2020 PRIME NUMBER MAGAZINE AWARD
FOR SHORT FICTION

Judge for Short Fiction: Wendy J. Fox

Wendy J. Fox won the first Press 53 Award for Short Fiction in 2014 for her collection The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories. Her debut novel The Pull of It, was named a top pick by Displaced Nation; her most recent novel, If the Ice Had Held is a Buzzfeed recommended read and a grand prize winner from Santa Fe Writers Project. Wendy holds an MFA from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers and has contributed to numerous literary journals including Washington Square, The Missouri Review (online), The Madison Review, PMS poemmemoirstory, The Tusculum Review and ZYZZVA. Her non-fiction was included in Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, a #1 English-language bestseller which was recommended by National Geographic Traveler and featured on The Today Show.

FIRST PRIZE IN SHORT FICTION

“Mercury Is in Mayonnaise” by Suzanne Samples of Harrisville, West Virginia (Pushcart Prize nominee)

RUNNERS-UP

“Troubled Boats” by Margaret Adams of Fort Defiance, Arizona (Pushcart Prize nominee)
“Meet the Standards” by Matthew Pitt of Fort Worth, Texas

AND CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FINALISTS

“My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: A Cuban Sandwich” by Leslie Blanco of South Pasadena, California
“Rats” by Courtney Harler of Las Vegas, Nevada
“Lucky Boy” by Suzanne LaFetra of Berkeley, California
“A Year in the North” by Rashi Rohatgi of Nordland, Norway
“It Ends Tonight” by Patrick Willwerth of Vergennes, Vermont

Runners-up and Finalists selected by editorial staff of Press 53 & Prime Number Magazine

Mercury Is in Mayonnaise

K. breaks up with me through a Google Doc titled “Five Reasons Why I Can’t Be with You.”

Okay, I think. K.’s a Millennial and gets her news from Buzzfeed articles. At thirty-seven, I’m a bit older. Maybe this is just what young adults do these days?

Break up with one another through listicles and advanced technology.

1.     I washed your comforter and was afraid it would not be dry by the time you got home. This terrified me.

I add my comments to the side of the document. The comments appear next to my icon, which is a fluffy miniature donkey.

A collaborative breakup, a breakup for the twenty-first century.

I never asked you to wash the comforter, and I thanked you profusely when I realized you had done it.

2.     For as much as I do around your house, I feel like I should get a free pass to be there whenever I want and do whatever I want.

I never ask you to do anything. You do not pay rent. Next.

3.     You use your brain cancer as an excuse to be cruel to me.

I log myself and my miniature donkey out of Google. We need a break.

~

When three days later I try to reopen “Five Reasons Why I Can’t Be with You,” I cannot connect to the internet. I have heard warnings lately. Something about the planets being out of alignment.

I barely paid attention to these admonitions.

After a cancerous brain tumor rendered my right side useless, my life no longer revolved around the sun; my life now revolved around making sure that I didn’t fall, that I could concentrate on grading student papers, and that I could make it through the day without shutting my eyes.

Although I relearned how to walk, I now drag around the right side of my body like a dying comet tail.

I was supposed to be dead by now.

I was supposed to be extinct.

Yet somehow, I survived brain surgery. Like a toddler, I taught myself to put one foot in front of the other. I blazed through chemotherapy, radiation, and going back to work. My doctors are amazed, astounded. The type of tumor I had formed its own blood supply, its own necrotic tissue, its own tails.

Yes, tails.

Those little tails jutted from the tumor and swarmed through my healthy brain tissue like shooting stars; although the surgeon thoroughly extracted the planet growing in my head, those little stars took on their own life and are still making pathways in my gray sky.

They will eventually grow into a new tumor, my oncologist told me. But you’re lucky they haven’t yet.

Yes. I am very lucky.

After twenty minutes of trying to connect to the internet, I notice that my router is unplugged.

K. has been here.

She still has a key.

Goddammit.

She knew I would have a hard time kneeling to plug the router back in. She knew she was going to make things more difficult for me than they already are. She knew I could lose my balance, fall, and not be able to get back up.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

You have no clue what it is like to have terminal brain cancer, my donkey brays on the finally connected document. I’m doing the best I can. I may be irritable, but I cannot think of a single instance when I have been cruel.

4.     You won’t let me sleep in your bed with you.

Brain cancer patients need a lot of sleep, I write. And you know you snore. Very. Loudly.

This technologically savvy breakup has really drawn things out, I tell myself. This would be so much easier in person, at a Panera Bread, at a Starbucks, at wherever. Who has access to the Google Doc, I wonder? Who else can see what has happened? Who else is reading my prolific donkey’s words?

~

My sister obviously cannot see “Five Reasons Why I Can’t Be with You.” She texts me and K. in a group message:

OMG mercury is in mayonnaise!

My sister is always drunk.

I mean, RETROGRADE.

Mercury is in retroblade, K. responds.

She is also always drunk.

Mercury is in my head, I want to say, but the black hole where my tumor once orbited tells me to stay quiet.

~

The knocking on my window begins at 2:34 a.m.

I freeze. The last time this happened was during a chemo cycle. I was very weak. A stranger came on foot and banged until he realized I had a dog.

I just got a new neighbor, I think. Maybe she locked herself out and needs help getting back in.

It’s me, K. slurs.

I let her in and take her keys. I hide them in a dying plant. She can sleep on the futon.

I just—K. falls onto the floor—love you so much. I can’tlivewithout.

Okay, first of all, I say, get your ass onto the futon. I cannot let you sleep on the floor. My safety is in danger—what if I forget you are here, and I trip over you? My balance is terrible. You know I fall all the time. You know I can’t easily get back up.

Fine fine fine.

K. weighs 225 pounds, and I weigh a solid 150. This didn’t matter until now, until she showed up drunk at my apartment (is this what she meant by free pass?), until she passed out on my floor, until I needed her to get on the futon.

Surprisingly, she complies.

We can talk tomorrow, I say. She is sobbing snot bubbles onto my futon. I do not care. I feel terrible that she’s so sad, but I can do nothing to stop it.

I get back into bed; I have to work tomorrow. Returning to work full-time has been a struggle since my diagnosis and month spent in the hospital, but I have persevered. I have made it. I have given myself the grand appearance of normalcy.

Except for the woman on the futon who is now belligerently screaming at me.

Youaresuch a fuckingjerk! Fucking asshole! Asswipe! I want to wipe my ass with you!

I imagine my new neighbor silently re-packing her belongings and heading out. I roll from my bed and steady myself on the floor.

I call a mutual friend.

K. is plastered and screaming at me, I say. Please help me.

Except that I don’t need to tell her that K. is screaming at me; she can hear her.

Uh, I’m really asleep, our mutual friend says. And I don’t have my car. I’ll come to get her in the morning.

Come on, K., I demand after I finish the phone conversation. Get up off the futon. I’m taking you home.

Gib me my fuckingkeys.

No. Get up and get into my car, I say.

I rescue her keys from the dying houseplant.

Gib me my phone. I know you have it.

Goddamn Millennials.

I do not have her phone.

She does not want to leave my apartment, so I leave. I shut the door and walk toward the cars. She follows a second later.

