It was, in the end, so goddamn easy he could barely see how anyone could call it murder. I mean, no one said it was murder when that guy over in Edge County shot his girlfriend after he found out the dirty bitch was trying to have her uncle kill him so she could get his veteran’s benefits. But it was murder, yessir: no doubt about it. He had put the bullet in her head that ended her life. And everything dad had ever told him was proving right—hence the reason he marched off into the hollow, howling heart of the desert the day after he did it: to be emptied of his guilt or his sullied life, whichever came first.

Far as Jack knew, Diane hadn’t gone far as hiring someone to kill him yet, but he wouldn’t put it past her by this point: not after getting him canned from the college, barred from the Club, telling everyone he beat on her (none of which was even slightly true), and now—to top it all off—filing a restraining order against him when he hadn’t been anywhere within a mile of her place since the last time he ever saw her: the night he dropped her off at her house and said, “Diane, I’m done—I am done, done, with this shit. Get outta my motherfuckin truck n’ just…leave me the fuck alone. That’s all you gotta do. Leave me the fuck alone n’ that’s the end of it. I’m done with you n’ this is over, Diane, n’ that’s all there is to it.”

But it wasn’t. Of course not. Nothing in Jack’s life was ever that easy. He certainly wasn’t the world’s worst judge of women, but neither was he the best—but still, her sudden vengefulness took him completely by surprise.

At first, he could sort of understand it. The day after he ended things with her, she went blabbing to some Dean at the University of Arizona’s local branch campus, said she’d been dating one of the campus guards and that he’d threatened her somehow—Jack couldn’t find anyone who’d tell him exactly what she’d said, not even that fucking Dean himself—so one week later, Jack lost his job. That skinny-ass jackoff Dean just stood there hemming and hawing and twitching like he was terrified Jack was going to slug him while he said that there wasn’t any policy against students dating campus employees buuuuuuut, you understand, Mr. Petty, we have to insure that our students feel safe, not unsafe—we can’t have a Virginia Tech here, you understand—and, well, Ms. Whitt says that you’ve said things to her which make her feel decidedly unsafe and though we have no means of discovering the truth of said statements, it’s just campus policy in these days of random shootings and sudden violence that…yeah, yeah, yeah—whatever. Jack couln’t blame the man; he was only doing his job. He didn’t really blame Diane much, either: when they’d been dating for eight months, she’d given him an ultimatum—you’ll never work again at this campus while I’m a student here; it’d destroy my reputation on campus and….Well. Jack just collected his stuff from the office, Bruno, his coworker telling him, “This is the biggest load of fuckin bullshit I ever seen”…but there wasn’t nothing to be done. Jack went home, called Diane and left a message, “Thanks a lot for gettin me fired, you fuckin cunt….Well. Whatever. Ain’t like I can’t find a job somewheres else, like I told you. Least tou won’t ever have to see me again n’ I won’t ever have to see you, so I guess we both win.” And then just sat down in front of the computer and started looking at the local Northern Arizona CareerLink website.

Two days later, he went down to the Elks for a beer after yet another day of emailing resumes and filling out clearance forms, and—what the fuck do you know? Sull the bouncer said, “Can’t come in here no more, Jack. Diane said you been threatenin her and we don’t need none a that here. Now, it ain’t personal, Jack, you know that…I mean, just between you n’ me? I know she’s full a shit, Rudy knows she’s full a shit, everyone goddamn in here knows she’s full a shit—but we can’t take no chances. You understand?” And, yeah, he did. The rage practically mired his understanding in hot, sticky red hate. But, man, he couldn’t blame Sull and Rudy; they were only covering their asses, which was fine with Jack. They even told him they’d gladly catch up with him down at the Rusty Spur on their offnights, Sundays and Mondays. They were good fellas. Rudy had served in Nam with Jack’s dad; Sull had played defense for Jack when they were in highschool football together.

But that night, Jack called Diane again, got her voicemail as always, and said, “Allright, what is your fuckin problem, bitch—I told you I just wanted to be left alone. I told you I wouldn’t do nothin to fuck with your life if you didn’t do anythin to fuck with mine. Now what is this? You get me fired from my job, now I can’t even go down to Rudy’s for a beer? What’re you tryin to do, huh? Will you stop this shit? I mean it. Leave. Me. The fuck. Alone, Diane.”

She didn’t. Towns the size of Demasiado, starveling huddles of sunhammered buildings wedged into Interstate crossroads, feast on rumors, local rumors and rumors that the truckers who stopped at the Get-Go or the spent the night at the Rest Stop brought, and over the next few weeks, Jack discovered he was at the center of every one of them—even ones that seemed to’ve been carried all the way from Mexico.Hey, d’jou hear Jack Petty shot out the windows of Diane Whitt’s car? No, I don’t know about that one, but last time I talked to her she said he actually came down her parents place—drunk as shit, you know—and tryin to start a fight with her dad. Always seemed like such a levelheaded guy. Guess them’s the ones that snap, y’know, the ones you never expect to. But you know his dad was in Nam, right. Good lord only knows what craziness he put in that poor boy’s head.

One day, his cellphone rang and it was her mom’s number on the caller ID. Jack didn’t answer it: the absolute last thing he needed was to have her fucking mother bitching at him, too. Leave my daughter alone, you done enough damage, rar rar rar rar….But the mom tried to call him a couple of times after that but he never would answer, wouldn’t even listen to any of the voicemails she left. “Jack, I”—click, press star to delete. Fuck her and her daughter.

Everywhere Jack went now, people looked at him differently. They whispered. They didn’t act right around him. People who’d known him his entire life, who’d watched him grow up and let him pet the calves on their spartan little ranches, people who’d sat next to him in every class in highschool, people who’d paid him five bucks a week to tidy up their garages or keep an eye on their little sister while they went out to the drive-in for a night to themselves. He started thinking about moving. Moving over to New Mexico somewhere, maybe Nevada—anywhere but Demasiado…where he’d lived his entire life. His roots and four generations of his family were buried deep in the halfdead, hardscrabble soil of this high country town. He still lived—alone—in the house his greatgrandfather had built with his own hands in 1897 out on the road that eventually, when 911 service came through, was given the family name: Petty Lane. There was a rock in the backyard that four generations of Pettys had sat on to watch the moon cross the sky at night; it was worn smooth and perfectly comfortable to sit in. And he was thinking of selling it all just to get the fuck away from Diane.

Then, just the other afternoon, when he woke up cooked in sweat in the day’s hottest hour (he was working part-time night shift at the Wal-Mart in nearby Escondido by then), a state police officer was there at the door. “Mr. Jack Petty, you are hereby served with this blah blah blah.” A restraining order? Now what the fuck was that for? he asked. Jack hadn’t physically seen Diane in nearly six weeks; he hadn’t called her in four. She lived on Los Cruces lane, which was completely on the other side of town, and the closest he ever came to that was when he was on the Interstate headed east for Escondido. “Don’t ask me,” the cop said, “they just asked me to deliver the paperwork.”Jack just took the piece of paper with a mechanical nod, saw the cop off, and then just sat there in the sweltering orange fumes of his livingroom, ass planted in the hollow two generations of Petty asses had carved into the ancient sofa.

