Molly Dektar

Bay and I approached the farm at dawn. The first sun churned sideways through the trees, catching in the previous day’s rain, which the wind now shook down from the Carolina silverbells, the beeches, and the poplars. I rolled down the window and heard the forest fizzing.

When my son had both his arms amputated, he was less anxious about the recovery and more anxious that people wouldn’t like him. 



“Mom,” he said, “will people still like me?”



“I have no idea,” I told him.



He had gotten brown recluse bites on both forearms. On the left, a few inches down from his elbow. On the right, on his wrist. Only a very special boy can manage to get two brown recluse bites in the same afternoon, playing in a tame backyard. Calamine lotion did not work.



Now he has a stub of a left arm and down to the elbow of his right arm. He’s recuperating adequately. 



A neighbor gave us a three-legged poodle—as though everyone expects me to knock the legs off the chairs and tables too. My son is not doing as well as the poodle, who, according to the neighbor, recovered its ability to squat and poop mere hours after waking up from its amputation.



I spoonfeed my son. Oatmeal, ice cream. He flops his stubs around uselessly in their tight white bandaging and moans. 



“Shall I cut off my arms?” I say. “Anything for you, dear one.” 



“Tell me about my brother,” he says.



“Oh, your brother,” I say. “A sweet child. He knew how to smile.”



My son smiles.



“Would you look at that, a smile,” I say. “You know, your brother had so many arms he was always begging us to cut some of them off,” I say. “We never did.”



“Did you leave them on to punish him?” says my son.



“Yes,” I say.



“Mom,” he says, “will you close the window?”



“What am I, your slave?” I ask, but I do it.



“Never mind, I want it open,” he says.



While I’m opening it, he says, “What happened to my brother?”



“People without arms aren’t allowed to ask that question,” I say.



“I still have arms,” says my son.



“Your brother grew very lonely because everyone hated him because he had the wrong number of arms,” I say. 



“Mom,” he says.



“People hate people with the wrong number of body parts,” I say. “There’s no way to get around it.”



“Stop,” he says.



“Your brother had some run-ins with the law,” I say. “They had to call in special police forces to handcuff him, because of the unique situation with his arms.”



“I don’t believe that. Close the window,” he says.



I go to the window.



“Where’s my brother? Where’s Dad?” asks my son.



“One day, when I least expected it, they turned into brown recluses and left for the back yard,” I say, closing the window and returning to the kitchen, where my table is supplicating on the floor. 



In the evening, my chief activity is picking up things I’d already flung to the floor in a rage and flinging them to the floor again.



The next day, I painkill my son and sponge-bathe him. His little trainwreck of body. 



“It’s not true about my brother and dad turning into spiders,” says my son.



“Right-o,” I say. “Good one.”



“Tell me the truth,” says my son.



“You’re a great kid, everyone thinks so,” I say. “Despite your astonishing susceptibility to spider bites.”



“Do my brother and dad think so?”



“They love you more than I do,” I say. “And that’s the truth.” 



And finally one quiet morning the doorbell rings. The poodle yaps. My son, prone on his arm-rail cot in the living room, does not stir.



I answer the door. “It’s your brother!” I call to my son. “Your brother!”



It’s the man with the prostheses.



“I brought these for you,” he says to my son, pointing at him with four arms.

It was the first day of April when I took from a man of about my age (though, I noted, not as hot as my boyfriend at the time) the light burden of his left eye. It was an accident, or at least as much of an accident as it could have been.



By that April, all my friends had reached their senior years of college and I was still living at home in Tucker, being what my mother in a bad mood called a “waste of space.” I worked at a grocery store in Atlanta and took (stole, really) upscale breads for my boyfriend. I’d spent the winter realizing in increments how much I needed to get my life moving in some good direction.



My life had been wandering for three years, ever since I didn’t get into the college I thought I wanted, Davidson, a college my boyfriend in a bad mood called “pretty enough.” It shouldn’t have been so bad, not getting into the right college, but that angry envelope unleashed gales that whirled my unhinged life into confusion. I mean, it really did—two days after the letter came in the mail some pre-thunderstorm weather devolved into a thrashing windstorm, which threw a rotten tree onto our garage.



In response, I retreated into my own body. I began to skip school, to ignore assignments. I fell into an easily-sustainable pattern of squalor. I was never a drinker, and couldn’t stand the taste of my throat scorching with weed, but nonetheless (and how could this be more easily forgivable?) I got almost nothing done. I would come home from school and lie down in my unmade bed and take naps punctuated by naps, and I let myself grow filthy. I would wear a shirt for days until it grew soft and tempered with skin cells. I bathed in my own odor and kept the lights so dim my eyes stung. I lay around pantsless, putting black sharpie dots over every reddened follicle on my thighs. When I did have pants on, I could not keep my hands out of them. I was furious every day, outraged with failure. Sometimes my boyfriend would come over, my river-god, to slip himself like cool gelatin into my nest. At the time he shared my fascination with unscented products: he used unscented soap, unscented lotion, unscented detergent, and I would close my eyes and breathe in his unscent.



I went to Georgia Southern for a semester, failed to complete a single assignment—hard drive failure, I’d told every professor every time, angrily like they were to blame—and came back home, thinking I’d try again the next year. But I liked being close to my boyfriend, who went to Georgia State.



I stagnated. I remember one early summer walking down to the creek that ran in the woods of a neighbor’s land. The center of the creek ran slick and green, but the edges, snagged with branches and rocks, were sluggish from the mosquitoes that laid their eggs in the water, clotted white with foamy arterial plaque. The image personally disgusted me. I had to run back to my house.



But really things weren’t all that bad, those three years. I was making money; my coworkers couldn’t smell me through the smell of the bread. My boyfriend and I were compatible in a spiritually gratifying way. I helped my mother cook dinner almost every night and I went on walks when I wanted to feel sweaty and purged.



So along came this April of my mock-senior year. That morning at my grocery store, Fowler’s, the four women who came every morning to bake the bread unexpectedly made pumpkin-seed cheese bread, which was supposed to be seasonal. I took three loaves and texted my boyfriend, who didn’t respond. He loved seasonal breads mainly because he found the idea satisfyingly non-modern, and he’d always liked pumpkin-seed cheese bread. Pumpkin-seed cheese bread has these cubes of bright-orange artisanal cheddar baked into the center. It’s a bread that refines itself. I was driving home, wondering if it would be as good in the moist springtime as in the fall. I was looking at my phone to start calling my boyfriend when my side mirror lightly hit the bicyclist.



