#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.

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“Wheels on the Bus” loops in the background.

The other moms in our circle at Bay Spring Community Center occasionally smile at the two of us.

At 10 months, Franky is not bubbly, not all smiles and delight, not babbling like you’d expect. He doesn’t clap his hands like clashing symbols or bounce as he sits.

In fact, I don’t think I can ever remember him cooing or smiling.

He’s had the same monochromatic expression since birth, a head more rectangular and narrow than daisy round.

He’s paler than the other babies, trending green in rooms with dimmer light.

One of the moms asks me if I’ve taken him to the pediatrician to rule out liver problems. He might have a rare form of jaundice, she says. Another asks me if his vaccinations are up to date.

I say, Yep, no worries. He’s good.

Had any of them shown the slightest bit of interest in learning more about Franky, what he’s like outside our circle time, they would have realized that there’s plenty of joy behind that empty gaze.

You just have to know what to look for, the slight curling up at the edges of his lips after he eats a spoonful of applesauce, the way he extends his arms out in front of him like two train tracks for balance and teeter-totters forward while making little grunts.

Grunts of joy, for sure!

I wish you had seen when he took his first steps in our living room. How he looked back over his shoulder with that long drawn-out stare as if to say Hey mom look at me! I’m doing it!

Our cat Fluffles gets quite agitated by him though. That rascal’s always been skittish, ever since we found her shivering under our neighbor’s car. Maybe it’s Franky’s herky-jerky way of toddling around the townhouse that sends her into a tailspin, but whatever the reason, she now calls underneath my bed home.

None of this fazes Franky though.

He loves animals. Any time I take him to the park in his stroller and he sees one of the Jack Russells there, his eyes get real wide, like they’re bulging out of his head and his mouth makes a small circle like a bubble wand and he groans a little, his way of saying Come’ere! Franky pet you!

The owners tighten their leash grips and I get a little indignant. I pick Franky up and walk over to them and start a conversation before they can find some excuse to wander off. I bend down as we talk so Franky can pet them. If he grabs them or squeezes too tightly, I say no Franky! and he looks up at me with those big “I’m sorry” eyes and a blank look of penance and stops. He does exactly what I say, when I say it.

That’s because he’s such a good boy.

When we’re out in public, you can’t miss how everyone’s eyes go right to his birthmark, the crooked line across his forehead over his left eyebrow.

Dr. Boyer says we should keep the staples in for at least a couple more months, but I’ve already been applying Burt’s Bees cream each night as I rock him to sleep. I really think it’s doing the trick.

That’s another thing.

Franky’s not a great sleeper and never has been. When I hear some stirring and the sound of his rattle tossed over the railing of his crib, I go in to find him more often than not staring out the window, reaching, going Mmmmmm, like there’s an ice cream cone he needs out there under the moon.

I have a feeling he’s going to be a little outdoors guy when he gets older. But if he is, he’s going to have to get over his stove jitters. He starts to shake and wave his arms and go Narrrrrrrrrrr whenever I turn it on. I say Franky, come on bud, it’s only a little blue flame. If you’re ever going to feel comfortable roasting marshmallows around a campfire with your friends, you’ve got to get over it. He just looks at me.

Our little ones always have a few strange aversions, don’t they?

I’m not going to worry though. Dr. Boyer says everything’s fine and I trust him.

It’s hard being a single mom who has to work in a town like Narragansett where most moms don’t. All the others here look so yoga-lifted, light and fresh, unencumbered by other responsibilities. To be honest, it makes me a little jealous.

I’m not alone in the traditional sense, but by virtue of my Heinrich’s schedule. He works nights in the lab and gets very irritated whenever I ask him to pick up diapers or formula. He barks that I’m interrupting his experiments, like I’m preventing him from winning the Nobel Prize or something. So full of himself.

Which reminds me that Franky’s got such the appetite these days that we find ourselves upping our cupboard reserves each week. He hates the pureed string beans though with a passion, so much so that he’ll spit it back out at us with a special kind of malice. I look it as a strength. Heinrich scolds him. You should see the look Franky gives him. I think at some point they’re going to butt heads. But for now, it’s simple.

He’s a growing boy who knows what he likes and what he doesn’t.

A good 5 inches taller and 10 pounds heavier than most babies his age.

I worry that Heinrich’s going to sign him up for football or ice hockey one day and I’ll have to put my foot down and remind him how common and dangerous head injuries are in those sports, which in Franky’s case could make his speech and cognitive delays worse. Dr. Boyer says he has plenty of time to catch up, but why take any risks? I’ve already got a great Montessori school picked out, the one on Boston Neck Road. It has an excellent reputation for working with less verbal children. I know the teachers will love Franky when they meet him.

From across the circle, Carly Swenson’s boy comes up to Franky and grabs his teddy and starts walking away with it. Now Carly’s always looked down her nose at me because I think she feels like we don’t belong there, like we don’t belong in Narragansett period and Franky’s quirks somehow spoil their little tight-knit group of giggling perfection.

She sees Tyler make off with my son’s teddy and gives me a little smirk and says something like Oh isn’t that cute. Franky looks at me, grunts a couple times, and lets out a small groan, so I know he’s upset.

He and I lock eyes.

There’s an anger building there, in both of us, as if we’re speaking to each other without words, coming to the same conclusion.