He looked at the paper and then he looked at his father’s rifle hanging over the fireplace.

Dad had been a sniper in Vietnam and at the end of the way, the military had let him keep his rifle: a Marine-Corps special M40 built from the Remington Model 700, one of the finest, most accurate rifles ever made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Dad could hide in the sawgrass on top a hill nearly half a mile from a Charlie outpost and pick every one of the motherfuckers off one at a time with well-placed shots and they’d never even know what direction the shots were coming from. That rifle had been his pride and joy: it had saved his life who knows how many times, plus it was his responsibility, and no Marine took that kind of responsibility for granted. Jack remembered him taking it down from over the fireplace every other evening and cleaning it, wiping it down with a rag that stank of years and years and years of oil, taking it apart like a complicated metal puzzle and checking each and every piece, measuring parts with a ruler fine enough to read millimeters, looking down the barrel as if it were a telescope to make sure the bore was perfectly smooth and clean and properly rifled, then putting it back together with the care of a watchmaker, finally screwing the huge telescopic scope back on. The next morning, without fail, He’d take it out to his little improvised shooting range in the back and make sure the scope was properly sited again. Accurate up to 900 yards or more.

When Jack was big enough to handle the rifle—at about age ten, since he was a big kid—one day his dad took him back to the range and handed the rifle to him.

“I’m gonna teach you how to shoot like a real man,” he dad had said in that quiet voice that never lost the penitential shakiness of all the horrors he’d committed in another country. “Most a these redneck sonsabitches ‘round here, they think shootin’s you just point your gun at somethin n’ keep pullin’ the trigger ‘til it’s dead. Then you eat it or you put it’s stupid head up on a wall. Uh-uh. That ain’t how it is, Jackie. See, a gun’s a special thing—there ain’t nothin else like it in the world. Anythin that can take another person’s life so easily, with just your finger pulling on a trigger…you gotta treat it with a lot a respect, son, understand? Gotta treat it with awe. Now, I ain’t teachin you any a this so you learn to kill people—because, buster, you don’t ever want to do that. Thatt’ll fuck you up for life for good. Look at me, buddy. You know I ain’t right. I’ll never, every be right again. You shoot a person n’ you kill ‘im, that’s not any different than killin’ yourself. But. There’s a purity in just shootin that don’t have anythin to do with killin. It’s about respect n’ it’s about discipline. N’ that’s what our family’s always been about. That’s what you’re gonna learn. Okay?”

So he taught Jack to shoot like a Marine sniper, all the while telling the boy he was forbidden—forbidden—to enter the armed services when he graduated from college. He could go to the U of A branch campus and study lawn enforcement, fine, but the military was anathema. And seeing what the military had done to his dad…Jack would sooner sweep streetcorners than he forced to massacre children in the name of some ludicrous offensive.

He taught him first to know the rifle like it was a part of his own body. Know all the parts like you know all the bones and joints and muscles in your arm and shoulder. Then he taught him to know everything about the world around him—the world that bullet would be passing through to get to its target (which was usually a golf ball placed on top of a tee). An old Chink advisor to the Sniper Corps had taught him this. You had to know the wind, the temperature, the lay of the land, the angle of the sun, the humidity, the amount of gnats or dust swarming in the air…total awareness, the Chink had called it. Total awareness of everything working outside in. Total awareness of you surroundings, and then total awareness of your own body, of which the gun was just another limb. You had to feel each tiny motion of the gun on its stand as a twitch in your own muscles. Finally came total awareness of your target. You sometimes had to study your target for hours: get to know them personally by their mannerisms, their habits, the company they kept and their nervousness—you almost had to project your mind into their head in order to known when they were in that “sweet spot” where you could take your shot and it would all be over in an instant: all those hours of preparation done in a single pop.

By the time Jack was fifteen, he could knock a penny off a fencepost at half a mile’s distance. His dad set up an old Lionel toy train past the fence that marked the end of their property and put a target on it so the boy would have a moving target to shoot at. Jack could ping the tiny engineer glued to the top of the engine right off which nicking the engine’s paint or so much as slowing down the train.

A few times, he was tempted to shoot at the birds wheeling ‘round in the black rock sky above or to take a shot at the goddamned coyotes that kept squealing and yelping out in the badlands beyond the family land, keeping him awake at night with their tortured whines. But his father would’ve taken a strap to him ‘til he was bloody if he’d done that. “You shoot to shoot,” dad said. “To put yourself entirely into the act of shooting. You don’t shoot to kill. We ain’t like the rest a this human garbage in this town; we know there ain’t no fun in killin. Killin’s somethin you do only when you absolutely have no choice. N’ even then, you still have the choice of shootin or dyin. Boy, this is the god’s honest truth: sometimes dyin is the better choice because dyin’s easy and it leaves you clean. Killin…killin’ somethin or someone takes something out of you that nothing can ever put back. Not goin to church. Not seein some army therapist. Not even havin a wonderful boy like you n’ a woman as perfect as your momma. Once you shoot that part outta yourself it’s gone for good n’ you’ll never—never, boy—be able to get that back.”

When Jack was nineteen, six weeks after his mother died of uterine cancer, Jack’s dad took the rifle out into the badlands one night, propped the barrel under his chin, and chose both shooting and dying. There was a search party, but Jack found him; he knew where to look. Once the police returned the rifle to him, he spent seven hours cleaning it and sighting the scope on it properly and hung it above the fireplace where it belonged, totemic in its significance.

Now he took it down for the first time since. Over seven years. He’d put himself through school, got a degree in Administration of Justice, and never once during all the stressful weeks and months at his time at U of A did he think of taking that gun down. He had a Latino professor who flunked him twice in criminal psychology just because he was a white boy without a shred of spic in him like all the other students. He let it go. He had a few girlfriends, every last one of which cheated on him, or pulled some kind of about-face turn of personality on him, like a light switch was thrown in their heads, love to hate. He let that go, too. People did crazy shit and, yes, their actions often stirred his temper so bad it stained his sunbaked face an even deeper, more dangerous red…but he never let it out. His father’s last words to him had been “Whenever you can, sonny…just let it go. Almost nothing’s so bad you can’t shrug it off, so why waste time getting your shoulders all bent over petty shit? Come a day when the real weight falls on your shoulders, the weight you can’t just shrug off, and then you’d better be ready to do what you gotta do.”

Now Jack spent several hours sweating in the arid evening heat with the rifle in his arms, his mind a blank, hard and tiny and completely featureless like a pebble. He took the gun out back as the sun sank in an explosion of bloody clouds and craggy mountains like chunks of skull in the west and he sighted the rifle carefully and shot at sparkling glints of flint in the desert until it was too dark to see.

He didn’t sleep at all that night.

