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Here's one. Well, it's a rough draft of one. I wrote it in two sittings. I think it's pretty clear where I stopped and picked back up.

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The guy stands next to a big cottonwood. The giant trees are everywhere and the cotton floats all around on the wind like homeless birds, some landing in the weeds or in the cactus. Some of the bigger pieces are stuck to the guy’s skin where he is greasy from all of the bug repellent. He glistens in the sun. I love the way he looks with those fluffy white pieces on him. I want to wear him like a shirt. I want him to cover me from the cold.

The guy approached me a little while earlier in the park near the small grove of trees. He was juggling these long black sticks three and then four at a time. I was there hoping to find the creek a little deeper than usual. I was just passing through the grassy area on my way to the creek. It had been raining more than usual and it was time to splash around in the water. But when I saw the guy juggling in the grass I couldn’t help just stopping to watch him. When he saw me he came over.

He said, “Do you want to learn?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh.”

“You just looked kind of musical,” I said. “The way your body was still but your hands were quick. I liked it, is all.”

He got this odd smile on his face. The guy had a bag with him, for the juggling sticks I guessed. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water, taking a drink and making a pronounced show of how good the water tasted. His hands were brilliant and clean.

“Do you want to go for a walk or something?” I said.

“Do you want to walk through the trees?” he said. “Across the creek.”

“That’s where I want to go,” I said.

So we crossed the river and walked around in the brush. There weren’t any houses over there, not yet. The sun was starting to go down and the bugs came out of their hiding places. The guy pulled an aerosol can out of his bag and sprayed himself until he dripped. He offered the can to me, so I just held out my hands to him. He sprayed enough into my palms. I rubbed them together and wiped on my arms and bare shoulders. I held my hands out again, got some more spray, and rubbed my calves and thighs. My skin felt smooth and good.

When we got far enough away from the river I stopped and turned to the guy.

“What’s your name?” he said.

I told him, “Jane.”

Jane is not my name.

I said, “I don’t want to know your name.”

I tried to make a move out of saying this. I blinked in an awkward way and turned my head a little bit. I know that guys like that, the pretend silly girl. I appeared sweet. I can do that well. So then he kissed me when I did my little dance. That was what I wanted.

And now here he is with the cotton all over his skin, looking like an old teddy bear falling apart. I want to say that I love him just to see what happens. I know that in a little while it will all be over, and for us to have the silly fleeting romance would probably make the whole thing complete. As he kisses me, his hands work up and down my back, then up around my neck and face. He brushes some hair out of my eyes and he lightly runs a finger down the back of my neck. I pull his hips closer to mine. He does have really great hands, but he is gentler than I want him to be. I want him to cup his hand around my neck. But he is a juggler, like a musician, careful with his instruments and tiny in his own way. See what I want from romance? I want to burn shit down. Right now I want things to be sickly and perfect.

He steps away, tripping a little bit over his bag. The guy reaches down and takes another sip from his bottle of water. Everything he does seems planned out far ahead of time. He comes to me again and starts to kiss me.

“Take off your belt,” I say.

He looks nervous, but he listens to me. He looks nervous and apologetic like a young boy. For a second I wonder how old he is. Then I look at his clean and strong hands. Like a fool, he hands me the belt after he has taken it off. I smile and laugh inside a little, then I feel bright.

“Tie me to this tree,” I say.

“What?” he says.

“Tie me,” I say, “to this tree.”

“But why?” he says.

“Do it,” I say. “Come on. We’re here.”

He looks confused and I can tell that he isn’t just putting on a show. With one hand he holds his shorts up and with the other he carries the belt to the tree. I stand in front of that tree and put my arms around it. The cottonwood feels better than the guy does. It is bigger and thicker. I hug it until he wraps my wrists together and locks the belt.

“That’s not tight enough,” I say.

And so he undoes it and retries. The second time around he gets it tight enough so that I can’t escape from the tree.

“Now what,” he says.

“Save me,” I say.

I can’t see him because of the size of the tree, but I can tell from the moment of silence and stasis that he is thinking about his life in general. Then I feel his hands on my wrists and things getting looser.

“No,” I say. “Not like that. Make it real.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says.

“I want you to save me like I am tied to this tree,” I say. “Now make it real.”

“Can we just take a minute,” he says. “What is this, anyway?”

“Help!” I scream.

“Are you okay?” he says. “Whoa, hey.”

“Save me!”

I think that the guy is starting to get it. He seems to panic a little bit and move around. Every time he goes back to undoing the belt from around my wrists I stop my pleading and just tell him no. Then I become a trapped young girl again and yell in a way that should make him feel like a savior.

He runs around the tree and looks at me.

“Help,” I plead. “Get me loose!”

I look over my shoulder to make it seem like someone is coming.

I say, “Get these ropes off of me!”

He looks at me with these eyes. These eyes! There is chaos in there. I glance toward his bag, and he goes there. He looks back up at me as he digs with his hands in the big bag.

“They’re coming,” I whisper in his direction. “Save me with your sword.”

He pulls out one of his juggling sticks, this big black thing, and runs to me. The guy looks behind me and ahead of me, then he goes to the belt and starts hitting it with his stick.

“Say something,” I say. “Talk to me.”

“I’ll save you,” he says.

“Louder,” I say.

“I’ll save you,” he says again.

Then suddenly my arms are free and the belt is on the ground. The guy comes around, looking different from before. He grabs me and kisses me a little. He picks me up and carries me to the next nearest tree, where he lays my body down on a small clearing of dirt and starts to undress me. This is, more or less, satisfying for me. He is on top of me for a while, looking like he can’t believe what he is doing. I look at the sky and think of drifting on the air currents and then settling on this person’s sticky arm, where I burrow myself deep.

When he is finished he looks at me and then gets up. The dirt has stuck to the parts of his body that were repelling insects.

“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say.

“Jane,” he says.

“I need you to take me somewhere,” I say. “Okay?”

In his truck we roll down Second Street until we get downtown. I watch the buildings as they go past. Within those buildings are people, strong people and weak people. They’re all separated. On a rooftop somewhere there has got to be a kid who climbed the maintenance ladder. He won’t find anybody from way up there.

Last week I found a newspaper on the ground. I took it as a sign. In the obituaries was my name. I knew that I was alive for the most part, and I knew that my name is not exactly a rare one, but still I was shaken by the whole thing. There was a part of me, somehow, in that paper. Somewhere I’d lost just a little bit of myself somewhere else in town and died, from old age or from gunshots, and then been written up in the tribune.

What you do after that? You wander around and you make dreams come true. People tell you to live sometimes. I thought about that when I saw my name in the newspaper. Since then I have been walking the streets looking for things that are meaningful. But I know that life is not meaningful forever, so I look for things that will be meaningful for a little while and then no longer meaningful. I look for the things that will resemble life, things that can just pick up life and hold it for a little while until they dissolve.

The guy’s truck is not a good one. It is old and dirty and full of junk. It is an automatic, and I think that that makes sense when I watch the guy drive with overwhelming timidity. I am bored with the guy’s truck. I don’t know exactly where we are going, but I see a classic-car show in a parking lot next to the movie theater.

“There,” I say. “Just drop me off.”

There is a big sign that says “Classic Cars 2009.” It hangs from the movie theater next door and has an arrow that points to the parking lot. The guy pulls over his truck and I step out. He rolls down the window.

“Hey,” he says. “What about? I mean, how can I reach you?”

His truck is a sore near this magnificent parking lot full of fine automobiles.

“It’s time,” I say. “Go on.”

The sun is almost completely down now. It looks as though I have gotten to the car show just before it closes up. Some of the drivers are getting into their cars. Two or three have driven off of the lot and gone home. I walk around and admire the machines. They are all sparkling and old as stones. They are older than I am. The men, they lean against the cars and look at them just as the passersby do. Some have their hoods up to reveal their massive engines. Some don’t.

I stop next to an orange car with a yellow interior. Two men lean against the side of the car and watch me watch the car. One tells me that it is a Woodie.

“1931,” the other one says.

“That’s old,” I say.

“Older than most,” he says.

The car has a spare tire above the front wheel rim. It looks very much out of place there. I run my hand along the wooden panel on the doors, and I can see one of the men get squeamish.

“Don’t touch the Woodie,” the other one says.

I don’t know exactly how to act at a car show, so I leave the men and keep walking. I don’t have anything to ask the guys with the Woodie car anyway. Car knowledge is something that I have never had.

A man touches my shoulder, so I turn around and face him.

“You look a little lost,” he says.

“I’m just looking at the cars,” I say.

This one is short and hairy. He has a thick beard and chest hair that crawls out of his shirt. His arms are big and his hands are dirty with grease.

“Let me show you my racecar,” he says.

It is just a little car, over in the corner of the parking lot. The thing is bright white, and has all of the accessories that I imagine a racecar has. There are roll bars, an American flag pasted on the window, big seats that sink low into the car, big headlights, a little wing on the back.

It is not a classic car, and I tell him so.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was made in ‘96.”

“Can you bring a car like that to a classic show?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I keep looking at the car. He does not really say anything while I go around and around. The seats look so deep inside the car that they appear to be sitting on the ground underneath.

“I want to get inside,” I say.

He opens the door and lets me in, then he goes around and gets in the driver’s seat. I feel so tightly hugged in the seat that I am afraid to try to move. The seatbelt clicks when I really strap myself in. I can barely see over the dashboard. It’s a good feeling overall, like I’m being held by some larger-than-life mother. The guy looks at me and then buckles his belt as well. He puts his hands on the wheel and then brings one down to the gearshift. His legs are just long enough to reach the pedals below. He makes some racing noises as he pretends to drive.

The keys are in the console. I take them out and hand them to the guy.

“Let’s go,” I say. “Take me somewhere.”

He looks around in a cautious way and puts the keys in.

“It’s dark anyway,” he says. “Yeah, let’s just go.”

The car grunts to a start. It is a great roar as the guy puts it into gear. He goes slow as he weaves through the other parked cars and out to the street. As we are stopped, waiting to pull into that street, a man comes running up from behind us. He is yelling. The guy looks at me and then pulls out quickly into the street. He shouts as he does this.