Tyler has the teddy at the center of the circle now, sitting with it in his lap, picking at one of its eyes, which comes loose.

Franky turns around, toddles up behind Tyler, and gives him a good hard shove in the back, sending him tumbling onto his side. Carly springs to her feet and scoops up her wailing precious treasure and shouts Oh my God! What wrong with you? You’re just going to let him do that? What kind of mother ARE you?

I stand up and get right in her face. I say I’m the kind of mom who raises her kid to respect others’ things. The other moms all stare at us, stunned, mouths open.

Meanwhile, Franky is happy again in the center of the circle.

He rips out teddy’s loose eye and tosses it aside.

Your boy’s a little monster, Carly says with full venom as she tries to soothe an inconsolable Tyler.

I give Franky a look in the circle and he’s going Mmmmmmm and I smile at him with brightest light of love that has ever shone out of my heart. Then I look back at Carly and nod. I’m smiling now with the multiplied force of love and pride.

Yeah, I say. He is.

He’s my little monster.

And I’m smiling now like I belong.

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I’m not so little anymore. The time for love and roses has come and gone and we have felt many seasons of our innocence fall like brittle leaves to the ground. I’ve broken out of that diminutive box people can’t help put you in when they think of you one way. We live in three dimensions. No longer in pens, but houses. It’s not how they want to see you, but how they need to see you. Usually in defiance of doubt, the nagging worry something somewhere might go terribly wrong (and I’m afraid it does) to wake up one morning and realize they’ve led constricted lives, opting in to all the protected coves of the world and selling their dreams for routines and incinerating a good many of the what-ifs.

But I want you to know—and this is not to be boastful, because I’m not that kind of pig—that I’ve done things in the world. I’ve worked for three large multi-national corporations in their grunt divisions, the hot boxes they call them, leading their turnarounds from the bottom up. You won’t see my name on the press releases, but I was the one who knocked over the slop trough at 2 am, scratching the dirt to uncover all those whimsical expenditures and self-serving ghost initiatives and fabricated profits.

After my corporate stint, I took to the world stage. I’ve held court as the assistant advisor to the ambassador from Greece, agricultural relations. When Katsaros schemed to cancel the subsidies countrywide through backchannel hijinks, I already had my nose to the wire and got wind of it to alert the committee. I don’t mind that the ambassador took all the credit, because for me, good things fought for and won transcend the limelight. I like to keep my snout to the floor to expose the territory of ego for what it is, all that preening before cameras and in reels, a smoke-and-mirrors act to make everyone say there’s nothing to see here, no soft pork belly underneath to point at and laugh at. We are more than avatars, or so the fortune teller with letters and numbers for a username said.

You might have heard that I spearheaded the charge for our rights in the upper Midwest while serving as deputy for PAN, that’s Pig Action Network if you’re not familiar with it. Great organization with great leadership. Sure, we dabbled a little in guerilla activism, but always to positive effect at the end of the day, midnight infiltrations into the lairs of the worst offenders who more than deserved the sanitizing light we brought to their appalling warehouse practices, the ultraprocessed matter of the soul.

And lest you think I’m a Philistine when it comes to the arts, last year I penned a play about the delights of gluttony that premiered at the Schubert to rave reviews. Even that perennial sourpuss Bob Mansfield of the Arts & Leisure section praised it, calling it a subtle suburban anthropomorphized take on all of humanity’s delicious but destructive tendencies.

So….. you’re probably eager for me to get to the issue of my three brothers, how I feel about them. Okay. Here goes.

Had they consulted me, they would never have made the nearly calamitous decision to use straw and sticks to build their houses and have a chimney without a flue flap. You can’t even really call them houses, can you. More like fancy huts, certainly not up to code and just begging our sharp-eyed hungry friend from the northern hills to have a go at them. Had the three of them not conspired against me and kicked me out of the litter for reasons I still don’t understand, I might have found myself cowering with them behind that straw door, looking for any chance to run. As I consider the branches of this tree, where they have knotted and bent upward and curled around sprouting leaves, it becomes clear that I should thank them twice for the exile.

That’s what I think at least when I’m looking out my office window of the 52^nd floor of the Chrysler Building and it’s raining and the city is gray as a funeral. Why did they do it? Because I was the runt maybe, even smaller than them, an embarrassment, an underdeveloped but nonetheless noticeable scarlet letter, or maybe they craved a little extra swine courage by subtraction. Get rid of him and there’s no reminder of how small we actually are. I don’t know. I guess everything does happen for a reason. I’m happy with how I’ve managed in the world, what I’ve done for myself with no help, and I didn’t need anyone cheering me on, only that internal voice I’ve had for as long as I remember saying you gotta keep going, if for nothing else, to show them just how bad a mistake they made. And that same voice says look, you don’t have to forgive them. I think they saw your mental acuity and spiritual fortitude and pushed you through the fence slats, so they wouldn’t have to stare for the next however many years at a reminder that the math of understanding life’s bigger picture floated well above their heads and well below the little hairs on their chins.

Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said “what kind of houses are these?” Straw and sticks? Come on. If I were you, I’d ask to see their building permits. I did it the right way. Chose titanium alloys and carbon fiber for my home’s walls and doors, installed a proper panic room under the steel reinforced den floor, set up eight heat- and motion-sensitive 4k fiber optic cameras around the driveway and front yard, with two more hidden in the shrubs along the walkway. If so much as a field mouse scampers within twenty feet of the doorstep, on go the floodlights and the interior red light warning, phone notifications to me and local authorities, front door auto-bolts engaging. Go ahead, my fine sharp-toothed friend from the north, huff and puff all you want, growl and claw and threaten. Yeah you had some success when you came for them. But come for me and you’ll find that everything’s being recorded and it can and will be used against you when the control folks arrive. I’ll be tending to my famous 12-hour vegetable stew, the one with turnips and leeks—you have to stir it every five minutes or it’ll clump—and I’ll have Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy pouring through my Sonos system, not even thinking what may be happening out there to you with the tranquilizer darts and the steel cage. And just to cross my t’s and dot my i’s, I made sure to install a gas fireplace—so sorry, no chimney to climb down.

It’s sad though when I think about my brothers. I hear they’re still living in that small house of stone and brick, all three of them, not venturing out much, always keeping a fire on, listening for footsteps on the roof, taking turns on night watch in case our friend from the north returns, keeping their noses close to the where the door meets the floor so they can be sure to pick up his scent if he gets near. The irony? He retired from hunting years ago, according to my sources in the north. His son sought them out once, wanting payback for giving their dad third degree burns when he came down that chimney, but the poor pup got confused as to where they lived and ended up getting wrangled up on a horse farm in East Orange and that was the end of that. So they’re hiding from ghosts and clouds as they say, jousting at windmills.

Had it crossed their minds once to contact me, not even to make amends—I don’t want, need, or expect an apology—but just to see how I was doing, I would have accepted the overture without a second thought, wide-eyed and warm, and I would have delivered the news about our friend the wolf, freeing them from the long shadow of their ten year self-imposed confinement.

The truth is I do miss them.

I think about all the missed opportunities to share my corporate victories and surmounted political hurdles and my odd sense of humor, how I look at pigeons, all the missed laughs over a fine stew. Those I work with here at PlyDev logging 70 hour weeks for the past three years to launch the next generation of GLP-1s—they have these wonderful families, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, kids, and I nod and smile when they tell me about their weekend and holiday plans going to the Hamptons or on a 10-day Mediterranean cruise and not one of them would ever know how much I ache with longing for a family of my own. After a while, it actually makes your eyes burn.

Some might say I’ve made a mistake, that I’ve given up too much for my career, trying to compensate for some perpetual inner emptiness (no one can hear you in that space) where you become obsessed with results, making a name but neglecting your relationships in the process until they wither into flatlines. My boss keeps telling me that reaching the rarefied air of the 52^nd floor requires sacrifice, but at the end of the day, I do wonder if it was all worth it.

Sometimes I picture them in that little brick house on a freezing January evening nuzzled up against one another by the fire, humming or playing cards, and I would give up everything, slap down every last dollar of my bank account, shove every accolade and vestige of status into the center of the table, just to be able to spend a single hour beside them, not saying anything, just being there, the four of us together.

It’s not because I need to edit myself into the story either. This is not about etching my likeness into a book so I can live forever in someone else’s childhood. If I’m being truthful, I just want the company. Not needing to explain myself or talk about the weather or some other tiny innocuous detail of existence. Because the worst thing I can imagine, worse than environmental collapse and civil decay and financial ruin, is being unwanted. So maybe I’ll go visit them tomorrow.

It’s a 13-hour drive to DeKalb. I keep their address in my top desk drawer, in a notebook with three large snout stickers on the cover. I look at it often. All it takes is packing a few things and putting 100 Winslow Way into my GPS. I think I’ll do that. I’m pretty sure I’ll do it. And when I get there, I won’t demand any answers or explanations even though something in me will be dying to know. But maybe out of the blue they’ll turn to me and say they’re sorry, sorry for what they did all those years ago. And that will be more than enough for me. And we can go on laughing and humming together and eating a stew we all helped make and playing round after round of Crazy Eights long into the night as if we had never spent a second apart. Have you ever known a dream like that?

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You must leave me here, Raelyn said to her brother. I have entered the upper chambers of the earth’s heart and the dry red dust is what’s left of me.

But Justin said he would not leave her alone under Balanced Rock as night seeped in, slow tears carving luminous channels down his cheeks. Skin against bone, the pain like sky everywhere in her, she said to him just above a whisper, you must let me go into this desert. Because I have arrived to it already and it has arrived in me and we are now overlapping. It offers its quiet embrace of sandstone and wind, like a small folded prayer, and I have accepted it, as one might a few words scrawled on the back of a blank envelope no one has thought to send.

I will choose to keep what’s inside to myself, she said, and Justin felt the tiredness multiplied in her eyes, a palpable weight, like two rooms filled to the ceiling with lead, a celestial gravity sinking her into the oxidized dust. She sat on the ground that gave up its heat as if compelled to do so, then lay across it straightening her fragile arms at her sides, waiting for the first couple stars to pierce the indigo canopy of her containment like the smallest xylophone notes, sounding out their simple two-note eulogy, then three, then a thousand, then millions. Raelyn reached for the crescent moon as though it were a single handhold chiseled into an infinite rockface. She heard the distant howl of a coyote moving through the grasslands. The occasional fleck of a meteor from the Perseids asked that she remember what wonder felt like, to think of how the heavens moved, in flickers and by great absorptions of galaxies, but in between everything, there was no sign of life other than the wisps of her own short breaths.

