It was 3 a.m. on the second day of March and the moon was waxing, gibbous, and full of rainbow. I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt, tripping on my feet but also on whatever madman’s panacea, whatever twisted elixir was coursing through my veins at the time. I can’t remember what it was called. I can’t remember who gave it to me. Might’ve been Dan–Dan’s always good for the bad, bad shit. The stuff that makes your eyes spin like kaleidoscopic whirlpools and gets the dandelions talking. I think Dan gave it to me. Did I see Dan that day? No, Dan’s been in the slammer for months. Or was he the one that OD’d back in December? That seemed more like Dan.

I don’t remember who gave me the stuff but I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt.

No, we don’t call it that even though the french school–a big blue monstrosity made almost completely from corrugated metal sheets like some kind of aluminum ocean–sits right behind the Shopper’s Drug Mart on that street. No, we don’t speak French here.

Let me start over.

It was 2 a.m. on the second day of May and the moon was waning, crescent, and winking at me. I was walking down Esquimalt Road, tripping on my feet but also on whatever madman’s panacea, whatever twisted elixir was coursing through my veins at the time. I was wearing my denim jacket and my tattered pair of blue high-tops, the one’s I was wearing when I kicked Johnny Z’s teeth in last summer at his sister’s birthday party after he caught the two of us fucking in the toolshed.

I guess you could say I was nailing her.

I guess you could say I was hammering her.

I guess you could say I was drilling her.

I guess you could say–

But enough about her. She doesn’t fucking matter.

It was 4 a.m. on the second day of Saturnalia and the moon was new and ignoring me like Donna Z three days after her brother caught us fucking in the toolshed at her birthday party. I was walking down the…the…

Where was I?

I was walking down the Rue de Esquimalt, tripping on my feet and the sweet-and-sour sauce that was mingling with my blood. I was leaving from someplace and most likely going someplace but instead, I ended up at that Shopper’s Drug Mart, the one that was open until midnight.

I guess it was before midnight then. Shit.

Okay, get it together. Deep breaths. Clear your head and just tell it. Tell the story.

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Sherman Larson has eighty-seven bear traps buried in his front yard. Every few weeks he changes them–different patterns for different moods.

Pensive: Neat rows exactly a foot apart. Carefully measured to promote tranquility. Balanced. Zen.

Anxious: Haphazard clumps. Only some are set to activate, their mouths held open in silent screams. The rest keep their mouths shut.

Grieved: As close to porch as possible, layered almost one on top of the other. Protection against the cancer that reduced the woman he both feared and worshiped into a hollow husk.
This week: Zen.

Sherman rises from his twin bed and stretches. His tan arms, brushed with almost imperceivably light red hairs, are thin, but toned. He keeps in shape by cutting firewood and the thirty-seven pushups he does every afternoon after lunch. It is important to stay healthy.

He takes a deep breath, filling and filling, until the pressure hurts. He allows it to linger. This pushes the black Bugs away from his lungs. As long as he’s lived, so have they. Crawling inside of his chest, wiggling through his liver, in and out of the thick valves in his heart. He tried to dig them out, once. On that night, they burrowed deep into his core, past his organs, into his blood, infusing themselves in every platelet and cell. His only achievement was a bright red stain on the floor and a trip to the hospital. The doctors kept him under observation for seventy-two hours. They did not understand that he dug the carving knife into his chest, not to die, but to allow himself to keep living.

Bedroom: Fifteen steps from bed to doorway. Sherman avoids the landmine concealed under the grey-green carpet. A faded red flannel shirt, four white socks, and pair of light blue boxers cover the lump the mine creates. They are the only pieces of clothing on the floor. They have never been worn.

Hallway: Eight steps to the bathroom. He walks along the left side, one foot carefully placed in front of the other. This avoids the small pressure plates laid into the floorboards. If pressed, an electrical current triggers the arrows hidden in family photos lining the right wall. The photos are all share the same dark brown wooden frame. They are not of his family.

He does not remember when he started booby-trapping the inner rooms of his house. He just knows it is needed. Just as the Bugs have always been there, so has the feeling of looming, imposing dread. That something was watching him, waiting for him to let down his guard. Waiting to strike. The bear traps outside, the landmines indoors, all were necessary to keep it at bay.

Bathroom: Two steps into the doorway. He ignores the light switch on the wall. It is rewired to create an electric shock if touched. Sherman instead flicks the small metal lever on the side of the vanity mirror. Stepping out of his white Jockeys, he turns the hot water nozzle in the tub, not bothering with the cold. He steps into the stream, closing the dark green curtain around him.

To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

On Saturday morning, I sit in bed and scroll through my phone and try to remember when, exactly, weekends became something to be endured. I text Madeline to ask if she and her girlfriend, Lauren, are going to Alice’s birthday party. Madeline is the one friend I have who does not require a week’s notice to make plans. The rest are married, with an assortment of children. 

I toss the phone on the bed and consider my options. I could trim my beard. I could scramble eggs. I could research memory foam pillows to replace the sad sack pillow I currently own. Instead, I pick up my phone and go to my ex-wife’s Facebook page. My ex-wife and I are no longer friends on Facebook—all I can see is her profile picture, which has not changed in several months. In the picture, she sits in an Adirondack chair, grinning, wearing a dress I don’t recognize. The dress is blue and looks a lot like a nightgown. I look at the picture and wonder, as I always do, when my ex-wife started to wear dresses that look like nightgowns. I wonder if her life now, six months after our divorce, more closely resembles the one she wanted. 

My phone buzzes. 

Lauren’s sick, Madeline says. But I’ll go if you go.

*

At Alice’s birthday party, Madeline pulls a beer from a cooler mixed with juice boxes and hands it to me. “I did the math, Sam,” she says. “By the time Alice is fifty, I’ll be dead.”

Alice is three. She is dressed as a hotdog, though it is not a costume party, and waving an orange popsicle. From the deck, we watch as she drops the popsicle on the lawn, picks it up, and sticks it in her mouth. “Where’s Nicholas?” I ask. Nicholas is Alice’s father. He, Madeline, and I shared a house on Calvert Street a decade ago, in our twenties. Madeline refers to them as the Ball Sack Years. 

“Hiding,” Madeline says.

“He said there would be other childless people. And he promised a moon bounce.” 

“Well,” Madeline says, “Nicholas a liar.”

Seven or eight children wander around the backyard like drunks, weaving through the sprinkler, crashing into stationary objects. A handful of parents gathers around the kiddie pool, casually vigilant. One of them is a red-haired woman in a gray shirt tucked into slim black shorts. She pulls a bottle of sunscreen from a bag and slathers it onto the arms of a small red-haired girl. “Should we go talk to them?” I ask.

The small red-haired girl lets out a long, piercing scream. 

“No,” Madeline says.

*

Nicholas appears with a store-bought vegetable tray and sets it on the table next to the cooler. “Good,” he says, “you found the alcohol.” He opens a beer. I met Nicholas at a party when we were twenty-six, after I overheard him tell a girl that he was deeply interested in ancient civilizations. I have come to learn that women find Nicholas appealing, regardless of what he is deeply interested in. 

The red-haired woman walks up to the side of the deck. “Is there another one of those?” 

Nicholas fishes a beer from the cooler, twists the cap off, and hands it to her. 

“Who’s that?” I ask, after she goes back to the kiddie pool. 

“Kate Holiday,” Nicholas says. “Her niece is in daycare with Alice.”

“That’s not her kid?” I ask.

“No,” Nicholas says. “Why?” 

“Sam likes redheads,” Madeline says. “Even though they make him miserable.”

I finish my beer and open another. “I’m not always miserable.” 

“Remember the time I came over,” she says, “and you were eating yogurt with a fork?”

“I was out of clean spoons.”

“You were unkempt.” Madeline raises her beer, in a toast. “Less so now.”

*

Alice climbs onto the deck. Her hotdog costume is a red tube with a yellow strip of felt down the center. She runs past her father and wraps her arms around Madeline’s legs. “I don’t get it,” Nicholas says. “Kids love you.” 

Madeline crouches to Alice’s height. “What do you have there?”

Alice holds up a plastic cow. “A dinosaur.” 

Nicholas shrugs. “She’s into dinosaurs.”

“What’s your favorite dinosaur?” Madeline says.

“T-Rex,” Alice says. “But his little arms make me sad.” 

“Honey,” Nicholas’s wife calls from the lawn. “Could you bring out the cake?”

Nicholas’s wife is wearing an off-white dress with a leather belt knotted at her waist; she gives the impression of someone who rode horses as a child. She has excellent posture and, the first time I met her, seemed either very shy or mildly disdainful. The second time I met her, she told a long, filthy joke about a priest and a prostitute and Darth Vader, and I started to understand her appeal. 

“The birthday cake?” Nicholas says.

“Yes, the birthday cake,” she says. “For our daughter’s birthday.”

“Where is it?” 

“It’s an ice cream cake. I’ll give you three guesses.” 

Nicholas takes a sip of beer. “Should I do the candles?”

Nicholas’s wife gives a big, dazzling smile. “How about you find a big box of matches,” she says, “and ask our three-year-old to light the candles?”

Madeline and I exchange the look we reserve for when other people’s relationships seem unenviable. Nicholas finishes the beer, tosses it into the recycling bin, and goes into the house. Alice sets the plastic cow on the deck and covers it with a paper napkin. “Be quiet,” she says. “The dinosaur is sleeping.”

*

Nicholas produces an ice cream cake without candles. We sing and eat the cake and the children run in literal circles around the backyard. Someone gives them water guns, and someone else wonders aloud if water guns promote gun culture. Madeline opens two beers and gives one to me. “If I drink too much and make a scene, maybe Nicholas will ask me to leave.” 

“Do you want to leave?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I want to complain.” 

We look at the adults on the lawn and play the game we sometimes play, where we try to guess the last time each of them had sex. “Your problem,” Madeline says, “is you think only good-looking people have sex.”

“Content-looking people,” I say. 

“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “Sex has nothing to do with being content.” 

“Interesting,” I say. “You and Lauren seem content.” 

I had dinner at their place the week before last: Lauren roasted a chicken, and the three of us split 2.5 bottles of wine. We talked about how Madeline’s work nemesis talked incessantly about toxins, and how Lauren was much better at smoking pot than Madeline, and how I should find a woman on the Internet because that was the whole point of the Internet, and because I still had a full head of hair. At the end of the night, they walked me to the front door, and Lauren hooked a finger through the pocket of Madeline’s jeans in a way that made me realize, acutely, that I would be going home to an empty apartment.

Madeline picks at the label on her beer. 

“You’re not content?” I say. 

She shrugs. “It’s like a video game. I thought when I met Lauren I had won the game. But then it kept going.” Her phone chimes and she looks at the screen. “Sometimes it’s hard,” she says. “And sometimes it’s boring.” She puts the phone to her ear, opens the door to the house, and closes it behind her. 