On the first of April, this is what I became. I became a girl who could clip a bicyclist with the right side mirror of her parent’s car, causing the bicyclist to swerve, hit a rock, flip off his bicycle like a plume of water sideways from a swiveling hose, land on the ground seemingly safe from damage, and then, after skittering forward a foot, plunge his left eye into the point of a broken sign pole by the roadside.



He was lucky—how easily, sighed the doctors, the pole could have perforated his head, piercing its metallic trail deep into the lax oxbows of his brain. Lucky! Yet I removed his eye, destroyed it. I could have just as well laid my lips on his soft socket-skin and sucked the eye from his skull, wet globe with fire-red contrail, mine to round out my cheek and keep smooth in my saliva.



As it was, I didn’t actually see the accident. I barely felt the bicyclist’s contact with the side mirror. He made less of a jolt than a squirrel. But I looked out the side window as I passed to see if I’d hit anything and I saw him lying on the ground, blood on his face, hideous. I remember my body trying to swallow itself. I pulled over to the shoulder. The pole, stolidly erect, was topped with gore like a gruesome candlestick. The man moved a hand to his forehead, to his eye, screamed. He had long curly hair and work boots with orange laces. I couldn’t stand the orange laces. I called 911, of course, which was not romantic at all. I called my mother. (My father, living his separate life in northern Florida, was left in the dark most of the time.) Along came an ambulance, and my mother, who said “Oh my god, god, god,” when she arrived at the crash, if that’s what it should be called. I told her to cut it out.



It was an act easier than pulling on a hat, and more enduring. I pulled his dead eye onto my conscience, immense and bleak and spherule, like an astronaut’s globe helmet.



 



I avoided people beyond the grocery store for a week, as my mother made phone calls. (This wasn’t actually much of a change for either of us.) After a week my boyfriend came over. “It’s all right,” said my boyfriend, stroking his thumb down my back. “He still has the other eye.”



“Fuck that,” I said, crying. “He doesn’t have any depth perception.”



“Who needs depth perception?” said my boyfriend. “I read that Rembrandt didn’t have depth perception, and it made him better at painting. And think how easy microscopes and telescopes will be for him now.”



My boyfriend used to be celestially obsessed, but astronomy had proved too hard in college so he became a psych major. And right now he was missing the point. Why an eye, of all things? It was so wasteful—after the bicyclist had spent his entire life keeping it clean. I could as well have crept to my victim’s bedside each dawn for the rest of his life and, as he slept, applied a pirate patch to his left eye. He will never again watch the goofy dissolve of a magic eye puzzle into its quilted window, the vibrating sparkle of glitter, the springing three-dimensionality of a stereoscope. Fuck me, that stupid bicycle, my fucking boyfriend.



 “Fuck Rembrandt,” I said.



“Did you take any bread today?” said my boyfriend. “Let’s put it in the oven.” He started to kiss my neck.



We had a mostly physical relationship. We didn’t make bread, of course—that’s what my boyfriend would call “too much”—but sometimes we’d heat a loaf up in the oven and then eat it in bed, in handfuls, hot. My boyfriend liked watching me get butter on my hands. I never knew why he liked me, and I used to think it was because no matter how messy he was, I was messier—how I didn’t use soap or warm water to wash my face, how I wore dirty underpants then no underpants at all, how I kept my room so chaotic that the bed was the only refuge. My boyfriend liked that I was always losing things, forgetting about things, scattering bits of myself (bitten fingernails, clipped hair). It turned him on. Anyway, he was not a “sweetie pie,” nor did he wish to “educate” me. I was the slut long before he was.



I wish I could say he was much too good for me, but really it was just that we had very little in common. “Bread,” I said. I tried to remember.



 “You can’t let this drag you down,” said my boyfriend. “You can get through this. You should keep making the effort to go back to school and stuff.”



“How can I,” I said. On this point I was acting more miserable than I felt. I thought that the bicyclist and his stray eye were bound to cause some change in my life. Just what I needed, I thought.



He kissed both my eyelids. He was so large and graceful. He had large hands and feet, hands he could cover his whole face with, a rangy body that would say “big cock” to people who listened for that kind of thing. I have never loved anyone more—just the sight of his hands made me pant. We heated up the day’s airy batard, tore it into pieces, and ate the fluffy center out together before we ate the crust. This was how he sympathized with me, and I felt it. Then we fucked with violence and generosity. Sex is what we had.



 



My mother did all she could do to deal with the crash. She spent so much time on the phone, holding the phone cocked under her ear while she washed dishes. I wondered if she was enjoying herself, wearing rubber gloves, rubbing the sponge hard enough to cast soap bubbles into the air against bowls that she could have just put in the dishwasher. It was unlikely she even noticed. I wondered what the insurance people thought of the clinking dishes as they talked to her.



It fell out like this: a misdemeanor, reckless driving. Four points on my license, which meant six months of no driving, because I wasn’t 21 yet when it happened. I got fined five hundred dollars, which seemed so slight it was ridiculous. But the car insurance rates flew so high that I wouldn’t even be able to cover it with the money I made at the grocery store. And because my mom had to go to her secretary job she wouldn’t be able to drive me to work. My boyfriend could drive me during the summer, but when the fall came, I would have to find a new job and public transportation to it—that was the hardest thing about it, from one angle.



My mother punished me by hugging me lightly and sighing.  Then I fried myself in the pan of my guilt.



 



I had been working at a nice grocery called Fowler’s for those two and a half years since I decided not to go back to college. I worked at the bread counter, and in the bread cooler. Four women came each morning at four in the morning to bake the bread as the sun rose. Customers liked to ask for bread recommendations, and I’d recommend whatever seasonal bread we had around that day. “Is it good?” they liked to ask after.



In the days after the crash I spent so much time hiding in the bread cooler, a square room behind the bread counter, that I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. The bread cooler was meant to keep bread cool and dry and maintain the internal lattice of yeast bubbles and the texture of the crust. The air of the bread cooler was scientific, modulated, carefully purified and locked. I liked sitting in there, picturing myself a seeded loaf in its most perfect atmosphere.