Justin said he loved her, kissed her on the forehead as she lay there, let go of her hand, and started back down the trail knowing he would not hear her voice again. Once the sound of his shoes shuffling across the gravel faded into the buzz of the katydids, Raelyn breathed deeply of the darkening blue dusk and it felt cool in her stomach and cooler against her throat. Justin had set a bottle of water by her and she thought about drinking it, lips like sandpaper, but decided instead to fall in love with her thirst like the burning residue of an eclipse.

How did I get here, from what beginning? What has this momentary flash called life divulged to me? What will it feel like to be everything and nothing all at once? I am convinced, now at the end, I was never fully myself.

One question Raelyn could not extricate herself from, the one that took root in the twilight of her sleepless nights, the one that cast her out into the expanse to consider how a broken line might somewhere, by some unfathomable logic, continue, was whether she wanted to return to this world. Mursin posed it as a practical choice rather than as a test of her attachment to life, the Cambodian monk she had visited earlier that year in a small nondescript Buddhist temple outside Boulder. She asked him if that meant she would come back in the past or reappear in the future, as someone or something, and if so, how far back would it be or how far ahead. He said he could not promise a direction or distance or form. It depended on how her affections for the world would accrete, how they would find shape as a mist that rises off the rocks at dawn. Mursin tied a light blue piece of string around her wrist, a blessing cord, and chanted in Pali, I go to the enlightened one for refuge. I let go of what I cannot carry with me.

At the time of departure, Mursin said a swan-like bird would come as a messenger and gather up her soul. She had until then to decide, to listen to her heart for its willingness, as it took into account the entirety of her path: breathing the air, seeing the mountains, loving her family, stumbling into relationships and out of them, nursing the hurts of childhood unaware of how brittle they made her, losing her son in childbirth, dancing in the streets of Pamplona at 4 am, feeling the bliss of a Black Rock Desert sunrise unobscured by clouds, crying under a 250 year old banyan tree in Kolkata, sleeping in a field of lilacs with her first husband, painting a watercolor of the Atlantic while sitting on a dock in Bar Harbor during a storm, the blues and grays and blacks swimming into each other like a blurred kaleidoscope of foreboding and exhilaration.

How much do I love the world? Let’s say I don’t love it as much as I should, or not as others might, how could I come back to some different combination of it, as myself or someone else or something else, with no memory of my fulfilments or yearnings, all that churn of thought, all that I have lived and forgotten, the battering tides of it, and no sense that it could turn out any other way?

Mursin described this as feeling the insipid sting of a pre-darkness, an end point before the middle point before the beginning. A going backwards, he said in his placid way, and that she should allow herself to be taken into it.

Now with every star having revealed itself, barely visible shadows of red-tailed hawks circling at elevation, Raelyn felt it harder to breath. Each breath she took hitched mid-stream, coming up against the same stone wall. Still laying on her back under Balanced Rock, she felt her heart slow, her blood hesitate in its constricted course, her thoughts stretching apart, fracturing into single random words like yes and yesterday and earring. Then came a flapping, another loud flutter, and another, white hazy flashes of arrival like soft lightning. One to the left. One to the right. Two more just past her feet. Enormous white swans with long arcing necks, wings unfurling as they landed to ensure their balance under Balanced Rock, sloping triangular beaks of glowing orange, serene and smooth.

You’ve come for me.

One by one, the swans lowered their heads and rested them on her body. The warmth of them made Raelyn realize how long she had laid there shivering. But soon the trembling stopped. She stopped breathing. Her heart stopped and yet she remained illuminated under the white light of the swans outlined by the towering round shadow of Balanced Rock. She felt an inviolable patience in her visitors, a love, but one with stark lines, encased by obligation, suspended over her.

Why so many of you? Where will you take me? I do not want to go backward and I do not want to go forward.

Without exchange of thought, their answers accumulated like a reverberation of voice in a deep canyon. They needed to turn her into an ethereal imprint for safe passage, so the others would know. Raelyn asked what others and they answered in unison all the others who find themselves in between. You should know that the sun will no longer shine here if we do not return you to it.

So I am the sun. I have always been the sun.

Yes and no. Some are endings. Others float in the middle. But you are origin.

Is that my next life upon this world, or might I live above it, if I am the sun?

The swans raised their heads and with a flap and a step or two forward, each settled on top of her, covering her, causing her to feel even warmer, an incubation of something in her spirit. They conveyed that they had not taken her back to the sun yet because she had not decided. With a soft collective huff, they asked if she wanted to be the sun or be dispersed among the mountains. It scratched open a truth in who she was, ever since those long summer days as a child in Plano, Texas when she stood outside over her toys strewn across the dirt of her yard. She would not pick any one thing to play with, not her Care Bears, not her Strawberry Shortcake, not her Barbie Big Wheel. She would stand over them all and just look. She could not choose because she didn’t want to close the door on something else that would have brought her joy. As long as she held out, as long as she resisted the foreclosure of picking one thing over another, everything remained possible. She could go anywhere and be anything.

If I don’t choose, will you do it for me?

