistair, Kitty’s husband, was standing in the doorway, his napkin in hand.

Kitty shot him a look that was equal parts warning and promise, and Alistair grimaced. “Ah,” he said. “Right you are then,” and discreetly, he closed the door.

Evelyn’s throat burned. The easy domesticity of Kitty’s house—the candlelit supper, the freshly laid fire, the look of complicity between her and her husband—it was all so cosy it was nearly painful. “I shouldn’t bother you,” she said, standing up. “You’re busy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Kitty pulled her back down to the sofa. “When Dr. Greitzer gets here, we’ll have Robert all patched up in no time. He likely needs some rest, that’s all. Where is—is he—he’s not in the cellar, is he?” Kitty said, fiddling with her necklace.

“He’s napping.”

“Napping?” Kitty winced, and Evelyn felt a thrill of horror run down her spine. What was he doing napping at seven on a Sunday evening? How was everything so awful when the day had begun so regularly? It was providential revenge—she had been a fool to think normality would last.

“Let me fix you a brandy, shall I?” Kitty crossed to the cabinet in the corner and returned with a tiny, tulip-shaped glass of brandy, so delicate and pretty that the strangeness of the occasion was thrown into terrible relief. Evelyn drank it in one mouthful. Through the wall she heard the scraping of a chair in the dining room.

Evelyn wiped the handkerchief along her face. “What about the Wheelers?”

Kitty wrinkled her nose. “Alistair can bore them silly about the latest fashions in model trains,” she said, and Evelyn gratefully received the mild rebuke, since it was the closest Kitty could come to admitting her own husband’s eccentricities.

Kitty’s expression became serious. “Now tell me, what exactly has he been saying about these voices?”

Cautiously, Evelyn probed the conversation she’d had with Robert. She didn’t want to collect too much information from that hour, so she scraped shallowly across her recall. “He thinks he’s acquired a new talent—a knack of receiving messages. From—” Evelyn paused to listen for Jeanie’s footsteps. “From people who have died.”

Kitty was making a valiant effort at keeping her face still, but nevertheless, her lip twitched. After a moment, she let out a breath. “Well,” she said. “Well. That’s probably nothing to worry about.”

“Really?” Evelyn blinked at her, and the rosy vision of her sister flitted through a prism of tears.

“Yes,” Kitty said doubtfully. “He’s grieving, that’s all.”

“But no one has died,” Evelyn said. Then they exchanged a horrible look, because, of course, everyone had died.

“I mean—nobody has died recently,” Evelyn said.

Kitty looked down at her knees. “Dolores?” she said, quietly. A cold pebble lodged in Evelyn’s windpipe. The room tilted. “Evie!” Kitty was holding her wrist. “Shall I get the salts?” Evelyn shook her head, but the room was listing. The mention of Dolores was almost too much. It was tapping the fracture in a pane of glass. She collected all of her senses into not shattering.

“Let me get you more brandy.”

Evelyn fixed her vision on a loose thread in the carpet. “No, I’m fine.”

“I’m sure it’s not anything to do with Dolores,” Kitty was saying.

“That could hardly be called recent. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“It’s fine,” Evelyn said with some effort. She met Kitty’s eyes. “It can’t be to do with Dolly, can it?” The panic began building again, a more byzantine kind now, an ornate, intricate terror with interlocking elements. “It’s not possible, is it? He’s not, somehow—”

“No,” Kitty said, steadily. “Absolutely not.” She gave Evelyn a long, hard look.

Evelyn came back to herself. “No, of course not.” Kitty was watching her with alarm, and she felt a flush of mortification. She dug her fingers into her palms. Older sisters weren’t supposed to collapse. Some kind of example she was setting. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” Kitty patted Evelyn’s hand. “Now, remember that first month in Edinburgh, when Mama kept losing things?”

Evelyn settled on a memory of her mother plugging a pipe under the scullery sink with a woollen stocking. Papa was back at Mairibank, overseeing the sale of the estate, and the weekend girl had gone home. As the stocking grew swollen with water and transferred the leak in a new direction, Mama had sat on the floor and cried. It wasn’t quite forgetfulness, but it was close enough. “Yes,” she said.

Kitty frowned, unconvinced. “Remember, she put her shoes on the wrong foot, and only noticed on the way back from the park?”

Still, Evelyn had no memory of these events, and her ability to summon up other moments of humiliation was compromised. “Well, after Dr. Halligan prescribed her that vitamin tonic, she was right as rain again.”

