When I was in eighth grade, I spent one afternoon each week with an elderly woman named Raisie who lived a block down from my mother’s house. She paid me to do an unhelpful job of helping her with non-essential tasks. I took a shovel to the weeds in her lush backyard while she supervised in a white lawn chair, sinking into its soft algae spots. She had a doll house made of fragile wooden sticks that had been damaged, and I sat on the carpet of her perfumed bedroom trying to glue it back together. My fingers were clumsy, and I left beadlets of glue in the seams of the house, but Raisie didn’t mind. She mourned that her children and grandchildren never visited her, and I knew that my home repairs were secondary to the company I gave her. One day, I just stopped visiting her, too. The more that she grew to trust me and expect my visits, the intimacy and emotional responsibility became overwhelming to me.

Raisie’s spine was rounded from age and orthopedic damage. When she walked, her torso curled to face the floor. She careened forward, all her weight upheld by her blistered, white-knuckled grip on her cane. One night I imitated her walk to my mother, tiptoeing and lurching my body forward in an exaggerated curve. My mom paused with true disappointment, then said “that’s really not nice, Em.” Beneath the deflection mechanism of my mocking was the pain I felt watching Raisie navigate her home – insisting on taking pots and ladles down from their pegs on the canary yellow walls of her kitchen, insisting on walking from the ottoman to the brocade couch holding albums in her arms, insisting on walking at all. The home was like a museum of a family’s life, necessarily frozen in time in a way that her bones and joints couldn’t be. The home that ostensibly gave her autonomy was also an unrelenting burden to her body. I felt inadequate in my ability to help and ashamed that she was in a position to depend on my help in the first place. Only now can I name a deeper shame: that Raisie’s fate might be mine, too. That domesticity would grow big around me, subsume me like a weed.

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

The turtles in the pond have been decaying since I got here. Since before I got here. I wonder how many soulmates each of them have had. If they feel more than pain, fear, and joy. Surely turtles can love, but in the haze of my confusion I recall that rabbits are the ones who mate for life, as well as eagles and lobsters, and I have no clue what I’m talking about which is almost always the case.

The first time I took mushrooms in a vain attempt to feel cool, I walked out to this very turtle pond in a crew neck that was too big for me, and I started crying when I realized that this was what captivity looked like. Turtles in the pond of a liberal arts college too understaffed to take care of them properly. Their home was covered in algae and it stunk of something rotten, certainly not fit for the needs of these sweet reptiles that stared at you as you walked by. The pain of this realization left me in too much of an inebriated state to look away from the horror, and it prevented me from doing anything but kneeling by the edge of the pond and sinking my slick toes into the mulch and debris. Carol, our psychedelic trip sitter, rubbed my back as the inner child in me lifted itself from its crib and shook the handlebars violently: “But they can’t get out! They don’t even know what they’re missing.”

Carol laughed at this seemingly ridiculous and unrelated assertion and our friend Nettie, higher than the two of us, walked in circles around the pond, muttering something about how the sky was too big for us to understand. The bushes around the pond got smaller, shriveling up underneath the weight of my sadness, and I failed to hold my body up. I slowly fell from a squat to a fetal position, and I asked questions that weren’t being heard. Ones that couldn’t be answered. Do they have friends? Have they ever been in love? Do you think they would want to be here or somewhere like Montana, like New York? How do we make it stop? Soon the emptiness of pet turtles living in their rotting ecosystem lost its importance, and I became tired of feeling responsible for someone else’s actions. But I didn’t need overpriced and shorthanded drugs to tell me this. I have always felt too much.

…

The turtles in the pond that have been decaying since before I got here, watch us from the slimy water lily pads that are not strong enough to hold more than one of them at a time, the weight of their shells and my silence dragging them into the water. They listen to us as we pretend we’re too grown to make mistakes.

“Turn to the side and stare at the sun,” I instruct. My voice sounds womanly in the warmth of September.

She maneuvers her neck confidently in the direction of the sky, swirls of mousey brown hair covering a mark that may have been from birth right underneath her left earlobe. What once was honey brown in her iris is now a mixture of green and amber.

“Yeah, it still works,” I gleaned, like the child I actually was, elated to show my current love interest a new party trick. The sensuality and innocence of having this knowledge, that eye color changes according to the direction in which you face the light, felt important. Declarative. I wanted to reinvent the wheel for her.

She turns back to me, smiling in a way that lets us both know she is older, but I am timeless. Her breathing dishevels her entire body, slowly, as I watch her shoulder lift from the ground and then center itself in the dewy grass.

“Now you. Look at the sun,” she orders, eyeing me up and down, pausing for a moment longer when she reaches my collarbones.

I do it, slowly, and she studies my profile while I stare into the space of her pupils and then the splayed-out bushes to my left.

Pupils, bushes.

Pupils, bushes.

3 seconds in between. This is how you get a woman with a wife to fall in love with you, I thought.

She calculates me calculating her and eventually we fall back onto the crocheted blanket that kisses my skin the way she never would.

…

“Have you read The Price of Salt?” She fingers the spines of my books in my studio apartment, all of them sitting passively on the juvenile bookshelf I bought on sale at IKEA. I really should’ve opted for the mahogany instead of the cheap black plywood, but I was poor and convinced that it was the amount of books you stored on a bookshelf that really mattered visually.

“No, I haven’t. Should I?”

“If you’re going to be a lesbian, you should.”

She smiled under her breath. Something about her having read Patricia Highsmith more than me must have confirmed her queerness in a way I had not yet experienced. I was too new to all of this.

She picked up Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, the corners of the novel weathered from my sweaty thumbprints and tight grip around what I thought held the answers to love and life itself. (This was, of course, untrue, but I didn’t realize that until I forced myself to finish every self-help book on the matter, particularly Robin Norwood’s bestseller, Women Who Love Too Much, published in 1985. It taught me all I needed to know about the love I learned from my mother and father. Women, being burdened, always nurturing, never being nurtured.) I wanted her to ask me how many times I had read the tribute to Virginia Woolf’s work, Mrs. Dalloway. I wanted to read her my essay on the subject for my Intro to the Novel class I was taking. I wanted to be admired for something I loved.

She paced to the front of my twin size bed and collapsed onto the mattress topper with a heavy thump, pressing her back against my windowsill and giving me an empathetic look. It, without a doubt read, I should fuck you, however, I won’t. But not because of me, because of you. The dimming of sky reminded us we only had another hour or so before it was time to close up the windows and drown out the sound of harsh ribbiting frogs that burrowed in the moss surrounding the nearby creak, and created a sheen around her silhouette. She had taken off her brown utility pants 15 minutes earlier in a way that seemed casual and relevant. In a moment of dazed confusion, I forgot the interaction out of pure hunger. I was enamored with her in a way that bent time. I craved her presence in each waking moment, and I was simply happy to see her comfortable — in my bed.

“Is this okay?” she had asked, knowing I wouldn’t object as she peeled the thick canvas material away from her skin. Her way of teasing was anything but subtle. She made this her specialty because to be subtle is to be virtually unknown and you could never say she lived this life anonymously. Nameless.

Her subtlety didn’t mean much to me. I was still going to love her despite our demise.

Sometimes I would try to match her implications, like when I would ask in the coyest manner if her wife would ever find out about the details of that night at my apartment. My subtlety felt so sexy at the time, like a tight black dress that peeked up when you sat down, or when you dropped fresh fruit onto your lap in the summer. Or when you stare at a stranger from across the room until they’re forced to look away. It all ended up being ridiculous, the game of who’s-more-profound-than-who. You only ever end up being the other woman.

In this particularly subtle and obscure moment, I remembered how three weeks ago she drunkenly called me outside some restaurant in Berkeley before meeting up with another partner, a woman she’d been seeing for a little over a year when her wife agreed to an open marriage. They were grabbing a drink, and then who knows, maybe they’d end up back at the partner’s house in Alameda. The partner was ten years older than her and lived in the city, a fact that mirrored our relationship in an uncanny valley sort of way. I was 10 years younger than her, in a studio apartment that was still too expensive for a full-time student. I was young and exciting, but naive and barely 21.

I was buzzed on shitty pink Moscato when she called. My heart stopped when I saw the caller ID and slowed when she told me where she was. It shattered when she told me who she was with. Have you been here before? It’s on Shattuck Street, right where we went to that bookstore. I was the bookstore date, not the dinner with drinks date. I tried to push back the disgusting euphoric image of them at the bar where they would share appetizers, laugh about the details of their day, and then race to her black Lexus to end their night with lustful fucking, faster than the waiter could bring them their check. Who was I to think I could own such a public declaration as that? Who was I to think we would ever romantically leave the confines of these four walls? I couldn’t even get into the bar.