I knew this would work.

I’m going to get your phone out of the car and then take you home, I say.

Except that I turn on her car alarm.

Jus fucking gib it to me you fuck.

I don’t want her to take the keys because I know she will run. I allow her to push a single button on her keyring so she can get her phone out of the front seat; then I direct her back to my car.

But instead she stands facing me, her arms spread wide like an unwise owl in the night sky. Whaddya gonna do now? she asks. Whaddya gonna do? I’m bigger than you. Stronger. I could beat the shit out of you, especially since you’ve gotten brain cancer and can barely walk anymore.

She laughs, and her wide wingspan laughs at me with her.

I break.

I break I break I break.

Get in my fucking car right now, or I’m calling the police, I say. You have stalked me. You have physically intimidated me.

These words mean something to her.

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, she says as she gets in the passenger seat.

I am listening to a murder podcast in my car. I always listen to murder podcasts; they remind me that my life could actually be worse. In some ways, the murder podcasts are the only solace I have. I have brain cancer, but Diane was strangled by the hands of her husband’s girlfriend! I have brain cancer, but Billy’s wife Elizabeth hired two hit men from church to knock him off! I have brain cancer, but Ashley was just a high school cheerleader who accidentally got pregnant and was then killed by her jealous stepfather!

Schadenfreude.

K. turns off my podcast, but I immediately turn it back on.

My car, my rules, I say. I do not realize at first that I am quoting Meredith from The Office. I—the sober one—am quoting Meredith, who is the promiscuous alcoholic on the show.

Meredith is way more fun than the drunk I have in my car.

My murder podcast pisses K. off. As we drive, K. has her hand on the door as if she is going somewhere, as if she is going to jump out and walk the nine miles back to her house. She does not know that I have locked the car, and she cannot unlock her door from her side. I know she wants to jump out, maybe try to kill herself. I’m suddenly reminded of her telling me days ago I think I have cervical cancer.

She was crying.

Why do you think that? I asked.

Because I’m twenty-three and have never been to the gynecologist.

Do you have any symptoms?

No, she sobbed.

You realize you’re speaking to someone who has actual brain cancer, right? Maybe I’m not the best person to confide in.

I am allowed to have medical concerns, she screamed.

She was not drunk.

That sounds more like a medical hallucination, I said, and I did not feel sorry for any of it.

~

The stoplight isn’t turning green. K. is pounding on the windows of my car. I pull out my phone.

Five Reasons Why I Can’t Be with You

1.     I washed your comforter and was afraid it would not be dry by the time you got home. This terrified me.
2.     For as much as I do around your house, I feel like I should get a free pass to be there whenever I want and do whatever I want.
3.     You use your brain cancer as an excuse to be cruel to me.
4.     You won’t let me sleep in your bed with you.
5.     You never come to my house.

My commenting donkey is sleeping, so I respond in my head.

You have sixty-three steps leading up to your house. You told me you counted them. You know I cannot walk up steps. I shouldn’t even be driving, but here we are. I can’t even lift my foot high enough for one step, more or less sixty-three. Are you fucking crazy? You knew all of this about me and wanted to date me anyway.

Fuck. You.

I drop K. off in the parking lot of a fruits and veggies store near her house. I toss her keys out to her. I’m being kind, I think. I’m being kind. She will need them to get back inside.

K. picks the keys up from the ground and chucks them into the nearby wooded area.

I do not know if she made it up the sixty-three steps or not. After all, I have brain cancer, but Shannon just got stabbed by one of her sisters who competed against her in a beauty pageant and lost!

Things could be much worse.

When I arrive back to my apartment, I turn off the murder podcast and take a moment to appreciate the clear sky. I can see most of the constellations, a planet perhaps, and even though my right leg has completely stiffened, I feel refreshed by the brisk cold of the quiet air. I think, for a moment, that I am an astrologist and have charted the tragic course of my destiny.

~

The next morning, I see what I could not appreciate in the dark: my new neighbor’s red Mountaineer SUV is smothered in a thick, white liquid. I nearly trip over a canister the size of my head between my car and the neighbor’s car.

Mayonnaise.

Did K. think my neighbor was trying to sleep with me? Did she think I’d already gotten a new girlfriend or fuck buddy after the infamous Google Doc breakup? It’s been less than a week—and I learned that perhaps a romantic relationship was not the best idea for me at the time. Did she make it up the sixty-three steps to her house?

I have no idea.

I stare at the container. There is a tumor-shaped blob of mayo still congealed to the discarded plastic. That’s my brain, I think. That’s me.

I’m going to die soon.

I imagine the mayonnaise taking the place of the fluid that will leak from my next mass. The last time fluid leaked before my craniotomy, I had a seizure that paralyzed my right side for three months. You will have another tumor, my oncologist said. We just don’t know when. This is an incurable disease.

I am thirty-seven.

Soon, I think, that mayonnaise will leak and surround the new planet in the sky of my head, the Mercury that will eventually kill me.

I get a text from the friend I called when K. was screaming at me. Someone called the police on her after you dropped her off, the friend tells me. She’s on a 72-hour psychiatric hold at the hospital.

I open my phone and create my own Google Doc. I try to share this document with K., but I can’t figure out how. My Google donkey, however, knows exactly what to type.

One Reason Why I Can’t Be with You

1.     Mercury is in motherfucking mayonnaise.

I enter the apartment to grab a bucket of water. I’m not confident that I can even get out to the driveway while carrying something so heavy. I also plug my earbuds into my phone, tuck my phone into my pants, and plan to listen to a murder podcast as I scrub mayonnaise off the neighbor’s Mountaineer.

Maybe I can wash off the slimy goop before she leaves the apartment again.

She would never know.

The water sloshes against the sides of the bucket, and I spill a third of the contents on my way out the door. Little did she know, Kimberly’s mother wanted her husband and his life insurance policy!

I set down the bucket, pick up the mayonnaise canister, and toss it over the hillside.

For a few minutes, I do not want to think about planets or comet tails zipping through the healthy tissue I have left.

For a few minutes, I want to be free from the galaxy.

~ ~ ~

Judge’s comment: In Mercury Is in Mayonnaise, the writer takes the ubiquitous Google Doc and turns it into a conversation about a breakup. Topics like terminal illness and contemporary technology can be hard to handle, but it's done deftly here. We feel for these characters as they try to navigate a generational divide.

~ ~ ~

Suzanne Samples lives in Harrisville, West Virginia, where she teaches (now online) Rhetoric and Composition at Appalachian State University. She received a PhD in Victorian Literature from Auburn University. Her memoir, Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild, is available from Running Wild Press and on her website suzannesamples.com. The memoir received the honor of being named a Best Indy Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. 

Troubled Boats

She was a simple rowboat: twelve feet long, flat-bottomed, all-wood construction with yellow cedar planks on oak ribs. The transom and seats were a worn mahogany, and a pair of patten swivel oarlocks shone dully in the half-light of the boathouse. The oars themselves sat loosely inside the boat, idle, unassuming. Darren thought the boat had an almost shame-faced look as he held the boathouse doors open for the Boat Master behind him. I’m just a small rowboat, she seemed to say. I’m no trouble. The faded white paint on her hull was beginning to flake, and seawater dripped onto the boathouse floor.