As the sun was creeping up again amid redsoaked clouds, born in blood as last night it had died in it, Jack pulled his dad’s old army kit box out from the closet. Inside, among the papers and the medals and the photographs of boys who’d died violently in nameless jungles, Jack found the rifle’s silencer. It looked like a hairspray can painted camo green. He went downstairs, screwed it onto the rifle and spent that whole day practicing shots out back. The silencer added something new to the shooting that he had never experienced before but had to be certain he could compensate for. As the bled out of the sky, he packed up his pickup and drove off slowly, mouthing the words to a Johnny Cash tune the local radio station was playing. “The Long Black Veil.” He’d barely known his Grandpap Petty—the old man had died when Jack was five—but he remembered so well that the old man had loved Johnny Cash, and that song, “Long Black Veil,” had been his favorite. Grandpap Petty had served in the Second World War. Dad had been haunted by his time in Nam; Grandpap had been tortured.

Nevermind.

At the end of Short Bridge Road, he turned into the desert at Random Corner, then drove six miles west on Jeep trails that tracked through the hardpan and the puffs of unkillable mesquite, then cut north into the rough, hardscrabble plain that stretched from there to Destinto Creek, which was little more than a gouge in the earth with a thin vein of salty water coiling down its belly. The moon was up, plating the desert in silver; he drove with his headlights out. Directly across the Creek, Los Cruces lane ran to its end in the desert, a few homes and trailers plunked down along with. Diane Whitt’s house was directly across the Creek: the house her dad, the big man retired from his million-a-year government job in Los Alamos, had bought for her so she could move out on her own without having to stay in the college’s filthy, scorpion-infested dorms. Just a few hundred yards. It seemed like every light was on in her place; every window glowed yellow in the fuming purple dusk. Odd. Jack got out with the rifle and found a comfortable spot behind a high rock where he could prop the rifle and lay his body down to the warm, jagged earth.

He looked through each lit window through the scope, but could see nothing but walls and ceilings, some decorations. There, the yellow walls of her bedroom. There, the white hollow of the stairwell. There the dining room with its lily of electric lights hanging from the ceiling and…what looked to be a picture of both of them on the far wall. He remembered that picture: he mother had taken it the night they went to some fancy awards dinner where she was being presented with a plaque for being the best student in the campus’ Communications Department. He had to lower his face to the ground, let the dry smell of sunscorch fill his sinuses and the day’s heat, leaking skyward, warm the awful ache from his face and dry his eyes. He raised his head then and sighted through the scope again.

There, the kitchen window, with its little handpainted suncatcher of a hummingbird hanging in its like a blob of molten glass. That’s where he finally saw her: she was suddenly at the sink, which was directly beneath the window, for a minute, not even looking out. Washing her hands; she always, always washed her hands, almost OCD about it.

The hair he’d loved, the delicate face he’d held in his big, blunt hands so many hundreds of times.

Then she turned away and was gone.

His breathing was out of control. He was sweating,he could feel his calmness bleeding into the night. No. This ain’t how you do it. It took him a while to calm down and to feel the gun again as part of his body. the stock growing seamlessly from his collarbone, the trigger just another joint to his index finger, his radius and ulna fused to the body of the action, metacarpals part of the complex firing pin system itself. He watched the kitchen window.

It seemed like hours passed. Owls flew with the moon into the sky and the desert began to grow icy. The air was perfectly still. His slow, careful breath blossomed grey in the air and held together for minutes like small sculptures. He could hear the small rodents skittering in the gravel and the clicketyclack robotic motions of scorpions. Bat wings slapped the night air as they came to lick perfume from blossoms on the cacti that rise like smokestacks nearby. He could smell the thousand separate scents of the dirt, he could feel the blood pushing carefully and calmly through every artery, vein, capillary, warming his skin against the prickle of nightime cold

—and then there she was at the kitchen window again, this time parting the curtains, looking out into the dark, as if she’d seen something, or was looking for something. Coyotes? Coyotes were a problem along Los Cruces but he hadn’t heard even so much as a pant or a squeal. Jack swallowed. This was it. The crosshairs were perfectly centered on her forehead. She looked frightened; had she seen him? Had someone warned her?

Jack’s dad had always said the moment for pulling the trigger and taking your shot came and you either seized that particular moment or it was gone forever; it would never come back and you’d have to set up a whole different shot.

Jack pulled the trigged. The gun bucked. The silencer chuffed like a dog sneezing.

Through the scope he saw the glass of the window spiderweb and Diane’s head jerk back, briefly haloed in a faint red flesh. Then she fell down.

….Well. Just like that.

Jack let out a long, thin breath that filled the air like a fraying cloud. That was that.. It was done and couldn’t be undone. Just like that. It hadn’t even taken a second and that just didn’t feel like murder, Jack kept thinking. Not that easy. Not that quick. Not that matter-of-factly: point, shoot, BANG!—you’re dead. And I don’t feel any different, not one bit, dad.

He simply put the rifle back in the truck and drove home. He passed a few cars on the way, waved at a passing friend, but just drove on.

Back home, he replaced the rifle above the fireplace and fixed some dinner, ate his mac n’ cheese mechanically, then sat there in the livingroom staring up at the sniper rifle for some time. He could smell the faintest scent of cordite, a smell no different than the unique smell of flint flakes in the desert. He put the TV on but he never even looked it it; he stared out the porch window and waited to hear police sirens. He waited until dawn and he waited all through the next day on the porch itself, the murder weapon propped up against the doorsill next to him—not for anymore shooting, just for evidence—but no one came.

When night fell exhausted and confused, clouds high in the blackened, starsprent sky still glowing bright white as if lit by some invisible high noon sun, he stood up on the porch, aching from sitting so much, doing nothing, and looked out into the malpais—the bad land—that stretched north from his property. He looked around inside himself and it was like looking into a labyrinth he’d never known existed. “You were right, dad,” he whispered in the dark. The stars and moon leaked slowly down his cheeks.

He picked up and shouldered the rifle. He went in and found a backpack and stuffed it with some granola bars and several bottles of water, a pack of cigarettes even though he hadn’t smoked in nearly two years, a little pony bottle of Goldschlager that Sull had given him for his birthday a couple months ago. He slung both over his shoulder and walked out of the house, closing the door behind him, locking it…then unlocking it and leaving the keys hanging in the doorknob.

He passed the sitting rock, then the place where he used to shoot with his father. Ostraca of old plates and dimestore ceramics, shot to pieces and lying bright as cleaned bone in the moonlight, surrounded by coyote prints. He reached the edge of the property, a fence of wood hardened to a stonelike consistency by the constant sun, and kept going into the unknown dark.

His mind—his entire mind, his being, his sense of self—had shrunken to a dry little pebble rattling around aimlessly in the hollowed-out gourd of his skull like a die or a rune ready to be thrown to divine the future. Jack couldn’t even guess what that could be. Maybe that’s the part you lost when you killed someone, he wondered.

