I sit by a gas tank with an open flame in my hand. Drop it and everything explodes. Mara, my wife. Ex-wife, I guess. The only woman I ever loved. Stephen and Abigail, my two kids. Not even teenagers yet.
 
            For the record, today didn’t start this way. I didn’t roll out of bed, stretch my arms towards the sky, and decide, “Today I am going to kill my family.”
 
            Mara turns 40 today. We hadn’t seen each other in two months. Not atypical: my work keeps me busy and she called for a break to “make things fresh.” We’ve known each other 22 years and been married 15, so we’ve taken breaks before. I just always trusted we’d come back stronger.
 
            I wanted to surprise her. I knew she would be on the boat. Our boat, the one I bought. I wrote a little card. I bought a birthday cake: all chocolate, not too much icing. Her favorite. I bought her candles, too: a 4 and a 0. They must not make candles for adults. Or maybe they don’t sell them where I went. I drove to the pier and boarded the boat.
 
            Someone else was already on board. He faced the ocean with his back to me.
 
            His hand rested on Mara’s lower back.
 
            Her hair was cut shorter and dyed black instead of the usual blonde, but I recognized her. I never saw the guy before.
 
            I didn’t know what to say. I opened my mouth to start saying something, like “Happy birthday, Mara!” or “Nice to meet you, sir” or “Well, this is a fucking surprise, isn’t it?”
 
            They turned around. I hadn’t said anything yet, but in my nervousness I dropped the cake, icing down, on the deck. I didn’t mean to do that. I mean, I hate Mara with all my guts but I love her with all my heart and I want her to be happy and I wanted her to have the cake.
 
            “Daddy!” Abigail ran from the inside of the boat and rushed towards me. “Daddy, Daddy, can you stay for a long time this time?” I bent to a knee and hugged her and kissed her cheek. I knew in that moment I couldn’t, but how could I look my daughter in the eyes and tell her I was leaving again? Her smile faded from her lips and her eyes darkened. Always such a smart kid. Always picking up on things. She pecked me on the cheek. I rose, still holding the candles in one hand and Mara’s card in the other.
 
            “I, um … I guess I’ll just keep these,” I said, slipping the candles in my pocket. I handed Mara the card. “This is for you.”
 
            She hesitated, looking apologetically at me and the ruined cake. Her fingers fumbled with the envelope, tearing it as she opened it. She laughed slightly as she read the card: Sorry, I never did print that manual. Enjoy the cake! “Thank you,” she said. “I really like it.” I half-smiled at Mara and nodded once, avoiding eye contact with the mystery man. I looked at Abigail with an expression that I hope issued an apology because the words caught in my throat. I spun on my heels and walked onto the pier.
 
            I take the 0 candle out of my pocket. “This is what I must mean to you,” I mutter to myself, and I light it. I find myself wandering towards the gas tank.
 
            The manual I mentioned in the card. That’s one of Mara and my oldest inside jokes. It must have started something like this. We lay under the stars on our trip to Yellowstone, or somewhere.
            “I love it here,” she’d say.
            “Me too.”
            “Think we can do this when we have kids?”
            “No,” I’d say.
            “You do want kids, right?”
            “Of course.”
            “Then we’d better make a manual for the things we can’t do after kids. The All-Inclusive Manual for Life at 40.”
            When we’d go to a concert, we’d give each other a knowing glance: Put this in the manual of things we can’t do when we’re 40. We’d lean in to kiss each other in the back of a taxi at 3am because we can’t do that when we’re 40.
            These memories mean the world to me, but I wonder what they mean to her now. Does she cherish them, or are they all a 0? How long has that guy been around? Months? Years? Or is he new? Is he a 0?
            I sit by the gas tank. Just open my fingers. I never need to know.
 
            I wish I’d known more about the mid-30s manual. My manual, as I lived it, was to provide. Pay for grade school. Save for high school and college. Buy food, clothes, cars, the house. Put in the extra hours when the kids talk about vacations to afford this Holiday Mansion, the same boat I’m about to blow up and where Mara cheats on me. Is it cheating if she called for a break? If I missed it when she said it was over?
            Just open my fingers. I never need to know.
            Merely providing cost me a lot. I missed Abigail’s fifth birthday party. I missed most of Stephen’s first soccer season. It caused this. If I could do it over, I would choose to be present.
 
            If I cannot be present, I must provide. I shut the gas tank and run from the boat. I stand frozen for what seems like hours.
 
            The boat undocks and sets sail, a blip of something in the vast blue nothingness. This voyage marks Mara’s new beginning. Fireworks burst over the boat. Maybe I just imagine them.
 
            As for me? The candle has melted down. The wax from my new beginning congeals in my palm. I turn my back on the pier and face the city.
 
            I am still here. And I am ready.

Dealing with Theo was much different from treating her first patient. Her first patient was a wispy man named George who started seeing her after his involvement in a traffic incident.
 
George walked along a sidewalk towards his home, as he did most weekdays after work. His neighbor’s motorcycle was parked along the street, as it was most weekdays after work. And a school bus was taking kids back from extended day camp, as it did most weekdays as George was coming home from work. But, unlike most weekdays, the bus lost control. It hit the parked motorcycle head on, throwing it in the air and spinning it end-over-end near where George stood. George froze and sort of smiled at it. He thought this was the answer to his prayers. This was the day he would finally die. But the motorbike flew clear over his head and left him unscathed. His sort-of smile widened in bemusement. He slumped his shoulders and sulked forward as he resigned himself to the extension of his life, and in the same instant felt the bike’s kickstand breeze past the hairs on the back of his head and fly through a mailbox on the other side of the street.
 
If only he had just stayed still.
 
