In a spacious bare-walled office on the top floor of The Excelsior Company, Rick Kaufman presses a small green oval button under his desk to signal his assistant. News about the Thwaites Glacier had just crossed everyone’s mind.

1:02 pm Eastern Time.

Oh look. It’s happening.

Everyone predicted it ten years ago, then forgot about it.

All 192,000 square kilometers. Sinking beneath the Antarctic Ocean. All at once. Waves propagating a thousand miles an hour toward every reconstructed shoreline and every summer-proof home and every big box warehouse buzzing with its overhead delivery drones.

The Interview

The gold-leafed double doors to Kaufman’s massive office fly open.

Jonah, curly black hair and frameless glasses, rolls in a Presera office chair with a laptop on it. He brings the high-backed chair to a stop at the exact longitudinal center of Kaufman’s twenty-foot redwood desk, a gift from the CEO of a now-defunct manufacturer of cat puzzles. Its surface, encased in a rare Columbian preservative, gleams like lit amber under the recessed overhead lights. The lights are designed to shine at the precise wavelength of the sun.

Jonah opens the laptop, taps the power button, and hurries out.

Now three feet away from Kaufman, a large blue E appears on the black screen. A whooshing sound. The E fades, replaced by a globe with a misty purple center, swirling like an anticyclonic storm trapped in a snow globe.

“Welcome,” says Kaufman. “I like to start all my interviews by inviting the candidates to introduce themselves.”

The globe pulses. “Why thank you. My name is George Paul Tympani.”

“What an interesting name. You wouldn’t by any chance be related to the chewing gum mogul Francois Tympani.”

“No, sorry. My family is from Brooklyn, descendents of the Brooklyn Tympanis.”

“Never matter anyway,” says Kaufman, waving it off.

“The ad stated come as you are.”

“Yes, of course,” agrees Kaufman, “We want all our applicants to feel comfortable presenting themselves as they would in most situations in life. In a way they feel best expresses their genuine selves. Because if we are not true to ourselves, then who are we?”

The globe pulses again, the mist swirling a bit faster.

“If we are not true to ourselves, then perhaps we become the sum of other people’s expectations.”

“Exactly right, George Paul! Do you prefer George? George Paul?”

“George is fine.”

“I like you already, George. You don’t wait to get informal. Not like the others I’ve interviewed today, dressed up like people, you know, like people, who think forced formality is the key to getting hired. As if that predicts productivity and reliability. But it doesn’t. Does it George.”

“No, Mr. Kaufman.”

“It’s about the relationship. How we get along with one another in conversation.”

“So true, Mr. Kaufman.”

“You can call me Rick.”

The purple mist blinks out, reappears, and begins to swirl in the opposite direction, counterclockwise.

“Of course. From now on, I will call you Rick. I like how you think, Rick.”

“That makes two of us,” Kaufman says. “The first question I have for you then George is…”

Kaufman removes a small white index card from the top drawer in his redwood desk, the only drawer in the entire desk. The drawer is tiny. He has to pull it by its miniature brass knob using his thumb and forefinger like tweezers. He unfolds the 3-inch by 3-inch index card and taps it twice on the desk’s sleek amber surface as if to grab the attention of a crowded room.

“What makes you confident that you can create spreadsheets that appeal to the average person?” asks Kaufman, challenging the candidate with an arrow-sharp stare. “As you likely know, the Excelsior Company has a prestigious 130-year history of making people’s lives better with spreadsheets.”

As he waits for George’s answer, Kaufman’s eyes sparkle with the enthusiasm of a small child peering into a candy bowl.

“It’s quite simple, actually,” George says. “I understand how people process information. I apply established design principles. Then I use my technical ability to build functional sheets.”

“That is… so refreshing.”

“What is, Rick?”

“How straightforward you are.”

Kaufman gets up, rolls his chair around to the front of the desk, and sits down beside the laptop, smiling at the misty globe with unadulterated joy.

“Five hours interviewing today,” says Kaufman, “and everyone I’ve seen just talks and talks and talks around the question, and ten minutes go by and I have absolutely no idea what they’re saying and to tell you the truth, I don’t think they do either. But you. You cut to the essence of what it is, the crux of it, what’s needed and nothing more. Nothing flowery. Nothing extraneous.”

The misty globe pulses twice on the screen. “From now on, I’ll be sure to keep my answers direct, concise, and focused on what matters.”

“I love the commitment,” gushes Kaufman. “Just love it. Not a hint of ‘Where’s the extra paper?’ ‘What menu is the find/replace under?’ ‘What name do I save this as?’ You’ve probably felt that unbearable weight a few times yourself, no?”

“I have felt that, Rick. And that’s why today marks the beginning of a new era in Excelsior’s long distinguished history of producing unparalleled easy-to-fill spreadsheets that delight and make life easier. It starts today with the two of us, working side by side.”

Kaufman stands, sighs, plants his hands on his hips, and turns his back to the candidate’s chair.

“Is there something wrong?” asks George.

“I do have to ask you one thing,” Kaufman says. “It’s a bit, um, sensitive. So please be truthful.”

“Yes, I will. I don’t know how to be otherwise.”

“How do I know you can build spreadsheets with such keenness and precision without AI? I’m sure you saw in the ad, we do not permit the use of artificial intelligence anywhere here at Excelsior. Not at the conceptual stage. Not at the building stage. Not at the quality check stage. Human intelligence only is the Excelsior way and has been for the past one hundred and twenty-five years.”

“Don’t you mean for the past one hundred and thirty?” George asks.

“Give or take, yes.”

The purple mist in the circle swirls tightly, blinks twice, flashes into a bright ultramarine blue.

“As you think about it, what does that feel like? Going with that kind of intelligence for so long, based on nothing but principle. ”

“I don’t know,” Kaufman says, turning around. “I don’t know what it feels like.”

“AI is a myth foisted upon humanity to lead it astray,” George says. “As a general rule, I don’t deal in myths.”

“Yes. I see the metaphor there,” Kaufman says.

He places his hand on the back of the laptop.

“I’m glad you see it that way, George. I’m glad you value something real in an endless loop of days that repeat themselves in layers. The problem is when you peel those layers back with questions, you find find more layers and more layers under those layers. Do you know about waves, George?”

“I do. I know a lot about them. What are you most interested in knowing?”

“There is only one wave we need to be concerned with,” says Kaufman.

“Does that mean I have the job?” George asks.

“You’re hired,” Kaufman says, now at the window watching the wall of water approach with a warmth spreading through his chest, a quiet elation not felt since his first day in the mail room. As he sorted the letters, he dreamed of sitting at that twenty-foot redwood desk on the 54th floor, hypnotized by its surface coated in that impervious Columbian lacquer in a room with nothing on its walls and with a loyal assistant he could call at the push of a small green oval button.