They said they couldn’t and would stay with her until she decided: backward, forward, restored to the sun, or dispersed among the mountains. Raelyn then did something none of her collectors expected. She stood up out of her body, which startled them into wing flaps and small urgent flights, rising and landing around her and rising again, encircling her physical form as they had when they arrived. Then she began to walk north up Balanced Rock Trail as they stared after her with their long craning necks. That trail became Strausenback Trail, which carried her into the southern interior of the park, across little rises and down into narrow gulleys through the night shadows of the sage-like shrubs and scattered junipers. Raelyn kept walking, no longer hurting anywhere, held in the quiet starlight and cool air. She decided she would continue this way, unhurried, wandering, for as long as she did, she could remain in the most beautiful state of equipoise, the kind that emanated from Mursin and the swans and the crescent moon and from all those who see the world as it is, as it exists in its entirety, not needing it to provide for them any longer and not asking it for anything it was unwilling to give.

She was neither sun nor earth, neither air nor water, and so she wondered how her brother would receive her in the land the Gods had neglected. For she had been the first to walk away and choose nothing over something, the in-between, the equanimity that had for so long eluded her.

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I. Algorithms

The more Theo Hart tried to do nothing, the further away he got from it. So he learned to stop trying to do things, for doing anything had become unnecessary. And that’s where nothing waited for him, lounging at his doorstep, ready to envelop him beyond effort in a nondescript state of what-else-is-there. At 42, Theo had never married and never wanted to have children, because what would they do with themselves? He worked platform programming jobs first in the clothing industry, then in the war industry, then in the toy industry—until the algorithms took care of those jobs for the workers, all of them at once.

Theo planned to spend his time reading but could not find places that still sold books. He remembered books from when he was a boy growing up in North Jersey, the weight of them in his hands, the earthy smell of their pages, the serpentine adventures they contained. He lived in a small apartment in Northeast Philadelphia above a pizza shop, slept on an air mattress, and enjoyed as much time as he could without screens—but no books and nothing to do. Theo would lay on his air mattress for hours and stare at the ceiling’s water stains which reminded him of a wolf’s face. Nothing does not like to be pinned down or called out. It likes to rest beside you, undisturbed, and does not appreciate crowds.

Over a period of weeks, Theo learned the rules of nothing, its preferences. He figured out what made nothing enjoy the time it spent with itself. He learned that nothing detests the spotlight. He learned that nothing is quite happy with its invisibility. He learned that nothing is most comfortable, as you might expect, with questions that don’t have answers. On most days, it won’t respond to what you say. On most days, it won’t even respond to your presence. Whispering may get you a little closer to it. Saying nothing could bring you alongside it, but that’s all that will happen. There is no grand revelation about nothing to be uncovered. It does not peer into you and you do not peer into it. This is the agreement Theo had with nothing in his small apartment. It is assumed. It is implied. It is a silent understanding few notice when they pass it on the street.

Theo learned that he could feel complete in nothing without guilt or shame. There is nowhere else he needed to be. No one else he needed to visit. Nothing else he needed to say. This is how it has been for hundreds of thousands of years, he thought. This is how everyone always thought things would stay. But just like all the programming jobs, Theo knew that nothing stays the same forever.

II. Something

Theo only left his apartment to get something to eat and do his laundry. Most people stayed home like him, the in-dayers. On an out-day, one warm May morning, Theo stepped out of his building and a bicyclist nearly collided with him. She swerved and braked hard, her front tire skidding, the bike frame scraping along the brick wall of the building to a stop. She wore an old green army jacket and carried a clear bag of five-sided fidgets over her shoulder. She gave Theo a good long glare and said hey what’s the idea and next time watch where you’re going. When she saw nothing in Theo’s eyes and heard him say nothing in response, she softened and asked the one question he wasn’t expecting: why aren’t you doing something? He said, How do you know I’m not doing something? She looked him over and said come on, really? She then offered to sell him a fidget for $5. Theo said he didn’t have $5 and shouldn’t everything be free anyway because of the algorithms. She said he had a point, drew one out of her bag, and handed it to him, saying remember, something is better than nothing. She got back on her scraped bike and pedaled away.

The more she made her rounds, selling fidgets, in some cases handing them out for free, asking the question that seemed to jab people on the block awake, the further that riptide spread. Soon everyone got swept up by it, thinking they should be doing something. But no one knew what exactly they should be doing. They could fidget for only so long before they tired of spinning it in their hands. They looked everywhere for a sign of what they should be doing next: outside, inside, in the forests and deserts and oceans and cities. No sign appeared. As time passed, everyone chose something and claimed it as theirs. They carried it wherever they went. They wore it on their sleeves. They talked about it over meals. They celebrated its presence alone and with others and at every possible turn. Most in-days became out-days. When asked their names, they would point to the one thing they had settled on. It was something. It had weight, substance, gravitas, status, meaning. No one wanted to let it go, not even for a second.

Mothers demanded their children receive something as soon as they were born and so they did. People would not relinquish the something they had organized their lives around except upon death and even then, they could not figure out whether they had truly left it behind or brought it with them into the next world. After many experiments and countless double-blind placebo-controlled studies, physicists declared that something had indeed occurred. Something had come into existence with mass. All the known forces, including gravity, acted on it without prompting, as if knowing a priori what to do. Over time, the world became something, large and overarching, and at the same time composed of something smaller, microscopic, atomic. Things went on like this for thousands of years and it all seemed okay because finally there was something to it.