*

I stand there, alone, and look at the yard. Nicholas sits on the lawn, arm extended, as Alice slides colorful plastic bracelets over his hand. Nicholas’s wife joins them, settling on the grass in spite of her off-white dress. She leans over and kisses Nicholas on the cheek. I watch them for about thirty seconds before I start to think about the phone in my pocket and how, if I wanted to, I could look at it. That’s when the red-haired woman climbs onto deck. Kate Holiday.

She smiles. “You look confused.” She opens the cooler, sifts through the contents.

“Oh,” I say. “I am sometimes.”

“All the beer’s gone.” She looks at me. Her cheeks are flushed.

“Do you want a juice box?” I say.

“Tempting,” she says. 

I hold out my beer. “Do you want mine?”

To my surprise, she steps forward, pulls the bottle from my hand, and takes a sip. It occurs to me, distantly, that my heart is pounding. I wonder if there is a medical term for when that happens. I wonder if there is a medical term specific to when it is induced by another person.

“Your beer’s warm,” she says. 

“Yup,” I say. 

She grins and sets the half-empty bottle on the railing. I pick it up and we stand there, leaning against the railing. There is a breeze in the air. The sun drops behind a passing cloud and reemerges. The color of the grass shifts from a dark green to a lighter one. 

Somewhere in the backyard a kid starts crying—the small red-haired girl. “Oh dear,” Kate says. I watch as she walks down the steps to the lawn. When she reaches the grass, I pull out my phone, tap on Facebook, and search for Kate Holiday. I find her profile, which is only semi-private, and scroll through her seventeen pictures. Kate next to a cardboard cutout of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Kate in sunglasses, holding a coconut drink in one hand, a champagne glass in the other. Kate swinging in a hammock, laughing, the right side of her face hidden behind a white paper fan. 

I look up and see her on the lawn, a plastic wand poised at her mouth, blowing soap bubbles. She tilts her head, watching the bubbles float above the kiddie pool, brushes a strand of hair from her cheek, and hands the wand to the small red-haired girl. It would be so easy, I think, to join her there. To ask for her phone number. 

I imagine sitting beside her at a low-lit bar, drinking a second glass of bourbon, sharing a tiny, seven-dollar dish of olives. I imagine her swiveling on the bar stool, rolling an olive between her fingers, popping it in her mouth. I imagine a series of dates: different bars, different drinks, a slow and steady reveal of our imperfections. 

I look back at my phone and tap on her list of friends. I pause. I draw the phone closer to my face. Kate Holiday has a friend who looks a lot like my ex-wife.

It is my ex-wife, I realize. She changed her profile picture. 

In the new picture, my ex-wife stands in front of a brick wall painted bright green. She wears a blue t-shirt she bought years ago, from a truck that sold t-shirts and live goldfish in tiny plastic bowls. Her smile is big, her hair unruly. Snaked around her waist is a man’s arm. It is impossible to tell who the arm belongs to, because he is cropped out of the picture. It could, conceivably, belong to no one of significance. It could belong to my ex-wife’s brother, even though he lives in Lansing, Michigan and has not spoken to her in three years.

The phone, suddenly, feels hot and slick in my hand. It occurs to me that my wife is not my wife anymore, for a variety of tangible and less tangible reasons. She will never be my wife again. It occurs to me that I am thirty-seven years old and drunk at a child’s birthday party. There is a neat, searing pain in my right temple. 

Madeline returns to the deck. “You look like you’re about to throw up,” she says.

I finish my beer. “I have a headache.” 

She reaches over and presses a finger to my forearm. The imprint turns pink. “You’re burning,” she says. 

*

The house is cool and dark, the curtains drawn, the central air humming. The kitchen counter is littered with juice boxes and plates smeared with melted ice cream, the dining room carpet strewn with towels and alphabet puzzle pieces. I follow Madeline into the bathroom and watch as she pulls different bottles from the medicine cabinet. “There’s no headache stuff.” She closes the cabinet and brushes past me. “I’ll check upstairs.” 

I go to the living room and sink into the couch. I look at my reflection in the television. I look like somebody’s sad, drunk uncle.

Alice walks into the room, holding an assortment of jumbled towels. Her hotdog costume is bedraggled, the strip of yellow felt trailing behind her. She approaches the couch, takes the beer bottle, sets it on the floor. “Lie down,” she says. I stretch across the couch. “No.” She points to the carpet.

“Down there?” I say. 

“On the floor,” Alice says, solemnly.

The carpet is plush. I lie on my back. “Close your eyes,” she says, and I close them. “You’re sleeping,” she says. She puts her hand on my forehead, and then covers my face with a damp towel. At first, I wonder why the towel is damp. At first, I make a list of all the liquids it might be damp with. But the cloth is cool, and it smells like laundry detergent, and it feels pleasant, like a spa treatment. Alice covers my chest with a towel. She covers my legs with a towel, my feet. “Goodnight,” she says. I listen to her pad away on the carpet, into the kitchen. I listen to the back door open and close. I listen to the sound of my breaths, in and out.  

It is after dark, and I’m waiting for Martin to return. He’s out jogging, his nightly ritual, though he’s been gone longer than usual. I’m seated cross-legged on the couch checking email on my laptop and, behind me, I hear the rain against the glass. I glance up to my left and see the top of the Space Needle glowing through a low-hanging cloud. An expensive view, but I’m an expensive lawyer. When I moved to Seattle a year ago, recruited by a law firm impressed with my track record litigating software patents, I made sure that I found an apartment with this view. 

When I was growing up in Indianapolis, my father, an office furniture salesman, would bring me pens from the cities he visited. Floaty pens. A San Francisco panorama with a trolley car that rolled back and forth. The Space Needle with an elevator that went up and down. I spent hours on the floor of my room, slowly twirling the Space Needle, making the elevator rise and fall, imaging myself in it. It became my lucky pen, the one I used for my diary, then exams, then my college application. The pen that got me out of Indianapolis.  

Now, I watch from my living room one of these elevators ascending without my assistance. I think about how far I’ve traveled, first the job in New York, then DC, San Francisco, and now here, a circumnavigate career. Each stop at a better firm, a higher salary. I wonder if this will be my final stop, or if this Space Needle is just a lighthouse I will pass on my way to somewhere else. 

I glance up when Martin enters the apartment, dripping on the carpet. He’s out of breath and clutching what looks like a soaked-through scarf.

“What took you so long?” I ask. Then the scarf opens its yellow eyes and looks at me. 

I follow Martin into the bathroom. He swaddles the cat on his lap in a towel I bought him as a birthday gift from Restoration Hardware. The cat is black with patches of white on its paws and patches of pink on its back and belly where fur used to be. Its left ear torn in two, partially healed over. No collar.

“Where did you find it?” I ask.

“It’s a she,” he says. “I found her on Queen Anne, by those stairs.”

“She could be feral.”

“If she was, she wouldn’t have let me carry her home.” Martin is tenderly drying her legs. The cat looks up at him with patient eyes. 

“She needs food,” he says. “Do you mind popping downstairs to the market?” 

“I could, but…” I hear my voice trail off. He looks up at me. “Martin, shouldn’t we just take her to the shelter?”

Martin stares at me the way a litigious client looks when I suggest arbitration. 

* * *

The next evening I come home to a cat reborn. The fur, combed out and shiny, covers much of the bare skin. She struts through our living room, tail erect, as if she has always lived here. 

Martin is seated on the floor as she circles him. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he asks.

I nod and watch the cat climb onto his lap, his arms surrounding her. I hover over the two of them like a mother figure. I feel my stomach clench.

“You realize that we’re going to have to pay a pet deposit,” I tell him. “Assuming this is long term.”

“We’ll pay it,” he says.

“What if she’s been chipped?” I ask. “She could be somebody’s cat.”

“I’m naming her Dido,” he says, then places his lips on her forehead and whispers something. I feel the urge to lean in. Instead, I retreat two steps to the kitchen and begin heating up some food. 

“Can you hear her purring?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, though I hear only the microwave.

* * *

Martin is an instructor of ancient literature at the University of Washington. In his late thirties and still deep in student loans, he seems resigned to his fate. There is a novel somewhere on his computer that he claims is near completion, but I’m not optimistic. 

We have a relationship one might call modern. No marriage certificate. No kids. And, until recently, no pets. Living in a luxury high-rise in Belltown, with me covering the bills while he chips away at his liabilities. Martin carries his end in other ways. He is bookishly attractive in his black-rimmed glasses and untucked oxford shirts. He keeps the fridge stocked. He takes to the chores with a passion I find curious yet endearing. 

He gives me the room I need, not just in time and space. In San Francisco, I dated VCs who put on a show of independence but rarely ever spent a moment alone. Always in meetings, texting like teenage girls, biking every Saturday morning in spandex pelotons. Men raised by helicopter moms, offended if you aren’t there to praise their Mandarin, favorite a Tweet, offer up a hug. 

I was never much of a hugger. I have no problem with sex, but sex is transactional, temporary, and comes to a definite conclusion. Hugs are open-ended, which means someone must be the first to let go. Usually me.  

The fact that Martin and I have lasted a year is as close to happily ever after as I know. On my darker days I wonder if he’s in it for the money. But not once has he ever asked me to pay off his loans, and I interpret this as love.

* * *

A month later, I’m still trying, really trying, to coexist with our new roommate, one that leaves trails of litter across the carpet and sheds tufts of black fur that stick to my clothing like stains.

Martin speaks to her like she is a child. The way his voice rises makes my spine crawl, cooing silly nonsense about her being such a good girl, such a good little girl. 

At nights, when Martin is out jogging, she waits for him by the door. I could open a can of salmon and she wouldn’t look in my direction. After Martin returns, she follows him from room to room then waits patiently for him to settle on the couch, offering up his lap. 

I am now relegated to the other side of the couch as we watch TV. I first tried sitting close to Martin, but she growled at me, the same noise she made when the vet inserted the thermometer up her ass.

This used to be our ritual. My head on Martin’s lap, Martin’s hands massaging my hair. I would hold the remote control, and Martin would signal by touch the show he prefers. One tap for YES, two taps for NO. And a tender lap around my ear to signal the volume. 

Tonight, I try leaning over, to at least share this precious real estate. But as my head touches Martin’s right knee she hisses.

 “Fucking feline.” I straighten.

“You frightened her.”

“I frightened her? She’s the one with the claws, Martin.”

“She’s still traumatized,” he says. “Give it time.”

Dido stares at me with satisfied eyes and begins purring so loudly I have to turn up the volume.

* * *

“This cat is ruining my relationship,” I tell Jeremy, my paralegal and only close girlfriend. “I’m beginning to think this would be simpler if Martin was having an affair.”