If I had gone to college, I would have studied something old, like Classics, I thought. The bakery and bread cooler were the most old-feeling places in Atlanta, so they didn’t taunt me with thoughts about how after that floppy collision the bicyclist’s world flattened out permanently. The Greeks ate barley bread and wine every morning and ate leavened bread at festivals.he Romans baked their bread in ovens with domes like temples and sweetened it with cheese or honey, and back then when no one bathed the world was flat for everyone. (I was lying to myself, of course, but it helped.)



Then dark-age monks and feudal lords would have had places like this. And the serfs at least had their bread to punch down when it rose high and soft. As a kid I called baguette crust “bark,” but raw bread, breathing and sighing, suedey and semisolid like buttocks, is so much more like bodies than trees. It is small bodies kneaded from edible clay. I’d sit in the bread cooler picturing sailors and warriors and smallpox-doomed girls passing ovals of edible clay through their digestion and building themselves up in its gradual disintegration and I’d think, me too. This sort of bread is built into our ancestral memory.



The air in the bread cooler was yeasty, fresh and lofty. Oldness pressed against me, and my eyes filled up with tears.



The bicyclist decided not to press charges. My mother called him “a darling” when she heard that. It’s possible he thought it was too much his fault for being so far into the road. It pained me that he should feel guilty.



 



During the May after the crash, my boyfriend and I saw each other much less often than usual. He didn’t tell me, but he was disgusted by the blood, or really the vitreous humour jelly, that I had on my hands. I could see his disgust in the way he refused to eat grapes around me. We used to love grapes. It occurred to me that we had a dirt-based relationship: I was the gorgon, he the hapless knight. Perhaps.



Despite the fact that I had ruined someone’s eye, life seemed to move on as usual.



In the shower I ran my fingernails down my legs and sloughed soft gray wads of skin cells into my fingernails. I caught a spring cold, collected my snot in napkins. I picked lint cream from my toenails. At night, I lay on my right side first, because my father had told me all the biggest organs are on the left, and if you lay on your left every night they will mash together and fuse in a heap. He told me sheep’s insides always do this. At night I imagined my organs hanging down in the emptiness of my right side, like Christmas tree ornaments pinned to my abdominal ceiling. The white clots drifted their tired way through my fingernails.



All that May, where was my boyfriend? My body asked me for him. As it turns out, I shouldn’t have trusted him with so much. (I never should have trusted him with so much.)



The fact of the crash seeped into my nonconscious body as well and I started to notice changes. I was having trouble sleeping. I couldn’t deal with the foggy noise of the air conditioner, switching on and off irregularly, so I wore earplugs. For a while I put an earplug in just one ear and slept with my unblocked ear on the pillow so I could hear my cell phone, which I put underneath the pillow. The faint sound of the air conditioning and my mother and the road leaked through the pillow like sounds underwater, like one of my ears was dead and the other one overfull with blood. But after a few weeks I tossed around too much to deal with just one earplug in, and I started using both. The wavering electric buzzing that my ears invented for themselves in the absence of sound would get to be too much and I’d pull the earplugs out most of the way, hoping for a little sound but not too much. I imagined myself floating through outer space in an astronaut suit—I’ve heard astronaut suits called the littlest spaceships—this is what outer space would sound like if something went wrong. It would be this body-deep plug right before all organs pop open and unravel in the absence of pressure, tongue unscrolling, eyes wetly bursting, body unfurling into globs of blood and muscle fiber, then disintegrating. In my two-earplug stage, I’d miss my boyfriend’s texts, which was just as well because they only told me he was busy with school. My tote bag filled up with dirty earplugs, orange-foam bullets.



My mother, after spending an hour each day driving me to work and then picking me up, decided that it might be best for me to go stay with my father in Tallahassee for a while. She hated driving after my crash, something I failed to notice, of course. Going to Florida was one of those drastic moves that had been nothing more than a bad idea since he separated from my mom during my sophomore fall and moved to go work on combat systems for General Dynamics. I’d never been down to visit him, though he came to Georgia occasionally. I gathered he spent a lot of time shooting and fishing with his equally masculine friends. I did not want to go live with him for the rest of the summer and the fall and the winter, which is what my mother told me I should do. I refused.



 



Finally at the end of May my boyfriend was available. My heart surged when he called. “Let’s do something special,” he said. Should we go to a movie? Go downtown? He suggested a picnic, which is why he ruled. He came to get me. Oh, smiling was so easy, and there was no need to mention all the times he’d ignored me.



We made up a picnic and put it in a canvas bag. We brought pain de campagne, a bastone, and challah. Among other things, we brought goat cheese, black olive tapenade, chicken liver pâté, apricot preserves, and gruyère, all from my grocery store. For dessert we brought crème fraîche and maple syrup. These seemed the only appropriate foods for a picnic. I miss myself, thinking about how I used to think. No wonder he had found sexiness in my messiness. I was messy as a body is messy, the mess of sweat and hair and the inevitable drift into uncleanliness. Looking back, I admire myself for my frankness, the frankness of eating chicken legs with my fingers, the rawness of cream-topped coffee yogurt, the foul richness of veiny cheese—these things I would eat in front of him, without a thought! I only realized as he was leaving me that it had always been him accepting me for who I am; it could never have been the other way.



We decided to drive up to Grant Park, which was a wooded wedge in a hilly neighborhood. We parked on the road, which followed the low creek, and hiked up a steep grassy hill. The white day sagged on the grass, straining red through its green. The top of the hill was clear and offered a view through the rumpled summer hills all the way to Atlanta. The sky hung low, dark and dense as pith, and against it the birds stirred up their usual racket. Their polysymphonic chirping, running through this liquid day like wire thread, spoke to me only of inevitability. It had taken me a while to realize that dimness, not brightness, makes coziness. Once I worked that out, bright light affronted me. I liked these threatening days, when the sky leans so low a spongiform musk covers all objects. My boyfriend and I sat on the grass and got our pants dirty, talking about school and the weather, but in the best way.



“Tell me about stuff,” he liked to say. As usual I felt the sweetness that came with being able to talk about whatever I wanted. My boyfriend, bewitchingly handsome on this viscid day, faked looking off distractedly into the distance. He was too smart or calculating to be ever actually distracted by the horizon while I was talking. (Thank goodness I was still worth listening to.) I told him about when I was little, how I used to draw landscapes where the sky was a blue strip at the top of the page, the sun a hairy quarter-circle in the corner, the ground a green strip at the bottom. Objects were always firmly attached to the green ground. What did I think all that white space was? I wish I had left that blue strip out—I wonder if I could have dealt with that idea, with no marked sky, while emptiness settles solid and heavy on each low form and crushes it onto the green edge.