I don’t remember if I said in the heat of my own jealousy, “You’re messed up for calling,” or if the only words that escaped in an effort to remain easy-going, the way women in open marriages find ultra-sexy, were, “Enjoy your night.” I couldn’t remember if I asked how she could have sex with someone in the city but rejected me with passive longing when I reached to hold her hand in public. I couldn’t remember if I asked how she managed to manifest someone to fulfill each level of companionship she craved: the reliable lay, the romantic friendship, and the spouse that approved of one but not the other.

…

I knew her wife’s name and that she was a professor for a local college, but I didn’t know what she taught, when or how she constructed her schedule, and I didn’t know the rules that were attached to their open marriage. I didn’t know if she meal-prepped or what car she drove or if she had a skincare routine that she forgot about on nights where tequila made things hard to remember. I didn’t even know if she liked to drink tequila. I couldn’t tell you the names of her nieces, two of them close to my age, that she took care of like a mother. And I didn’t know for sure, but I certainly assumed that these girls were the reason she despised me being in the picture, tangled in bed with the woman she thought she could work out a marriage with, being all young and in love.

…

Back at my apartment, I stared at her in this gleam made up of dusk and passion while she handed me The Hours with an evasive smile.

“Read me something.”

Finally.

“River” by Leon Bridges played in the background and I felt my cheeks get hot underneath the glow of the fluorescent light I had covered with a sheer shirt above my vanity to give it a vintage sort of haze. I opened to the first page and read each passage I had underlined with black ink until I reached the end of the novel. She watched my lips move over words—unstinting, potent, bereaved, I want a doomed love—like they were sentences sleeping in my bed and I needed to retrieve a glass of water on the other side of the twin mattress. Careful. Not wanting to wake them from dreaming. I watched her watch me and I thought that maybe perfection could exist between all the things we wanted but could not have.

…

During a last-minute trip to Maine, I told a girl I met online from Portland I have four tattoos and showed her the pain it caused me to get each of them stitched into my skin. I flirt with her while contemplating texting you. I try to find an excuse to move on. This all makes me think of the book you recommended to me, the one you bought for me on Shattuck Street. That was our obsession: language. Our elaborate infatuation with words that I tell myself you shared with no one else, but I’m sure you did, because every person you fall in love with is a living, breathing novel.

You’re intrigued (obsessed, maybe) by the monotony of women who enter your life—the married-to-a-man-for-three-years woman who used to be on your softball team. Your friend, Maggie, who you told me was also in a sexless marriage, so maybe you two should just fuck to get over the mutual sadness that comes before divorce. And then me. There’s a tedious sameness to all of us; we like poetry and fiction and alluring conversation that you try to replicate like your favorite authors who I’ve never read. And what am I accomplishing after the rubble of us? What do we have left?

I ask the girl from Portland what scares her most and she says getting a tattoo and all I can think of is that terrible ugly stick and poke of a falcon on your left shoulder and how un-scared you must have been, telling me you already outlived the age you thought you’d die at.

…

A few months after I ended things between us, I visited my parents in Maine. I drank an entire bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon made with organic grapes while my father slept with a flu and my mother suspended consciousness with neon orange earplugs and covers pulled tight over her forehead. I always thought this was an odd way to sleep until I realized how badly I wanted to shut the world out. I mixed the last swallow of red with expensive gin my mother bought for her 50th birthday and stomached down the last 3 ounces of burning alcohol. You texted her. This is what you deserve.

The text message bubble outlines eight miserable words shines bright and blue.

Hope you’re doing okay. Been thinking about you.

I climbed with shaky palms onto the top bunk in the spare room. The bottom was stacked with forgotten boxes of photo albums and bank statements, baby clothes, and broken picture frames my mother told herself she’d restore. When I reached the top, I felt the weight of my decision sink into the sheets next to me. I didn’t have her, but I had the memory of what could have been. Worse than that, I had a text that verged on the line of drunk and sober but in reality, was a measly attempt of unearthing the woman I so desperately wanted.

Hope you’re doing okay. Been thinking about you.

Always.

The room kept spinning and I was too sad to pull the mass of myself up from the hot sheets and before I knew it, I was salivating at the mouth, too tired and drunk to make it to the bathroom. I threw up pink liquid that had made a home in my body and cried when I realized I was the only one who could fix it. I sat in my mistake for a minute and climbed back down the ladder, carefully gathering the putrid smelling blankets and feeling like a five-year-old who couldn’t call her mother for help. With laundry started and freshly brushed teeth, I slept to the sound of the whirring washing machine and my own broken heart.

…

This is how I remember you.

You and I, sitting in some local barbeque spot in downtown Oakland waiting to be served. We had just come from a lesbian acapella event held in a synagogue. I had met your best friend that day (more so, your non-biological brother), and drove to his two-story baby blue house on Telegraph Avenue after my morning shift. I walked up the steps with sweaty palms and stuck-in-my-throat nerves because he had to have known I was more, that I was a light she had been looking for. I heard her laugh from the backyard and the fear dissipated into the dandelions on the edge of the walkway.

The baby blue paint off the side of the house was peeling and although the house looked like it was slowly withering away, succumbing under the weight of gentrification and climate variability, the warmth from the sun radiated against my skin and the smiles of a 30-almost-31-year-old woman and her best-friend-quasi-brother filled me up as I watched them place handmade pom-poms made of multicolored yarn on the backyard fence.

“Oh hello, you.” She thrashed through the dead grass that was ankle-high and hugged me tight with poms in her hands. The adornment she had for me stuck to my espresso-scented shirt and I breathed her in for as long as I could. “You wanna hang up some poms?”

We lined the multicolored mini universes made of thread and fibers along the wooden fence until we ran out and got hungry and realized it was time for lunch. Her brother stayed behind to work in the yard.

“I want to put the garden over here.” He stood close to my frame, pointing to the bare soil lined with a semi-circle of cinder blocks. He wanted someone to tell him that what he was doing was worth it. He trusted that I was that someone even though we hadn’t known each other longer than 30 minutes.

“I think that would look really good,” I replied, smiling in his direction and not the mockup of his nursery. He gave me a solemn look that let me know he understood what this all meant to me. His arms were crossed but his figure was soft against the backdrop of the decaying home. “I’m tired of tending to dead things,” he whispered.

In the cramped clean kitchen, pretending we were not falling harder for one another than we had been before, I was your sous-chef. I whispered that your cilantro wasn’t fine enough, that the onions should go in now, not later. They take time to marry themselves with the garlic. The marriage of spices shouldn’t be rushed, no marriage should.

I said these things with my body. I sat cross-legged on top of the counter where you fed me parsnips, told me I smelled like jasmine underneath the redolence of hard work. And then you introduced me as a ‘friend’ to your brother’s roommate when she walked in the kitchen and witnessed the scene. Your brother’s roommate made her own fruit leather. She bragged about it, the organic quality of the materials, and I knew there had to be a part of you, the woman I was stuck loving, that suspected we were all meant to be in this kitchen eating your brother’s roommate’s cherry flavored fruit preserve. You found it charming, and not at all heartbreaking, a moment in time where I knew for sure what you meant when I asked you if you remembered calling me a ‘friend’.

“All I remember,” you said, “is cooking tacos.”

…

Does anyone know what Fate is? Because sometimes I feel like it’s a knife, and sometimes I feel like it’s a spoon, and I can’t get myself to believe if it’s the sharp death of someone never admitting my worth, or the soft semblance of my admiration for all that they are. If it’s musings from Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things or the long-forgotten letters to your Aunt Lori, an intertwining of work at the hands of other women.

I wonder if I’m allowed, sometimes, to be disappointed by Fate. To regret its passage through my life the way I regret leaving bread in the oven for too long. If the byproduct of Her is my mistakes, something I can alter with time and practice, or if it’s something that leaves me empty for years to come, bringing up memories of infidelity that had nothing to do with me. Of youth and death that had everything to do with me.

I want to have seven soulmates before I die. I may have already met one. And it’s not because of the wife, or the almost-11-year-old age difference, or the inability to stop loving her. It is none of the things we want it to be. It’s only the thing itself in all its glory.

The turtles in the pond have been decaying since I got here.

They are surrounded by memories of cleaner waters, missing loved ones, and wishing for a change in the seasons that may or may not come.

You stay in the room with him the whole time. You only leave once to pee, and you let yourself linger, praying it’ll all be over by the time you get back. But, of course, it isn’t; it won’t be over for hours.

Sometimes you’re alone with him. Most of the time, your father and brother are there. Sometimes you sit, sometimes you stand beside the bed. You try talking to him, but you don’t try for very long. You don’t know if he can hear you, and if he can, he can’t respond. You give up. You let the machines do the talking: the whirr, buzz, beep, and click of air forced into failing lungs.

At first, he’s able to make eye contact with you, and you know, at least temporarily, that he knows you’re there. But as they up his morphine dosage, his gaze wanders to the ceiling tiles and sticks.