I’m sorry, Darren thought at the boat. He might have said it out loud if he’d been alone, but he’d brought the Boat Master. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten the Boat Master, should have waited. It was too late now.

“You’re telling me it happened again?” the Boat Master asked.

“I’m not certain, sir,” Darren said, looking somewhere between the Boat Master and the boat. “Everything seemed secure when I left yesterday. But when I came in this morning, her hull was wet, like she’d just been brought out of the water.”

“And no one’s been seen coming in or out of the boathouse? Hollins was at the gate all night.” It was a question.

“I spoke with Hollins, sir. No one’s been—”

“You think the boat has been getting out of the boathouse on her own during the night?”

Darren was silent. Water continued to drip, and a herring gull called keow, keow, keow in the distance.

The Boat Master swore. “We can’t have any of the boats breaking out in the middle of the night, Darren. Not even the little skiffs. We’ve talked about this. It sets a bad example for the rest of the boats.”

Darren looked at the rowboat. Her hull needed refinishing. He should start that this week. He wondered when those oarlocks had last been oiled. “Sir, the family who owned her the longest before we took her in last month, they brought her out on the water every morning. You remember, I’d looked into her history, when we first acquired her. Their boy used to do deliveries with her around the bay. Maybe if we just brought her out on the water more, I mean, brought her out properly, with lines, and fenders—”

“Lock her up, Darren,” the Boat Master said. “Don’t make me say it again.” He strode out of the boathouse.

Darren stood where he was just inside the entrance of the boathouse, listening to the Boat Master’s footfalls plodding further away, and the slow drip of seawater off of the rowboat’s hull.

“I’m sorry.” He said it out loud this time. After a moment, he put a hand on her gunwale. “He’s right, though. You could get hurt.”

The boat said nothing.

~

Darren had been working at St. Brendan’s Marina for Troubled Boats for two years. His family had not been happy that he’d decided to take the job. “Oh, Darren,” his mother had said. “That’s very noble. But son, those are tough cases. What about the Lytle Marina? Or Ramona Whitman’s shop? You could do some of that detail work that you’re so good at there, work with some really great boats.” There was a meaningful pause. “Boats with potential.”

“The boats at Brendan’s are great boats, too, Ma,” Darren had said. “They just need a different kind of work.”

His mother sighed. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

The Boat Master had said essentially the same thing when he’d interviewed Darren. The Boat Master was a big man, and his hands on the desk between them, casually interlocked, looked solid, compact, like a Ballantine coil. “I’ve talked to all of your references, and they say you’re good,” he had said. “There’s no question that you love boats. But here at Brendan’s, loving the boats too much can be the sort of thing that gets you into trouble.” He paused, then leaned forward, the coil of his fists unmoving on the desk. “You know the saying, ‘If you love something, let it go?’ That’s not true here. At Brendan’s, if you love something, add more snubbers.”

Darren had assured the Boat Master that he’d thought about this very carefully, that he’d read a lot about burnout, and that he didn’t think that he’d have a problem. Working with troubled boats, he said, was his calling.

The Boat Master had looked sad as he’d offered him the job.

Darren remembered the first really bad case he’d worked on at St. Brendan’s Marina for Troubled Boats. She was a twenty-two-foot wereboat, a beautiful wooden sloop in great condition. Her name, Ylva, was painted across her transom in red and gold. Darren had first met Ylva at a neap tide, and couldn’t believe the amount of chafe gear that they used on her. He didn’t know. He’d heard about wereboats roaming the ocean at the full moon, but the stories had seemed hyperbolic then. Romantic, even. A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. He was so naïve. The morning after the full moon, a spring tide at the lunar perigee, Darren had been shocked to see the splintered boathouse doors, the frayed and snapped lines, the wreckage of wood along the shore. He’d cried when they’d found what was left of her mast.

Ylva was the first boat he’d lost, and he vowed he’d never lose another though, of course, he did. After Ylva, Darren began going over all of the gear himself, painstakingly checking every inch of the dock lines with careful hands, replacing rope, wood, and canvas at the earliest signs of wear. But accidents happened.

Now the little rowboat was breaking out at night. Harrison Boatbuilding, her most recent owners, had sold her to them at less than half of what she was worth. Harrison’s had kept her for just a few weeks, and were cagey about why the price was so low. She was small, but very well built—less than fifteen years old, with classic lines, modified only slightly from a 1910 Asa Thomson design. Wooden Boat Magazine had done a piece on her for their fall issue ten years earlier, before she’d started showing signs of being troubled.

Darren had tracked down the family who’d owned her before Harrison’s, the McElroys, a small family living out at Wren’s Point. They were downsizing—another strike at the cannery had hit the family a little harder than they were willing to admit, though Darren had heard what they weren’t saying. They’d had to sell her. The McElroys’ teenage boy was the one who talked the most about the boat.

“Her name is Restless,” the gangly redhead had said, looking at his feet. The sheer quantity of his freckles made it hard for Darren to tell whether he was flushed or tanned. “I know it’s not painted on her anywhere—Da said she was too small to really need a proper name—but I put it on all of her papers, and that’s what we always called her. Is she—doing okay?” he asked, stealing a quick glance up. The boy seemed to know what a boat sold quickly to Brendan’s could mean, especially with a house call from a man like Darren, all the way to Wren’s Point.

Darren reassured the boy that the little rowboat was fine. They were going to touch up her paint, do a little refurbishing; they were just trying to learn more about her history. Darren made sure that the love he already felt for the little boat showed on his face as he talked to the McElroy boy. He knew that the truth of this would be, really, the most reassuring thing that he could offer, more than anything he could say.

But anyone could tell the rowboat wasn’t adjusting to the boathouse, and it broke Darren’s heart to lock her inside.

Not all of the boats sold to Brendan’s were so difficult. They had a decent amount of turnover, rehabbing many, refinishing them and selling them to new owners. They did high-quality work at Brendan’s, and people knew it. Financially, the marina could be doing worse. They had an annual grant from the Department of Wayward Transit. Occasionally, especially after a particularly disturbed watercraft made the news, they got some funding from the Public Safety Bureau, which generally liked to keep the issue of troubled boats hush-hush but, when that failed, were partial to big shows of action. The Boat Master had a good eye for craft and was choosy about which boats they took on; they weren’t a pro-bono gig that had to take every vessel that washed their way, not like those pulp mills down south. Brendan’s had some recidivism, which, though regrettable, was generally accepted as being an unavoidable part of the industry. Once a boat stayed too long at their marina, though, it got a bad reputation. Darren had been hoping that the little rowboat would be one of the successes.

“Okay,” he said now, talking over the boat, addressing the back wall of the boathouse. “First things first. We’re going to make this place more cheerful.”

Darren brought in a stepladder, a pail, and a rag, and set about cleaning the tall narrow windows that lined the boathouse walls. He listened to the radio while he worked, commenting out loud on the news stories in a way he hoped was companionable. Soon, clear light streamed through the windows. He scrubbed the whole boathouse, getting rid of the dust, making it cleaner and more pleasant than his own small apartment in town. Next, Darren went over the only metal on the boat—oarlocks, breasthook, the small anchor and chain. He cleaned and oiled the pieces until they shone mirror-bright.

