Tim and I were in bed together when he saw the spoon. I’d accidentally left the closet open, I noticed, at the same moment he said, “What’s that?” and I knew exactly what he was referring to. He took the spoon out of the closet and carried it over to the bed. Reluctantly, I told him its story. “Put it on,” he said. But I didn’t feel like putting it on; I wasn’t in the right mood. “Probably won’t fit,” I said, but he insisted on slipping the straps over my shoulders and then it was like old times, only different. I’d never worn the spoon without clothes on before. Tim said, “I like it…I like how the straps push your tits together.” He started kissing me on the face and neck and we were back in bed when something unsettling happened in my brain. “Stop,” I said, and I was about to take off the spoon, only Tim didn’t want me to. “But it makes me think of my mother,” I told him, “and this isn’t when I want to be thinking of her.” “So think of me instead,” Tim said, and I tried, I really did, but it was still as if she was right there in bed with us. I pointed to the corner of the bed where I envisioned her sitting with her back to us, pretending to read a magazine, to give us some privacy, because Tim seemed like a nice guy, she’d said to me once, and of course it wasn’t her fault my unsettled brain had put her there in bed with us. “This really isn’t working,” I said and I tried to take off the spoon, only Tim stopped me again. “It’s not just that I like how you look in it,” he said. “It’s also the message—I don’t want anyone walking off with you either.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that. I didn’t have a problem with what the spoon said in the context of my mother; she was my mother and always would be; beneath what she said with the spoon I knew she’d be OK with whomever walking off with me just so long as I was happy. What the spoon said in the context of Tim, however, suddenly made the lightweight plastic on my back feel forged from the heaviest metal. Maybe if I’d been in love with him, I would’ve felt romanced by what he said with the spoon; there was no way of knowing. I took off the spoon, we argued, and then he left. The beginning of the end, which, I think, would’ve come about soon enough anyway; it wasn’t the spoon’s fault. Still, there was a time after I stopped seeing Tim when the sight of the spoon in my closet annoyed me. I considered getting rid of it, throwing it away, donating it, Goodwill—but having to explain to that person with the clipboard—it’s a giant plastic spoon with adjustable shoulder straps; now can I have a receipt for tax purposes? But I couldn’t part with the spoon, not the spoon my mother had given me. I just needed somewhere else to put it, a spot where I wouldn’t have to see it all the time and if I ever had someone over again, there’d be no chance of him seeing it. Unless I wanted him to—if and when I was sure he was the right person and only then, I might let him slip the straps over my shoulders.

• Disking my father’s farmland while singing tunes from Les Misérables.

Churning soybean stubble in the John Deere.  Dad showed me how to work the hydraulic lift on the disk.  With acres of land before you, and the disk kicking up moist soil smelling as rich and dark as it looks, you lose yourself thinking about everything in the world.  Dad says there’s only three places in the world to do any real thinking—in church when you ought to be listening to the preacher, on the deer stand watching a chilly sunset, and on this John Deere disking land, preparing for a new year and a new crop.  I’d never disked land until Dad took the job carrying mail, but he’s right about the thinking thing.  That was the year I went with the marching band to New York and saw the musical at the Imperial Theater.  Every time I lifted the disk to turn it around I’d start belting out, “Lovely Ladies smell ‘em through the smoke…”

• Posting fliers around town that read: “MISSING: Where’s Judy Winslow?”

Man.  That was college.  Me and some buddies were talking about token cartoon characters who were overshadowed by their counterparts, like Porky Pig’s girl, Petunia, or Donald Duck’s girl, Daisy.  And how about the mysterious disappearances of sitcom siblings?  How the regulars never acknowledge their absence.  For example, from the TV show Family Matters—which could’ve been re-titled The Steve Urkel Show—one episode Judy Winslow goes upstairs to play with her dolls and never comes back down.  Next season there’s a spunky new nephew, Richie, to fill the forgotten void of a regrettably un-cute, annoying little sister.  When I say “that was college,” I don’t really mean that we posted the fliers back then.  Well, we did, but what I mean is that this scenario, the bastard wallflower sibling in a poorly scripted sitcom—this is the metaphor for my college experience.  Or life, really.  One day you graduate or you move out of your apartment or you quit your job tearing tickets at the movie theater, but no one ever asks, “Hey, where the hell did Judy go?”  Maybe Judy’s in college somewhere posting fliers with my picture in some parallel universe.

• Adapting Morrissey tunes for the tenor banjo.

The tenor banjo is a musical relic.  A vestigial instrument from the days of Dixieland jazz that the old guy/jerk at the guitar store assured me I’d never get my hands on. Two words: “e-bay,” you big old bastard.  Mr. Moustache-No-Beard says to me, “Well, pretty much you won’t never get your hands on one because everyone who plays tenor banjo is dead,” which for me conjures up some interesting images of cigar-smoking skeletons wearing derbies, sitting cross-legged on pieces of posh Victorian furniture, strumming their four-stringed banjos.  Picture that.  You’re probably the only person in the world who is currently doing so.  Anyway, this is a roundabout way of telling you that I can play an original adaptation of “Everyday Is Like Sunday” on the tenor banjo.

