We found it behind our school, in the alley the four of us liked to roam late into the night, after I dared Jesper to leap into a blue dumpster. “Fine,” he said, boosting himself up, jumping in. He landed with a squishy splash. “Sometimes people find things in dumpsters.”

“We have better things to do than to jump into dumpsters,” Colby said, “where things might be found.”

And while this was true, it was also true that I had dared Jesper to do it, and a dare was a dare. Even Colby couldn’t argue with that. Last week, Antonio dared Colby to kick the burnt-brick exterior of the school gym, and he did, even though it meant he was now hobbling around on a single crutch and had a grey boot on his right foot.

“You’re going to find things alright,” Antonio said, his voice cracked apart by the puberty we were all in the middle of. “Like slime and grease and the discarded remnants of chicken wings.”

Just then, Jesper grunted and held something in the air, his skinny arms trembling.

“What the hell is that?” Antonio squeaked.

It was garish in the gaze of the streetlamp and looked heavy. “Help me,” Jesper said as he tried to balance it on the dumpster’s lip. Colby hobbled over on his single crutch and Antonio rushed past him.

“Help!” Jesper said again, and just as Antonio, Colby, and I reached the dumpster, Jesper lost grip and dropped the thing over the dumpster’s edge. I watched it tumble through the air, end over end, and as I inspected its weird sheen, its cylindrical shape, it crashed into my head with a heavy crack and sent me crumpling to the ground.

“Ouch!” I said, and heard Colby and Antonio also say, “Ouch!” because I guess it had bonked into all three of us at once. I squirmed on the ground, and when my head stopped throbbing so bad, I looked over. Light blared over Colby, highlighting his thinning blond hair as he writhed around. Antonio was motionless, splayed out on his back, limbs in all directions.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

The house sat on the shore of the lake with a bald, open face. It was wide and white with a black front door and blacker windows, two gaping eyes on the second story that blinked with the flutter of pink lace curtains. The roof lumbered to a lazy gambrel peak and the siding was warped and weathered grey where the paint had long ago peeled. The house was older than the girls, but not by much, and it groaned and ached when they ran through it, barefoot and pigtailed, naked skin against wooden bones.

Outside the house, it was August, summer’s death, and the stiff heat held them like a coffin. The air was still and the light slanted regardless of the sun’s height, gold and swollen with a life it would soon lose, sinking through the blue sky in tandem with leaves just beginning to yellow. Before long the sun would be distant and cold, small and white, but this was no longer of the girls’ concern.

Nancy sat on the dock with her feet dangled in the water, a water snake looped around her ankles, the house watching her from behind. She couldn’t feel the wind, only her sweat. Carol shrieked, sprinted through the grass as Mary chased her. It was so hot not even the moths beat their wings, stilled as a broken heart, and the shadows were dark and thick enough to hold secrets. The old stone cellar behind the house was the only cool, dry place, and it held the bodies that would soon begin to smell.

Carol, having escaped Mary, ran the length of the dock to Nancy. The water snake floated away to weave between the shoreline rocks, its body spined with diamonds of rust, glittering with water and the creature’s own scales. Though it was not small, it was young, for it had yet to turn black with age. Carol sat down and pushed her wet hair from her cheeks and watched the snake with Nancy. The snake slowly brushed against the rocks as it went, inch by inch, its skin catching, pulled from its body until the hollowed silver ghost was entirely freed, a delicate lace on the surface of the lake, the skinned snake gone until whenever they’d see it again.

“A gift!” Carol clapped then, and she jumped from the dock to fish out the skin. She held it up to admire it, and it shimmered with sunlight in return. “Mary!” she shouted, and Mary looked to the lake from her spot in the oak tree where she hung upside down from a low, dead branch. “A gift!”

Mary fell from the branch and landed on her feet. She bound over to the dock, naked because she could be, the crooks of her legs scraped and jeweled with blood.

“If only ours had been so pretty,” Mary said, gently taking the snakeskin from Carol. “I’ll dry it from the rafters with the rest of them.”

The front door was open in greeting and Mary slid a tender palm along the wall as she slipped into the kitchen, the house creaking smally in response to the soft patter of her feet. Mary hummed to herself or the house as she climbed onto the kitchen table, her hair hanging long over her chest in tangles—she’d get Nancy to comb it for her, later before bed. Gently she draped the skin over the rafters and it shone and twinkled, a crystalline chandelier to light their dinners.

“There you go,” Mary said to the house, and a crow, perched on the windowsill above the sink, looked at Mary and then the snake before flying off when the hounds began to call. It did not fly far, just to the oak, for it was too hot to be startled away.

The house was on a hunting lake and the men used hounds. The hounds’ moans would rise from the woods that circled the shallow, tourmaline basin and the sound would echo across the water towards the house, drift up the shore and through the halls. From the kitchen Mary heard Nancy outside wail in return, Carol soon joining in. As though called Mary jumped from the table and ran to the door, stood on the threshold of the house to watch as Nancy and Carol danced on the dock as though the two were floating above the water, held fast in the thick light of the dying sun which cast the shadows that were dark enough to hold their secrets, howling not at the moon but the sky and the lake and the woods that surrounded it. As Mary stood, not quite outside, the heat pressed towards her, warm and familiar as tongues or the palm of a hand against her skin. But still, Mary felt light, as untethered to everything as Nancy and Carol were on the dock above the water, and as she stood in the mouth of her house she reveled—as she had every day for the last unknowable days—at all that the change had given them.

Mary could not remember how long ago it had happened, but she remembered all of the years that had led up to the change, and she remembered the summer when the change occurred, a summer nearly as hot as the one they lived in now. Days before it, when Mary was not yet young, her body had felt as though it were a dead thing as she laid on the bed in a circle of sweat. Bill had stared at her while he lit a cigarette before he scanned the floor for his belt. Mary’s arm dangled off the bed and blood jellied between her legs, the white linens stuck to her skin and soaked translucent, stained beneath her back like grease rings on parchment paper.

“I wish you would have told me you were on your period,” Bill said, exhaling smoke, the room and Mary’s body turning hazy with it.

Mary shrugged against the bed and watched the ceiling fan spin, the smoke and sunlight and dust swept up into the same unseeable particles of nothing. “You don’t mind,” she said, and the words were swept up too, up to the ceiling, flattened against the mauve-painted walls, slipped in loops around the tarnished gold bedframe, fluttered through the pink lace curtains, for though it was hot it was not so hot that things couldn’t still move through the air. Mary had had the bed and the room since she was a girl but now it was the guest room.

With his pants still unbuttoned Bill rested his hands on his hips and looked out the window at the lake, pearls of laughter coming in through the screen. A row of glossed porcelain cats sat on the sill baking in the summer sun, pink-nosed and milk-white and spotted grey.  On the dock, martini glass in hand, Nancy danced to nothing but the sound of the water lapping against wood and sand and rocks. Nancy’s husband, Frank, and Carol’s husband, John, were sitting in lawn chairs smoking cigars.

“Still.” Bill shrugged but didn’t say anything further. He zipped up his pants and buckled his belt.

Mary stood then, the sheets a second skin peeled from her body like a sunburn. She was warm, her cheeks red, and she didn’t care much about Bill. She looked in the vanity mirror framed with little white bulbs, photos from her childhood bent and creased and taped in the corners, an illegible love-note that still smelled like perfume yellowed and peaking from an unstamped envelope.  Despite being wet with sweat her skin was dry—old. Her bones were the same as they had been in high school when she had sat at the vanity getting ready for Friday nights, but her skin hung different, as if it didn’t quite fit, or it simply wasn’t hers. This period would probably be her last, she thought, and Bill should be grateful. He never was, but then again, none of them ever were.

“You’re bleeding on the floor,” Bill said and the bed springs groaned with his weight as he sat on a clean edge of the bed.

Mary looked down. She was bleeding on the floor. The blood formed small, perfect circles on the flat grey carpet that used to be white. Mary shrugged at it then but, as she looked at her blood, the air in the room seemed to clear of the smoke and the dust and the light. Everything seemed to show itself at once to Mary but she did not yet know what she needed to see. So rather than study her blood she once more studied her face in the mirror and while she did so she thought of nothing; she did not think about how they had come on this same vacation every summer for years, nor did she think of all the things she had dreamed up when she had been a girl sitting before the same mirror. Mary would soon leave the room that was now a guest room and ask Nancy to make her a martini, and the three couples would slip into the evening like the blood down her leg. They’d have dinner in a dim kitchen, the night coming in through the windows louder and closer than they, and when it was time to wake Mary would walk past the vanity on the way to the bathroom and not spare it a glance, not for fear of seeing herself but because it seemed too much to remember youth. It wasn’t the love letters or pink cheeks but the wild hope she once held, all she had imagined when she had laid in her bed on summer nights clear and bright as the moon.

That wasn’t, however, what had happened. When Mary woke the next morning it was in the blue hour, dawn hardly reflecting in the lake, and Bill was as pale as death in the nascent light. Although his skin appeared to have gone cold Mary could hear his warm, wet breath and she looked through the shadows to find what had startled her out of her sleep. At the foot of her bed was a child of about seven, her face hidden by tangled hair, her body naked though her skin was not the same blue as Bill’s, the moonlight not reaching her small feral frame. She held in one hand what appeared to be a blanket that trailed behind her. Mary, whose kids were grown and no longer visited the house, assumed, at first, herself to be in a dream, but nonetheless she spoke to the child.

“How’d you get into the house?” Mary asked, hushed with breath held, but the girl only giggled then quickly clasped a hand over her mouth. Mary shifted in her bed in unease and as she did so she realized her sheets were wet; she must have sweat during the night, the bedding sticking to her skin. She felt the sheets peel from her back as she sat all the way up to get a closer look at the girl.

“Mary,” the little girl whispered, and Mary’s skin crawled although she couldn’t quite feel it. Her heart beat and she suddenly felt charged with the knowledge of something light and impossibly free.

“Mary,” the girl repeated.

Mary tried to blink away the shadows and Bill continued to sleep.

“Mary,” the girl giggled again and this time she did not quiet herself, “it worked.” She began to prance and tramp about the room, and, sleep and dreams suddenly pulled from her body like thread, Mary recalled the night before.

Dinner had been cleared and the dishes were in the sink, the kitchen filled with the staticky sound of crickets and the lake and the fire the men were starting outside. Small papery moths that fit through the holes in the screen, drawn to the candles that Mary had lit, were nearly unseeable in the flickering light.

“Do you remember,” Nancy said, picking up a candle from the middle of the kitchen table. She tipped it just enough so that the wax spilled from its lip down onto the palm of her other hand, pale yellow like an echo of the sun. “Do you remember when this was fun?” The wax cooled and hardened in Nancy’s hand and she peeled it from her skin, set the coin down on the tabletop. None could remember because it had never been fun; not since they were children.

The candles flickered in a draft from the window and Mary suddenly saw the same light reflected back to her in a mirror. Startled she spoke without having planned to. “I remember that summer when we were seven, or eight maybe. When that kid down the way told us about Bloody Mary, and we stole those candles from that pharmacy in town. Remember, that night, how we went into the bathroom and turned off the lights?” Mary said it more to the kitchen itself than to Nancy or Carol, as though the memory belonged more to the house than to them, their childhoods too far from them, taken by marriage and raising their own children, growing old in other cities and towns, not on the shore of the lake and the sun.

In response Carol looked at her own hand, not pooled with wax but instead smally and almost imperceptibly scarred, a slight vein of silver burned down the stomach of her thumb. “I remember almost burning my hand off,” she said, offering a laugh quieter than the hum of the crickets. “I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to let a seven-year-old fumble with a lighter in the dark.”