Before he closed the shop for the night, he tied a few extra lines on Restless, the clove hitches and rolling hitches he would have used if she’d been dockside and in the water, not forty yards from shore and on a rack. And then, as he’d been instructed, he locked the boathouse door.

~

After three more weeks, it became apparent that Restless was going to be one of their most difficult cases. The rowboat was an escape artist. She didn’t go into door-battering rages with the lunar cycle the way the wereboat had, but neither did she show any inclination towards contentment. They switched out all of the nylon braided docklines for three-strand Dacron, Darren’s personal favorite—cheaper and easier to splice, but also more elastic, and much more chafe-resistant and less likely to cause any damage to the wood when under strain. He branched out from the usual belays, tying knots he hadn’t tried since he’d first cracked open a copy of The Marlinspike Sailor as a kid. Restless was not subdued.

Darren began coming to work early—several hours early—in order to bring the craft out onto the water himself. He was bargaining with her, something he’d been told never to do—it would undermine his authority—but he did it anyway, telling her, stay put, I’ll come in early. They were short trips just beyond the edges of their harbor, not really a solution, but he couldn’t help trying. One morning he was rowing Restless back to the marina and saw the outline of the Boat Master standing on the dock in the morning mist. Hollins must have told him; Hollins, who had been at the marina for a decade, Hollins, who was skilled and imperturbable enough as a watchman to keep around but who had had multiple disciplinary actions over the years for his general crassness about the boats. “Don’t knock Hollins,” the Boat Master had said to Darren once. “He may not have the best, well, bedside manner, but he’s got staying power, which is hard to find in this industry.” Now the Boat Master’s arms were folded, and although he appeared to be staring off at the head light in the opposite direction, Darren’s heart sank.

“You can’t spoil her like this,” the Boat Master said, once Darren had tied up Restless and clambered onto the pier.

“I was thinking that she might—she could make a good mail boat. She’d go out every day for a few hours, and that would—well, maybe it would be enough,” Darren said.

“A mail boat? She isn’t nearly big enough. You know that. She was barely big enough for those deliveries the McElroy boy did.”

“She might make a good small boat for one of the barges,” Darren said. “Strapped above the transom, for getting to and from anchor. That way she’d be out every day, moving—even if she wasn’t, you know, in the water herself.”

“Can’t risk it, Darren. Remember Untameable? What if we had another situation like that—Christ, she could sink the barge. Besides, most of those large vessels use inflatables these days.” He sighed, and looked back out at the head light. “It’s interesting that she keeps coming back,” he said. “I don’t know if she wants us to help her, or if she’s just attached to you.” He eyed Darren with the same mournful expression he’d had when he’d offered him the job. “The boats can always tell when they’re working with a new guy,” he said.

Darren dreamed about going through the whole marina with a pair of wire cutters and his rigging knife, severing every lock and line and setting all the boats free. He would wake up sweating. Awake, he knew that cutting all the lines would be as good as taking a sledgehammer to the boats. It was his job to protect them. At his annual review, the head of Human Resources had given him a survey to fill out, titled “Professional Quality of Life Scale (PROQOL): Compassion Satisfaction and Compassion Fatigue.” The survey wanted to know if he felt connected to others, easily startled, or overwhelmed. Darren felt guilty for throwing the papers away without filling them out, which now gave him one more thing to think about at night when he couldn’t sleep.

Worst of all, he had noticed that every time Restless did encounter the sea—on sanctioned trips or otherwise—she was taking on increasing amounts of water. He went over her carefully, checking every joint and plank for leaks that might account for it. He found nothing. If he didn’t know better, he’d think the little rowboat was trying to sink herself. At the very least, she wasn’t trying very hard to stay afloat anymore.

“How’s work?” His mother asked him during his weekly Sunday dinner home. For once, it was the question he dreaded the most, even more than Whatever happened to that girlfriend?

“Fine.”

“It must be very meaningful,” said his aunt. This, he’d noticed, was what people said when they truly pitied you, or when they felt that self-sacrifice was the most positive thing that could be said about your work.

“Mm-hmm,” he replied.

After dinner, he washed the dishes in the kitchen with his younger sister. She dried the plates and watched him out of the corner of her eye with a mixture of hopefulness and concern. “We read about that skipjack in the paper the other day,” she said, in tones of undisguised encouragement.

“The 1965 skipjack, the Lady Percy?”

“No, the other one, Hotspur, the boat that the coast guard recovered after it foundered off of Holmedon Point two years ago. We read that before Brendan’s worked on her, she wouldn’t make it out of the harbor, but now she’s doing trips again.”

“It’s true,” Darren told her. He didn’t tell her about the careful instructions they’d given Hotspur’s new owners for how to deal with the boat at nighttime, how never to startle her. They’d probably have to shrink-wrap her on the Fourth of July.

On Monday morning Darren went to visit Restless. They were keeping her in a new boathouse now, even further back from the shore and apart from the other skiffs. He’d roped the doors on Friday night. The ropes were gone. Restless was inside, though not entirely on her rack; she listed precariously to the side. There was nearly a foot of standing water in the bottom of the boat, almost covering the center thwart. The oars floated loose in the water.

Darren bailed out the water slowly with a milk jug. He’d considered trying to bring her back to the family that had successfully owned her for so many years—invent a grant, give the boy a part time job—but he knew it wouldn’t work. The boy had already taken a full-time job to help out his parents during the cannery strike, and his days of bringing a rowboat out every day were gone. It would be just him, instead of Darren, watching the boat fail. Darren had tried everything he could think of—keeping Restless in the water and tied up on the dock, hauling her as far out and up the shore as he could, strapping fenders all over her, anchoring her. Even the Boat Master was running out of ideas.

That morning Darren had found an envelope of papers for him in the main office. Department of Wayward Transit was printed across the top, along with the state seal and the words Affidavit and Petition for Disposal. Darren had scanned the form, though he didn’t need to read it to know what it was. I, the undersigned affiant, having sufficient knowledge of the vessel, do hereby give the Department full and complete authority to dispose of said vessel. I attest to evidence of imminent danger to self or others. Alternative methods have been attempted and have failed.

Hollins had appeared in the office and jerked his chin at the form as Darren shoved it into his back pocket. “That might be written on paper made out of the last boat we pulped,” he said. “Ironic, no?” He whistled as he walked away.

Darren had been struck by the urge to knock the other man down in the same instant that he realized he also envied him. He couldn’t remember the last time he himself had whistled.

Darren still had the forms stuffed deep in his pants pocket as he finished bailing the boat, dumping the seawater on the ground outside of the boathouse. He stood in the doorway looking at the little rowboat for a few minutes. Then he got to work.

Darren re-caulked every seam on the boat. He sanded any edge that had been roughened in the last month and a few that didn’t really need it, re-oiled the oarlocks and touched up the paint. He got out the vinyl lettering he’d set aside a few days earlier, lining up the letters on her transom to spell out her name: Restless. Every letter was perfectly level, a neat, clear line or print. Named. Not changed.