• Trying to convince my classmates that I am Thomas Wolfe reincarnated.

Grad school.  A professor told me that at the age of 25, it was too late for my life to be changed by Look Homeward, Angel.  O lost?  I beg to differ.  I may never write like  Tommy, but I will pay fifty cents for a tour of his one-time home in Asheville, and fantasize about sneaking out a bedroom window, crawling around to the lady boarder who waits with arms open, yearning; I will hike up any old North Carolina mountain and shout my literary delusions of grandeur to no one in particular; and I will write volumes about my life, thinly veiled as fiction, detailing the never-ending search for some universal truth about man’s ineffable longing.  I will no longer suppress the urge to compose elegiac sentences such as: O lost, and by the wind grieved, Judy Winslow, come back again!

• 3 a.m. driving, listening to Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” because it makes me emotional.

Why do we do it?  Why do we find ourselves perpetually crossing county and state lines, early in the a.m., hungry, dazed, half-drunk, half-asleep, and whole-alone?  It’s because we think we can somehow outrun our inherent loneliness.  But if we’d stop our getaway cars long enough to admit to ourselves that we can’t actually outrun anything inherent, then we’d all pop Springsteen’s album Nebraska into our car stereos, skip to track five and hear the Boss’s “nothing feels better than blood on blood” story-song, ‘til you weep because you’ve never even had a brother—in fact, you’ve never even had a friend who would “look the other way” if push came to shove and you accidentally killed a man in a bar near the Canadian border.

Commiseration’s the name of the game.  You commiserate with yourself.  Part of you wants to feel like you’re not the only one in the world feeling the way you do.  But then there’s another part that believes somehow if you indeed are the only one in the world singing, joking, playing, reading, weeping—writing—then you really are alone, and like the Boss says, “When you’re alone, you ain’t nothing but alone.”  There’s no one else who gets you, you tell yourself.  But if the world were larger, you think, there might be another.  But it isn’t, and there isn’t, and secretly, you’re glad.

Alcohol swabs to clean it, liquid Novocain to numb it. She worked in a dentist’s office and furnished the Novocain; he in a hospital and supplied the scalpel.

Small, unobtrusive areas only: the inside of the upper arm, ditto for the upper thigh, the lower back, the top of one foot. Not deep, the epidermis only, not the dermis, lest it never grow back. Each cut their own skin and fed the other, then dressed the other’s wounds. They slept.

Did they dream? They must have, they always had, but in the morning they couldn’t recall. In the morning they were ravenous, but they didn’t eat before work, or at lunch, or even at dinner. Then, when night fell, the other arm, the other leg, the other foot, a bit higher on the back. Eventually their spines were ladders of skin and scabs.

They never wore white in case they bled. Skin regenerates slowly. There were days they didn’t eat. They lost weight rapidly, they walked more—despite their bound and bloody feet, they became fit. People invited them into their homes. You look nice, they said. You’re always together. They pressed food on them but they demurred. They touched them, these people, their hands, their shoulders, their arms. As long as they didn’t touch their backs, they were all right.

The body’s largest organ. They knew its rhythms, they watched it heal. They could make love only with him standing behind her, so his hips didn’t abrade her thighs. Every night and often in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoons, the soft arm of an upholstered chair supported her stomach. At night, after visiting their new friends, they would undress and climb into bed naked, where he would lie with his head in her lap, tonguing the newly formed skin, learning its salty smoothness. He liked that these new, shiny patches had yet to suffer the abuse of daily living. And she would stroke his hair, and they would sleep, and dream their dreams. Not one featured a barking dog.

As personal assistant to the CEO, my day also consisted of dictation, typing, travel arrangements, and his Grande Americanos. Some work mornings, I could hardly drag myself out of bed. I’d force myself through the motions and dream of quitting, of being able to make a living from my illustrations and comic books.

At least the job paid well and my boss traveled a lot. However, whenever he was around, he insisted I cover up my tattoos. One night, my boyfriend suggested acid or his razor to remove them, only half-joking. A bicycle messenger, he didn’t hold himself to any high prospects and preferred my paycheck over his. I threw my size eleven shoe at his head.

A Monday, the sun turned violent. My co-workers and I suffered inside the stifling office, dripped sweat, melted. My boss was off-site at a meeting, so I risked removing my turtleneck. From her bright orange cubicle, Fanny gaped at the tattoo on either side of my thyroid, of a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey. She asked why I’d do something like that to myself. I told her it was a picture of my daddy.

She carried over her can of soda and parked a quarter of her enormous rump on the edge of my desk, asked to see some more. I pulled up my sleeves, revealed a pirate’s treasure chest, King Arthur’s sword, a fire-breathing dragon, and a naked, buxom, black-haired pin-up.

She grunted, said “At least you put a half-ways real woman on yourself.”