“Who was that?” I say.

He finally gets to talking now.

“The thing about racecar driving,” he says, “is that it’s all instinct. You have to know when to punch it and when to take it easy. You have to be aware of what’s around you. A lot of drivers have co-drivers now, I think, these guys who tell you where the turns are coming from. A good driver doesn’t need any of that co-driver stuff. You just know.”

“This isn’t your car?” I say. “This isn’t your car. Okay.”

“How they did it in Two-Lane Blacktop? That’s how I do it. Did you see that?”

“I was just thinking about it, I think,” I say.

“Well,” he says. “It’s just like that. Just like that.”

He is going very fast down a main road, weaving in and out of other cars and other drivers. I start to feel a little excited with it all.

“It’s not all about speed,” he says.

“It’s not?”

“No,” he says. “Most think that it is. But it’s more about instinct than speed.”

He drives through a red light.

“But,” he says. “But you do have to go really fast too.”

We drive and drive and drive. The guy whoops from time to time and speeds up. On the highway we are mostly alone. I think that no one can see us. I say this out loud just to hear how it sounds in the air. The guy agrees with me and turns the headlights off for a few seconds and then turns them on again.

“Stealth,” he says. “We call that stealth.”

“Who does?” I say.

He thinks about it.

“You and me,” he says.

The road is supposed to be free. That is how it is talked about all the time. It feels that way for a little while, but then it is really a slow death. You can drive really fast, still it takes a lot of time to get anywhere. Sometimes it is little more than a waste. The guy and I drive until morning. We do not talk about much except for the car. I listen to him talk about what he dreams racing to be. He is probably right. We are all racing in a way.

In the morning we find a small town and pull over into a diner for some breakfast. We sit down in a booth and look at each other across the table. His hair is dirty. He might be the shortest man I have ever known. At least he is the shortest man to ever drive a car in front of me, especially in the sunken racecar seats. This amazes me somehow. I suddenly don’t know how he can even see the road from a perch like that. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about the road.

I say, “I had a short grandfather.”

“What does that mean?” he says.

“I had a really short grandfather,” I say. “He married a taller woman. Then they had my dad, who was taller than his dad but still pretty short. My dad married a much taller woman, and they had me. I’m pretty tall.”

“How tall are you?” he asks.

“Almost six feet tall,” I say.

“Do you mind short men?” he says.

“No,” I say. “Weren’t you listening?”

“Yeah,” he says.

He looks around for our waitress, but nobody is really around the restaurant. The sun is about to come up and thinks are mostly empty around the town.

“Do you think we should’ve waited before seating ourselves?” he asks. “I thought in these places you’re just supposed to sit down somewhere. It’s morning already. Shouldn’t there be people in here, the old people who drink coffee so early and just talk?”

I am not really listening, but I look into his bearded face. I try to see through the hair and into his skin. I consider instinct for a brief moment.

“When my dad died I wrote the notice for the paper,” I say.

“He died?”

“He was skiing when it happened,” I say. “He hit a tree. I think that the sun must have blinded him or something, because he was a good skier. I don’t know for sure though.”

“And you wrote it in the paper?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“That’s rough,” he says. “Man, in the papers, those sad little pages. Like you could ever fill in a life in a small box like that. Not even a page.”

“I know,” I say.

“What did you write?” he says.

“I remember when I was a girl,” I say, “that my dad took me one time to California. We had a small shack on the beach for a little while. We walked inland and into a vineyard. He told me not to tell anyone what we did. We just got a bunch of grapes and walked out to the beach. The grapes smelled so good, and the smell just kind of flooded out when you bit into them. I lay on the beach and ate grapes while my dad waded around in the water.”

“So what did you write?”

“I don’t remember much else with him,” I say. “My parents divorced pretty early on. I didn’t see much of him. Why I was asked to write about him is so strange.”

“What did you write?” he says again.

I look at the short, bearded man.

“Don’t leave me,” I say.

“Tell me what you wrote in the paper,” he says.

I look at the racecar outside and think about being held in the sunken seats.

“Let’s just drive forever,” I say.

“Tell me,” he says. “Okay, but tell me.”

A Tremendous Thing

Right, well. I haven't posted anything here lately because I'm submitting stories to journals that accept only previously unpublished work. "Published" includes blogs.

Thus far I am 0 for 6 on submitted stories. So I'll post the rejected ones here.

First up, "A Tremendous Thing."

A Tremendous Thing

I am standing in a house of bees. The house is mine. It smells like honey and love from the outside. Inside it just smells dead. For a few minutes I watch the clock, then when it is time I walk outside and stand on the porch, where I wait for the people come.

A bee stings me while I wait. I want to feel it but don’t.

Then fifteen minutes later people come. There is a woman with two young children. They walk from the gravel parking area a little ways away. I watch them intently as they come, checking myself over a little and shaking out any sleepy dumbness that might still be in me. Last night the bees seemed restless.

When she gets to me she stands and looks at me.

I say, “You’re looking for the bee-house? This is it.”

“I know,” she says. “I’ve been here before.”

A few months ago I quit my job. I was a wedding photographer. The thing is, a lot of people have dreams about their weddings, and those dreams include a certain kind of photographer. Brides especially seem to have a thing with photographers who are covered with red spots and aloe cream. I don’t know why. I guess I never asked them why. It’s just a blemish, I suppose, on the whiteness of things.

And we can’t have that.

Outside the house I wrap the children’s bare arms and legs with saran wrap, because it is all that I have that could work. I look at the woman.

“You’ve been here before?” I say. “Really?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know why I lied. I know people who have.”

“Next time cover yourselves,” I say. “I mean, Christ, there’s bees in there.”

The children don’t seem to mind the wrap or the duct tape that closes up their sleeves. I try to put some on the woman too, but she refuses.

“I think I should brave it,” she says.

“Sure?” I say.

“Don’t you?” she says.

“It’s all I know,” I say.

We go inside, and I show them around. The house is not a big house. It is more of a shack, really. Outside it is painted white. Inside it mostly looks like wood. If you dream really hard, you can imagine that you’re in the woods, even though you’re in a house.

The woman starts to examine the walls, and then she makes a noise.

“Yikes,” she said. “They’re real.”

She turns to the kids.

“They’re real, all right,” she says to them.

I take them first to the back bedroom, which has my bed and dresser. That’s about it in there. I tell them that this is where I live.

The bigger of the children says, “You live here?”

“Of course,” I say, and look at the woman because I want to make fun of the kid a little but know that I probably shouldn’t.

The woman understands, though, and nods.

The kid says, “I would be scared of the bees.”

“It’s not the bees that can hurt you,” I say.

The woman looks at me. I look back. I had meant to sound smart in front of the kids, wise like a wizard. The little one seems to buy it, the bigger one no.

The kid says, “No, it is.”

The woman waits for my reply. I guess she is on my side, and for a moment I think she’s gorgeous in her dumb look. I stay quiet for a second.

She says, “You only hurt yourself, right?”

And I think, these can’t be her kids.

Everyone lets everything go, and we move into the living bathroom. I tell them that it is usually wet and steamy in here and that the bees don’t like the walls around the bathroom. They nod.

Next is the living room, which has bookshelves and chairs.

“Go ahead,” I say to them. “Sit down and feel what it’s like.”

They do.

“If you stay real quiet,” I say, “you can hear them in the walls.”

For the most part this isn’t true, but people always buy it. They sit on the edge of their seats and try to point their ears in the direction that seems the most bee-like.

The woman says, “I can hear it! I can! Kids, listen.”

The big kid says, “I am. I just hear us.”

The little one says nothing. The big kid is right, because there is no noise but our silly human noise.

As we’re sitting and listening for the bees, someone knocks on the door. Outside there is insurance man that I called the week before. I tell him to wait and come back inside.

I say to the woman, “Okay, it’s time to keep moving.”

But they don’t listen. Up in the corner of the room some of the bees have come through a tiny crack and are flying around with a purpose. The visitors are entranced by this. I let them have their fill, and eventually the bees fly into the bedroom and land on the curtain that covers my bed.

So I take the three people into the kitchen and offer them some honey. I have big jars of it sitting all over the place. The people assume that the honey is from the house, but it’s not. It’s from a supermarket downtown. There is honey in the house, sure, but I don’t know how to get it. I’m not a carpenter or a beekeeper. I’m just a salesman and a guide.

The people eat some honey with crackers and then look around the kitchen.

“This whole place smells like honey,” she says. “That’s just, it’s really pretty.”

By the table the little kid is looking at a bee that has landed on his arm. For a second I think about what the kid would look like completely covered with bees. Then I think about him flying away, carried by bees.

I say out loud, “Someday this house will be carried away by bees.”

I try to say it like I was actually dreaming it first, and saying it out loud only by accident. This usually works. This was how it started. I think that lately I actually have been dreaming it.

The woman in her beautiful way nods in approval and then chomps a cracker with honey.

And then, shortly after they arrived, the woman and the kids are gone. After they pay me forty dollars.

Outside the insurance man is standing with a few people.

He says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I told them you were already on a tour.”

“We can wait,” one of them says.

“Thanks,” I say. “I don’t mind. Excuse me, people, but I need to have a meeting with this man.”

Inside the insurance man asks if the living room is the best place.

“I mean, with the bees and everything,” he says. “They’re real, right?”

I show him the stings on my arms.

“The bathroom might be better,” I say.

The thing is, people say that bees get used to the people who are around them all the time. This has not been my experience. For me, bees are bees. They sting you if you get in their way. It’s a price to pay for running a profitable house of bees.

The insurance man says, “How did you get into such a weird predicament?”

“I’m not sure I know what that means.”

“You run a house of bees.”

“Right,” I say. “Well, I’m not ready to go into all that.”

So instead we talk about insurance. It’s difficult to get insurance for myself and for my house. The house is likely to fall any minute, most think. In fact, most think the same for me the bee-man.

The whole time the man is just talking, on and on. I don’t recognize most of what he says, but I think he is on my side because of the way he smiles at me. After a while he sighs and quits with the insurance stuff.