Meanwhile, we glowed. Our skin was perfect and pellucid. I was a dirty, scattered person, and this weather was indispensible to me. My boyfriend knew it. It makes me irrationally sad that already then I was secondary in his life.



He breathed hot and buzzy in my ear. “You look so hot,” he said. He rubbed his hands down my arms and licked my neck. “You have the softest skin,” he whispered. It felt like he was hitting on me. I felt uncomfortable. Then his mouth tasted rotted-out, after he smoked. I could not get enough of that taste. I could never have gotten enough of that taste. I had not realized until then how utterly unimportant we were. An hour in, the sky licked down hot and thick and vitreoid, and we were devoured. It rained all over the bacon bits, the bread, the brie.



 



I didn’t hear from my boyfriend again for a week. My mother was getting fed up with driving, and she didn’t understand why my boyfriend couldn’t drive me, as he was done with school. She wrung her hands. I had to call in sick a few days in a row.



Then, as she had never done, she forced change upon me.



“I’m sorry,” she said one evening. “I think a change would be good for you.”



I knew immediately what she was talking about. “I’m changing!” I said.



“You’ll enjoy the warm winter. The wildlife is beautiful,” she said.



“I’ll get a bike and find a job in Tucker,” I said.



“Your father really misses you. And you can come back in December, I’d say. Just take a little break,” she said.



“I’ll get out of bed, if that’s your problem. I just don’t want to move.” As I said it, I realized how silly it sounded.



“That’s not my problem,” she said. “You’re a mess, that’s the problem.”



I was so surprised she’d noticed I almost didn’t feel hurt. Then I felt hurt. “I could,” I started. I could wear sleek leggings. I could cut my hair short as a boy’s. I could run my head, over and over, into a wall. I could cultivate a terrarium. I could tear pieces of bark from trees.



“No. I cannot tolerate you here any more,” she said. That was the forcing. I knew she’d feel bad about it someday.



The next week my boyfriend called me (he was right to call; it wasn’t really worth meeting up) and told me we should probably stop seeing each other. That didn’t matter, I knew—he would still be just as present in my life whether he actually was or not.



I ate the sand from my eyes, the scabs from my skin. I peeled flesh from the soles of my feet like skin off a fruit. The bicyclist’s single eye glittered at me. It was your fault, you eye, for changing things, I thought. The eye had added an unpleasant thought into our relationship—not a thought of the doom we’ll all face, my boyfriend didn’t think that way. More that the eye had set a palpable breach into our formerly sort-of-equal relationship. I had become a hero, not a good one of course, but at least a force of damage, a producer of real enduring consequences. My boyfriend enjoyed taking other girls’ virginities but it wasn’t the same. He was unmoored and would have loved to find himself in a situation as ends-of-the-earth as mine. Where before we could deal, when I had simply been attractive because I had lived in a puddle of my own making, a model of self-containment, the god that kneels in disguise at his own altar. Beyond the heliopause, I had been a place so empty it can only be itself.



 



Now I had no driver at all, so I had to sail away from my bread counter. I said goodbye to the four bakers on my last morning. Only one of them smiled at me. I stole four loaves of pain paysan, then my mother drove me home. There was not nearly enough ado, I thought, not even a dead tree falling onto our house.



Alas, I had been searching for human connection, and this is what I found; I connected with an eye. Guilt blew across my face and settled like snow.



And so I entered the slack zone of my life. When in high school or middle school I would get nervous for a test, this was what, unconsciously, I had been nervous for. When I was encouraged to study, to get up out of bed, to clean myself—this was the end everyone had been hoping I would avoid. It was only the bleakest comfort knowing that this state right here was the seeping center of my life, a black hole like my boyfriend had described to me once, which dilates time with gravity so objects seem to take an infinite time to fall in.



Six days before I left for Florida I made my mother drop me off at Wal-Mart so I could buy some toiletries. She didn’t ask (not out of delicacy; she wasn’t paying attention) why I wanted Wal-Mart, which was farther into town, instead of Target, which I usually prefer. I wanted the Wal-Mart because it was right near the stretch of road where I’d hit the bicyclist.



My mother dropped me off. I hastily bought a soap dish and three tubes of toothpaste—of course, I didn’t know how to buy toiletries—and then went out into the vast rainstained parking lot and down to the road. I walked along the grassy shoulder for ten minutes. The frank pale sky fixed itself in a glare. My mind hummed blankly. I could not connect this space (too little space, that had always been the problem with the bicyclist) to the ruin it had wrought. Walking, I reached a rhythm and became sweaty and came to another section of shops and parking lots—nail salon, pet supply store, shoe store, gym. In the vacant lot next to the gym there was a kids’ jungle gym and swingset, swings twisting above the tall gray grass in a foreboding attitude that stung my eyes. I was daring myself to go over to them when I saw a man coming out of the pet supply store. I don’t know why I looked at him. He was carrying two big sacks of dry dog food and a leash. He had short curly hair and walked weirdly with a kind of lope. As he got closer I could see his brown work boots, his orange laces—I already felt like screaming and then he turned towards me and his left eye was just gone, erased, blanked over with flat flesh.



My heart fell down but I didn’t scream. His blank socket looked dough-filled. It was a flesh-colored eyepatch, I realized. He kept staring at me. He furrowed his brow. I wondered why he was walking so weirdly, sort of stumbling, tottering like a giant avoiding stepping on the things far beneath him. He wasn’t looking at me because he recognized me (he never saw me properly during the crash, and never saw me again after). He was looking at me because I looked so afraid.



He reached his car. He unlocked the door and put the food in the back and I saw he had two huge fluffy dogs, those white ones with the hair matted over their eyes. They wagged their tails. He straightened up and closed the door to get into the front and looked up at me and smiled—the smile did not make him look any better. He smiled and I smiled (mine was the kind of smile I couldn’t have stopped if I had tried) and he got into his car. Then he drove away and the wind blew over me clean, clean, clean and I sat down on the curb without realizing I was sitting down and sat there for twenty minutes listening to the chains of the swings kill themselves in the wind.