===

They heard the dry crack of glass splitting, the wet crack of bone splitting the same, the soft little “Uh?” of blown-out breath, and then the heavy, ugly thumpadump of the body hitting the floor one limb at a time. They stayed hidden for a moment, listening scientifically to the dusty, following quiet, measuring the tilt and whirl of that troubled, over-lit house. Nothing stirred, not even the dry desert air that had begun to sop up a coppery dampness.

Then, at a signal, they came out from the ceiling corners and the heavy shadows beneath the couch and in the basement where not even every bulb in the house burning at once could give them away. They came from beneath the sink, down the attic steps on legs too many but far too thin to make the arthritic old boards creak. They unfolded from under the couch, pushed aside tiles in the kitchen’s drop ceiling and spilled through like avalanches of cobwebs. They spooled out of keyholes and the A/C vents in the baseboards.

They found her lying dead on the kitchen floor, a small red bindi on her forehead almost precisely between her eyes, her long brown hair mopping up the pool of blood that spread from beneath her head. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, staring at them, blue slowly drying to grey, and even in those tacky orbs they could see their reflections and the horror of them.

“What the fuck?” the Surgeon gasped. It reached down with a scalpeltipped finger and lightly touched the bullethole in the girl’s forehead, felt the bruiseblue rim that sloped inward to a cataclysm of spongy red and splintery white. Even through the metal of its fingertips it could feel the residual heat.

“Don’t look at me,” the Marksman said from the back. “That wasn’t me. I did not do that.”

“This wasn’t any of us,” the Surgeon snarled. “Oh, christ. Projectionist?”

The Projectionist fluttered down from its perch in a ceiling corner, already knowing what the Surgeon asked of it. It alighted upon the dead girl’s face and unwound a tongue, lapped briefly at the girl’s corneas, pried in through a tearduct to feel around the retina for any cooling images. Finally, it let another tongue down into the bullet wound, shucking aside macerated skull and flesh and hair until it touched brain still alive with random lightnings. It saw glimpses of shadowy forms in the upstairs hall closet, a bird with peculiar plumage sitting on a windowsill, but most recently just her reflection in the kitchen window and, vaguely visible through it, the dark gash in the earth behind the house.

The Surgeon saw all throught the Projectionist’s eyes. “Nothing. She saw nothing,” it rasped. A terrible vertigo swam in its head like a hot desert window. Shit. Shit and shit and shit—it reached into a deep pocket on its smock and brought forth a pair of objects that looked to be carved from brightly-polished hematite. It placed the pyramid on the nearby tabletop, then carefully balanced the long bar, the ingot, the ruler with a plus on one end an a minus on the other.

They watched the Fulcrum intensely as the bar teetered back and forth, plus rising, sinking, minus rising, sinking…finally sinking, sinking fast—the floor shuddered under their feet and water slopped in the kitchen sink. The Surgeon closed its tangerine eyes as the world tilted sickeningly around it, the one end of the Fulcrum thumping the tabletop with a regular metallic ping. The others felt it too; many caught the countertops and the backs of chairs to hold on as the vertigo swept through, fingers burning into linoleum, nails scoring upholstery. When the disturbance settled down, everything had at a new slant. Some stood on the ceiling, some straddled the gap between cabinet and floor, climbing the changed angles on unsteady limbs.

There were new ups and down and left and rights to consider: the Fulcrum was just sitting there now, negative end flat against the table.

The Surgeon held its fingers up to the ubiquitous kitchenlight, letting the blades and needles and tubing catch sparkles. “Whoever did this,” it spat, “I’m gonna slice their eyeballs out and make them choke on ‘em.”

It took me a lot longer to find Circe’s than I’d thought it would. Weeks. Many days of slowly mounting loneliness and hormonal hauntings. Scouring first the bright white glare of the net for a mention, a hint, a rumor, a map; then scouring the dark closetlands of the West Virginia panhandle for the place itself—which, when located, turned out to be nothing more than a remodeled barn or a hangar of some sort: a metal halfbarrel lying on its side in an overgrown field, flickering beer signs covering one end, a random mix of cars and trucks and even an old schoolbus sitting quiet and dark in the trampled grass all about. But what had I been expecting? Something like the mythical Area 51? No name visible anywhere, but this was it. I could smell all manner of sweat and other strange stinks soaking the humid July air around it.

I entered cautiously by the only door and found myself in a tiny, neon-lit antechamber, walls covered in photocopied posters for local bar bands, missing pets and children, want-ads for stripclubs and private dancers…and in one corner a little counter where a thin, twitchy boy sat behind a cash register watching something on a video iPod.

“Five for the bar, ten for the underground,” he said without looking up. On the iPod I caught a glimpse of a strapped-down forearm, a scalpel, a smear of something; a tinny scream or some kind of music whined from the earbuds.

I opened my jacket and pulled out the email I’d printed out the day before: a series of random graphics and slivers of text, dates and times. “I’ve got an invite.”

The boy took the page and squinted at it. “Y’sure do. Serena, huh? You’re ‘bout an hour early, though.”

“Uhh. Yeah.”

“Well. Don’t think that’ll make any difference. You just go in to the bar n’ you give this to the bartender—he’ll hook you up. Enjoy.”

I nodded and passed through another door into the bar itself, a little box of drywall and fake wood panelling in which a handful of disparate drinkers—men and women, some old, some young, some clearly monied, others as filthy and disheveled as bums—slouched together at the dim, scarred bar. A Johnny Cash tune played from somewhere in the greasy shadows. The bartender was another boy, thin and pale as the first, with black, sickleshaped hickies all over his sweaty white throat. He took my invite and glanced at it, nodded, and picked up a phone from under the bar. Mumble mumble mumble, and then he turned to me and said, “Just go through there, go up the stairs, n’ then you tell the bouncer you’re here for Serena. She’ll be expectin’ you. You want a beer or somethin’ first?”

My mouth was dry but still, strangely, sticky—but I was not sure what kind of effect alcohol or too much sugar would have on me now. “Nah. Maybe later.”

“Allrighty, then, tiger. Enjoy.”

One of the drinkers looked up as I passed, muttered: “Serena, huh? Sick motherfucker.” I spotted a loose gray smile deep in a beardy thicket and smelled some kind of oil souring his breath. I walked on and passed through the door the bartender pointed out.

At the top of the rickety metal stairs, a drowsy black man wearing what looked like a woman’s nightie was waiting for me, sucking a toothpick. He had some sort of contraption strapped to his forearm, lengths of medical tubing winding up his biceps and into the nightie. His eyes were wet and horribly bloodshot, the pupils vast. “You’re Serena’s?” he said. “Li’l early.”

I nodded.

He shrugged and led me through a ponderous metal door that looked like it had come off of an oldfashioned meatlocker, and down a long, toobright hallway illuminated by a number of bare bulbs dangling from fluorescent orange cables. Numbered doors lined the hallway. The man led me up to 9, nearly at the end, and knocked. Taped below the number was a postcard depicting an old Japanese watercolor of a gapemouthed geisha lying sprawled on some cushions, her kimono open, an octopus sprawled between her spread legs, tentacles looping up over her breasts in suckered knots.