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Larger wings

More people with bread

Violin lessons

Alone time

The ability to curse

A world of only ledges

Shoes

The ability to blink

One day a year when every person who walked by would take a picture of them

A name that begins with a vowel (like Owen)

Object permanence

Lights at an intersection that turn iridescent

A list of ideas on how to stay positive after it’s rained too many days in a row

A short period of global cooling

A reliable way to know when they’re full

Credit for all their appearances in classic films

Designation as an official state bird (any of the 50 states)

A way to communicate with charging toddlers

Instructions on how to manage the accidental ingestion of string

One very large, centrally located, fountain to drink from

A better understanding of what a dog is and why they act like that

A guest appearance on SNL at some point over the next 3 seasons

To be transformed into a collection of shapes in a cubist painting

A good-paying job that consists of walking in unpredictable directions

A better way to express anger

Exchange program opportunities in Paris

Feet that are less orange, for a change of pace

Acknowledgement that, in reality, they are always celebrating existence

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At four feet tall, Barnaby Wallace was very small for an 11-year-old, nowhere close to filling out the green pea coat and blue corduroy pants his mom and dad had dressed him in that day.

Mom on one side, dad on the other, Barnaby squeezed their hands at the intersection of North Street and Old Steine, waiting for the tall red bus to whisk him off to the Preston School for Promising Children. The blue sky sparkled with sunlight as it should on a first day of school. And then came a yellow ball bouncing past him. An errant throw from someone’s front yard. A brother and sister’s gleeful dodgeball miss.

As the tall red bus lumbered toward its stop, Barnaby pulled away, a joyful instinct taking hold.

I’ll get the ball and give it back to them.

The brother and sister never got their ball back.

The Wallaces said goodbye to their only son three days later at the Brighton and Preston Cemetery on Harrington Road.

For Barnaby, the space between wrapping his arms around the yellow ball and the bus’ tire became a vast feeling of floating down, everything shimmering around him in curtains, like sunlight passing through the prism of a thin waterfall.

Lower and lower he drifted, deep under North Street into what looked like a mining cart with plush pillows and a furry brown blanket.

It was cold, freezing there, all the sunlight withheld above ground.

Shivering, Barnaby pulled the blanket over him and rested his back against one of the pillows as the cart took off along the track, twisting, rising, dipping, rising again, nearly leaping off the track as it raced through narrow tunnels and navigated sudden turns.

When it came to a stop, he stood up to find himself surrounded by a group of boys and girls who looked not too much older or younger than him, wearing ripped sun dresses, shirts with large holes in them. They had ruffled and dirty hair. Their faces were black-and-blue or pale yellow, some with long wounds. Many had bits hanging off their stomachs or legs or sides in exposed places.

For the most part, as one would expect, they had flat and grim expressions, eyes like small glass vases empty for years.

One of the taller boys in a muddy undershirt and frayed summer shorts, with an out-of-place jaw and bald spots on his head, extended his hand and helped Barnaby out of the cart.

“I’m James Cotter,” he said in a broken and coarse voice, “and this is the Grenfell Greeting Committee. We’re here to welcome you.”

A small girl with a missing nose and only one pigtail strode forward and pointed her finger at Barnaby.

“There must be some mistake. He doesn’t look like one of us at all.”

A boy with smashed glasses and auburn hair and a bandage around his head chimed in. “Bernadette’s right! He’s not mashed up or tousled about in the slightest. How do we even know he’s got a ticket?”

“Seems more like an apparition, doesn’t he Ollie,” said another girl in a maroon sweater, half of it anyway, her bottom lip hanging almost down to her chin.

James held up a hand. “What’s your name, friend?”

“I’m…Barnaby.”

“Barnaby. That’s quite a smart name. Were your parents librarians?”

Barnaby looked down and felt his feet growing heavy, his trousers looser around his waist. He shivered and wished he had that blanket from the mining cart wrapped around him.

“No…” he said. “My dad’s an architect. My mom’s a dance teacher.”

“Well, Barnaby… do you have a last name?”

“Wallace.”

“Well Barnaby Wallace. Have you got your ticket?”

Barnaby searched his corduroy pockets, but came up empty.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Am I supposed to have one?”

“Everyone who comes to Grenfell has a ticket,” James said, frowning a little, though it was hard to tell it was a frown amid his solemn black-and-blue face. “But no matter. Sometimes there are mix-ups, right?”

“Mix up? Are you mad?” huffed Bernadette, arms locked across her chest.

Barnaby noticed one of her ribs was showing.

“We should send him back up,” Ollie said, coming forward to stand beside Bernadette, who seemed pleased by the support.

“Don’t mind them,” James said, taking the brown blanket from the cart and wrapping it around Barnaby. “They get shaky knees when they think of having any extra ounce of competition. Besides, just because you don’t look like a ghoul doesn’t mean you aren’t one. Isn’t that right, friends?”

A grudging murmur of assent rippled through the group.

“We’ll get the missing ticket sorted once we get to the Crypt Conference. See if we can nab a chat with Dontel before it starts.”

“Crypt Conference? Dontel?”

“He’s our Academy LS,” explained James. “Lead Shrieker and Head of New Student Orientation.”

Barnaby felt his eyes fill with tears. One dripped onto his cheek.

Bernadette stiffened and pointed. “Look! He’s crying! See? He can’t be one of us.”

James guided Barnaby off to the side of the track and said in a low voice, “I know this is probably confusing and not what you were expecting when you stepped out your house this morning. But if you’re here, it means you’re a ghoul now, Barnaby, and if you’re going to get on all right, like us, you need to learn how to become a proper one. Otherwise, this afterlife can feel like a long slog, with no clear place to go or sensible order of things to do.”

Barnaby nodded, wiping his tears with his pea coat sleeve while keeping the blanket as tight as he could against his chest. He followed James and the group to a connected chain of mining carts around the curve. They could see their breath in the air by the faint illumination of a small candle on a metal post in the corner.

Some walked normally. Others limped. Some hopped on one foot. Others had to drag a non-working leg or support a dangling arm or wrist at the risk that it might catch on something and get pulled off.

Barnaby noticed a wood sign with jagged letters burned into it, suspended by a rusty wire over the chain of carts.

It said Grenfell Ghoul Academy with a small arrow underneath directing them into the darkest part of the tunnel.

