Rhonda Browning White won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for The Lightness of Water & Other Stories. Her work has appeared in Entropy Magazine, Qu Literary Journal, Hospital Drive, HeartWood Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, Ploughshares Writing Lessons, Tiny Text, NewPages, South 85 Journal, The Skinny Poetry Journal, WV Executive, Mountain Echoes, Gambit, Justus Roux, Bluestone Review, and in the anthologies Ice Cream Secrets, Appalachia’s Last Stand, and Mountain Voices. Her blog “Read. Write. Live!” is found at www.RhondaBrowningWhite.com. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and was awarded a fellowship from Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise. She resides near Daytona Beach, Florida.

Salad Night

There was rain in the forecast, a ninety percent chance. Jenny knew this because the weather report was the first thing she looked at when she brought the paper in. If she needed further proof, the sky was a slate-colored dome, the air heavy with moisture. Rain was a certainty. But it wasn’t raining now. It wasn’t raining when she stepped out onto the front porch. It wasn’t raining when she extended her hand and felt only a light breeze, and so she headed to the car with just her purse and her lunch bag.

The library was a short drive across town but Jenny had her windshield wipers on before she got to campus. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining hard and her thick head of hair protected her, though it might be a while before her dress dried out.

“So where’s your umbrella?” Ted asked her when she came in.

“At home,” she said.

“What’s it doing there? It’s raining, isn’t it?”

They’d done countless variations on this exchange over the years. Jenny never tired of it.

“Yes,” she said, “but it wasn’t raining when I left the house.”

“You must have known it was going to rain. It’s been raining off and on for two days.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jenny said.

Harriet, who also shared the small office, chimed in. “There could be a hurricane coming and it wouldn’t matter to Jenny. No rain. No umbrella.”

Jenny sat at her desk, situated across from Ted’s and facing Harriet’s. Ted was surfing news websites. Harriet was on Facebook. Reserves was more seasonal than most library departments, with a rush at the beginning of the Fall and Spring semesters, but every year brought technological advances that reduced Reserves’ work load, even during peak times. There wasn’t much for staff members to do other than take turns supervising the checkout desk. Lately there had been rumors that Reserves would be reduced by one or two staff members or, worse, eliminated altogether. Preferring not to blur the line between work and play, as well as demonstrating dedication to her job, Jenny refrained from either surfing or Facebooking or anything else not work-related. After reading her email, she sat with her legs crossed and divided her time between watching for new email and checking the digital clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. 

At nine-thirty she went to the bathroom, the same time she went every morning. At nine forty-five she took one of the two fifteen-minute breaks all employees were allotted. She rode the elevator down to the staff lounge, found a quiet corner and opened The American Mind by Bliss Perry. On her first day of work fifteen years ago she had checked out the first of the PS books in the library’s collection, the books the Library of Congress classified as American Literature. She’d proceeded to read the PSes in strict call number order, one after the other, dozens in total. They weren’t always the most entertaining or exciting of books, but she didn’t let that deter her from reading them from cover to cover, including the indexes. They were about literature rather than being literature. (American fiction—the novels—were hundreds of books away.) But that was all right with Jenny whose greatest satisfaction came from establishing a course of action and never deviating from it. Taking the guesswork out of what she would read next, like removing the decision of whether or not to bring her umbrella to work, made life so much easier and simpler.

 She read,

Let us suppose, for instance, like Professor Woodberry a few years ago, we were asked to furnish a study of Hawthorne. The author of The Scarlet Letter is one of the most justly famous of American writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock...

At ten o’clock, Jenny went to the checkout desk for her morning hour of supervising the two student assistants. Patron traffic was slow and mostly she sat and watched Rick and Emily do their homework. She could have read a book or magazine—as Ted and Harriet did—but again, that would be mixing business with pleasure.

When she returned to the office, Ted was passing around a bag of malted milk balls.

She plucked one from the bag. “Thanks, Ted.”

“Take another,” he urged.

“You know better than that,” she said and smiled. Unless the candy was tiny and multicolored (M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces), in which case she allowed herself one of each color, Jenny only took one of any treat. “Ted!  No!” Jenny had not meant to raise her voice, but before stepping away, Ted had put a malted milk ball on the corner of her desk.

“Easy,” Ted said. “You don’t have to eat it today. You can save it. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said.

She decided to eat a milk ball after lunch and placed both of them in the bottom of her desk drawer. A few minutes later the office phone rang. Harriet answered it, then gave the receiver to Jenny. 

“How’s Bubba’s sound to you?” Rob said.

“I have my lunch,” Jenny said. “I brought my lunch.”

“You can eat it tomorrow.”

“I don’t feel like barbecue. I feel like eating my sandwich and reading my book.”

“You can do that any day. Pick you up out front at twelve. Be there or be square.” 

Rob was late, of course. He had no sense of time. When he finally pulled to the curb—a full ten minutes past the hour—she reminded him she needed to be back at one sharp.

As usual at lunchtime Bubba’s was packed, but they managed to find a vacant booth near the back of the restaurant. Jenny couldn’t remember the last time Rob had taken her to lunch. Normally he slept as late as he could before leaving for his second-shift job at Murphy’s Trucking, which meant he’d made a special effort to see her, which would have pleased her if she didn’t suspect his motives.

“I’m having the chopped plate with hushpuppies,” he said. “What about you?”

She always got the sandwich when they went to any barbecue place.

“What else?” Rob said. “Fries or hush puppies?”

“You know I never order those things.”

“Maybe it’s time you started. I know you like their french fries. We’ll split an order.”

“You’re going to eat hush puppies and fries?” If she was a bit underweight, Rob was more than a bit over. They were both short people dealing with the slower metabolism that comes with middle age, but as far as Jenny was concerned, she was handling it better than her chunky husband.

The waitress took their order. Service was swift at Bubba’s and they had their food in minutes. Half way through her sandwich, Jenny, to appease Rob, ate a French fry. Rob, unimpressed, stared across the table at her. For a while now he’d been sporting a mustache that never quite grew in and an earring, which seemed strange to her until he explained that as a dispatcher with a college education it was his way of fitting in with the truckers who’d all taken to wearing a single earring. It didn’t suit Rob at all, though, making him look like an overweight pirate.

“I’m worried about you, Jen,” Rob said.

Here it came. “Why?”

“You know why.”

“I’m sorry you’re worried but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“You can eat another French fry,” he said. “That’s what you can do. You can stop starving yourself.”