“Yeah?” a slurry voice asked through the door.

“Serena. Eleven’s here.”

“Oh. C’mon in.”

The man opened the door and watched with those bloody porcelain eyes as I ducked in out of the hallway. The door clunked shut behind me.

I was in a comfy, if small, livingroom awash in aquamarine light. The walls were covered in cheesy murals of ocean waves that tried to ape the Japanese style but ended up looking like fish scales. A couch, a chair, a coffeetable, a weird metal lampstand covered in unshaded green and blue bulbs.

Serena was lying on the couch: narrow, wan, black-and-white hair heaped up atop a narrow skull, a backwoods face—pretty, sure, but stippled with acne scars under heavy pink pancake makeup—and a spindly body hidden beneath a heavy terrycloth robe. Just a girl.

“Hi, baby,” she said. Sickly cheer. Acrid breath. She was full of some chemicals that no doubt made her job easier—and certain other effervescent concoctions that made my nerves sing tunes I hadn’t heard in years, it seemed. “I wadn’t expectin’ you for a while yet.”

I shrugged. “I….Didn’t take me as long as to get here as I thought.” I’d actually tracked the location yesterday, and had done my best today to kill time in the shoddy little town a few miles away where I’d gotten a motel room, but…I’d come here for only one reason.

“Ah, well, that happens. Siddown, sugar. Want me to have Buster send up a li’l somethin’ for us to drink?”

My mouth was still violently dry, but I said, “Nah.” I sat down in the chair, not quite looking at her body, or her highschoolish face. She was older, I could tell, but she’d aged surprisingly well.

“So what’s your name?” she asked, never budging from the couch, barely moving, eyelids and fingertips heavy.

“Carl.”

“Carl. You come far?”

“Pretty far.” Not as far as I thought I’d have to, though. There were places like this everywhere, it seemed: you just had to look hard for them, seeking them in the backlots and under the paving stones of the everyday. There was one in Pittsburgh, too, but people on the one deeplyburied bulletin board I’d begun to frequent had steered me clear of that place: just a bunch of down-and-out Art Institute kids playing around with costumes and masks, they said. Circe’s was much better—more expensive, and out in the middle of nowhere, but well worth the drive….The real thing. Or, well, as close to the real thing as you could get.

She tried to make inane smalltalk with me, to which I responded with little more than grunts and nods. My hands were trembling, my nostrils stinging with her smell, hormones bubbling in my blood and fizzing under my skin. I wanted to leap on her, pin her to the couch—but, paradoxically, the more riled my body got, the quieter and more inward I grew.

Finally, growing tired with my reticence, she said: “Well, Carl….Enough a this. Wanna just cut right to the chase?”

I nodded, a little too eagerly.

She smiled, stood up. The robe fell away and she was naked: a bony body, yes, but welltoned and muscular, little breasts with dark orange nipples, a narrow belly sweeping down to a narrower pubis—and there, dangling from the strut of bone, a small, blue-and-green clump of tendrils, each no longer than my finger, each slightly curled and pinkish at the tip.

Beautiful. Saliva flooded my mouth like a gullywasher after a yearlong droubt.

She stepped toward me carefully, a little unsteady on her feet, and her tentacled sex was level with my face. Real. Real enough. As much as I’d anticipated this moment over the past months, I’d never quite envisioned it like this. I’d expected something more…cartoony? I don’t know. I’d expected more and less.

They were false, of course—prosthetics, special-FX appliances—but very, very professional: my online “friends” had told me Circe’s employed a number of silicone make-up artists to sculpt their illusions, making them as convincing as possible. And Serena was convincing. The illusion was damnear perfect to my pheromone-saturated eyes.

She made me stand up and undressed me, slowly, careful when pulling things over my hands or my hips, noting what was there. When I was naked, she ran her hands carefully over my body, massaging the muscles, smoothing over the bones, relaxing me—touching all the appropriate places where the nerves bundled close to the surface of my skin. She’d made a career out of men like me, and knew her job well.

“You’re a nice one,” she purred. “How long you been out?”

I shrugged. “Idaknow….A year? Year and a half?”

“Wow. You take good care a yourself,” she said. “I like a man who takes care a himself. Y’know?”

Her breath smelled powerfully of opiates and aspartame, and stranger molecules that unlocked a cascade of stages inside me.

“But you’re all so tense, sugar!” she giggled. “First time since y’came up for air?”

No need to lie. “Uhhh. Yeah, actually.”

“Awwwww. Well, I’ll take good care a you.”

Without another useless word, we moved into the next room: a small, quiet bedroom. A naked waterbed took up much of the room, covered in oil and mud. Nearby, an antique clawfooted bathtub sat full of cool, murky water that stank wonderfully of saltwater and iodiney seaweed. Gorgeous.

We tumbled onto the bed and she kept mumbling, “It’s okay, just be yourself, just be yourself,” and after a few awkward moments I was, shutting off my mind and just letting the urges that had been building up in me for months now take full control, unhooking my bones, relaxing my skin, letting myself spill out and cover her and writhe blissfully in the cool oil and the clayey muck, her body a warm bolus swallowed in my loosened flesh. Her eyes drooped shut and she panted, fighting for breath as I wound myself into the warm clump of tentacles at her groin and into the warmer opening hidden beneath them, fingers uncoiling deep into her, writhing with excitement, pushing deeper and deeper into her damp, tidepool heat until they reached her core where they could taste only the brine of her body and there I boiled over, blinding heat convulsing me as I filled her with eggs and venom. It must’ve only taken a minute or two.

I woke slowly in the tub, entirely submerged, staring up through vague shadows and a thin film of algae. I faintly remembered crawling here after finishing with her. I stood up painfully, flexing my arms, my resolidified fingers, running them over my lumpy hips, tucking a stray filament in here and there. Serena was lying on the bed, smeared with drying filth, an empty bottle lying on her distended belly. It reeked of some tart, dessicating poison. Something that would clean her out in a little while. To keep her human.

She grinned blearily at me. “So how was it…?”

I smiled pleasantly, a little numb now that the soreness of reintegration was rapidly fading. “Excellent.” I felt wonderfully empty—the pressure and the seething need that had haunted me for weeks now gone, my body cool and silent, its seasonal imperatives completed.

“Good.”

I sat around, waiting for her to say something more, wondering awkwardly if there was anything more to say, but she’d passed out. I kept staring at her belly, wondering, curiously wishing—a little—that she were real and not just a very desperate girl working for a place that dealt in convincing appearances.

After a while, I found some towels and wiped myself off. I dressed and the black man came for me and led me again down the headache-bright hall. As we passed number 6 the door creaked open and a child of maybe seven or eight looked out, amber eyes sparkling painfully, needles of chitin working like sewing machine parts between her painted lips, spinning out a long, silvery thread of saliva. She smelled strongly of a terrible loneliness that clung in my sinuses, making me sneeze.