He waited until the very end of the day, when he was the only one left at the marina except for Hollins, who always took his fifteen-minute breaks on schedule. Then he brought Restless down to the dock, set the craft in the water, and pushed her away from the shore.

“Good luck, girl,” he said. He watched the little rowboat drift into the fading light, the letters on her transom still readable at dusk.

When she’d reached the edge of the cove, he turned away. He walked away from the water, up the shore and inland. He dropped his resignation with the unsigned affidavit in the main office on his way out.

~ ~ ~

Editors’ comment: The power of attention is both subject and style of “Troubled Boats”: what begins as the tale of a boathouse-slash-rehabilitation center for wayward watercraft becomes an ultimately human story about what it means to be Restless—and restored. “Gently down the stream” doesn’t cut it for Adams’s rowboat; but this story's refreshing unexpectedness is its power.

~ ~ ~

Margaret Adams’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2019, Threepenny Review, Joyland Magazine, The Pinch Journal, and Monkeybicycle, among other publications. She was a Best American Essays 2019 Notable, the winner of the Blue Mesa Review 2018 Nonfiction Contest, and the winner of the Pacifica Literary Review 2017 Fiction Contest. Originally from Maine, she currently lives on the Arizona/New Mexico border in the Navajo Nation.

Meet the Standards

First, I lost their glue. Now, I can’t shake their gripes. This day started out sticky with predicament, and I don’t see it untangling soon.

“I need to know. Right now,” Kentucky complains, stretching the last word to sound like he’s in physical pain. I’ve done my level best to ignore his bobbing and twitching, plow through my lesson, but his hand’s been raised flagpole stiff for nine minutes. At first a tentative hoist, now he flicks his fingers urgently, and licks them (licks!) as if they’re topped with cream.

“I’ve seen you wait it out,” I counter, irritated for rising to his bait. “Know at the appropriate time. And it all turned out fine.”

“Yeah, but this time it’s bad. I need to know so, so bad.”

Kentucky—Kent for short—is hardly my only pupil to get this bursting feeling. But his bursts come more frequently, intrusively. He’s…I could say earnest, could say persistent, but why mince words in your own mind? Kentucky’s a whiny snot. “Hold it in, Kent. Once our lesson concludes, which won’t be long if I’m uninterrupted, I’ll issue you an e-pass, and you can know all you want. You can know all over yourself.”

Kentucky slumps in his seat as if my command converted him to putty. Once we complete our escape velocity unit, everyone’s free to bask privately in higher-order matters. At this point, all my pupils grasp that rockets require 11 km/second of thrust to break Earth’s gravitational pull. But straggling students assume this rate remains constant from planetary body to body. Before we can move on, it’s essential I clarify why escape velocity adjusts depending on the mass of what’s been departed. Why it’s different on Neptune or Mars. Why we’re as sure of this truth on Mars, where we travel regularly, as we are on Neptune, where our visit is still in planning stages.

They better know this material cold soon. Some are already nine years old.

Plus, we spent all morning on art. Wasted it, my pupils argue. They defy even the lone piddling creative project they’re accountable for annually. Motor skill upkeep and visual organization strike them as backwater talents, like attending cotillion. But I lost the glue. Don’t know where it’s gone. I blame the district: why assign supplies in September that we won’t need until April? Old glue sticks in my cabinet cracked in half as pupils pasted slapdash pages, insisting their projects looked fine. For now, sure. But without ample adhesive, the reports are doomed to peel right off.

My husband would remember where I misplaced the glue. Liesl would remember.

But I can’t reach either of them.

“Mrs. Chafee? I can’t hold back anymore really need to know please let me?”

Sighing, I click a button confirming his e-pass. “Fine, Kent. But know quickly, then dash back. Fail to return before Field Path and I’ll revoke your tech privileges.”

Kentucky’s not angling to flee Science Path because it’s daunting, but because it’s dull. Other matters of matter—for instance, how Earth would need to contract to peanut size to be a black hole, from which any light attempting to escape would crack like peanut brittle—are, for him, already elementary. Problem is, he’s flooding with new data unrelated to our subject. If he doesn’t process it out loud, get it out of his brain’s bilge soon, he’s liable to wet his pants in frustration. I’ve seen it happen.

So too, unfortunately, has our custodial staff.

Kent clutches his e-pass receipt, hands tacky with glue residue, chirping musical notes down a corridor, screaming ecstatic time signatures. Johann Sebastian Bach must have finally dissolved into his system. While Kent’s science fractals are subdividing at a prodigious pace, he’s fallen behind in musical acumen: comprehension of four-voice chorales, brass or string quartet grouping. This development is a relief. Another day at deficit and his parents would’ve had to hire an emergency tutor.

As suspected, with Kent on a warpath elsewhere, my stragglers are up to speed in seconds, so I can resume the Checklist of Covered Standards. “Are we all here today?” A display of concepts whir by my Promethean board. I confirm pupils digested all expected data in their systems overnight, beneath their cartoon character bedspreads. Quantum. Are we all here? The pupils nod. Calibrate. Are we all here? John Archibald Wheeler. Are we all…

“Mrs. Chafee?” Georgia asks timidly. “Wheeler’s essential quotes are just dispersing into my system.”

I hear scoffs behind Georgia. Without even looking up, I know it’s Utah. “You’re only now getting Wheeler’s quotes? You are like, so broken.”

“It’s fine, Georgia. You aren’t behind. He’s a minor part of today’s baseline.”

“But his assertion ‘Black holes have no hair’ confuses me. Why would he say…?”

“A humanist joke. Wheeler’s referring to what inside black holes can or can’t…”

“…be measured,” Georgia finishes, audibly relieved. “I get it! The only measurable traits in black holes are mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.”

“Right. Absent those three things, no tangible characteristics define a black hole, ergo no way we can, with any accuracy, define them ourselves.”

“Oh, that is funny. A black hole having hair.”

“Yes. Imagine.” Sometimes, I imagine I’m a Sherpa, leading pupils into blizzards of bombarding facts, aiding their shaky ascent from one aptitude summit to the next, and into life’s loftier altitudes. But are there times when I feel like a misplaced hospice nurse, relegated to administering the snarl of drugs trafficking in bloodstreams? Oh, yes.

To these students, and my own teenaged daughter.

Strange thing is, I mastered in primary education to avoid teenagers, and the lurid, tragic lenses they viewed the world through. After I graduated, though, the education sector erected The Standards. I remember celebrating with my new husband, Li, over lots of wine. “Don’t you see this is wonderful?” I asked. “So much of a teacher’s life is drilling, testing, rehashing. This democratizes what’s known. Permits me to keep lessons moving forward.”

Li shrugged, gently squeezing the bulb of his nose, its little perch.

“This means never having to leave a student behind,” I added.

“I get its gist.” He studied brochures. “You don’t think drenching a kid in data could leave them parched for perspective?”

Touché. By accelerating subject mastery we accelerated Sturm und Drang. Not in terms of hormonal leering: my prepubescent pupils grow at the same rate as always. But they don’t savor learning anymore. Each setback looms over them, while each triumph is abridged.

Then there’s what they learn too soon.