 



My mother picked me up eventually. She drove me home. Then in my final five days in Georgia that June I did not go outside. (I could not go outside, my body binding me the best it could.) All my circadian rhythms messed up. I got a fever. I had ecstatic night pleasures that became cramps so severe they woke me up. I drank so much water, and peed it all out. It was sad to me, when I had learned that the feedback cycles in our bodies never rest. There is never equilibrium. Living is always a kind of pain, whether you have both eyes or not. A game for the restless: notice the itchiest place on your body and then scratch it. Immediately another itch will fill its place.



I lay in all sorts of positions on the bed but none of them felt any different. The bed heaved its weight against me. I imagined getting bedsores, their crawling progression, large mucilaginous scabs that crust over silkily, I imagined, like floured bread dough. Oh yes, I was soft. Soft as a medieval maiden, afraid to bathe to let the demons in. Soft as the fallen bird feathers I would find on the ground as a kid, that my mother would never allow me to pick up. Soft as the white pit of a pockmark. Beautiful as the lacy mold that creeps on moist leaves, plating them with ivory, coating them with tendrils. Harmless as the night sky wrapped in its dismal skyglow.



I missed my boyfriend. I pictured us: how we used to lie down and feed each other spit.



The sun would rise, then set abruptly, upset. My love for my mother churned me up, my mother who sat at the kitchen table under fluorescent lights, furrowed brow, reading glasses low, reading the local paper, frying herself an egg. These actions were not sad but they made me sadder than anything. She belonged to me only as much as an empty envelope, a pack of printer paper, a sheet of added-ounce stamps. Oh, I longed to hold her, almost as a lover would—at that time I did not know any other way. But I was perpetually bound to disappoint her, as the bread will never deign its sublime cooler air.



There was only the hope of spending the summer, fall and winter in north Florida, with my fishing father and his uncouth, beery bachelor friends—a prospect I faced with as much enthusiasm as I would face sewing myself into a pillowcase.



This is what I bear now, the jewelish ghost of some guy’s most beautiful organ.



I am left alone, holding this eye, opalescent jelloid sphere, swiveling itself to madness in my palm. Oh my ovoid child, my seeing stone, be still. You won’t get to see or scorch off the face of your son, and you won’t get to star an ancient person’s face, a solace in a shriveled moue. Unpaired, the exploded sun to a loose earth, no Greek trickster has ravaged you. My side mirror and the road’s pole—undignified end! At least we are each other’s complements, I try to think to myself. I am as fit, soft and beautiful as I will ever be. And you are rent through with iron.

Paul’s older brother Christopher died when Christopher was seven and Paul was just a baby. Christopher had gone down to the cellar searching for apricot preserves, the imprudent craving of a young boy who could remember a little too well the delight of a sugar-sticky mouth. But—and he had undoubtedly been warned of this—the wine, fermenting down there in the cool deep and swelling the bellies of its big round tanks, sent out its heavy pockets of flavorless, odorless gas, the secret feelers of the monster that trapped him on the floor. The whole town went searching for Christopher, up to the white church on the tallest hill, through the vine slopes and the slanted pastures, through gardens and kitchens and paddocks and even, presciently, down to the graveyard, but he was not to be found in any of these places. The father, thrashing down the stairs and holding his breath, found Christopher lying on the dank floor, frowning and pale as the dawn. He was not to be revived.



Now Paul sat in the kitchen, holding his hurt ankle, and watching the first apricots, delicate orange and swollen, tap against the windowpane. Paul was fourteen, and Christopher would have been in his twenties now, and married, and living in a cold stone building that the family would have built next to theirs. After Christopher’s death his father had put a lock on the cellar door, and his mother had put a small, blurred photograph of Christopher in a little silver frame from the jeweler’s in Alessandria, and Paul, at age four, had seized the frame and with an urge to reach its contents, its vacuous image of a small ghostly boy sunk deep beneath a fall lake, smashed it across the stone floor.



Now this morning the ugly sunlight edged through the windows and spilled its milk all over Paul, conveying with it a harmful level of nostalgia. With the girl Margaret here, Paul knew the sun would feel different. With Margaret, his old friend he’d seen again during this Easter break at home, it would feel like light, not failed sun, and so they would dunk themselves in its broad milkiness instead of sitting at the window feeling that the sun was veiled through a veil of memory. Paul felt the separation acutely, and was sick of himself.



The sun still felt white and wet like washed cloth from yesterday’s rainstorm. Yesterday a fast and monstrous storm had tackled the hills and scared Paul into running away. He’d tried to race the storm to the white church, that safe place on the highest hill of Cuccaro. He couldn’t escape, of course. But now the storm had vanished, and the morning sunlight slipped through the window and bandaged trapezoidal spaces of the kitchen floor and walls in white. 



Paul’s mother entered the room, as quietly as she did everything, pressed ground coffee into the coffee maker, and began pounding the air into milk for Paul’s coffee. Paul listened to her and looked out the window, at the first apricots hitting themselves against the glass. He did not want to turn around. He waited. 



In Paul’s bedroom there was a dead bee on the windowsill which had died a few months ago. During the worst of the winter, Paul had heard the bee buzzing against the pane for four nights, and when he looked the fifth day, it had died on the windowsill. It had been something so bright, so firm, so swollen, it seemed impossible that it would ever crumple in on itself, like any dead thing. But crumple it did, after a few months; its legs pinched together, the fine fuzz on its striped back diminished, its gleam rusted over.



Two nights ago, the night before the storm, Paul woke up (restless from his hurting ankle, and from thinking about the girl Margaret with whom he’d spoken in the garden that day) and saw the tiny dark bit on the mantelpiece, and in the vibrating dark he thought he saw it moving. The bee had been dead for months, and crumpled, and now Paul was sure it was moving. It seemed to be walking in circles. Paul pulled himself out of bed and ran down into the kitchen. The stone floors were terribly cold. They all wore slippers around the house (perilous not to wear slippers) but it had been too dark for Paul to find his. His whole life he’d never been to the kitchen alone at night, nor without slippers.



Now Paul had gone down to the nighttime kitchen to get a drink of water. He wished he could have drunk out of the faucet, but recently the water had gone yellow as urine and filled with black specks, as bad as it had been during the last year of the war, when Paul was ten.