“He is having an affair,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

Jeremy shakes his head. “The name he chose. Dido is the other woman.”

Martin now volunteers at the animal shelter in Ballard. He began going Thursday and Friday afternoons while I was at work. 

“Isn’t one rescued cat enough?” I ask when he tells me he has decided to volunteer on weekends too.

“There is so much need out there,” he says. 

“There is need everywhere,” I tell him. “You can’t rescue them all. What about your book?”

“I’m taking a break,” he says. “These cats. Just spending a few hours a day with them makes all the difference in their lives. You should join me.”

I tag along one Saturday. He leads me into the cat room, low-ceilinged with stainless steel cages along the walls, stacked three high, each containing expectant, pleading eyes. Some cats meow while others stare in silence. I feel like we are starring in some performance piece in the round. 

Martin puts me to work cleaning litter boxes and refilling water dishes. I yell out when one cat bites me as I’m reaching in for his dish.

Martin looks at my finger, blood beginning to bubble up through two pinpricks. “You’ll be fine.”

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

“If you say anything, Tom-Tom will be put back in quarantine.”

“Maybe he should be.”

Martin’s eyes narrow. “You stick a cat in quarantine and they’ll be alone for ten days. You have no idea what’s that like.”

 “I have some idea,” I say. “What it’s like to be sequestered.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jesus, Martin, it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, which is about as rare as a lunar eclipse in this city, and we’re in here shoveling litter.”

“I didn’t force you to come.”

“No. Of course not. But how else am I going to get your attention these days? Crawl into one of these cages?”

Martin shakes his head and turns back to Tom-Tom. An overweight vet tech enters wearing pink scrubs. She smiles at Martin and passes between us. He follows her into the next room.

I turn the other way, leave the shelter, and go for a long run along the waterfront. I can’t pretend to love these creatures, and I know Martin thinks I’m abnormal. This shelter visit another failed audition for a role I never wanted in the first place. Dido brought a part of him to life I didn’t know existed, a maternal quality. I would think it lovely if I had such a quality lurking within me. If I had, like him, been raised with little animals scurrying around the house.

The only animals in my house were three gerbils, given to my older brother and kept in the basement in a cracked aquarium. I named them Ariel, Cally, and Samantha, and I visited every morning and every day after school—until my brother, out of brotherly spite, moved them into his room and locked the door. I was so jealous of him for having little creatures to call his own that I pretended from then on that they didn’t exist. 

Perhaps if I had been properly raised with pets, I’d be different now, the way children soak up second languages. Either there was something I did not soak up, or it was never there to begin with. 

* * *

I text Martin from the office, inviting him to a romantic dinner. I suggest the new Italian place on Pike, but when he replies with an offer to cook, I feel as if I’ve won a summary judgment. 

We’ve endured two months of silent cohabitation, me working late during the week and Martin absent on weekends. Tonight will be different. 

I sneak out of work and arrive home to the smell of sautéed garlic. Martin is busy at the stove. I kiss him on the neck and pour a glass of wine.

I sit at the table and look out over the city, feeling a sense of relaxation I have not felt in months. Martin used to say that cooking calmed him, gave him a sense of accomplishment absent from the rest of his day. What calmed me was my participation—chopping vegetables, washing a dish or two. But these dinners ended when Dido arrived—baked brie and risotto replaced by rescued cats. 

Martin brings the plates and sits across from me. I raise a wine glass and wait for Martin to reciprocate, but he’s staring off at a corner of the room. 

“What’s wrong?” I ask. My eyes follow his, since I assume this has something to do with the cat. “Is it Dido?”

“No,” he says, then stands and stares at the ceiling like some petulant child, and I realize I’m going to have to squeeze it out of him. Men. The closer you get to the truth, the more tightly they cling to it.

“Martin, what’s the matter?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Patent law is hard to explain.”

“I’ve met someone,” he says. “At the shelter.”

“Someone?”

“Tami. A vet tech.”

“Stop. Back up.” My mind reboots into lawyer. “You’re having an affair?”

“I’m sorry.”

“With Tami.”

“She lives in Snohomish. I’ve decided to move in with her.”

I’m trying to picture this woman. Pink scrubs.

“You mean the fat girl?” I ask.

“I knew you’d say that.” He walks to the closet and removes his luggage, already packed. Then he removes a cat carrier and opens the gate.

I want to slap the bastard. I want to push him off our seventeenth-floor balcony onto Western Avenue. 

He scoops up Dido.

“No,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“No fucking way. Put the cat down.”

‘But you hate her.”

“I hate you.”

“I can’t just leave her here with you.”

“You can pick her up tomorrow,” I am standing. I grab the carrier away and throw it across the room. “Put her down, or help me God I’m going to start screaming.”

But I already am screaming. The cat has sprung from Martin’s arms and run under the television console, and he couldn’t get her out from under it even if I’d given him the chance. Martin fumbles with closing the door behind him. I lock the door and take a deep breath. 

I pick up the phone and instruct the front desk to change the lock. 

* * *

I’m on a conference call the following afternoon when my office door swings open. Martin’s face is burning. 

“How dare you,” he says.  “You don’t even like Dido.”

“You have no idea how I feel—just as I clearly had no idea what was going on in your twisted mind. I paid the cat fee, security deposit, food, vet bills. I have more legal right to that feline than you do.”

“I’ll take you to court.”

“Please. I’m the best lawyer you know. And I’m opposing counsel.”

I watch the words sink in. Martin exhales. His shoulders slump. He sits. He’s wearing a shirt I don’t recognize.

“Do you want me to beg? I will.”

“If you really loved Dido, you wouldn’t have left her.”

“I left you,” he says.

“In the eyes of the law, you left us both.”

Martin stands. “I’m going to get her back,” he says.

“Be my guest. I’m always up for a challenge.”

Later that night, I finish the leftovers of Martin’s meal with Dido perched at the far end of the table, back to me, staring at the door. 

“Sorry kiddo,” I tell her. “It’s just you and me now.”

* * *

Martin had identified six meows. 

The feed me meow. 

The good morning meow. 

The calling for other cats meow. 

The where have you been all day meow. 

The about to use the litter meow. 

The looking at seagulls meow. 

I never could tell them apart, but I’m quite certain that Dido is now using the full repertoire, all night long, every night. 

She sits at the foot of my bed and wails. The first night, I tried locking her out of the room, but she just stood outside the door and turned up the volume. Then clawed at the door. Then figured out how to open the door. 

I began using earplugs. That only spurred the little miscreant to position herself next to my head. 

One night, at three in the morning, nerves spent, I remove the carrier from the closet and I wave it at her. 

“You think I wouldn’t fucking do it?” 

She sits at the foot of my bed, expectantly. She knows I am bluffing. That or she is hoping for a way out.

I return the carrier to the closet and bury my head under a pillow. A few minutes later she is seated on my nightstand filling the room with one of six meows.

* * *

Jeremy hands me a coffee as I yawn into a fist. “Cat?”

“It’s like having an infant that won’t sleep the night.”

“And you still refuse to get rid of her?”

I wave him out of my office. Of all people, I know the value of a contract, and now I have nothing but this furry bargaining chip. 

“My friend Eddie has this little terror of a tabby,” says Jeremy later that day, during a break in a deposition. “Peed on their carpets. Clawed everything in sight. Then he hired Ron, and a week later—problem solved.”

“Ron?”

“They call him the cat whisperer.”

“Have you met this whisperer?”

Jeremy shakes his head.

“What did this person do? Give the cat pills?”

“Eddie says Ron just talked to the cat, played with him. Like therapy.”

“I refuse to hire a cat shrink.”

“He saved their marriage.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Plus, Eddie says he’s got an amazing ass. I’ve been dying to see it.”  

Martin took a major standard of living hit when he left me. Now he is living on the east side of Seattle in some generic apartment complex with a shitty walk score and a woman who can barely support herself. I remember her from the shelter. In her scrubs like some nurse. The way she passed between us in the cat room. If only I had spent more than one afternoon there, maybe I would have seen it coming. 

The next evening, I am sitting in my car in front of Martin’s apartment. The information Jeremy can unearth when I promise him a half day.

I watch Martin emerge from the apartment, alone, dressed for his run, right on schedule. He looks up at the mist, raises a hood, and starts. I follow in my car. 

He’s wearing the same jacket as the day I met him. It was raining then too, and I had beaten the movers by eighteen hours and was irritated to have so much empty time. I wandered the streets until I found a small park overlooking the sound. Tourists, umbrellas, selfies. I watched a ferry headed toward Bainbridge and wished I was on that boat because at least I’d be headed somewhere. 

I felt self-conscious so I took out my phone and pretended to be busy. I opened a dating app. My fingers scrolled through all the available men in my vicinity. The faces were new, but so much else felt sadly similar. Men who loved to travel, try new restaurants. Men who sailed, summited Rainier, hiked the PCT. Men who had children. Men who wanted children. Men who loved children.

I heard his voice, looked up. He was asking directions to the Sculpture Park, and I didn’t see him clearly at first because there were tears in my eyes.

He had just moved to Seattle and was looking for an apartment, living out of a hostel. And he laughed when I told him I did have an apartment but would probably be more comfortable in a hostel.

I treated him to a trip up the Space Needle. From there, I pointed out what I thought was my apartment, and I invited him to stay. For a week or two until he found a place of his own. 

I have stopped at a light, and I watch Martin getting away. I picture myself the star of a David Lynch film, the camera tight on my face, tense music. Do I accelerate and cut the runner off and yell at him in the middle of the street? Or do I accelerate and swerve into him? 

I turn the car around and park across the street from his apartment and close my eyes. And for a moment I am back at my own apartment, listening to the rain against the glass, waiting for Martin to return from his jog.

When he returns, pacing back and forth, his head steaming, glasses fogged, I lower the car window. This is my plan. I will call out to him and he will join me in the car and I will apologize. I will ask, beg, for him to return to me. 

But I am too late. The door closes behind him, and I watch shadows moving against the curtains. I get out of the car.

Then I notice the curtains moving, parting. A cat has slipped between the curtain and the window—gray with a white chest—and it studies me. All this time, I thought there was only Dido. 

I get back in my car.

Later that night, I am coming out of a dream when I hear breathing next to my face. I can see Martin’s face, the short nose and stubbled double chin and they way he stares at me. Those eyes dark and reflective, and I can see myself in them. He is talking, and I can’t hear him over the noise. I ask him to speak up but the noise is so loud, a scream.

I am the one screaming, Dido’s claw hooked into my left nostril. 

I grab at her collar and squeeze until she disengages. I toss her out of the bed and hear books falling. By the time I get the light on, the cat is limping across the living room floor, tail dragging. By the looks of the damage I had hurled her into my tower of unread books. The next morning, a Band-Aid on my nose,I tell Jeremy to make the call.