“Wait,” said Nancy, pulling Carol’s hand into her own, holding Carol’s thumb up to the candle’s light. “You can still see where you burnt yourself?”

Carol nodded and Mary, seeing Nancy and Carol hand-clasped above the candle, suddenly remembered not just trying to conjure Bloody Mary but also her blood on the carpet. The same thought as before—the thought that she should be seeing something she was not yet seeing—squeezed around her heart and her heart seemed for a moment to beat in time with the moths’ small papery wings, erratic and panicked and on the cusp of a knowing or a possibility. But Mary assumed it was just the martinis and the wine, the saccharine dessert they had had after dinner; or perhaps it was just the night making her feel on edge in the way nights often do when one sits in them for too long without purpose.

Nancy, who was still holding Carol’s hand, now carefully dipped each of Carol’s fingertips into the melted wax puddled around the wick. Carol shimmered and shook with held-in giggles, Nancy’s eyes narrowed in focus and, though they were nothing but the small slits of a snake’s pupil, still they reflected the flame of the candle. Mary watched them, the two sitting in the kitchen in the night as though they were children, and suddenly the air that came in through the window above the sink felt thicker, heavier, either more real or less; Mary did not know which but still she could tell it carried something. It was as though the moon and stars beyond the house had shifted closer to watch Nancy and Carol too, the night and its darkness more present, a shadow seated with them around the table.

“Let’s do it again,” Mary said, once more speaking without having known she was going to.

Nancy looked up from her work on Carol’s hand and Carol too looked at Mary, her drunken giggles finally breaking free from her, her body wracked with laughter.

“What,” Nancy said, setting the candle down. “You want us to all squeeze into the bathroom and ask a ghost what our future is?”

“I, for one, already know my future,” Carol said before Mary could answer Nancy. Carol’s voice was slow with alcohol, and she didn’t look at Nancy or Mary or the night, just her own wiggling wax fingertips. “I think I’m having my last period, so with any hope my future includes a tropical island and a lot of men who aren’t John. No babies, no problems.” Carol laughed again, seeing only the fantasy inside her head, but still Mary saw more; she saw the flame and the night, the three of them hand-clasped in a circle. Mary remembered her own blood, how she too had been struck with the thought that she was having her last period.

Nancy rolled her eyes and she began to swat at Carol in dismissal when Mary interrupted her.

“I’m having my last period, too,” said Mary.

Nancy paused then and looked to Mary first, then to Carol second. She cocked her head. The crickets hummed and the moths fluttered. Carol’s earlier giggles echoed off both the lake and the sky although perhaps it was only laughter from the men around the fire outside drifting in with the night through the open windows. The moon and the stars came closer still, and, though a small gust of wind came then, weaving its way through the three of them, the candles did not snuff out, the flames steady and bright.

“Well then,” said Nancy, paying no mind to the still-lit candles and standing up from the table. “This calls for a celebration.” She looked for an unopened bottle of wine and poured three glasses, thick and red. “All of us, becoming barren at once.”

Carol took her glass eagerly and swallowed but Mary and Nancy did not touch theirs, Nancy simply raising hers to the middle of the table in cheers or in offering. “To becoming empty shells of women,” she said, though the other two did not raise their glasses in return; Mary ignored Nancy’s proclamation because she was looking at the chair where the shadow of night sat. It seemed to point her to the window above the sink, and when Mary followed the night’s finger she saw a glossed black crow perched on the sill, almost unnotable against the dark sky, but, because the stars and the moon were close, she could see. Mary nodded along with the night and shifted then, leaned across the table to blow out the candles.

The three sat for only a moment, all unable to see but to Mary, everything had suddenly become clear. “Follow me,” she said, and though she could hardly make out their bodies in the blackened room she could hear, in the creak of the floors, how Nancy and Carol stood, the women gathering in a line, hands settled on one another’s waists as they walked from the kitchen. In her own arms, Mary carefully carried the candles, still warm and wet with wax.

Mary, Nancy, and Carol ascended the stairs, stepping on the landings in the places they knew would not groan beneath their feet. Mary led them not to the bathroom but to the attic for she did not want the men to find them. She struck a match and the smoke lingered, the air in the attic unyielding, solid with dust and heat; it was the room in the house closest to the moon and the stars and so it was the heaviest, holding the nature of the sky. There was one window, small and octagonal, and though Mary lit each candle one by one the window did not betray the light—if Bill or John or Frank were to look up they’d only see black, the house’s third eye closed and asleep for the night.

The three women sat around the candles, palm in palm, held tight and threaded together with a sudden and wild hope. Their shadows loomed and stretched behind them, black and flat as though not of them, as if, in the attic in the light of the flickering flame, Mary, Nancy, and Carol had untethered themselves from their very bodies. Each drew in a stiff, deep breath and each held the stale air in their chests and stomachs and hearts before eventually exhaling, slowly and steadily breathing out a game of their childhood with just as much wonder and fear.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary, they chanted, none in time with the other so that the chant sounded more like a continuous pitched hum. At first, Mary thought of nothing but the words, about Nancy and Carol, the attic rippling and silver with heat from the closeness of their bodies, the candles and women alike aflame, the air between them a mirror.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary, they said again, eyes closed as though they existed only within the black stomach of the sky. Mary thought about being a child, stood in the bathroom with Nancy and Carol. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter in time with the beat of her heart and she wished, as she spoke, to be in that room again—she wished not for youth but for a freedom and possibility she now understood.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mar—the candles snuffed out as Mary completed her silent wish. Carol shrieked, bringing her hands to her mouth in surprise, the chant and their circle broken. The shriek lingered because the air was still both thick and heavy and as it rang through the attic the women sat silently until it was gone, and as it left the stars and the moon returned to their proper places far from the house. After hardly a moment of silence, the women collapsed into laughter in the dark, hands blindly groping for one another once more as again their closed eyes watered and their ribs grew tough and breathless.

After, tired and sore from cackling and shrieking and rolling and chanting, they descended the stairs and each went to their rooms to sleep. Mary climbed in next to Bill, the bed dipping beneath her weight, and she had only just slipped into a shapeless dream when the little girl at the end of her bed had startled her awake.

Mary watched the girl now, how she twirled, her giggles as light and as shimmery as a pearl, as the water in the lake beyond the house. The sun had risen perhaps only a finger more but it was enough, the room shifting out of the empty blue of dawn to a tender, pale pink, and Mary could see that the little girl held not a blanket in her hand but something that looked like a skin, shed from a body much bigger than hers, hollowed and light but not, in the girl’s hand, a ghost.

In realizing what the girl held Mary looked down at her own bed, the sheets not wet with sweat but damp with the life of her own skin, peeled from her body and lying still and quiet next to Bill. Mary pressed her hands against her cheeks and neck and chest and stomach, her small knocked-kneed legs and sharp elbows. She held her palm before her eyes and studied it, smooth and unlined as if nothing were fated to happen again, her future as clear as the previous night’s sky. The little girl now kneeled on the foot of the bed, eagerly watching as Mary discovered that their magic had worked, and when Mary fully understood she looked at the girl once more. Though the girl’s eyes gleamed with a delight and wildness Mary had not seen in years she recognized Nancy, a child just as Mary now was.

“We should find Carol,” Nancy said, and Mary nodded, the two slipping from the bed and then the room hand-in-hand, their footfalls so light the house did not creak beneath them. But Carol was not in her room, her bed empty save John who slept as though nothing had happened. Quickly enough Nancy and Mary found her outside, floating in the golden, sun-stained water of the early morning lake.

“Where’s your skin?” Nancy called, and her voice skimmed the surface like a skipping stone.

Carol sunk beneath the sound for a brief moment before her head buoyed back up, her hair wet and slick and glittering the same as her mischievous eyes. “I hung it from the rafters in the kitchen to dry,” she called in return, and while the others considered this Carol stretched her arm out towards them, twisted her hand in the air as she admired it. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked then, her face widened with a smile as long as the shore. When she dropped her hand back down she hovered it just above the small, windless cat’s paws licking at her skin, a sudden seriousness clouding her delight. “There is, of course, a problem. We’ll have to do something with the men.”

“I’m sure there’s some magic for that,” Nancy offered, as if she had been considering it too.

Carol shrugged, the water rippling out in small circles around her submerged body. “If not there’s always the cellar,” she said and she laughed, a sound as golden as the sun. Carol then waded out onto the shore and joined Nancy and Mary, their bare feet in the sand, their hands reaching for one another without thought. Together they turned from the shimmering glamour of the lake, the sky and the water blended in the sunrise as one, and they looked at the house. Despite the early hour, the air was already still and hot, the curtains not fluttering in the upstairs windows. The house stared back at them, unblinking, its door open in greeting, and the three walked towards it to live not in their skins but inside their spell.

 

 

Enjoy your life after I’m gone, Jon would tell Rachel. Go to the theater with rich widowers. Travel. Just promise me you won’t die first. But then her cancer returned, and she tried to prepare him, explaining where the passwords were filed, how to use Venmo and WAZE, telling him which of her widowed friends would be best for him. He wasn’t interested. Not in talking about a future without her. Not in any of her lady friends.

 

When the doctors say they’ve done all they can, Rachel asks to spend her last days at the lake house, the place where she and Jon had wed and where they’ve spent every summer of their married life. Although it is only September and the days are still mild, she lies shivering in their bed, swaddled like an infant in wool blankets. On good days, she asks to be propped on pillows so she can gaze out the window at the garden they built at the top of the dune, the stone staircase winding down to the macadam brick road, and the tufted beach grass stretching to the shore beyond. On the afternoon of September 14, a week before their fifty-third wedding anniversary, Jon tiptoes up the stairs to check on her. He asks whether he can get her anything: water, a popsicle, her Oxy.

“Tea would be nice,” she tells him.

When he returns with the steaming cup, she is gone.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

 

I was seventeen and a half when I took part in my first and only orgy.

It was 1991. My family and I, originally from Belgium, lived in Rwanda, where my father worked as an epidemiologist mapping the HIV-AIDS pandemic. In November that year, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive; a few weeks later, Freddie Mercury died. Those events were huge, because AIDS was still a taboo subject. In Rwanda, no one ever died of it, but of a “long illness” instead. Most people had no clue how the disease was transmitted. Handshakes were avoided, toilet seats disinfected.

This ignorance wasn’t confined to Africa. In the US, three young kids—the Ray brothers—had contracted HIV through blood transfusions and were not allowed to attend school for fear they would spread the disease. The ban was overturned in court, but one week after they were allowed to go back to school, their home was burned down. Even after the family moved from Arcadia to Sarasota, they had to cope with protests from groups like Citizens Against AIDS. In 1992, one of the Ray brothers died, just 15 years of age.

In my family, I would say we were better informed about AIDS—thanks to Dad’s job, but also because Mom would not stop talking about it. With two teenage sons, she had taken it upon herself to educate us about the dangers of sex––and she did a pretty good job. For my brother and I, sex was no longer about freedom and experimentation, like it had been for my parents in the 1970s. It wasn’t just about reproduction anymore. Instead, sex had become something you should fear because, quite simply, it could kill you. There were times I worried that losing my virginity would be an act of suicide.

As a reminder of the threat my budding sexuality posed to me, as well as to her—Mom kept repeating there was nothing worse than losing a child—she provided me with an endless supply of condoms. I am not sure what kind of person Mom thought I was, but to my embarrassment and frustration, the condoms never got used and piled up in my bedside drawer—apart from maybe one or two I had tried on while masturbating. Watching my sperm collect in the tip of the condom had excited me. It was also reassuring. Presumably, if nothing could come out, nothing could enter, and so condoms seemed to offer pretty good protection. To get rid of the evidence, I had wrapped each used condom in endless layers of toilet paper—like a shriveled, little mummy—and flushed it down the toilet. I’d been lucky not to block it.