Now Evelyn remembered the vitamin drops. The bottle was crafted from thick brown glass, and was deceptively heavy. The tonic had to be dispensed through a special pipette. The fragile instrument, the spidery float of the bubbles of tincture dissolving in a glass of water—the ritual of administering the drops had transfixed her. She held on to the image of the heavy brown bottle. “Do you mean it could be a vitamin deficiency?”

A line of concentration appeared on Kitty’s brow. “Certainly. After all, scurvy is a vitamin deficiency.”

Evelyn nodded seriously.

There was a knock on the door. Jeanie put her head around. “Dr. Greitzer is arrived,” she said, opening the door wider so he could enter. Dr. Greitzer was dressed in a black woollen overcoat, drizzle pearling on his hat. Evelyn stood to shake his hand, and the reassuring sturdiness of his grip, plus the memory of the brown glass bottle of tincture, brought her back to her senses. She became painfully aware she was wearing a stained gabardine cloak and Turkish house slippers.

“Mrs. Fraser, Mrs. Hazard.” Dr. Greitzer stood next to the card table. “How can I be of assistance?”

As he unbuttoned his coat, Evelyn saw he was wearing a dinner jacket, and a fresh wave of shame rolled over her. He had been at supper when she’d rung for him.

“Please.” She put out her hand to stop him from removing his overcoat. “We’ll have to go to my house, it’s my husband.”

“Bobby?”

“Yes,” Evelyn said, although he hated being called Bobby. “That’s right.” She glanced at Kitty. “He has some kind of vitamin deficiency, I believe.”

Dr. Greitzer looked almost disappointed. “Very well. After you.” He motioned towards the door. Evelyn fastened her cloak and glanced behind her, where Kitty was following. “Please, I’ll be fine now. You should go back to your guests.”

“Absolutely not. Let me get my coat.”

Evelyn kissed her on the cheek. “Really, don’t worry.” She felt much calmer now. How embarrassing that she had made such a fuss! Thank goodness the Wheelers hadn’t witnessed any of it. And Kitty, she had done so well, keeping her head, telephoning the doctor, the brandy. Evelyn felt a surge of pride for both of them; for Kitty for being so level-headed, and for herself as Kitty’s tutor.

Kitty studied Evelyn’s face. “I’ll call over first thing tomorrow.” Evelyn smiled. “Apologise to Alistair for me.”

She followed Dr. Greitzer into the corridor, and Jeanie let them out, wearing a sulky, almost thwarted expression. It had begun raining, and Evelyn’s gabardine was soon spotted with water. Dr. Greitzer offered her his umbrella, and gratefully she took his arm. In silence, they walked along Inverleith Row towards her house. And as she watched puddle water soak into her slippers, Evelyn thought of Dolores, of Granny and Grandpapa, of their neighbour’s son Stevie, of Dugald Grear, of Alistair’s brother, Sydney, of rows of boys in army greatcoats, queuing up in heaven to speak to Robert, like the line for the telephone at the post office.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Hazardous Spirits by Anbara Salam. Reprinted with permission from Tin House. Copyright (c) 2023 by Anbara Salam.

Celine found Marta beside the ice-cream bar. She showed her a glimpse of the latest pamphlet, which she then concealed very fast in a hidden pocket.

– Oh: yeah, said Marta.

They went to hide behind an imported tropical plant, for private conversation.

Celine loved Marta because she was small and intense, her fingernails were often black with mud and paint and other dirt, she had a filthy sense of humour, she had features that were elongated and outsize but also magically alluring, and she smoked even more than Celine did.

This new pamphlet, said Marta, described a list of pornographic affairs between Celine and various celebrity women, government ministers and assorted minor characters. There was also a lot of politics, she continued, like bribery and extortion and a conspiracy against the government. And it ended with an agreement between Celine and several Jewish billionaires to negotiate with foreign powers and take control in America, which they then celebrated, added Marta, in a variety of truly barbaric sexual positions.

Celine thought she might be sick – not so much at any single detail of this picture but because there were so many more images of her in other people’s minds than she could bear.

—Don’t carry on, she

—I mean, that’s kind of everything, said

An empty moon was orbiting at a vast distance from their planet, the same way the conversations continued orbiting.

—I grew up among women, a man interrupted, speaking very close to

His breath smelled sourly of chocolate.

—I am hyperalert to conversations between women, he added.