* * *

I answer the door. Jeremy is standing there, dressed for a date. 

“Is he here yet?”

I shake my head.

“Mind if I wait with you?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Jeremy looks around. “Where is the little Beelzebub?”

“Staring out the window. She took a crap on my pillow yesterday while I was at work. I believe that’s what they call passive aggressive.”

“That’s not passive aggressive,” he says. “That’s aggressive aggressive.”

I open a bottle of wine and pour out two glasses. The front desk calls to let me know Ron has arrived. 

“He’s on his way up,” I say, and Jeremy rushes into the bathroom to check his hair.

When I open the door, I see a man in jeans and flannel shirt carrying what looks like an old metal toolbox. He says nothing.

“Are you Ron?”

“I am.” He walks past me. 

Jeremy extends a hand. “I’m Jeremy. The person you spoke with. I was hoping I could watch. The session.”

“I work alone with my clients.”

“Clients?” I ask. 

“Where is she?” he asks. I point her out, now crouched on the back of my leather chair, watching us.

“What’s her name?”

 “Dido,” I say. “And, for the record, I didn’t give her that name. You think she blames me?”

Jeremy giggles, but Ron says nothing. He kneels down and opens his toolbox, which I realize is an old fly-fishing tackle box. He removes several pieces of bamboo and assembles them into a sort of fishing rod.

“Going fishing?” Jeremy asks.

“In a manner of speaking,” he says as he strings a small fake mouse, colored purple, to the end of the rod. Dido slowly approaches, tail in the air, and follows him into the bedroom.

“You think he needs an assistant?” Jeremy asks.

“If this doesn’t work out, you’ll be available.”

Jeremy follows me out onto the balcony, and we watch a container ship making its slow escape from the harbor. 

“You need to take a cruise,” Jeremy says. “Get your mind off things.”

“Too many people.”

“Must be weird to be alone again.”

“I’m not alone. That’s the problem.”

Ron emerges from the room. Dido follows a few steps behind, her tail curling upward like smoke. 

“So?” I ask.

“Dido is full of rage.”

“No shit.”

“I’ll need two more sessions.”

We watch him return his toy to the toolbox. I try rolling my eyes at Jeremy, but he is too focused on the man’s backside. And I must admit the man is built like a lumberjack. He starts for the door.

“Wait,” I say. “Is that it?”

He gives me a blank look. “For now.”

“What all did you do with her in there?”

“We played.”

“You played. And how much do I owe you for this playtime?”

“Two-fifty.” 

“That wasn’t even an hour.”

“I explained everything to your assistant.”

“I’m sure you did. I just assumed I was paying for more than cat R&R. I mean, for this kind of money I’d expect more out of this cat than a better mood. Like the ability to open her can of food. Do her own litter.”

“Speaking of that, it needs cleaning,” he says. “I’ll see you Monday.”

The door slams shut before I can respond.

“Can you believe that? The nerve of that man.”

“He is so hot,” Jeremy says. “I have to get a cat.”

* * *

I am seated cross-legged on the couch, laptop balanced on top. I feel movement and look over to see Dido sitting on Martin’s cushion. 

This is a first. Dido has never shared the couch with me. Could this be progress?

I tentatively reach over to pet her. I try to do it the way Martin did, not from in front of her face but from behind, gentle. My hand rests on her head, and I find myself smiling. I feel I have passed a test, made some sort of breakthrough, and I suddenly want to thank her for suffering me all these weeks, for letting me in. And for the first time I can imagine a life together. A peaceful coexistence, which was all Martin and I enjoyed anyway. Why can’t I enjoy this? Must my life consist only of adversarial relationships? 

I feel before I see that her head has swung around, her jaw landing on my wrist. 

I don’t push her away. I let her teeth pierce the skin, going deeper. I welcome the pain. Even pain is a currency. A point of negotiation. The absence of accustomed pain is in itself a form of pain. I watch the blood trickle down my arm. I think of the slipcover, the cleaning deposit on the carpet.

I am no match for her, and I yank my hand back. She jumps to the floor. I’m shaking.

“Martin left you too, sweetheart. It’s time you got on with your life.”

* * *

Truth is, I could have had the front desk give Ron a key to my apartment. He could do his business and be gone before I got home from work. 

On his second visit, I ask Ron to let me sit in on the session. 

He looks at me for a moment like I’m just another one of his cats. His eyes are blue, and he has a habit of massaging his neck when thinking, exposing firm biceps, which he is doing now. “I will call you in when I’m ready,” he says.

I go into the bedroom and wait. I can hear them out in the living room. Sounds of a cat galloping from room to room. 

“We’re ready for you,” he says.

I sit on the couch and watch the way he plays with her, how focused she is. A ballerina on hind legs, paws extending, twirling. It occurs to me that Ron is nothing like Martin. With Dido, Martin sought out purrs and intimacy. Ron seeks only to work the cat out, dispensing trivial doses of attention, minimal eye contact. As if he is working with a hardened convict.

“How do you do it?” I ask.

“There are no secrets—no secret language, if that’s what you’re getting at. Cats were here before humans. I think at some level they all know that. If you look into a cat’s eyes, really look, you’ll see it. Something you won’t see in a dog’s eyes.”

”What?”

“Resentment,” he says. “Which is the highest form of intelligence.”

“Everything is claws with her.”

“She hasn’t learned how to use soft paws,” he says. “She’s like you.”

“Me?”

“You’re a lawyer,” he says. 

“I don’t get paid to be gentle.”

He hands the toy to me. “You try.”

I jingle it in front of her. She is motionless.

“See. Nothing.”

“Not in front of her face like that. You make it too easy. You have to give her a challenge. Keep it out of reach. Slow it down.”

I do as instructed but Dido is now staring in the opposite direction. 

“She hates me.”

“Appears the feeling is mutual.”

“I don’t hate her,” I say. “I just don’t like cats all that much. My ex was the cat lover.”

“Why didn’t he take her?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re using her for ransom?”

“I’m the one with all the money.“

“How long has he been gone?”

“Six weeks.”

Ron rubs his neck again. “He’s not coming back for Dido.”

“How would you know? Martin is not a cat.” 

“He’s a man, and I know a thing or two about that species as well.”

I feel a tug on my hand and I look down to see Dido playing with the toy. 

“I wasn’t even doing anything.”

“You let it drop behind your shoe. She couldn’t see it, she couldn’t hear it, so she had to have it. Silence means more to a cat than noise,” he says. “Cats are minimalists.”

Ron kneels down and opens his toolbox. He reaches up for the toy.

“I’m not done yet,” I say.

“I have to go.” He grabs the toy and I tug on it playfully, until I nearly coax a smile out of him. 

“How about a drink?” I ask, standing by the door, blocking it. He looks at me, and I think he is considering it, but then he opens the door. Before I know it, I have grabbed the belt loop of his jeans and pulled him to me.

 “What are you doing?” he asks.

I say nothing, and now I have my right hand on his right butt cheek, holding tight, feeling it flex as he tries to turn. And I’m now one with him. My other hand on his other side, grabbing just as firmly. And my mouth on his evasive mouth until I hear the door fall closed again. 

Later, in the dark, we lie naked on the couch. He is staring at the Space Needle.

“What did you do before this?” I ask.

“Fisherman.”

“Not exactly a lateral move.”

“I woke up one morning and realized that I was on the wrong side of life.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is a right side and a wrong side. Those who kill for living are on the wrong side.”

“Somebody has to do it.”

“No,” he says. “Nobody has to do it.”

“So I take it you given up on seafood.”

“All animals.”

“Oh, I see. You’re one of them.”

“Them?”

“You know. People who try to make the rest of us feel guilty about eating meat.”

“I don’t have to try,” he says. 

He pulls away. I hear him getting dressed.

“I didn’t mean anything by that.” I sit up and turn on a light. Dido is high on the bookcase, looking down on us with knowing eyes. 

 

* * *

Ron doesn’t show the following Monday. Nor does he return my calls. 

“Typical male,” Jeremy says. 

Walking home, late, I check email. An invoice for $500 with one line item: Feline behavior sessions. Payable Net 30.

The cat has torn a linen couch pillow to shreds. She sits on the kitchen counter with a fuck-you look.

I park the cat carrier on the dining room table. 

Dido climbs on top of the bookcase. I reach up for her and grab a hind leg. She slashes me but I hold on. She is biting me now. 

Some people are cat people. Some are dog people. But what if you’re none of the above? What if you are unfit to care for any pet? 

Even gerbils.

My brother quickly lost interest in his gerbils, which stands to reason because our parents had already lost interest in us. Three weeks without food. That’s all it takes to turn childhood pets into cannibals. 

I, following the smell, was the one who found Ariel, alone and skeletal. I watched her die, surrounded with lettuce and sunflower seeds, my feeble attempt at rehabilitation. When my father returned from Dallas, he yelled at my mother, who yelled at my brother, who yelled at me. If I were a lawyer then, I would have sued them all for negligence and abuse. But I was only ten years old. The best I could do was convince my father to let me bury Ariel in the backyard. 

The Space Needle is blurry, and at first I think it is raining. My body trembles when I feel her, the fur, curling up on my lap.  The purring begins and grows louder, like an ocean. 

* * *

I place the carrier on the front porch. I kneel to look at her one more time. Her eyes are black, unblinking. I don’t dare poke a finger through the gate. 

Martin answers the door. When he sees the carrier he studies my face for sign of a practical joke. 

“She missed you,” I say.

He kneels at the carrier, and she meows at him. When he stands, Dido in his arms, I see tears in his eyes. 

“Which one of her meows was that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Must be new.”

The cat is purring now, and they are both staring at me with satisfied eyes. 

* * *

A month later, driving through the city at night, I see a dead animal off to the side of the road. Raccoon? Possum? I tell myself to stop asking such questions. The animal is dead. But these are the questions I now ask. Since Dido. Since Martin trained my eyes to see them. Sniffing around dumpsters. The far corners of parking lots. Emerging from under mufflers. Tails low. Collarless. Were they always there? Or was I always so blind?

I turn towards Ballard.

Tom-Tom is still there, along with the god-awful name the shelter gave him. I vow to change it.

Back at home, I open the door to the carrier and watch him take his first tentative steps, as if he is walking on the moon. Which my apartment must feel like after two months of living in that shelter. I am lying on the floor, at eye level, as he sniffs at the clawed-up couch.

“You’re an only cat,” I assure him. “But I have to be honest with you. I’m not a very good cat person. Still learning to use soft paws.”

He tilts his head and rubs against my forehead.

“But you are a good little boy,” I say. “Such a good little boy.” 