A few more co-workers gathered round, including those in suits. Ken asked exactly how many tats did I have? A gallery, I smirked. He wanted to see more. The others murmured in agreement. I kicked off my size elevens, peeled free of my opaque nylons, and hitched up my skirt. Gasps went up, the sudden charge in the air palpable.

The phones went unanswered and the clients in reception were ignored. My thighs revealed a troupe of lions, elephants, blue and yellow striped zebras, and miniature, short-necked giraffes. Fanny grabbed at the back of my swivel chair and wheeled me out from behind my desk.

Brian, from accounts, was the first to ask to touch the tattoos. He was muscled, as hard and broad as a door. I snagged my lower lip with my teeth, nodded. His fingers grazed my skin, traced the portrait of my mother on my left calf.

“She’s beautiful,” he said.

She was.

The growing crowd drew closer.

Someone else in the back asked to see more. I pulled my tee-shirt up and over my head. On my chest and stomach, bright illustrations of the superheroes I’d created. My co-workers rushed me with questions and fingertips, fascinated.

I stretched out on the carpeted floor and allowed them to move around me, stroke me, to flip me over, and over again. They babbled, exclaimed. Fanny wanted to know about the pain of the needles, how I could stand the shame of forever. I didn’t tell her that those pictures made for great company, my best friends.

Brian ran his wet tongue over the red, flaming rocket on my pelvis. The group released pained, aroused sounds.

Shouts sounded from the reception area. Our boss drew closer, his voice growing louder, angrier.

Everyone scattered.

I scrambled to my feet, dressed only in scant, leopard-print underwear. 

My boss stared, his eyes bulging and color high.

I stuttered and spluttered.

He ordered me out, fired.

I stared at what had unwadded inside his pants.

He whirled about, and slammed his office door.

I packed up my desk, still in my itsy bitsies. He watched.

On my way out, my now ex co-workers cast withering looks. Only Fanny waved, seemed sad. As I exited, Brian turned his back on me, even his neck ringed in hot embarrassment.

Out on the street, a jumble of feelings hit me. I told myself what a riot and recalled the wet trace of Brian’s tongue on my stomach. I’d held everyone mesmerized. They’d come more alive than I’d ever seen them. They’d admired me, envied me, wanted me.

Yet I also felt the jolt of falling. I thought about how narked my boyfriend would be when he heard, how no one cared nearly as much about my illustrations and superheroes when they were on the page instead of on my skin. Also, the extremes I had to go to just so people would notice me.

To comment on ”Illustrated Girl,” follow the “discuss” link below.

max and i know, without knowing, each other.  he is a bruise; a few shades darker than me and geometrically misshapen. i am a rat and he is the flashlight. i am the clap-clap-clap and he is the echoing microphone. i am in mono and he’s the distortion, cramming the room.

sometimes he dances on stage in white shoes. but now he’s scratching his head through bleached hair, violin f-holes tattooed on his wrist. “she’ll be here soon,” he says.

i nod, not speaking. i’m still unsure how i got here.

we’re waiting for a friend of a friend, some person i’ve never met: a body that strolled across the lawn, a ghost that flickers in and out of consciousness, a unit occupying space at protests for ending violence.

she’s probably been penning-and-inking symbols on her skin, the same way i do. everyone fucks in library study rooms, don’t they? everyone writes songs about anarchy, heartbreak, and terrible psychiatry. everyone’s tasted rain and thought, new york is acidic and i miss home. where’s home, again?

max and i don’t attempt conversation because my stomach’s too empty for camaraderie and my voice powerless. i’m an empty shell scattered on a shore, but i’ve never been to california, where max is from. his head is bleeding because he keeps scratching and scratching at it.

finally she walks into the lounge, the place where all the “hip kids” hang, and sits on the opposite couch. i’ve never seen her before. not once.

she’s frowning bright, a genuine sylvia plath in the making. maybe this girl almost bit the bullet too, not one but three times, almost squeezed her way through “suicide proof” windows because she couldn’t take the bitter taste of defeat. maybe i’m wrong, though, and she’s frowning because her smile would fill the room with too much light, and these “hip kids” enjoy dimness the way william s. burroughs needed heroin, but didn’t die from it.

her face is a diamond; her eyes are not windows to whatever soul she hides, but they buzz. i can hear them humming above the room’s chitchat. like crickets. her nerves hot-wired.

max whispers, “that’s violet. hand her the envelope.”

i extend my shaky arm. i’d rather pass a candy heart, glass rock, autumn leaf, paper valentine, but she accepts. leans back. shakes the curls from her ears and sighs, puts her nose inside and starts to sniff. must smell good, all that medical herb that’s legal where max resides and one day this past july i signed a petition that said, “make it legal here too!” but no one listens to a goddamn thing any one of us has to say, because we carry on about how much we “love” to soak our sole-less feet in grass, how much we “love” to shoot our energies through the souls of people we barely know, and they ridicule. hey max, hey violet…i mean to say, they don’t care what happens to people in iraq, new york, or the black kids next door, so long as they’re kissing the toes of a crucifix on the bathroom floor.