—But you’ve never heard that kind of conversation, she said. – By

—But I can try, he said.

Everyone loved pleasure. And perhaps the gruesome man talking to her was sincerely attentive in his feelings towards women, but Celine doubted it. Increasingly, to Celine and her friends, pleasure seemed complicated.

Celine escaped into a side room, which had a few vases arranged on the floor for women to piss in. She began to piss too. It was a difficult operation and some splashed on the rim, staining the edge of her dress.

Someone she loved once said to her: It looks like a party, it feels like a party, it smells like a party. But don’t get it twisted. This isn’t a party. This is power, baby.

Celine started to cry, then stopped herself. Then she went back into the room.

*

The following night, Celine was in her apartment with Marta and Julia. The general climate outside was an intense heat. Celine was in an old vest and leggings. Julia, who tended to wear the costume of the ultra-feminine, was on a sofa, while Marta gave her a new hairstyle with many ties and pins. They were practising their usual hobby – which was trying to understand the world. They sometimes did this with Tarot cards, sometimes with conversation. And Celine was half observing Julia and wondering at her look, the elongated length of her body and her hair and her pale attractive skin, how she disguised herself for men in these floaty dresses when really she should have been standing there with a riding crop or chain.

Then Sasha interrupted, and it was as if all the pleasure disappeared immediately – the way a room disintegrates at the end of a disco party when someone turns the strip lights on and all the plants are crushed.

—The fuck is this? said Sasha.

He had a pamphlet in his hand, and they were all so badly printed and so smudged that it was impossible to see if this was a new one or an old one.

—Is that the most recent one? said Marta.

—Can I speak with my wife? said – This is family.

—What’s that? said Celine, ignoring him.

—It’s new, he said.

—How new? said Celine.

Then Sasha grabbed her by the throat and smudged the pamphlet up beside her face, as if this might help her to read it. It was very rare for so much violence to be so present in a room, it made everything claustrophobic, like they were all crushed up against a wall. He began to recite, or paraphrase – it was impossible to tell. She tried to speak but he was holding her too tightly round the throat and she felt frightened partly because of what Sasha was doing but also because of the violence of the words being quoted at her. She had become used to never hearing the words in which she was described and the effect now was very ugly.

When Sasha finished there was a bright red ragged line around her throat. She tried to pick up an old cigarette from the plate where it was slowly unravelling to ash but her hands were shaking too much. So Marta took this stub and relit it and placed it in Celine’s mouth. There was so much tenderness in this little gesture that it made Celine briefly courageous.

—Wait, do you mean that you believe this? said Celine.

In reply, Sasha punched her in the face above her cheek. The shock of it was almost as major as the pain inside her eye and her soft skull. She felt unbalanced and understood very vaguely that her legs were failing to support her until she suddenly found herself collapsed on the floor. Very slowly she got back up, holding on to the leg of a sofa, then the silk of its cushion. There was an old Tarot card, lost underneath a chair. Her ear was very sore, she touched it, and there was a light smear of blood on her fingertip.

Sasha was breathing very fast. He said that it was humiliating, or he was humiliated, or she was humiliating: she couldn’t hear perfectly and didn’t want to ask him to repeat the sentence. For some moments he stood there, breathing. Then he left the room.

Slowly Celine walked over to a mirror. She was also bleeding from the corner of one eye, and from the retrospect of a long-distant future it would seem to Celine that this moment when her reflection stared blankly back at her was the moment when she discovered the basic law of her cartoon world – that anyone suspended above a void will remain suspended until made aware of her situation, at which point she will fall.

There was a purple mark on her cheek. It was shapeless the way a spider or spit is shapeless.

—Hey, look, said Julia. – Your psychotic husband dropped something.

Then she picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Celine.

*

Celine had always asked herself why she didn’t do more. It seemed that everyone assumed there was nothing to be done. But around her many men thought that they could make plans, many men everywhere were plotting and conspiring and making moves, and Celine felt that she should be able to make moves too. She just needed to make calculations.

In the morning Celine received multiple messages from Marta – telling her that she was not unhungover, that she wanted to kill someone, and that she was coming over immediately to discuss their major operation.