END

These mountains are killing me—killing all of us—though I know it’s in self-defense. Getting away from here is all I can think about as I step off the bathroom scale, skim my jeans over my pelvic bones, take up the slack inch of denim with a safety pin. Another pound has slid off me this week, even though I shoveled the last of an orange-glazed Bundt cake into my mouth yesterday. Missy’s momma baked the cake for Paw, but my father-in-law wouldn’t eat it, sent it home for Jasper and me to share. Paw won’t eat much of anything these days. He went from mining to logging when the coal dust sucked the air from his lungs, then from logging to sitting on the couch when his Crohn’s disease turned to cancer and his body started dissolving. Like mine seems to be doing.  

My ribs look more like a washboard now than four years ago in high school when they nicknamed me Bony Romie. I worry maybe I have Crohn’s, too. It’s wiping out half the mountain, what ones don’t die of cancer or black lung. The GI doc in Bluefield told Paw he’d called the CDC down in Atlanta, told them they should start tracking it. Said it wasn’t normal for Crohn’s to nest in an area like it had in Stump Branch. Paw and the doctor think it has something to do with the coal mines—something they’re pumping into the ground, or something they’re pumping out—probably the same thing that’s causing the grass to burn up and the fish to swell and lay on the bank like wall-eyed shovel heads. 

The smell of sweet cornbread baking wafts into the bedroom, and my mouth waters, but I ain’t hungry. Food sometimes turns against me these days, causes a quick rush of nausea. It always passes, though. Paw told Jasper the same thing happened to him right before he was diagnosed.

I put away the pink Myrtle Beach 2012 t-shirt from our last vacation, pull down one of Jasper’s bulky West Virginia Mountaineers sweatshirts instead. It’ll hide my ribs and the little swollen paunch that’s shown up low on my belly.

“Anybody home?” Jasper calls from the living room. Our trailer trembles when he slams the front door behind him, and I massage the dull ache building behind my temples.

I snatch the notice about the mountaintop-removal-mining protest from the dresser, shove it into the drawer before Jasper sees it. I hate the anti-MTR meetings and protests. The things they say about what’s happening to the land and to us who live here scare me, give me nightmares even, yet I can’t seem to stay away. The woman who invited me to my first meeting in the back bay of Walker’s Garage told me that what I didn’t know could kill me. Since then, I haven’t missed a one. I want to learn everything they’re teaching, see firsthand the changes taking place in the people of Stump Branch. 

I’ve watched a dozen locals become spies or environmental activists in a matter of weeks. Men and women I’ve known all my life have turned into scientists who show us soil and water samples, toxicology reports, easily pronouncing six-syllable words and reading long lists of deadly chemicals—and one of those men never finished high school. Funny how staring at death makes people smarter. 

Now I smooth back my hair and make myself smile, then head down our short hallway. “There’s my man.” I lean in to peck a kiss on Jasper’s lips, the only part of him besides his eyeballs that isn’t pitch black. “Did the nightshift treat you all right?” 

Jasper nods, sets his lunch bucket on the vinyl runner by the door, slides out of his dirty twill coat. “I smell cornbread.” His blue eyes light like propane flames, their brightness intensified by the mask of coal dirt surrounding them. 

“Can’t have brown beans without it,” I say. 

“Mmm, lady! I’d marry you again, if you weren’t already mine.” 

“Get cleaned up. Cornbread’ll be done in a jiffy.” I turn off the warming flame beneath the pan and spoon potatoes fried with onions into a blue-speckled bowl. “Might want to bring in your work boots off the porch, set them in the tub. We’re supposed to get a skiff of snow later this morning.” 

“Too early for snow. I ain’t ready for it, yet.” From the bathroom down the hall, Jasper’s voice echoes as if he is still deep in the mine. “You check on Daddy after work yesterday?”

“I did.” I add a thick pat of golden butter to the fried potatoes, the same thing I made for my father-in-law yesterday, and I think of the man’s yellowing, wary eyes. Paw—I’ve always called him Paw instead of Daddy, out of respect for my own daddy who died when I was a teenager—Paw’s sliding downhill fast. It isn’t just his sickness, either. His mind ain’t acting right. He’s not himself, and I worry he’s up to something. A no-good sort of something. 

A long pause settles between us before Jasper asks the heavy question I know will follow. “He send any more Oxy home with you?”

“On the bedroom dresser.” I set the table, stand by the kitchen window and watch the morning sunrise illuminate the miles of flat, beige scab that used to be a cloud-grazing piney mountain. I unclench my teeth and work my aching jaw. 

Ten minutes later when Jasper pads out of the bathroom bare-chested, barefoot and smelling of soap, I slide the pone of steaming cornbread onto the table. “Want milk for dunking?” 

“Heck yeah.” He flashes his white smile, and just like that, my icy mood melts.

Jasper picks up a slab of cornbread, slathers it with butter, takes a big bite and talks around it. “How many pills did he send this time?” 

I look out the window again, listen to the harsh wind whistle past the windowpane. No deep folds of mountain, no heavy forest out there anymore to hedge us in, protect us. “Didn’t count ’em.” I break off a piece of cornbread, crumble it between my fingers, watch the grains sprinkle onto the plate. “Felt like too many.” I dust my hands and take a long swig of milk to wash away the bitterness on my tongue.

“You’ll wish you had more, the day comes you ever need to sell ’em.”

I set down my glass hard enough to make my fork jump. “Dammit, Jasper, you been dying since the day you walked into that mine. I’m tired of you always planning for the day you don’t come home.” I stand, rake my food into the garbage can and run scalding water over the plate. 

“Don’t be like that,” Jasper says. “Sit down, honey. Eat.” 

“Not in the mood for cornbread,” I say.

“Want me to make you a sandwich? Peanut butter is my specialty.” 

“I’m not hungry.” I dry the plate, and I’m startled when Jasper breathes into my hair, slides his arms around me, pulls me back against his chest. I rest there, let his warmth seep into me. 

“We talked about this when I started working for Prospect. You know the chances I got of coming home in a box.”

I know. Oh, yes, I know. Roof bolting is about the most dangerous job an underground miner can do. It also pays the most. 

Jasper nuzzles my neck and whispers in my ear as his hands move lower on my stomach. “Babies cost money, and if we want a little Grodin some day, I need to stick around there a while.”

I squeeze his hands, slide them a bit higher. How I ache for a child in the hollow of my belly, pray day and night for a baby. A selfish prayer, premature, but one that, if God will answer, might help Jasper see the sense in leaving. Stump Branch might cradle Grodin family land, but it’s no longer the place for Jasper and me to start our family. The land is sick, the people are sick, and now I’m feeling sickly, too. 

I turn around in Jasper’s arms, look up into his once-smooth face, now lined and creased a decade beyond its twenty-two years. “You promised you’d quit in five years.”

He nods, and a trickle of water sluices from a light-brown curl, skims his neck and slides onto his chest. “Still got part of one to go.”

“We could get out now, Jasper, go to North Carolina. Plenty of textile jobs down there. Construction jobs.” 

“You ain’t got no reason to worry about me spending a lifetime underground. I can’t stick around there no longer than six or seven years, anyhow.”

“Six or seven years! You’d consider staying longer?”

“We’re less than a year from tearing into the last big coal seam on the property. After that, no more underground mining. Prospect’s doing everything above-ground. MTR mining all the way. I’m the last of a dying breed, baby.” He grins. 

“Jasper, nobody says you got to stick out the full five you’d promised. Besides, Stinson didn’t keep his word, neither. You still ain’t got no medical card. You have to beg for a day off and lie to take one.” 

He tilts his head, touches his lips to mine, and electricity snaps between us. I flatten my hands on his chest, push him away. “Finish eating, and get some sleep. I have to run into town. I’ll check on Paw again while I’m out. I believe he’s supposed to see the doc again tomorrow. He thinks he can drive, but I want to make sure.” 

Jasper eases onto the straight-backed chair awkwardly, gingerly, like an old man.

“Your back bothering you again?” I ask.

“Not too bad. Big slab of roof fell today.” He lifts his palms heavenward. “Had my hands up just so, caught the edge and shoved it to the side before it crushed Jimbo. I might have twisted wrong.” He rolls a shoulder, arches, then digs his spoon into the beans. “Say Paw’s going again tomorrow? Didn’t he just go a few days ago?”

I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, quietly. “They go more often when it gets to end-stage.” I watch him carefully, but he won’t look at me. “The doctor called and said the big polyp he took out last week showed more cancer. Said Paw needs to have another ten or twelve inches cut out of there, but your daddy won’t hear of it. Said no more knife.”

“No more knife,” Jasper echoes, pushing his food around his plate. 

“Sorry, Jasper. I know you hate talking about these things.”

“So . . . what’s Daddy gonna do?”

I watch my husband for a moment. He wouldn’t want me to candy-coat the truth. “He told the doc to double up on his pills if he would, but no more cutting.”

Jasper chews slowly, puts down his spoon and looks up at me. 

I hold up my hand, stop him before he can speak. “He needs them pills himself, Jasper. You know he’s got to be hurting.”

“Ain’t like I’m taking anything he ain’t offering. His idea to skim off the bottles, not mine.” He breaks off another wedge of cornbread, dunks it into the milk. “He don’t take half of what they prescribe for him, anyhow. Said if he took Oxy at the rate the doctor pushed it on him, he’d O.D. in an hour.” 

I turn away before I wipe my eyes, so Jasper won’t see.

“Besides,” he says, “I told him he ever needs them back, I got them right here, and I’ll come running. Told him I’d never sell them, anyhow. They’re yours for when—”

“For when you die! Hell yes, I know that!”

Jasper shrugs, bites off the sopping cornbread, swallows with hardly a chew. “It’s the only life-insurance policy we got.” 

I blink hard, his words stinging me like a slap to the face. I yank Jasper’s good hunting jacket from the coat tree by the door, shove my arms into it and push the cuffs over my wrists. Jasper’s words circle through my head again. Caught the edge and shoved it to the side before it crushed Jimbo. My Lord. 

“I’ll try to be back before you leave,” I say, then I catch myself and speak a bit softer. “You pulling a twelve again? What time you go in?” He doesn’t answer, and when I turn, Jasper’s eyes catch me, hold me in the way that hurts my heart. 

“Baby, come here.” He holds out an arm, and before I know it, I’m wrapped up inside him, he’s wrapped inside me. 

With the groceries bought, the electric bill paid, and what’s left of Jasper’s check deposited, I head back up the mountain, almost wishing I didn’t have the day off work. Not that I like calling patients who can’t afford their medical bills to remind them a turnover to collections is looming, but it beats watching Paw die. 

The Jeep rocks like a boat among waves as I navigate the ruts and climb the ridge toward Paw’s place. I peer into the skeletal tree-line as the afternoon sun begins to sink, but I find no colorful fall leaves, no late green shoots, no encouragement that spring will follow winter, will ever come again to Stump Branch. 