Another tactic Mom used to freak us out about sex, was to talk about what was happening to Immaculée, our maid. Her full name was Immaculée Conception, but that was too long to pronounce, so we just called her Immaculée. Despite being only seven or eight years older than I, she was married and had two children. I remember her husband coming to our gate once, asking to see her. His eyes were bloodshot and he reeked of banana beer. As soon as Immaculée appeared, he pounced upon her and knocked her to the ground. Our guards had to restrain him. I finally understood the source of the bruises Immaculée sometimes had on her body when she came to work.

Mom didn’t talk to us about Immaculée to warn us against the perils of marriage, or to moralize about domestic violence. “Did you see that?” she would whisper when Immaculée had left the room. “She has a sore on her leg.” On other occasions, Mom pointed out her blotched skin or weight loss. While we couldn’t be sure, we were pretty confident that Immaculée had AIDS, and that it had been passed on to her by her whoring husband. We’d often spot him at a kiosk on Friday night, spending his weekly wages on drink and women. “I just hope her poor children don’t have it,” Mom would say.

One day, when I was playing video games, Mom asked me to fetch Immaculée from the outhouse at the back of our garden, where our staff went to rest. There was a camp bed and a hole-in-the-ground toilet combined with shower, that always reeked of detergent and moldy mopping cloths. Outside, under the banana trees, corn roasted on an open fire.

Since no one answered when I knocked on the door, I let myself in and barged into Immaculée standing naked in the shower. In the split second before she had a chance to cover herself  and I had the decency to look away, the picture of her body, ravaged by disease, was printed on my retina: her thin arms and large joints; the protruding hip bones; and her flattened breasts that bore no resemblance to the fleshy curves of the women in the porn magazines I kept under my mattress. I mumbled apologies as I pulled the door partway shut and remembered to add that Mom was looking for her.

Back in my room, I took a while to compose myself. I had just seen a naked woman, but there had been nothing sexy about it. I drew the curtains and reached for one of my magazines to erase the image from my mind and disassociate it from my idea of sex. The women on the page stared at me, offering their breasts, pouting their lips, spreading their legs and everything in between. But all I could see were nature’s snares, poisonous tricks to ambush the innocent. Their vulvae looked like venus flytraps, their mouths like leeches. I couldn’t get it up and closed the magazine again. I slept badly for weeks.

A few months after the shower incident, there was a knock at our gate. We didn’t have a bell, so people hit the metal with pebbles to announce their presence. It was early morning and I’d had another nightmare. The rest of my family were still asleep, so I got up to check who it was. When I came down, the guard had already opened the gate and let in a young girl—she must have been eight or so—carrying a baby on her back in a kanga. By her cowrie eyes and teardrop-shaped head, I concluded she must be Immaculée’s daughter.

“Maman is ill,” the girl said. “She can’t come to work today, so I’ve come to clean.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I woke Mom. When she saw the girl, who had probably walked several miles carrying a baby on her back, she hurried her into the kitchen and prepared hot chocolate and eggs on toast. Meanwhile, I was tasked with holding the baby. I had no idea whether I was doing this right—the child kept fidgeting and drooling on my shoulder. Even though Dad had said HIV did not transmit that way, I couldn’t help worrying about the saliva on my skin. I decided to change my shirt and take a shower afterwards. Immaculée’s daughter was the size of a shrew, but she had the appetite of a starved elephant. While she ate, Mom took the baby from me, changed her, and fed her some mashed banana. When the children had regained energy, Mom said she would drive them home. She took a bag of groceries, as well as some painkillers and money. “Tell Dad I will be back for lunch,” she said.

Later that day, after Mom had done some of the household work, she drove me to the tennis club. She said Immaculée would probably be alright and back at work within a week. “What an awful disease,” Mom said as she parked the car and pulled the hand break. I grabbed my tennis bag and stepped out of the car, when Mom added, “Benjamin, please be careful with these things. One mistake and you see what can happen.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, I’m only going to play tennis.”

“I know,” she said, “I know. I’m just saying. This disease…”

“Alright,” I cut her off. “Can you come pick me up at six?”

Down by the courts, I spotted my best friend, Eros. We were playing a doubles semi-final that day and he was hopping from leg to leg as part of his warm-up routine. “Ah, there you are!” he shouted, while hitting the side of his shoes with his racket to remove the clay from his soles. They were nice shoes—the kind that Agassi wore. Eros’ parents worked for the European Commission, where they made a killing managing projects for AIDS orphans. They drove a Mercedes-Benz in Kigali and owned three flats back in Rome.

“So, are you ready?” he grinned with the Italian kind of confidence that wins you games and breaks girls’ hearts. I was better than Eros at tennis. But he still beat me every time through psychological warfare. He’d use dirty tricks, like pumping his fist when he won a point or shouting the score out loud when he was in the lead. While those may have seemed insignificant in and of themselves, cumulatively, they threw me off balance. My wrist would tense up and I’d hit double faults or net backhands that against any other opponent would have been easy winners.

When it came to sex, Mom and Eros were, respectively, the angel and devil on my shoulder. While Mom did everything within her powers to freak me out, Eros made sure to pile on the pressure to lose my virginity. He pricked my curiosity and fueled my insecurity with stories about his sexual exploits. In practice, these were hard to fact-check since, allegedly, they had all taken place during his summer holidays in Italy, when I was not around. The acts he claimed to have carried out with these girls also bore a striking resemblance to some of the scenes in the porn movies he stole from his father, and which we sometimes watched together when his parents were out, in lieu of doing homework. Still, Eros spoke about his conquests with such confidence that I had little choice but to believe him.

Regardless of whether Eros was still a virgin or not, he used to tease me for being one. Once, when he was over at my house playing video games, Immaculée had come into the room to clean. As she bent over, we both caught a glimpse of her breasts down her blouse. Eros elbowed me and said, “She offers it to you on a plate, and you’re still a virgin!” Then he laughed so loud that, even though Immaculée may not have understood what he said, she must have sensed the joke was at her expense.

The other thing that bothered me was that Eros had a girlfriend, and I didn’t. She was a petite, round-faced girl from Québec, called Marie-Lys, who was as crazy about horse-riding as I was about her. No one knew I had a crush on her, least of all Eros. He and I would sometimes go to the stables and watch her ride. “I’m telling you,” he’d say, “She really knows how to control a thousand-pound animal between her legs.” I told him to stop, but he’d go on, “Seriously, man, she loves being on top, riding like a cowgirl. Oh, and when she gets out that whip…”

I convinced myself these things couldn’t be true. Eros and I spent nearly all of our time together, so when would he have had a chance to sleep with her? Besides, Marie-Lys was too pure, too innocent for anything like that. In my mind, she was the kind of girl who would keep her virginity for someone special. Still, the images Eros conjured hurt, especially because I sometimes had the impression my feelings for Marie-Lys were reciprocated. There were occasions when I caught her eye and we would look at each other for longer than was comfortable between two teenagers of the opposite sex. But Eros was my best friend, so I considered her off limits.

“Are you ready to get your ass whipped?”

Eros and I turned to see our doubles opponents walk onto the court. The tall one was Augustin Duquesne Wathelet de Wynendale, who looked like he had stepped out of a Lacoste Summer catalogue: waxed hair, pastel green polo shirt, shades parked on top of his head. Augustin wasn’t the brightest kid in school and we suspected he scraped through only because he was the son of the Belgian ambassador. His family was Flemish, but they spoke French at home—that is what posh families in Belgium do––so we called him “the Baron.”

The other kid was the Baron’s best friend, Dimitrios Voulgaropoulos. I doubted that Augustin’s parents approved of this friendship. Dimitrios’ father owned the only supermarket in Kigali and he was rumored to catch stray cats and dogs and grind them to sell as beef to unsuspecting expats and Rwandan nouveaux-riches. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that story were true; Dimitrios himself was a dirty little cheater—calling balls out that were in, questioning line calls, miscounting the score. Still, his drop shots were magic and his lobs were the finest that the Cercle Sportif of Kigali had ever seen, so we admired him nonetheless. He also had a way with girls, which is probably the main reason the Baron chose to hang out with him.

The four of us hit a few balls from the baseline to warm up, but just as we started practicing our serves, the sky turned dark. “Don’t worry,” Dimitrios said when thunder rumbled in the distance, “We’ll double-bagel you before it starts to rain.” Sure enough, Dimitrios and the Baron soon led by four games to love. Then the heavens opened. We ran for shelter under the giant strangler fig by the entrance to the club. It was a proper, tropical storm. The courts turned into an orange mud bath. There was no way we would be able to finish the game that day, so the Baron suggested we all go to his house to play table football for the rest of the afternoon.

The Baron’s invitation came as a surprise. None of us had ever been to his house—not even Dimitrios. The ambassador always had important guests or urgent matters to deal with and his children were never allowed anyone over. But, that week, Augustin’s family was away on safari and he had the house to himself. Dimitrios—who lived in a small flat above his dad’s supermarket, together with his four siblings and his ninety-nine-year old grandmother—nearly had to collect his jaw from the floor when he saw the ambassador’s residence. But he wasn’t jealous or resentful about the tennis court and Jacuzzi, the games room with snooker, ping pong, and table football. He just kept oohing and aahing, and when he saw the swimming pool with the view over Kigali in the valley, he could no longer contain himself.

“Man, man, man,” he said, shaking his head and raising an eyebrow. “You know what this place would be perfect for?”

The Baron looked the way he did when Mr. Dubois, our maths teacher, asked him a question—his mouth half-open, eyes glazed over.

“A party!” Dimitrios said when he realized the Baron had reached the limits of his imagination.

The Baron was still puzzled, “A party?”

“Yes, dumbass, a party! Just imagine…” Dimitrios said, turning towards the pool with his arms spread, “Music, food, dancing—with this pool and that view. And, of course…” He turned back to face us, his eyes sparkling like disco balls.

“What?” the Baron asked, a little uncomfortable at Dimitrios’ excitement.

“And girls!” Dimitrios said.

An idiotic smile spread across the Baron’s face. “Yes,” he whispered, “And girls…”

“And some of us,” Eros added, slapping my back, “might finally lose their virginity!”

***

              We agreed to hold the party the coming Saturday, while Augustin’s parents were still away. Dimitrios orchestrated everything, commanding the ambassador’s army of staff—three guards, two cleaners, a gardener and a cook. The Baron volunteered to do the music; Eros and I were left in charge of the invitations. We designed flyers on my dad’s Macintosh, with pixilated images of balloons, champagne bottles and confetti, as well as a wild mixture of fonts that should have come with an epilepsy warning.

Before we knew it, Saturday had arrived. Around 5 p.m., I started getting ready—Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, button fly jeans, Nike Airs. So much gel in my hair I looked like a troll doll and a toxic amount of Davidoff aftershave stolen from my Dad. I was packing my sleepover bag when a car hooted outside—Mom’s signal that she was ready to take me.

“The party doesn’t start for another hour?” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But I need to take Immaculée to the hospital. She’s unwell. So I will pick her up on the way. I don’t want to have to do the journey twice.”

Reluctantly, I grabbed my bag and jumped into the passenger seat.

We took the tarmacked road out of the Kacyiru district towards the center of town. Halfway, we turned into a dirt road towards Gisozi. The stone houses gradually made way for mud huts marked off by bamboo fences. The streets narrowed and the potholes multiplied as we approached Immaculée’s place. Mom drove slowly to avoid hitting the chickens and children crisscrossing in front of our car, and then she pulled over. Immaculée’s daughter stood outside, holding her baby sister on her hip. “Maman is inside,” she said.