Marta had grown up in the outer provinces on an estate in a kind of swamp land. Her father was very rich but dead, her mother was therefore very rich but drunk or depressed or both, and as a child Marta shot rabbits and deer and listened to thunderstorms. Then she was adopted by her aunt, who lived in a larger house in the countryside and taught her the rules of behaviour. When they met, Celine had immediately loved her. She wasn’t someone, thought Celine, who would ever swoon. Marta was exacting and pitiless and for these qualities alone Celine would have adored her, even without her garish and brutal beauty. Also Marta was extreme in her care for her friends. In a society made of words and images circulating and recirculating, all devoted to disinformation, it was very difficult to find any personal safety, and one minuscule form might just be this intense form of friendship between two women.

—I am going to die, Celine said. – Why doesn’t he love me? What am I meant to do?

—You won’t die, said Marta.

—What does your husband say? said Celine. – Has he said anything? Did he speak with Sasha?

—You want to talk about my husband ? said Marta.

—I like the dress, said Celine.

Marta was wearing a very bright outfit, with outsize rainbow sleeves. She looked very young, thought Celine, even though she was older than her. This was possibly their problem – that they were all so very young, or seemed so. To be that young made people think you could be attacked forever. There was so much hatred! It was all there, waiting for them, expressed in strings of words, and maybe this hatred was the reason why they could not see the sunlit cosmos they were expecting, but only corridors and dead ends.

Marta smiled, took off some layers, and ensconced herself in bed beside her friend. There was a stale gateau by the bed which she ate.

—What do I do about these people? said Celine. – I need to do more.

—You can’t worry about what misinterpreters think, said Marta.

—But don’t you care, said Celine, – when people talk about you? I can’t bear It feels like death, it feels like a transformation. And then for it to be my husband who is angry –

All language was disgusting, said Marta. But people seemed to adore it. It was like how everyone loved reading these novels in letters. As if everything existed in order to end up in words! Whereas most feelings, or at least the most interesting, she said, avoided language entirely. Then Marta leaned over to pour from a bottle into a dirty cup.

Meanwhile the planet continued to be whirled around a zooming sun.

—I want revenge, said Celine.

—You need a handle on them, said Marta. – If you want to scare these men you need something that they want.

—But I don’t have anything, said Celine. – My husband hates me. And if I have no husband then I have nothing.

—I’m not like trivialising your pain, said Marta, – but no: I refuse that.

They had the window open. The sound of the courtyards below came up to them: distant parakeets, muffled horses. She had to admit that it was always delicious to lie around in the daylight when the world was working, however depressed you might feel.

—Like: what was in that message? said Marta. – The one he dropped.

—Oh the message, said Celine. – Yeah, the message was from his boss, the chief minister, talking shit about Marie Can you imagine? Also it’s written in code. But you know what shows how dopey they are? It had the cipher with it.

—Well, said Marta, – so then we have something?

—Why? said Celine. – What can I do with a letter?

—It’s talking shit about Antoinette, said Marta. – No one talks shit about the first lady. Give it to Ulises.

—Ulises? The little diplomat?

—Sure, the little Portuguese, said Marta. – The one with that funny jutting penis. Sorry, no, the Spanish one.

For a short moment, neither of them spoke.

—Yeah, said Celine. – But we still need more than that. I need to take control.

It was so unnerving to lose a world, thought Celine, or even realise that a world could be lost. All the bricks and children and treetops, everything she could see from her window, now seemed remote and distant. In that kind of situation all she had for her survival was whatever was closest to hand. And the persistent pleasure of her life was this back and forth of conversation between friends, perhaps because a conversation was the last remaining place for words to be tender things. She liked the way a conversation could produce unforeseen creatures – concepts she was not sure she believed, or was unaware that she believed – and then suddenly it occurred to her that this beauty of conversation could be improvised for a different purpose.

—What are we best at? said Celine.

Marta raised an amused eyebrow.

—Talking, Celine corrected her.

She couldn’t leave her husband, because without any money of her own she would be dependent on the hospitality of others. It was true that at any point it was possible to seduce another man and so acquire some influence over him but that seemed a limited and precarious power – to be once again dependent on the whim of a man. Everything therefore, as it always has been for those with no money of their own, and no obvious means of making any, was very confined and limited. But the power that had destroyed her, she was suddenly thinking, might also be the power that could help her too. She had this vision of a group of writers and artists around her who would repay her for entertainment and snacks with their own arguments and fictions – a field of influence, cloudlike and enveloping.

—We need writers, said Celine.

—We don’t seem to have the writers, said Marta.

—I mean we need other writers, said Celine. – We throw parties.

But, worried Celine, it wasn’t obvious how she could just throw a party that writers would think was cool. It was always very intricate, the question of cool, and it seemed to interest writers most of all.