It seemed that the only person who had not picked up something was Theo. The fidget stayed on a green lawn chair that doubled as his bed stand in his small apartment. His in-days remained in-days. He did nothing without trying to do nothing, as he had learned. Days like pages on a tear-off calendar passed like perfect mirror images of the ones that came before.

III. Nothing, Again

On one of his rare out-days, Theo spotted the bicyclist coming down the sidewalk toward him, this time with a clear bag over her shoulder of neon water pistols. She stopped and gave him a polite hello and it felt a little awkward. She put her bag down on the sidewalk and looked him over. She could tell Theo had not yet traded nothing for something and asked why. The only answer he had for her was nothing, and she frowned, a clear indication his answer wasn’t good enough. It fell short of something, even if that something couldn’t be named, even if it had nothing to do with a water gun fight on a hot day. I have to tell others about this, she said, a sense of regret in her eyes. She picked up her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and pedaled away. The news took some time to spread, but not that long, a week or two at most. For those to whom nothing felt like a faraway memory, those who were now doing something—and this was the great majority, nearly everyone—said Theo must leave. Not only the block, but the city. He had to go away from them. A lot of them showed up at his apartment to make sure he knew just how serious they were. For nothing, they argued, cannot stand beside something for very long without seeming to mock it. Theo abided, because what else could he do? He packed nothing because he had nothing. He took nothing with him to a faraway corner of the world and lived there without people and that was fine with him because it meant no one would ask him whether he had something to do. It did feel lonely though. Nothing, when present for long enough, can become an unbounded emptiness, but it also remains full of possibility if you’re open to reminding yourself that there’s always a great expanse of possibility where nothing is.

Theo was sure no one would come looking for him since they would assume there was nothing to find. Nothing could be forgotten, so that’s what they did. They forgot about it and they forgot about Theo, blocked him out, because at the end of the day something is incompatible with nothing, insoluble to it, unaffected by it, immune to it, and wants nothing to do with the memory of something it’s not.

IV. Wear and Tear

For years, it was great to have something to do. Something to take up the hours. From fidgets to water gun fights to playing music to a hundred other pastimes. But something odd began to happen. People began to think of something as a burden, a responsibility they had to fulfill, a cloud following them around, the joy of it faded, replaced by a mild irritation at first and then a discontentedness and then a sense of being worn to the nub, threadbare. When some went to swap something with something else, it helped for a little while but soon the same nagging inertia returned, only worse. Out-days turned to in-days.

Maria, the bicyclist on the block, set down her bag of flutes on the sidewalk and left them there. She noticed people had this hollow disoriented look in their eyes along with a tiredness that seemed to saturate every part of their being. She thought of Theo and how he was somewhere in a faraway corner of the world doing nothing and maybe very happy at it. She tried to remember her own days of doing nothing, before she took the job with the bicycle shop, and she couldn’t. There was nothing there, nothing at all. This gave her a feeling of relief, surprising her.

Maria figured that if it gave her some relief to think of nothing, remember nothing, and envision nothing, how she and most everyone at one point did nothing, then others might feel better in wading into that place as well. The problem was, with all these years spent centered around something, nothing now seemed like a lock box missing its key. They needed help returning to nothing, restoring it to the center of their existence, replacing something with nothing until the cows came home. For this, they needed someone who lived with nothing and slept with nothing and spent all his waking hours with nothing. They needed to find Theo and decided they would spare nothing in finding him.

V. The Art of Doing Nothing

They came to him one-by-one and in small groups, discovering a path to his faraway corner of the world by using heat maps and GPS and crowdsourcing. They seemed elated to discover his lean-to made of branches and fern leaves. Sometimes when Theo came out he would find one person, sometimes two, sometimes 40 or 50. They always asked him some version of the same question: How do you do nothing? Or, what is the key to a life of nothing? Or, if I drop something, will I be forever bound by nothing? Will nothing sustain me? Do you get lonely with nothing? If everyone has nothing, would they fight each other for no reason or fall in love? Would memories of something disappear the moment a person held nothing in their arms, or would those events that marked something of importance fade over time? Can you exist in a meaningful way with something and nothing side-by-side? What would a day in the life of nothing look like? And would it still be worth living?

As Theo looked into their hungry travel weary eyes, their thin bodies swaying in the occasional saltwater breeze, the answer was always the same. He said there is an art to doing nothing and being nothing that you have to figure out for yourself. Now, I know you have come all this way, a thousand miles for some of you, but there is nothing I can tell you in a definitive way that would alleviate your worries and dull your fears. You have to sit back and close your eyes and breathe for a little while. You have to not try to look for anything inside or out. You have to say to yourself there may be nothing behind something and nothing behind everything, nothing to witness and nothing to put your arm around, saying this is it, nothing to be gained and nothing to be lost, nothing to unpack or put away, nothing to depart from and nothing to return to, nothing that is yours and nothing that isn’t. And the seekers would nod, looking just as uncertain as when they had arrived, and begin in many cases their long journey home.