You’re there when they take the air pump away. They replace it with a steady stream of oxygen, which he must inhale and exhale manually. You know he can’t keep this up for long. Your father agreed to this. You agreed to this.

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

Your mother used to call you zaftig.

Yiddish for: a full figured woman. Used mostly for women, though occasionally for men if they are a little chubby. You had long, beautiful brown wavy locks. Gorgeous hair, the women used to say, in their nasally Long Island Italian accents. Hairdressers would pose you for pictures like a mannequin while their long plastic fingernails combed through it, made the curls so big you could hide behind them as if they were the coveted walls of an attic. After you come out as gay during the pandemic, the first thing you do is buy a brand new masculine wardrobe.

When you were zaftig, you took all the Jew jokes at your new southern public high school with a smile. You made yourself laugh each time a boy did the Hitler salute or suggested you should be in an oven. You didn’t call out your friends for laughing. And you didn’t punch that Q-anon looking asshole, with his ugly toothbrush mustache in the mouth before first period, even though you wanted to when he asked if you had horns, since he heard all Jews have horns,  and even though you debate giving him an uppercut, putting a childhood filled with sweaty Tae Kwon Do lessons to good use, you don’t, because you are a nice Jewish girl, and even if you did have horns, you’d keep them rinsed and shampooed, hidden beneath your Nice Jewish hair.

You keep a list on your phone of all the times you have been called sir in public. You stop counting after five. You enjoy the game of it, the agency you get when men think you’re one of them. Your hair is boy-short. Your clothes are from the men’s section, but even on feminine days, they don’t see your body and think your shape checks the box of a woman. This should bother you, but it doesn’t. You learn how to be a man: how to walk like one, how to talk, how to do a proper handshake, lift weights at the gym without being anxious, how to win instead of lose.

On Yom Kippur, the security guard gives you a firmer handshake than usual, compliments your haircut. When you walk into the synagogue, dressed in beige trousers, purple Nike Jordan basketball shoes, and a boy’s collared t-shirt that’s way too big on you, the rabbi offers you a blue yarmulke to put on your head and the chance to give an aliyah blessing at the bimah before the congregation, to sit in the men’s section, says without saying it that now you are a mensch. You have dreamed of this moment your whole life. But when you look up at the closeted Arc of the Torah, folded in on itself, you think of G-d watching you, of all the sins you are about to repent for, and sit back down in the women’s side of the mechitza.

The first time it happens, you are in a restaurant with your mom. A waiter arrives and after he goes through the usual spiel about specials in his southern accent, he asks your mother for her order. What can I get for you today, ma’am? She tells him what she wants. He turns to you, stands up a bit straighter. And for you, sir? It rolls off his tongue with more purpose, more power. Your whole face lights up. She’ll have the Caesar salad. Your mom corrects him. He steps back, his eyes wide. I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I- It’s okay, you say, basking in the compliment. I don’t mind.  Later that same day, you tell a butch friend about your new ability. Welcome to the first of many, my friend. She says.

How can I help you, sir? The men ask you. What can I get for you, sir? Nobody holds the door for you anymore, you hold the door open for them. Uber rides are no longer plagued by uncomfortable, unwarranted questions, but comfortable silences, the driver’s eyes remain on the road as rap music plays instead of bubblegum pop. When you ask for the restroom, you are given directions to the men’s bathroom. When you order food, the waiters write it down as you speak, not afterwards. There are pluses to the patriarchy that you never observed before in a lifetime of minuses. When you say you are a writer, you no longer hear things like what your cousin once said, nobody reads books written by women. What job are you going to get with that degree? They ask what you write about, if you’re working on a novel. When you say you are autistic, you are not given  anecdotes about how you’re nothing like two year old autistic family members or a list of solutions to cure your puzzle piece: yoga, gluten free diets, essential oils, walking, meditation. When your autism speaks, you no longer have to worry about your voice shaking.

At the airport, your mother is asked if you are her son. You are referred to with he/him/his pronouns, go from a pretty lady to a young man. Sometimes even she slips up, uses your brother’s name for you by accident. You take any spare coats or shirts he doesn’t want, mold your gender from pink to blue like a clay Golem. You asked to cut your hair short in seventh grade, yet didn’t know how to say what you meant, so you ended with a bob—continued to maneuver your hair in the mirror until it resembled a guy’s cut. Each time strangers address you, you can see the multiple choice survey appear instantly before them right above your undecipherable body. Is this person A. Male B. Female or C.Neither? You come out as nonbinary twice, hoping this will give people the explanation they need, then end up at your starting point.

In your senior year of college, once lockdowns end, you try to be zaftig again.

You grow out your hair, contemplate getting a wig, wonder if lesbians can wear sheitels after marriage. You replace suits with dresses, buy the frilliest pink dress you can. It hugs your shoulders and has a lacey bow on the front. Your mother says you look mousey. The fabric clings to your skin too tightly. A friend sees a picture of you and says you look uncomfortable. You feel like you have gone back into the closet. Your shoulders hunch over, your eyes are downcast. You sit with your legs together instead of apart, keep your hands on your lap, speak quieter, apologize more. Men go back to talking to you in Uber rides and seeing phone-tapping silence as an invitation for questions. As hard as you try to be one, a zaftig is just not who you are anymore. You are a mensch. The tally proves it. The next time you wear a suit to synagogue, the sides of your head buzzed off,  you feel like the Torah as the arc opens; your scrolls of truth unfolding. You stand up and down three on your tip toes during Kedushah, repeating Hebrew praises in a chorus of the body’s movement, returning to a place where you finally feel:  holy, holy, holy.

A wild entry from Helen this morning, positively raging she was and without any preliminaries. From the get-go there was something clearly the matter. Helen had entered the kitchen with her shopping trolley, which she kept inside the main entry door. Ordinarily, when Helen needed to fetch it she came in from her room and immediately took it outside. A woman of the neighbourhood who she didn’t know but who knew Helen had approached her the night before to offer her rice. Helen fed birds (illegally), right? She could use it, right? Turned out later there were 6-7 packets of a kilogram or more that almost filled Helen’s trolly, when she was encountered shortly afterward by the waste bins after breakfast. In the kitchen Helen had little time to talk. While she spoke her hair shook and came loose in a couple of places. No time to talk, OK, Helen reiterated sternly. She wasn’t going to be held up. The woman was going to leave the rice at the corner of the lane toward Onan Road. Later in the subsequent conversation by the bins it turned out the woman concerned might have been a Malay man’s maid from Block 2, sent over on the errand. The man often passed by there and knew Helen and her feeding, like so many others. There was the rice and around the corner in Onan proper by Galaxy Tower, a cat that Auntie Ena formerly fed had overnight passed away. As Auntie E was weak on her pins now and found it hard to come down, Helen had accepted the responsibility for that particular cat too. Last night she had noticed it looking poorly; for some few days she had not been eating her food. Something was wrong when a cat was not eating Helen’s choice food, but in this instance the cat had not looked that bad. Then this morning she was dead. At the waste bins when Helen had calmed down she told how she had come upon the cat in the morning, saw it lying there and when she came up to pat it found it stiff. The cat was not particularly old, maybe fifteen years. Helen had been feeding it since 2020. Dog years were x 6-7 in human terms, Helen more or less agreed. In cat reckoning it was a factor of 3, Helen said. Making this particular cat 80, Helen had calculated in the kitchen. (Later in the morning Wan Ling had explained the more complicated life terms of cats.) Ordinarily there was nothing wrong with Helen’s arithmetic, or reasoning. Clearly she had been in a state. Off to get the rice. Don’t want to talk to you. At the bins Helen was met coming up from the slope and showed the rice in her trolley. That would save her $40-50. Monthly Helen spent $30 just for the bird food. Helen fed the crows, pigeons, mynahs & sparrows only at night and careful about it. So many people had the so-called bird problem wrong, the government included. In the telling in the kitchen it had seemed someone had brought the dead cat to the rubbish bins for disposal. Out there later when we talked again there was no sign of it. No. There it is, Helen indicated toward her door, where a large cardboard box sat on the paving beside Helen’s outdoor chairs. It was of course Helen herself who had brought it over. Some of the sharpness again in that, though not as bitingly as in the kitchen earlier. If it was up to her, Helen would dispose of the body in the large green waste bin. What was the use of anything else? But in this case Helen could not do that. Over coming days Maureen would notice Bush Girl’s absence and ask after her. Helen had called Maureen between times to convey the news, knowing that Maureen would want to arrange a cremation. $120-30 wasted, according to Helen. What was the sense once the cat was dead? This had long been a point a friction between Helen & Maureen. Instead of helping Helen with the cost of good feed that saved on vet bills, Maureen spent money on hopeless cases, $8-9K recently on a couple of doomed cats whose condition the vet had clearly explained. Irrational. Money down the drain. But one could not reason with Maureen. Maureen would come over shortly to see off Bush Girl. (Not Gal, Helen had snapped earlier in the kitchen leaving for the rice.) It was Maureen who gave all the cats their names; by which Helen meant the outdoor cats. Helen had names of her own for her litter.