As I near the top, I slow and steer the Jeep to hug the inside of the narrow road, my stomach balling tight in anticipation of meeting one of the monstrous coal trucks that race up and down the ridge all hours of the day and night. Each year since the mine opened in ’98, someone has died either in a head-on collision or from being run over the steep embankment by a coal truck. Prospect always pays the fines, but they’ve never lost a court case, and no family has ever received reparations for loss of life. My fingers ache from gripping the wheel too tight, and I flex them, telling myself that maybe tonight I will paint my nails for Jasper, telling myself anything to get dying off my mind.

I let out a pent-up breath when I round the blind turn without meeting a coal truck. A jarring blast from the mine a mile and a half away further stretches my nerves, and I grit my teeth as loose dirt and rubble tumble from the steep shale bank above onto the Jeep’s hood and roof. You can’t ever have anything nice around here. 

Topping the knoll, I gaze out the passenger window at the bleak desolation below. Another big gray slurry pond—nearly the size of a lake—burbles and pops where once a field of Queen Anne’s lace, wild strawberries, and morning glories ambled over the ground. Nearly seven years have passed since they dug the pond, and not a weed nor a blade of grass grows within a hundred yards of it. Poison slop. Full of arsenic, copper, selenium, and other chemicals I can’t yet pronounce, but have heard named at the anti-mountaintop-removal coalition meetings. I study the pie charts, and I always pay special attention to the one depicting water quality, where the chemicals cover all but a blue sliver of the pie. A pond can’t hold in that kind of misery for long. Nothing can. 

After the turn-off toward Paw’s place, the Jeep travels smoother road along the man’s well-tended drive. I pull alongside his mailbox, reach out the window and retrieve a handful of doctor bills, insurance notices, and the same anti-MTR flyer that was in my mailbox yesterday. Paw hasn’t been outside since my last visit.

The house hasn’t changed much since the first time Jasper brought me home to meet his folks six years ago, right after he’d gotten his driver’s license. The white clapboards don’t look as proud now that coal dust stains the crevices, and though Paw usually keeps up with the ditch lilies Momma Grodin planted the year before she died, he hasn’t cut them back this fall, and they lay like heaps of wilted broomstraw along the edge of the porch. 

Paw doesn’t come to the door as he usually does when I drive up, so I jump out of the Jeep and mount the steps two at a time. He could be in the bathroom, I tell myself, trying to banish bad thoughts.

I knock at the door, three quick raps. “Paw?” I open the door without waiting, knowing my father-in-law’s front door has never been locked. As easy to lock the boogeyman in as out, he once told me. May as well let him come and go as he pleases.

“Paw?” A rush of heat wraps around me, nearly takes my breath, and I cross the wooden floor and check the thermostat. Eighty-five. “Where are you, Paw?”

“Be out in a minute.” His voice sounds strangled, and he rattles a wet cough. 

Bathroom. I drop the mail on the coffee table, shed Jasper’s coat and lower the thermostat to seventy-three. “It’s hotter than Hades in here, Paw. You got the chills or something?”

The toilet flushes, followed by running water at the sink, then Paw emerges. “I’ve been a little chilly, yeah.” 

I suck in a breath. His face has grayed overnight, and his eyes have sunk so deeply into their orbits that he looks like the plastic Halloween skull I put on our front porch last week. He offers a strained smile and walks cautiously down the center of the wide hallway, as if barefoot on broken glass. 

I rush to his side. “Paw, my Lord, why didn’t you call me?” Once a foot taller than me, Paw now walks with a stoop, and he levels his hollow gaze with my stare. “You look a mess,” I say. It’s an understatement.

Paw grins around his grimace, and his watery eyes make me want to cry. 

“Ain’t nothing you can do for me, doll baby,” he says. “If they was, I’d tell you.” He pecks a hot, dry kiss on my cheek. “’Sides, I’m getting along just fine for an old feller.”

When I slide an arm around Paw’s back, his spine presses against my arm through my sweatshirt. He feels so light I think I could carry him on my hip, like a baby. “Let’s rest a bit, why don’t we?” I say. He leans on me more than usual as I lead him to his recliner and help him sit. “Can I get you anything? Drink of water? Coffee?”

He lifts a bent finger and points toward the kitchen. “Just put on a pot about six hours ago. Ought to be stout by now. Black. No sugar, sugar.” He grins at his joke, but his lips are thin and tight, and another cough bubbles in his throat.

“Want me to take you to the hospital, Paw?”

“No. Next time I come out of this holler, it’ll be in a box.”

I can’t stifle a groan. “Great. Now you and Jasper are both talking that foolishness.” I fill two mugs, add a spoonful of powdered creamer to mine, carry them into the living room.

“What’s got Jasper dying today?” Paw asks.

“Slab of roof fell while he was bolting. I swear, Paw, between worrying about him, and you, and the mine blasting that goes on all hours of the day and night, I ain’t had a solid night of sleep in a month.” 

Paw’s gaze settles on the fluorescent pink flyer that came in the mail. “Reach me that thing.”

I curse myself for not throwing it in the trash before he saw it. “Aw, you know it’s another piece of propaganda. They’re right, of course, those protesters. But it ain’t doing no good, and it only serves to stir up trouble and hurt feelings.”

He grunts, but I don’t know if he’s agreeing or not. I push to find out. “Need to take their fight to Charleston, or maybe Washington. Only making people feel bad who have to earn a living in that mine. Ain’t like the men’s got a choice.”

“Everbody’s got a choice.” He sips the steaming brew, sets his mug on the side table. “They got a right to protest, and what they’re saying is the truth, Romie. Prospect Mining is killing all of us, what ones are working in the mines, and what ones ain’t.” He stares off for a moment, then speaks softly to the air. “I’ve had about enough of it.”

He turns and fixes me with a serious stare. “Jasper don’t know you go to them anti-MTR meetings, does he?”

His question catches me off guard, and I wonder how he knows, who might have told him. “No, sir. I’ve only been to a couple. I just wanted to see what they were about.”  

“You ought to go to all of ’em. Don’t miss nary a one.” He points again at the flyer. 

I hand the stack of mail to Paw, taking care to shuffle the flyer to the bottom. His words sound foreign to me. He’s long supported the miners, worked the mines himself in the years when men only went underground, gouged deep to get the coal instead of decapitating mountains. Used to say underground mining might not be the best way to treat Mother Nature, but it sure beat chopping off her head like Prospect has started doing now. 

Paw’s glistening eyes rove the hot-pink page, then he lays the flyer on the table, sips again from his coffee mug. “They’re going about it all wrong.” He stares silently at the dark TV for a full minute. Then he turns to me. “Say you’ll help me, if I need it?”

I wipe the dampness from my forehead, wish I’d worn my t-shirt instead of Jasper’s sweatshirt. “Think you ought to go to the hospital, after all? Let’s get you a bag together.” I stand and head toward my father-in-law’s bedroom. 

“Sit down. I told you I ain’t going to no hospital.” He stares at me in a hard way that tells me not to argue. “I want your word that you’ll carry out my last wishes.”

My throat clogs. I try to think of a joke, something funny to lighten his mood, but the words won’t come. Momma Grodin’s old cuckoo clock sounds from the kitchen, as if telling me it’s time to listen, time to do what Paw wants me to do while time is left. “Of course I will, Paw,” I whisper. “You know that.” 

He points. “Reach me that Bible.” 

I lift the worn, oxblood Bible from its place on the center of the coffee table, offer it to Paw. 

He puts on his bifocals with trembling hands, then opens the leather-bound text to the last pages. “Let me read you something.”

I try not to look surprised, but it’s hard. Paw reads the Bible, believes in the Lord above, but he’s never preached to anyone, always says a man must find God on his own terms, and that he can find Him anywhere. 

“The Book of Revelation, eleventh chapter, verse eighteen . . . ‘The nations were angry, and your wrath came, as did the time for the dead to be judged, and to give your bondservants the prophets their reward, as well as to the saints, and those who fear your name, to the small and the great; and to destroy those who destroy the earth.’” A wet cough gurgles its way out of Paw’s chest, and he snatches a tissue from the side table, closes his Bible. 

He composes himself, and when he looks at me, his eyes are puddled. “You get that, Romie? ‘. . . to destroy those who destroy the earth.’” 

I start to nod, but shake my head. “I get it, Paw. I think.”

“I want to be a bondservant.”

Dread slops over me like smothering mud, and I ache to have Jasper here to hold my hand, to pull me to fresh air. “I don’t . . . what are you saying?” 

Paw dabs at a watering eye with the tissue, points toward the coat closet by the front door. “You done give me your word. Now look in there. On the floor.”

I stand, and my feet feel heavy, like they’re stuck to the carpet. “What do you mean? About being a bondservant?” 

He points toward the coat closet, but doesn’t speak. 

I think he must have taken some Oxy that’s made him loopy, and that’s good. He needs it. I open the dark wooden closet door and stare at the strange thing on the floor. I step closer, realize it’s a hunting vest that stands rigid, rust-colored sticks of dynamite holding it erect. My knees want to buckle. “Paw.” The word comes out on a half-breath.

“Destroy those who destroy the earth.”

I kneel in front of the closet. “No.”

“What time’s Jasper go in tonight? Five?”

“No, Paw.” 

“Look at me, Romie.”

I turn my head a bit, but my stare won’t leave the hunting vest. 

“All I need is for you to drive me up there.”

“People will die, Paw! You will die. We have friends at that mine. Jasper could be in that mine!” I finally turn to meet his gaze.

His smile comes easier now; his face is peaceful. “I’m already dead, doll baby. Only a matter of timing.”

It’s a struggle, but I manage to hold back a sob.

“Jasper will be going in soon, won’t he? I could go into the mine this evening at shift change, during their meeting,” he says. “They always meet in that old office trailer. Either way, won’t be a soul underground, ’cept me.” He holds out his palms like Jesus on the cross. “You take me up there, go interrupt the meeting to see Jasper, tell him loud and clear something’s wrong with me.”

I shake my head to clear the cobwebs—can he really be saying these things?

“Say it so the others will hear. Tell them you came straightaway to get help . . . phone’s out, so you couldn’t call for an ambulance.” 

Paw lets his hand fall between his recliner and the end table, and when he lifts it again, he holds up the phone line he’s cut, so I can see its frayed edges. He gives me a white-lipped grin. “I’ll mosey down past the equipment bays while you’ve got their attention. You and Jasper will be off the ridge before I let her blow. The ones atop the ground’ll shudder and shake, but they won’t be hurt none.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “The shafts will collapse . . . mining equipment will blow all to pieces. It’ll cost more to wade through the EPA and OSHA paperwork and replace all that equipment than it will to shut her down . . . clear out of here.” Fresh pink blooms on his pasty cheeks.