all of a sudden, the chipped wall, or the broken light fixture, or the knockoff dali, or the modern art atrocity shouts, “ok, we got you now! come with me.”

a man emerges from the shadows and yanks violet’s curls. he rips the envelope from her tightly-clenched fist as two identical men rise from the backside of the band-aid couch. one of them places his whole hand on max’s bleeding head.

a terrified hyena: “fuck you, you maggot faggot, gonna give me aids!” aids is terminology for the coming together of youth culture and max was only loving himself in the backseats of all those cars. he isn’t afraid of aiding. the other man places his hands all over my torn and dirty sweater. “fucking pig,” he says to me. to me?

we are noon shadows, exact. they are long and looming (the evening kind).

we are dragged into the parking lot where their cars are parked. typical police mobiles with cages, just waiting for us rats. they’ve got the sirens ready to switch on full blast, and blast they do.

violet and i are shoved into one car; max into another. “the bloody boy, a more violent threat, a mad man,” we hear them say. where are his thorns, they wonder. where’s the stigmata? yeah, he’s mad all right. i’m mad, and she’s mad, and we just like to fuck, not get fucked. we know the government loans oceans to submarines and drops the fusion of atoms on the heads of babies. you think it’s easy to be this aware?

we whisper while the identical men talk on intercoms in the front seat. she says, “call me vie.” i tell her, “call me my.” and i tell her, “i have to pee.” she tells me, “i’m going to start a riot band.” observing her face, i want her to know she’s so beautiful. also, that her purple barrettes are coming undone. instead, i think of the faulted ones i fall for, that boy who snorted heroin for one week. my breasts pressed like flowers. my life: a chalkboard, constantly and easily erased.

there is no past, only future: a road out the window.

we’ll look ahead; we’ll help create.

while the earth gets blown away, we smell the leather of the seats and each other’s hair. we watch prisms form in the glass.

i am a sonogram, my insides illuminated destruction.

and here i am, thinking about a book i barely remember. it has no pictures, only words. even though words are lies, they are good lies. white blinds the blinded.

Terry has unwrapped a beach towel from his backpack. Terry has laid the beach towel out on the asphalt. Terry has laid flat on the beach towel, his mouth closed to the rain, water peeling down his face. Terry in the playground, underneath a tetherball pole. Terry closes his eyes.

In the rain are answers. The answers in the rain are Yes and No and Maybe. Terry once wrote a note to a girl and the note to the girl said If you like me and you want me to be inside of you then check one of the boxes.

Terry is a boy. The note was for a girl.

The girl that the note was for is a girl that Terry wants to shred into a billion pieces and use as postage stamps and mail love letters all over the universe. He wants the love notes to be in the shape of hearts. He wants the hearts to be pink and purple and red. He wants the paper-cut hearts to bleed when people open them, confetti falling to their feet, the smell of the girl that Terry loves still adhered to the postage stamps, still marked on the envelopes—still listening to the words people speak about her in these billion places where she is opened up.

Terry is a boy. A boy is an autopsy.

Terry out on his beach towel and rain coming down.

Terry is a boy. It is raining. Tawny is a girl watching.

Tawny is a girl. But Tawny is not the girl that Terry wanted to break into pieces and send via post. Tawny is the girl who watches Terry and wishes that she was a girl that Terry would want to break into pieces and send around the universe. Tawny in the sky sees clouds in the shape of Terry. Tawny in the skies sees rain coming down.

Tawny is a girl and a girl is a flower. A girl is a rhythm. A girl is a train riding tracks.

Tawny is a girl and a girl is a bloom is a ripening is an opening.

Tawny, when she thinks of Terry, is thinking of the opposite of everything that has ever been. Tawny is not dreaming of being pried open—is not dreaming of being clawed apart is not dreaming of being torn torn torn slickened with blood—but is dreaming of Terry and how his cutting into hearts, notes, would be a soft bath in warm water would be a sun in day would be a night where there are no dreams.

Terry is a boy and Tawny is a girl that this boy doesn’t see. Lucinda is a girl too. But Lucinda is the girl that Terry sees and writes notes to, notes that say if I was the boy for this, you, the girl then I would be the best kind of boy.

Tawny is working open children’s mouths with pliers. Tawny is combing through their spilled intestines for a note that Terry may have written that is disappeared in insides. Tawny is looking for a love that is not a love over fences. Tawny is looking for a love that is not a love climbing trees. Tawny is looking for a love that is not hidden underneath a moon’s ocean.

Terry is a boy on a towel in the rain getting wet.

Tawny is a girl.

Lucinda is a girl with dark colored skin. Lucinda is a girl wearing glasses. Lucinda is a girl tilted towards the sun. Lucinda is a girl holding a note in her hands that is the one-thousandth note that Terry has written her. This note says I Love You. The note is heart shaped. The note bleeds.