Geylang Serai, Singapore

2.

Lorong 16 corner the fellow was truly tickled to receive the order. Not a little astonished.

— You want Jiang Cha? Yes, sir.

Local not more than one-point-five rattling at the tables with the customers. Now the man was newly delighted.

10pm was too early for the girls; only a small number had landed. Men drinking beer, including one or two Whites. Perhaps that was some part of the surprise. Jiang Cha. Ginger tea.

A good deal stronger brew was going down on the other side, three large shot glasses with Carlsberg chasers. Somehow the Danes had cornered the market in Geylang.

Seasoned lads here knew what they were about, seen off a couple of novices and settling in for the evening. Gestures like sober judges weighing life and death. The big beefy carrot-top needed another treatment; his faded tattoos too dated from an earlier generation’s inferior ink.

Budget One Hotel on the main road; off further two 81s faced each other. The Hotel 81s had started as hourly Love Hotels in Geylang. Now they were all over the island and the founder likely one of the billionaire class.

On the pavement workingmen using thumb and forefinger for nose-blow. The locals had disowned their cousins from the Mainland long ago—perhaps here with somewhat lesser contempt. Middle Geylang was almost entirely Chinese.

The first star in seven weeks stood high above the neon, pale and faltering. A single example standing in for the mass invisible in the grey cover.

It was Pure-heart, Minhtan the Viet, who had commented on the absence of stars here a few weeks before.

Ho Chi Min presumably was not the standard Minhtan had in memory; even in her childhood that city’s night skies could not have been covered by stars. Minhtan must have been thinking of her hometown two hours out, where she had been brought up by her divorced teacher mother; her “idol,” Minhtan had called her.

In youth Minhtan had not allowed her mother to re-marry, being unable to accept any of the suitors.

My mistake, Minhtan had frankly confessed.

Working in the capital as a materials engineer, Minhtan had been sent to Singapore for training by her German company. Chosen especially no doubt.

On the walk back from dinner that night under a blank sky the absence of stars had been felt by Minhtan. Earlier sitting at the table in upscale Katong, the Amerindians had come to mind during the conversation. Minh tan; Pure heart.

The young woman contained a great deal in her short, slender person. Like her manner and movement, the talk was measured and decisive.

For the first week here Minhtan had been chaperoned around the city by a newly married Filipino colleague, whose wife was jealous and monitored her husband’s movements by phone and GPS. Minhtan could not help scoffing a little in her report.

Freedom was essential in a marriage, in living, Minhtan maintained. Belief too. Minhtan herself needed both, she said.

The ruling principles stood clear without any need of elaboration with Minhtan’s words; something like newly emerged stars from the blank heavens above us, in fact. Freedom and belief together; not an automatic pairing usually.

Somewhere where Minhtan had lived there had been masses of stars; it sounded like the numberless cover that gave off enough light to see. Much about Minhtan made it easy to believe throughout her life the woman had been drenched in starlight.

It had been a pleasant evening. There was no surprise when Minhtan had not accepted the invitation upstairs at the hotel. The suggestion had been one of those reflexes that sometimes sprung out unintentionally. Another date during Minhtan’s short stay had seemed unlikely.

Now there were two more stars out above the Geylang street, dim and barely visible in the grey blanketing. Scanning more carefully, an unsteady third too on the other side. Champagne Hotel‘s vanilla signage skipped a couple of letters further down along the slope.

Two generations here, like so many in other cities across the globe, had lived beneath only empty stretches of night sky.

Katong, Singapore

3.

Tableau (Good Friday)

At first you wondered whether the four on the end were connected to the nearer five—a woman with two boys and a girl and the chap sitting with his group of four.

The entire row was almost filled.

No, they were a unit alright: husband and wife with their seven children.

The eldest was the girl beside mother, eighteen or nineteen. The three young in the middle were girls.

Eldest boy sat opposite dad and next eldest lad opposite mother.

Earlier dad had given the youngster beside him a hand massage, with the suggestion of good expertise. Chap sent a brief, sliding smile behind when he had been turned working the girl’s fingers and saw himself being observed.

Not a whimper of any kind from the children for the duration, the quiet in the row making it seem two groups of strangers had been thrown together.

In the beginning dad appeared the only one armed with a phone. One Hard Rock Classic sported by a junior; dad advertised a coming six pack, on the back of his tee in this case. Unbranded like this, and the Islamic garb declined, one wondered where this woman would have shopped in the Republic. Prices at the mall were beyond the family budget.

The wife was not hankering for any of the handbags at the boutique up past the Levis outlet; nor her eldest either. A day or two earlier a chap had been found taking a photograph of a pink studded item displayed in the window. Imitations were cheaper, or secondhand online.

Quiet, patient youngsters. There was no sign of fidgeting or swinging legs beneath the tables. These children would never play on an inflatable castle (currently erected in the mall beyond the KFC, where rock-climbing was provided other weekends); nor take turns in the sandpits or on the play cranes & backhoes at Diggersite, at the head of the rear escalators. (XXXS hard-hats & work boots were available there.)

Did these people even have television at home? Music or toys?

Patient sitting and hardly a sound; certainly nothing audible behind from any of the chairs.

It was unlikely the crew would get any goreng pisang after the meal.

One could make a spectacle of oneself here; merely watching was beginning to overwhelm.

Fascinating.

The Coke cups came with the iced water at Al Wadi, 30 cents. (Twenty without ice.) In fact it may have been Nutri Soy cans that were being shared. The older lads had their own tall plastic cups—Iced Milo and limun.

Elder precedence was laid down: the oldest wore a simple necklace and the boy opposite dad gold-coloured watch. (The latter’s phone came out afterward.)

One could not ask questions; they would have been blurted.

Father Lazar had had five siblings, counting the first boy who was lost in infancy. Mother the same. One-room thatched stone houses at 1,000m above sea level. But that was another generation; dark side of the moon. (The kampung living had been a universal across the globe, once upon a time. Doklen je srece bilo, while there had been fortune, Bab said.)

Even congratulating the old guy here—only in his early or mid-fifties—the words would have failed.

Unexpectedly, a red ten was produced by dad and eldest brought back from the counter a couple of Cokes with ice-cream floats for sharing. Sore-hands took a few sips from dad’s offering only because he pressed, sipping on the straw once and then again when he pressed again. One or two others had a taste.

Altogether stupendous the whole while; vivid like a genre painting by one of the old masters. In time Eldest noticed the observation and must have quietly wondered to herself.

Not even the pair of lads on dad’s side was drawn by the EPL on the screen. Eldest opposite kept his back turned throughout.

The drizzle came unnoticed and suddenly the rain was angling in, causing dad to bunch closer to Sore-hands. Being out of sorts, the child received the cuddling coolly. All here had learned to share the affection of mum and dad in their turn.

A coin was produced for a new face doing the rounds at those tables, framed in virginal white and baju the same. Practiced old auntie smile.

Elder boy was given the coin. The lady having turned to the next table, lucky for her she turned back again in time. One of the seasoned Indian-Malay group she must have been, who had come from the gates of Khalid for any of the worshippers who had been missed there.

This dad could not manage the Friday sermon, living the holy life as he was instead. It really did appear the complete picture.

Forty minutes later a bag of fries appeared, with chilli. They would not have such a treat every day of the week.

Hardly a smile, much less chatter between any of them. The under-current however bubbled up at many different points up and down the line—in the looks passed among the youngest three; the closeness apparent between the two boys opposite mother; and in the responsible manner of the eldest delegated for delivery of the various items to the table.

On such a day, sitting among these people, you would make them wonder. Going back to the room the night before, one of the chaps at the Haig at parting had offered, “Happy holiday.” For the upcoming. With the community’s own practice, the people assumed the same for the marker days of others. The Chinese in Singapore allowed what they called “Free-thinkers;” they were found here and there among their groups of Daoists, Buddhists and the rest. For the Muslims in particular, such a category was more than a little baffling. In the official record on the identity cards in Indonesia, each citizen was noted as belonging to one of six designated faiths. Anything else was inconceivable.

Geylang Serai, Singapore

I.

This morning a common cellar spider fell into the scalding water of my shower. Already half-lathered by the time I spotted the pitiful creature failing to scramble up the corner of the tub, I hesitated to intervene lest I do more harm than good. Touching the delicate wet body might be like trying to remove someone from a car after a severe accident. If I took care not to spray or drip any more water on her, she might find a path to safety.