The bartender winked at me as I left and, outside, I sat in my car for nearly an hour, letting the damp summer breeze lick the last beads of fever and pondwater from my temples, thinking about going home and about not going home. Thinking about my real home and the dry, dusty city where I now lived. The little girl’s loneliness had seeped into the recently-emptied parts of me and made me feel hollow, confused.

Something came through the grass while I sat there, just a breeze at first, but soon a thin and lonely shape that passed by me on many wirefine legs and went in to Circe’s—another someone like me, I supposed, seeking a little succor in the middle of a vast and lonely place.

Nearly midnight and Clyde’s is Tuesday-night dead except for old Mister Binton, who’s slumped at the counter as always with his eyes halfshut and a cup of sugaredclotted decaf wheezing steam up into his face, and there’s a gaggle of quiet teenagers in the corner booth weeping through some secretive crisis. Joe’s in back scrubbing down the grill, Marla’s swiveling on her stool behind the cash register, waiting for anything to happen, glancing at the sputtering light panel above her head….

Lights spill in through the window: a truck of some kind easing itself off the road and into Clyde’s parkinglot, creeping up slowly beside Mister Binton’s rustpocked Horizon. Sits idling there for some time, headlights shoving their idiot stare into the diner and unnerving the kids in the corner—“Jesus, that your dad?” one of them gasps—but finally the engine chugs down to a phlegmy silence and the lights fade into pale orange embers and a man drips out of the cab…just a little fellow, Marla sees: skinny and limp with weariness, ballcapped head wagging like a halfdeflated balloon atop a narrow neck, shirt flapping from coathanger shoulders. The very spirit of a long day on the road shouldering clumsily through the door and over to the counter and sagging onto a stool as if he were a sack of wet wheat.

Marla waddles over, squinting at him. Handsome guy: a little too thin but what beautiful green eyes, and black black hair cut really short, a strong nose and strong lips and strong, wiry forearms covered in black, Italiany fuzz….No one she’s ever seen before—definitely an out-of-towner. “What can I getcha, hon?” she asks.

He smiles so prettily, so many gleaming milemarker teeth, an interstatewide smile that glows with life in his otherwise lifeless, roadworn face. “Uhhh. How much is the coffee?” Slight somewhere-else accent.

“Forty cent, first cup. Refills’re free.”

“Oh, thank god. That’s all I want then.”

“Sure thing.”

She pours him a cup, sets it in front of him. He bobs his head low over it, nose practically dimpling the oilbeaded black skin of the mug, and inhales slowly and deeply. “Oh, hell yeah,” he whispers, and hauls the fuming cup up to his lips. One gulp. All gone. He winces at the heat—holy shit, this guy just chugged a straight cup of nearly-scalding black coffee!—and carefully returns the empty cup to its saucer, nods at it, says, “Refill, please?”

“Damn,” Marla drawls, impressed. “Someone’s got a real jones for some caffeine tonight.”

“Heh. Yeah. Been a loooooooong day.”

“You been drivin’ all day—I can tell.” From here she can just discern the out-of-state license plate dangling under the truck’s grill. Yellow and red. What was that—Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada…?

“That obvious, huh?” Another cup of coffee gone. Impressive. She pours the empty cup full again.

“Ohyeah. We get truckers here all the time, comin offa the interstate. Some of ‘em been sittin so long they can’t hardly stand up n’ all they ever want is coffee.”

“I’m just passin’ through.”

“Ohyeah? Where you headed?”

“North.”

“How far north?”

“Well…Maine, eventually. Tonight, I’d just be okay if I got to Morgantown.”

“Morgantown’s still a ways up the interstate. Maybe an hour? Honestly, hon, you don’t look like you’re gonna make it.”

“Christ. Probably not. All I really want’s a place to sleep right now.”

“You passed the Nine Pines Motel if you come here offa the interstate.”

“Yeah. I, uhhh, saw that.” He doesn’t sound too enthused about the prospect, and Marla can’t blame him: the Nine Pines is a Grade A overpriced roach motel that even the few local whores avoid for fear of picking up something itchy from the scabby linens.

“Well. I think there’s another motel’r something off at the next exit up, too….”

“Really?” The man’s eyes are feverish with exhaustion, so bright they’re nearly steaming like all the coffee he’s gulped even though the rest of him is slack and grayish and dry, caked with roaddust. “You know how much it is a night? I’m a little strapped for cash right now.”

Marla shrugs. “Got me. Nine Pines is, like, thirty a night though, I think.”

“Shit. Even that’s a little steep.”

“Only thing else I know is there’s a rest-stop offa the interstate right before the PA border you could pull over at.”

“Really? I still gotta go through Morgantown, though….I’ve gotta see someone there.”

“Well….Hell, it’s all the same to me and Joe—you can pull your truck ‘round the side of the buildin here and crash there if you like. Police won’t bother you or nothin.”

“That might work. All I want’s a place to sleep. More coffee, too, please?”

The teenagers leave after a while, one of boy’s paying while the girl hunches in the doorway, her face a filthy rag of tears and despondent snot, and Mister Binton finally drinks his coffee and Marla pours him a refill, and in the back Joe’s closing down the grill and growling on his cellphone to his exwife. The traveller turns chatty as the caffeine bleeds into his veins and cools the addled heat in his moviestar eyes. Marla leans by him and listens, always fascinated by travellers’ tales and more than a little attracted to his sharp face and that smooth, coffeestained grin. He’s a general contractor, originally from Tuscon, Arizona, on his way to Maine to join a buddy at work on a very lucrative project—“some hoitytoity government thing, y’know”—and he’s making his way slowly up through the east, staying with friends along the way, living off of McDonalds fries and bags of potato chips so he can afford the gas, detouring West a little to pick up another “friend” in Morgantown on the way to Maine—an unbearable snot whom he really can’t stand, but, hey, the man does good work and he’s willing to chip in for travel expenses, so….He’ll make enough cash on this Maine venture to buy another truck—“a big ol’ gorgeous F-350 extended cab”—and drive back home to the desert because he won’t fly—“I’ve had more than enough flying to last me another thousand years”—and, besides, he’s how old and hasn’t seen more than a handful of this great country? He really wants to take a long ride around the Great Lakes, spend a night watching Niagara Falls by moonlight, maybe stop at the Mall of America once he hits the Midwest and of course he wants to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and Mount Rushmore and—

Lord, is he a talker. Marla’s always loved a man who could talk. Her first crush growing up had been Bob Ross, the painter guy on WNPB, because even though he had hair like a nigger he spoke soooooo beautifully, every word a soft silver ribbon of detailed calm that wrapped lightly about her heart and threaded her head with silky dreams of lavenderlit forest meadows and joyous clouds and trees. Marla’s first husband had been a real talker: he’d been skillful enough with words to talk her into marriage even when she knew, knew, he was a worthless pile of shit. Her second had been too damned quiet, but she’d needed a break from mouthfuls of fake but shiny words….Now this man, this contractor from the Great Southwest—a sunbleached land she’d often dreamed of visiting—is lulling her with his fidgety, sleep-deprived, coffee-fueled stories and before she even knows it she’s asked him if he wants to just spend the night at her place.