The kitchen that night was quiet and cold and barren as a field. Paul’s hands shook as he took a glass from the rack. He felt like he was outside. He could feel the void of the sky inside the kitchen, like the walls were much too thin, like everything was shaking, about to fly apart. His feet stuck to the cold floor and made a wicky pattering against it that he feared someone outside would hear. He could feel the cold beaming up from his feet to his whole body, like lamplight pitched upward into fog. Margaret could have sat on a chair and steadied things, and he imagined her on a chair with him, but when he pulled her up in his mind she was a ghost on the chair, a mercury vapor light, veiled, horrible, and he banished her, because the real Margaret was not like that at all. He drank his water and crept back to his room. The bee was not moving. Paul hoped he was not going blind, like his grandmother, whose eyes were filled with clotted cream, who could not distinguish between dead moving bees and dead still ones, so long as they made no noise. 



Paul was back home at Cuccaro for Easter, and for the things that happened that week: Margaret, the kittens, the bee, the rainstorm and the next-morning sun. Paul spent most of his time at school at Alessandria, boarding during the week to save gasoline. Paul didn’t care much for his school. There the mattresses were wiry and lower, the conversation louder, the food much poorer. The floors were just as cold as at home.  Paul also didn’t care much for his home. And every time he came home, to his mother, his father (childhood polio had kept Paul’s father from dying in the war, though it had not kept him from farming) and his grandmother, he despised himself for feeling such discomfort everywhere. His parents spoiled him the best they could—when he was at home, they didn’t make him do more than feed the animals and water the new vegetables.



Only one of his old friends was back in town for Easter—Margaret, who had a face as homely as Cuccaro’s gravel path and languorous square: a short nose, a wide mouth, eyes that squinted up when she smiled, which was rare. She had always been so thin, so glum, making up mountains of lamb-filled pasta or potato dumplings with her older sisters and her mother (her father had died during the war, shot fighting in Dalmatia). One of her eyes had never quite lined up with the other. Paul wanted to see her.  It had been months. And many of the families with children his age had moved away, to Turin or Genoa, as the town population veered down to seven hundred from the thousand it had been in his parents’ time.



After the war, this was an infertile place. The land robbed itself. The cat bore kittens every year near Easter and every year she didn’t care for them and they died. The chickens made eggs with yolks as orange as the late sun, but only occasionally. The chickens groaned when Paul tried to collect their eggs.



Now they were all living under the air’s silent clamoring, this shaking memory of shaking, like after the ringing of a bell. It reverberated over the hills and through the fuzzy radio which recently had quit itself, through the rounded hills topped with small yellow-walled towns, this place to grow up with a distinctly horizontal sky and so many hills to tumble down under it. It was in the land and in the air, a grieving sense of the thing just swallowed now passing through the land’s insides.  



Paul saw Margaret on the second day of the break, as she walked towards the square and he towards home along the gravel path that ran down the spines of the hills.



“Margaret!” said Paul.



“Hello, Paul,” said Margaret.



“How are you?” said Paul. He was happy to pretend no time had passed, though it had been since last summer. She looked different, though, undefinably. She was weightier, taller, but in a way that kept shifting back to how he’d known her before, as if how she looked now was just outlines over how she ought to look.



 “Walking,” she said. “Walking along.”



Her voice, Paul thought, was very smooth and beautiful, even in dialect—a voice which would not be a disappointment to hear coming from over a high fence.



“It’s great to be home for Easter, isn’t it?” said Paul.



“Yes,” she said. She looked away, down the road. 



Paul was desperate for her to look back. “How has school been?” 



“We’re making dumplings,” she said. “I ought to be peeling potatoes. I went for a walk. I didn’t mean to see you.”



“Oh,” said Paul.



She looked at him. She smiled. “I ran into you, though,” she said.



“I’m glad to see you,” said Paul.



“We ran into each other,” she said.



“Yes, yes!” said Paul. “What a nice day it is, right?”



“I have to go do the potatoes, or I’ll be scolded,” she said.



Paul took it all as a good sign, even though as she walked away she began to run. 



Paul couldn’t wait to see her again, he realized, as he walked home along the gravel path. 



The clotted veins of the grandmother, her cheese-white forearms filled with soft dimples—this was how he knew women. His quiet mother, with dark, gleaming hair, whose hands were always floured (it always seemed intentional), like she was trying to fade away into part ghostliness, like she could touch her son who lived in the other place—the place which Paul defined as the place you see when you carry a mirror around in your hands and navigate your house by looking at the ceiling, the place of broad colors you can see in a reckless way when blindfolded, the wind that blows out from the balcony in a joyful way over the fields like the hugest most invisible bird, the place visible through the sifting flour, through veiled sugar (veiled sugar, they called it, not powdered) falling on cake, a place where Paul thought his mother, with her floury hands, could reach. On the other side his brother Christopher would just see those hands emerging out of brightness and they would stroke his cheek and his hair and hold him and come back to this earth washed clean with tears. 



Paul’s mother was always crying, in a squawky way, like a dark bird. In the summertime she sometimes sat in a white plastic chair on the patio with no top on, sunning herself, and those dark oblong folds came down low on her concave chest completely unconnected from any thought of nourishment.



But everything was like that, even the pasta boiling away in its salted water, that swelled up so delicious sometimes it made Paul cry, though he pretended it was the steam—each piece was always so small, each bowl so close to being finished even at the first bite. Paul dreamed of the thick rich mash of risotto, threaded through with kneaded cheese, pots and pots of it on each burner of each stove in Cuccaro, and of an infinite egg custard and the warm thick grainy sugar of corn semolina pudding, made all with cream, not watered-down milk, things with no pieces.



But at home such rich foods, when there were any, went first to Paul’s mother and grandmother. Sick was needier than young, Paul learned, and palliative more important than strengthening. 



On Easter, though, they ate a high cake shaped like a dove, some before church and some after. Paul’s father gave him the best part, the top all crusty with sugar, and dunked the soft center in sweet wine.



There was never a priest at the white church, not even on Easter. Everyone attended services at the orange brick church in the center of town, the church with the flat bell face that Christopher Columbus’s family built. Margaret was there, with her sisters and her mother, and they took up one pew but left room for their father, whose ghost, it could be assumed, had found a way back from the anonymous flowered Dalmatian field where for him the world had shaken a little too hard to keep its pieces. Paul’s family sat on the other side, Paul could feel his pulse or the trembling of the ground through his thighs on the hard pew, the sun made trapezoids on the stone floor and revealed dust in the air, the women wore lace and murmured Ave Maria sixty times (Paul always wondered if they were actually counting; their words blended into a numberless throb, like bees) and then the priest spoke for a time always much shorter than Paul expected, and then they all felt the wine sink deep into their tongues.