—Writers ? said – Are you serious right now? Have you never met a writer? We give them alcohol and chicas. We give them glamour.

Celine looked at Marta. In the sunlight from the window her old acne scars were more visible. She was very attractive. It was suddenly possible, thought Celine, to feel hopeful.

In the history of the world, said Marta, the most corruptible, the most lethal and most innocent, had always been the writers.

*

There was literature everywhere. The world was a jungle called writing. In this world writers became politicians and politicians wrote for newspapers and meanwhile everyone wrote to each other every day, as if an experience were not an experience until it had acquired its own image in words. Words were being printed on newspaper sheets, scribbled on notebook scraps and letters, hoarded in archives, pasted up on walls or bound together in little booklets for distribution in the arcades. The paper they had to use was rough, was heavy and stained and it ripped very easily, but the words themselves, it seemed, were becoming lighter and lighter, quick sketched symbols for catching the universe in a delicate, ineffable net. And the more ineffable a net is the more impossible it is to escape it.

The way this looked in the ordinary world was that everyone was putting on shows, or starting magazines, or developing crazes for particular kinds of writing. Then they went to bars to talk about these shows and magazines, arguing over masthead layouts and font design and the backwardness of current writing. It was the new era of publication, everyone was gradually realising, with amazement, as they walked around in the alleys and woodlands and concert halls – the way you might enter a fashion show and discover slowly and with amazement that the entire decor, even the chair you sit on, is made from flowers. And perhaps from now on there will be no other era – until the solar flares and asteroids at last demolish everything. Stories multiplied very fast, the way germs or spores will emanate from any decaying thing, while outside roamed the calamitous dogs. People wanted to compose their own crônicas, or comment on the writings of other people, only interrupting this writing for more reading, which led to even more writing. It was as if writing was a narcotic or at least an obsession, and no one really thought about the effects of producing so many words – not on those whom the words described, or on those who produced the words, or on a world in which so many words existed.

A world in which writing is everywhere is really a world of reading. Everyone was writing – but this meant that everyone was reading, and then experiencing a deep illness of reading. And among these words and articles were the libels about Celine and her friends, as well as many other women who found themselves described maliciously as famous. Defaming and libelling and stalking and attacking had never been so easy: it was the golden age of psychosis. This writing was all anonymous and the anonymity seemed to confer impunity, like how everyone savaged the house party Celine had been thrown for her seventeenth birthday. It made these writers feel invincible and invisible, and perhaps the two states were the same.

Celine understood all this while still thinking it was disgusting. She had a fear that meaning was shifting, maybe not just shifting but disappearing, and it was happening because there were now no true sources of information. So much information was being put out there in real time, local and non-local information, and all of it was warped. Every sentence extended objects or people beyond their natural habitat, creating images and rumours – the way a shadow might be peeled away from a person and converted into a silhouette.

And yet no one else, by which of course she meant no men, appeared to share her anger, or to appreciate the violence betrayed by this mania for writing. I mean sure, they said, if she tried to mention it, but did you see what they wrote about Antoinette? It was as if she had been chosen to understand things before other people understood them, precisely by being transformed into deadbeat pornography. To be exposed in this way was to exist in a total abject state – with nothing to protect her from being made up by people less imaginative or intelligent than she was. But this gave her a knowledge that no one else possessed. People seemed to believe that they had the power to  determine  their own image. They didn’t realise, thought Celine, that they were determined by other people and the words of other people.

All the forests and squid and greyhounds had been engulfed by the literary world, the way a serpent will envelop an elephant. This world, of course, exists wherever representations of people are made, and its essence is compromise, terror, vanity, fashion and death – because in the business of representations all value is subjective, and therefore impermanent, and therefore only ever installed by force. But still, the proportions between this world and the other gigantic world are very mobile and delinquent. At any moment, it turned out, the old world could disappear entirely and become little digital strings of symbols, vanishing into the white air.

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Excerpted from The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Adam Thirlwell. All rights reserved.

THE INTERVIEWER WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT FASHION

 “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked

 Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.