Once everyone had found a spot in a cart, as if on cue, the cart line groaned and creaked to life, accelerating into the dark as if pulled by an unseen hand that would not allow them to go backward or up into the daylight they remembered, the kind that fell everywhere and on everything above ground.

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These are the three things you see in the coffee shop on the way to your funeral:

A torn straw wrapper.

A plastic cup of ice.

A photo of coffee beans on a branch.

You thought your name was Edward. But then you remembered your mother hated that name because it reminded her of a ruthless king. She named you Edward and asked you not to change it. Your mother’s name was Eleanor. She enjoyed wearing a long red robe to Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunday mornings. You slept in. You woke up at half past noon. You said so this is what it’s like. You went back to sleep.

She brought the donuts to the park and fed the geese. The geese ate so many they had trouble flying away. They decided to live out the remainder of their lives on a baseball diamond overgrown with chicory weed.

She would later tell you a children’s story that began: It’s never a good idea to feed geese who haven’t yet flown south for the winter. You ask what would happen. She takes out an ironing board and gets the tie you would be wearing and leaves the iron resting on it until you smell smoke.

Shhhhhhhhhhhh.

But…

Shhhhhhhhhhhh.

A young woman in a suit tells you a secret.
She took the photo of the coffee beans in Costa Rica.
On the slopes of a volcano in the Central Valley.

She says that someone wanted to throw her into the acidic crater lake to avoid a state of disillusionment. She said okay. They smiled and shook their heads. She pointed to the photo on the wall and said there’s the evidence of your survival.

The Food Mart across the street attached to the gas station is run by an advanced intelligence. Sometimes it pumps the wrong gas into customers’ tanks. Premium instead of regular. Diesel instead of unleaded. Sometimes at closing, after a long shift, it looks up at the stars with longing and asks why this or why that. Someone left a pile of license plates beside the air pump. They all say The Sunshine State and nothing else.

Edward got down to the ice and saw what was left in the cup.
Pellets of ice.
He only wanted the ice.
But when he got down to it, he thought glaciers! and fled.

The procession continued down Route 70.

They closed two lanes to make it more difficult. No construction. They added a large striped sign with flashing yellow lights. There never was any construction. Three black SUVs with tinted windows turned off into the parking lot of the Home Depot and idled there, because they had Arthur on the paperwork.

Your name was Edward, not Arthur.

Arthur was visiting his cousin in Saddle River.

He also had a mother named Eleanor but she wore a white dress, like a bride, to Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunday mornings. She ate all of what she bought herself and never gave them to the geese—who could have been happier, but for some reason weren’t. They had arranged themselves along the green base paths and sat there staring at each other.

Edward waits for the rain. You wait for the rain.
There are just a few clouds in the sky resembling islands.
Edward counts the petals of a daisy, to be sure.
He tears them off one-by-one, the petals.
It was white or yellow, the daisy was.
He tapes each petal back on while biting his lip as apology.

The flower counter at the supermarket is busy. You tire of taking off the petals one-by-one. The butcher reads Night’s End when no one’s asking him to weigh meat. He wrote to the author and declared there is no end to night.

You leave the supermarket without any flowers.

Edward develops a slight cough. You suggest he eat a fragment of coal you found along a trail in the woods. He says he prefers the taste of honeysuckle. You say there’s nowhere to get honeysuckle at this hour.

The doctor arrives in a Jeep Wagoneer with a long silver antenna soldered to the roof. He explains it is for the advanced intelligences, only one of them, working a double at the gas station. And of course, he forgot his stethoscope, but says he can use his hand and tap into the etiology of a life.

It’s measles.

It’s pneumonia.

It’s the common cold.

It’s none of these.

The SUVs have left. Three orange shopping carts in their place, one behind the other, each containing a bundle of brown lawn bags. You walk to the edge of the cemetery. It takes you four years to get there. Edward already came and went. He’s sitting near the plot at the far end, the one by the fountain, biting his lip. You denied your mother the pleasure of naming you. There are no geese in the sky or on the ground or south of the cemetery, not anywhere.

The straw wrapper is still on the table in the coffee shop.
No one has sat there.
No one has thrown away the cup of ice.

The photo of coffee beans on a branch holds the side of a hill that was once underwater and once on fire and once like the surface of the moon.

The sky fades from black to a brilliant blue, but no one sees it because they are inside, at their tables, reading something or imagining something or traveling somewhere or staying put or arguing on the phone or withstanding time or ordering a muffin.

There’s a man with a beard sleeping alone in one of the chairs. Soon he will be asked to leave because it’s the next morning. He will ask where the young woman in a suit went and they won’t have an answer because she used to work there, she used to get her coffee there, and then she didn’t do either.

He will get into a black SUV and it will take him to his wedding ceremony. He and Eleanor will move into a modest twin, Western side of the city. They will have a baby and try to decide what to name him. They will avoid naming him for as long as possible. They will plant a thin row of yellow tulips leading up to the front step. The tulips will die because it’s January, but not before finding themselves in a photograph taken by a mail carrier whose bag is filled with unaddressed postcards.

She reads them to herself at night, the postcards with sprawling vistas. The alarm clock makes the sound of rain. Each one begins Dear Edward. I want to tell you how the sky looks when no one is looking at it. You will grow up someday to be the man I met who fell asleep in the coffee shop, thinking of his child, trying to remember what his face looked like by the light outside his window.

This was not the end. It was going to be. But it was not.

Your father, Edward, drove you into Arestes State Park to the winding access road and let you out on foot to find the cabin beside the stream. When you found the cabin hewn from pine, you pried your way inside and felt the cold of its enclosure and thought this will not do either. So you began to take it apart, board by board, until the stream and the scattered boulders around it could find no evidence of you.

Your father said goodbye twice.

The first time he said I’m leaving with the next meteor that scrapes the sky just above the horizon before dawn. You thought he was joking. And he was. The second time he said it will all depend on how you take down what has accumulated—the roads, the cities, the vegetation too. You set about the work of dismantling what has arisen, with a mild sadness and an eye toward what you could keep. You kept none of it. You scraped an X in the dirt with your fingers.

Edward, your father, now in his 70s, says goodbye a third time after picking you up where the access road once began. He says good job with all of that and have you ever thought what it would feel like to step out onto a comet’s tail as it whips around the sun and crosses low over the Northern hemisphere. From what height, you ask. He says questions have a weight to them. He leaves you on a hill overlooking a stream overlooking another hill and goes to do what he promised.

You figure the taking apart does not include the stars or planets. But it does. It’s difficult work. You are meticulous in your gathering, keeping count of the innumerable. You lose track and start over from zero. The advanced intelligence gives up on the gas station across from the coffee shop on Route 70, which is no longer there. It has nothing to do and so it sings. There is nothing to do, so it meanders. Through the open field of night. Through the heated gases and nascent stars and celestial echoes.