“I’m not starving myself.”

“The doctor said you were a potential anorexic.”

“I’m not a potential anything. I don’t care what he said. Anorexics hate food. I love food.”

“Then why won’t you eat it?”

“I’m eating it. What do you think I’m doing?” She held up what was left of her sandwich.

“But you won’t eat more than one French fry. You won’t eat more than one of anything practically. You’ve always had your little routines but this is different.”

“I’m very disciplined, that’s all.”

“I think you’re stressed. Do you feel stressed?”

“No more than usual.”

“I think you are. More than usual.” Rob stuck a forkful of pulled pork into his mouth. After he swallowed, “You’ve had a rough year. Your father dying and all. I think it’s what’s causing you to lose weight.”

Her ob/gyn had recently informed her that she’d dropped eight pounds since her last exam, dropping her below a hundred pounds.

“You haven’t forgotten it’s salad night, have you?” Jenny said.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that’s the problem?”

“Do I think what’s the problem?”

“Your father dying and all.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Not here.” If she was going to cry she preferred not to do it in public.

“Okay. But other things, too. Like work. I know you’re worried about job security. And my cancer scare. All that was this year.”

“I’d like the Side Salad with Ranch dressing,” Jenny said.

Rob sighed. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

Every Tuesday, before leaving for work, Rob bought a salad from McDonald’s so Jenny would have it when she came home from the library. Before Rob started working second shift they both had salads, but lately Rob preferred something more substantial for his Tuesday dinner. Most McDonald salads were as high in calories as a Big Mac. The Side Salad was like a house salad, with different kinds of greens, grape tomatoes, shaved carrots—light and nutritious.

“Nothing else?” Rob said. “Just the Side Salad?”

“Yes.”

“You’re impossible. I’ll get you the Side Salad with Ranch dressing, but on one condition and one condition only: you eat another goddamn French fry.”

She knew he meant it when he started cursing. She popped one in.

Only by what she admitted to herself was nagging did Jenny get Rob to return her to the library by one o’clock.

She opened her drawer and saw the malted milk balls. She put one on her tongue, savoring the delicious outer layer, letting the chocolate melt until she got down to the malt, then crunched it slowly with her back teeth. She’d received new emails while she was out, two internal memos she quickly read and deleted, but also one from her sister which she opened with a certain wariness. Karen only seemed to write when she wanted to tell Jenny what to do. Jenny hadn’t mentioned to Karen anything about her exam, but obviously Rob had gotten to her. She’d attached three different meal plans and the email itself was full of advice which, typically, sounded more like commands.

“Any one of these plans is guaranteed to put meat on your bones. Another thing: have you ever considered an antidepressant? I know you pride yourself on not taking anything stronger than aspirin, but you might be depressed and not know it. Antidepressants have the added benefit in your case of causing weight gain. Write me back immediately and let me know which meal plan you’ve decided on. We’ll take it from there.”

Jenny knew she should respond right away. Her sister would not relent until she wrote back, but she wasn’t in the mood to be bossed and chose to put it off.   

At 4:55 p.m. she went to the bathroom. It was 4:58 p.m. when she returned.  She began packing up, removing from her bottom desk drawer her lunch bag, purse, book. When the digital clock flipped to 5:00 p.m., she shut down her computer and stood.

“If you wait a sec, I’ll walk with you,” Harriet said. “It’s raining again.” But Harriet was so slow—she hadn’t even turned off her computer—and Jenny was someone who liked to leave a place as punctually as she arrived, and the last time she looked it was only drizzling. “Thanks, but I’m fine. Bye.”

Twelve minutes later she was letting herself into the townhouse. She put her things away and went to the kitchen. Opening the refrigerator, she expected to find a McDonald’s bag on the top shelf, but it wasn’t there. She checked the other shelves; not there either. She opened the freezer section, her absent-minded husband being incapable of anything.

Stomping through the living room, she grabbed up the landline phone and called Rob’s cell. 

“Hello?”

“You forgot to buy my salad.”

“No, I didn’t. Side Salad. Ranch Dressing. Right?”

“Right.  So where is it?”

“What do you mean? It’s ... oh.”

“What?”

“It’s in the car. I left it in the goddamn car.”

“Well, that’s not going to do me any good. Can you drop it by?”

“We’re busy. I can’t get away. Just buy yourself another one.” McDonald’s was so close to their townhouse they could sometimes smell burgers cooking.

“I don’t want another one,” Jenny said. “I want that one.”   

“You can have it—tomorrow.”

“I don’t want it tomorrow. I want it today.” She could have gone herself to get the salad from Rob, but Jenny never drove anywhere unless she was familiar with the route. “Besides,” she said, “I know you won’t eat it and I don’t feel like eating salad two days in a row. I’ll just eat it when you get home.” The salad had been bought. The salad existed. Salad night could still happen.

“That’s ages from now,” Rob said. “You’ll be starving.”

“I’m starving now.”

“Then eat something for God’s sake. When did we have lunch? Noon? You can’t go—what is that?—fourteen hours. You can’t go fourteen hours without eating. There’s some chicken soup left over from the other night. You can have that. And eat some crackers with it. That’s crackers—plural.”

“Don’t forget to take my salad out of the car. You have that little fridge in the office, right?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Jenny began the evening by reading the newspaper front to back (skimming the sport’s section). This took her up to seven o’clock, the time she usually ate her dinner, tonight being an exception. When people found out she spent five nights a week alone in the townhouse, they assumed she watched hour after hour of television. But the only channel Jenny watched other than Turner Classic Movies (TCM) was TV Land with shows like Little House on the Prairie and The Andy Griffith Show. Tonight it was Happy Days. During the first commercial break she went looking for the gum Rob used sometimes to curb his appetite. She needed something to tide her over, and gum, which wasn’t food, strictly speaking, seemed just right for that. She found a pack of Spearmint in Rob’s suit pocket. 

 At the end of Happy Days she turned off the TV, fetched her book and sat on one side of the couch.

While very few writers of eminence, after all, in any country, wish to bring a ‘blush to the cheek of innocence,’ they naturally wish, as Thackeray put it in one of the best known of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a man to the utmost of his—    

The phone was ringing.

“Did you eat it?” Rob said.

“Did I eat what?”

“The soup. The chicken soup.”

Sometimes Jenny wished she were more capable of lying. “No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“That soup’s been in there since Saturday. And I’m waiting for my salad. Did you remember to put it in the fridge?”