He says, “I didn’t come here just for business.”

Then he stops, waiting for me.

So I say, “Okay.”

“No,” he says, “I think this place is a star. A real star. I’ve been here so many times that I’m sure the bees know me.”

“They’re just bees,” I say.

“Still,” he says. “I have something. What you do, I think I can do. What you do is what I will do.”

I look at the man. I don’t think he’s crazy. I should, but I don’t.

I say, “I’ve been in this house for a long time. You want to show me something? Show me. Please.”

So he does. He shows me. We sneak out the back window and run through the trees to the parking lot. I feel new again. We get in his car and drive away, laughing at the people who are still standing outside of the house of bees, waiting to get in and get my tired tour. In the car the insurance man talks hotly about life and beauty, and I listen because I have to say nothing. Halfway down the mountain, halfway back into town, a bee flies out of the man’s shirt.

“That bee didn’t sting you?” I say.

“Jesus,” says the man. “That’s a sign. That’s a sign if I ever saw one.”

And I believe him.

In town he takes me to a neighborhood that I have never seen before. It is on the south side of town. He drives deep into the place and then pulls over in an alley.

“It’s behind this building,” he says. “Follow me.”

So I do. I follow him. Behind the broken down building is a big pile of shopping carts. There are just a ton of them, stacked up and spread out on this empty expanse of cracking concrete. It is a tremendous thing. Just tremendous.

I say, “Dear God.”

“Right,” says the man. “Right?”

He leads me to the middle of the ornament of shopping carts. No, it’s a skeleton of something long lost, something beautiful and sad and ancient. I look at the man and feel thankful.

“I’ve been gone for a long time,” I say.

“In the mountains,” he says. “In a way, I have too.”

“Who knows about this?” I say.

“Only us and lost souls,” he says.

I look at the red marks on my skin.

“I think that my soul is lost,” I say.

“That has to be why we’re here,” he says.

He brings me to the center and has me kneel down there. I do gladly. He kneels next to me and tells me to wait, so I do. I put my hands together.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “That’s not right. Just wait.”

And I do. After a while a bird lands on one of the carts stacked on the highest part. Then a while later another bird lands nearby.

“Jesus,” says the man. “This is rare.”

“Oh, God,” I say.

I wish that it would rain. I wish that it would rain a rain that could wash me all away into the concrete cracks of the shopping-cart foundation. That is all that I want at this moment.

Sometime later I jolt up. I have been nodding off. Or meditating. I still don’t know the difference, but want to. I get up with the man and feel strong and alive. I feel good. And I know that in the days to come I won’t remember how many birds came that day to save me, to lift me away.

It could have been a thousand birds. Or it could have been a single bird. In the end, I know it wouldn't have mattered.

Movers

I started to expand a story into a novella. So I guess I haven't had much to post here. I wrote this story after reading some Tobias Wolff. The man must have had patience.

Movers

They were sitting on a couch in an apartment full of boxes of books and dishes and garbage bags full of clothes. The pieces of a disassembled bed-frame leaned up against the wall opposite the couch.

The new tenant for the apartment got up and said that the two of them should go back downstairs to get the last of the boxes.

The other said, “Again, already. All right, let’s finish it up.”

“You didn’t have to help out,” said the tenant. “I really appreciate it.”

The two shook hands.

“No problem,” said the other man. “I don’t mind at all. It’s really a pain to move, especially when you don’t know anyone around town to help you.”

The tenant had been right. The other man didn’t have any reason to help the first man. The other had woken up late one morning and gone downstairs through the back door of the apartment building to have a cigarette. Outside there was one man backing up a truck and another man, the tenant, guiding the driver. Furniture lay all over the bumpy asphalt. The couches and bed were in pieces. The boxes were stacked in threes and the bags were grouped in one big pile. In the corner were a bicycle and a bag of golf-clubs. In another corner were a television and a wooden stand.

The tenant had said, “Do you mind not smoking next to the furniture? Sorry, I just don’t want them smelling like smoke.”

The other man had said, “Not at all.”

Then the truck drove away, and the tenant looked back at his pile of stuff. The other man watched him.

“Do you want some help?” he asked the tenant.

“You don’t have to do that,” said the tenant.

“I have time,” he said. “I’d be happy to help you move in.”

When they finished getting everything into the new apartment, they sat again on the big white couch and drank some beers.

“It feels good to be done,” said the tenant.

“Yeah,” said the other. “Yeah, I bet it does. Where did you move from?”

“Denver,” said the tenant. “I lived there for about four years.”

“Why’d you move?”

“I followed someone out there,” said the tenant. “Then it didn’t really work out with her. I got a job out here, so here I am.”

The other man thought and then said, “Where were you from before that?”

“Manhattan, Kansas,” said the man.

“Oh,” said the other. “That’s not too far away. Not as far as Denver, anyway.”

“Nope,” said the tenant. “When I was driving, I felt like I was coming home in a way.”

“Did you ever have any tornadoes?” asked the other man. “I mean, did you see any when you were in Manhattan?”

“Sure,” said the tenant. “There were tornadoes from time to time. I guess I never saw any up close, but I’ve been through them.”

The tenant got up and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out another bottle and then motioned to the other man on the couch, who nodded. Then the tenant came back with the beers.

“I wonder if people in Manhattan, New York, have ever been in tornadoes,” said the other man.

“Yeah,” said the tenant. “I was thinking about how funny it used to be in Denver when I told people that I was from Manhattan. They would always assume.”

“I would have too,” said the other man, “if you hadn’t been up front about it.”

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the beer and generally just resting their tired bodies. The move had been hard, up three flights of stairs.

The other man said, “Have you been driving through most of the night?”

“Yeah,” the tenant said. “I left Denver yesterday evening, because I didn’t want to drive during the hot days. I thought the humidity would make the drive uncomfortable.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said the other. “Did it work?”

“I was still sweating and hot,” said the tenant.

The two laughed.

“I was soaked through,” laughed the tenant.

“Yeah, I bet you were,” laughed the other man.

The other man got up to get two more beers. There was a pile of bottles getting bigger and bigger on the floor next to the couch. In the tenant’s eye was a softening gleam, like his eyes had been open for too long. The other man’s face was getting redder.

“Another?” he said from the refrigerator.

The tenant said, “Yeah, thanks.”

The other man brought the beers back to the couch, handed them to the tenant, then said, “I’m going to go have a cigarette. Do you want one?”

“No,” said the tenant. “Not for me, thanks.”

“I’ll be right back, then,” said the other man.

Outside the other man smoked and looked around the parking lot. Most of the cars were gone. People were at their jobs or at their schools. He smoked slowly and with pleasure, like he was kissing a young girl. That was what he imagined outside.

Upstairs in the apartment the tenant was feeling good, but pleasure was not exactly the right name for the feeling. The drinks made him feel all right, but the end of the move was not a sense of enjoyment. It was something else. Probably it was just a sense of another thing done and behind him.

The two men, separated then, were momentarily very different. The tenant got up from the couch to christen the bathroom. He stared at the water in the toilet as it flushed down into the pipes below. As he did so, the other man came back into the apartment.

“You smell smoky,” said the tenant.

“Sorry,” said the other. “I’ll try not to sit on the couch and get my smell all over it.”

The tenant laughed.

“She used to get upset about smells like that,” said the tenant.

“Don’t they all,” said the other.

“I think it’s about time that we went out on the balcony,” said the tenant.

On the balcony the two men began to talk like friends might. The alcohol made them loose.

“You any good at golf?” said the other.

“I’m shit,” said the tenant. “I keep that around just for rare occasions. But I’m just shit.”

“I could’ve guessed that,” laughed the other man. “They say golf isn’t a man’s sport, but to have the patience to do it, you need to be more than a man.”

“Who says that?” said the tenant.

“I don’t know,” said the other man. “Someone had to say it sometime.”

They laughed at that.

“I can’t believe I have a balcony,” said the tenant. “I never thought I would end up with a balcony.”

“Mine’s on the other side of the building,” said the other.

Across from the balcony were an alleyway and then the rooftop of a wide building. There were groups of businesses under that rooftop.

Another pile of bottles had grown up now on the balcony, near where the men were standing and talking. They kept drinking beers until they were almost out of bottles.

Then the tenant said, “You know, I never liked our place in Denver. It never had a balcony. I never liked the couch or the TV. It was all shit.”

The other man said nothing.

“And the golfing?” said the tenant. “I’m not even a golfer. I never knew how to play golf.”

“I think I like baseball more,” said the other man.

“Yeah, baseball,” said the tenant.

He finished his bottle and then walked over to the bag of golf clubs. He unzipped a pocket on one side and pulled out a handful of golf balls.

As he did so, the tenant said, “I like baseball too, but I was usually shitty at it.”

The other man said, “I can’t hit for shit, but I can throw.”

They laughed at this. The tenant brought the golf balls to the balcony.

“Let’s throw these,” he said. “Let’s make a baseball game out of golf.”

The two men looked at the rooftop beyond the balcony. There were some columns coming up out of the flat rooftop. Two of them were on the left and on the right. On the far end was a big aluminum box, one that looked like it was there for a swamp cooler for the businesses. And nearest the two men was a small pipe for steam.

On the balcony, the two drunk men threw some practice balls at the four parts of the rooftop that looked most like a diamond. They decided that this would be the game. The two men took turns throwing the balls from the balcony.

After a few throws, the tenant hit the aluminum box on the far end. After another few throws, the other man hit the column on the right.

“That’s two on,” said the tenant.

“This is much better than golf,” laughed the other man.

“Golf is shit,” said the tenant. “Golf is not a man’s game.”

“That’s what they say,” said the other man.

“They must be right,” said the tenant.

The tenant threw another ball and hit the column on the left.

“That’s three on,” said the tenant.

The men kept throwing balls, trying to hit the pipe nearest them.

“I’ll tell you about Denver sometime,” said the tenant.

“Tell me about Manhattan,” said the other man. “I hear that Denver is shit.”

The tenant laughed.

“It is,” he said.