We pushed through the plastic fly curtain and found Immaculée lying on a straw mat. Mom knelt down and I stood behind her, gazing at the sparsely decorated room. An old, stained mattress, with a couple of soft toys that used to belong to me, was where the children slept. On the opposite side were a few plastic chairs, dented aluminum pots and other kitchen utensils—the wall blackened by the cooking fire. In the corner, a doorless doorway that led to the parental bedroom. The only item on the walls was a photograph of John Paul II, taken during his visit to Rwanda in 1990. I remembered being there, in the stands of the Amahoro stadium, watching thousands of young people hang on every word the Pope said. Mom was horrified when he started blaming the pandemic on homosexuality and championed faithfulness, not condoms, in the fight against AIDS.

“Can you give me a hand?” Mom said. “Let’s take her to the car.” We each slipped one of Immaculée’s arms around our neck and then helped her stand up. She smelled of cassava and sweat, and I became painfully aware of my Davidoff aftershave. Her bones poked me through her dress. Immaculée shuffled along with great difficulty, wheezing and grimacing. When we lowered her into the back of the car, she suppressed a shriek. Her daughter, still standing by the door, observed the whole scene. Although she kept a brave face, I could see her eyes watering.

We drove towards town, up the hill and past the colorful kiosks selling beer and soft drinks, the petrol stations and garages overflowing with rusty spare parts rescued from crashed and abandoned cars, and hardware shops trading a random selection of imported goods. Pedestrians fled from the reckless maneuvers of the twegerane—mini-van taxis—which were trying to pick up as many passengers as possible. Then all would make way for the hulky menace of a green bus, huffing and puffing up the hill, bloated with people and packages, sometimes even chickens and goats, leaving a cloud of pestilent smoke in its wake. Motorcycles zigzagged through the mayhem with the speed and unpredictability of water striders.

We stopped at the traffic light and small children swarmed the car, peddling chewing gum and cigarettes from cardboard boxes. A beggar lay on the ground, his arms and torso muscled from dragging around his weak, stumpy legs. The light turned green and we drove past the French cultural centre, the Hotel Mille Collines, and then down the hill again until we arrived at the ambassador’s residence. Mom blew the horn, the guards opened the gate, and I jumped out.

“Have a good time,” she said, and then, half-jokingly, “Don’t forget about safe sex!”

I could have sunk in the ground. “Mom…”

As she drove off, I caught one last glimpse of Immaculée’s ghostlike figure in the back of the car. She had fallen asleep, like a child on a long journey. When the car had disappeared out of sight, I put my hand in my pocket, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten the pack of Durex condoms.

“Mwirime,” one of the guards greeted me.

“Mwirime,” I replied and I asked him how he was, “Amakuru?”

“Ni meza,” he said, but I could see that he, too, was as thin as Immaculée—sunken cheeks, hollow temples, deep smile lines on the side of his mouth. His uniform looked smart, but the soles of his shoes were coming loose. I returned a pitying, and likely condescending, smile.

The gates clanged shut behind me and I found myself in the driveway, lit by a row of floodlights. It was 8 p.m. and pitch dark. I could hear music coming from the front of the house and the buzz of people talking. The party was well underway. I took the small path by the side of the house that led through a tunnel of bougainvillea, brimming with cicadas—their clicking so loud it almost drowned out the music.

I emerged on the other side, into what seemed like another world. Paper lanterns, like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale, guided me towards the crystal-blue pool which looked enchanting in the dark. Two candelabra trees, wrapped in string lights, rose high into the sky, like giant, tropical Christmas trees, and Kigali twinkled in the valley below.

A hundred or so people were gathered around the pool, chattering and dancing. My body shook with each vibration of the bass as I squeezed between groups of laughing guests, their sweat rubbing off on me. A symphony of aftershaves and perfumes hung in the air. Through the crowd, I spotted the Baron behind his DJ equipment, bobbing his head to the rhythm of the music. With his height and slimness, and his hair gelled into spikes, he reminded me of a crowned crane. I tried to wave, but he didn’t see me. Not far from him, behind another table, Dimitrios shook glitzy cocktails and poured them ostentatiously into the glasses of half a dozen girls who were giggling at his jokes. When he saw me, he beckoned me over.

“Here, take that,” he said, pushing a deep red drink into my hands.

“What is it?” I shouted over the music.

“Trust me,” he smiled and set me to work cutting lemons, passion fruit and mint. Each time I passed him a batch, he replenished my glass in appreciation. I soon felt warm inside and everything became even more beautiful—the fairy lights, the pool, the lanterns, the stars: it all dazzled and sparked. I turned jovial and chatty. I even talked to some of the girls queuing up for drinks.

Dimitrios elbowed me. “Check her out!” he said, and nodded to his left. I followed his line of sight to the middle of the crowd, where a girl with short blonde hair and a tight-fitting dress was dancing, surrounded by a few twelfth-graders trying to impress her with their moves. Her name was Aude and she was known as the school nymphomaniac. She reveled in the attention of the boys around her and teased them one at a time, making them feel special and raising their hopes of getting lucky that night. She rubbed her back seductively against one of them, leaning her head on his shoulder. Then she lifted her glass high in the air and spilled champagne all around, like a human fountain. Despite the loud music and party noise, her sensuous laughter travelled all the way to where Dimitrios and I were standing.

Everyone knew about Aude and her behavior—even my parents. “What do you expect,” Dad would say, “with a mother like hers?” Her mom worked for Doctors Without Borders, so Dad sometimes interacted with her on a professional basis. He told us she was an alcoholic. “To be fair,” he said, “I would drink like a fish too if I had her job.” Every day, streams of patients would come to her—emaciated, with hollow eyes.  But there was nothing she could do. All she could offer, was hope based on lies—the only medicine she had. So she drank at night, to forget the horrors of her day.

“Can you take over for a second?” Dimitrios said, as he headed over to dance with Aude. I hadn’t the faintest clue how to make cocktails, so I cracked open a beer, put another in my pocket, and deserted the bar as well. I hadn’t seen Eros all night and decided to go look for him. It was approaching midnight. The party was beginning to degenerate. Slurred singing, people falling over, some ending up in the pool. A couple of girls were taking part in a wet t-shirt competition, cheered on loudly by the guys from the school football team. Empty bottles and broken glass littered the floor. A tenth-grader was vomiting behind a flower pot.

The ambassador’s cleaners, turned waitresses for the occasion, navigated this chaos, careful not to knock over their silver trays stacked with hors d’oeuvres—imported salmon, caviar and foie gras––that Dimitrios had stolen from the ambassador’s pantry. One of those trays probably held the equivalent of three months of their wages.

I climbed the stairs to the patio where it was quieter and I had a good view over the party. I rested my arms on the balustrade, downed my beer in one go and opened the second can. My head was spinning, my senses clouded with a thick layer of mist—like the hills of Kigali in the early morning. In the middle of the dancing crowd, Dimitrios was kissing Aude, one hand squeezing her bum.

“Enjoying the party?”

I spat out the beer I had in my mouth and nearly dropped my can. I hadn’t heard Marie-Lys sneak up behind me.

“I was getting a little bored down there,” she said, leaning over the balustrade next to me. “Mind if I have a sip?” She reached over to grab my beer and, as she did so, the strap of her dress slipped off her shoulder.

“Have you seen Eros anywhere?” I asked, my heart still pounding from the shock, but also from nervousness at talking to Marie-Lys. Her perfume was like an orange grove in spring. She seemed to be standing very close, so I moved a little to the side.

“No idea where he is,” she said, as she handed the beer back to me and readjusted her strap. When I brought the can to my lips, I could smell and taste her mouth on the metal.

“Looks like he’s abandoned me,” Marie-Lys said, staring straight at me. When she reached for the beer again, her hand brushed against mine.

“I think I’d better go look for him,”  I blurted out. “I worry that something might have happened to him.” I rushed off towards the house, abandoning Marie-Lys on the patio.

I stumbled into the dining room and found half a dozen people playing beer pong, cheering each time their adversaries had to drink up. One of the maids was on her knees, collecting pieces of broken glass. In the living room, the lights were low and the music filtered through in muted tones. There was no one there, apart from one of the Baron’s dogs, scoffing down canapés from a silver tray left on the coffee table. I walked through the kitchen where the cook, in his white uniform, was doing dishes and tidying up. Heading upstairs, I opened each door I came across, like an advent calendar. There were people making out, arguing, passed out on beds, or on the floor. Everything seemed like a dream. I felt like I was wading through thick, invisible treacle. The sounds came to me as though they’d travelled underwater. In one of the rooms, a group of kids were smoking dope and the smell made me so sick I rushed to the nearest toilet. I have no idea how long I was in there for, but it was half past one when I checked my watch, so I figured I must have lost consciousness for a while. I remembered that I was looking for Eros, so I got up and staggered towards the only room I hadn’t checked so far—the ambassador’s suite.

This was the largest room of all, with windows wall-to-wall offering a spectacular view over Kigali. Moonlight lacquered the furniture and everything was still, apart from the white voile curtains swaying in the breeze. There seemed to be nobody here and I was about to turn round, when I heard a noise at the far end of the room. Through the mosquito canopy hanging over the giant wooden bed, I thought I could make out the silhouette of someone and I wondered: was it Eros who had fallen asleep?

I crept closer, careful not to wake whoever was lying there. Then the shape stirred and it looked like there might not be one, but two persons on the bed. I hastened my step, parted the material of the mosquito net, and found Dimitrios lying starfish, grinning back at me, his trousers down on his ankles and Aude bent over him. Then Eros’ head popped up from behind Aude. “There you are!” he shouted. “I’ve been looking for you all night!”

“You’ve been looking for me?” I said. “Seriously, I thought I’d lost you!”

“Come here,” Eros said as he grabbed my arm and pulled me onto the bed. “Let’s see if we can make you lose something else!”

I fell on top of Aude and Dimitrios, who both burst into giggles.

Eros said, “Come on, help me!” as he tried to pin me down. Dimitrios grabbed my feet and Aude climbed on top of me, bringing her face so close I could smell the alcohol on her breath.

“Please, guys, let me go!” I tried, but Aude bit my bottom lip to silence me. Dimitrios found this excruciatingly funny and started playing percussion on Aude’s bum.

Unperturbed, Aude slid her hand down my chest, over my stomach, and towards the buttons of my jeans, which she proceeded to undo, one by one. Despite the state I was in, I could feel myself getting hard. Aude let go of my lip and I whispered, “Please …” But, by then, my resistance was disingenuous. A heat spread through my body as Aude kissed her way down. Eros and Dimitrios cheered. Then Aude took me into her mouth. I closed my eyes and everything turned like a spinning top. The last thing I remembered before passing out, was Eros and Dimitrios jumping on the bed, belting out Handel’s Hallelujah.

***

              I woke next morning from the breeze blowing the mosquito net across my face, tickling my nose. My head was pounding and, outside, I could hear the gardener sweep up dust and leaves with his corn broom. Wood pigeons mocked me with their coo. Someone snored loudly behind me—it was Dimitrios—and the events of the previous night suddenly came back to me. I sat up and saw Eros was also there. Quietly, I slipped out of bed and collected my clothes. As I put on my trousers, I noticed the pack of condoms lying on the floor, unused.