“You mean you’re staying up until I get home?”

“No.”

“So you’re going to bed on an empty stomach?”

“I’ve been chewing gum.”

“You’re impossible, you know that?”

“Did you remember to put my salad in the fridge?”

“Yes.  I remembered. You don’t have to eat the soup. You could have one of those energy bars you like. But for God’s sakes eat something... You’re not going to, are you? You’re going to be difficult. You’re going to be stubborn.”

She said nothing.

Rob hung up on her.

Jenny felt a hunger pang so sharp it was like her stomach acids had joined forces to find something—anything—to break down and digest. But she remained firm—no soup, no energy bar—and the spasm soon passed.

Bible and meeting-house, school-house and town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the responsiveness of the American character to idealistic impulses. They are external symbols of a certain kind of mind. It may be urged—

The doorbell rang, followed by loud knocking, a rare occurrence that time of night. Putting her book aside, she got up and looked through the peep hole. 

“Rob!” she said and unlocked the door.

On the porch was a young man with a pizza box in one hand and an umbrella in the other. 

“You’re going to have to take it back,” she told him. “I don’t have money to pay you.”

“Someone already paid,” the delivery boy said.

“I don’t have money for a tip either.”

“Taken care of, ma’am.”

She had no choice but to accept what would be a small mushroom and green pepper pizza on a whole wheat crust, her favorite pizza from her favorite pizza parlor. The delivery boy placed the warm box in her hands. Jenny inhaled the cheesy, salty aroma. She could almost feel her stomach acids surging, rising up, in anticipation.

She brought the pizza inside and put it on the dining room table, after first placing the newspaper underneath the box to absorb any grease that seeped through the cardboard, the grease which made it so good. What Rob knew was that she would go to any lengths not to throw food away. She ate bananas when they were black, cheese when it was moldy. Waste not, want not. She was not going to march outside and toss the pizza into the garbage, as far from temptation as possible. The pizza would remain in the house. She would eat it, sooner or later. If she were a different sort of person, she would have called Rob back and hung up on him the way he’d hung up on her. Instead, she vowed to read for thirty-five more minutes, which would take her to nine-thirty, the time she always began preparing for bed. The pizza would have cooled by then and she would find a place for it in the fridge.

Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate—

The smell of fresh-baked pizza seemed to be getting stronger. The acids churned and roiled, crashing against her stomach walls.

Let us see how this glow of idealism touches some of the more intimate aspects of human experience. ‘Out of the three Reverences,’ says Wilhelm Meister, ‘springs the highest Reverence, Reverence for Oneself.’ Open the pages of Hawthorn. Moving wholly with the framework—

She shut her book. Crossing the living room, she halted outside the entrance to the dining room, her feet together, her arms straight at her sides. Somehow, she found the strength to return to the sofa and her book. But her concentration was poor. The words made even less sense than usual. She got up again and this time entered the dining room. She stood over the pizza box. The aroma dazed her, stupefied her. She extended her hand. She pulled out the little flap attached to the lid. She lifted the lid. The pizza was coming into view. She was getting her first glimpse of it when the doorbell sounded.

It was the pizza guy again. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot your breadsticks.” He handed her a narrow box and left.

A short while later the phone rang.

“Did you get it?” Rob said.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

She hesitated.

“Well?”

“It’s delicious,” she said.

“I knew it,” Rob said. “I knew you couldn’t resist.” He chuckled. “Save some for me. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”   

She considered wrapping a piece of pizza in foil and hiding it in the back of the freezer section. But Rob might find it there when he reached in for one of his popsicles. She had no choice. Dislodging one of the slices from the box, she let herself out the back door and buried it in the trash, then made room for the pizza box and the bread sticks in the fridge.

She laid the dining room table with two sets of place mats, napkins, silverware. Because of Rob’s weird hours, they saw little of each other during the work week. To give them more time together, Jenny always got out of bed when Rob came home and kept him company while he ate something, usually cereal.

She went upstairs and got ready for bed. 

Slipping under the covers, she glanced at the clock radio. It was exactly ten. More than once she’d been with Rob when he told people, “My wife goes to bed at ten-o-one every night. Ten-o-one. Not ten. Not ten-o-two. Ten-o-one. Every night. Ten-o-one.” She watched the clock, her hand on the lamp switch. The time changed and she turned off the light.

Half an hour passed, an hour.  She usually dozed off minutes after putting her head on the pillow, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d told Rob—not a lie, technically—she knew the pizza was delicious—but it amounted to the same thing. The more she thought about her lapse of character the more fearful she became for her marriage, for herself. Lies breed more lies. A marriage could only support so much untruth before it collapsed. She knew what she had to do and, throwing back the covers, hurried down to the kitchen. She opened the fridge, lifted the box lid and tore off a slice. Standing in the refrigerator light, she ate the cool but still-yummy pizza, biting off piece after piece, chewing hungrily.

~ ~ ~

John Picard is a native of Washington D.C., living in North Carolina. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published fiction and nonfiction in The Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A collection of his stories, Little Lives, was published by Main Street Rag.

Volveré

I’m known to stand in my yard at three o’clock in the morning and look at the tall trees across the way, faded outlines under a trace of moonlight. It’s a feature of menopause: I wake up at that hour and I’m finished for the night. I don’t want to be finished, but I am. At such times I’ve caught glimpses of you, Val, bits of you shining forth among the trees and then covered over, like my own vanishing self.

It was your brain—not your radiant heart—that first caught my attention and gave rise to my envy, awe, and eventually my fascination with you. Everything goes back to eighth grade, to the shoes. You had seen an ad in a magazine that boasted: 100,000 PAIRS SOLD. 500,000 HAPPY TOES. Sketches of shoes circled the words, shoes with rosettes and straps and leather tassels. You didn’t let those pictures distract you. Instead, you wrote a letter to the shoe company, asking, “What about the other 500,000 toes?”

One of the math teachers got wind of the incident, so that the clipped-out ad and the carbon copy of your letter came to be passed around our classroom. “It’s basic arithmetic,” said my friend, Suzanne. “I would have figured it out. You would have.”