It is raining.

Lucinda sees the notes from Terry. Lucinda reads the notes from Terry. Lucinda would rather get a letter from the broken moon. Lucinda would rather get a letter from the broken moon that says I did this that you see for those your lips. Lucinda would rather go sun-blind. Lucinda would rather dig out her hair from her head. Lucinda would rather.

Tawny pushes her fingers into a boy’s eye sockets. Tawny does not find words beneath their melting shapes. Tawny tears a  boy’s arms from their homes in his shoulders. There is no language that comes out. Tawny is a girl searching.

Lucinda reads a note. The note says: This is the kind of boy that I am, would be, could.

Lucinda is a girl wishing away her head.

Terry on a beach towel feels rain but the rain is Tawny with an axe raised. Terry on a beach towel sees clouds but it is Tawny’s hair, swirling up. Terry wants sky though the openings, but the openings are all Tawny’s holes, picked open in him, searching for letters.

Lucinda watches from an empty classroom. Lucinda watches from somewhere to the side. Lucinda watches through a broken window. Lucinda sees Tawny taking Terry apart. Lucinda watches a moon through rain.

It is raining.

Terry is quiet and Lucinda wishes herself away. Lucinda wishes herself away and bleeds down the gutter. Lucinda wishes herself away and the moon leaves no note for her going, her gone. A note that doesn’t say Hey there girl, isn’t this what you were looking for?

There are answers in this rain that is from clouds above, in the sky, coming down.

These are boys and girls.

These are children.

It is, always as it is, raining.

I put on a goat suit because if I was dealing with magic, what the hell, and I put on a brave face to drive up the raggedy roads of Appalachia.  My Jeep scattered leaves as the autumn wind blew chilly and whipped my fur:  Me, Pan.  Pan in Appalachia.  Maybe a dead Pan soon enough.  Popcorn might mistake me for game or who knows if someone else’s shotgun didn’t catch me trespassing first.

When I pulled over to stretch my legs at a lookout, the leaves talked to me in pigmy tongues.  The trees and mountain and sky called in motley array, whispering faker —whispering about a running start, a free fall through the air.  No.  Not while Popcorn still lived.

Voices came from deep holes in the ground.  I hallooed. Maybe I’d get some directions.

“Get gone!” came a muffled warning.

I walked over to another hole.  I remembered what my officemates told me, that only a billy goat could reach Popcorn, so I tried something else: I bleated.  It worked.

“You lost?”  A different voice, gruffer.

I should say, it almost worked, because then the same voice yelled, “Use the road!” before cackling into a coughing fit.  The crackling voice began mumbling again, but not to me.  All the voices coming from the holes in the ground were talking to themselves, sometimes shushing themselves, too.  They were hiding from the Bully, the one that got Popcorn.

Back in the Jeep, I nearly ran off the road a few times and would’ve plummeted down the mountainside, but by then I had a kind of dream magic with me.  The Jeep zoomed under yellow droplets of leaves.  Gold, gold, everywhere, but not a coin to deposit, not for Popcorn.  I carried currency for Popcorn in the form of a carton of Pall Malls.  Also I toted two cases of Ensure, which an interview mentioned was all Popcorn could eat nowadays.  He couldn’t even afford Ensure after Uncle Sam, the Bully Billy.  The Bully came for Popcorn, and now all of Appalachia was hiding from the Bully.

Somehow I knew where to pull off.  About a mile’s hike from the road, Popcorn’s wooden shack house stood with two other shacks.  A hand-painted sign like the name of a restaurant stretched over his porch—“NO SMOKING OUTSIDE.”

Popcorn came around from out back, coming up a cloud on this trespasser, but he put down his gun when he saw the Ensure and cigarettes.  Popcorn Sutton was a sight for a weary traveler: gray beard long like a stretched Brillo pad, cigarette in mouth, overalls worn and mud-stained from moving rocks, laying copper pipe, making moonshine.

Talk about bleating.  Five sips of that moonshine and I forgot English.  I saw a Cheshire goat popping up in the trees, peeking over the supply shack, a big grinning Cheshire face hovering out in the clouds.  We sat on Popcorn’s porch with his photo album—his daddy, his daddy’s daddy, all passing the moonshine, his whole family playing fiddles and banjos with the neighbors.

Popcorn, a stick figure with a swollen liver, stroked his beard and rocked.  What rocking chairs he had.  “All damn gone.  All damn gone.”  He chain-smoked, big bug eyes squinting.  I stroked my fur suit.  I always trusted people with eyes like his.  He trusted folks who bore Ensure to a starving man.

Popcorn wore a blinking anklet.  He said the government put it on him and told him he’d have to wear it until he went to jail.  Then the government stole the piping for his stills, and the government stole his “likker.”  They got him sentenced for non-payment of taxes on the likker.  But what else could he do?  Popcorn’s daddy lived from making moonshine, his daddy’s daddy, all them daddies.  Mountain folks put it in their cough syrup.  High demand in Appalachia.  No, says the Bully.  Told him he’d go to jail if he kept at it, and he did.  Popcorn told me he wasn’t going to jail, and he said it like he meant it.