The truth is Theo did envy them for having something and wished he could have gone back with them and made something the center of his life like they did and for once, have something in common with others that they could talk about and argue about and pine over and show to people to say this is what life is supposed to be about, something that answers the central question of why we are here in the first place. But the truth was also that there is no analytical way of going from nothing back to something. There is no clear schematic or set of turns one could follow. He wanted to tell all the people who came to him with their desperate gazes that they all had nothing inside them already. They didn’t have to go anywhere or talk to anyone or ask him questions to discover it. Nothing is the perpetual sound and the perpetual silence. And isn’t that reason enough to be alive?

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If you like this story, you’ll probably also enjoy #5, #3, and #10.

January again. A liminal snow coats the wheat fields and razor wire fences erected along Dryden Road. Zosia, wrapped in a black wool shawl, makes her away across the uprooted asphalt, vestiges of the bombardment from the night before. She emerges as a hunched over shadow from the line of soldiers on the East side, their rifles drawn in a neat row and aimed across the road. They do not flinch. Nor do they notice her breath rising among them like a mist. They do not pay any attention to the bundle she carries through the break in the line. Two parallel lines of a hundred rifles, holders silent, expressions flat, muted like the hours, facing each other across Dryden, her breath freezing as it meets the air. Zosia is now on the West side in Ludvig, the town of her birth, only a half mile to go to the village where she will move from house to house in no hurry, feet and hands numb, delivering venison from the farm storehouses to four families. She will repeat this journey two days later and two days after that. She will not make a fourth trip because she will have fallen ill, pneumonia, families gathered around her bedside saying a prayer for their beloved Zosia and another for Ludvig as they wait to see what will become of it at dawn.

The Terms

The ornate domed atrium at the Plaza d’ Oro in Litzin finds its heavenly aura at 3 pm each day when the sun strikes the gold and red-leafed geometric patterns arrayed around the ceiling, squares and triangles interlocking, overlapping in their right angles and hypotenuses, all of a Persian air. A single square table carved from ivory stands in the center of the atrium, draped in a white tablecloth, bearing two meticulous place settings of Wedgewood, pure silver utensils gleaming as though polished that morning, crystal water goblets half-full, no ice, and a vase with a white peony in full bloom.

Senik squeezes his Waltham pocket watch as if to trap time, imprison it in his palm while awaiting his counterpart Croyden to return with a position on the matter of the impasse at Ludvig. The crisp echo of shoes on tile announces Croyden under the atrium’s north archway, straight-lining to the table, possessed of a single mind, focused as sunlight through a magnifying glass, velvet folio under one arm. Croyden’s long mustache and heavy eyebrows speak of a perpetual fatigue as he takes the seat across from Senik, setting the folio down on the corner of the table.

“This is our last conversation about it,” starts Croyden, “I’ve been instructed to tell you.”

“Ahh, I expected as much from the weary mind of a donkey loaded up for the canyon descent,” said Senik. “Not the slimmest latitude of thought granted by Luchey since we’ve begun, eh? But go on. What other instructions?”

“Here is the reality, my friend,” says Croyden, his right eyelid twitching. “We have 5 lines of troops split by 3 lines of Panzer tanks, 2 sets of heavy guns behind the Panzers, and a thousand plus men who are hungry and cold and rather impatient staring down your thin village stop-gaps at the Western doorstep to Ludvig, which—and I will say this for what, the sixth, seventh time—was never was yours to begin with, never mind what the centuries have made you feel entitled to. So you see, you have nothing in all of God’s creation to give us the faintest pause in our righteous campaign of reabsorption, our only regret being it did not come sooner so as to squelch any whimsical hopes of nonattachment passed down by firelight from babushkas to their children’s children, you know the ones, with the wide doe eyes, rapt with dreams of frolicking in wilted wheat fields that were never theirs and never were going to be.”

Senik sits upright, unflinching amid the iron residue of Croyden’s first move in their tenth hour of negotiation. He studies Croyden’s quartz plateau of a face and considers the excess of force used, the elbow bent up behind one’s back by one’s opponent who hopes you do not see the reachable release point at the neck. Senik glimpses it behind Croyden’s stare, a tiny lit pinpoint of uncertainty.

“Then why not call the advance and be done with it? I’m sure your superiors have other menial tasks for you, Croyden, no? Some other pressing list of small humiliations that would save you from an afternoon here in Plaza d’ Oro with me, not a drop of jasmine tea or crust of rye in sight.”

“Because Luchey would like a full surrender,” says Croyden, opening the velvet folio revealing a single sheet of paper inside.

“Well of course he would.”

“AND a pledge of allegiance from the town’s council,” Croyden continues, tapping the paper.

“As a matter of course.”

“For the glory of the state, you see, for posterity.”

“The child running into her long lost mother’s arms,” says Senik.

“Exactly. You’ve got it!” Croyden says, pointing at him. “Along with a commitment to provide without conditions, for the duration of 35 years, unlimited access to your mineral deposits, silver and platinum, and a substantial percentage, say 40%, of Ludvig’s workforce to mine said deposits for the state for that duration.”

Croyden looks to either side unnecessarily, as they are alone in the atrium, and with a lower voice says, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but there is some wiggle room there, with the percentage. I wouldn’t want you to come out of this nothing, Senik.”

“How generous of you. May I see the terms?”

“I have just told them to you,” says Croyden. “But if you must see with your own eyes, here they are, in black and white. No one wants a massacre, Senik. I’m sure you and your delegation would agree.”