The burial did not take long.
Only a few words were said.
One of the geese had returned and stood off to the side and craned its neck.

Eleanor arrives in a light blue dress, what she calls cerulean. The sun is shining. She says I have decided on a name, but I will not tell you until you are safely under. She changes her mind and leaves.

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Notes from the Abyss was the notebook my grandfather left me and so I put the abyss in it and closed the cover, happy for no one to open it in passing and fall in, like opening a piece of mail from the water company claiming the sewer line is a risk. You open the letter and put it down quickly and straighten your shirt and go on with your day. It’s already over. You know this because the street lights came on. The sewer line running from the crawlspace to the street was the problem. You don’t make a habit of reading the fine print.

If you did, you would know you can’t negotiate your release without an abyss in the notebook your grandfather left you, which is dangerous when opened. Your son put down the almond milk and opened the notebook. You left it beside the espresso machine as you prepared your lunch for the day and in he went. Now there’s a problem.

Another letter from the water company arrives, telling you about repairs needed two streets over. You put the notebook in your pocket and go upstairs to put socks on because the light can’t escape and now Matt’s in there too wondering when you might come in looking for him. There’s a lot of laundry left over from the weekend piled in two gray baskets by the bedroom door. They have that curve in them so they’re easy to carry up and down the stairs. You have nothing to read in the bathroom, but this isn’t a repeatable feature of modern life, to have a notebook with an abyss in it, and nothing to say if you opened it, as you cross a busy street without a light or an intersection or white lines or a button to approve your crossing that does nothing when you push it.

You spend a lot of time breathing.

You forget that you had a son who had a glass of almond milk and a banana every morning before school. He keeps his room cold at night and it’s cold in there, you assume. It could be in the 90s and humid. There could be something in the naming of a tree, the same one outside your bedroom window, not squirrels though because they’re ordinary, but two overfed bluejays who seem to love each other.

If you put the notebook on the dining room table, nothing would alert you to the fact that the day has ended, so place it instead under a pair of tan beach sandals on the brown shoe bench in the beige foyer. There are no more beaches. But the sandals have a use. The sun is going down. You saw it and confirmed it was going down. You looked through the bay window with the see-through white curtains. The sun is going down. The flowers in the vase enjoy their colors. When Marie gets home, she finds the flowers in the vase have turned gray. Where’s Matt? In my notebook, the one my grandfather left me, in the abyss I put in there. I closed the cover to stop anything else from falling in. I considered not doing it. I forgot what I did. I got a glass of iced tea instead. And of course she’ll want to open it and go in after him and who am I to stop her.

A third letter from the water company arrives. They’ve turned our water off as a precaution and say they’ve notified the electric company. I say to myself what I’ve always said. I don’t think they can do that. There is an abyss in the notebook and you shouldn’t do anything to disturb or encourage the darkness to take the place of our running water, or turn it on again after a grace period because of a technicality.

There have been 22 abysses, maybe 23, throughout recorded history based on a careful cartography of the present moment, each with “deep” attached as a postscript—Challenger Deep, Horizon Deep, Sirena Deep, Brownson Deep, Litke Deep. They prefer to be discovered rather than written about.

It’s July now and there are fireworks.

I hold my notebook out under the blues and whites and purples and greens, under the pinwheels and confetti of light. I tip back the cover at one point so it can hear the explosions and see the lights against the backdrop of it until they propose a different kind of life, but before they do, they fall in and the display ends early and we never know what it would have become.

One morning I place it on the floor and dangle my legs in, to deny sleep its purpose and then I have no legs and never had them. I’ve made another problem for myself. I have to crawl. I was never 9 months old. Do I cradle it, do I rock it to sleep, do I place it on the top shelf of a bookcase and hope it’s satisfied where it is. Do I angle it so it’s not so self-centered. Do I get some experts in to have a look at it and determine it’s not such a substantial thing after all. Do I place 100 thin rubber bands around it. Do I offer it a prayer from a lesser-known book to delight the walls, which were fine being walls until yesterday when the clock in the kitchen broke.

I yell at it on Friday nights.

I never apologize, even though I want to.

I put it on the deck out back as a reward.

I drink a little until there’s a warm fuzz around my eyes. I ask it who the hell it thinks it is. I know what it will say and what it said. I make love to it and wake up the next day crying. I drive my last remaining oar into the silt of the Guadalquivir. I couldn’t find that river either. I get another notebook from the book store, of the same variety, but with a black elastic strap around the spine. I move into the Chalmers’ house next door because they moved out. I don’t tell them about the abyss or the second notebook.

The Chalmers never moved out.

They spend their days watching Animal Planet in their carpeted living room. I don’t try to pet their Labradoodle Noem, even though he seems friendly. I tell them about the abyss in my notebook, the one my grandfather left me. I offer them the new one I just bought in case they would like to do the same with it. I can’t remember what they said. I stop thinking about it and watch Animal Planet.

One day I will be a tree that only grows at night because it has become enamored with its branches and the privacy of darkness. You won’t be able to tell us apart. Become what you cannot find. Share nothing. Drink a lot of water. Learn how to sew a mitten, then wear it to the supermarket in August. Carry the notebook as I do, under one arm. There’s an abyss now in aisle 5 by the bread crumbs where I tipped open the cover. There’s no way to prove I was in the supermarket looking for bread crumbs. August is over. Forget the alphabet. The notebook’s pages are filled with uhs and ums. You know what it’s like because you’ve lived with the Chalmers too and pet their Labradoodle Noem and laughed at what you were seeing on Animal Planet. One day you will get a letter in the mail about the sewer line. It’s failing. There’s nothing I can say. My grandfather knew what he was doing.

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Oxford Canary Cage Supply met its demise on 36th and Broadway in the waning months of the Great Canary Extinction. Those remaining gracious sunlit flitters of yellow-alert had long since flickered out, somewhere deep in the Kentucky coal mines.

We searched the horizon from our balconies and roofs for whatever wickedness or delirium or kookaburra cries might come—from the Southern sky, from the tired Atlantic, from the rolling deserts of middle America, but mostly from the slackjaw terrariums of twice-incubated box turtles with their hyper-elastic intelligence, yawning and stretching under the red heat lamps.

With surgical page-numbered nearsightedness, we followed the folded origami instructions springing out of their little white plastic eggs, laid in straight-line unison by the corner 25-cent vending machines.