But as the situation progressed, it became clear that her floundering was bound for tragedy. Her frail limbs were collapsing, and I concluded there was nothing to lose by attempting a rescue—except for the obvious possibility that my action might only prolong the creature’s suffering. Perhaps I was only helping myself by gingerly lifting the body from the shower to a dry, sheltered area behind the toilet. Whether I’d saved her precious life or kept her from a welcome end to her earthly troubles, I could rest assured of my own benevolence.

I never remembered to check on her. Either she recovered and scurried away, or I vacuumed up the body while cleaning the house for company.

II.

I’m not in the habit of measuring the duration of spiders’ deaths.

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

Singularity

In 1993, mathematician Vernor Vinge warned against the coming technological ‘singularity,’ an event he predicted would occur between 2005 and 2030. The event: basically, robots take over the world. Vinge felt ambivalent and said more or less this: The robots are coming, the robots are coming, the robots are almost here. I am excited for the robots and afraid of the robots the robots are almost here. The robots are almost here, my friend, the robots are almost here. The robots will do whatever we say the robots won’t do what we say. The robots are us until the robots aren’t us the robots are almost here. The future is coming close your eyes close your eyes the robots can almost hear. I bring news of the future the end is in sight all is afright the robots are almost here.

Transit Manifesto

1. The purpose of transit is transit.

2. Three transit zones exist: mechanical, perambulatory, and the collective line.

3. Each zone has rules. In the mechanical, one must think only of transit. Any deviation from thoughts of transit results in revocation of one’s mechanical transit pass. The purpose of transit is transit.

4. The purpose of transit is not consumption of food is not consumption of information is not pleasure the purpose of transit is transit.

5. Those in the collective line will be removed forcefully if impeding the movement of the collective line. Pretending one is not in a collective line is strictly forbidden.

6. The collective line can spring upon you at any moment. Do not be taken unawares by the collective line.

7. Creation of collective lines by standing before or behind another citizen is encouraged but only for the sake of transit not for personal revenge.

8. Collective lines are organic. Transit is organic. Transit is purpose.

Interestingly, the Vow of Chastity DOGMA 95 Manifesto

raises a heretofore undiscussed aspect of a good manifesto: it must be self-flagellating: The author of Manifesto X sees clearly that the power dynamic is broken and while author may have some power it’s meager as manifesto authors are never empowered they are on the short side of things. Author of Manifesto X must make himself Christlike via manifesto, must through Manifesto X show that he is willing to sacrifice his own humanity—empathy, including pleasure, most of all joy—in following the dictums of Manifesto X. Manifestos are composed by the sad muttering heirs of Zeno the madman as only words remain now that THE STOICS are gone; their pitiful descendants, upset at the state of the world, slap words together as a sad code for self-punishment, thinking that through personal suffering they will challenge the order of things…

…precisely as is seen in the Dinner Party Manifesto

1. A dinner party is not a ‘party.’

2. A dinner party is rather a competition with every other dinner party.

3. In advance, request dietary restrictions.

4. Then, insultingly, ignore them.

5. In the days leading to dinner party, make a time-plan: this dish then, clean this then, prep then.

6. Burn the list before significant other’s alarmed eyes.

7. It’s all just fun! insist to significant other.

8. Because: We’re going to win this thing together!

9. A bit of sensory imbalance and discomfort creates sensitive and open-minded

guests: Johnny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack
a too-strong scent of aromatherapy bergamot
welcome bags with Off! wipes

10. Instruct guests to, as you apply the finishing touches, go outside and behold the moonrise.

11. Provide there for them a tub with ice, alcohols, and raw potatoes.

12. Watch them from the kitchen window; shut it quickly when they look at you.

13. Serve the meal two hours after the announced time.

14. Make sure it’s bloody.

15. Tell them about the handfuls of MSG only after the meal.

16. Tell them that this dinner party, your dinner party, has the advantage of recency bias.

17. That, as it’s the season’s first dinner party, it also has the advantage of anchoring bias.

18. Throw your napkin down and cry out that you will never ever attend another dinner party!

19. Bow. Show them the exit. Never once ask their names.

Everyone Knows

Marinetti’s Futurism manifesto, which proves the hypothesis that a manifesto is by nature hysterical. As in this line:

“Smell,” I exclaimed, “smell is good enough for wild beasts!”

Etc. A manifesto is a bit like Viktor Frankenstein in the midst of one of his mad passions, always fainting, far too frequently employing questionable metaphorical language. A little violent, existing in opposition to established orders. A manifesto goes on too long. A manifesto is not meant to be funny at all yet is fucking hilarious. A manifesto is written after midnight drunk with friends and is forgotten until whoops social media alerts the next day. A manifesto is an angry teenager who blares Cat Stevens’s “Father and Son” behind locked doors. A manifesto is a little tired. A manifesto is so glad for summer vacation. A manifesto looks back from time to time and thinks, Wow, what an asshole I was! And it is in a layered gray pajamaed ambivalence of nostalgia, regret, fondness, and shame that manifesto climbs into bed each night, leans over, kisses significant other on the cheek, and lies back, wishing the ceiling weren’t there, that sky and space and stars in all their darkness were visibly rushing in raucous still silence above.

Then of course there’s the SCUM MANIFESTO

In which, prior to shooting Warhol, Valerie Solanas shared these amongst many lines:

Maleness is a deficiency disease.
He is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob.
He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes.
He’s a machine, a walking dildo.
Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit.
Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars — invest it!
And in three years time you’d have 300 trillion dollars!!!
Actual fact: the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself.
The male function is to produce sperm.
(the ultimate male insight is that life is absurd)
Sex is a gross waste of time.
Life, an utter bore.
SCUM wants to grab some thrilling living for itself.
SCUM is too impatient to wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes.
Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves.
SCUM will couple-bust — barge into couples, wherever they are, and bust them up. SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: `I am a turd, a lowly abject turd.’
If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.

Thusly we learn that a manifesto can in fact be a mad cry in the darkness a hot burning flame a match struck this this is wrong this is so wrong wrong wrong here I proclaim what would be righter maybe also wrong but at least a little righter than this abject bullshit motherfucking turd unfairness this utter dehumanizing inequity. A manifesto doesn’t even know that all about in the darkness there are other burning flames. A manifesto is so alone that a manifesto doesn’t know that it is not alone because in its heart of hearts a manifesto is a written thing written by a writer in a dark room alone in her mind screaming (silently) against darkness her skin aflame (screaming) and perhaps we might reach out and give comfort but no, we can’t, too hot, have to let her screaming burn.

Neoliberal Aurelian Grocery Shopping Manifesto begins

Oh, wow, are your days numbered.

Meetings Manifesto

• The focus should not be on fear of the “what if” scenario if we don’t hold meetings, but to focus on building meetings to improve them

• Definitions and roles are defined by Position Description Questionnaires (PDQs)

• The formula for determining roles may not be one that can be applied to everyone

• Professionally, certain titles do matter

• How we define meeting roles may be based on intelligence quotient, velocitation, or other metrics or factors

• Definitions of roles should also clearly specify summer advising expectations

• Prior to meetings, units should meet first to define their own affinity groups to create opportunities for collaborative team-building exercises at subsequent meetings

• Meetings could help us be more distinctive

• Meetings should focus on improving experiences and success

• To help with meetings we need to look at comparable models

• The activity of thinking about how meetings can be interdisciplinary should certainly be on the first half of the agenda

• So much more flexible with meetings offerings

• Meetings should begin with recitation of roles followed by meetings offerings

• Meetings should address specific problems stake-holders need to resolve (e.g., increasing follow-up meetings) and if meetings cannot resolve these specific problems, meetings about how meetings need to be realigned with meetings can be had, based on this evidence

Pizza Manifesto #37

All pizza is perfectly fine food.
But not all pizza is good pizza.

A Manifesto

Does not laugh.

Does not listen.

Is as deep as it is shallow.

Complains and proclaims.

Is masculine at heart.

Is one more terrible written in the face of all the more terrible.

Even as it is born it rejects and wishes to inflict suffering.

Is pleased with all the coming ends of things.

Wants to eat its father.

Shouts and shouts even as it begins to suspect that no one is listening.

Goes on too long.

Doesn’t ever learn that there’s no point in arguing.

Doesn’t understand that a person is not a people.

Is so lonely.