My racing heartbeat slows, and I chew on a fingernail. It can’t be that easy, can it? Jasper won’t have a job, a place to work. If he’s unemployed, we’ll have to leave the state for work then, won’t we? Get out of here. Have a baby in a place where the water isn’t chemical soup.

“It’s my dying wish.” Another cough breaks from his chest, and this time red dots spot the tissue. 

I lurch toward Paw, wrap him in my arms. 

“All you need to do is give me a ride,” he whispers. 

After a moment, he pushes me away from him, holds me at arm’s length. “They done killed more’n five hunnerd mountains and four times that in people. Somebody’s got to show them we ain’t gonna take it no more.” He shakes his head. “They poisoned me.” He pokes a finger at my stomach. “And they’re poisoning you. You, and Jasper, and everybody else in Stump Branch.”

I look down at the concave void just below my ribs, and I imagine a mound there in its place, a swollen womb full of Jasper’s child. I dry my wet face on my sleeve. “Don’t you want to talk to Jasper about this first?”

Paw shakes his head, and tears slip out again. “That’d hurt worse—hurt me and him both.” He looks away, wipes his sunken cheeks. “It’s better this way, he don’t know.” He motions toward the small table by the front door with a shaky hand. “There’s two more stock bottles of OxyContin sittin’ there, both plumb full. Ought to be enough to buy a new start in Carolina.” 

I follow the direction his fingertip points, look at the big, white, square bottles. Has to be more than a hundred pills in each, a dollar a milligram. Thousands of dollars rolled into little blue tablets.

Paw pats my hand, rubs away the dampness on my cheek with his thumb. “I done laid out my UMWA life policy on the bed, ready for you and Jasper to take to the lawyer. Ain’t much, but it’ll help. There won’t be no funeral, nothing left to bury.”

“I know you think you’ve thought this through, but them mine owners won’t shut down. They’ll just lop off another mountain on down the road. Jasper’s already said that’s their next plan. And that life insurance policy—it won’t pay for suicide.” 

Paw waves his hands, and his voice comes out in agitated wheezes. “I’m sick, Romie. They’ll say Oxy stunned me . . . old man wasn’t thinking right. He got confused . . . went to mines . . . thought he still worked there.” He swallows against the gurgle in his throat. “That much dynamite . . . all the gas that builds up around there . . . they’ll never know I blew the place. What’s left of that hollowed-out mountain . . . it will be gone. Insurance will pay, you bet. It’s the United Mine Workers Union.” 

“They’ll fight it. You know they’ll fight it. Insurance companies don’t care about us.”

Paw’s bushy eyebrows lift, and again I’m struck by how gaunt his face has become. “Prospect’ll make ’em pay. You think they want word to get out . . . that one of their own blowed up a mine on purpose? That miners are turning against the mines?” He clears his throat. “No, they’ll want to cover it up quick as they can . . . money’s the best way to do that. They think money’ll shut up anybody.” 

I grind my teeth, shake my head. “Paw, this is your sickness talking. I’m taking you to the doctor.” I stand and offer him my hand, but he waves it away. Instead, his gnarled hands grip the armrests, and he thrusts himself forward. 

“Get my jacket.”

I take a deep breath. Finally, he’s thinking right. I return to the closet by the door and pull out Paw’s flannel coat, averting my eyes from the hunting jacket. 

Hunched forward, Paw eases toward the door. “Not that one.” He points at the hunting vest. “That one.” 

“Humor me, Paw. Put this on.” I hold open the flannel coat, guide Paw’s long arms into the sleeves.

“Humor me, now.” He jerks his head toward the open closet. “Get it.”

It’s not a bad idea to get the dangerous thing out of the house. I can set it over the hill and send Jasper to take it apart later. I pick up the heavy vest, surprised that it takes both hands to lift it. I look toward Paw, but he’s headed out the door, trusting me to do as he said. I slide the vest onto one arm, and then I see the two medicine bottles. I look toward the ceiling. Would it do any good to pray? I heft the vest against my hip, and my hand trembles when I pick up the bottles and slip them into Jasper’s deep coat pocket. I hurry out the door to steady Paw as he ambles down the porch steps. 

When we reach the Jeep, I set the hunting vest on the ground, help Paw climb inside, and start to close the door.

He grabs my arm and tilts his head toward the vest. “I’ll take that.”

“Bumpy as this road is, we’ll blow to Kingdom Come before we get off the mountain.” 

“Who’s the master blaster here? I’ve hauled dynamite around most of my life. It won’t blow unless somebody blows it.” He reaches out his hands, and his voice is stern. “I said I’ll take that.”

I peer into the bone-dry woods on the other side of the driveway. I’ve never disrespected my father-in-law. Never spoken a harsh word to him. He and Jasper’s mother treated me like their own child from the first time I stepped into their home. 

My shoulders sag as I lift the awkward vest, ignoring Paw’s outstretched hands, and place it in the floorboard at his feet. I close the door, walk around the Jeep, and slide behind the wheel. 

The pills clatter inside the bottles in my pocket, and Paw looks at me and smiles. “Good girl,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I hate it’s come to this. Shame you two got to sell them pills to make a life, but the Good Lord always provides, don’t He?” He clears his throat, sinks backward into the seat and sighs. “I’m looking forward to meeting Him.” 

I press my lips together to keep from cursing. “Hope you know we’re going to the hospital.”

I glance toward Paw, but he won’t look at me, keeps his gaze on the homeplace as I head down the graveled drive. 

“Last time I’ll be seeing this place.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Romie, I won’t last another day or two. I don’t want to die in no hospital.”

“You can stay with Jasper and me.” I reach the end of the drive, brake, and the clock on the dashboard reads 4:44. The numbers seem like a message, one I can’t decipher. I turn to look at Paw. “I’ll take care of you.”

“No pride in that. I’m a strong enough man, still got one more job to do.” 

I look out across the rutted road, once smooth blacktop, now fractured into a million pieces by the too-heavy trucks hauling out tons of mountain soul. What was once the rising mountain where I picked blackberries, chewed teaberry leaves, and made love to Jasper among blooming dogwoods is now low-lying scarred craters—sterile, desolate, and barren. No place to live. No place to birth a baby. Only a place for dying. A place for destroying those who destroy this good earth.

I take Paw’s hand in mine, kiss his palm, let him go. I hold tightly to the wheel, turn onto the road and drive toward the mine.

“I love you like a daughter, Romie. You’re a real good girl. Thank you for doing this.”

“I ain’t doing nothing but taking you to see Jasper, let him talk some sense into your head. Lord knows I can’t.” I flinch when Paw’s fist slams the dashboard.

“I told you I didn’t want Jasper in on this.” Red-tinted saliva flies from his lip, and he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, glares out the window. 

“When you brought me in, you brought Jasper in.” Another blast at the mine causes the Jeep to vibrate, and I grip the wheel tighter, shoot a sideways glance at the hunting vest standing in the floorboard between Paw’s feet. “You sure that thing won’t blow?” 

“Got to light the fuse, first.” Paw pulls an old Zippo lighter from his pocket, flips open the metal lid. 

“For God’s sake, Paw! Put that thing away.” 

Paw shoves the lighter into his coat pocket, speaks with a soft voice full of hurt. “I would never lay harm to you. You ought to know that.”

I reach the entrance, drive past the Prospect Mining sign. I want to throw up, rid my stomach of the nerves writhing like snakes inside it.  

Paw touches my arm. “Stop here and let me out.” His voice warbles, and he clears his throat. “By the time you get to the trailer, I’ll be at the equipment bay entrance. You get Jasper, and y’all get off this mountain. I figure it’ll take me four or five minutes to get to her belly. That’s where I’ll . . . you know . . . let her blow.”

I set my jaw, press the gas pedal, and cut the wheel, slinging red-dog gravel and coal dirt in an arc across the wide parking area as I drive toward the office trailer. “I’ll do no such thing. I’m going to get Jasper, all right, but only so’s he can straighten you out. You’re going to sit right here while I do it, you hear me?” I turn off the Jeep and snatch the keys from the ignition. “If you can look your son in the eye and convince him to go along with this fool idea of yours, I’ll stand with you on it. But I won’t let you put this burden on my shoulders to carry alone.”

I step out, turn, and glare at Paw. “You staying put?” 

I want him to say no. Want him to sling that heavy vest onto his shoulder, march like the soldier he’d once been into that mine, defend his family, defend this land, even at the cost of what few days he’s got left. My face grows hot, fired by coals of shame smoldering inside of me. 

Paw’s lower lip thrusts outward, and he reaches into the floorboard, tries to lift the heavy vest onto his lap. 

I hold my breath. 

Paw grunts and strains. “Help me put this thing on.”

I look skyward, blinking hard and fast. Overhead, a lone red-shouldered hawk screeches, searches the gray strip mine in lonesome circles, moves on. I look again at my father-in-law, wonder if maybe I should do this God-awful thing that he asks of me. “Paw?”

Another rattling cough shakes his body. He lets the vest fall against the floor, leans back to catch his breath. He presses his steel-blue lips together, stares straight ahead, won’t look at me.

Ahead of us sits the trailer, and I know Jasper’s in there, know this is the place where he spends his nights and part of his days making a living for us, making a life for us, and in a way I can’t pretend to understand, he likes mining coal. How can I take that away from him? 

Paw drops his head, stares at hands curled like dead leaves in his lap. He sniffs and turns to me, lets out a long, jagged breath. “Useless,” he whispers.

I climb back into the Jeep, pull a handful of tissues out of the console and offer them to Paw. When he won’t take them, I put all but one in his lap and dab the blood-tinged spittle from the corner of his mouth. “This ain’t the way you want to go out of this world, Paw. You’re too good for that kind of destruction.”

He looks out the window, surveying the wasted mountain. “I’m a foolish old man.” His chin quivers.

“No. No, you’re not.” 

A wet cough rattles Paw’s body, and I turn my face away. “What say we go, before the men come out of that trailer?”

He picks up a tissue and swabs his damp face. 

I wipe my eyes as I drive past the Prospect Mining sign. 

Paw stares out the window toward the eight-mile fissure where once stood a mountain. He reaches over, pats my hand where it lays on the gearshift. He lets out a ragged sigh, turns his ashen face toward mine. “You done the right thing.”

I try to smile at him, but can’t. “It ought to feel like it then, oughtn’t it?” I glance at the dynamite, push away second thoughts, and drive down the broken road toward home. 

When Claire traveled, which she did often, she left a message in the bathroom of every hotel room she slept in, for the eyes of whoever stayed there after she had gone. She would write it on the mirror, in big letters, with a bar of soap, smearing the soap thickly onto the mirror, then gently cleaning most of it off, with the care and precision of an art historian cleaning a painting, or anyone cleaning something that actually mattered. When she was done, it looked as if there were nothing written on the mirror, but left behind was a residue that would be invisible until the next guest took a shower, filling the room with steam that revealed to him the hidden message. That person, whoever he was, would pull the shower curtain back and see what Claire had left for him to read.