“We’ve got three on,” said the other man. “Just need to hit the plate. Hit the pipe to bring them home.”

And that was how it went, the two movers taking golf balls out of their pockets until there were no balls left, throwing what they had on top of a rooftop from a balcony, trying to hit the pipe there that would bring them home.

The Good Life

The Good Life

Kevin and I? We are sick of shadows. We are sick to death of them. In the mornings when we wake up I like to remind him that we are sick. And at night, before we fall asleep, he reminds me of the terror of the shadows.

He tells me, “I’m sick of all the shadows in this apartment.”

And I say, “Tell me about it.”

He concedes, “Some things, sure, are worse than turning light into dark.”

“But not much,” I say.

We have two big windows in our pretty little apartment. One is in the living room, the other in the bedroom. No curtains or blinds adorn our windows. We keep no furniture in front of the windows. Our furniture is small and our apartment is mostly bare. There are lights in our apartment, but rarely do we use them. We like to keep what we have close to the floor, because such a move minimizes unnecessary shadows.

When people ask us what we do, Kevin says, “I work in an office doing copy-work for an ad agency.”

I say, “I’m a transcriptionist who works from home.”

This is true, but in my mind I know that my real occupation, the one that counts, is nothing to do with transcribing sound files. My real job is harbinger of light. When Kevin leaves for work in the mornings, I kiss him goodbye and tell him to have a good day. He tells me the same, and I think about guarding the apartment until he gets back.

Our apartment is particularly gorgeous at two specific times. One is at noon, when the sun is directly above our part of the world. Light is everywhere then, and I like to sit on the rug on the floor, away from the window, and watch the light come in. On other occasions I go outside and lie down under the sun, in a place without trees or buildings. There is no better activity for soaking up light-beauty than floating on your back in the ocean. Accordingly, we live on a few blocks away from a good ocean.

The other time gorgeous time is at about nine in the morning, when the sun is rising in front of our east-bound windows. Kevin is usually gone from the apartment at this time. I alone must face the eye of God at nine in the morning. After much practice, I am hardened and wise in this endeavor.

There is one time that is particularly ugly, and that is the exact second at night when Kevin and my part of the world is facing outer space, not in the direction of the sun. When I wake up at night, around this time, I can get scared, because this is the moment of the biggest shadow of all. But Kevin assures me that there is light coming down from stars farther away from the one that lights our planet.

I say, “I wish it would get here already.”

“It takes some time,” he says. “Try not to be impatient with the stars.”

I laugh and say, “I’m such a stinker.”

Kevin says, “I love this stinker,” and then we make love.


One weekend morning Kevin and I woke up to see the sun come through the windows right at nine in the morning. We watched from our mattress that sits on the floor, far away from the window. I had my head on his chest, and his arm was around my neck. I could feel his hands brushing against my left breast.

Kevin made a noise and blinked his eyes.

“That’s a bright one,” he said.

“You’re just out of practice,” I said.

I let it go and then thought that maybe God was speaking to me by blinding Kevin momentarily. So I started kissing his chest a little bit. He made a more pleasant noise so I got on top of him.

“Take off the blankets,” he said.

“Turn around,” I said. “I want to see the sun while we make love.”

As he entered me, I watched the sun. I felt I was doing right. I looked back and forth between Kevin and the sun. We were bathed in light and happy.

After we were finished, I felt a little sick, leaned over the mattress and threw up on the floor. Kevin gasped and ran to the kitchen. I went to the bathroom and washed up.

“Are you okay?” Kevin asked me in the bathroom.

“It’s a miracle,” I said. “A true miracle.”

Kevin made a look with his face. I pulled out a pregnancy test then and peed on it. I had a lot of pee in me because it was morning-time. Minutes later, when the air was totally full of the smell of urine, the test confirmed that a miracle had taken place. In fact, I was pregnant with a baby of light.

“Look, Kevin,” I said. “Just look.”

“I can see,” he said. “Now I can truly see.”

“A baby from God,” I said.

“A baby from the sun,” he said.

“Our baby,” I said.

Kevin got dressed and said that he was going to get some sparkling grape juice from the grocery store. I thought that this was a good idea. After he left, I stayed in the bathroom and looked at my naked body. It was a beautiful-looking body. I imagined how my breasts would get bigger along with my belly. I ran my hands over my chest and stomach. I felt my legs and my bottom. I looked down at my vagina and then studied it in the mirror.

“I hope you are ready from the task that lies ahead,” I told it. “A baby of light is a lot to handle.”

In the mirror I thought that my body was trying to tell me that it was ready for anything. I was quick to believe it. My body hadn’t spent many days letting me down. It was the first to alert me to the dangers of the shadows. When I was young, I remember lying on patio in the sun. I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit, because my father didn’t want any of the neighbors looking at his young virgin daughter. I didn’t mind. For an hour I lay in the sun, soaking it all up, until I just fell asleep. I drifted off into dreams of flying.

And when I woke up, the clouds had come in to cover the sun. For innumerable minutes I must have been lying in the now-dark. I was suddenly freezing cold, too cold to be angry. It was at that point that I knew what the sun really meant. It was then, awaking on the patio of darkness, that I knew all of it.

Shadows are impossible to extinguish completely. They’re like love, I think. For years it was very difficult to get along. I met Kevin in college. We took many of the same classes, and he refused to sit next to the windows. He first approached me on the boardwalk near our campus. I was walking along quickly to get back home when he stopped me.

He said, “I’m Kevin.”

“I know,” I said.

“Can you move?” he said.

I looked down where he was looking, and noticed that I was somehow standing in his shadow.

“Quick,” he said.

And then I kissed him and dragged him into the big water nearby, knowing then and forever that we, in our own little way, had saved each other.


I left the bathroom to go back and lay my new body down on the mattress near the light. After a while I got up and moved to the living room to look at the light from a new angle. For some reason, I felt that I should try to get into the light there. This was a risky move, because with the angle of the sun and the window I could easily just create my own shadow without needing to. I felt my belly and looked ahead of me, and eventually decided that now was the time.

In the light in front of the window I felt good. I managed to get myself down in a way that made very, very little shadow. I was proud of myself. I spoke to the baby inside of me about my life and about its life, explaining to the baby that for now I was its sun and universe and everything.

“And I promise now,” I said, “that I will absolutely harbor no shadows for you. But in the future, you will have to learn how to do that on your own. Yours is a world of a different kind of light. Ours is a world of many sources of light that conflict and trouble us.”

Kevin eventually came home and showed me the bottle of juice. It was grand. At noon we decided to drink it outside under the noonday sun.

“It’s a cloudless day,” he said.

“It’s a day of miracles,” I agreed.

So we went to a park near our apartment to lie in the grass. We lay on our backs and drank big swigs from the bottle of sparkling juice. For a long time it was really nice. There were no trees in the way. We could close our eyes and just absorb the light.

A man approached us after a while, though, and asked us if we were drinking alcohol in the city-park. We opened our eyes to see that it was a copy, and that he was standing over us.

“No,” I said. “Of course not. We’re drunk on the light.”

The man sighed. I looked over at Kevin, who was staring in horror at my belly. I looked down to find that the shadow of the cop’s head was covering my entire stomach. Kevin yelled at the cop.

“For God’s sake,” he said. “Leave this park, sir!”

Kevin looked at me, and I stared back.

“Save us,” I said.


Kevin is Kevin. He is strong and full of light. Sometimes I know that we are being tested. This was Kevin’s test. Earlier in the day he had been blinded by the sun. I had saved him with my love. Now I knew that he was blinded because God was hitting the reset button on Kevin. I should have known that a true test of the pure soul of Kevin was coming. I just didn’t realize it at first. In my mind I promised the baby that I wouldn’t make the same mistake with him.

Kevin picked me up and ran towards the ocean, looking back and hoping that the shadows were still behind us and not in front. We were heading in the right direction, at least. It was a good thing that this hadn’t happened earlier in the day.

We kept running towards the sun that sat over the water. Kevin didn’t have time for streets. He held me up, his arms bulging and his hands close to my breasts and under my knees. He ran through front yards and back yards. He ran as I imagined God could run. He carried me across Northridge and Prospect, then across Lake Drive and beyond. When we got to a fence, he would say, “I’m sorry, baby, but I have to toss you over.”

I said, “Do you mean me, baby?”“I mean all my babies,” he said.

When we finally got to the beach, I was feeling tired and thirsty. It was the dark setting in. It was going to come right down to the end, I knew. Kevin didn’t take off his clothes, he just ran straight into the water.

He went deep enough so that his waist was wet. He held me up so that I was floating full-length in the ocean.

He said, “Here I stand with my babies. I have two of them, and they have been drenched in the worst kind of sadness. Here I stand, humbled, ready for them to be washed clean again with the light.”

He looked at me and I looked back. It was love. It was sacrifice. It was there. Kevin waded away and left me floating and looking up at the sun. I felt my face getting hot. I put my hands on my belly and wished for things. When I looked at Kevin I saw that he was floating in the same way. With my face back up at the sun, I thought about Kevin and the baby. I started to feel better.

We floated until I felt my body dissolving into water. It was a feeling that I hoped resembled death. Kevin and the baby and I all turned into the water then as we floated. We were the surface water, the water without shadows, and we were all praying strangely and thankfully for the good life.

The Clean Place

The Clean Place

In the convenience store a few blocks away from my apartment building, I was wandering up and down the few tidy aisles. I was looking for deals. The clerk up at the front of the store was eyeballing me like I was a wild animal. When I noticed him I ducked behind the end display and pretended like I had found something when really I hadn’t. Crouched there I felt ready but anxious.

Eventually my eyes focused, and I saw these packages of paper towels in front of me. They were individual rolls, but they were two for one. I grabbed a pair and stood back up, trying to make myself noticeable now to show the clerk that I wasn’t wasting the store’s time, to show him that I was being a useful, good customer. I tried not to look at him while I did this, but failed, and found him staring out of the window.

“This is a good deal,” I said at the counter.