Even More Essentially,

a manifesto is an articulated desire for freedom in an age of imposed constraint. In 1776, the American colonies published the Declaration of Independence Manifesto. In 1812, Simón Bolívar published the Cartagena Manifesto. 1848 Communist, 1850 Anarchist. In 1965, consumer advocate Ralph Nader subverted the manifesto form by publishing the anti-manifesto Unsafe at Any Speed, articulating a desire for imposed constraint in a time of freedom. The year prior, 1964, conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn published the Short Manifesto. It’s got 96 words, so it’s not really that short. In it, Brouwn writes things like, “When science and art are entirely melted together,” and “people will have lost their remembrance and thus will have no past, only future,” and “they will live in a world of only colour, light, space, time, sounds, and movement…[all] will be free.” Come on. It is abundantly clear that Brouwn did not overly consider his assertions. A people with no past and no memory is a people who have not suffered and people who have not suffered cannot empathize and people who cannot empathize are not humane and Brouwn supported being humane. Science and art will not entirely melt into one. Gross. A people who don’t need others aren’t people, they are a person. A person is not a people. You cannot bestow freedom on Space as Space is free. As light is free.

Oh, Stanley.

An Alternative Short Manifesto: The Holiday Party Manifesto

There is nothing more or less ironic than a deviled egg.

Perhaps in Fact a Manifesto

is everything ever written or spoken? Perhaps a manifesto is in fact all communication, every plea and exclamation, every careful or indignant assertion? An I-hit-my-shin-against-the-bed-frame manifesto. An I-would-like-a-large-#9-combo-meal manifesto. A No-one-by-that-name-lives here-manifesto. An I-wonder-many-good-movies-Don-Draper-has-been-in manifesto. A What-is-the-root-of-the-Azerbaijan-Armenia-conflict manifesto. A What-is-going-on-with-this-weird virus manifesto. A When-will-this-presidential-race-be-over manifesto. A When-will-we-get back-to-normal manifesto. A What-even-was-normal manifesto. A Despite-it-all-Good-morning,- Lovely, manifesto. Last-night-was-quite-nice, manifesto. Wasn’t-it, manifesto.

Or, Alternately,

Is a book a manifesto? Is a manifesto a book? Or is: a book-is-a-manifesto manifesto. Is every book a manifesto? Is this a manifesto? Is a manifesto deep or is a manifesto shallow? Does a manifesto resound or is it a wee bit tinny? Is there even a new manifesto? Or is every manifesto already written? Are we just stumbling in darkness with our hands out groping after manifesto after manifesto? Are we lost in space, surrounded by dark matter manifestos? IS THIS MANIFESTO A DARK MATTER? Is it the type of manifesto to make a sound like Whoosh? like the deep sound of spinning in space? like all the sound was there a moment ago, all about you and in your mind, and Whoosh, now all the sound is gone, all is gone, the Whoosh Manifesto in which the future seems suddenly unstable and bleak and scary, but does anyone even hear this manifesto?

Early in the German sci-fi rom-com I’m Your Man, Alma, a fairly nondescript middle-aged white woman, enters a Berlin dance club. Inside, she encounters a crowd of fashionably dressed people smoking, flirting with each other, and dancing to a live band. She isn’t fooled. The people are holograms—part of a meticulously designed romantic atmosphere. They don’t tire of dancing, as humans do. Alma examines a laughing man and passes her hand through his shoulder, then through his date’s hair. She joyously dances around the room, sweeping her hand through oblivious holograms, until she accidentally hits the shoulder of the only other solid being: Tom, the robot who has been designed to be her perfect match.

I watched this movie alone in my kitchen six months after I met Sean, a PhD student studying mechanical engineering. We met in another digital playroom of artifice: OKCupid. Unlike Tom, he hadn’t been created by an algorithm, but he still checked off many of my boxes.

Sean, like Tom, was tall and quiet, pleasing to look at in a way that felt kind and reassuring rather than intimidating. Tom speaks with a British accent, because Alma is attracted to men who are “slightly foreign.” Sean too was “slightly foreign” – he was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in three countries, but had spent the past decade in America studying at the university where I worked. Tom defies stereotypical gender roles to clean Alma’s windows and tidy her apartment. Sean, whose favorite color was pink, also loved cooking and cleaning.

I’m Your Man makes Tom immediately appealing to the audience. Those intense blue eyes! That boyish smile! Alma is not impressed. She’s willing to spend three weeks with him, but only so she can report her observations on robot lovers to an ethics committee. Even three weeks feels excessive. She asks her boss why it has to be her, and he explains everyone else already has a (human) partner. During their meeting, a coworker accidentally walks in and exchanges a tense greeting with Alma. One wonders if her reluctance to be charmed by a robot has to do with unresolved feelings for a particular human.

I was reluctant to rush into anything with Sean. I had already made that mistake with a coworker a few months ago. After a few intense all-day dates with a new officemate, I had assumed we would be A Thing. I was heartbroken when two weeks later they got as close as one can get to ghosting me while maintaining professional courtesy. I drank tea with Sean on my balcony and explained that it didn’t feel right to get involved with him when I was still pining over someone I saw at work each day. He nodded, sipping from the same Pooh Bear mug that my ex-fling had always preferred. He opened up about an unrequited crush he had on a roommate that had gotten so intense he had to move out. “It was a jerk move, I know,” he said. I told him it was OK to get distance from that situation. He was very understanding about my reluctance to start dating, and I wondered if he still wasn’t fully over the roommate. He asked if we could continue hanging out. He loved cooking, and said I was always invited over for homemade food and anime with him and his roommate. I started going to his apartment about once a week. If we were in a rom-com, you could label us the “friends-to-lovers” trope.

I’m Your Man flirts with, but doesn’t fully fall into, rom-com tropes like “haters-to-lovers” and “fake-dating,” where two people who are obviously going to get together start off definitely not getting together. While Tom is designed to be admiring of Alma, Alma is immediately suspicious of Tom, pulling away after he touches her hand and compares her eyes to mountain lakes. She doesn’t see him as a possible object of romantic affection because he is, literally, an object designed entirely to please her. When she first drives him home, he offers advice on statistically lowering her chances of getting in a car accident. He notes her icy look with no hurt feelings. “Failed communication attempts are crucial for calibrating my algorithm to you…. soon every shot will be a bullseye.”

Sean and I started texting every day. Once, Sean teased me with innuendo, twisting my innocent comments about my day into references to orgasms. I told him I didn’t find sexual humor particularly funny. He never sent me sex jokes again.

The more time I spent with Sean, the less I thought about the coworker. We started meeting up for lunch on the campus where I worked and he researched. When I told him I often didn’t have energy to cook after work, he said I was always welcome to come to his place for dinner. He held up his container of shrimp curry. “If I knew you were coming, I could have made this with pork or chicken instead of shrimp.” He had quickly figured out my food preferences: yes to onions and potatoes, no to anything with sausage.

One weekend I stayed at Sean’s apartment till 3 a.m. watching movies. I wasn’t drunk, but was so tired I might as well have been. I said I wanted to date him and asked if we could kiss. He was taken aback. He didn’t say yes. He rambled a bit about not having much experience, and not being sure about his sexuality. It was adorable. Almost as adorable as the way Tom tucks Alma in when she gets drunks and demands sex. “I’m not in the mood,” he says. “It’s not the right time.”

A week later, I drove Sean to a porch music festival an hour away. He wore a nice sweater and the glasses I knew he wore when he was trying to look good. He carried a container of brownies covered in marshmallows and chocolate chips, like the ones I told him my mom made when I was a kid. As we sat in a park listening to alphorns, he said, “Is it okay if I sit closer?” and waited for my nod before letting our knees touch. He didn’t bring up dating until the end of the day, after we had dinner. Later, he would tell me he was nervous I had changed my mind. As we crossed a bridge to return to my car, he said he was interested in dating, if I still was. We spent the car ride home having what felt like a very mature conversation about expectations and boundaries. We kissed and cuddled in the parking lot under the moon.

Since Sean enjoyed reading but didn’t have a library card, I insisted we go to a library to get one. A week later, he texted asking if we could explore another library for our next date. A kindred soul, I thought. Or maybe he just knew how much I loved libraries. Either way, so romantic!

Even though Alma makes Tom sleep in a separate room and turns down his offer of a candle-lit bath, the two share an undeniably romantic bond. He is designed to keep her happy, even if it means keeping the reality of their arrangement a secret. Tom introduces himself to Alma’s ex as a colleague she met at a conference, but the ex isn’t fooled. “I know that look,” he tells Alma when Tom has left the room. “You used to look at me that way.” Alma and Tom look at each other with the weight of this rare, secret experience they share.

It’s hard not to root for Alma to give Tom a chance as a partner, especially when he agrees to join her at her ex’s housewarming party. How nice it must be to go to a social event with someone who looks at you like you’re the only reason he’s there! Who cares if he’s a robot?