Sometimes Claire would write just one word, whichever came to mind when she had the idea to write a word, like LIAR, maybe, or PONTOON, or NOUGAT, or RAPIST. 

More often, she wrote entire phrases, like LEAVE IT BEHIND and IT MIGHT BE BENIGN.

YOU KILLED THEM, she wrote on a hotel room mirror in Ann Arbor, to excite the conscience of whoever saw the words she wrote. Who knew? Maybe the next guest was an actual murderer. Maybe he would be moved by her message to confess his crimes to the authorities. 

He might be guilty of a figurative murder. Maybe he had killed someone’s hopes and dreams.

She’d had the idea to start doing this thing one morning in Sacramento, when she’d emerged from the shower to see streaks left in the mirrorsteam. The streaks she saw did not form words, they were mere streaks. But she formed words there, after searching online for the best method for writing words on a bathroom mirror that would be invisible until the onset of steam. The best method involved the use of soap, said the internet. And so she used soap.

The first words she wrote, in that Sacramento hotel bathroom, weren’t much to look at. She wrote CLAIRE RULES. 

It was the first thing she’d thought of, when she had the idea to write something. 

It did not communicate much. It communicated CLAIRE RULES.

She knew that sometimes the women of housekeeping must have cleaned her words off the hotel room mirrors by washing the mirrors as soon as she was gone. She also felt confident that at least some of the time they didn’t clean the mirrors. So often, when she stepped out of the shower herself, streaks were left there, providing no meaning but offering evidence that someone had touched the mirror with greasy fingers and the mirror had not since then been cleaned. 

At a Radisson in Cleveland, she left behind a mirror message that read, HOPE IS BAD, which she hoped would be seen by someone who knew a woman named Hope. It wasn’t what she meant when she first wrote it; she had only meant to communicate that hope is bad, not for any particular reason.

In the bathroom of a room on the 4^th floor of a Hilton in Chicago, she was met with a mirror much larger than the ones she was used to. Surely, she’d thought, when she’d seen the hotel on her itinerary, there has been some mistake. This room is too much. It cost too much. Just look at this mirror. SURELY, she wrote on the mirror, THERE HAS BEEN SOME MISTAKE.

Claire traveled often. She had to, for her job, which was to travel to different offices across the country and hire people on behalf of whatever company had hired her to deliver the news. She was an intermediary, a middlewoman, a professional hirer. Her job was to give good news to people who needed good news—not to give them jobs, but to tell them they now had jobs. She was a messenger who only ever delivered one message, to many people.

She liked her job. She got it when the recession ended, just as she finished college and people started getting hired again, usually for less money than they’d made when they lost their jobs at the start of the recession. 

She never thought for very long about what message she would write. It would have been contrary to the spirit of the thing. She had to write the first thing that came into her mind when she saw the mirror, just before she wrote on it. If she did it any other way, it would mean that she was taking the whole enterprise too seriously. It would mean that what had started as a lark had become a hobby. 

Claire had no hobbies. Her only hobby was not about to be the writing of messages on mirrors that were meant for strangers she would never see.

And she wasn’t the only one who did this thing with mirrors. She learned as much after months of mirror writing, at a La Quinta in Kansas City.

She took two showers in every hotel room she stayed in: one as soon as she arrived, usually, to get the plane grease off her skin, the other the next morning, before she left to do her work and left on a plane later in the day, to whatever city someone was to be hired in next. 

In Kansas City, she was especially eager to leap into the shower, for a woman on the plane, or a man on the plane, had left some hand sanitizer on the handle of the door to the airplane bathroom, for the next plane bathroom patron to deal with. It had gotten on her fingers, on her way out of the facilities, and she was deeply worried that it had traveled to other parts of her body, when she later put her hand on her neck or her leg or her face. Claire was no germophobe; she was reasonable; but she had no proof that what had been on the door handle was in fact hand sanitizer. As soon as she’d felt something on the handle, she’d wanted to go back in and wash her hands again, and again and again, but another woman had already pushed past her and shut the door. 

JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE, the Kansas City mirror said. 

She hadn’t written it. She was not the author of JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. 

What she had done, upon bursting through the hotel room door, was wash her hands for the second time since exiting the plane, and with the soap write EATING IS BAD FOR YOU, elsewhere on the mirror. She would have known it if she’d written EATING IS BAD FOR YOU and JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS together as a kind of if/then statement, like, as long as all eating is bad for you then you might as well enjoy the clams. 

She stood in the shower, dripping and watching the words slowly disappear from view as the steam left the room. As the words faded, her own body appeared before her in their place, fuzzy at first and then less fuzzy. She watched the words go for a long time, and she didn’t especially like to see her body, enough that before dismissing the idea as absurd she wondered for a moment if writing messages on all those mirrors across the country was a figurative way for her to write over the space where her body would otherwise appear, a means for her to claim authority over a space where she was otherwise faced with her lack of control, with her body the features of which she’d had no hand in deciding. 

In spite of the man she’d brought back to her room at a Holiday Inn in Seattle, three months prior, who behaved toward Claire as if she had revealed to him at last what a woman was, she did not consider her body to be something to admire. She felt strongly that her hips didn’t quite match her legs, and found she could not explain just what she meant by that in Seattle, to her gobsmacked admirer, who said her body was perfect, which made her laugh.  

She couldn’t explain to him what she meant; nor could she explain to herself convincingly the presence in the La Quinta of the words she didn’t write. 

Did someone else have the same idea she’d had? It was possible. It seemed likely that someone else would think, at some point, to write things on bathroom mirrors. 

It seemed less likely to her that whoever this person was would choose to write messages as nonspecific yet evocative as hers were. That’s how she thought of them, at least.

Did another guest write the other words? Was it a hotel employee who’d done it? Was the hotel itself sentient; had the La Quinta become self-aware, or been outfitted with an artificial intelligence that had predicted she would write something, not knowing what that would be, and preempted it? Was the place fucking haunted?

All of these things she considered as she dried off and wrapped the towel around her weird hips. As she continued thinking—something she did more or less constantly, even when she’d tried and failed to meditate, with that guy in Seattle the second time she went to Seattle, looking him up before she arrived, since she was going to be in town anyway—the words disappeared from what then appeared to be a plain mirror without any writing on it.

When she returned to the room, later that evening, after hiring an ecstatic man who overreacted to being granted a customer support position at a corporate headquarters where, without a college degree, he would never make more than $28,000 a year—$30,000 if he was lucky—the mirror still looked like nothing. 

When she emerged from the shower the following morning, no new words had been written there.

She bid them goodbye, and left for her flight to somewhere North Dakota, where a fracking company was hiring a new engineer. 

Engineers were the most fun to hire, because they rarely seemed very pleased to be hired. Almost to a man they were stonefaced, and they were nearly all men.

For another eight months, she continued to write messages on hotel room mirrors.

In that time, she stayed at 111 hotels in 28 states. She hired almost 200 people, and was growing tired of her job. As joyful a thing as it was to hire people, she was beginning to feel a little pointless, to feel somewhat or very purposeless, like a tool that was invented not because there was any need for it but because it hadn’t been invented yet. She felt like the human equivalent of a piece of metal that would help screwdrivers drive screws.

She felt also like a midwife who delivers a thousand babies but never has any of her own. After hiring so many people, she wanted to be hired herself. She wanted to partake in some of the satisfaction she saw on the faces of the people she hired. It had been long enough since she’d been granted her current position, she’d forgotten what it felt like.

Mostly, she wanted to get a different job that made more sense to her. 

She had asked men and women at the companies that brought her in why they’d bothered bringing her in, why they hadn’t just done the hiring themselves. 

It’s not hard to do, she’d said, imperiling her livelihood. You just tell them they’re hired.

Most of them said it was something they were required to do by their corporate higher-ups. Others explained that it was just better this way, that many of the people they hired wouldn’t be with the company long, and so if an intermediary did the hiring it would make the separation easier, later on. Not much later on. 

Having you here, said a man to Claire in Albuquerque, is like pulling off a Band-Aid. It’s always better if you can get Mom to do it. 

Claire didn’t like that the man had essentially just said that she was playing the role of his mother. There was nothing about it that she liked. But she knew she would never see him again. So, whatever.

She had had enough, by then, of the job and of the travel. 

It was no coincidence that she had gotten tired of writing messages on mirrors. Usually, now, when she looked at a mirror, she felt utterly uninspired. 

At a Holiday Inn in Columbus, she had written on a mirror I AM OUT OF IDEAS. 

Soon, somewhere in America, she would probably end up writing CLAIRE RULES again. 

At a La Quinta in Kansas City, the last La Quinta she would ever stay in for work, she wrote on the mirror EATING IS BAD 4 U. 

The news of Prince’s death had just arrived. She was trying to process it.

She looked at what she’d written, sighed, and took a shower. 

When she stepped out of the shower, minutes later, the entire mirror was covered with writing. 

Holy shit, she said aloud, brushing back her hair. 

DON’T TELL ME THAT EATING IS BAD 4 U, it read. JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. The words overlapped in some places; it was a clumsy mess, up there on the mirror. 

But the message was clear.

The message that lay behind inside the written message grew even clearer, the longer Claire stood there, the more the words and the steam faded and her hips and the rest of her body grew less obscure. If she had stayed in this room three times in the nearly three years she’d had her job, and had written on the mirror on each visit, and hadn’t recognized the room on her return visits, and in all that time no one had cleaned the mirror thoroughly enough to remove the words she had written, then it was time to switch careers, to settle down and stop staying in hotels, or at least to find work with a company that would put her up in better hotels. 

There would be no tip for housekeeping that morning. As she waited for the Uber she ordered, she gave notice in a terse email to her supervisor, whom she had only met once, when he’d hired her. He had done it himself. The rest of the time, she had been on the road. 

She would travel to hire only eight more people in the two weeks that followed, at the end of which she would be done hiring people on behalf of the cowards who couldn’t face the temporary employees who didn’t know they were temporary. 

Her final mirror message, written in the bathroom of the apartment she moved into in St. Louis after quitting her job, because she had family in St. Louis, was written for herself. 

It was EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. It was a word she had made up on the spot, but she swore that when she found a job she wouldn’t travel for, except when commuting, she would decide what it meant. 

Or maybe she would have someone over. Maybe the guy from Seattle would visit, and he would take a shower in her rented bathroom, and see the message, and together they would decide the meaning of EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. 

It probably wouldn’t be the guy from Seattle. 

There was no telling what might happen, though, in St. Louis.