He hands Senik the folio and Senik takes a moment to scan the sheet.

“Very interesting,” says Senik, as he reads. “Very interesting indeed. I bet Luchey’s sitting in his banquet hall surrounded by his generals as we speak, yes? Enjoying his favorite? Kippenborst and baked apples with plenty of cognac in celebration.”

“Oh you know, Luchey,” chuckles Croyden. “He cannot pass up the opportunity for a victory banquet with Kippenborst.”

“Hm, yes. I suppose not.”

“I almost forgot something,” says Croyden, drawing a sleek black fountain pen from his coat pocket and extending it over the table.

“Before I sign this, I’ve got something for you to have a look at,” says Senik.

Croyden places the pen down beside the vase. Senik places the folio on the floor and removes a sheet of paper folded in thirds from his inside coat pocket and hands it to Croyden.

Smirking as he unfolds it, Croyden asks, “What is this?”

“What does it look like?” asks Senik, matching the smile.

“Well, it appears to be a map of the Western line, our troop and artillery positions along Dryden road. What are these circles here and here and here?”

“You know, I always tell our delegation how perspicacious you are. I admire that in you, Croyden. Nothing gets missed. You are like a hawk always perched atop a pine tree honing in on his morning meal you are. No mystery as to why Luchey tapped you to lead these negotiations.”

Croyden snorts. “Negotiations. If you want to call them that. But thank you, Senik.”

“Those circles mark the burial points for the devices. And as you can see, they lie by my estimation, given the movements of the last week, directly under the tank line and your third and fourth line of troops behind that line.”

Croyden, still smirking, stiffens a little. “Devices. What sort of devices?”

Senik folds his arms in front of him, shoving the place setting toward Croyden so it knocks into the vase. “The kind that go boom.”

“You think a few planted land mines changes things,” says Croyden.

Senik shrugs. “The atom is an incredible paradox, don’t you think? Something so small that it cannot be seen, yet when forcibly divided, capable of consuming the entire world with the fire of hell.”

Croyden shakes his head. “You are decades from the technology for it.”

“You’re right,” says Senik. “WE don’t have the technology for it. But our friends on the Southern continent do, you know the ones I’m talking about, in the disputed Ibrimium Territories. You know them, the ones who have endured nearly 60 years of relentless persecution in your labor camps. What you don’t know, and our counterintelligence has made sure of, is that for those 60 years, their best and brightest have secretly been smuggled out with our help and trained in physics and engineering in friendlier countries, the ones with the capability and materials, Luchey’s quieter enemies, waiting patiently for their opportunity. And I would remiss if I did not tell you that this opportunity is now, as we sit here, you and I, without a drop of jasmine tea in this beautiful domed atrium. And oh, those extra hours of our back-and-forth, inching ever closer to a signed agreement of surrender, made the room needed for some small adjustments to the timers and triggers. Simple to do, a turn of a knob, so much so that an ailing grandmother innocently carrying food across the lines to her people could do it if she knew exactly where to crouch down along the way. Your divisions, Croyden, with their rifles drawn and Panzers idling are sitting directly over 72 kilotons of explosives. Oh I’ll take that back by the way.”

Senik snatches the map from Croyden’s hands, refolds it in thirds, and tucks it back inside his jacket.

“Wouldn’t want you to guess the locations of our buried treasure, now would we? Looks like you’ve grown a bit pale. Would you like some water? Shall we call for some?”

“You mean to tell me, you would dissolve your entire people,” says Croyden, “poison the earth beneath Ludvig and air above, for hundreds of miles surrounding. This is what you are saying.”

“There is a phone in the annex. I have but to make one call and it is done. The people of Ludvig have decided unanimously that they rather rise to heaven than spend a single day under the thumb of Luchey’s rule. You are done here, Croyden. These are our terms. You will withdraw your forces and never again set foot within 50 miles of Ludvig. You will, however, pledge your protection of our small territory, guarding its independence and autonomy indefinitely from afar, and you will also close the Ibrimium camps and free those people and leave the Southern continent. Do you understand these terms? Answer me, you shad. Because after these 10 hours, I have little patience left for ambiguity.”

Croydon swallows hard and stands, looking like a spinning top that has come loose from its string. He nods. Senik stands and extends his hand.

“Shall we shake on it?”

Croydon nods again and offers his hand. Senik takes it and squeezes hard.

“It’s been a pleasure, Croydon. You may return now to your feast in Brechnev and announce to Luchey and the generals that you have single-handedly brought this matter to a close. And please note to them that those devices will remain in place, under close watch, for years to come should you try anything clever. But we should grab a gin, one of these days. How about it?”

Senik claps him on the side of the shoulder. Croyden turns and walks like a man to the gallows, disappearing under the north arch of the atrium, not turning back for one last look at the victor. If he thought to, he might have spotted the tiny beads of sweat forming on Senik’s forehead and heard Senik’s small sigh of relief as he slumped down into the chair at the empty ivory table. He had an important call to make, but figured it could wait an extra minute or two, as he stared up into the red and gold mandala of domed geometric cacophony, thinking about how a homeland is child of sorts that never grows up, always on guard against those who would take advantage of it, if not for the custodial responsibility handed down across the generations to sustain its survival amid the avarice and desperate dominion of fearful men.

You can listen to the cinematic version of this story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here on Substack.

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