Sean invited me to his friend’s birthday gathering. There were only six of us. Sean made chocolate chip cookies. “I thought you’d enjoy them,” he said. That was the only thing he said to me. We sat side by side on a couch. Every time I glanced at him, he was honed in on his friends. They talked about anime and programming, two worlds I knew little about but tried hard to be interested in, desperate to make a good impression. It didn’t matter; no one seemed to care much that I was there, least of all Sean. If I hadn’t driven Sean and his roommate, I would have found an excuse to leave. After six hours, Sean said the host could kick us out at any time, but he was having fun and didn’t have any other plans that evening. I said that I hated to break up the party, but I needed food that wasn’t chips and dip, plus it was getting dark. I cried when I got home, feeling silly for thinking Sean might be excited for his friends to meet me, when it seemed he just wanted to save money on an Uber.

I considered confronting Sean about how I felt at the party, but the next day he texted me about a work assignment he remembered I was stressed about and offered to proofread it. I convinced myself I was overreacting about the party. Perhaps Alma resists falling for Tom to avoid the anger that comes when an illusion dissipates, and you have to admit you should have known better, that you only saw what you wanted to see.

While drunk, Alma asks Tom if he ever gets angry. “If it seems appropriate, I believe I could display something like anger. Or even get angry. I’ve never understood the difference.”

Sean told me he had trouble understanding his own emotions. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt happiness,” he said as we walked down my street to get ice cream. He clarified – this wasn’t about us. He really liked spending time with me. But he just couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt happy. His former roommate encouraged him to see a therapist, who had said he was “mildly depressed.” He didn’t stay with the therapist for long. “I’m not really committed to changing,” he said. “I like how I am.” I figured that was the depression speaking.

In the few months prior to Sean, three dates said they didn’t want to meet up again because of their mental health. It was refreshing to have a guy open up to me about his mental health, rather than use it as an excuse to cut off communication.

Later, after I told Sean it just wasn’t going to work and cut off communication with him, I came across the word “alexithymia”: an inability to recognize one’s own emotions. I longed to text it to him. I assured myself that he probably already knew the term. He loved psychology. He had the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in his bedroom closet.

Sean told me he wanted to work more on his mental health and get in touch with his feelings, and that he wanted my help in holding him accountable. I suggested he try journaling each morning. He was diligent– bringing his spiral notebook when he slept over so we could be “writing buddies,” filling up page after page. I like to think it was the journaling that saved me from him.

Alma finally gives in to Tom’s appeals. She allows herself to imagine that Tom was the boy she had a crush on as a child, and sleeps with him soberly, sweetly. The next morning she makes breakfast for two. A tear forms as she realizes he won’t care how perfectly she boils her egg for him. “I’m acting in a play, but there’s no audience,” she says. “I’m only talking to myself.” She decides to end the experiment early.

Sean and I had been dating almost three months when he came to my apartment for dinner, apologizing for being in a bad mood. He had been journaling about something that put him in a funk. We sat on my couch and I tried to understand what was going on. He said that he sometimes thought there was something corrupt about him. I told him that if he didn’t elaborate, I’d assume the worst. He said it was worse than I could imagine. I thought about his interest in reading Lolita despite usually preferring fantasy and sci-fi, and his involvement in a Discord that he said was mostly teenagers.

“Well, right now I’m imagining pedophilia,” I said.

“How did you know?” he asked.

He told me he watched porn with post-pubescence girls on the Dark Web. “I see people, not ages,” he said, and I felt sure he was quoting something he read on some creepy male-dominated forum.

I was still processing this when he added that this wasn’t the bad thing he was thinking about. He had done something bad, although he assured me it didn’t “directly” harm anyone.

“Voyeurism?” I asked, disgusted that I could predict how his mind worked.

It was worse than I could have imagined: he had once put a hidden camera in his shower to spy on his former roommate, the one he said he had a crush on. Over a year later, he still “occasionally” watched the footage. “I don’t think about who it is,” he said, as if that made it okay. “I kind of detach.”

I told him he had to delete the videos. He promised he would that night. For the first time I fully realized how good he was at saying what I wanted to hear, and how little it meant. I felt an ache in my stomach, and curled up on my bed while Sean cooked pasta. He said he wanted to make sure I ate something.

After dinner, I held Sean and told him I loved him. I still don’t know why that felt right at the moment. Maybe it was a defense mechanism. Maybe Sean knew that my instinct to nurture would override my disgust. That even if I wouldn’t let him spend the night, I’d still give him a ride home. The next morning, I told him we were done and changed my phone number.

After Alma has her boiled egg epiphany, she tells Tom to leave. He asks, “Don’t humans say ‘love knows no bounds’?” Alma laughs through her tears. “That’s always been a lie.”

If Sean could violate his roommate’s consent – someone he had a “crush” on – he could certainly invade the privacy of someone he met on OkCupid who was lonely and easily enticed by homemade meals. Especially someone quick to believe him when he said he had never kissed a girl before and didn’t ask how, if he lacked sexual experience, he knew he had a urine fetish. Perhaps all those nights he made me hot chocolate while we cuddled watching Gilmore Girls, he was merely waiting for me to pee in his bathroom. I have no proof. Just a nagging, unsettled feeling.

Although Sean at first said he understood my decision and would leave me be, a week later he mailed me a handwritten letter full of references to my Gilmore Girls ships and assurances that I had been making him a better person; that he loved (underlined twice) me; that even just a letter back would make him euphoric. A month earlier, I would have been charmed by such a letter. Now that I knew about the old roommate, I was disturbed by his lack of remorse. His algorithmic assessment of what I wanted to hear had its limits. It couldn’t comprehend desires driven by basic ethics.

Alma’s ethics report characterizes Tom as the next in a line of technology that appears to be desirable, but years later will prove to be harmful. It’s dangerous to expect technology to provide what humans do, and vice versa. She acknowledges the appeal of humanoid robots as partners: “They fulfil our longings, satisfy our desires, and eliminate the feeling of being alone. They make us happy. And what could be wrong with being happy?”

I had trouble eating after Sean. I kept thinking about how much I had enjoyed the green curry he made me, how I had liked the feel of his tongue against mine. Now I didn’t want to put anything in my mouth. He once told me that he was glad I liked Ethiopian food, since he enjoyed watching me eat it. I assumed he meant that he liked seeing me happy. It occurred to me later that perhaps he enjoyed sharing meals with me not for my friendly demeanor and bad jokes, but because he was turned on watching me eat with my hands. I started throwing perfectly good clementines and leftover stir-fries in my compost.

Sean was not a robot. He wasn’t created to please me. I may never know to what extent he genuinely enjoyed me as a person, and to what extent he was roleplaying as the sweet, attentive boyfriend so I’d continue giving him what he wanted: access to my body, consensually and maybe not.

Intellectually, I knew Sean’s disregard for privacy and the safety of minors was entirely a “him” problem, but I still blamed myself for dating him. I should have known better than to want a cute boyfriend who would hold me when I cried but never cried himself, who always deferred to what movie I wanted to watch. I should have known better than to stare at the selfies he sent me, in awe of how I radiated happiness beside him.

My friend asked me later if I ever had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right with him. If I did, I don’t remember. I just remember feeling more physically attracted to him than anyone I’d known in years, and feeling light and excited every time I parked outside his building for an evening of dinner and Netflix. I can’t help but feel like my body should have known better than to long for someone who deserved to be repelled.

Alma’s report continues: “But are humans really intended to have all their needs met at a push of a button? Is it not our unfulfilled longing, our imagination, and our unending pursuit of happiness that are the sources of our humanity?”

It’s okay, human even, to want a Tom or a Sean. Someone who always says what you want to hear, and makes you feel accepted exactly as you are. But if the trade-off is not being able to give that acceptance in return, is it really worth it?

When Alma tells Tom to return himself to the factory, she watches from her window as he crosses the street. She puts on her coat to chase him, but by the time she gets outside he’s gone. When she learns he never turned himself in, she goes to the beach where she used to play with her childhood crush. Sure enough, Tom waits for her on the outdoor ping pong table. Alma lies on her back and tells him how she used to close her eyes and imagine her crush would come over and kiss her, but he never did. The movie ends with her eyes closed, waiting for a maybe-kiss from Tom – hopeful for something she knows better than to want.

This is a story about a mouse whose death taught us what it means to live. It’s a story about a mouse as a teacher. About a mouse and a teacher. And a trial. This is a story about all the ways we don’t understand what we’ve done until after we’ve done it. It’s about a murder and a funeral. It’s also a metaphor, because even a mouse can be a metaphor, if looked at in the right flash of light.

At 1:23 pm on November 7 we condemned the mouse to die. This is when the story starts, with death, but, like all good stories, its beginnings have earlier roots. And like all good deaths, it begins with a lesson.

This one was on electricity. It was also on the end, and what happens to our synapses when we’re gone. It was a lesson that began with the idea that all our human interactions are electrical. All our brain waves and muscle movements, all our hopes and dreams, are simply little arcs of electricity shocking us into existence.