I thought about my former officemates: pale, scared.  Homeless.  Like me.

When I left a few days later, I promised Popcorn I’d bring back more Ensure.  I couldn’t leave, though, not really.  I kept my goat suit on.  I slept on my own porch, close as I could be to the mountains.

Popcorn died later that week.  The government stole his money and his moonshine, but couldn’t steal the rubber piping he used to suffocate himself in his garage.  I got a phone call.  Popcorn had me on his list.  At Popcorn’s house, I hopped into the back of a pickup with twelve others, and we did our best to hang on while the pickup jumped around the mountain roads and lost the press—a movie about Popcorn had been released and suddenly he was a mainstream legend.  But he was particular about who could be there to bury him.  Only thirteen people stood in the field where he was buried, all toothless except me in my goat suit,  and passed a jar of moonshine.

I bought the shack next to Popcorn’s and moved in.  At first I was scared.  I missed TV and chain stores.  Pizza delivery.  But if I took up Popcorn’s work, the mountains would be my home.  I made like a goat Easter Bunny and carried my own apple batch of moonshine in my basket around to folks up in the mountains, and to tell the truth, they were nothing to be afraid of.

Mike sings with the radio. I consider the icicles that hug bare branches and also, my own frozen limbs. The sun, the drink, do nothing to warm them.  I am naked beneath my dress.

“He didn’t look like him,” Mike says, enamored of his thoughts. Can he remember himself as a young man, enamored of me?

This day brought sun when it should have brought rain, and we passed a secret bottle beside our sweet friend’s grave until the handshakes were easy.

“I hate your car,” I say, because I’m looking deliberately, again, at that open pack of Parliaments in the my-side door. The plastic is gnarled, bitten. I imagine Mike’s girl going at it with sharp animal teeth, insatiable, like I used to be.

I reach for Mike’s Camel and take a drag, our spittle like accidental kisses. I feel that familiar wet between my legs. My body warms to it.

We pull onto a snaking, gravel path. We used to play here, and lay here, once we got older.

We are out of the car and Mike grabs me close. I thrill at the touch of our skins.  He caresses my breast and then we are kissing. It is poison rather than spit we swap.

“Will you write this?” Mike asks.

“No,” I say, because I cannot summon the feel of a pen between my fingers, cannot imagine anything but this.

Mike spreads my legs. His touches are rough. He lays me flat, on my stomach, not my back.

“Will you write it?”

“I won’t,” I say.

Cold hearts crossed, there’ve been so many promises between us.

“Go ahead,” she says.

I enter the tunnel. The radio is talking about how ants keep herds of aphids, like humans keep herds of cows. Static breaks in and I let it; I like how the stations are different underground. The tunnel slopes up towards daylight. The radio returns.

The next morning I give her two singles.

“I have it today,” I tell her.

“Good, okay,” she says. I notice a tattoo on her neck. It says Sammy in an echo
script.

“Are you a Mom?” I ask. She is looking at the Corolla behind me. My diesel engine is loud, forcing me to shout.

“Are you a Mom?” I ask again. I realize it is not the dirty combustion keeping her from answering. She makes a dismissive flick with her hand toward the tunnel. I go. I want to communicate with chemicals, understand attraction and terror as smells. There is no algorithm here, no easy pattern of pheromones to follow.

By Wednesday she recognizes my car in her lane. Her eyebrows rise. I’ve made an impression. I hand her a twenty.

“Get EZ pass,” she tells me. She gives me eighteen dollars. I put the car in park and count them. She is offended. The car behind me beeps and she raises her hands, palms up toward God and hunches her shoulders. I go.

I stop by the toll plaza office on the way home from work. A drunken Ukrainian stands in front of me in line. He has seventy-five dollars worth of fines. He doesn’t understand how this happened.

“You blow through the toll without money on your transponder,” they tell him.

“Transponder?” he asks. They ask him to sit down and think about it. He sits and reeks.

I am given a piece of white plastic with Velcro on the back. I am given the commuter plan; I’m told that it saves me money.

“I got EZ pass,” I tell her. I point to the device and smile, squinting a little in the gaining light.

“Why are you here? Look”—she points to the fast moving purple lanes—“you don’t have to stop.” I don’t think she is really frustrated, just pretending. Her little feelers taste my head for signals. I taste hers. They tell me to push ahead.

“What is your name?” I ask.

“Toll booth five, shift two,” she answers.

I go into the tunnel. The static is harsher than usual. It is building up and my turbo diesel is slowing down. I stop. I count the missing tiles on the ceiling of the tunnel. The cars pile up behind me. I get out of my car and walk on the thin, elevated sidewalk. The walls are wet and sooty.

“Do you need a jump?” someone shouts.

“Get the hell back in your car, you idiot!” someone else shouts.

“I’m going to be late because of you!” say several voices.