“Nothin funny, now,” she says sternly. “But you can crash on my couch if you want. It’ll at least be warmer than sleepin in your truck….”

“That’s…really generous of you,” he says. Very, very humble. “I can’t really pay you anything—”

“I ask you to? I wanted money, hell, I’d’a asked first thing.”

He grins. “All I need’s a place to sleep.”

“Well, it ain’t nothin. I can put you up on my couch. Be nice to have a little company in the house, even just for the night.”

“I’ll be up and gone early.”

“That’s fine. I don’t gotta be back here ‘til four anyways, so….”

Clyde’s closes at 1. Mister Binton leaves a handful of change beside his empty cup and stumbles as if already unconscious out to his car. Joe shuts off all the lights and leaves without even saying goodnight, jaw clamped tight and angry—his fucking ex again, of course….Marla locks the door behind her and outside it’s a frigid night, nearly starless, the vast black holes between the stars swabbing up the last of the day’s heat and the traveller’s not dressed for this kind of weather: he shivers and snorts great clouds of steam. “Just follow me back to my place,” she instructs. “It ain’t but maybe a mile or two up the road. Just follow me, okay?”

On the way home with his headlights filling her car with a great white UFO light, she tortures herself with the expected fears and, maybe, a little fantasy, too: Prince Charming bludgeoning her to death in the depth of night with a tireiron, waking up next to him covered in blood or her own nightie…but, christ—he’s just a lonely, roadweary dude with barely enough cash to get him to Morgantown and when hasn’t she been a sucker for green, green Hollywood eyes and a dark complexion and there just aren’t enough decent people anymore willing to give up their couch to a poor working man in need of a place to sleep. That’s all he needs: a place to sleep.

They pull up in front of her trailer and Marla stands by watching him carefully, carefully, carefully—so drowsy despite all the coffee he can barely hold his emerald eyes open—pull his truck up next to hers, hoping he can’t see the sudden stupid doubts and nervousness in her own very wideopen eyes. He fairly staggers from the truck’s cab like a jellyboned drunker (hubby number one, for instance), already mumbling appologies and endless thankyous, but “C’mon, hon, it’s allright—lemme get you to that couch ‘fore you fall right over,” she says and actually lets him lean against her warm, pillowy side as they walk to the door.

Inside, Marla’s a little ashamed to have a guest over since she hasn’t cleaned up in some time, but the traveller’s rapidly running out of consciousness and what do the piles of TV Guide and People and the midden of unironed laundry on the recliner matter to him? He tumbles down onto the couch and sighs.

“Here’s some blankets,” she says, fetching a couple of old threadbare throws from a hall closet, “and there’s pillows kinda behind the couch, you see them there?—and glasses’re in the cupboard over the dishwasher so if you get thirsty, just help yourself to anything in the fridge, and…uh, bathroom’s right there, down the hall. You can leave anytime you like tomorrow—door’s open, so….Well. Make yourself at home.”

“Can do,” he says. He carefully unlaces his workboots—surprisingly clean, spitshined, like only a military man would wear—and tucks their toes under the couch, then spends a strangely long time in the bathroom. Marla really, really hopes he isn’t shooting up in there (though for some reason she can just tell that he’s not even much of a drinker, much less a smack cowboy), but after a few minutes he comes out wiping toothpaste from his mouth with his forearm, a little travel kit in his hand.

They spend a few moments in idle, pointless chitchat while he curls up on the sofa and wraps a blanket tightly about himself…but even good natured conversation can’t hold him awake any longer, and he’s snoring lightly before Marla even shuts off the lamp. She sits for a moment observing him sleep, sighing again and again and again, then finally clumps off heavily to her own bed all the way down the hall where she can’t hear the faintest whisper or snort.

She sits for a while staring at her bedroom door, snidely pondering whether she should prop a chair up under its knob just in case, or if she should check on him every now and again to be sure he’s still breathing or to be sure he isn’t hauling all her tickytacky possessions out and piling them in the bed of his truck….Whatever. Right now Marla’s tired as hell, too, and almost comically melancholy, indifferent to her present, bitter about her past, and expecting nothing more of her future than maybe a few awkward moments tomorrow talking to that handsome contractor before he hops into his huge gray truck and drives off into anonymity again.

She changes into her nighty, lies down, and falls asleep almost instantly.

Deep in the night, she wakes briefly to a shudder of damp heat blooming through her belly, slow and muddy like a wet dream, but the dreams start after she sinks back into sleep again.

She dreams of a vague pink sky, dusty smears of tan cloud, and strange taste in the air like hot tin. Beneath that sky, a sculpted desert: huge, gnarled fingers of red stone poking up from flat red hardpan—and running through it a perfectly straight road of shiny black glass. Beneath the soles of her feet, the glass is feverhot and so smooth. She starts walking, one direction no better than the other, the obsidian stripe thinning to a brittle needle stuck into the wavery heat of the vanishing point before her and after her.

But not endless. The glass road soon becomes a plain old stretch of gritty blacktop with a double yellow stripe down the middle. She walks past clumps of trailers, emptywindowed houses, lonely gas stations, a collection of old cars all rusting together in a strange clump by the side of the road. She grows tired in the middle of the deepest sleep she’s ever known and lies down to rest as the sunless light cools out of the sky.

When she later wakes she stands up and there were she lay in the roadside dust and the dried, prickly grass, a dessicated skeleton is halfburied in the windstirred dirt. She knows she slept comfortably couched within the big barrel of its ribcage, and she looks at the skull tilted crazily beside a sunbleached forearm of wood or bone. Huge and flat and angular, a triple jaw lined with black glass teeth, too many openings, little pieces of shiny metal welded to the bone here and there. She looks around and on the horizon there stands the jagged black ruins of a city, not much different from the skeleton at her feet.

She walks on and finds herself sweating and uneasy and oh so goddamned tired on the narrow porch of some old man’s hovel in a sweaty, wilted forest. The old man sits shirtless atop a styrofoam cooler, watching her blankly while he sips from a beerbottle, his narrow torso burnt red as the naked clay of the road out front, a halfdeflated pot belly sagging over his belt. Very little room in there, she thinks. Any port in a storm, though…So tired. She just wants to cozy up someplace warm and dark and rich in sugars and necessary proteins, lit up with someone else’s dreams of distant lightning.

Dreams of playing Barbies with her older sister, older sister saying, “Nuh-uh! Ken ain’t gay! You be Ken, then.”

Dreams of a huge place with dark lavender skies and no roads and river valleys full of mileswide rivers, in which fish the size of riverboats sing.

Dreams of the miscarriage she had when she was still with her first husband, only in the dream the baby doesn’t die, but sleeps deep in her womb, big and shapeless and full of dreams itself, thousands of little red roots like squishy wires sunk deep into her belly and her blood.

Dreams (or does her baby dream?) of a road that never ends…but the universe is circular, so someday that road will have to loop back on itself and, many many many miles from now, on the other side of a hundred million more sleeps, maybe she’ll wake up home again.