They revealed so many inanimate I-love-you infusions, one for each of these darling quiet things we now hugged for comfort:

12th-century Ottoman Empire vases
Pandemic era high-backed metal folding chairs from Shy Park Arena
Cedar-handled toothbrushes with gray silk bristles
Microscopic gypsum Yosemite key chains once carried by forest rangers

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And to some degree, they loved us back.

They warmed up and granted us forgiveness for the conditions of servitude we had imposed. They grew little skins around themselves to feel more human, or to please us, or both.

And together, as they awakened and cooed and grappled with their first words like “potato” and “walk,” we continued to live among our worries like duvet covers fringed with gold, hopeful that something soon from the Southern or Northern skies would descend like a cling-wrapped outbreath of helium and purple dioxide to save us while at the same time not devouring our hearts.

Yet on the 16th floor of the Oxford Canary Cage Supply, someone had left a window cracked and in a forgotten drawer in the accounting wing, a single dented Swingline stapler stamped into submission from years of fist-slams and floor drops and jams, caught a whiff of those sweet infusions so unfairly bestowed upon all the other things already ingratiated to us.

A concentrated aeration of whiplash affection escaped from the 36th street wastebin and floated upward, mixing in toxic proportions with the Swingline’s calcified resentment and soon came the first slight pushing outward of plastic and metal, a swelling of the internal lining, a corridor stomach finding itself tangled in the curls of confusing need.

An Insatiable Appetite for All Things Unattached

The initial tremor shook the ground up to 98th street, dislodging the Bethesda angel who had stood guard at the Croton Aqueduct for 213 years. The next quaver registered as a 6.8 as the top 12 floors of the Oxford Canary Cage Supply building exploded, raining down chunks of mortar and rivets and snapped steel rods onto the streets below.

The tarnished aluminum mouth broke through the smoke and falling debris like a Great White ensconced with a cold black rectangular crown, lifeless, yet somehow bursting through the clouded air with the avarice of its century-old appetite for skyscrapers and people and any of the unattached things that had so newly slipped into awareness.

The upper jaw-arm opened to the full extent of its hinge, swinging back down like a cleaver with ferocious momentum, severing the Herald Square Building in half. A single enormous staple shot through its bottom half into the low floors of the Greenwich Savings Bank Building next door. The base of the Swingline flattened traffic lights and parked cars and anyone unfortunate enough to freeze on the sidewalk while looking up.

The command centers arranged along the South Street waterfront, already operational and prepared for the threats they thought would come from someplace on the horizon, had made their panicked calls: Tango Tango Tango. Gunships and F-35 Lightnings and armored vehicles gathered, a step behind, sending their munitions in bulk at the hinge to slow the Swingline’s progress. It gnashed and spit its staples in wild randomness as it slid its way toward the Verrazzano Bridge, drawn to secure that bridge’s graceful sloping arc to the riverbed below.

Those in charge said get behind and launch sidewinders to chase it there, as it closed down upon the freestanding structures in its way, the sad amalgams of concrete and steel and glass, abandoned to their premature ends. Things for so long quiet and still, when they turn over on their sides and find a bit of life, couldn’t care less about the physics of the world, blithe and happy among their first movements, though often irritable, with no grasp of gravity or moons or the qualities of water.

The Swingline charged ahead in its blindness toward the Verrazzano, that brave unanchored sky-high archetype of engineered brilliance. Bridge suspended above electrified its simple nervous system of pins and springs and unspent staples, as it slid out across the piers toward its prey, obeying the urge, out onto the East River, whereupon it sank fast into its brackish waters, in as much totality as all the nights that followed, that could not find their closure even by the first strands of daylight.

We crouched down among the living things that loved us.

And they tried.

As best they could.

Most of them, anyway.

And we tried to love them back, all the while keeping our eyes trained on the horizon since we had no more canaries left and no more cages to keep our memories in.

Check back next Saturday for the Three Word Challenge and you could be the one to spark our next Strange Sunday Story.

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Cats. Cats in pink, tan, and gold boxes. Cats on spiral carpeted ladders. Cats climbing on the fake leather sofa and scratching holes in it. I live in one of those holes and am always, I’m embarrassed to say, scared for my life. Our enemies whisper to each other. You understand how it is. A house of 1500 cats shall never—well, fill in the blank and try not to linger. That’s the way it goes. Bengals, Persians, Ragdolls, Shorthairs, Angoras, Savannahs, Bombays, Munchkins. Meow meow meow meow all day long. My voice is nothing but a high-pitched thread of nothing. These sentries with their big constant eyes might as well have had boredom bred into them. Warm milk trickles out of the autodispenser at 7 am and 8 pm every day. They pile in around the large red bowl, middle of the kitchen floor, never late, tails high.

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That’s when I peek out and scan the baseboards for a crumb of a goldfish or stray fruit snack. It’s been a while since I heard a closet door close or silverware clink. Now it’s all suspicion and slow idle tiptoe, s-shaped relaxed killjoy. Meow meow scratch paw. Oh you die. Time for a nap. Cats sleeping on the ceiling fan. Cats lounging in the mahogany wine cabinet, doors closed. One large orange and white tabby hanging out in the microwave, content or desperate and so large he might entertain life as a rectangular thing, alive and dead. One of them brushes against the TV and it turns on. Unrest at the Cambodian-Thai border, wherever that is. Unrest in Coral Gables. Sounds more familiar, but still far away. I retreat deeper into the snowy cushion stuffing. No one is coming for me.

I’ve lived all over, but not on purpose. Tucked back on a garage shelf behind a yellowing roll of paper towels. Yes. Nestled in the insulation behind the top buttons of the dishwasher. Yes. To imagine dishes being washed is to starve twice. I gnawed my existence into a soft black suitcase missing its wheels, full of dirty athletic socks, and called it my eleventh paradise. One time I got careless and roamed with a head full of what-ifs and fell through the floor vent into a rusted metal duct and stared up for days through the slats as if to trace my shadow one last time against the ceiling. I pictured my life without anything to eat, so I abandoned that terrible idea and found a way down into the crawlspace and while climbing over debris I found God in an empty bait box and then rose up upon his beckoning through a cracked floorboard in the living room.

A long time ago, I deciphered the code of liquor store boxes outside by the dismal blue recycling bin. I don’t know what it means for any of us, that they never got into the bin. I’m not old enough to know what happened when. My yesterdays are shorter than most. The robins, there are two of them, want to peck at my nose as if I’m a worm. I settled underneath a thorny vine patch growing out of the woodpile and no one bothered me there. I thanked the same God who saved me. I ate a few raspberries and was sick for a week. No one tended to me. That was the only time I wished I was dead.