Until that moment I had considered myself smart—no, the smartest. I sailed through every test. Teachers praised my ability to memorize the phyla of worms, geometric formulas, and the succession order of the cabinet officers, should both the president and the vice president happen to be killed. But your triumph with the shoe company opened cracks in my soul. I began to fear that there were swarms of facts and ideas, all around me, that I had forgotten or failed to notice. Therefore, I sought your friendship. I stuck near you every minute I could, to see how you operated, to adopt your methods. If I needed any reminder of your superiority, I had only to look at your feet, at the spectator pumps—black with a white crescent across each toe—sent to you by the grateful shoe company.

Suzanne disagrees with me. She says that the shoes were grey suede with little bows.

I don’t know when we began to eat lunch together or walk home together. All that is part of the mundane bliss of those years, which were neither blissful nor mundane at the time, but only in retrospect.

We took Spanish together, Mr. Durban’s class, and you never spoke up except when he pointed at you. You sat at your desk, your long, straight fingers always holding a pen, although you didn’t appear to take notes. Your face, with rosy skin and narrow forehead, resembled a piece of summer fruit. Naturally the boys took notice of you, even those acne-ridden, undersized boys of our eighth-grade class, who still punched each other in the hallways.

Mr. Durban called you Valentina; that was his idea of a good Spanish equivalent for Valerie. “It sounds more Russian,” you said later, when we were stretched out on your living room floor. “There was a cosmonaut named Valentina.” You always knew things like that, that Suzanne and I didn’t. Then you said, “¿Por qué quieres usar ese nombre, Valentina?” imitating Mr. Durban’s Georgia accent. We spent the rest of the afternoon drawling and twanging.

I believe your mother was in the house at the time, lying on her bed with the curtains pulled. I’m not sure when I became aware of this habit of hers, and I never thought much about it, except to envy you for even having a mother. There were days when she came out to say hello, when all of us basked in her brief attention. “You girls be sure to drink some 7-Up if you want,” she’d say with an uneven smile. She was pretty and small, with painted-on eyebrows. Sometimes you slipped an arm around her, as if to protect her, or to show her off.

“I still wonder,” Suzanne told me last year. “What went on with her mother exactly… and the stepfather who would come home at five and tell us to get out?” But you were happy in those days, Val; I can only conclude that you had a gift for it.

Somehow you understood about my not having a mother. You often invited me to bicycle to your aunt’s house, out past the edge of town. Aunt Myra. She fixed us delicacies for lunch: chicken livers on toast, green beans with toasted almonds, Bavarian cream. I had never eaten such foods; you seemed quite accustomed to them. After lunch and the attending conversation, you and I wandered in the surrounding forest. We examined the hulks of cars that had pitched into the trees years earlier, their corroded pedals and wheels and ruined cushions. We sat on secret logs. We nibbled on miner’s lettuce, which I pretended to think delicious in order to please you.

Suzanne can describe Aunt Myra’s living room perfectly; I have forgotten it. She says there was no miner’s lettuce in the forest.

What is the truth, then; what is there to know? That time is far away, and for some years I have considered it part of a different life entirely. Was that me back then? Or you? I have some bright islands of perfect memory, but around them lies a black ocean.

Do you think Suzanne was jealous when the two of us went to Oaxaca on student exchange? We were picked because we had managed to learn a modicum of Spanish, despite Mr. Durban’s incompetence. Our exchange families paid little attention to us, leaving us to walk around the town, looking at the houses and shops while trying to ignore the dead mallate beetles piled in the gutters, and the men who followed us through the streets, calling out, “¡Güera, oye güera!” Most days we stopped into the market, where women with joined-together braids sold cheeses, herbs, and limes. There were racks of embroidered blouses, and butcher counters that displayed bloodied animal parts and mounds of glistening lard. You learned to bargain like a local, calling the vendors marchante and dancing with them toward the customary prices. We’d buy quesillitos and peaches, and sit on a bench in the Alameda to eat them.

I remember looking at you more than once, as we walked through the summer streets, at your lips that seemed to guard secret knowledge, wondering how I could learn from you. How I could be like you. My own Spanish, which met the A standard in Mr. Durban’s class, did not suffice when I tried to speak with people I met in Oaxaca. In order to pick up new words, I needed someone to hand them to me. You apparently learned vocabulary just by passing it in the street.

One afternoon—was it outside the cathedral, or along a block of derelict houses?—you linked your arm through mine, Oaxacan style, and told me you wanted to stay single forever. You would teach Spanish and spend your summers in Mexico or South America. I’ve just remembered this lately. Would you laugh if you knew that I had lived out this plan myself without realizing that it had once been yours?

In the evenings we liked to visit the zócalo, joining the dreamy circlings under the trees, to the sound of marimbas. How you surprised me when you showed up, one evening, arm in arm with a local boy named Hugo. I had seen him talk to you several times, but never suspected. The branches of the trees touched over our heads, holding the music in, as Hugo explained about the limestone used for the cathedral, about the Gothic arches at Santo Domingo. Perhaps he wanted to become an architect. He bought you gardenias that night in the zócalo, and the air was heady around us. Around you, really. After a few circuits I said good night and left you to walk with Hugo, around and around, to the sweet, hollow song of the marimbas.

It was a different sort of surprise when we finished college and you introduced me to Keith. Suzanne and I drove across the bay to visit you, at a stucco apartment complex in Hayward. Suzanne said, “All she told me is he’s a Quaker. That should be good; they’re very cerebral.” She mimed a wide-brimmed hat and below-the-chin, oatmeal box hair as we mounted the steps to a concrete walkway and followed the strip of indoor-outdoor carpeting to your door.

Keith answered our ring, a sharp-chinned man, cheekbones like rocks buried in his face. “Come in, come in. The high school friends.” He didn’t say his name until we introduced ourselves. Then he stuck out his hand to us. “She talks a lot about you.”

Air hissed from the couch cushions when we sat down. Keith said, “Val’s coming right out, she just had to finish with the bathroom floor.” I didn’t dare look at Suzanne; she may have looked at me.

You came rushing into the room, wiping your hands, your hair in a kerchief. Your smile seemed to wrap itself around Suzanne and Keith and me, to wrap all of us in love. You offered lemonade and disappeared into the kitchen.

Keith settled into an armchair across from Suzanne and me. “Where you girls been the past year? Val and I haven’t seen boo of you.” So you had been together a whole year.

“We were in college. We just got out,” Suzanne said. “Same as Val.”

I searched for a polite question. “What about you, Keith? Did you just graduate?”

He eyed me. “I’ve been busy being a conscientious objector. They had me working in a mental hospital for a few years. Right now I’m taking a well-deserved rest.”