“This everything?” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

Back at the apartment I unwrapped the paper towels and placed them carefully in the closet next to the front door. They would sit there until I needed them. I settled into a corner of the couch and began to think about things with my eyes closed. For a good while I was there, thinking ultimately about foreign places and people, dark corners and artful smells.

By the time my mouth was watering I was in the kitchen, pouring water into a large bowl. I had never made tea before, but I wanted to because I thought that it would be mysterious. In the water I put some sugar. I cut up a lemon and let the slices float in the sugar-water.

I thought, I guess I need tea now. I put the big bowl of good stuff on the counter and put my shoes back on. But when I opened the door there was a man standing there looking back at me.

“You’re here,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I didn’t realize you were here,” he said.

I stood there with my hand still on the doorknob. I wanted to move to lean on the doorjamb but felt like that would be too much of a gesture.

“I’m sure here,” I said.

He nodded.

“I need to come in to check your smoke alarms,” he said. “So.”

“Oh,” I said. “I can usually do that.”

I didn’t know if this was true.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

“Okay,” I said finally.

The man came in looked around my place for a few minutes. I motioned toward the alarms on the ceiling and in the bedroom, but he didn’t see me. He had to find them on his own.

“Here they are,” he said. “Got ‘em.”

“All right,” I said. “Yeah, I’ve never heard an alarm like that go off.”

“Really?” he said. “It’s pretty common.”

I thought about it.

“No,” I said. “Actually, I have. Of course I have. I don’t know why I lied about that.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Sure, everyone’s had to hear these things.”

“No, you’re right,” I said.

He was right. I’d heard them. I’d heard them sound off like angels coming down from heaven, even if the alarms were only testing us tenants.

He pulled a box out of my closet and put it under the first alarm, the one in the bedroom. I stood next to him and watched. I thought that he should probably have his own stepladder, but figured that he was the professional and that I should stick to what I knew.

“Do you think everyone has their own thing?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “I mean, well, sure, but what do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said. “You know alarms and safety. You know how to prevent things and save people. Do you think everyone has something like that, like in their own way?”

“This is just a job,” he said.

“I have a job, too,” I said.

“I still save people in other ways,” he said.

“I guess I don’t,” I said. “I can’t think of any way that I do.”

“Is that what you meant, then?” he said.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “It must have been.”

I was both happy and sad that he had answered me how he did. I was glad that he was there with me.

He finished looking over the first alarm and started in on the other one near the kitchen. On the box he looked kind of like this wooden figure that I saw in a museum one time when I was a kid. I wanted to tell him that, but never did, instead just admiring him.

He stumbled off of the box when he was done with that last alarm. As he tried to catch himself, he knocked over the large bowl of good tea that I was trying to make. It spilled into the living room, onto the hardwood floors. I gasped without meaning to.

“Sorry,” he said. “Really, sorry.”

“It’s not that big of deal,” I said. “Wait a second.”

“If you had had any furniture there,” he said, “it would’ve been a real problem.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right.”

I went to the closet next to the front door and stopped for a second. The smell of lemons was drifting throughout the room like a song. Everything smelled real fresh and beautiful then, like my place was the clean place.

“Do you smell that?” I said.

I watched him close his mouth.

“Sure,” he said.

I brought back a roll of paper towels, happy to use them and be of use. I handed him some, but he sent me a look of refusal.
“Help me soak this up,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “I was just here for the alarms. Yeah.”

I didn’t know how to convince him, so I just stood there with the towels.

“Oh, okay,” he said. “I mean, I got time.”

So that was how, on our hands and knees, we soaked up lemon sugar-water from the wood floors.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Lewis,” he said.

I waited for him to ask me mine, but he didn’t.

“Mine’s Nick,” I said.

“Nick,” he said.

“Right.”

“I got a good deal on these paper towels, Lewis,” I said. “Just earlier today I got a hell of a deal.”

I was sure glad that he was there. It felt good to hear my name. It felt good to do some real work with another man. Like the sun the two of us were coming down to the ground to make things dry and smooth again. I thought about being outside and being so hot that the earth just cracked under me. It was a fire inside of me, a glorious one.

“Let me get rid of some of these wet towels,” I said, brushing him on the shoulder as I got up to walk away.

I gathered up the ones we had used up and walked into the kitchen to throw them away under the sink. The trash can was full, though, so I walked down the hall to my bedroom to throw them away in the can there. He eyed me as I walked down the hall.

At the moment that I was out of sight in the bedroom, I heard the front door open and then close again. I walked out to find that the man was gone, even though there was still plenty of water left on the living-room floor. I stood there confused and betrayed by the man. I was betrayed in the worst kind of way, I somehow knew, because we were men working. I closed my eyes to calm down for a second. I smelled the air swelling with the lemons of nature and thought no. No way.

I hurried out through the front door without even putting my shoes on again. I looked first left and then right, assumed that he probably went back out through the front door of the building, and decided to take that route as well.

Outside he was gone. For all I knew he was in the middle of the ocean. I sulked for a second under the awning of my building and looked around. I wished that it would rain. I really did. I closed my eyes again and dreamed good, sad dreams. In my mind it would rain soon, and the people would call on me for my paper towels, for my great sense of deals and forethought.

But when I opened my eyes it was still hot and sunny. The sun-me that I had made with the man was still the me that was there. He had left a mark on me, this man who had come to my house to save me from smoke and then to also spill my good tea. I realized that that must have been the best tea that I had ever made.

I started to wander around the sidewalks like cotton from the trees, and eventually what I had felt with the man in my apartment waned. I wondered if people in foreign countries smelled or tasted like flowers.

Then a few blocks up I started feeling dirty again, not like in my clean apartment. And then a few blocks later I saw a man walking toward me and smoking a cigarette. I stopped him.

“Can I have one of your cigarettes?” I asked. “I’m just feeling that way.”

He gave me one without saying much else. Then he kept walking, maybe because I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

The smoke felt good in my lungs, and I imagined that there were pine needles inside of me. I hadn’t smoked in awhile, but I suddenly remembered why people do it. Despite all of it, I felt rugged and natural again, even just for a few seconds.

When the concrete became too hot for my feet I walked to a grassy area that had some benches for people to sit on. The cool grass felt real good then, and I decided to lay myself down on the bench nearby to look up at the sky and think about the clouds.

***

A little while later I woke up on the bench, still facing the sky. There were fewer clouds now, and I knew that it was time to go home. I sat up on the bench and looked around, rubbing my eyes a little bit to reorient myself. Over by one of these medium-sized trees I saw a loner-dog barking up into the branches of the tree. It would bark and then jump up, putting its two front legs on the trunk of the tree, and then sit back down again, hackles raised and mouth open.

I assumed that there was a squirrel in the tree, but to be sure I went over to scope out the situation.

“Dog,” I said, when I got close enough.

The thing turned around to me and then went back to barking at the top of the tree. I got closer and looked up at the tree myself. I didn’t see anything there. Whatever it was that was irking the dog was hidden real well. Whatever it was, the dog really wanted it, enough so that it was willing to try to climb a tree, even though it was a dog and dogs don’t really climb trees. I thought to myself about what it would take for me to bark up senselessly at an empty-looking tree.

God, I thought, would have to be up in that tree. It would have to be God or something like that.

I started to turn to go back home, but as soon as I got a few feet away, the dog made a screeching noise like a siren would make. Looking back, the dog still was facing the tree, but it didn’t matter then, not after a noise like that.

I ran toward the tree, taking off my socks as I ran. Against the trunk of the tree I threw my body, scraping my hands and feet on the ridges of the giant before me. I mumbled to no one in particular encouragements and certainties that I will never remember. Up into the branches I went. It was hard at first, but I eventually got the hang of it. I never knew I could climb so well.

In the branches I looked around and saw nothing, really. I checked my hands. They were mostly fine, but my feet were bloodied and a little bruised. I looked down at the dog. It was still there, yes.

So I kept on climbing. I climbed like I was afraid and fearless at the same time. I climbed like I had everything and nothing. I climbed until I couldn’t climb any farther. I rustled the branches around and looked down at the dog. For a minute we looked at each other—him expectant and me defiant. Up in that tree, looking down at that dog, I knew for sure that saving probably wasn’t my thing. The cleaning and the alarms maybe weren’t either. I was a climber, a bloody climber of trees.

It was that minute with the dog, I think. For that minute we just looked. And then, like everything ever, he was gone.

A Meeting

I wrote this story today. I gotta tell you, it is a total failure of a story.

A Meeting

Let me tell you about that street. It was a long and nice street. It was not the kind of street I was used to.

I was walking north up Lakeshore Drive just after dawn, right when the sun was beginning like a burglar to peak its head through the buildings downtown. Still that was miles away. The sun wasn’t touching me quite yet.

For most of the night I was awake, tracing some of the cracks in my hardwood floors with a knife to see what would crop up. In the end not much emerged from the floor. Whether it was all empty or just that I couldn’t get to whatever was in the cracks, I can’t say with any certainty. Some dirt was there, some lint, some hair that didn’t seem to be mine. I thought there would be bugs. I guess there were none after all. That was good—after Paul moved out I couldn’t really afford the place anymore. A cleaner and emptier place would probably get me the security deposit back in full.

In the early hours of the day I started out towards the lake, walked a bit cold down the smooth black biking track that runs close along the beach, and tried to outmaneuver the day. When I got to Lakeshore I realized I was on streets and sidewalks that were smooth and as suddenly surprising as black ice. Concrete and asphalt as fresh and virgin as I imagined God’s skin to be, sitting under houses that belonged in the sky somewhere.

It was a street I had never walked along before. The houses were stone and giant. There were hedges that lined their sidewalks to keep people on the ground level from getting in too easily. I walked and watched and imagined that I was in Italy or France or the middle of the sea.

People walked by with their husbands and wives and dogs. I nodded my head even if they couldn’t see me and felt good for them. I really did. Later on down the street, when the sun was coming larger and brighter, I could hear dogs behind the hedges rolling around and being dogs.