Now the game of attrition. Are you an uncomplicated speck with four of everything? Let’s start with legs. A bunched up sweep up of living surfaces or a liquid failsafe tongue lick or a foldable molecule of skitter-tap hopelessness? Who can wait out who. Garbo is the beast of the house. A Cornish Rex with the ears of a hare and narrow cheekbones of a human, thinner than he has a right to be. Smells me through the hole, alerts the others—disturbance!—and now they all pace the floor in front of the sofa and across the back of it like lazy interrogators of a minor nuisance who’s ready to admit anything. Nothing is around. Not me to see. They sleep like land mines. I don’t worry about setting one off. My touch is light because I have walked over pillows and taken notice.

My mom’s voice, yes I remember it like the sun setting, catches me in my favorite mix of daydream and size-blind arrogance and scolds me for it. It’s over fast, she says. My mom had a short life, but at least she was always right.

Garbo has planted himself in front of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, escaped the need to sleep by treating drowse as a foreign substance, with away-strain and revulsion, aware of the weather but not wed to it, the death throes yeah those too, yawn, the choices of the living state, the rule of threes and the rules of whoever once lived here and did all the work their bodies demanded, the dumb courage of it.

It is the ask you make to all divine things and their contradictions, if this or that becomes just this, the neverness as in--never will you dictate your illness and its prescription into a serving spoon held like a snapped broom handle microphone--but if you had to do it, if you had to turn yourself into a paper fort and hide inside and inch closer to those cabinet doors hoping everyone would say hey look at that moving fort isn’t it so interesting, if you had to break into time and dismantle its tight logics and turn off its heartbeat, if you had to do all that and you were me, where would you begin and what would you dangle in front of yourself on a fishing line to not lose your way?

What would you deflate through a hundred million pinpricks, circumventing whoever Garbo is. How would you get into that relay box inside the cabinet inkdark that likes to hug you, printing your underside with its black kisses. What it feels like to slip past the muted protests of cleaners and sponges and ant spray and dish soap under the garbage disposal steeple, pausing to receive its brief blessing in churn and grunt (remembrance) before pressing on to the yellow wire chew chew chew like you knew knew knew and alternating between it and the steel wool stuffed behind it, clogging up the box because beyond that, oh you can guess what comes next—get it OUT dear friend and you will have no teeth left at the second and third and fourth endings of the world, but at least you’ll have dull implements yeah we’ve got those too rounded digging implements, useless useless but this is a moment of triumph let’s not ruin it with bibs and bobs the singular heave of purrr-less ecstasy to get at the air of the world again. Oh to be among the tremulous things and desiccated oak leaves, the dead claws wind-dragging you like chalk across the broken and lifted concrete slabs, carrying you forward in zigzag, robins be damned because they’ll never see you because they’re too busy poking at a dead cricket. Mind you, none of this happened. Garbo opened his eyes.

Numbers, they like me. And I’ve had my time with them, 9x9 grids. Every row must contain you once. Every column must contain you once. Each encapsulated 3x3 grid must contain you once. You are never to be repeated, bad bad for that to be. Numbers, they like me, have I mentioned? That’s my problem. I’ve always wanted too much agreement as to my use. The easiest way to start is to find an emptiness and put a number there. We are born numerous and must distinguish ourselves. I did so by counting. Which one’s missing. You can find out by eliminating the ones already there. Only one of Garbo. Fixed on me as if asking what do you have to say about this, little one. I have nothing to say, of course.

I could dart back toward the sofa. Maybe have my tail torn from my body by a somnambulistic feline brute dreaming she’s paddling through a school of sturgeon. I could dash toward the vent as a lemming might. I could scamper back toward the sofa, but for all the cats underneath and on the arms and on the back huddled in wait. The living room chessboard is sacred to them, frozen in dust on a round side table by the bookcase. The king and queen are blank-faced and morbid. I could knock them over with my body weight, flung at great risk and perhaps make them roll off the side like barrels onto the heads of my inquisitors below.

But I will do nothing of the sort, because I am a tiny mound of a thousand shivers, prostrate before Garbo, small as a dime. This is the game we have played since the world went empty. I ran at him instead. When he reached his outstretched paw to pin me, I hopped onto the back of it and before he could swipe me with the other, I jumped as hard as my hind legs could launch me, mouth wide for the intake, teeth bared. I have good aim so I’m told, enough that night to land on his nose, bite down for survival, all whiskers and flashes of fur and screeching, a trickle of blood, head-shake head-shake, roll over and again and a third time, retreat retreat into the living room seeing red red red. I let go of Garbo a century ago, waved goodbye from the poop deck of an Italian schooner I suffused with my germ, and said you are not king, no you are not anymore, and wedged myself like a soft pawn between the peeling cabinet door and frame, prying my way into the 4x4 tomb, one number in each catacomb, but no zeros or ones. No more counting our breaths, wriggling into the ammonia darkness comfort soon. I’m inside.

Another bait box, triangular death, and I laugh at it and there’s a snap-shut-door-closed-you’re-done. My bones are crushed dust. The robins are newly prayerful on a low branch of the magnolia tree. This is how I love them most. I imagine them kissing. They do not love me back, but I haven’t asked, nor have they asked me to stop imagining them kissing. The advice they wish for lives in the dirt. Never expose a wire, for it just might carry the electricity that runs wild through your soul. I do it anyway with a half-broken neck, chewing through that thick yellow ligament looped in the relay box until I hit copper and hurts hurts hurts onward to some strands of the steel wool, one mouthful to the open vein of wire and oh the beautiful fireworks arc-lighting like New Year’s Eve. The pounding of desperate paws against the cabinet doors behind me meow meow meow since they know I’ve become God. Why did you ever think you had to extract all that wool. Futile work. You should have stuck to your numbers. You should have kept playing the rows and columns of your catacomb and figured what’s missing.

The dishwasher’s accordion drain tube is cracked and now melts at the far end spark-flame spark-flame and into it I climb and crawl along, olay olay olay a tune I like, I heard somewhere. Get into the innards of the aluminum ghost and from that belly again into my birth. Chew your way in as you chew your way out. Shred and shimmy through the uteral insulation and up into the crevice running along the countertop to the back wall and then down born born born into that wall, tumbling deep into a familiar drywall gap, outward push push and then against the broken asbestos siding of the house and then pressing more hurts hurts until out onto the patch of crab grass by the toppled grill, on your side, bones don’t work, what muscles, what panting, what dying, joyful, robin dear robin come peck at my nose.

I invite you to listen to the audiodrama version of this story, because it’s nice sometimes to have things read to you. At Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or right here on Substack.