I realized he was older, already out of school for some years, or he hadn’t gone to college. “Which hospital?” I asked.

“Up at Napa. They’re pretty sick up there.” He pointed a finger at his temple and made the crazy sign.

You came back with glasses on a tray. I made room for you on the couch.

“It’s a nice apartment,” Suzanne said, touching your wrist. “The carpeting and all.”

“A lot better than what I lived in at Napa,” said Keith. “They stuck us in these little cubicles, figured they could do anything to C.O.’s. Who’d care, right? And the food stank like a bad breeze. Val cooks much better; she’s good that way.”

“Do you have a job yet, Val? Are you still thinking about a teaching certificate?”

“I’m cleaning houses.” You lowered your chin a little when you said that. “I have eight customers already: old people, people allergic to dust, one’s in a wheel chair. I like helping them.”

“She’s getting twenty-five, thirty bucks a house,” Keith said. “Plenty for the two of us to live on while I reorganize my brain, get everything back into the civilian channels. It was a rough few years, you know. But Vallie pops up every morning, cheerful as a canary, and goes off to do her work. It’s female liberation.”

I didn’t know what to make of you. I wanted you to be studying law, writing new forms of poetry, tracking ocean currents. Still, if I could go back to that day right now, to that occasion, I would tell you it was wonderful that you’d found work already, that you enjoyed what you did.

We each saw you a few more times—Suzanne lasted longer than I did. Keith seemed to be always present, doing most of the talking, inescapable. I would leave your apartment hot with frustration; were you and I never going to have visits with just the two of us? I had so much still to learn from you.

One day you called to announce that you were going to be married. The little black holes in the telephone receiver stared at me until I said I couldn’t make it to the ceremony. You were quiet so long that I gibbered on about lack of transportation, other plans, all the reasons I was turning you down. I should have had the wit to stick to just one excuse. You started to speak loudly, in a way you had never done before, then paused. Then something very soft before you hung up, something like, “I’ll pretend you’re there.”

Before long I heard that you’d moved to the Sacramento Valley, and that was all. Suzanne and I faded away from each other, too; it was the normal way, before the worldwide web kept everyone snared together. Recently, when I saw Suzanne again, she showed me a picture she took at your wedding: you and Keith, facing each other, standing in sunshine.

Suzanne and I crossed paths last year, in a small Americana museum that neither of us had visited before. I recognized her very quickly, although she had dyed her hair black and wore an elaborate neck brace.

“A touch of whiplash,” she explained, after a cautious hug. “Let’s not go into it.”

We walked to the next exhibit and turned to each other. “Have you seen Val?” I asked it before anything else. I think you had never left my mind, you were always somewhere below the surface—although in my thirties and forties I was too carried away with teaching and the intoxication of free summers, the overseas wanderings, to be concerned with the past. Now that I’ve reached my sixties, questions of remembrance have begun to consume me: How do my early years join up with the present? What have I forgotten? I have no parents, no children. Who will tell me my past and carry the memories into the future?

“You think they’re still married?” I asked.

“Dubious,” Suzanne said. “But you never know.” We gazed at a re-creation of an old-time kitchen. A shelf over the Wedgewood stove held red and yellow spice tins; there was one for Colman’s English mustard that I was sure dated from my own lifetime, my own childhood kitchen.

“I don’t know what to hope,” I said.

From Suzanne I gleaned enough of the vanished facts about you—Keith’s last name, your stepfather’s name, your birthday—that I thought I could track you down. Within a week I had paid forty dollars to the genealogy site where I found you.

I called Suzanne on her cell. “Victory. She’s in Chico this very minute. They’re listed together.” The roar of distant traffic masked the sound she made. I think it was a little groan, or a cough. “Are you driving? Pull the heck over, someplace quiet.”

More roaring, dying away to static. “Good work. Nice to know she’s around.”

“Yes.” It was time to progress to my uneasy question. I framed it as mildly as I could; Suzanne and I didn’t know each other very well after our long hiatus. “So do you want to call her, or should I? I mean, either way.”

“How about if you do it? I’d really rather not talk to Keith, in case he answers.” There was a ripping noise and then a short silence. “Sorry, I had to readjust my brace. You’ll think I’m strange, but I’m not sure I even want to talk to Val. It’s good to know she’s out there, but…well, you know. I’m happy just to remember her.”

I guess that was the difference between us. Suzanne remembered things with so much confidence. She held all of it in her memory and was comfortable with her place in the world. I hungered for what you could tell me: what had I forgotten about Oaxaca, what was I like back then, what parts of me had you kept within you all these years?

~ ~ ~

“Amy. Yes. I remember you, all right.” At first I didn’t recognize his voice on the telephone. It seemed higher, more nasal. “Val’s asleep.” It was two in the afternoon. “She hasn’t been too well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Theories competed in my mind: you might have asthma, multiple sclerosis, cancer. Or—in a wild leap—Keith was deliberately keeping me from you, or had beaten you up. Your face could be purple with bruises, your teeth broken. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Kind of a chronic situation, but we do all right. I help her any time she needs it. I’m retired, see; I was a real estate appraiser, certified. You wouldn’t know that.”

“No, I didn’t.” His words reassured me a little; I eliminated cancer and beating from the list of possibilities. “Do you think…I was hoping that I could visit Val?”

“Sure, if you want to. Her mind isn’t the same, but you can come on out. You know we’re in Chico. Not the best place for a real estate appraiser, not a hot market, but we like it here. We have almond groves right next to us.”

My eyes had stopped focusing when he said that about your mind; all the outlines of my furniture collided around me.

Keith’s voice lifted. “Sure, you can visit. Bet she’ll remember you.”

~ ~ ~

I drove to Chico as soon as I could. It was May, and I feared it would be hot in the valley. After an hour I approached the wind farm at Altamont. The blades of the wind machines turned steadily. I knew that eagles and hawks flew into them and died. Hawks that didn’t die, that flew free, went about their business of killing other creatures—ground squirrels and rabbits.

I thought about what Keith had said, that you lived near the almond groves. I hoped they would be in bloom. I was glad that you were somewhere pretty. I wanted to tell you I was sorry for staying away from your wedding, and for giving you such awful excuses. I hadn’t thought of that phone call in years, but lately I had recaptured the memory of your voice, how you sounded in the face of my lies.