Downstairs, the staff were up—or had been up all night—tidying. They said breakfast was served outside, but I wasn’t hungry and I asked them where the telephone was. I called Mom to pick me up. As I waited for her, I reflected on what had happened the previous night. Technically, I had taken part in an orgy, but did it count as losing my virginity? I wasn’t even sure I had come. Either way, I felt a little smug about it all, glowing almost. Finally, I had become a man. Finally, Eros would stop teasing me. I spent the rest of the day lightheaded from lack of sleep and dreamy with disbelief.

By evening, however, my excitement gradually made way for worry and I couldn’t sleep that night. I replayed the events of the party frame by frame and started to freak out as I realized that, despite Mom’s warnings, I had engaged in unprotected sex. I twisted and turned in my bed. By 3:00 a.m., my doubts had taken on monstrous proportions and I had managed to convince myself that Aude had AIDS and that she probably had been bleeding from ulcers in her mouth when she gave me that blowjob. Shining a torch under my sheet, I inspected my penis over and over again; the more I looked, the more I imagined red spots and lesions through which the virus could have entered my body.

Next day at school, Eros looked equally disheveled and nervous, not his usual, confident self. It made me feel better, to think that I wasn’t alone in this.

“Didn’t sleep well?” I asked.

“No…” he said.

“Same here. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Terrible. I really wish this hadn’t happened.”

“I know…”

“I’m so worried…” Eros said.

“So am I!”

He looked puzzled at me for a while, then finished his sentence, “… that Marie-Lys will find out about this.”

“Oh…” I said, realizing we weren’t talking about the same thing.

“Promise me you won’t mention it to her?”

“No, of course not,” I said. And he walked off, seemingly relieved.

That week, I didn’t sleep through a single night. By the end of it, I was a wreck. The more I worried, the less I slept, and the less I slept, the more I worried. My thoughts went in circles, my anxiety snowballed. I started having palpitations and lost my appetite. By Saturday morning, I felt like the Nyiragongo volcano—ready to erupt. I was so desperate, I could only see one solution: I had to tell Mom. She might get angry, but it would be short-lived. More likely, she’d offer me the comfort that I needed so much. Maybe we could see van den Broeck, the embassy doctor, and he could do a blood test to take away the uncertainty—because it was the uncertainty, more than anything else, that was the source of my distress.

“There you are!” Mom said when I walked into the dining room. A bag lay open on the table, which she packed while speaking. “I was about to wake you. Immaculée’s daughter is here. Her mom has taken a turn for the worse and she’s been in A&E for about six hours, but nobody has attended to her. I’m going to head over and see what I can do. I’d like you to come with me, if you don’t mind, so there’s someone to look after her while I try and find a doctor or nurse.” Mom pressed some sheets and towels into the bag, closed the zip, and then looked at me.

“Benjamin?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you OK? You look pale…”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You don’t look fine to me…”

“I’m fine, Mom… It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Let me help you with that bag.” And I accompanied Mom and Immaculée’s daughter to the car.

When we arrived at the hospital, we parked outside and walked across the gardens towards the A&E unit. There was a light drizzle and the wet plants looked miserable in the gray morning light. Under the porous umbrella of an acacia tree, two men in green overalls cut grass with machetes, the chopping of their blades rhythmic like the ticking of a clock.

A stench hit us when we entered the block where Immaculée lay—a sickening mixture of unhealed wounds and pus, of bodily fluids and decay. Nobody checked who we were; we walked in, no questions asked. Immaculée’s daughter guided us down a long, dark corridor, lit only by an occasional, flickering light. Paint was peeling off the walls in sheets. Big, meaty flies buzzed around our heads.

At the end of the hallway, we turned into a ward that felt more like Kigali Central Market than a hospital. It was packed with people—women carrying children on their backs, men sitting on the ground with their head in their hands, cleaners mopping up unidentified liquids. I struggled to breathe the thick, moist air. There was such a din that I didn’t hear, but could only see Immaculée’s daughter say, “There she is,” as she pointed to a thin, emaciated body lying in the far right corner of the room. For a moment, we thought we had come too late. Immaculée’s eyes were wide open, unblinking, staring at the ceiling. Then a gentle heaving of her chest betrayed the obstinate presence of life.

Mom ran off to seek help, leaving me with Immaculée and her daughter. “Would you like something to drink?” I tried, but Immaculée didn’t respond. I stood awkwardly holding the bottle of water, until her daughter took it from me, wetted a handkerchief, and dabbed her mother’s paper-dry lips. Immaculée turned her head, but looked straight through us. She was far away already. I began to feel agitated about what to do if she died while Mom was away, and my anxiety from the previous week flared up, about everything that had happened and the awful consequences I’d imagined.

“Mom!” I called, but she was on the opposite side of the ward and couldn’t hear. She was gesticulating, trying to get the attention of medical staff. At long last, a nurse stopped and nodded with sympathy when Mom pointed in our direction. But the nurse disappeared again, and never returned. Then Mom ran back to me and said, out of breath, “Can you stay here for a while? I’m going to see whether Doctor van den Broeck can come—I’ll drive to his house.” She headed for the exit.

“Mom!” I shouted after her. “I need to tell you something!”

She turned around and said, “Not now, Benjamin, not now. There’s no time.” And she disappeared out of sight.

Left on my own, the horror of this place hit me. There were people ill like Immaculée everywhere: on beds and stretchers, on straw mats, even on the bare floor—people whose lives were slowly ebbing way, slipping into darkness. I saw their thin bodies, their eyes sunk deep into their sockets. I heard people wailing, praying. Small children standing by their dying parents, not knowing that, soon, they would be orphans. Women holding their husbands’ hands, worrying about who would provide for the family once they were gone. Men bidding farewell to their beloved wives, their only solace being that they would soon join them in death. Elderly people wondering why their sons and daughters had to go before them.

The worst thing was that nothing could be done to help them. There was no cure for AIDS, and even if there had been a drug, there wouldn’t have been enough for the deluge of patients that arrived here every day. As cruel as it sounds, the medical staff knew this, and with just one look, they triaged those whose lives could still be extended, from those for whom all hope was lost. Sadly, Immaculée was no longer a patient worth spending scarce time and resources on.

When I turned back to look at Immaculée and her daughter, they were holding hands and the little girl kept repeating, “Maman… Maman…” But Immaculée was too weak to respond. Her eyes were still open—big hollows of fear—but the movement of her chest had become less noticeable, less frequent.

Around twenty minutes after she had left, Mom came back—without Doctor van den Broeck. He was the embassy doctor and his job was to look after Belgian expats, not locals. In any case, it was too late. Immaculée had left this world. Nothing remained but a thin, half-naked body, ravaged by an invisible enemy. I was terrified. I wanted to hug Mom. But she went straight past me, knelt, and took Immaculée’s daughter in her arms. They sobbed until the girl had no tears left in her. Eventually, a nurse came and covered Immaculée’s body with a sheet. She handed us some paperwork, and then we left the hospital.

Back home, we ate dinner in silence. The chirping of crickets outside did not have its usual, soothing effect. It was unnerving. We took a meal out of the freezer—it was one that Immaculée had prepared. I barely managed a few mouthfuls. The images of the hospital kept going round my head. When my brother had gone to bed, I broke down and told my mom what had happened at the party.

“Oh, Benjamin…” Mom said as she hugged me. She assured me everything would be alright. She made an appointment with Doctor van den Broeck, who would see us first thing Monday morning. When we arrived, there was no queue, and van den Broeck welcomed us in his bright, modern consulting room with all the latest equipment, shelves full of medicine, classical music playing in the background, and a photograph of the Belgian King hanging on the wall. I gave him a watered-down version of what had happened, and van den Broeck confirmed I had nothing to worry about. But, if it would make me feel better, he would do all the necessary tests and check-ups. That night, I slept a full fourteen hours without waking up.

***

              Immaculée’s funeral took place on top of a hill, early the following Sunday. The mists filled the valley and the sun’s rays dragged over the hilltops, tired and hesitant. The priest mumbled the scriptures and the extended family wailed around a hole in the red earth. There was a small window in the coffin through which Immaculée’s face could be seen. All those years I had known Immaculée, I had seen her as our maid or the person who had AIDS. She had occupied a small space in the background of my life. Now, in death, I finally came to see her as a person, an equal, someone for whom life had been a lot less kind. I remembered that time when Eros had mocked her in her presence, and how I had done nothing about it. I wished I had acted differently.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground, her husband sobbed, his eyes twisted by alcohol. Immaculée’s daughter stood next to him, expressionless. At only eight years old, she would now have to take responsibility for the household work. She held her little sister on her hip and I could see she was exhausted, so I walked over and took the baby into my arms. The small child, dried snot on her lip, was chewing on her fists. Copious amounts of drool dripped onto my shirt. She must have been teething. I stroked her flushed cheek and she grabbed my finger, putting it into her mouth. Then she lay her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes to sleep. The poor thing had no idea how different life would be from then on.

Immaculée was laid to rest in the more affluent part of the cemetery, where the graves were cemented and tiled, because Mom and Dad had offered to pay for it. The poor lay further down the hill, in neatly lined graves marked by simple wooden crosses. As we walked back to the car, I looked at the inscriptions on the markers and subtracted the years of death from the years of birth. Most had died in their twenties or thirties, and the majority of graves were recent. A tsunami of illness was hitting the country. The hospitals were at breaking point. Immaculée was a drop in the ocean, her children two orphans amongst many. People were dying by the thousands, even before the genocide hit Rwanda.

But that is another story.

2005

Bruce Kuipers found the baklava on his porch, plated and wrapped. It sat on the table, under the eight-point rack of antlers, and his retriever sniffed at it with a wagging tail. The plate was heavier than he expected, and he nearly spilled its contents kicking off his sandy shoes in the mudroom. In the kitchen, dried egg crusted on the stovetop’s cast iron skillet. His Cessna’s transponder sat on the table, colored wires snaking from its backside, copper tips poking from their ends. He set the plate on an avionics manual and fished one of the treats from its Saran wrap cocoon. He brought it to his nose, the sugar and pistachio scents melding with the motor oil sponged into his skin. When he bit into the moist pastry, flakes of it tumbled to the floor. The dog was quick to lick them up, leaving the hardwood wet, with no trace of what had been consumed.

A salad was next, in an ornate bowl Linda would have liked, the glass a quilt work of protruding squares. It was almost July. His own chard and lettuce heads had begun to wilt in the heat. He could tell the spinach and arugula were store-bought through the plastic, but the vinaigrette smelled homemade. The salad had come with two tubs of feta cheese and spiced olives bathing in their own oil. When he popped the lid from the latter, Tolkien whined like a panhandler.

He drew the line at lamb chops, half a platter waiting for him when he returned from Ace Hardware with fittings. The meat was still warm, dripping in a lemon sauce and starred with oregano.

“Down!” he said when Tolkien rose on his hind legs, a line of drool dribbling from his jowls.

Bruce set the plate on top of the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk. She had done this when Jonah had passed, almost six years ago, but even then, not with such excess. After eating the lamb chops for dinner and lunch again the next day, he washed the serving dish and the glass bowl and knocked on her door.

“Yassou?” said a voice. “Come in.”

Bruce opened the door and stepped inside. The hall was a peach pastel color, pictures and paintings postmarking it in frames. Classical music echoed from the kitchen, a plinking piano over deep strings, the kind of thing Linda had playing in the house when Jonah was a toddler. Over it was the ringing of pots and pans and the sliding of metal sheets. It smelled of cinnamon and oranges.

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At first, when I held you in my hands, you drew into your shell. But, after some time, you stuck out your head and looked at me with these tiny, ringed eyes. I petted you and asked if you could feel my touch because I read that turtle shells are like skin, living cells crackling with nerve endings. You seemed to nod and reach out to me with your fin-like hands. I drew a shallow bath and placed you in the tub with some rocks from the rain garden outside the apartment. You quickly perched yourself on a rock and basked in the sunlight streaming in through the bathroom window. I cut carrots and lettuce into small pieces and let you eat the bits out of my hand.