There were never services at the white church. And it stood on the hill so bright, so firm. It seemed like it would never crumple in on itself, like every dead thing. Up on the hill, it felt like something visiting from a separate place. It was a square moon sunk into the land. 



Paul had only once been inside. He’d been with his friend Mark, whose family had given up farming and moved to Turin to work on automobiles. Mark had noticed the hinges of the left door were so rusty they were getting pulled down by the doors’ weight, and they were so curious they spent an hour wiggling the left door and forcing against its hinges (each time, it shrieked horribly) until they broke it away and pushed inside.



It hadn’t felt like normal air, like the air outside or in other buildings. The air had been heavy and sweet as soil, touched through with glorious light from the high diamond windows, rich with the smell of growing things. Birds flew in and out. Both boys had felt fearful and they hadn’t stayed long.



The next week Mark and Paul coaxed Margaret and one of her sisters to come see it too but both doors had new hinges, bright as silver, in which they could see reflections of their stretched-up faces and all the trees collapsed in behind them like an accordion. The doors were locked shut and would not open.



They ran back home instead, along the gravel path on the ridge that connected the white church to the rest of the town. Paul had fallen on that gravel path and skinned his knees more times than he could remember. He didn’t mind falling because falling was always preceded by that moment, right when he felt he was running so fast he couldn’t stay up, when he ran so fast he started tipping over, when he felt the beginning of flight. Then he’d fall and smash his knees and sometimes his hands and his face, and if he smashed them hard enough when he walked back the grass would turn white and the sky would fill with black explosions and still things would start to move. 



It was on the afternoon before the dead-bee night that Paul ran into Margaret again. He’d gone to the store in the square to get bags of ground corn and dry pasta. His mother had gotten him new stiff trousers for the holiday and his legs itched around his knees and ankles. As he went up the gravel road he watched the blue bus walking smoothly up the hills. There used to be two buses, but the war crushed one of them in, so now there was just one. The Alps smoldered quietly far away. The sun came into the dry-goods store and rang off the thin crinkly plastic bags of dry pasta.



As he came out of the store, he saw Margaret on the road, holding a piece of red ice on a stick. On the road, she walked, with her hair with its wheat-furrow parted so straight. She blushed delicately, on purpose Paul thought.  



“Margaret! How are things?” he said. 



She looked to the side. “Good morning,” she said.



“What are you up to?” said Paul.



“Do you want this?” she said, holding out the ice. “I don’t like it.”



“No, thank you,” said Paul. 



She let it drop to the gravel ground and laughed. She was wearing a yellow dress and yellow socks folded down over her sandals. Lovely—she was very lovely. Her eyes did not interest Paul as much as the way they crinkled up.



“Well,” said Paul. “I have to bring these things home. Would you like to come?”



She looked out over the hills, at the blue bus creeping its way to Lu. “I should be helping my sister,” she said.



“All right,” said Paul. He stood there for a few minutes hoping she’d change her mind, but she didn’t speak, so he turned to start walking back to his house. She started walking along with him.  She hummed a little as they walked. Paul worried about what they would do when they got to his house. He’d show her the kittens, he decided—all four had still been happy and in their box when he’d checked on Easter. And he’d offer her coffee.



They arrived at the house, unlocked the gate, and went through to the garden, where the apricot trees and cherry trees and new-planted squash and tomatoes met them with their reeling turmoil of color and scent. Paul went around to the shed to check for the kittens, but their cardboard box was empty.



“Early apricots this year,” said Margaret.



“We need to find the kittens,” Paul said.



“Why?” Margaret said.



“Because they’re not in their box,” Paul said.



“Why not?” Margaret said.



“The mother cat never takes care of them,” said Paul, rummaging around the zucchini pots more and more quickly. “Here, help me find them,” he said.



“I’m sure they’re fine,” Margaret said, sitting down in the plastic chair and closing her eyes.



“I don’t think they are!” said Paul.



“Fine,” said Margaret, reaching out to touch one of the apricots.



Paul saw a bit of gray next to one of the tomato stakes. His heart beat fast. He reached out and grasped the kitten out of the cold dirt. It was limp and very dead. He held it delicately, then realized he didn’t have to.



“Margaret! See?” said Paul, standing up to show her. 



She wouldn’t look at him—if she wasn’t crying she certainly looked upset enough to be crying. Her eyes were squinted up. “I’m going to leave,” she said.



“Stay,” said Paul, hiding the kitten behind his back. “I’ll make you coffee. We’ll put cream in it. And we can take a walk.”



“No,” said Margaret.



“Well—” said Paul.



“I hope to see you soon,” said Margaret, like she meant it. 



Margaret left and Paul squeezed the kitten and put it behind a tree, then went into the kitchen and took out the sifter and the flour and sifted through the flour and watched it fall. It hissed like a breathing thing.



The apricots outside the window were small and firm. He wondered how it was that apricots don’t need to be fed apricots to grow apricots. He wondered how they formed out of the dirt, what was under the dirt, and what was under that. Certainly there were things under it, moving things and buried things and things both at once.



Paul got out of his chair, too miserable to stay still. His mother was upstairs sleeping, where she spent most of the day, and his father out in the fields. He felt the freedom of an empty house. So he hit his head and arms and legs against the stone ground and pressed himself into corners and bruised himself pulling the table onto himself but he could not find something that would resist him all the way. He went outside to the garden where the earth was plowed up to receive the zucchini seedlings and he plunged his thin arms into the dirt. He put his face onto the heavy clods. He lapped at it like a cat at milk. He pushed the soil into his mouth. He felt lost in his dread. It was dread, this heavy feeling, that made the sky feel like something he could fall into, too dangerous to look at with a mirror, dread that made things shake as if they were going to fly apart. Nothing was working, so he decided to run down the gravel path to the graveyard. At the graveyard there was a little round photograph of Paul’s brother under glass, on the front of his upright grave. The photo, and the flowers planted in baskets and placed on the stones with no way to root into the actual earth, usually kept Paul far away. 