There was one house in particular that was shaped like a lower-case letter N, with a chimney and an arch. Maybe it wasn’t a house, or maybe it was a house that was more than a house. I stopped in front of it and looked through the space underneath the N. I lit a cigarette even though I thought I should probably stop and tried to blow smoke all the way through the N house and out to the lake behind it, but settled for watching the smoke just disappear. The wind was coming up through the hole towards me, and I could feel it come up under my clothes. I let the wind come in and tried to capture it under my shirt. Then I let it all out again and felt my belly and sighed.

When I got to North Street I turned west and started to walk faster. Buildings got smaller, roads got bumpier. Things seemed to be trying to sprout up out of the pavement. There were more and more cars. As I walked, I smoked one cigarette and then another until what was left in my pack was gone.

I had almost made a big circle back to my apartment when instead I decided to cut through a small park in the middle of all the things of the city, through some trees and brush that surrounded a small body of water. I felt I should stop and look at that water, so I did that for a few minutes. It was mostly water, is all.

Some kids were scrounging around near the shore. There were four of them. They had something that they were passing back and forth. Three would laugh and the fourth would stop and look at his chest. Then he’d move and would laugh with two others while the last one looked down at his chest. I watched them and then looked at my chest too.

Then I walked over to them without really knowing why. Before I got close enough to say anything, they saw me. They had a small cat in their arms. I couldn’t really tell yet, but the cat looked gray and wonderful, especially in the arms of small children.

The children panicked and threw the kitten into the water, running off right afterward. I guess I panicked too at that point. But things sometimes just come to you when they’re supposed to, even if you don’t think they’re supposed to, and I started to forget the children and run into the water. I stopped only to check my pockets. I had some matches and some keys in there, so I was good. I waded into the dirty water up to my waist. The kitten was wet and unhappy. It was struggling. I lifted it up out of the water and held it up to where the sun was in the sky. For a second, before the sun hurt my eyes, it was there. All of it.

On the way back to my apartment I had to put the cat under my shirt because I saw some gesturing woman with a box outside of her townhouse selling pet babies. I had saved the cat, so I thought that this one should probably be mine. I just didn’t know how the woman would feel about this.

The little thing pushed its paws into my skin. Again and again it did this, and even with its little claws I felt right. Plus it was all cold in there, under my clothes. I figured if I was getting colder, then the cat was at least getting warmer. That night I talked to the kitten as it roamed around my apartment getting hair everywhere. I told the cat about people and about apartments. I made a bed for it with some towels and a mixing bowl that I put on my own mattress.

We slept well that night.

***

In the morning I got up and got the kitten ready. I wrapped some string around its body and held onto it while it peed in the dry dirt outside the building. When I awoke I had decided pretty clearly that I should drive the cat around the street I had walked on the day before.

I said, “Not everything is dark and deep like the pond.”

But I wanted to show it too. So we got in the car.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t have any AC in here.”

The cat stumbled around on the seat and mewed the whole time we were driving. It was really hot in the car. The poor thing was probably uncomfortable there.

I stopped on the side of the nice, long street at a spot where we could see the lake in the distance. For an hour or so I just sat with the cat. I took it out on its string for a few minutes and let it roll around in the grass and chase the leaves that that blew in the wind. Then we got back in the car.

And then an older man came up and knocked on my window after awhile. I rolled it down.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said, startled and feeling guilty.

“What?” he said.

“This is my cat,” I said.

“Your tire in the rear is a bit low,” he said. “And you’re parked on the curb.”

I looked up at him standing over me. He was tall and broad. He looked beautiful for some reason, and before I knew it I wanted to cry. I put my arm on the sill and felt strange—good and bad at the same time. The cat lay on the seat, while its tail shot back and forth.

“You saved me some trouble,” I said.

He touched my arm for a second and nodded. Then he was gone. For a few seconds I was in love with the touch he’d given me. I moved the car forward off of the curb and petted the cat between the ears. I lifted it up and put its paws on the window, then let it doze on the seat again. I was sweating so I pulled my shirt up, scratched my belly and circled my belly-button with my finger. The sun was out of sight, right above us, right above our heads as we sat in the car. I dreamed of going places in that car then, riding along in perfect places where the sun was out of sight, where we were free and imperceptible like the old man on the street.

I said to the cat, “We’re going.”

And then I dreamed the whole way home.

***

Those twenty-four hours were the most gorgeous of both our little lives. But that cat died a few weeks later from falling out of my window into the backyard next door where a dog roamed around. I suppose in a way I might’ve made the same mistake.

I should’ve known about the window, but it was so hot where I lived. It was the best I could do. I didn’t realize what had happened for awhile. But when I did I stood next to the window and dreamed of falling through the cracks there into something grand. It wasn’t beautiful. I felt that it should be, but it wasn’t. Not at all.

In the following years I would get another cat and another. The baby inside of me would come out wrong and die there in the hospital. I would remember the way it was cold and clutching like it too was drowning. I would lose the apartment and most of the deposit would go to the last month’s rent. I would dream of saviors and smooth streets and find none of them for real, becoming instead some kind of broken, ambling wizard of the pregnant streets, just getting by.

Our Baby

Our Baby

For a while I lived with Frank and Marilyn in a small townhouse on the north side of town. I don’t anymore. They weren’t married yet, and I don’t think they ever planned on getting married. If they ever changed their minds I can’t tell you. The two of them did have a baby, though, just about a year after I moved in with them. Frank was working at a second-hand bookstore downtown. Marilyn worked as a waitress in a locally owned restaurant not far from the bookstore. They got along pretty well for the most part, and probably they didn’t need me to rent their extra room at that time. But I wasn’t doing much at that point. I was working part-time at a thrift shop somewhere on the west side of town. Living with Angela didn’t work out like we both thought it would. When she told me that I had to leave I needed a new place. Frank and Marilyn and I had been friends for a couple years, and they told me that I could rent with them for cheap. So I did. I rented. For a long time it went about as well as it could’ve.

I didn’t see much of Angela after we broke it off. We split in April and I moved in with Frank and Marilyn right afterward. In about October of that same year I ran into Angela while I was walking around downtown. I found out that she was working nights as something like a nurse in a home for people who needed constant care. What she did I never really understood. I knew where the place was and I’d drive by there at nights some of the time when I was done working. Then I drove by for a week straight.

For months I couldn’t build up the courage. But at the start of the next year I found myself going to our old home to wander around and check up on things. Angela worked the same hours on the same five nights of the week. I had seen it when I drove by the place. I knew when she would be gone.

Getting in was easy. I knew how to get in. I’d lived there for months, and I’d known her for longer. There was a window in the back that always had a problem closing. It wasn’t a real nice house. It was good enough, though. The way I saw it, I deserved a chance to see my own home every now and again. Angela and I hadn’t worked out, but it wasn’t over. We just hadn’t worked out yet. Couples that work really just work because they have it. If you don’t have it, then the relationship doesn’t go anywhere. Some people work at the same store and have that. Other people like to eat Thai food three times a week. For some it’s more than that, like having it in a baby. Angela and I just hadn’t found our thing yet, but it was out there somewhere. I would find it.

That’s partly why I started going by the house when she was gone. I wanted to see what she had been doing with herself. There had to be clues around the house that led to the it that I needed. I thought I would find a magazine on biking or a new puppy. Then I would show up on a bike with a dog in the basket by the handlebars. I would dream of it that way. It would be grand. Angela would see it and tell me that she had thought of the same things, and I would tell her that life is full of surprises, right, and wow what a thing.

I didn’t really find much at first, though, so I kept going back. Three or four nights a week I would go while she was at work.

Frank and Marilyn didn’t find out about any of it while I was still going to the old house. They wouldn’t have understood what was going on. Frank and Marilyn had something to go off of. I didn’t have that. Frank told me about their thing one time while we were drinking. This was after they had the baby. Frank still worked during the days, but Marilyn had to start working at nights so that one of them was home with the baby at all times, day and night.

I said, “How is it?”

“How is what?” said Frank.

“How is seeing Marilyn only a few hours a day?”

“You see her a few hours a day,” he said. “Tell me how it is.”

“It’s not too good,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “It’s really just pretty bad.”

“But you’ve got that baby,” I said. “You’ve got that holding you together.”

That baby was lying on a pile of newspapers gurgling or sleeping or something. The thing just loved doing that.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “We’ve got that.”

He paused.

He said, “It’s hard with some things but other things get better this way. When we see each other we just fuck around all the time. Even when we’re tired from the day, we just fuck around until we have to sleep. Then we just sleep forever. On the weekends too, when we don’t work so much, we just sleep and sleep. The baby too. The baby just sleeps.”

“The baby sleeps like that too?” I said, excited by it.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “It came from us. It sleeps like us. The baby is just a sleeper and it’s ours.”

“Jesus,” I said.

So they had that. They had fucking and sleeping. Angela and I didn’t really have either of those things. We didn’t sleep like Frank said he and Marilyn slept. We didn’t have the kind of falling through stars sleep. We had something harder than that. Frank and Marilyn would sleep like giant mountains. They would grow up out of each other and hold steady and breathe deep down out of their mountain cores. They would float on oceans and dream deep. When I slept with Angela I would feel rugged and wrong. I’m sure she felt the same. And it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It just was what it was. We would wake up in the night and get angry with each other because we woke up in the night. Still it’s an anger that is hard to recover from.

I said, “Angela and I never really slept like that. Ours wasn’t really even sleep, really.”

“It’s hard,” said Frank.

“We just have some other thing,” I said. “Something like sleep that isn’t sleep that is ours.”

“You must,” said Frank. “Sure.”

And the other thing was that Angela and I didn’t fuck around. We just didn’t. Angela liked me to hug her from behind, just wrap my arms around her. I would bury my head in the back of her neck, and she would rub herself for a while. I would do the same. When we were done we would just lie there for a second. Then we would try to sleep but never fall hard enough.

I pretended that it was enough for a long time. I honestly thought it could be our way. It wouldn’t be sex, but it would be our way. I thought it could be, but it wasn’t. I wanted more. I wanted to curl up into each other and be seashells. I wanted to bite her hair and spin around until I was wrapped up nice and good. She never wanted to be curled up shells. I never told Frank about it. He asked me about Angela and me in bed together once. I tried to sound soft and knowledgeable like Frank was.