“I need to give back my transponder,” I tell the elderly woman behind the wheel of a Civic. She looks worried.

I walk to the opening of the tunnel. I throw the transponder over the highway wall, in the direction of the EZ pass office.

“Okay,” I say and return to my car.

That was when I knew you loved us. Snake says he’s not so sure.

The Illustrated Book of Snake Care says that living with a reptile is a responsibility that can become an adventure. It also says that all creatures require the security of a routine. It was unsettling, waking up without you, staring at the blank spaces where you used to be.

Our initial reactions were irrational. We exfoliated frantically in a vain attempt to eliminate every shred of skin we’d worn before you left. This was Snake’s idea. He left hollow, papery shells of himself draped down the stairs like forgotten streamers. I exhausted three loofahs. Then, since our new skins were pink and raw, we spent a long, dark week curled up in the cold belly of our bathtub, only moving to twist the shower knob on and off. With each twist, the ancient pipes rattled behind the tiles like thousands of mice in wheels.

When I told Snake we’d better wait and see if you came home on your own–a wish at best, purely to pacify–he unhinged his jaws around a bar of moisturizing soap in desperate protest. It took an hour to detach him. Afterwards, I drank a whole bottle of cooking sherry and tortured myself by tracing and retracing the white spiral of the Vertigo poster you left behind. Ashamed, Snake wound himself into a tight coil beneath the radiator, doing his best to resemble an extension cord.

Those were dark days. I kept the patio blinds drawn so I wouldn’t have to picture you in the backyard, smiling kindly as you lift Snake over the greasy metal track of the screen door, his buttery baby scales glinting citronella yellow as he slithers into the cool absinthe lawn. You were so proud of him back then–slinging him across your shoulders like a scarf whenever you walked down to the gas station, inviting your friends over to marvel as he swallowed pinky mice, roaches, hard-boiled eggs. You probably don’t remember that. I don’t think you want to.

I think you should know that we’re done waiting. Snake says it’s time to go, and I agree. He’s convinced that if we open the toilet tank and climb inside, we can slither through the pipes out into the New Jersey public sewage system. He vows we could track you by scent and navigate the plumbing like a subway, possibly reappearing in your sink or garden hose.

Upon joyous discovery, you’ll gently fold Snake into your new lambskin attaché and tote us into the city streets, past bus stops, through museums and hot dog stands, and finally to your shiny new office building, which you’ll ignore, smiling. We’ll spend hours in Central Park, basking in the sun. We’ll browse ritzy department stores and let Snake slide luxuriously between stacks of silk shirts. In the evenings, we’ll dine on sushi and cannoli and filleted rats.

And in the end, when we’ve finally shed our last skin, I think we’d all fit in a regular-sized coffin, because we’re pretty small, and Snake’s pretty small. And then we could all turn to dust together. That’d be pretty nice.

Baby, we just want to know what changed.

My father, he’s an engine. Pour it in and watch him go. Sometimes he sputters instead of speaking. His back is broad, we’re building seats and “Oh shit” handles and stashing bags of gold. The bags have names in many languages. He doesn’t, in any, but he hauls from coast to coast, carving stinking gullies. He doesn’t hate, he’s just indifferent—”What’s a coast?” he grunts, en route to meet himself, smelling awful.

“Honey,” says my mother, frying songbirds. No seasonings. But he’s gone, he’s never not.

My sisters? Cancer cells. They’re taken. The adopted one’s a continent of smoke. She swirls, is single.

Blinking lights for brothers. They’re pretty and they know it, and they’re my mother’s favorites.

I’m on the roof because I like to try to see it all at once. My best friend, a cockroach, says to me: “You guys’ll be around forever.”

Not my brothers, I think, staring into the city. But me? So long as we progress. I say so to my friend: Progress. My landlady, who snoops, has snooped. She puffs herself up and rumbles: “Breathe!”

Instead, I unwrap my mother and eat my fingers: each one a chewy pill, my cousins. Birds with wilted beaks are dropping in the city. All the fish are small and hard. I hold my breath. When it lets go I cough and shudder fiercely.

This makes my landlady angry, the kind that’s sad and righteous and slightly pleased. She blushes—she can’t help that I’m hers. She can’t help that she also eats herself.

I wink at my best friend, but he’s on his back and dead and drying out.

My sisters slink between my pretty brothers. My throat glows, soaked in pill. Coughing harder, I trace my father’s fearless stinking tracks.

At the river, water raging against swollen banks, the guide cautioned against swimming, but Abby, after facing the threat of flash floods without flinching, felt she could conquer water, fear, anything.

When she yelled for help—the current sucking her under and then spitting her back to the top, washing her fifty yards down the bank, half the group running after her—Manuelo pulled her from the river. That night around the fire, after she’d coughed up more water than he thought could fit in a person’s lungs, Manuelo sat and listened to her talk about a white tunnel of light and her life flashing before her eyes—clichés, yes, she said, but true. Manuelo was credited with saving her from drowning and in his own short life, this was a pretty big accomplishment. He felt proud, but also uncomfortable with the details about the light, the fact that she said she had died and then he’d brought her back. In Albuquerque the next week, he was determined not to bring it up, but after a beer or two downtown, it was all he could talk about.