When I got home from work, you were human again, pink and naked, asleep in the tub. I woke you and you looked around and stretched, arms and legs pressing up against the basin and wall tile. What was I this time? you asked, hanging a leg over the edge. I helped you out of the tub and, as you dressed, I showed you the notes I had taken.

I think you recognized me, but I don’t know. Do you remember anything?

I wanted to feel safe, you said.

We ate dinner on the floor among boxes we still haven’t unpacked. Since downsizing to a one-bedroom, we will have to get rid of most of our things. Just throw it all out, you said. But I can’t. Not yet. At night, while I graded papers, you rested your head on my shoulder and said you’re sorry you can’t work anymore, that we had to move here. I stroked you, your hair, your soft human skin.

The next morning you were an ocelot. You paced the length of the bedroom along the foot of the bed. Back and forth you went. Your long slender body rippling. I said your name and you swung your head to me. Your muscles tensed under your dappled fur like a tightly wrung rag. You let out a low growl and sized me up with your big eyes and, after a few moments, you resumed your pacing.

I got ready for work, moving slowly and quietly so as not to startle you, threaten you. I showered with the bathroom door closed and made my lunch facing the bedroom where you continued to pace like the wild cats at the zoo. Captive and bored. Aware of being studied. Before I left, I set a raw chicken breast on the kitchen floor with a dish of water.

I taught a class about foxes in my ethology class. How, through selective breeding, a Russian scientist was able to domesticate silver foxes over the course of sixty years. A student asked, When people turn into foxes, do they turn into domesticated foxes or wild foxes?

The time you turned into a silver fox, we were watching the news. The anchor announced that, following months of conjecture, the WHO had officially classified the Serenity Virus as a sexually transmitted disease. People could take off their masks and use less hand sanitizer. I looked over and you were curled into the corner of the couch, your shirt still hanging off your sleek body. I tried to touch you, but you yipped and tore down the hall. A slithery streak of black. This was when we still had our house. You rushed from room to room, searching for a way out. And when you couldn’t find one, you tried burrowing into the couch cushions.

They turn into wild foxes, I told the student.

When Serenity Retreats first developed their treatment for mental illness, they found that wild breeds, ones that had evolved without human interference, produced the best results. Spending a week as a frog or a lioness proved to be more therapeutic than spending the same amount of time as a bulldog or a cow.

For a few years, it was just a thing rich people did. They would go on the retreat and then talk about it on podcasts. How being a ferret for a week had cured them of their depression or their schizophrenia. But then the virus became transmissible and mutated into something it was never intended to be as it passed from person to person.

At lunch, a colleague came to my office, and we ate our sandwiches together.

How’s your research paper coming along? he asked.

I have a lot of notes, I replied. And not a lot of conclusions.

I chewed on my ham and cheese. My colleague waited for me to continue.

She’s turning more frequently, I told him. Almost every day now.

Do you recognize her when she does?

That’s the question, isn’t it? What I see when she turns, is it her, or am I projecting something that isn’t there onto a wild animal? Humans love to project human traits onto non-human things.

It’s a problem, he said.

It is.

So how are you going to solve it?

Domesticated foxes have a white patch of fur on their foreheads, which differentiates them from wild foxes. Other researchers who study turnings have been looking for a physiological hallmark that differentiates a person who has turned from an ordinary animal. These are studies with large sample sizes conducted across the world. But I’m an ethologist. My sample size is just her. I’m trying to draw a map of her, so I can trace an ethos that remains present in every form she takes.

Maybe you need to expand your sample size.

Maybe.

I heard there’s a home opening for turners who have nowhere else to go, my colleague said. The directors might let you observe the guests if you give them a call.

I shrugged. Couldn’t hurt.

When I got home you were human. On the couch, reading a book.

I must have just finished eating something terrible when I turned back, you said. As soon as I woke, I threw up all over the floor.

It was raw chicken, I said as I peered around the corner at the kitchen.

Don’t worry, I cleaned it up. I’m at least good for the occasional house chore.

I didn’t mean to—

It’s fine.

I dug my notebook and a pen out of my shoulder bag and sat down across from you.

I don’t remember much, you said, closing the book in your lap and crossing your arms over its cover. I was carnivorous. Hungry. Even after I’d eaten, I was thinking about my next kill.

Did you recognize me?

You shook your head. I made a note.

Do you know what you were?

You shrugged. A cat maybe.

I nodded. Ocelot.

You made a face.

It’s like a small panther, I said. About the size of a Maine Coon.

A Maine Coon?

I held up my hands a few feet apart to demonstrate the size.

Yeah, a Maine Coon.

Okay.

That night, in bed, you draped an arm across my chest and said, Aren’t you afraid one day you’ll wake up and I’ll be a bear or a wolf or something else that might hurt you?

You wouldn’t hurt me.

Wouldn’t I?

Your breath was warm on my neck. I thought of the first time you turned. You were a gecko, perched on my nose. The virus and speculation on how it spread had been all over the news for weeks. I held you and felt your tiny heart beating fast against my finger. I could have crushed you if I wanted.

I canceled classes and went to the St. Francis Home for Turners. It was a large facility converted from a mansion outside the city, nestled into a hillside of lush gardens and artificial habitats. One of the directors met me in the lobby. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Dr. Venkata. He gave me a tour of the facility. We started in the guests’ quarters, where they lived while in human form. Then we entered a great room filled with terrariums customized to nearly every climate, all big enough to fit a human comfortably. Most were empty, but I noticed a desert snake basking under a heat lamp in one terrarium and a bright tree frog hanging from a wet leaf in another.

We passed through a few rooms that smelled of sawdust with cages meant for rodents and rabbits. Then we went outside and Dr. Venkata showed me the aviary. A few colorful birds darted around the large, netted enclosure. Off to the side, within the aviary, but sectioned off from the other birds, a hawk was perched on the highest branch of a tree. That’s Samuel, Dr. Venkata said. He’s been like that for a couple weeks now. We are planning to build a larger aviary just for raptors soon. Hate to see him unable to stretch his wings in there.

Could he stay like that forever? I asked.

It’s possible, Dr. Venkata replied.

Would you ever release him?

Dr. Venkata grew very serious.

If Samuel were to ever turn back mid-flight he would almost certainly die.

Samuel gazed down on us as we passed below him. He flapped his wings, rising a few inches off the tree branch, and bit at the netting between his enclosure and the sky.

Next, we saw habitats built for large mammals, semi-aquatic mammals, even one for penguins, though it was empty. Beyond that, there was a fenced-in pasture where a couple horses and a sheep grazed. We finished the tour at the outdoor visitor area.

Many of our guests come to us because their families don’t have the means to take care of them anymore, Dr. Venkata explained. Most people would prefer to visit their loved ones while they’re in human form. But as the turnings become more frequent, it sometimes isn’t possible. So, we have set up this space for the guests to interact with their families in their current forms. And of course, we have an indoor visiting area as well.

A woman sat in the grass with an armadillo. A father and his child fed vegetables to a goat, speaking to it in soft voices. But what caught my eye was an old woman sitting in a lawn chair with a silver fox resting at her side. She pet the fox and the fox licked her hand. As we got closer, I looked for a leash. Dr. Venkata suddenly grabbed my arm.

Oh no, he said. You shouldn’t approach them.

The fox heard us and sat up on its haunches and bared its teeth. Its forehead was perfectly black. No patch of white fur. No leash. The old woman shot us a look and we backed away.

That fox is tame, I said as we went back into the facility.

With her, he is.

When I got home you were a roadrunner, hiding behind some boxes. You had a beautiful plume of feathers on your head and bright, intelligent eyes. After some time, you let me take you in my hands and carry you outside. I’ve read that roadrunners fly low to the ground and for only a few seconds at a time. So there was no danger of you falling out of the sky. I set you on the grass and you sped away, darting under bushes and around trees. You ran across the playground in the middle of the complex and into the parking lot, where you stopped between two cars. I trailed you, like an ornithologist.

As I got closer, you ran across the street into an undeveloped plot of land, spreading your wings every once and a while, taking off and diving down to catch crickets in the grass. Your wings caught the sun and they glowed a bright auburn. It’s like you were dancing. Leaping and diving. When you grew tired, I caught up with you and we went home.

I made you a nest out of a towel and set it behind a stack of boxes. I sat and waited for you to find the nest and settle into it. I touched your wing and said, I’m sorry. For thinking you could be mapped like the stars.

The next day you were still a roadrunner, and the day after that. I prepared for lectures, finished my research paper, and fed you insects I bought from the pet store. Finally, on the third day you were human again when I got home from work. You wanted to take a hike before the sun set so we drove to a trailhead that would lead up to a view of the city and the whole valley.

When we reached the overlook, we sat in silence for a long time. From so high up, everything below appeared to be unfolding in slow motion. The cars on the road, the people on the sidewalk, the trees swaying in the wind.

It looks like someone took a scoop out of the earth, you said.

Kind of does, yeah.

Another silence.

I finished my paper.

Yeah?

Yeah.

A chipmunk skittered through the dead leaves behind us.

I said, You were a roadrunner this time.

I remember wanting to be free.

You tossed a rock over the ledge.

One day I won’t turn back, you said.

I know.

Promise that you’ll bring me here.

I thought of all the cages at the home for turners. The way you can fit into the palm of my hand sometimes. You looked at me, all squinty-eyed in the sunlight. Wild as the day we met. A bit of your hair fell across your face and caught the sunlight just as your wings did. And we sat there, listening to the forest, the animals.

Someday when I come here, I’ll be listening for you. But not yet. We got up to hike back, dusting the leaves and bits of the forest floor from our pants. You lingered for a moment on the ledge. I was about to call to you when a red-tailed hawk screeched overhead and dove into the great basin below.

This little girl, who has no right to remind you of yourself, stands whining by the terrarium with grubby fingers smearing the glass. Grubby, you think, not to mean dirty or soiled but instead as a term of relative comparison to denote resemblance to a grub. You have not yet chosen the week’s vocabulary words for the homework assignment. Last week’s—relay, coward, sensitive, predator—remain in increasingly permanent dry-erase marker on the board. Patrice, with her fat, pale fingers layered in playground dirt, is here with a two-fold announcement: the snail has escaped; you are falling far, far behind.

“So get a new one,” the principal told you when you visited her office during recess. “Or don’t. We are not in the habit of supplying classroom snails. Mr. Kennedy’s terrarium is his own responsibility.”

And when you called Mr. Kennedy in his hospital room, he only sighed and shook his head as machines beeped in the background. “Jeez. Not again. Tell them he went on vacation or something. I’ll bring a new one when I come back. Better yet, buy a new one tonight and I’ll reimburse you.” He sounded old—the kind of age that has seen snails come and go.

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The rain drives so hard that Nick imagines it puncturing the roof of the Saab. He peers through the wiper blades swatting at the windshield and rechecks the gas level. The Texaco shouldn’t be much farther. Just beyond the McDonalds and that bail bonds place. If only they could get through this intersection. He’s lost count of how many cycles of green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red they’ve sat through already. Clouds the color of charcoal edge across the midday sky, and with every spark of lightning and clap of thunder comes that shriek, so goddamned predictable.

“You okay, Roxy?” Nick glances back at his daughter snug in her car seat. Her eyes find his through a chaotic mass of brown curls, and she pushes the sides of her mouth into that maniacal grin she’s been wearing lately. “It’s not funny, Roxanne,” he says. “If you don’t like the thunder, put your fingers in your ears. No screaming. Daddy can’t focus on the road with you doing that.”