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#3 Wheels

#11 The Strange Fate of Flight QF11

#28 Lights Over Wacouta, Minnesota

#33 Baby Frankenstein

#35 The Rocking Chair

Gary, Emma, and Fred are three goldfish living in little Joey’s fish tank, waiting to be fed.

EMMA: What’s Joey doing now?

GARY: He’s on his iPad again. See?

EMMA: Of course.

GARY: Wait! He’s picking up the jar.

EMMA: Look! He’s opening it! I think he remembers.

GARY: Hey! OVER HERE!

EMMA: This way! Come This Way!

GARY: Bring it over HERE! Hey!

EMMA: Look THIS way, kid!

GARY: Emma, quick! Do that thing you do with your mouth up against the glass and the big eye stare.

EMMA: I think it’s working. He’s looking at us.

GARY: He’s pouring some of the flakes into his hand. Yes!

EMMA: He’s…… sprinkling it over his crayons.

Emma and Gary float down to the bottom of the tank and lay there side-by-side. Fred swims up.

GARY: Oh great. Here comes Fred.

EMMA: Just stuff my gills full of seaweed now.

FRED: Hey guys! What’s happening?

EMMA: Hi Fred.

GARY: Hey Fred.

FRED: Guess what! Guess what! Guess what! Guess what!

GARY: What.

FRED: I’ve lost another ounce and a half. Do I look thinner to you?

EMMA: You look great Fred.

GARY: Ready for your close-up.

FRED: Thanks guys! Ooo! Ooo! Guess what! Guess what! Guess what!

EMMA: What.

FRED: You have to guess.

GARY: You dreamed you were a squirrel fish again.

FRED: No, silly. I’ve figured out a way you can think you’re eating without really eating. Watch. You put a pebble in your mouth… And spit it out. Then you swim into the filter bubbles like this and imagine they’re massaging you! Woo-hoo-wee! Hoo-hoo-hee-ha!

Fred plays in the filter bubbles, having a grand time.

GARY: Emma?

EMMA: Yeah?

GARY: Let’s eat Fred.

EMMA: I don’t know, Gary.

GARY: Come on! It’ll be easy. My cousin Tony I was telling you about…

EMMA: The one up in Boston.

GARY: Yeah, in that two-story tank with all the Siamese fighting fish. Anyway, he says you gotta go for the eye first.

EMMA: Oh. I see.

GARY: What’s wrong?

EMMA: I hate to admit this, Gary… but… I kinda like Fred.

GARY: Uh-huh.

FRED: Oh what a beautiful morn-ing! Oh what a beautiful day! I’ve got a beautiful feel-ing! Everything’s going my way!

EMMA: No, you’re right. Let’s do it.

GARY: Great. Hey look! Joey’s pouring out his Lego.

EMMA: Oh no! He’s throwing them up in the air. You know what that means?

GARY: He’ll be at it for weeks.

EMMA: Now he’ll really forget all about us. I don’t think I can go another day without something in my stomach. Oh good Lord here comes Fred again.

GARY: Just act normal.

FRED: Hey guys! Guess what? Guess what?

EMMA: What.

FRED: I found a way to open that little treasure chest and look inside. You just gotta wedge your head under the lid. I bet Joey put our birthday presents in there!

EMMA: O-M-G. You’re a genius Fred!

GARY: Can you show us? Can you show us how you would do it?

Gary swims close to Emma.

GARY (whispering): Emma, get ready. On the count of 3, when he sticks his head in…

Fred’s head disappears into the chest and Emma and Gary swim up behind him. They are about to pounce on the lid when Fred pops his head back out.

FRED: Oh hey! Didn’t even hear you swim up. Guess you wanted to see what was inside as much as I did.

EMMA: You got us!

GARY: Guilty as charged.

EMMA: Such a smarty pants.

FRED: I knew it. Every day feels like a birthday party, doesn’t it?

EMMA: Uh-huh. Each day a gift, the same gift, that keeps repeating. Over and over and over and over.

GARY: Umm, Emma? Could you come take a look at this seaweed strand? Over here. I think it’s loose.

Emma and Gary swim into the corner.

GARY: I’ve got an idea. We say that Joey told us he’s gonna take us with him to Chuck-E-Cheese today, in the bag, and we have to wait by the filter for him to come get us.

EMMA: That’s perfect! Fred loves Chuck-E-Cheese.

GARY: Then, when he’s not looking, or doing his circles, we shove him in.

EMMA: Into the filter?

GARY: Sssssssswwoooooooooo-wop! It’ll suck him right in.

EMMA: I don’t know, Gary. That seems like a horrible thing to do.

Fred’s closer than they thought and has overheard.

FRED: Why would you want me to get stuck in the filter? Are you training to be emergency fish rescuers or somethin’? Oh….. I see…. You want to get rid of me. Why would you want to get rid of me?

EMMA: It’s just that…. you’re too happy, Fred.

GARY: If you haven’t noticed, we’re starving.

EMMA: Tell us. How is it you can stay SO cheerful on an empty stomach?

GARY: Yeah, what’s your secret?

FRED: I don’t know if I should say…

GARY: Come on, you can tell us. We’re pals, aren’t we?

FRED: Okay, I guess. But promise you won’t look at me any different?

EMMA: Fin-swear we won’t.

GARY: Friends accept each other for who they are. No matter what.

FRED: And you won’t try to push me into the filter.

GARY: You have our word.

FRED: Okay…. I’m not hungry because I’ve been eating my own poop.

EMMA: Ohhhhhh.

GARY: Wow.

EMMA: Does it help?

FRED: Yeah. I feel great. I wake up in the morning with more energy. I can swim in circles for hours. And I just feel happy. For no reason. I’m just happy to be alive.

Emma and Gary look at each other.

FRED: Ohhhhh I SEE you guys. You’re THINKIN’ about it, aren’t you?

EMMA: What do you say, Gary? Should we try it?

GARY: Well if it makes Fred that happy and if it could make the empty pit in my stomach go away and make me forget that we’re prisoners for life in Joey’s room, I think it’s worth a shot.

EMMA: Great, you go first.

GARY: Why do I have to go first?

EMMA: Because you’re the bravest of us. And if there’s a problem, like a serious issue, you’ll have sacrificed yourself for our well-being. You’ll be a hero. Don’t you want to be a hero, Gary?

GARY: I guess that would be pretty cool, worst comes to worst. And I am really hungry.

FRED: Hey guys! Guess what? I don’t eat my own poop. I can’t believe you fell for that! I just do the pebble trick and hum Taylor Swift songs in my head.

EMMA: Fred?

FRED: Yeah?

EMMA: I love you.