“You know,” I said. “It’s hard sometimes.”

I imagined Frank was steady because he worked in a bookstore and had stuff to read. He had to be full of words and romance. I thought that I was full of something too. Of what I didn’t really know. It was something. I thought that maybe Frank wasn’t aware that he was full of calm wisdom, like I imagined a horse might be if it could talk. Maybe Frank just had stuff and used it because it was there. But that meant I had something too, and whatever I was using it wasn’t making a big difference. I guess I wasn’t sure of any of it.

He listened to me answer him and seemed to get it.

“Sure,” he said.

That was what I had.

***

On the first night that I went to Angela’s house to break in, I was nervous without knowing why. I used to accept donations at the thrift store where I worked then. I would stand out back and collect the many things from people who drove up to see me. There were things that I wasn’t supposed to take, though. I mean, if we had too much of something in the store already, or if it was a donation that didn’t fit the season, like skis. But that day I was just taking bags left and right. I didn’t know what I was saying or what I was doing. I seemed to know that I was in for something that night.

I’ll go to Angela’s, I thought. I’ll go and find something there and use it.

I knew I would go. I wanted to. Still I felt rotten and on fire all day long. It wasn’t that I knew I was doing something wrong. I thought I was doing right. It was something else. It was like the nervous feeling before climbing a tree as a kid, because you know you’ll do it, but you aren’t sure how easily you’ll get down again. Once you look down, like once you look back over your life to where you’ve been and what you’ve just done, there’s a chance that you’ll fall, knowing that the fall will be bad and desperate. Or worse yet you’ll just look and know you have no choice but the fall. I think now that that was the feeling I had, the feeling of looking down deep and knowing that you’re high up and far away. You’ve got a hole full of air, or maybe just full of nothing at all, just empty and motionless.

I left work a little early and bought a pack of cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked in a while, but I thought I should go prepared. I smoked one outside of the convenience store where I bought it and felt burned out and good. After going home for a few minutes to make sure that Angela would have enough time to be absolutely gone, I drove there, making sure to park a few blocks away and walk the rest. I didn’t want to raise suspicion.

I had had the window in mind all the while that I was building up my courage to go to the house. It just came to me when I thought about getting inside. I just envisioned it without thinking. There the window was to use.

So I walked around the side of the house to find the window. Sure enough, there it was. The window slid open without problems, even from the outside. I had to grab a flower pot from the other side of the back yard and stand on it to get a good enough grip to climb in, but everything worked out. I was inside the house.

When I was inside I felt odd. For a while I had been back and forth between feeling that the place was mine and Angela’s. Being inside I felt different. I felt like I’d walked back into my parents’ house or something. The house didn’t resemble my home. It was something else. Angela had changed it somehow. Things were dustier, I thought. It didn’t seem fuller, but it did appear to have less space.

I walked along the hardwood floors, holding my hand out to the walls, looked at the photographs of landscapes hanging there. There was just the kitchen, living room, single bedroom, single bathroom, and dining room. I stood in the middle of each of the rooms and turned in circles.

Then I remembered the spot in the bedroom where the floor seemed to dip down into a little pocket. Dust would collect there. It was hard to see, and we didn’t really notice it at first. But when we first cleaned the house the pocket was inescapable. I walked there and took my shoes off. I sat down, then got up again to put my shoes by the front door, thinking that I was stupid for tracking in the house.

Then back to the bedroom to sit down and finger the kind of half-made hole in the floor. I dreamed there, with my hand in the hole. I thought about my entire body roaming around the house and then pooling here in this one spot, just like the dirt and grime and hair. I became part of the waste that collected. Then I became part of the house for Angela to walk on.

I stayed like that for about an hour and then decided to go back home. I got my shoes from the front door and didn’t put them back on until I was outside again. It was dark. I checked to make sure that nobody was watching me. I knew there wouldn’t be anyone watching. No one seemed to watch, or if they did, they didn’t care about what they saw. It was just the act of watching that was important.

I would come back the next night and do the same thing. It was all I had in me for the first couple weeks of going to Angela’s. It took time to build up to more.

It wasn’t until about a month later that I started bringing things from work to Angela’s place. Just little things, really. I would bring a towel and put it in her bathroom closet, under the other towels. Or I would bring a wooden spoon and put it with the other wooden spoons. I put pencils and pens in her desk drawer. They all were little pieces there that could stay hidden but mean something. They became real important.

***

I guessed that sometimes things get lost for a little while. I was working at the store one day, taking in donations and handing others back out. Angela was rattling around in my head for most of it. After I closed the gates to the donations area, just after lunch, I started throwing the bags of unsellable goods and clothes in the back of the truck. We had a lot of stuff back there that was no damn good. The truck was packed full, until it looked like the back door was just bulging out with stuff. I stood there looking at it dreamily until my boss came out.

“You’re taking that to the dump,” she said.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“That’s what I said,” she said.

So I opened the gates again and drove the big white truck the few miles outside of town to the dumping area. The truck was big and wild. I felt like a giant bird riding through the stoplights. It was a good feeling.

The dump was beautiful in its own way. Red dirt covered the entire place. Wind blew everything around in circles and seagulls floated stationary in the air, moving their wings only slowly to keep them up against the wind.

There were stations. One for tires and rubber, one for electronics, one for miscellaneous worthless bags of trash. I stopped at each one to unload what I had in the back of the truck. Sometimes while driving and unloading that truck I would feel sorry to see things go. Other times I would relish the task, just a constant draining of energy. I felt sorry for the things this time without knowing exactly why. It was work, so I kept going.

When I got back in the truck, ready to drive back to the shop, I saw that I hadn’t changed my shoes before going outside. They were covered in red dirt. Just covered all over. This wouldn’t do, especially not at Angela’s. Red dirt would give everything away.

Back at the store I parked the truck and heard that an old couple had bought some furniture. People from the store were waiting outside to load the stuff into their van, but apparently the old husband had gone off on his own to get the van and had never come back. They asked me to go look for him.
“Because you don’t have anything else to do,” said my boss.

“You don’t need to tell me,” I said.

“I know that,” she said.

So I went out looking for the guy. I walked around the west side. His van was white, his wife had said, so I looked for that too. I didn’t really find much at first. I wondered if this was what Angela was doing at the home where she worked, just wandering around in circles looking for people. Or maybe that was what the people she took care of did.

There was a shoe store in that area, among the other shops, so I stopped to get some new shoes. I tried to trade my newly red ones in, but the young girl didn’t accept them. She looked so young that I was amazed she worked there. They get younger and younger.

“Do you have boots here?” I asked.

“Is this a shoe store?” she said. “Yes.”

So I went over in the direction she steered me and tried on some boots until I found some that fit. There were so many boots in that place. There were boxes of them, just overflowing with boots. I thought of them being worn and then coming back to me at the thrift shop, where I would take them and put them inside and watch nobody buy them. Then I would take them back outside and put them in the back of the truck until it was full enough to take to the dump, where I would bury those boots under gorgeous red sand.

I felt good, like a real working man, wearing and getting boots. Back at the counter the girl took the boots from me. I mean, she looked real young.

“Just the boots then?” she said.

“Do your parents own the store or something?” I said.

“Just the boots then,” she said.

I wore them out, left my old dirtied shoes hidden under the bench by the boxes of boots. I walked around some more but didn’t find the old man. Maybe he was better off lost. I don’t mean away from his wife. I mean maybe the newness of everything to a senile old man is the best thing in this world. He would be a baby again. He would walk around and watch people pass, then forget them and forget himself just in time to forget being alone on the street. Yes, I thought to myself, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But when I got back to the store he was there with his wife, who was scolding him in a friendly sort of married way. They got their furniture, the furniture that didn’t really fit into their dirty white van. My boss tied down the back door that opened straight up and then tapped on the side of the van. After a few seconds they drove off with their stuff. And for days, I thought, they would have something to fuss over.

I was jealous, then scornful. Then I got tired and went back inside. That night after work I drove over to the restaurant where Marilyn was working and sat at one of her tables. I ordered a bottle of wine and drank the whole thing. I tried to chat up Marilyn, but she was too busy to get in much conversation. I told her she was beautiful after getting good and drunk off of the wine and meant it in my own little way. She took a swig from my glass and said thanks and gave me my check. I tried to walk to Angela’s but felt bad and ended up falling asleep in the grass of a park nearby. In the middle of the night I woke up and thought about sleeping the rest of the early hours in my car. I went home instead.

***

One weekend night Frank and Marilyn didn’t have to work. I had the day off too, so we decided we would cook a big dinner to celebrate being alive and well and free for a few hours. I thought it was a good idea, and so did they, but through the afternoon I ended up drinking a few beers and getting sleepy. By dinnertime Frank and Marilyn didn’t want to cook anything at all. Neither did I, so I drove out to get some more beer while Frank drove out to get Chinese food. We took separate cars because we thought it’d be quicker. Marilyn, she stayed home with the baby.

When I got back Frank was still gone. I opened up a beer and sipped from it, let the cool drink move down my neck and chest. I offered one to Marilyn, but she refused.

“The baby,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

I tried to sound like Frank but knew that I couldn’t.

Frank got home then and set up the boxes of food. I opened a beer for him, and he took it gladly. On the table was fried rice and chicken, vegetables and egg rolls, soup and sauce. It all smelled just like a dusty old house from long ago. We sat down and talked about how good the food looked, then started eating.

“Where’s the baby?” said Frank. “The baby should come on out here and just hang around with us.”

“The baby’s in the bedroom,” said Marilyn. “The baby,” she said, “is dreaming with the angels.”

“You don’t want to wake a baby,” I added.

“No,” said Marilyn, who laughed. “No, you don’t.”

“You don’t wake our baby,” said Frank. “Our baby is one that doesn’t wake up easily. You got to know how.”

“How’s that?” I said with interest.

“You don’t say a word,” he said. “Talking to our sleeping baby won’t wake it up. That’s not enough. You got to walk over to the baby and touch it on its side. Then touch its head gently, maybe nestle your cheek against the baby’s face.”