“It’s your fault we’re here,” Joelle tells Roxy. “You and your stupid mouth.”

“Enough,” Nick says, though Jo’s not wrong. Both girls are supposed to be at YMCA day camp, improving their swimming, or learning how to tie knots, or macramé, or whatever the hell they do there. It lasted two days before the call came.

“She’s just too much of a distraction,” Pam, the camp’s director, explained when Nick picked them up that afternoon.

He had tried to assure Pam that Roxy’s behavior was temporary — the screaming, the foul language — that she’d calm down eventually. He suspected Roxy was acting out, in part, because Lisa was gone for one or two weeks. Maybe more. His wife had been emphatically vague when she left their Galveston Island home for a conference of some kind in the Hill Country. Or maybe it was a spa. She said she’d done all she could for him. Needed space. Nick got that — he wouldn’t want to be around him anymore either.

But he didn’t lay such speculation on Pam, of course, so she just nodded and gave him one of those solemn, meaningful looks he found so irritating. “Temporary or not, she can’t stay. Maybe she’ll be ready next summer,” Pam said, staring at Nick for what felt like too long.

Nick estimates that it’s another 400 feet to the gas station. They should make it. Then again, the car’s running on fumes. He can hear Lisa chiding him for not filling the tank yesterday, using the same tone she gets when asking whether he’s remembered to take his medication, or if he’s contacted that headhunter, or would it kill him to do a load of laundry and wash the dishes since he’s going to be home all day.

Nick hates that his life has devolved into an endless charade, the perpetual remolding of himself into someone qualified for something — anything other than teaching. Yet there’s no hiding the fact that his job as the physical science teacher at Stephen F. Austin Middle School represents his single professional credit. What does he know about anything else? For fifteen years, he’d relished introducing young minds to the scientific method, atomic structure, chemical bonding, matter in motion. He’d believed this would remain his mission until retirement, or at least through the Reagan administration.

He just wasn’t prepared to explain the physics of how certain materials could balloon under the stress of ignition. How the collapse of a fuel tank could release liquid hydrogen and oxygen into the atmosphere, causing them to detonate into a ball of fire thousands of feet in the air. How a shuttle’s component parts could break apart and shred from the pull and thrust of this matter in motion, volatile, destined to fly. His brain had tried to comprehend those initial moments of horror, the recognition seeping in as he and his students watched the unthinkable unfurl live on CNN.

The media and public would comfort themselves believing that the seven crew members, a fellow teacher among them, had died the instant those white blades of smoke and gas sliced through the winter blue sky, but Nick knew otherwise.

It should’ve been him up there.

He could recite from memory the lesson he was prepared to give had he made it past the final round of interviews. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he was still proud that he had been one of the ten remaining candidates. But after five months of trying to reconcile what he should know with what he couldn’t accept, he’d lost the desire to recite or explain anything to anyone. His students deserved better than his paralysis. His principal thought a three-month leave of absence would help get his mind right. Nick didn’t tell her he might go permanently.

Now, he’s got to get his daughters to his mother’s house on the mainland, so he can spend the next week scanning the phone book and newspaper ads for temp agencies before falling asleep in front of All in the Family reruns. He’s promised Lisa that he’ll have something lined up before handing in his official letter of resignation.

The car makes it through the congested intersection, and Nick feels it pull up. The engine coughs, and the car slows and sputters to a stop. “What the…No. No-no-no. Shit!”

“No-no-no, shit,” echoes from the back seat.

“Roxy, so help me…”

“Are we out of gas?” Jo asks. Her eyes dart from Nick to the gas gauge and back to Nick. The car rocks in the percussive rain, and Nick looks at his oldest daughter, small for her seven years but smart enough to know they’re screwed.

“Yes,” he says, amid the blare of car horns behind them.

“What are we going to do?”

Nick doesn’t answer. Gusts of wind yank the car from its rain-battered rhythm, and his heart drums a rapid staccato in time with the windshield wipers.

“Dad,” Jo says again.

“Yeah. Yes. I’m…I’m thinking.” He needs to get them out of the road, but the steps to accomplish that goal elude him. He puts the car in neutral and lifts the parking brake. “I’ll push it the rest of the way,” he says finally. They’re positioned in the innermost lane of three lanes of traffic on a six-lane thoroughfare. He needs to push the car almost the length of a football field to get it across three oncoming lanes and to the station.

Nick hits the flashers, unbuckles his seatbelt, and inches the door open. Rain thrashes the inside of the car, and he feels the rush of water underneath, four to five inches deep. Has it really risen that quickly? Of course, it has. Twelve hours of rain collects then flows with the urgency of a ruptured dam. Matter in motion. Soon the car won’t need gas to move from its present location.

He steps into the road and feels the water seep into his shoes and soak the bottoms of his pant legs. He stares into the cars steering around him, honking, frantic and indignant. They lurch through the intersection, heaving water at his knees, each driver ignoring his pleas for help.

Nick returns to the car and collapses into his seat. “Fuck!” He punches the steering wheel, causing Jo to jump. He pounds again, repeatedly, until the stinging forces him to stop. He waits for the anticipated response from Roxy, but it doesn’t come. When he turns to face her, she stares back, eyes wide, tiny hands cupped over her ears.

“I’m sorry,” he says, mostly because nothing else comes to mind. “It’s gonna be okay, girls. Has to be.” Nick exhales and looks down at Jo. He wonders whether her feet will reach the brake pedal, whether she’s strong enough to hold the brake and wheel in place. Why hadn’t he opted for a model with power steering? He’ll move the seat all the way up.

He tries not to think about the rising water. Or how far it is to the gas station. Or what Lisa would say of their situation. The forecasters said the storm — no, tropical depression — wouldn’t come ashore for another six hours. But knowing others thought it was safe to drive won’t lessen his wife’s judgment. It isn’t lessening his.

“Okay, Jo, you’re going to slide over here,” he says.

“What? No Daddy, I can’t drive.”

“You’re not going to drive. You’re going to help me guide the car.”

“No, I can’t.” She shakes her head and shrinks away from him into her seat.

“Yes. Yes, you can, honey. Sit up, Jo-Jo. Look at me. We need to do this now. The water’s rising, we need to get the car to higher ground, and we don’t have a lot of time.” He suspects he sounds more agitated than reassuring.

Joelle nods slowly, wincing at a jagged bolt of lightning. Storms have always frightened her. He should say something comforting, but Lisa is the one who usually calms her down, who coaxes her back to sleep when the skies erupt at night.

“It’s going to be okay, you guys. I promise,” he says.

Nick lowers the steering wheel and gets out of the car. Jo crawls into the driver’s seat; her feet dangle just above the floor mat. He pulls the seat forward.

“Now, put your foot here on the brake pedal,” he tells her. “Press down and leave it there until you hear me tell you to lift it. Got it?”

“I think so,” she says. Nick hears the hesitation in her voice. He brushes a strand of hair hovering over her left eye and tucks it behind her ear. Her hands tremble, but she clasps the steering wheel, scoots to the edge of the seat, and presses her foot against the brake pedal.

Nick releases the parking brake. “Good. That’s good. Foot on the brake until I say lift it. Keep the wheel where it is; hands ten and two. If it wobbles, just hold on tight.”

Joelle nods, says nothing. Such a compliant kid. She’d given Nick and Lisa premature confidence in their parenting skills before Roxy bounded into their lives and met their every instruction with attitude and suspicion. Nick looks into Jo’s pleading eyes, sees his own staring back. The rain pummels the back of his head and streams down his neck. He should close the door now, but it feels like he’s leaving them. He leans in and kisses Jo’s forehead. “You’re a good girl,” he says. “You too, Roxy.” She gives him a half-smile, hands still over her ears, and Nick shuts the door and wades around to the back of the car.

“Okay, lift your foot up, Jo,” he shouts, as the wind slaps his jacket collar against his chin and whips rain into his eyes. He pushes, but the car won’t budge. Maybe she didn’t hear him. “Now, Joelle,” he shouts louder into the squall. He pushes again, and this time the car begins to ease through the murky water now swirling about his shins.

The thick stench of motor oil, salt, and sewage shrouds the air. Cars swerve around them, scattering water like glitter in the steady blaze of lightning. Nick pushes the car through the muck — five feet, ten feet, twenty. After several minutes, he begins counting the beats of his heart, then each step. How many feet to go? 300? 250? The blinding rain and flashes of light make it difficult to estimate. But he can see the Golden Arches ahead, and the car wash, and the drive-thru bank, and that surf shop Jo’s always bugging him to take her to.

He wonders whether the wailing car horns exist only in his mind, whether they signal more than just the other motorists’ aggravation. Could one of them end up pinning him to this trunk? A shard of pain cuts through his arms to his shoulder and neck. His saliva tastes like metal. Or maybe that’s blood. Maybe he’s bitten his lip.

Nick opens his mouth and lets the water slide in and around and onto his tongue, warm but bitter. Every breath is a negotiation. He might as well move the car through a river of molasses. His hands stiffen and tingle, so he adjusts his grip. What had his shrink told him last week? You need to allow yourself to feel, Nick. Well, he sure as shit can feel everything now. In his neck, shoulder, arms, legs, even his groin, and he hasn’t felt anything in that region in several months, reason enough for Lisa to want to leave. Maybe he’s given himself a hernia.

With every step, every inch of road, the destination appears to retreat farther into that obsidian void. As if he can see the end coming but no light. Maybe it was like this for the crew, bracing against the force of gravity, against the free fall, anticipating the inevitable plunge into blackness.

Maybe the water will swallow him, too.

Nick doesn’t know how long the car’s been stopped when he hears Jo’s cry, muffled but unmistakable, the sound knifing him in the gut and forcing his hands off the car. His eyes strain into the sheets of gray as he calls her name. No answer. He doesn’t know what he notices first: the water suddenly at his thighs; the folks ahead bailing out of cars that drift and circle each other in a slow-motion tango; or his own car filling with water, rotating away from him, unmoored. He doesn’t know if his mind or limbs react first, but he pulls open the door, unfastens the car seat, and lifts Roxy into his arms, then wades around to grab Jo who is both petrified and determined, insisting she can walk on her own, promising to hold on tight and never let go, not ever.

Nick hoists Roxy onto his shoulders and steadies himself within the roiling brown water. Roxy tugs at his jacket collar as he grips her legs with his left arm and presses them into his chest. Jo clings to his right arm with both hands, tight enough to cut off his circulation. He has no idea where to go; he only knows to move. Ahead he sees scattered hordes of stranded motorists begin to converge and migrate towards what he assumes is higher ground, and he follows. The water is chest-high on Jo — if it rises higher, he’ll have to carry her, too.

He wishes they could move faster, wishes they had a raft, wishes he could just let go and allow the water to carry him wherever he’s meant to be.

But then he has a vision of himself as a child, with his friends, trudging through the surf, far into the Gulf, diving over the arcing waves only to be swept back and deposited ashore in white foam and seaweed. Once, near a fishing pier, a rip current caught him and drew him slowly, steadily away from shore. He’d been warned this could happen. A friend of a friend had died after being dragged down by the undertow; he’d been told. But Nick knew the term was a misnomer — you couldn’t really be pulled under. Somehow, he knew not to panic or resist but to swim parallel to the shore until he was out of the current’s grip.