For Liesl, that meant a devoted father’s departure. And a dictator’s reign of terror.

When Liesl was my pupils’ age I held her constantly; her fingerprint pattern is etched more sharply in my memory than my first kiss. “Let’s play ‘Dolphin or Predator,’ Mommy,” she said, coiled in my lap the night before her ninth birthday. “Pretend your hand’s a dorsal fin, but I can’t tell if you’re a devious shark or friendly dolphin.” After a few fun rounds, she bolted out of my lap. A break-in in her brain. New knowledge pickpocketing her innocence. “Wait. We supported the Pinochet regime for how many years? When we knew he tortured thousands of… Am I supposed to be okay with this?” Sobbing, as if I’d personally armed the dictator, the dolphin dead to her. I was livid. Couldn’t the capsule’s South American Despots Standards have waited until after she opened gifts, wolfed her ice cream cake, to disseminate its grim report? How was she supposed to blow out pastel-colored birthday candles while reeling over victims blown apart by dynamite?

“I’ll level with you Liesl,” Li said, pouring oil on a skillet, its sizzling pops timed with her sniffles. “Injustice makes grownups feel powerless. The one comfort is realizing most of us want to fight back. Your mom became a teacher to fight. But if you want to fight too, you need strength. So….” He then served up a trio of delicious dumplings. I can conjure every morsel of that scene, except his ingredient list. But the dumplings, that night, did the trick. Glued us back together.

Last night, I had to glue us back alone. Liesl raided my lockbox, popping Standards on the sly, when I stepped out to buy butter. Thankfully just two, but when I returned with salted quarters to the sight of her swollen eyes I stuck fingers down her throat anyway. Was it just a dumb stunt? Start of something darker? Knowledge gorging on too many capsules triggers renal failure. But it’s become fashionable for zealous or bored teens. An LSD trip for nerds, minus bending walls or howling colors. I convinced Liesl to purge, then myself not to judge. Asked—gently—about her boyfriend Reggie, who’s stopped coming by, but she only responded in gibberish algorithms and modal logic. If I could’ve conjured Li back, just for a moment, he’d have located some perfect ingredient. Singing off-key, maybe, to console Liesl through sweat and shivers. Not once telling me I told you so about the Standards’ hidden costs. He’d handle it all in stride. Dumbfounded only by how she now filled out his weedy culinary school sweatshirt. Since the days when his shirt cuffs hung like elephant trunks past her fingertips, or his hood swallowed her face (“My daughter disappeared!”), she’s grown so much.

Liesl’s pupils had stopped dilating by morning, but she still spouted vengeful words, scraping burnt carbon barnacles off the surface of toast I made. I almost took a personal day. Only, hiring a trained sub on short notice is tricky. Kids can’t fall behind on the treadmill. Our Standards must be met. They must. So I clocked in. Stood at my Promethean board to periodically ask, “Are we all here today?”

Knowing I’m hardly all here myself.

Picking up on facial cues is vital. Seeing a sea of wide-open eyes, I can move to the next term or theorem. Seeing squints means I must recalibrate. Usually straggling students catch up before I have to fully explain, at which point I certify with a thumbprint that my entire class is up to speed. Then onto the next Standard. Rinse and repeat.

“Mrs. Chafee?” Another question from Georgia. Many pupils are named for states—a reaction to our dissolution of borders. I have a Pennsylvania (Sylvie for short), a Utah, a (New) York, Flo(rida), and strangely, two Oregons but no Carolinas or Dakotas. Li and I sniggered at the trendy nostalgia. Since losing him, I’ve become less haughty. “If a black hole remains, at its core, hypothetical, how are we sure laboratory-produced ‘dumb holes’ are accurate auditory mirrors of the phenomenon?”

Great. We needed to be done with black holes forty-five seconds ago. Kent hasn’t returned from his hall e-pass, likely sketching musical ligatures in a toilet stall. While my Liesl could be sleeping soundly on a sofa, or strung out from another score. Sometimes I’d like to toss the lot of them deep in our school’s woods. Recesses where no sound or light can pass. Force them to escape their own dumb/black hole.

Instead I pinch my desk lip, as if to make it squeal in pain.

Truth is, Georgia’s streak for solving mysteries impresses me. Like I’m trying to with Li’s dumpling recipe. Even a quick nip of the trio I made for lunch made clear it’s another failure. They’re missing some sweet note. Seasoning is out of whack. At least this latest attempt confirmed Li did include zucchini in his version. I just added it too early, rendering the dish soggy.

“Mrs. Chafee? Are you even going to answer Georgia?”

“Five-minute snack refuel,” I say, as an alarm’s ding saves me.

Most pupils throw back carrot wafers. Some pierce their wrists with ballpoint pens. This isn’t troubling behavior. Stopped-up data leaves their appendages maddeningly itchy. Not knowing how to tell Liesl to endure her itches was torture. Much like what her father went through when she had her first period, I suppose. I’m grateful Li lived long enough to see that, to know she could give life, that our genes could go on after he had gone.

Liesl is part of the Beta Intelnoculated Generation, or B.I.G. Back when data chips were still a choice. Watching Liesl’s get inserted terrified me more than watching her crown. The nurse, though, was a pro. Talked Liesl through the process, then sewed it inside her inside of a minute. Now insertions are done at birth, right after the foot’s pricked.

All accessible data rests in chips as a kind of gristle, micro-grains of knowledge clinging to them like barnacles. When nurses plunge syringes into little arms, the serum—basically saline—merely moistens and dislodges data, allowing it to raft through blood on time release. Stores of knowledge unfurling more or less uniformly. Prêt-a-porter intellect.

“Mrs. Chafee. Can dolls be healthy?”

“Dolls, Utah? You mean the ones on toy shelves?”

“I say inanimate stasis precludes any and all well-being indicators. But Georgia contends dolls are always healthy because they’re never alive. What do you say?”

I don’t say, initially. I scowl and think: I will not burn precious class time on metaphysics. It is fields askew from Science Path, not to mention the expertise limits of my master’s. I think how Georgia and Utah’s fights remind me of childhood tiffs Liesl and Reggie once had. Her rival, turned boyfriend, turned…whatever he is now.

I only say, however: “Time for Field Study.”

A collective groan. We’re jetting class sixty-eight seconds early; we can review so much intellect ingestion in sixty-eight seconds! Plus, they argue, shouldn’t we wait for Kent? Maybe we should, but he heard my ultimatum. He deserves to have a locked door disorient him when he ambles back. Besides, I’m permitted to place personal calls during Field Study. I scribble a note letting Kent know where we’ve gone, while pupils fasten morning jackets, cinch scarves, and don knit caps. It is 71°F outside. Is that 21°C? The pupils find it hilarious I still think in Fahrenheit, slog over conversions that are second nature to them. I find it grating that they loathe nature. “It’s too human outside,” one complains, waddling in a bulky ski jacket. No matter the conditions, overcautious parents entomb them in outfits providing maximum skin shelter. Worse, the kids have gotten used to it. They’d rather review an infantile fraction unit than have one lousy rain droplet seep into their woolen sweaters.

Yet go we must. Thirty minutes required Field Study for every ninety of completed Digestive Review. Experiential education remains—as of now—a Mandated Standard.