As I passed the first exit for Stockton, I turned on the air conditioning. You would forgive me, I was nearly sure, and it would relieve my mind. And then I could ask you all the questions I had, and you would answer them. Keith’s words ran through my head again: Sure, you can visit, bet she’ll remember you.

I drove through the valley, due north most of the way. The air conditioning made my eyes feel cold and dry. When I reached the almond groves, the blossoms had already fallen, replaced by nubby green fruits.

~ ~ ~

Keith’s face had fleshed out, smoothing over his chin and cheekbones. “So here you are, Amy.” He cut me an assessing glance. “Been a few years, hasn’t it? But I’d have recognized you.”

He didn’t put out his hand to me this time, just held the door and waved me into a narrow entryway. He led me to a square room at the back of the house. No pictures on the walls. The one window had a sheet tacked over it, to dull the sun, I suppose.

You sat, a smaller version of yourself, with your back to the window. I called out your name. You didn’t make a move to stand up. I moved close to you, I was about to hug you, but your face stopped me. You weren’t reacting at all. Foolishly, I glanced at your feet and found them tied into bulbous white sneakers. Keith had brought me a folding chair. I unfolded it and sat down, feeling a squeeze in my stomach. Just as in your Hayward apartment, Keith seated himself nearby, in what looked like the same armchair of forty years ago.

I looked at him. “What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Thought I mentioned it,” he said, with a pinch in his lips that was nearly a smile. “Her mind’s gone downhill.”

Your eyes stared across the room, pretty and opaque and unmoving. “But doesn’t she even…?”

“Alzheimer’s. If you’d showed up a few years ago, you two could have yakked away. But it’s still fine to visit; go right ahead.”

A cloth lay across your lap, and you were paler than before, your hair shorter and wirier. I rested a hand on the chrome wheel of your chair and peered into your eyes.

“Val, it’s Amy. You knew me at Picchetti High School. Remember? My hair was darker then. We took classes together and always had lunch together and we’d go to your house…”

“She won’t remember what happened yesterday, but the stuff from years ago is different,” said Keith.

“We were friends. You were a good friend,” I said to you. Your face didn’t change. As I watched, a string of drool slipped from your mouth and dangled halfway to your waist.

Keith stood up, took the cloth from your lap and wiped you clean. “I had a lot of practice with this kind of thing, at the hospital in Napa,” he said. He aimed a smile at me as he sat down again.

“I’m sorry.”

The smile stayed, aggressively. “It’s all right. I’m used to it.”

“We’d eat lunch at Aunt Myra’s,” I said, and brought out some details Suzanne had mentioned to me: “She had porcelain lamps with butterflies on them. And a fireplace. There were pictures of you on the mantel, and little crystal animals.” I couldn’t picture any of it, but I knew the words now. You kept staring into nowhere.

“She gets disability; it keeps us going. Once the kids were old enough, she worked at a clinic, you know.” Keith went on and I tried not to listen. I wanted to concentrate on you, to make your eyes change.

I was still looking at you, hoping to somehow pierce into you, when something Keith said caught my attention: “Didn’t you speak Spanish? You could try that. A different language goes to a different part of the brain. She spoke Spanish to people at the clinic, used it all the time. They didn’t pay her enough for being bilingual…”

I picked up your hand then and started to talk—somehow it was easier in Spanish—about afternoons at your house, Mr. Durban’s class, our summer in Oaxaca. I had only my dabs and flashes of memory, but I brought out all I could. I mentioned Santo Domingo and Hugo and the Indian laurels in the zócalo. I stroked your fingers, still long and elegant, and tried not to think about them holding a pen. You leveled your eyes on me and I went on talking, about gardenias and marimbas. I even sang you one of the marimba tunes, “Adiós, Mariquita Linda.” Your eyes were following me by then, with a new keenness. I got to the line that says, ya me voy para tierras muy lejanas y ya nunca volveré.

“Veré,” you said, with brightness in your face. “Volveré.” That’s when I put my arms around you, Val, and said how I’d missed you.

“Oh.” Keith slumped back in his chair. “That’s the first she’s talked since last week.”

“Volveré, veré, veré, volveré.” You bounced in your chair. Volveré. It filled me with joy, and I said it back to you. I will return. Although in the song it was nunca volveré.

Keith leaned in. “Imagine Vallie coming out with all this chitchat.” More drool was escaping your mouth, whitish this time, and Keith wiped it away again.

I couldn’t think what else to say. I wished Suzanne were there to reminisce about something—our classmates, your wedding, even your school clothes. I had a picture in my mind of your young, rosy face, your prize spectator pumps, but the clothing and body in between had been lost to me for years.

The room was growing warmer; I could feel a glow of heat from the covered window behind you. Keith was talking about one of your children, a civil engineer living in Colorado. “He graduated with honors and now he’s working on the top-notch projects, you name it. Highways, bridges…” You nodded a few times, maybe thinking of your son, and a little later you went back to staring at nothing.

“Aw, she’s tired,” Keith said. He got up and stood behind you, gathering your short hair back from your face. He moved his hands to the tops of your shoulders, and you tilted your head to rest against his arm.

I slid my chair back a few inches and watched all this. My cheeks prickled as though sweat were about to break out. Finally, Keith stepped away from you. “Come on,” he said, with his new voice honed to a point. “I’ll walk you out.”

He followed me to the narrow area near the front door. For a moment I wondered whether he would open the door for me or whether I should do it myself. He stopped and stood with his fingers laced, the point of his elbow leaning against the wall. “Too bad you didn’t get here earlier, a few years back.”

“That’s when it started?”

“Or if you didn’t live so far.”

I saw there were lines down his cheeks and next to his mouth. “It must be hard on you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m used to it. Hell. In the beginning she went around and smashed things, every picture we had on the wall. Took the photos of our kids and tore them to pieces.”

I thought I might faint. It was such a small space between those narrow walls and Keith and your front door. “Does her mother visit? Do you have any help?”

“Her mother stays home next to her pill cabinet.” He gave me a sharp look. “Nobody comes around; the kids live out of state. But it’s okay, I’ve been managing.”

I put my hand on the knob.

“We’ve been here all this time,” Keith said, as if to detain me. “Feel free to come back.”

~ ~ ~

The sunlight came down through the rows of almond trees with their young, green fruits. It would be dark by the time I got home.

I pieced together what I had learned. You had children, one of them an engineer. You’d worked at a clinic. Never got your teaching credential. I repeated these facts to myself as I drove.

You had torn up the pictures of your children.