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Excerpted from Watership Down: The Graphic Novel by Richard Adams; adapted by James Sturm and illustrated by Joe Sutphin. Available from Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Robert and I had uprooted ourselves from Penang at the end of 1922, sailing on a P&O liner to Cape Town. We stayed a pleasant fortnight in a hotel by the sea before taking the train to Beaufort West, a little town three hundred or so miles to the northeast. Bernard, Robert’s cousin, was a sheep farmer, and he had built us a modest bungalow on his land. The bungalow, whitewashed and capped with a corrugated tin roof painted a dark green, stood on a high broad ridge. From the deep and shady verandah – I would never get used to the locals calling it a ‘stoep’, I told myself – we had an unbroken vista of the mountains to the north. These mountains had been formed by the dying ripples of the earth’s upheavals an eternity ago, upheavals that had begun far to the south at the very tip of the continent.

It was high summer when we arrived, the sun smiting the earth. Everything was so bleak – the parchment landscape, the faces of the people, even the light itself. How I ached for the monsoon skies of the equator, for the ever-changing tints of its chameleon sea.

A week after we had settled into our new home we were invited to the farmhouse for dinner. The sun was just burrowing into the mountains when we walked the half-mile there from our bungalow. We had to stop a few times along the way for Robert to catch his breath. Bernard Presgrave was thirty-eight, twelve years Robert’s junior. Robust and ruddy-faced, he reminded me of Robert when I first married him. His farm was called Doornfontein, the Fountain of Thorns, the kind of inauspicious name that would have set my old amah Ah Peng muttering darkly, ‘Asking for trouble only.’ But Bernard and his wife Helena, a placid and dull girl from the Cape, appeared to be prospering.

The other guests – farmers and their wives from around the area – were already gathered in the straggly garden behind the farmhouse when we arrived. We joined them in a circle beneath a camelthorn tree, its bare branches spiked with thin white thorns as long as my little finger. The laughter and shrieks of the children playing at the bottom of the garden rang across the evening air. A pair of oil drums, cut open in half, rested on trestles, wood fire lapping away at their insides. Lamb chops and coils of sausages were smoking away on the grill. The farmers were Boers, blunt-faced and blunt-spoken, but affable once we got to know them. The meat of the gossip that evening – and chewed over and over into gristle throughout the district that summer, I would discover – concerned a wealthy middleaged Englishman and his beautiful young wife who had moved to Beaufort West from London the previous summer.

‘His doctor advised him that the air here would be good for her,’ said Bernard, keeping one eye on the lamb chops on the grill. ‘Graham – the husband – bought a piece of land on Jannie van der Walt’s farm and built their new home on it, a great big house. We’ll take you out there one of these days to take a gander at it.’ Bernard went to the oil drums and flipped the lamb chops over; fat dripped onto the fire, sending clouds of maddened smoke hissing into the air. ‘The wife’s health improved,’ he resumed when he sat down again, ‘but one morning, about three weeks ago, she walked out on him. Left him when he was still snoring away in his bed.’

‘She took all her jewels,’ Helena picked up the tale, ‘but she didn’t leave a letter for Graham, the poor man, not even a note.’

Bernard chuckled. ‘Knowing Graham, that deplorable lack of manners probably enraged him more than anything else.’

‘Ai, that’s not funny, Bernard,’ his wife said. ‘Coincidentally, our GP in the dorp disappeared that same morning,’ Bernard continued. ‘Left his wife behind. Neither hair nor hide of him has ever been seen again.’

I glanced over to Robert sitting opposite me; our eyes met. ‘Just the sort of tale Willie would have relished,’ he said.

‘Willie?’ asked Bernard.

‘Somerset Maugham,’ said Robert.

‘Who’s he?’ one of the guests asked.

‘A writer,’ Robert said. ‘A very famous one. An old friend, actually. He stayed with us in Penang. He’s promised to visit us here. We’ll introduce you to him when he comes.’

‘I liked some of his stories,’ said Helena. ‘But “Rain”’ – she made a face – ‘I’ll never forget that one.’

‘Is dit ’n lekker spook storie?’ one of the men asked, rubbing his hands together with relish.

‘No,’ replied Helena. ‘It’s about a . . . a woman.’ Her face flushed; she smoothed the folds of her skirt around her knees. ‘Oh, I’ll lend you the book, Gert – you can read it yourself.’

‘Ag, who has time to read?’ Bernard grinned at me. ‘Did he put you two in his stories?’

Twilight was dissolving the mountains. I pulled my shawl closer around my shoulders. ‘He probably found us,’ I said, giving just the briefest of glances at Robert, ‘to be the most boring married couple he’d ever met.’