****

Marla finally wakes much later, after dark, damp and sore and ravenously hungry and thirsty. Before she even takes stock of herself she’s gulped most of a 2-liter of Coke and eaten four bowls of cereal…and then she notices the shriveled sacks of empty hide dangling beneath her upper arms, the loose pleats swinging beneath her nightie. What the hell? She stumbles groggily to the bathroom. Stares at herself naked for some time. The pale skin. The bruised eyes. The sagging body. She weighs herself: sixty pounds lighter than she was when…she last checked. How long ago was that? Yesterday morning?

What time is it? The clock flashes 9:14 am.

Marla drifts numb into the living room and sits on the couch. The blankets she gave the stranger are still where she left them.

Joe comes knocking sometime later, knocking and growling, demanding that she open the fucking door if she’s still alive and she does….Joe’s hounddog mug falls even longer than usual when he sees her. Catches her as she almost falls down. “Dear god,” he says. “Dear god. What the hell’s happened to you?”

“Oh. I been sick,” she mumbles into his armpit. “I think.”

“Who….What about that pickup that was out front all day and yesterday? Who the hell was that? That guy from the diner the other night? He do something to you? What the hell’s wrong with you, Marla?”

But Marla can’t answer anything, can’t recall anything but a vague suggestion of sleepy greenness—can’t even find it in herself to be scared or perplexed or even a little…weird. She just sighs and shrugs, starts to slide down the doorframe. Joe takes her by the arm, spindly fingers sinking deep into slack, crepepaper skin, helps her stand.

“Christ, Marla, I ain’t heard from you for two days—I didn’t know if maybe you’d fallen down and died or something—I mean, I saw your car, so I stopped, and…”

She appologizes but, like she said, she’s been sick. She promises to be in tomorrow. Joe looks at her a long, quiet time, watches her glancing around in confusion, as if looking for something she misplaced and forgot about until just then.

“You want me take you to the hospital?” he asks quietly. “I think you need to go to the hospital.”

“No, no,” she slurs. “I’m okay. I just been…sick. I had the flu or somethin. I’m feelin okay now.”

“Well…shit….Don’t even worry about comin in tonight. Okay? I’ll just call Rachel. You…you just…rest. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Joe vanishes at some point, sometime later, and Marla finds herself lying on her bed again, thinking about a past husband whose face she can scarcely remember now, a drowsy man, and the cold ashes of a million forgotten dreams: flickery visions of red deserts, black caverns full of strange, deep echoes, roadsigns and reststops and miles upon miles upon miles of road beneath many different skies, some blue, some green as pondwater, some orange and filled with metallic motion…and she cries for no reason in her unmade bed, feeling much like an unmade bed herself.

I live in sevens–in gasps of 7 years. I’m seven years old, I’m fourteen years, I’m twentyone, twentyeight, thirtysomething….I’ve lost track as, seven, I scramble in the gluey heat of a rundown sunset, rusted old sun screeching away beneath the horizon and the air above the old slag dump behind my house stinks of hot metal, vinewired geometries of dead appliances (a washer and a drier tumbled together in a rut, doors wide open, mouths stuffed with the straw of somethings’ nests; a doorless refrigerator; the burst-open puffball of a broken stove, gritty red rust sprayed over the silverblack coke like spores) radiating the day’s heat into the blue hollows of coming night. The coke cinders beneath my feet grind and clink and breathe a faint, wobbly heat of their own into the sweaty air. Feathery heads of sunbleached wild wheat nod in unfelt breezes. Wheatcolored birds–doves, more tan than gray now as if the June oven heat as browned them–whisper soft gray (now tan) coos in the wilted umbrellas of poison sumac leaves, fuzzy stems crooked like skeletal fingers covered in a soft, twilight(not dove-)colored gray. Gray nuggets of wasted coal clink and grind beneath my feet; gray strips of cloud bandage up the far horizon; a grayishblue light lies heavy and wet and hot over the overgrown heaps of coke and the limp, no-rain-for-seven-days mounds of vegetation that smell like rotten cabbage in this heat. It’s just the right time for fireflies: seven of them drift in front of me, green sparks in the damp gray, and behind me my mother’s calling me, “Hey? Hey, where are you?!” back to

my fourteenth birthday, seven pairs of halfbored eyes ringed around me as I lean over a cake shaped like a tombstone (harsh stone white frosting on a marble cake, glossy black strings of icing outlining ghosts and a lopsided skull and my name and my dates, June 26, 1973 - June 26, 1987) and with a single sneeze of air snuff the fireflygreen blossoms of fourteen skeletal candles. My mother cuts the cake and I somehow expect rust, or rustcolored bourbon sucked back in time from my twentyfirst birthday, to come seeping out the slice as Wes grins and hands me a small package wrapped in silvery, cokecolored wrapping paper…

which almost vanishes in the wind of a car’s speed down a sunwhitened strip of asphalt across which my shadow lies stiff and angular like a broken appliance, an ironing board, tissuethin and pale in this awful brightness, everything gone gray but a much lighter shade of gray, all the color steamed out of the world (and myself) and everything turned the color of warm cigarette ashes, a rind of leftover sunshine on the western horizon of my twentyeighth birthday like a single last ember burning away into a thin cloud of smoke.

I’m twentyeight and not married, and I wear a lot of gray.

Thirtyfive and there are thin gray wires (seven of them) lacing their way through my goatee.

Fortytwo and her gray, cigarettebutt eyes can barely hold mine for a moment as the last toenailclipping of sunlight fades, and her body in the tooquick dark is wide and square as a refrigerator missing its door, bulky and hollow, eyes like a washer and a drier packed with ignorant hay.

Fortynine. Hospital sheets, warm and wet as evening air, crumple into a discarded slag dump of cotton and disinfectant beneath my skeletal, grayfurred fingers.

Fiftysix. I’m gray. And always warm, can’t count to seven on fingers anymore, forgetting–

Sixtythree seconds crowded into my mouth as I turn in the slagdump, fireflies numbered in a halo ’round my paindampened oldman’s brow and I run with seven-year-old legs through a fourteen-year-old scree of cadaverous appliances, feet kicking up rust that tastes like a hot June childhood or an operating room, going home to sleep and dream of highways and shadows, women with asphalt eyes, a world too full of sunlight and not enough dark….The soul weighs twentyone grams, little more than a puff of pollen in my young man’s head but a load of hot, dry coke cinders in the last seventh of my life–

and old man shuts his grayed-out eyes and lifts a coke cinder in his hand, flings it hard through a curtain of years stained with faces, smiles as it rings loud and hollow in the hollow evening air when it bounces off the metal petal of a broken stove’s side in a time when all possibilities remain to be fixed.

Seven hundred seventy sevens–an amazing number of possibilities all wrapped up and strewn like rust or broken glass amid the sunken crevasses and limp vegetation of an old, old dump where long ago old workers dumped burnt waste…where now despite the sting of a profligate summer fireflies dance in sevens, technology sighs into rust, wheat and doves grow toward a sevenfold future….