There was so much that I would never know, could never ask. I passed Stockton and the sun began to set. I felt myself fading into the darkness of the highway.

A dead-animal lump appeared, and I veered around it. The lights of other cars had telescoped away into nothing. The road was treacherous as a dark sea; it would be worse in the consuming fogs of winter.

###

Lynn Gordon lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction has appeared in The Southampton Review, Epiphany, Ruminate, Baltimore Review, and Zone 3, among other journals.

The Lost Boy

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and Margaret has just come unstuck from time. She hasn’t realized it yet. She sits dead-eyed in the living room, staring at the dark television screen. Nathan had another choking fit last night. She can’t stop listening to the beep and whir of his heart monitor just down the hall.

He hates when she’s in the room with him. He told her that once, tapped it out laboriously on the keyboard. His electronic voice still wedges itself between her ribs: Why can’t you leave me alone sometimes?

So she finds herself perched here, on the couch. It’s as close as she can be to his bedroom without hovering in the hallway. Her back draws into an attenuated line. She sits, and she listens.

Time unlaces itself for her. The beads scatter across the floor of her mind.

She watches them roll and roll.

~ ~ ~

It’s that gray day in February that split her life into before and after.

The officers ask her what happened and she just stares at the wet soaking into the pavement and she wants to ask don't you have eyes in your fucking skull, but nothing comes out.

Instead her throat swallows itself like a snake finding its own tail. The whole sum of her existence disappearing, gone, just like that. Gone gone gone.

That snake lives within her now, picking at her piece by piece. Memory by memory.

Did you see it?

~ ~ ~

“Did you see it?”

Nathan is nine years old and obsessed. His little fingers spread open wide. They twitch, dramatically. One hand wavers a little more than the other, trying to draw her attention. 

Margaret squints at his hands. She focuses on the right one and pretends she did not see his left hand dip the coin down his sleeve. “No, I didn’t.”

A toothy grin. “That’s because I made it disappear.”

He has a whole getup: a top hat with its velvet worn off in patches, a cape covered in white stars, a spray-painted wand. They made the cape together one evening bent over the sewing machine. Nathan pricked his finger half a dozen times and got a tiny constellation of blood on the star-print fabric. It’s a brown splotch on his shoulder now.

She applauds him as he bows, deeply, sweeping his hat across the kitchen floor. He has just had a growth spurt. His pant legs sit high on his ankles.

In some ways, this is always how he looks in her mind. Her little magician, beaming before her.

Margaret couldn’t help her smile. “You’re getting good at this, you know.”

This particular hobby had lasted longer than most. A few hobby books turned into months and months of Nathan practicing alone in his room, standing in front of the mirror to get the sleight of hand just right.

His stare darts to his shoes, suddenly shy. He slips the coin out of his pocket and palms it from hand to hand, back and forth. “You think?”

She reaches for his shoulders and holds his stare. “I know it.”

It’s a rare moment of openness. They have become more and more fleeting, the older he gets. Soon she fears he won’t need her to smile and clap anymore. He won’t come looking to her for approval.

Nathan burrows into her arms for a brief hug.

“What do you like about it?” Margaret murmurs into his hair. He looks up at her, questioningly, so she clarifies, “Magic.”

Nathan thinks about this for a long moment. His heart pulses against her forearm.

Finally, he says, “I like surprising people.” He grins. “I like watching them try to figure out how it happens”

~ ~ ~

How did it happen?

It’s a late night in March. Hail taps against the hospital room window.

Nathan is alive, but only barely. He sleeps suspended in a bundle of tubes and wires. His face is still swollen and scraped. A cocoon of bandages pillows his head.

She can’t look at him without her breath buckling.

Margaret sits up and watches the monitor as he sleeps. She winds and unwinds the moment over and over again. Everything she should have done.

She has his cape in a plastic evidence bag under her seat. The police returned it with his other belongings, when they reassured her they would never stop looking for the people responsible for this.

Hours later, when she went home again for the first time in days, Margaret puts the cape in the kitchen sink and scrubs at it. Nathan’s blood blooms on the porcelain. It runs rusty down the drain.

But she never gets the stain out. It’s never quite the way it was.

~ ~ ~

It’s June, and Nathan is finally home again. He brings with him a legion of machines and pill bottles and catheters and a binder full of instructions. There’s no going upstairs again to his old room. Shame chews at Margaret’s belly but she knows she cannot manage it every day: carrying him and the machines up and down and up and down. Instead, Margaret’s father helped her gut the dining room to make way for the hospital bed. The dining room table sits in the garage, getting dusty.

Her house feels foreign and loud. That first day he is home, she stands in the open threshold of his new room, watching him, trying to make sense of who he is now.

“We’ll bring some of your old things down here,” she says, to fill the loud silence of the room. “Make it feel a bit more like you.”

Nathan just lies there, his eyes tracing circles into the ceiling. It is as if he is funneling the entire focus of his being into expanding and contracting his lungs. His hands crumple inward, curled up toward his chest. His muscles lock his limbs at strange new angles.

She walks over to palm the dark hair out of his eyes. Nathan looks at her like he’s searching for something. Margaret freezes and waits. He woke up three weeks ago, and he hasn’t spoken a word.

The boy just raises his right arm, taps his lips, and grunts. Water.

Margaret nods and pins her smile in place. She will not let him see the disappointment in her eyes.

“Sure,” she says. “I can get you some water.”

It’s early. The air is warm and yellow, and she is hopeful.

She still thinks they will overcome this.

~ ~ ~

The months tumble one over the next. Margaret’s life becomes a haze of tube feeds and catheter changes and linen changes. Her friends come over with casseroles and condolences, but, one by one, they drop off like moths in winter. As if they too can’t deal with the howling emptiness of the house. The relentless pulse of the monitors keeping him alive.

She learns not to answer the hall phone anymore. The thoughts and prayers evaporate, and now it’s only the hospital billing department, the insurance company, someone wanting money she doesn’t have.

Sometimes, she straps him into his wheelchair and brings him out to the garden to be in the sun. She heaves the monitor stand with one hand, all those wires a second nervous system feeding into him. 

He always sits there, wincing at the light, his face like a stranger’s.

Nathan is trapped in his own body, curled like a question mark. The doctors murmur uncertainly about the extent of his neurologic impact. She bristles and insists, “You don’t know my boy like I do.”

But his neuroreceptors aren’t flickering back to life the way she hoped they would. Nothing has changed. Nothing at all.