Frank paused to sip at some soup. I drank a big drink of my beer and waited impatiently. I didn’t know why, but I was so interested in hearing about how to wake the baby.

“Do you kiss the baby?” I asked.

“You can kiss the baby,” said Marilyn.

She looked at Frank and he looked right back. They stared into each other for a moment and smiled. I drank at my beer, thinking about the baby.

“Can the baby eat Chinese food?” I asked.

“No,” said Frank. “Our baby isn’t ready for Chinese food.”

He said it with such force and stability that I was in awe. He looked at Marilyn again and touched her on her leg. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to see the touch, but I saw it. I watched it real hard and kept thinking about the baby. I wanted to be able to say “our baby” with Frank and Marilyn. I wanted to be part of it with them. They had it and I didn’t, but I wanted it. I thought about whether they would fool around later, right there in the room with the baby who wouldn’t wake unless touched.

We ate in silence for a little while longer. I got up to get some more beers. The food and drink all went well together. I was getting full, but I never wanted to stop eating and drinking beer with these people.

“I miss Angela,” I said. “It’s hard.”

I looked at Frank.

“It’s hard,” I said again.

“Sure,” he said.

I drank from my beer. He did the same from his.

Marilyn said, “Do you want to watch the baby for us in a few weeks?”

“Sure,” I said, imitating Frank.

I wanted to ask where but felt that I should keep quiet a little longer. Frank looked so wise when he did that quiet sort of thing.

Marilyn kept on, “Frank and I are going to go camping for a weekend here in a few weeks. We thought we could take the baby, but we decided that maybe we should just go out there alone.”

“What’s our baby want to do in the forest?” asked Frank.

“So we thought that you could just stay with the baby for a few days,” said Marilyn. “You would maybe have to take off of work, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” I said real quick. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch the baby.”

“Thanks,” said Marilyn.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah.”

“It’ll be great,” said Frank.

“Real great,” I said. “Yeah.”

That night I stopped by Angela’s for just a few minutes to drop some red sand on her lawn. It was some of the dirt that I’d kept from the last time that I was at the dump with the big white truck. Why I wanted to leave her some dirt I don’t know. Part of me thinks now that I wanted to leave her an inkling of my work, just to let her know how hard I was working and how much I was getting done for the community. I really was doing things, I thought. I was making a difference.

I didn’t even go inside her place this time. Instead I laid myself down near a tree in the backyard and looked at the sky. Buried deep in the darkness up there were bright white stars, ones that you could see and ones that you couldn’t see. They were everywhere. I watched the moon big and white halfway up the sky.

There was a grayish streak in the sky after a while. It wasn’t attached to anything that I could tell. Just a little streak, like the seams of the universe had split. I thought about God for the first time in a long time, thought about him reaching down with a knife and cutting open the world. And for a second I dreamed of all the stars falling through that cut seam and landing on top of everyone on Earth. After all this waiting, we little people would find out for certain if the stars were good to us. We would find out if they burned or soothed. My guess was that they would do a little of both.

I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. And I stared at the streak until my eyes cracked. The moon was higher then, almost right up straight above me. I knew I had to go home.

***

I don’t think things now matter like they used to. The weekend came when Frank and Marilyn went camping somewhere south of town. They left me with the baby. Throughout the first day with that baby I didn’t know what to do. We watched television together. I fed it from a bottle while I had myself a beer. Then I thought that I shouldn’t be drinking near a baby. I remembered what Marilyn had said so coolly about the baby and beer. So I had water instead.

I felt vaguely like other people. I felt like Angela taking care of people. I felt like the woman whose husband was lost after buying furniture from our store. I had responsibility somewhere inside of me that was bubbling to the surface finally. I was glad that Frank and Marilyn had gone, even for just a little while.

In the middle of the day the baby fell asleep for a good long nap. I talked to the baby to see if it would wake up, but it didn’t. Frank and Marilyn were right. You needed to either let the baby wake up on its own or you needed to touch the baby a certain way. I let the baby wake up when it was ready.

Then the baby wanted to play. Night was rolling around, and the baby maybe had slept for too long. It just wasn’t tired. Frank and Marilyn never told me what to do in this case. I figured the baby would just go to sleep again when it was ready. That was fine by me.

And then I decided to take the baby with me to Angela’s house for a little while during the nighttime. It would be fine. I needed to go, and I couldn’t leave the baby at home alone. Probably the baby would like an adventure anyway, a car ride out into the world. I didn’t think that the baby got out into the world enough.

I asked the baby.

“Do you want to go to Angela’s, baby?” I said.

The baby gurgled.

“You want to go to Angela’s, don’t you, baby?” I said.

The baby smiled.

“Let’s go, then,” I said. “Yeah.”

So I cleaned the baby up and put it in its little baby-rocker. I got some extra blankets in case we were outside, and I put plenty of water for me and milk for the baby in the car. I even got a bag of apples and a loaf of bread from on top of the refrigerator, just in case. It was a picnic.

I strapped the baby into the front seat of my car and then went around and got in myself. We were ready, the baby and me. We were ready to go out into the world. I looked in my mirrors and then looked at the baby. I looked at my hands. There we all were.

I parked a few blocks away from Angela’s, just as I always did. Carrying the baby was easy, but on the way to the house I was worried about getting the baby into the house through the window. When I got there it turned out that it was too difficult, so I had to go in myself and then come out through the back door to bring in the baby that way. It wasn’t bad. In the dark the baby seemed to think that it was back at home or something, not out in the back yard of some stranger’s green stucco house. I locked the back door behind us and showed the baby around the house.

“This is where I used to live,” I said.

The baby didn’t do anything but lie there in its rocker.

“Baby,” I said, putting down the rocker and looking in. “This is where I lived before I moved in with Frank and Marilyn. They’re your parents. You’re their baby.”

I kept giving the tour to the baby.

“This is where we used to watch TV,” I said. “This is the bathroom, where we showered and brushed our teeth. This is where we cooked and ate. This is where we slept.”

The baby seemed uninterested. But that was okay. In the bedroom I took the baby out of its rocker and put it on the bed. The baby seemed to like this. I leaned over and looked at the dent in the floor. I picked up the baby and showed it the little half-hole. The baby just giggled, so I laid it back down.

I thought of baby things to say.

“Who’s my baby?” I said. “Who is the baby? Where is the baby?”

Eventually the baby turned on its back and looked at the ceiling. I did too. The ceiling was rough and textured, the way a lot of ceilings are. I looked for pictures in the texture of the ceiling, and I imagined that the baby was doing the same. I tried and tried but didn’t see much. I mostly saw clouds there in the ceiling. Maybe a few faces of people I didn’t really recognize fully.

Then I turned to look at the baby and saw that it was asleep. It had just fallen asleep, that perfect little baby. I turned back to the ceiling and imagined the baby crawling around up there, looking down at me, saying here it is and don’t worry.

And after a while, I fell asleep too. I fell into the deep and wonderful sleep that I assume was the sleep Frank and Marilyn had together. The baby and I were one in our sleep and it was grand right then.

I woke up to the front door making noises. I sat up and sleepily listened to the sounds of the door that made me dream of flowers. Then it hit me that someone was home, that it was brighter out than it should’ve been. Sunlight came in through the windows, and all that upset me right at first was that I had woken up to sound. The baby was still asleep, because it needed to be touched. I wanted to be touched awake too.

Angela came into the bedroom and saw us there. She didn’t look happy. I mean, she looked real uncomfortable and then real angry.

“What is this?” she said. “What the hell is this?”

“You don’t have to be quiet,” I said. “The baby won’t wake up.”

“What are you doing here,” she said. “Who is that?”

I paused and thought about Frank and Marilyn for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said, imitating Frank’s best voice. “This is our baby.”

“What?”

“Our baby,” I said.

“Get out,” she said.

Angela just wasn’t getting it. I had it there for both of us and she wasn’t getting it.

“Angela,” I said. “Angela.”

“There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “Go.”

She grabbed a phone and started dialing numbers.

I supposed she was right. It was day now and it wasn’t the right time for any of it. I turned to the baby and touched it the way that Frank and Marilyn suggested. Eventually the baby just started to wake up. It yawned lazily and rolled around a little bit. In the rocker it kept making pleasant and quiet noises.

As I left, Angela said pretty much nothing. She didn’t need to. Things were still over for now. We just hadn’t found our thing yet. It wouldn’t be over forever. She was on the phone when I was walking out through the front door. I dreamed she was talking to herself about me.

Back in the car I drank some water and ate some bread. I was far, far hungrier than I thought I would be. I thought about what Frank and Marilyn were doing. Probably they were out in the woods somewhere fucking around and sleeping through their lives in the best way. I was jealous of them. I would have to move out.

The baby took some liquid from a bottle and started to doze off again. I started driving north to our townhouse. But as I got closer and closer, I started to think about grand things. I started to dream again. Then I had passed by the intersection that led to the townhouse. Then I was closer to the interstate. Then I was on the interstate, driving up through mountains and through the trees. The baby was it, was all there was. I had seen the way Angela looked at that baby, like it was ours. I wasn’t ready to give that up.

So I drove and drove and drove. I drove to the state line and kept driving. Frank and Marilyn wouldn’t be back for at least another twenty-four hours. I hoped that they would understand. I just needed the baby for a little while longer. Then I would come back and move out and have my it with Angela.

I was somewhere in Illinois when everything started to get dark. The day was ending with a grunt. I was tired. The baby was awake. That was good. We had things to do.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I said. “Things are on their way.”

That night I took a motel room and lay on my back with the baby next to me gurgling and dozing. I looked up at the ceiling and so did the baby. I knew that in the days to come we would all be back in the green stucco house with the hardwood floors. We would curl up in the bedroom and in the living room. We would wash our hands in the bathroom and then cook in the kitchen and eat in the dining room. And then at night we would all collect our thoughts and twist together like dust in the lowest part of the floor. Like tornadoes we would blow around and make things fresh.

Then we would ravage what was left of our silly lonely lives.