Life here for us was not much different from our old one in Penang. Robert and I had our own bedrooms, and every morning we would meet for breakfast on the verandah. Afterwards he would adjourn to his study to work on his memoirs – he had begun writing them shortly after we moved here. There was not much to keep me busy around the house. Liesbet, the wife of one of the Coloured farm workers, cooked and cleaned for us. She was a few years older than me, a fat woman with broad flanks and a round smiling face which reminded me of the Malays in Penang. To fill my days I decided to create a garden in front of the house. The soil was as dry as the powder in my compact, but with the help of Liesbet’s son Pietman, I persevered with it.

In the evenings Robert and I would relax on the verandah with our whisky stengahs and gin pahits and watch another day slip away behind the mountains. And later, before we retired to our bedrooms, I would play my piano for a while. Robert would sit in his armchair, sipping his favourite pu’er tea, his eyes closed as he drifted away to the music.

On the large map pinned up in his study the lower shores of the Great Karoo lie about a hundred and fifty miles to the north of Doornfontein. But there were days when I felt it was much closer, and I was convinced I could sense its timeless silence reaching out from the deepest heart of the desert – its stillness, its infinite emptiness. It called to my mind a story I had once heard: a pair of explorers, husband and wife, had got lost during an expedition across the Gobi Desert. To hide their growing despair and feelings of hopelessness as they wandered deeper and deeper into the desert, they stopped talking to each other. I often wondered which of the two was more oppressive: the silence of the desert, or the silence between the husband and his wife.

*

The sound of the screen door opening and banging against the wall pulls me back to the present. I lift my eyes from the page and close the book. Liesbet steps out onto the stoep, her white starched apron taut over the prow of her stomach. She only comes in once a week these days, and without fail she’ll moan about her painful knees as she cleans the house.

‘Another book?’ she says, stacking my plate and teacup onto her tray. ‘Everywhere in the house, books, books, books.’

‘Yes . . . another book . . .’

She puts down her tray and peers more closely at me. Offering a watery smile to her, I take the book with me into the house. In the sitting room I walk past my watercolour paintings of old Penang shophouses to the wall of photographs above the Blüthner piano. I lean back and study the photographs, searching for a particular one I have in mind. I have not looked – really looked – at them in years.

Many of the photographs are of Robert and me with our two sons. A few of them show people who had visited us in Penang: stage actors, MPs, members of the aristocracy, writers, opera singers. I can’t even recall their names now; and anyway, they are probably all long dead. Claiming pride of place on this wall of imprisoned time is my wedding portrait. Robert and I are standing on the steps of St George’s church in Penang. I straighten the slight tilt of the silver frame, wiping the thin layer of dust from it with my forefinger.

People around here had expected me to pack up and return to Penang after I buried Robert. There were days when I asked myself why I didn’t do it. But – sail home . . . to what? And to whom? Everyone I had known in Malaya was either dead or had disappeared into distant lands and different lives. And then war had broken out all over the world and the Japanese had invaded Malaya. So I had remained here, a daub of paint worked by time’s paintbrush into this vast, eternal landscape.

Below my wedding portrait hangs a photograph of two women, their blouses and frocks and hats quaintly old-fashioned, from another age: Ethel and me, each with a rifle in our hands, the mock-Tudor façade of the Spotted Dog in Kuala Lumpur looming behind us. The photograph had been taken after a shooting competition on the padang. Poor, poor Ethel. My eyes glide to the photograph next to it. I unhook it and study it in the light of the windows. Looking at the four of us – Willie Maugham and Gerald and Robert and myself – lounging in our rattan chairs under the casuarina tree in the garden, my mind loops back to the two weeks in 1921 when the writer and his secretary had stayed with us at Cassowary House.

I put down the photograph. The morning is decanting its light down the slopes of the far mountains. It is the autumn equinox today; here, in the southern bowl of the earth, the portions of day and night are exactly equal. The world is at an equilibrium, but I myself feel unsteady, off-balance.

There is not the slightest stir of wind, and there is no sound, not even the usual petulant bleating of sheep from the valley. The world is so still, so quiescent, that I wonder if it has stopped turning. But then, high above the land, I see a tremor in the air. A pair of raptors, far from their mountain eyrie. For a minute or two I want to believe they are brahminy kites, but of course they cannot be.

My eyes follow the two birds as they drift on the span of their out-stretched wings, writing circles over circles on the empty page of sky.

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From The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, on sale October 17th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Tan Twan Eng, 2023. All rights reserved.