Until last year, we even took field trips. I organized what turned out to be the final one. The Ice Cream Museum. The last trip Liesl loved taking with me before turning cold, degree by degree. Her father’s flagging health kept him from joining. We laced boots, applied Vapo-Rub, walked in. Condensation flowered round our lips. Admission fees entitled us to twenty trial tastes. Liesl lit up at the Creamy Scoop of History Hall, sampling nectar-flavored ice produced centuries earlier. Terrified as Liesl was over a fatherless future, her teeth jittered with joy against tulip glasses at the Anydae Is Sundae exhibit. How can you not crack smiles in a cave of flavored cream, scraping tasting spoons along fudge mint and Neapolitan stalactites?

Did pedagogy drive my returning with pupils? Misplaced nostalgia? Don’t know. Either way, ICM had become a shell of itself since our last visit. The bulk of interactive delectable displays, like Drumstick Music Booth, had been sold to curious collectors. Only the lame remained, like that Gelato vs. Sherbet Challenge no one ever played. Docents ushered us past drippy ceilings that barely held, leaving us sticky from a botch of butterscotch. Pupils only took timid tastes, panicked about potential falling pieces on Rocky Road. The trip was a wire-to-wire trial.

“Am I on trial?” Liesl had yelled at me this morning, gnawing my burnt toast.

“Of course not.”

“Sure feels that way. Like my wanting to know why bumblebee tongues shortened due to climate change, or if camel’s milk might mitigate effects of autism, is a full-on felony! Guilt by aspiration.” Eventually, her rant cycled down. She confided the huge pressures she felt to down prohibited Standards. Sure that if she doesn’t, my current pupils, those mental monsters, will overtake her job prospects before she hits her twenties. She had a point.

When I asked if Reggie shared her concerns, Liesl went silent.

Utah, layered in a waterproof parka, asks me over to the slide. Not to show off how fast he can ride, mind you, but to critique its components. “Mrs. Chafee, are the bolts fastening this apparatus metal or plastic? They feel slick to the touch, as if coated, and, even in torrential downpours, do not rust. But wouldn’t the maker, by using plastic, risk a steeper degradation through wear and tear?”

“Utah, I’ll answer your question. Only, first, climb the slide.”

“Why?”

“So I can indicate you applied muscular exertion while outside. Which you failed to do on three prior excursions.”

“If I avoid exertion again, will you be reprimanded?”

Contractual consequences have never been fully spelled out, but I damn well don’t owe an answer to a boy still sporting half his baby teeth. Instead I shrug.

“Well, Mrs. Chafee, consider this summit scaled. I want to cause you no trouble.”

“Many thanks.” I watch Utah grip the ladder rungs with gusto, attempting to hoist upward using arm strength alone. “Utah? Try using your feet, too.”

He chuckles at his Chuck Taylors. “Dad’s always calling these my play shoes. Guess this is why!” Placing his feet on the first rung, he attempts ascension to the second…from a fully seated position, rump and back embedded in a well of mulch.

Sherpa or hospice nurse? I ask myself. Sherpa or hospice nurse?

“Utah—move your feet and hands simultaneously. Hands grant grip, and feet stability. When used in concert, the limbs’ collaboration offers optimum propulsion.”

“In other words,” Georgia adds, smirking, “learn to walk, moron.”

Utah blubbers into his parka sleeve, begging to be let back into our classroom. The smarter they grow, the harder they cry. Georgia and Utah mercilessly tease one another’s shortcomings, hell-bent on beating the other’s attainment of each Standard. Is it prelude to eventual truce? Igniting animus? Courtship? Don’t know, don’t care. I may have made a mistake not taking a personal day to sort through the Reggie mess with Liesl. But a personal day would’ve meant completing an extensive application demanding justification for my absence, which demands time, so before you know it, you’re spending half a stressful night putting in a request to relieve the next day’s stresses. In the end I went with trust. That Liesl wouldn’t hurt or hurtle herself away any further.

Only she won’t, or can’t, answer my calls, the ringing bleats like nagging classroom questions. I wonder at Utah’s question about the toy doll. What are these kids doing to my well-being indicators? It’s tiring, this ambition. Domineering even parts of hearts that should be occupied only with the rush of sweeping down playground slides. Or recreating a fallen father’s savory family dumpling recipe.

Not that I badger Liesl to her face. Things with us are too tenuous as it is. When I asked this morning what’s gotten between her and Reggie, her sneer made clear she knew I knew already. Reggie has refused further capsules. Ingesting had been their together activity, their Friday date night. But he quit the regimen cold. Swore off swallowing any more, instructionally or recreationally. Bemoaning that he and Liesl never just kiss and breathe anymore. Told her he’d found what he excels at, didn’t want its gleam dulled by what he’s “supposed” to know. It is his choice, darling, I told Liesl. This was a truism like a billboard ad claim, hiding harder honesty. It is his choice, but won’t be so for his kids—whomever he has them with. He’ll still graduate, I added. By your side. Again this is a yes, but. College administrators are required to grandfather in Beta pupils who “attain B.S.,” or Basic Standards. But eschewing more rigorous Attained Serum Standards (the even more unfortunate acronym A.S.S.) will scrawl an invisible scarlet letter on Reggie’s chest as he enters adulthood. Compromising his Standards ranking, along with social standing.

“He’s abandoned our path, Mom,” Liesl sobbed—oh, how these serum-smart students sob. “Telling me it stopped mattering. That I’ve stopped mattering.”

This time it was Liesl overselling her claim. Reggie wants to inherit his family’s auto repair shop. He asked what did it matter, whether he could recite theoretical entries on the periodic table when repairing rack and pinion systems? In our tiny apartment, I couldn’t help but be privy to their fight. People still need cars, cars still break down, so I’ll still be needed, he’d argued. Same as my parents. I’d never felt prouder of Liesl for picking Reggie than when he set this lit match to their romance. Maybe he’s right, maybe she is—either way, this fire between the couple has fanned ours. His renouncement of the Standards will take Liesl time to digest. I get it. All I want is one night to perfect her dad’s dumpling recipe with her. I was sure Li wrote it down, but if he did, he didn’t paste it in plain sight, and my frail hunches haven’t brought it back. I’d like help in the test kitchen is all. But just as her higher-order physics questions are unintelligible to me, mine about zucchini preferences are asinine to her. We are impatient with one another’s obsessions.

She still isn’t answering the phone. To push out panic and keep from fleeing outright, I suggest an activity my pupils and I can try while outside. Try first with a kickball. “Why should we make this bound?” one gripes. “We digested the physics of rubber weeks ago, and the rules of four square…”

I try with a jump rope. “Is the rope really fundamental to the exercise’s efficacy?” one of the Oregons complains. “Wouldn’t leaping at regular intervals achieve the same goals in acquiring rhyming and rhythm ability? Not that I want to tell you your job…”

I try having them pick flowers. “We don’t need a botany taxonomy refresh,” gripes one pupil, Connie, pointing irately at a daisy. “Pistil, stamen, petal. Boom. We know the species, its anatomy, its blooming season.” Frustration only mounts when I have them sit on grass to link their picked daisies. “What for? Does it have practical implications? Do beetles employ this strategy and make daisy bridges?”