Nick’s legs buckle as the road seems to collapse beneath him, and Roxy’s fingers fan across his eyes and press against his temples, squeezing his head as though she thinks it will keep them upright. He peels her fingers away from his face and back to his shoulders and tries to regain his footing. But from below the surface of the water other hands grab at his legs, and he realizes that Jo has slipped from his grasp and is under him, bobbing and sputtering. Nick holds his breath as he crouches and reaches and swipes and misses, again, and again, his thighs burning to maintain his balance, until he catches Jo’s outstretched hand and pulls her back to her feet.

“You’re okay; I gotcha,” he says. He draws her trembling frame against his waist. She coughs into his stomach and rests her head awkwardly next to Roxy’s leg. “We’re almost there,” he says, not knowing where there is. “Almost.”

“Hey, heads up!” a voice calls to him. Nick looks to his left and sees a man standing in the bed of a pickup parked in front of the surf shop. “Take this and head there,” the man says. He tosses Nick a black inner tube and points to a side street just beyond the shop. Nick pulls the tube in; Jo grabs onto it. He looks down the side street and sees a 7-Eleven lit up like Vegas. Higher ground. Nick maneuvers them around clusters of cars listing in the water like abandoned bath toys. He sees other folks headed in the same direction, while others remain atop their cars, viewing the scene like it’s some cinematic version of the apocalypse.

“Thanks, man,” Nick says to him.

“No problem,” he says. “Hell of a thing. It’s like the water rose from fuckin’ nowhere.”

“Yeah.”

“Daddy, he said ‘fuck,’ Roxy notes. “Fuck. Fucky, fuck, fucker…”

“I know, Roxy, I heard him. Let’s get you guys dry.”

 

Inside the 7-Eleven, they’re surrounded by beleaguered eyes and soaked bodies, clustered among the aisles of junk food, comics, and motor oil. Cigarette smoke drifts and coils into the unforgiving light. Nick spots the payphone towards the back of the store. “Girls, stay here near the register,” he says. “I’m gonna call Mom. Then I’ll get us something to eat.”

At the phone, Nick touches his back pocket and feels for his wallet where he’s placed the paper with the phone number Lisa gave him. Only his wallet is gone. Of course. It’s either buried with the car or on its way out to the Bay and Gulf and beyond.

Nick has no plan B. Why can’t he ever have a plan B? He has a quarter in his pocket, so he lifts the receiver, deposits the coin, and punches the zero. A disinterested alto answers. “Operator. How may I assist?”

“Hi. Hello. Okay,” Nick stammers. “See, my wife is at a conference — I think it’s at a hotel near Austin, but I don’t know the name, and my car is…My daughters and I…Look, can you maybe find me the number?”

“Sir, you’re going to need to be more specific. What’s the name of the hotel?”

“So, that’s the thing. I don’t know. It was on a piece of paper in my wallet. But I don’t have it, and I thought maybe you could look it up and…”

“No, sir. Not without the name of the hotel. You need to give me a name.”

“Look, you don’t understand. I don’t have the name. I don’t have anything. That’s why I need to talk to my wife.” The numbers on the dial pad blur and crisscross, and Nick closes and opens his eyes, willing them to focus.

“Sir, I can’t find a number without the name…”

“I just need to talk to my wife. I need my wife.” Gulf waves crash in his ears, and his voice sounds like he’s speaking underwater.

“And I need you to give me the name of…”

“Listen to me. Please listen. I need to talk to my wife. I need to explain to her that I didn’t see it coming. I wasn’t prepared. Okay? Can you just tell her that? I didn’t see any of this coming.” The throbbing in his head feels like nails that pierce his nasal cavity and melt into his mouth. He places his hand against the booth to steady himself.

“Sir, we don’t relay messages. I’m disconnecting you.”

At the drone of the dial tone, Nick replaces the receiver and rests his head against it. He needs the spinning to stop. He needs water. Better yet, a stiff drink and a cigarette.

“Hey there. Other folks are waiting for that phone,” a man calls from behind him. “You ain’t the only one in here.”

“Yeah. I know,” Nick barks back. He could deck the guy, but he hasn’t any strength left in his arms, nor the energy to feel genuine rage.

Nick stumbles down the aisle, brushing past wet elbows and shoulders. At the end of the line, a tattooed arm shoves a roll of paper towels into his chest. Nick doesn’t look up but stops, takes the roll, and leans against the shelf next to a rack of sunglasses. He studies his reflection in the curved mirror above the rack. Sees his defeated, stubborn eyes. His chapped lips. His cheeks blotched with rain and sweat, making it appear as though he’s been crying, absolving the real tears that, for the last several months, have refused to come. The pain in his head has dulled, and he inhales and exhales, slowly, deliberately, summoning long columns of air from deep within his gut until it, too, begins to unclench.
Nick wanders back towards the front of the store where he finds Jo and Roxy sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the Donkey Kong machine. Somehow, they’ve managed to score bright red Slurpees and a bag of Doritos.

“Where’d you get those?” he asks.

Roxy points to a man behind the cash register. Manuel, Manager, his name tag reads.

“He said we could pick out whatever we wanted,” Joelle explains, her voice calm and matter of fact.

“But I told him we’d share the chips. There’s a lot of other people here.”

“Right.” He notices the tranquility of the room, everyone milling about, wringing water out of clothes, shedding the heaviness of the day, accepting that the loss of their surroundings in a pool of darkness is an inescapable element of nature and nothing more.

Nick rips off two sheets of towels and hands them to Joelle. He tears off another, drops to his knees, and blots the water from Roxy’s matted curls. “We’re okay, Daddy,” she says between chews. Dorito crumbs dot the corners of her mouth. He looks into her eyes and nods. He’s about to go the register to thank Manuel when someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns and sees a young woman, or older teenager. She looks familiar, and Nick realizes she’s a former student, from five or six years ago. What was her name? Started with a D – Dahlia, Darla?

“Hey, Mr. K. You all right? Remember me? Delia.” Her blonde hair is mostly wet and gathered into a loose ponytail. Faded turquoise-blue shadow crowns her bloodshot eyes, and she smells vaguely of weed. “Looks like you could use one of these,” she says, sliding a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes and pointing it at him. She stands uncomfortably close, but Nick doesn’t move. He briefly wonders whether she’s a hallucination.

Nick looks down at the girls. They don’t know that smoking was once a habit of his, one he’d given up as soon as he and Lisa decided to start a family. He clears his throat and takes the cigarette. Roxy looks up at him but remains silent, then wraps her Slurpee-stained lips around the fat straw and begins to make those loud sucking sounds that drive Lisa insane.

“Thank you,” Nick says. Delia offers him a light, and he accepts — his first drag in almost eight years. It’s not the sweet relief he’d anticipated, but it feels like the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the situation.

“You still teaching at Stephen F?” Delia asks.

“Yeah. I mean, no. Not really. Not for a while. It’s complicated.”

“Huh. Well, if you aren’t, that’s too bad. I mean, I know I wasn’t all that there — man, you were so patient, but…Hey, you sure you’re okay, Mr. Kerrigan?”

“Yes, Dahlia.”

“Delia.”

“Delia. Sorry. Yes. I am. I’m getting there. I think. I’m just going to sit down with my girls now. If you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, okay, sure. Y’all take care.”

Nick slumps to the floor and stretches out his legs. The cigarette dangles from his lips; droplets of water crawl down his scalp. He should continue drying off, but it feels like forever since he’s sat. He doesn’t know the time, or whether it’s day or night. Any marker he might rely on to draw such distinctions has dissolved in a watery grave. Maybe this should make him feel cleansed, renewed, redeemed — his shrink will have an apt metaphor.

Mostly, he just feels drowned. He doesn’t know what comes next, can’t remember the last time he did. But if they have to sleep and eat and wait on this cold, mud-streaked floor until the rain stops and the water recedes, that’s what they’ll do. That’s his plan: Slurpees and strangers and a cigarette haze, his daughters’ arms holding on, never letting go. Because the one thing he remembers is to not steer himself against the tide.

I.

 

Lexi was reluctant to be Matthias Gerner’s accompanist for the gala concert, but not for the reasons her colleagues at the Manila Youth Conservatory imagined. It wasn’t that she missed the limelight and wanted center stage for herself, or that she had nerves about performing. She simply didn’t know if she could trust him.

He was the most popular concert pianist in the world. Young-looking even at forty, muscular, with a disarming smile, he had been the darling of classical music fans, young and old, for almost twenty years, until a mysterious falling-out with a conductor named Elias Wojciekowski. At the last concert they were supposed to do together, Wojciekowski walked off the podium without even touching his baton. Matthias remained to conduct and play on his own, which had the audience in an uproar of admiration by the end. Not long afterward, Wojciekowski completely disappeared from the public eye, and Matthias took a noticeable break from performing and moved to Osaka to be guest faculty at the music school. The move, such a long way from Vienna, struck Lexi as odd, and a fundraising gala in the Philippines after some master classes with young Filipino musicians seemed like a convenient redemptive photo op.

“Maybe he’s just a nice, generous guy who cares about young artists all over the world,” Lexi’s best friend, Cherry, suggested in the car on the way to the conservatory.

“Maybe,” said Lexi.

Cherry pulled into a parking spot behind the main building and retrieved her oboe case from behind the driver’s seat. Lexi got out of the passenger’s side with a shoulder bag and the oboe sonata by Saint-Saëns. The two went up the stairs to the rear entrance, where the guard, who had worked there for a decade, raised a hand to greet the distinctive pair – Cherry with her loud ‘70’s blouse, flare pants, and a frizzy bob dyed green at the edges, and Lexi, at 5’6” taller than most Filipinas, in white pants and a sleeveless cornflower blue top, her black hair in a long, high ponytail that hung to her ribcage.

“And you did turn the gig down,” Cherry pointed out as they entered the elevator.

“Because someone who quit performing before her career really went anywhere shouldn’t be putting her name in front of the phrase ‘master class.’”

“You won an international competition!”

“That was a lifetime ago.”

“1991. Twelve years. Then when you recorded your CD people compared your Chopin interpretations to Rubinstein and your Liszt to Brendel, for God’s sake.” The elevator pinged as they arrived at the fourth floor. “Ugh. I hate that it pings in G instead of A.”

 

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

I

Justine is nineteen and living in Toronto when she learns her mother has been killed. It’s November and she’s pretending to love chemistry when what she really wants to do is act. She works at a pub to pay for the scene study classes that she takes in secret. Her sister is the only one who knows. Justine never told her mother. Now, she never will.

In those last moments before she becomes a girl without a mother, Justine is discussing Angels in America with her teacher. She’s been assigned to play Harper, the unhappy wife of the conflicted Joe. Harper is Mormon, which is another way of saying she’s in a miserable marriage she cannot leave.

“Why does she stay?” asks the acting teacher.

“Because marriage is a trap,” says Justine. “It swallows you and you’re stuck.”

“You can’t play marriage is a trap. Acting is about verbs, not philosophy. What does Harper want from Joe? Does she love him?”

“I don’t see how she could.”

“Then why fight for the marriage?”

“I imagine she wants to go to the celestial kingdom.”

“Aha! Now you have something to fight for. Go on, Justine. Save your goddamn soul.”

It’s then that her phone rings. That Justine left her cell phone on would be a problem if they were in the acting studio, but they are in his bedroom – she’s been sleeping with Darcy Porter for almost a month. Darcy is tall and bald and his apartment is littered with the weights he uses to stay in shape. Justine steps around the dumbbells and takes the call in the kitchen. Uncle Duke’s voice is cool as he delivers the news. This is just his way but it’s the sort of resolve that lives in the genes. Justine can do it too. Her only response is to ask about her sister. Iris will be in a battle now. Justine and her mother were the only ones who became fluent in ASL.

“Iris is staying with us,” says Duke. “The accident was at the house.”

“Put her on.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened?”

 

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]