His mother Ayla heard the story, and in the studio she’d set up in Manuelo’s old bedroom when it was clear he would no longer live at home, she started on a new series of paintings. While she wanted to paint what she imagined the girl saw when she was about to die, about the objects a person might think of—an aging childhood swing set, a mother’s hand on the oven door warning, hot, a little black dog curled up on a floor mat—Ayla couldn’t paint them. Instead, she painted colorful abstractions of these images, a purple dog-like shape in the corner of a color-filled canvas, a series of faint, gray lines that could resemble a swing set, but not necessarily. Ayla used a long, slow process of layering washes, one color over the next that created a depth she’d never achieved before in her work.

Ayla called a few connections from her old art teacher to place the series of paintings in a small gallery on Canyon Road. Wanda, who lived behind the gallery, took an interest in the series. She came in almost every morning—her bulldog’s nylon leash in one hand and a half-full cup of coffee in the other—and examined the paintings, especially one that seemed divided into two overlapping worlds: one in which a girl floated in a river and the other, an abstract blend of purples and reds in great billowing shapes. It was called “Liminal Water.” The painting reminded her of a dream she had about childbirth a few years ago as she was beginning to experience the first hot flashes of menopause. Childbirth was something she’d never experienced firsthand, and the dream had left her wondering for weeks if she’d made a mistake with those two abortions in the 80s.

Her husband would be displeased if she bought another painting—their walls were already full and Wanda had a stack of Brazilian art in one of the spare bedrooms—but after a few weeks of visiting the painting, she bought it one morning with a crumpled check she pulled from the pocket of her jacket, placed there just in case. When it was delivered from the gallery later that day, Wanda propped the painting on the sofa, opened a bottle of Pinot Noir and sat with it. Before her husband arrived home, she slid it between two Brazilian paintings in the spare room.

At Wanda’s next party, a few co-workers came from Casa de la Luz where Wanda had recently started volunteering. Justine, the nine-to-five front desk girl, sat on the living room sofa drinking gin and tonics as fast as she could make them. At one point, she had three lined up neatly on the table next to her. People at the party were loud and animated—a characteristic that Wanda’s parties, in certain circles, were known for—and it was overwhelming for Justine, who felt too young and unsophisticated for the party.

There was a lot of talk about the painting that hung on the wall behind the sofa, a mishmash of colors and shapes that Justine was sure a six-year-old could reproduce, and then everyone circled around one woman who turned out to be the painter. When Wanda started telling a story about hiking in Mexico, Justine scooped up two gin and tonics, leaving behind a collection of empty glasses, and moved toward the courtyard. There were a few people outside and Justine sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette, taking alternate sips out of her two glasses.

Something about Santa Fe made her feel reckless and act differently: sitting alone at a party where she felt she did not quite belong was nothing to be ashamed of—it was only a great opportunity to get drunk and maybe say something inappropriate. She would love to be known as the girl who says inappropriate things. She heard someone—Wanda, the artist?—inside telling a story: it was about a girl who’d gone for a swim in a river, the water high, fast, the bank too wide. Justine liked the story until it turned out that the girl had been saved and had spouted all kinds of mystical things about almost dying. Justine thought that was such bullshit and she thought, for just a minute, about going inside and saying so.

My son is dreaming. He is not asleep, but not awake. The glassy sheen over his heavy-lidded eyes reflects everything—the firelight, the mantle above, my chair, my listless body. I am not dreaming. I am awake with the visions. I sit with the small, slithering, nameless things that lurk behind the bright backdrop of waking and dance free in dreams. And they are not asleep; they are not dreaming. They wait patiently, undeterred by any machination of man or god. They wait for me to follow them, like a spring lamb, to low ceilings and musty soil. All eyes and grim determination. They have secrets to tell. My wife must have been dreaming when she left. They know when you are dreaming.

The snow came fast and hard with the full moon and the fever on its heels. Now the sky is clear and blank with the new moon. The snow looks like iron in the starlight. My eyes are full of the snow, full of its weight, and the pines are silent. No bobwhite or winter finch sings in the damp and heavy quiet, and I wonder if I am sleeping. I wonder if the small things with their thousand eyes and dull teeth will know that I am sleeping. I say my son’s name softly once and then again. I am strong and so is the fever. I have had it for three days. I brought it home with me from the coal camp. My son is too young and weak. He is shivering and the eyes are shivering with him. He will go before me, because I am strong and he is dreaming.

In the light, the snow is dazzling, blinding. All is vapor and magnified sky. I can see the small, sidewinder-like trails through the drifts, and I know that I am to follow them. A fever tells you secrets and they are terrible and vivid. A fever is a small thing and it knows when you are dreaming.