“Connie, it’s…fun. Just fun. Making daisy crowns to place on your head.”

Connie—short for, you guessed it, Connecticut—warily eyes the already-wilting crown. “Is it? I could see myself being amused if this were some sort of lampoon. Of ancient Greeks and their laurels, say. Is it a lampoon? Some parody, perhaps, of bygone monarchs and sovereigns?”

“What royalty would it represent, though?” Georgia asks.

Utah gasps. “An agrarian society! One that—what? Worshipped weeds?”

“That could explain why the society faded,” Georgia admits. “Touching a wrong weed can trigger rashes, lung inflammation, and so forth.”

Fuck this. I cannot facilitate a conversation whose speakers refuse to see beauty in daisy chains. Who assume the chains must be emblems of bungling royal governance. Who can’t shake off prim intellectual pursuits to make one art project. Though that one’s on me. Our glue’s been lost. No. I lost the glue. Not that my kids care about glue or the project it’s binding, a presentation on a longstanding family tradition. What sort of tradition did I mean? Laundry on Wednesdays? Whistling in showers? Not exactly. I offered a personal example: a dumpling recipe Husband learned from his mother, who’d learned from hers before. Do you capitalize the “H” in Husband as you do the “D” in Dad? It’s something I should know. I should also know how to replicate the recipe, but each attempt I tackle tastes less like Li’s. Less how, though? Cabbage too tough? Lamb too limp? Husband remains alive, as does Dad, so long as we get his recipe right. That’s the point I want Liesl to know. Eyeballing how much coriander to sprinkle may mean little to someone capable of estimating meteor mass given only two factors. But inert knowledge in a lockbox can always be pilfered. What I’m after is under threat. A baseline of memory retreating further from us each passing day.

Last week Liesl bemoaned to a friend that she’d been cursed with her dad’s nose.

Liesl’s nose looks nothing like Li’s. Have you already forgotten? I wanted to yell. Can you really see in your mirror what of him you inherited? And what would be so wrong if you did have his nose? Did squeeze that little bulb when something ate at you?

Liesl’s call stiffens my fingers; I barely manage to hit “Accept.” So quiet on her end, I’m certain she’s emptied the lockbox, or scored capsules directly from a dealer, and will be frothing about Robert’s Rules of Order or dissecting signals from the Arecibo telescope as I have her stomach pumped. When words finally wobble into her voice, they’re hushed, haunted, diffident. A voice I’ve never heard from her. Adult.

“Do you think Reggie would hear me out?” she asks. “If I invite him over for dinner?”

Dinner, I say, is a capital idea.

She agrees, then agrees with herself agreeing. “I need to hear him out too,” she says. “Not lash out, not lament what we’re losing. Just listen.”

“Listening doesn’t always solve a mess. But it’s a vital ingredient.”

“Yeah. Only how do we have a relaxed dinner,” she worries, “inside an apartment where we’re always fighting?”

“Comfort food,” I suggest. “Warm, fragrant, something settling easy into the belly. Maybe even food that’s fun to play with, pick at, so you aren’t picking at each other.”

“Got it, Mom.”

I tell her I’m not trying to lecture, just team up, but she cuts me off.

“No, I mean, I got it. As in Eureka. Perfect dish. The one you keep making—Dad’s dumplings? They never failed to pull me out of foul moods, back to cozy,” she says. Says it just that way, so again I lose grip on my phone. She laughs brightly; a picture has gotten in her head, how Li served out three dumplings at a time, stood on end, like legs of a tripod. Same way he did for diners at his restaurant. Such a stylish, elegant touch, remember? In fact, I’d forgotten that part, but now it comes rushing back. Will I help her make the dish tonight? For Reggie? I will, I will. For Reggie. Then I hang up because my enlarged heart won’t let sound leave my throat.

This is the closest I’ll come to comprehending what swallowing capsules feels like, having jittery jubilees of new wisdom and wonder schussing through your skin. We’ll nail the ingredients when I get home. Together, we can’t fail.

Because I’ve turned away from my pupils to savor the private conversation, I’m first to notice Kentucky, slumped in hedges lining the long path connecting our main building to the playground. But they’re the ones who first rush to his side, noting the e-pass receipt still gripped in his hive-enflamed fingers. Who first identify the marks scoring his body as stings.

“What is Kent saying?” Connie asks. “‘I want another? I want to mutter?’”

What must happen next? Elevate the head? Open airways? “Do you hear me?” Chest compressions? “How many fingers have I got up?” An EpiPen App would be welcome. “Hang on until help comes.” But I am that help.

Kent’s head swoops. “I can’t miss school,” he wheezes, swollen tongue slurring. Like Li in his last throes. “Please. Make my puffing and pain stop.”

“Honey, I’ll try,” I tell him. Mother, I realize. I want my mother is what he said.

“We’re making an art project today. If I miss out, I fall behind.”

Then I remember: panic buttons. Any pupil with any allergy, for wheat germ, cat dander, let alone hornet venom, must carry one on their person. I push Kent’s, then tell the kids to give him space. None move far, though: wary of towering trees adjoining the cleared path, certain a hornet nest awaits them in every hollow. Surmising how the crisis unfolded: Kent was familiar with hornet habitats, aware they scavenge for food in fall but forage in spring, cognizant, perhaps, even of the composition of their toxin.

But he had no idea that if you prod their comb walls, the suckers puncture your flesh like it’s their pub dartboard. He hadn’t gotten there yet.

The class, to rouse and rally Kent, repeats his name in useless unison, some loose Gregorian chant pitched octaves higher, a sound Kent may now, thanks to his e-pass and hallway digestion of musical theory, be able to identify. My kids want to know why it’s taking the nurse so long, why Kent’s mumbling gibberish, why he poked something dangerous, why we didn’t find him before heading outside. I can impart only a few answers. Reassure them Kent will come back to us. He’ll be revived—but in a slightly scrambled form, a few new ingredients added, pain and uncertainty, conditions you can’t quiz for, that you only acquire through the head-on collision of hurtling time. Same for their guilt and anguish: felt the instant it enters blood, yet refusing to distribute evenly. This isn’t what they need me to cover anyway. They know all this. Know a comrade has fallen. Know enough to be terrified. Each of us at last caught up with our day’s lesson.

~ ~ ~

Editors’ note: “Meet the Standards” imagines a not-so-distant future in which technology and knowledge become synonymous—but even in a world where everyone knows everything, it’s remarkable how much there is to learn. While the story transports us to a visionary new age, the characters’ losses, fears, and misremembered family recipes are hauntingly familiar. Pitt’s prose leaves our ears ringing: “Know enough to be terrified.”

~ ~ ~

Matthew Pitt has published two fiction collections. His latest, These Are Our Demands (Engine Books), won a Midwest Book Award, while his first, Attention Please Now, won the Autumn House Prize. Individual stories appear in Oxford American, Conjunctions, Epoch, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and BOMB, as well as Best New American Voices, Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post, Press 53's Everywhere Stories, and other anthologies. Matt lives in Ft. Worth, where he is Associate Professor of English at TCU and Editor of descant.