But as he ran closer and closer to the graveyard he realized that he wasn’t tired at all, and he wouldn’t get tired, and he could run to Alessandria and back, if he wanted, if it weren’t so boring. So he turned and sprinted back to his house, steady and lost in dread, this monster, like a sky, thickening everything into shaking dimness.



He went back into the kitchen (stiff trousers ruined), found a heavy glass and the cellar key. The cellar was safe this time of year; the grapes were still tiny and green. He went down the stairs to the cellar, past the dusty jars of preserves and bottles of wine, avoided looking at the tanks which had watched Christopher die, and went to the winter storage room, where no one would come for months. 



The glass was heavy and sweaty in his hand, and he regretted that it was empty. He threw the glass at the ground and watched it smash. Then he picked up a jagged piece of the glass and dragged it over the soft pits of his ankle, where no one would look. But his skin beckoned the glass painlessly, and the knife embraced back, and everything gave: not what he wanted at all. Paul went back upstairs, neglecting the blood, which would not show on the floor or the steps once it dried.



The next day the storm came. 



The morning after the rainstorm, Paul sat in the kitchen by the window, in a crooked wooden chair with an embroidered seat, and watched the pale gold apricots bounce on and off the windowpane in the wind. They made light meaty thuds against the window, but they wouldn’t break it. They split the sunlight into ghostly shapes on the glass, dirty shapes that, where they caught on the dirty edges of dried raindrops, were bright as the sun. 



Paul listened to his mother walk softly into the room with her slippers. He smelled the fervid smell of coffee rushing out of the canister in her hands. He listened to her push a whisk through milk to fluff it up for him. He thought of Christopher: how easily his mother would have spent twice as many minutes every day fluffing up milk for both of them.



Paul thought again of Margaret. He was sure she would know his shaking dread, if he could explain it to her. He thought over and over the thing that had happened yesterday when the storm had come.  He had been next to Margaret and he had felt a heartbeat either in his hand or his neck or in her hand or her neck—a heartbeat. She would say that the earth’s deep, pitless throb was its heartbeat, even if the rhythm was spaced in such a way that they could not feel it, only because they were inside it. A heartbeat with neither heart nor beat, for all things are veiled and unveiled—the sky, shaking from misted to cloudless, the cold stones and the compost heat, the grapes, the floating poison, the boy dead on the ground, his brother. Paul felt his throat.



He looked out the window. Past the apricots he could see the hills—steaming up in the early sun, pale green fading in the distance to pale blue, where they blended into the sky like watercolors. He could hear the chickens, and the jangling of the horse’s bridle in the paddock. Paul wondered what it would be like to be everything, both wondering and feeling what it would be like to be everything, hill, beast and sky. The hills swelled up and almost breathed, neither asleep nor awake.



This is how it ends: with everything, everything, feeling different to him. 



      Yesterday there had been a terrible sudden storm. Paul had been in front of the house, having found the last kitten dead next to the outdoor sink. He lifted up the kitten, which was soft and wet and only as heavy as an egg, and turned to look down at the garden and the hills to see if he could see his father. He didn’t see his father, but he saw the sky had changed.



A curtain of rain quickened across the far hills—immense, gray, trapezoidal. A tin whirligig flapped haplessly on the balcony in vertiginous circles. A crew of black birds rose from a cedar, cawing, and tilted off over the hills. The rain was coming up fast, ghoulish, bigger than any monster Paul had seen before. He gaped at it.



Paul watched the rain patter up the gravel road, darkening it bit by bit, more terrifying than the darkest night. He needed to be with someone, to find someone with whom he could turn this horror into wonder. He scrambled backwards, ran out his front gate and to the right, towards the shop and caffe at the dip at the center of town, past the small crooked fountain and up the far hill, towards the small white church that stood on the flatness of the hill’s center, surrounded by lowering layers of narrow black-trunked trees. It was a long run up, past the highest houses. Paul’s left arm ached, and his ankle.  He had a jagged stitch in his side. Bits of trees and plants blew over the hills hard enough to knock tiles off roofs or horses to their knees.



The church door was locked. Paul sat on the small stoop, the smell of rain hitting dust rising against his limbs and face. He felt terribly alone. Then his eye caught on, or predicted, almost, a young body coming around the corner of the church. Margaret, of course. 



“Margaret!” he yelled. “We need to get inside!” 



She didn’t ask why. The branches were about to fly off the trees. His panic inflamed her panic. They needed to get out of the storm. The countryside was blowing in around them, erasing them.



They slammed themselves against the doors, which would not open.



They worked frantically at the doors. They battered against them like their wood was made of longing. They slammed their fists against the heavy dark doors and against the rusty hinges, as if they were going to break into the other space. The rain wet their ankles. They were maniacally terrified of the storm. As they pounded at the doors, cracking one a little, tearing at the splinters, they moved into what they would both consider the best kind of meaninglessness, the meaninglessness of oneness, where nothing else needs to be said.



Finally the distance was so thin he broke through and clawed her out. They clawed each other out. They yanked at each other, like wrestling. They yanked each other through the opening they’d made in the door. The splintered door scratched them with its claws. They bled, and they lay on the ground. They waited. The storm ceased—gravel to sugar to nothing but air.



As his terror faded, Paul began to look around. The ground was covered with dim moss. Soft things moved in the corners. What stones there had been had mostly rotted away or washed away. It was different from what he remembered. Maybe it was a house, not a church. They’d all always thought it was a church. Maybe it was a house.



For a little while, Paul thought, this! This was the other space. Where was Christopher, and his mother’s hands? 



But of course when he looked around—there was only Margaret.



The half-circles of sun, modulated with shadow, rocked delicately across the floor. And soon enough Paul felt discomfort. He hated himself—even here, even now, he could not hold up the sliding cielo of dread. He felt fear dangling all around him, dawdling dark shapes that evaded his blind grasp. He began to know that lying here in this space could not be the solution. They were inside something, and interiors must not be the solution, Paul felt deep down in his heart: interiors and burials, even in the richness of blackness, even in this shut space where the air sank down heavier than water or skin and embraced them, even here engulfed in the mantle of this glorious moon.



Meanwhile, the birds flew in and out above them. It was clear when the sunlight struck them that the feathers on their wings were perfect. Their feathers overlapped their feathers gray into milky white, their quills fine as brushstrokes, their bodies firm, their inky black eyes and gnarled feet blooming, their contours elegant and unruined as a pen line on a white page. And Margaret said, “I bet those birds can see the hills.”