All this time, and he still hasn’t said a thing.

Margaret finds herself glued to his side, terrified of missing that first real word. She sleeps in the armchair she hauled to his bedside. She reads him books while he stares out the window. Like he doesn’t even know she’s there. 

So she decides to stop waiting for it to happen.

She drags the desktop computer out of her office and into his room. It’s a squat gray dinosaur, huge and unwieldy. She hands him the keyboard and wrestles the monitor onto a table beside his bed.

Nathan’s eyes widen and burn. It’s the first light she’s seen in them in weeks. He reaches out with his right arm and pulls the keyboard closer to him. His fingers won’t separate enough to touch individual keys.

She offers him a pencil. Nathan grips it tightly between his thumb and palm, like it is everything. He lifts his arm and leans forward as far as he can, lifting his shoulders a precious few millimeters off the mattress. He begins pecking at the keys one by one. She doesn’t know it yet, but this is the only way he will talk for the rest of his life.

The pencil slips out of his fingers when he’s finished. His eyes find Margaret’s, expectantly.

The screen says, Can I have a coin?

Margaret brings him the biggest coin she can find: a silver dollar, heavy but easier to grip. She stacks quarters on the sheet so he can reach them. He clutches the silver dollar between his fingers and turns it over and over. Drops it against his chest and picks it up, again and again, trying to let it tumble and leap through his fingers once more.

Every day, he tries and tries.

It is only a few weeks before Margaret walks in to find every coin strewn on the floor. Nathan lies on his back, glaring up at the ceiling. When she places a few coins next to Nathan again, he shoves them away, back to the floor.

“What’s wrong?” she says, staring around at the coins.

His scowl drills into her. He holds up his hands as if this should be answer enough.

Margaret offers him the keyboard, but Nathan just tilts his head away from her to retreat into the dark corridors of his own mind.

The coins sit on his bedside table for months, untouched.

~ ~ ~

For years, this is Margaret’s life. She has only Nathan and the void that he wraps around himself like a shield. He grows from a boy to a man, and the distance between them grows with him. When he is alone, he pecks relentlessly at his keyboard. But when she enters the room, he meets her with nothing but a wall of silence. His fingers lay still.

No matter how long Margaret hopes, his miracle never comes. There will always be that little divot in his skull. The little handful of gray matter that Nathan lost to the asphalt, when his skull met the ground.

That will never change.

It is a dark night in late winter when she finally accepts this. The snake has come alive in her belly again. It churns and hisses and winds itself tighter and tighter, until she’s half-convinced it will devour her next.

Margaret sits alone in the dim light of Nathan’s old room upstairs. She can never bring herself to change it. His Transformers still lie where he dropped them a decade earlier. His bed is still unmade. A museum to a boy lost to time.

No, she tells herself, as she often does. She hasn’t lost him. He waits downstairs, in the room full of machines keeping him alive.

She hugs the cape to her chest. If she squints, she can make out the amber spatter of the first bloodstain. It feels like a bad omen now. Like a warning she should have recognized.

She has spent hours upstairs, in Nathan’s old room.

In a box under his bed, she keeps everything that he had once been. Everything he could never be again.

His baseball mitt.  All the coins he can no longer tuck deftly against his palm. The ruined cape. The wand that snapped and broke on impact.

If she closes her eyes, she can still see it lying in the middle of the pavement. Nathan, face-down beside it. The red taillights of the car, already fleeing into the gathering dark.

The snake is a fat tight wheel within her. A tire screeching and turning and screaming.

But nobody screams as loudly as she does.

~ ~ ~

An urgent beeping heaves her back into the present.

Margaret pushes herself off the couch. It is 2:18 p.m., and she shores up fragments of time around herself as she stands, shakily. This could be any day of her life: this same lonely house, the same cry of some machine, summoning her back to her son’s side. Nathan will need his feeding tube flushed, his drain bags checked, his water cup refilled...

She can do nothing else but gather up the scattered spools of memory and bury them away once more. She will find herself digging for them again one day when she least expects it.

Like usual, Nathan is silent when she enters his room. His gaze does not waver from the video on his computer screen. This monitor is new, a slender LCD that casts Nathan’s face in shades of pale blue. The result of scrimping and scraping every penny she can from the social security checks that keep them afloat. His face has barely changed in ten years, even with the scruffy beard that he refuses to let her shave.

Margaret goes to the blaring feeding tube pump and turns it off. She asks him, “What are you watching?”

He snorts and points toward the screen. A clear enough gesture: look for yourself.

She tries not to let her stare settle for too long on his hands. Nathan doesn’t like to feel stared at. When she looks up again, she finds Nathan watching her with a familiar gleam in his eye.

That keeps her grounded. That is a mischievous look she could never ignore.

A smile tugs at her lips. “What?”

Nathan shrugs one shoulder and looks back toward the computer. But still he watches her out of the corner of his eye.

Margaret rolls her eyes. “Fine. Be coy about it.” She can’t keep the relief out of her voice. This is the first time he’s seemed interested in her in weeks.

She turns to take out the supplies for the flush from beneath the nightstand. There should be a basket with blunt plastic syringes and cups and a gallon of distilled water so she can clear his feeding tube. But she finds nothing.

Nathan plucks up his stylus and, after a few rapid taps, offers, “Try the kitchen.”

For a few long seconds she holds his stare. He raises his eyebrows, innocently.

The kitchen offers up nothing to her. Margaret returns, baffled and distantly annoyed, uncertain if this is some sort of game or not, if she should accuse her paraplegic son of trying to trick her.

But when she pushes back the curtain, there sits the syringe on the nightstand. Perfectly full. He certainly could not have done it in the minute or two she had been gone.

Margaret looks between Nathan and the syringe. Her smile warms her whole being. “How did you do that?”

What she does not see, what she will not notice until later, is the half-gallon of distilled water soaked into Nathan’s mattress that spilled from the jug hidden under his covers.

For now, there is only the small, delightful mystery, shrinking the gap between them.

The Nathan she has always known grins up at her. He waves his arms in a mimic of jazz hands and plays the answer he has already typed into his computer, as if he knew exactly what she would ask.

“Magic.”

###

Taylor Rae is a recently reformed mountain troll who is trying out city living. She holds her Bachelor's degrees in psychology and English literature from the University of Idaho. She can be found in most caves (or, all else failing, @mostlytaylor on Twitter).