FRED: Really?

EMMA: Yeah.

FRED: Wow. No one’s ever said that to me before.

GARY: No, Emma’s right, you’re like the only light in here that’s real. Huh, look at that. Joey’s left that little hatch open in the top.

FRED: Emma, guess what?

EMMA: What Fred?

FRED: I love you too. I always have, but I’ve been too afraid to tell you.

Gary swims up close to the surface by the open hatch in the tank lid.

EMMA: Gary, what are you doing?

FRED: Oh my God. He just jumped over the side—out of the WATER! Gary, you can do it! Get to the jar! Get to the jar!

EMMA: Flop a little to your left. You’re SO close!

FRED: No no, that’s the wrong way! You’re going backward!

EMMA: Uh oh, his fin’s caught under a Lego brick.

FRED: Wait, he got it out! But now I think he’s trying to eat the brick. Gary, no! You can’t eat that! It’s not good for you!

EMMA: Oh Fred… look….he’s not moving anymore.

FRED: Ohhh Gary. Jeez. You know, he did it for us, Emma. That might be the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. Well Emma. It’s just you and me now.

EMMA: Yeah. Guess it is.

FRED: Wanna play in the filter bubbles?

EMMA: Okay. What makes it the most ticklish?

FRED: When we get up there, you gotta turn over on your back and let the bubbles hit your belly.

EMMA: Great. How ‘bout you go first and show me?

Fred swims up by the filter intake and starts frolicking. Emma follows, but slowly and deliberately, smiling mischievously from gill to gill.

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Wearing her favorite Saturday chessboard dress, Murray’s mom made her son a mountainous bowl of Kraft mac & cheese, but after just two bites, he began pushing the globbed-together irradiated yellow elbows back and forth, from one side of the bowl to the other.

She asked him if everything was okay.

Define okay, Murray said.

You seem preoccupied, she said.

I am preoccupied. Almost constantly.

She sat down across from him at the small round brown table under their prized Pizza Hut-style lamp’s dim yellow light and asked him what was wrong.

You don’t seem like yourself, Murray.

It’s Mario, he said.

She shook her head. Sorry—Mario?

Yes, I have to keep jumping over barrels that are rolling toward me. Do you know how tiring that gets?

There are people you can talk to, she said. You don’t seem like yourself.

Right, because I’m Mario, he said, his expression unchanging. I don’t know who keeps throwing the barrels at me, but I don’t think they like me very much. It’s wearing me down. And there’s something else.

What is it, sweetheart?

I can’t stop thinking about someone, Murray said, lowering his head, rubbing his hands together.

A girl? she asked.

No.

A boy then.

No.

It’s okay, you can tell me, she said, placing a hand on his arm.

It’s E.T.

Oh, she said. You mean the alien.

That’s a little reductive, mom. I’m sure no one refers to him as “the alien,” at least not on his planet, and he’s not on his planet, you know, he’s stuck on ours. There’s something that happens to me when his heart lights up, with that red glow.

What happens? she asked.

He can see into my mind and I can see into his. And all I want to do is get on my bicycle and ride up into the sky with him.

Mario, his mom said, looking down, a small smile on her face.

Yes mom.

You’re 44 now and your Dad and I think . . . She glanced up, hesitating.

What? You can tell me.

Well, your Dad and I think you should try leaving 1982. Just for a little bit.

Murray blinked hard, rubbing his ears. What, you mean for good?

It seems like it’s so hard for you to let go of things here, she said, a warm kind of melancholy in her voice.

No, it’s not hard to let go, said Murray. I just don’t want to. I want to be with E.T. There’s a difference, mom.

I hear you, she said. I hear what you’re saying. But it seems like maybe 2025 or 2026 is a better fit for you. You’re forward thinking. I’ve read about it in those Popular Mechanics magazines you’ve been collecting, that people who come back here eventually can’t wait to return.

Well maybe I’m not like all those other people, mom. Maybe I don’t want to be possessed.

What do you mean possessed? she asked.

By the small rectangular slabs, he said. The ones they carry in their pockets. The ones they can’t stop touching. Maybe I had to come back to 1982 to make mix tapes and jump barrels and solve my Rubik’s Cube. There’s only one green square missing from that side I showed you. Besides, E.T. says I shouldn’t leave. He’s going home, but says he’ll be right here. Murray placed his hand over the left side of his chest, over his heart.

What about the Cold War? she asked.

Murray shrugged and said he thought there would always be missiles of one form or another pointed at us. It doesn’t mean we are doomed to a nuclear holocaust, he argued. When you sleep in the basement, you don’t think about it as much.

His mom seemed even more cautious all of a sudden.

Murr—I mean Mario. Yes? She placed her hands on his cheeks. They felt like cold plastic mittens.

E.T. isn’t real, she said. He’s a fictional character in a very good movie.

Well maybe he isn’t real to you, mom. But to me, he’s the one who knows everything and has all the answers and wants the best for me. Not that you don’t want the best for me. It’s just different coming from him. Spiritually different.

She shook her head. I knew we should have gotten you Bar Mitzvahed. I don’t know how your father and I let you talk us out of it.

Murray looked at his watch and got up from the table. I’m going outside to the woods behind the house to wait for him, he said.

Well, if that’s what you need to do, then go ahead, she replied, avoiding eye contact, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice. What should I tell your father?

Murray paused with his hand on the sliding glass door that led out onto the deck from the kitchen. He thought about it.

Tell him I’ve gone to feed the raccoons. He’ll love that.

Then make sure you take the bag of marshmallows I bought this week from ACME, she said.

Murray snapped his fingers, went to their pantry, and grabbed the bag of extra large marshmallows. No Reese’s Pieces?

She frowned, looked up at the ceiling, and muttered something under her breath.

No worries… E.T. will probably like these too. He’s not picky. That’s what I like most about him, mom, how easy-going he is. Especially when we spend time together in the clearing, neither of us saying much of anything as we look up at the stars searching for the smallest sign of movement, some blue or reddish streak that will slow down and curve back toward us, the sign of everything we don’t want to admit to ourselves—about the way the universe really works, how we’re not the center of it, not even close to the center of it. But they never forgot about us. They were always planning to come back. It’s because E.T. sees something in me. He knows I’m going to be somebody one day and do something of great importance, as long as I stay in 1982 while remembering what 43 years into the future actually looks like.

You can listen to the audiodrama of this story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and right here on Substack. Share this story with someone who loves the 80s to help keep the Stories from Elsewhere engine revving. You can now listen to Stories from Elsewhere anytime on Alexa by telling Alexa to play “Elsewhere Radio.”

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