We’d been learning about muscles in Mr. Prewett’s senior Science class. This was in the fall but we were already leaning toward graduation and getting out of this God-forsaken town. We were aiming ourselves elsewhere, not knowing at the time we’d always be circling back to see what we were once like, trying to understand how we ended up the way we are.

Mr. Prewett wore glasses so thick we said he could see the future. Really he just observed the present, and what he saw through his thick lenses were teenagers tired of worrying about their futures but too tough to admit it, so they adopted a degree of indifference that kids have been carrying around since the first synapses of the first one arced into adolescence.

So one afternoon when we weren’t paying attention, while Mr. Prewett tried to explain to us how electrical impulses that originate in the brain drive all bodily functions, as our eyes glazed over and we thought of college or summer or what we would do after school that day, as he could see us slipping away toward wherever we would go after we left here, he said, “Electricity can even stimulate muscles after death,” and, when that didn’t fully arouse us, “That’s why men convulse when they’re electrocuted.”

I assume now he meant in movies, and that art imitates real life. We did not think Mr. Prewett had seen an execution, though we would have, at that age, liked him more if he had, even though we did like him very much. We had taken his 9^th grade class too. We had done the egg-drop experiment, climbing to the top of the football press box and dropping our contraptions 50 feet, most of our eggs exploding, reminding me now how difficult it is to convey a concept, like an egg or an idea, across such vast distances. Earlier in the year he had taught us vectors, which I don’t remember much about, except how they can determine the position of one point in space relative to another, which is what writing in general and this essay in particular are about.

But we had gone past learning. We were in our senior year and Mr. Prewett knew we were just marking time. He knew his days of teaching us something new were over, so some afternoons he let us play that paper football game or that game where we broke each other’s pencils. Some days we told jokes and some days we had cut-down fights, though no one ever beat Mr. Prewett. I came close once when I said “You’re so ugly you have to Trick or Treat by mail,” but he responded that I was so ugly I could make a train take a dirt road, and though I’d like to rewrite the scene so I say “ You’re so ugly when you throw a boomerang it doesn’t come back,” that didn’t happen, and Mr. Prewett remained king of the cut-downs.

So in this soft, liminal space before we eased into the rest of our lives, Mr. Prewett said he could prove it.

“Prove what?” said someone, maybe Mike Bryant or Jerry Bradley.

“That muscles move by electrical shock,” he said, pausing just long enough that we were leaning forward. “Even after death.”

In the eager quiet that followed, the kind I’ve gone looking for in every class I’ve ever taught, Mr. Prewett laid out his plan: we would need a test subject, a mouse or a frog or a snake. We would kill it, then hook a small electrical generator to it and send pulses through its body to see its muscles move. We had to kill it in class, he said, because the body only responded to the impulses for a few minutes. After that it was over. Finished. Final. El finito.

I’d like to say there was a moment where we realized the monument of death stood before us, but the collective momentum had not yet struck. As these things go, it would not until years later, when the mundane is rendered monumental, and all our molehills become mountains.

In the silence, Daniel Simpson said he could catch a mouse in his barn and bring it to school the next day. Mr. Prewett told us he had the rest of the equipment, which made us wonder what chemicals and compounds lingered behind the always-locked door in the science room. But the bell rang and we filed out and when we filed in the next day Daniel had a mouse in a big glass jar with holes poked in the lid, and we stood around while it sniffed the air inside and put its little paws on the side of the glass as if looking for a way out.

It was here that the first objection was raised. Heather Hall, who now has a child older than we were back then, said she didn’t want to see it die. Some wit offered she could always leave, but she raised her objection further—we could not kill this creature, she said. It would be inhumane. It would be immoral. We knew what would happen when the impulses hit its muscles because Mr. Prewett had told us, and none of us needed to actually see it happen.

I’d like to contend that Heather was wrong. That we, and by we I mean us humans walking around wondering what we are doing on this earth, have to see it happen. That we do see it happen, every day, and yet we still don’t understand the electricity that flows through us or what happens when it stops, which is, ultimately, what everything is about.

So a chorus of voices shouted Heather down, and that might have been the end of it, but perhaps Mr. Prewett, whose glasses were not quite thick enough to see the future, said if there was one conscientious objector we had to take that into account. Maybe he was as bored as we were, ready to head into summer and the freedom it brings from little shits like us, or maybe he saw some lesson we didn’t—maybe he knew death isn’t the ultimate lesson, only what happens after.

So when someone suggested we have a trial to determine the mouse’s fate, Mr. Prewett agreed. Heather would be the defense. Matthew Foy was named prosecutor, and Cliff McAnally and Sherry Wann were the judges. We would have opening statements tomorrow, and the mouse would have a short reprieve until then.

And look, I don’t remember all the arguments Heather and Matt made the next day. Matt teaches high school music now, and I doubt he’s ever dealt with the death of a mouse in his classes. If I had to guess I’d say he doesn’t use those humane mousetraps at home, nor does he drive captured mice out into the woods to be released, as I sometimes do. Heather’s big mistake, if I remember correctly, was assuming we all shared the same morals she did, when in reality we were, like far too many of us, trying to find some entertainment, even at the expense of others. I remember making a point to ask why we got the mouse in the first place, as if to remind everyone. I remember asking Mr. Prewett if he thought lessons about how our brains control our bodies were important, if learning about death was important to learning about life.

What I’m saying is, I wanted the mouse to die. I framed my questions in such a way as to help Matt in his prosecution. I used words to move the class toward the verdict I wanted, which is what I’m doing now. There’s a verdict coming, and it isn’t the one you think it is, because we can’t ever see it coming until it gets here.

But I wanted to see it happen, there in the classroom. I didn’t yet know what it was like to lose something. I was sad for reasons I can’t recall. I’m sure most of these reasons seem now so small they couldn’t even fill the holes Daniel had poked in the jar lid, but maybe we need to see suffering to understand why we are so unsettled. Maybe we need to see the last throes of death to understand life. Maybe we constantly need to revisit the past in an attempt to see the future.

And I don’t want to belabor the point, so let me just say that Heather lost. Cliff and Sherry went out into the hall and came back in with a death verdict. They didn’t write a dissent, but I’d bet all the mouse shit that had accumulated in the bottom of the jar that it would have said they just wanted to see it die.

When the verdict came back, Heather asked to be excused from class. Mr. Prewett, who later said the whole situation turned out to be an important lesson on moral values, along with learning about the electricity that runs through us and makes us what we are, took some chemical—formaldehyde, maybe, or some other compound back there in that locked room with the beakers and burners and powders and potions—and soaked a cotton ball with it. Daniel opened the lid and Mr. Prewett dropped the cotton ball in and a few moments later the mouse curled up and died.

In my high school yearbook there’s a huge picture of Dustin Blankenship, my best friend on that day 30 years ago, shocking the mouse after it died. And it did twitch a little, as Mr. Prewett told Dustin where to hold the electrodes. Its legs twitched when he touched it and we took turns shocking the mouse until it eventually quit moving, no matter how high we turned up the machine.

And afterward, as men will, we turned the machine on ourselves. Mr. Prewett said the same principle worked with us as well, so we held the electrodes to our arms and watched our muscles jump, but maybe we were only trying to feel something. Daniel held the electrodes up to his temples and said he could see flashes behind his eyes, and when Dustin held them to my knee I kicked a desk so hard it lifted up. For the rest of the class, while the mouse lay dead, we kept shocking each other, watching all our involuntary movements, all the ways we don’t know what we are doing, only following impulses sent to us from the thing atop our necks we never understand.

The truth is, there’s always some electricity swimming through us, until there isn’t. In the yearbook Mr. Prewett is standing next to Dustin, guiding him. Another picture shows the funeral we held for the mouse. We buried him in a little box outside the Science room. Kelly McClendon played “Taps” on her trumpet. Mr. Prewett read from Genesis that unto dust shalt thou return. The funeral procession wound down the hallways of the old high school, past the Typing classroom where the typewriters were ticking away, as if everyone inside had a story they wanted to tell.

So here’s the story I want to tell: 13 years later, after I had moved away and was learning how to write stories about the past, Mr. Prewett was hit by a car and killed one evening jogging along the main street of my small hometown.

The night he died my mother called to tell me. And here’s the way synapses in the brain work: they’re still there, years later. Still firing and connecting and vectoring from one place to another, still reminding us we were once moved. So I told her about the mouse and the trial and the funeral and after I finished, in that tender space somewhere between denial and acceptance, she told me he had died instantly, though maybe she just didn’t want me to wonder whether the doctors tried to shock him back to life.

After Laurie Easter

ACROSS

4. During talk sessions with Lance,
   when I don’t want to say the hard
   thing, I approach it from its love
   handles & nestle in the belly. I spend
   my time with him writing________ 
   on Post-it notes, taping, sometimes
   stapling them, caddy-corner to each
   other & reading them to him out of
   order, because I feel out of order:

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