The emergency teams came shortly after. This time, George had stayed still, and Millie found him frozen on the sidewalk as she hopped out of the back of an ambulance. She always remembered how nervous she felt. After her years of nurse’s training, George was the first person she treated. Or, would have treated, if he had sustained any injuries. Millie did not see even a scratch on him and figured he was perfectly fine. But her over-anxiety and his stunned silence led to a hospital exam that proved Millie’s initial instincts correct.
 
George realized over the course of the night that the time had come to do something about his depression. He and Millie established a rapport as they talked. When he asked, she agreed to meet him once a week, on Tuesdays, from seven to eight in the evening, in one of the hospital’s usually-empty offices. Millie was thirty then and George was eighty-three, though his frail frame gave him the appearance of a man even older. She became the only person he felt he could share his story with and he confided in her as he would a peer. To him, her office had the warmth of a living room despite the bright walls and fluorescent lighting.
 
George had always been introverted and shy, worked hard but did not get ahead, found few friends and never married. He struggled with thoughts of worthlessness. Though untrue, a depressed and paranoid mind aims to believe the least pleasant realities. He felt no one cared for or listened to him. The latter was, strictly speaking, true. George grew up at a time when everyone physically did listen. In his teen years, people started shutting their ears off. Yes, they sacrificed music and movies and the benefits hearing comes with, but they escaped the unignorable tragedies of everyday life.
 
Those years saw the rise of a dystopian politic. Wars and bombings became common as people picked baseless fights over colors and creeds. Water became scarcer as the climate warmed and wars increased further still. People wanted to listen. People wanted to make changes. But they would listen as one party recounted the day’s grim facts and then as a different party refuted those facts and provided new ones of their own. No one could agree on what to believe or how to fix the problems. It became easier to give up, and so people did. They simply shut off their ears and found they rather preferred being deaf. They lived in their own bubbles and scraped by, hoping violence would not find them.
 
As a result, the empowered families used the distraction and confusion to horde and protect as much of the dwindling water supply as they could. Rumor had it they lived in a region called The Oasis, though no commoner could confirm or even reliably guess where this region was, if it even existed.
 
Because of all of this, George wanted to die for nearly the entirety of his adult life. But twenty-five years passed since his brush with death before it finally visited at the age of one hundred and eight. Millie thought it odd that death was reluctant to befriend a man who sometimes prayed for it and yet would pluck children away from the Earth as they screamed and waved their hands for just a drop of water to save them. It was because of George that Millie believed in God. Not the benevolent God that the authorities praised, but the sort of God that answered all prayers with a definite, sadistic “No”. The only way to get what you wanted from God was to convince Him (or Her, or It) that you really, sincerely did not want whatever you asked for.
 
Five years had gone by since George had passed away. Millie still thought about him most days and missed his mildness especially when she dealt with patients she did not like. Theo was such a patient. Or, at least, his friend Trynik was. Trynik was an athletic man in his forties who carried a cavalier condescension and treated all those around him as servants at best and children at worst. He was the kind of man who really, sincerely did not want to listen. Which is exactly why Millie knew God would help her to make someone listen.
 
Theo’s family hired Millie after his injury. Theo, since given his inherited opulence had no need for work, had been jousting with Trynik in the middle of a Thursday. The game became quite competitive and ended with Trynik lancing Theo through the abdomen. Some bystanders managed to slow his bleeding but his family immediately sought to hire the best wound-care specialist in the land.
 
In fact, Millie was not the best. Certainly she excelled at her career, but she knew two colleagues who possessed broader skill and deeper knowledge. Naturally, the family contacted these colleagues first. Both refused to serve. They resented the lifestyle of the idle rich, whose arrogant disregard of the rest of the world disgusted them. Children and young adults in poorer neighborhoods often died of dehydration; few lived to middle-age. Millie’s colleagues felt called to serve those troubled communities.
 
Millie shared those sentiments to a degree but would not let anyone suffer on account of politics. When she received the call her colleagues urged her not to go, pleaded with her to decline. She did not entertain the discussion and Theo’s family sent a limousine for her that day.
 
Except for the LEDs in the back of the limo, familiar scenery surrounded her journey. Grey, barren land stretched from the road to the horizon. The cloudy sky did not offer much in the way of comparison. Groups of people took shovels to the cracked ground, seeking streams of groundwater. Their sweat made their white cotton shirts almost see-through.
 
The bleak landscape did not change for the duration of her trip. She had heard rumors of Theo’s opulence, but started to doubt them as the town loomed closer. Dusty windows on crumbling buildings belied stories of luxury. She could see people shoveling at the ground, seemingly as parched as everyone else.
 
The limousine slowed near a group of shovelers. Millie heard them ask for ID and the drivers showed licenses and registration. Once satisfied, the shovelers stood aside and the limousine rolled through. The cracked ground at once came together and a cropped lawn appeared. Millie could see now that the group that admitted them were not shoveling. They stood in a semi-circle around the edge of the grass tapping the ground with their staffs, gesturing incantations, shielding their Eden from outside eyes.
 
Millie’s limo parked in front of a tall building she had seen on the horizon, though she noticed now the building was constructed of perfectly polished marble; she could not see any of the cracks she had seen from miles away. She marveled at the pristine sidewalks edged by manicured lawns and budding flowers. She started to fall to a knee to smell a rose (she had never seen one before!) but her drivers hoisted her by the arms and directed her past the fountain, through the entryway, and into an elevator.
 
Millie wished she could share with George what she saw. George’s generation only heard of disparity and greed before they stopped listening. Millie was actually seeing The Oasis. Her drivers, the magicians at the gate, Theo – all of these people subscribed to the concept that their wealth was owed them. They unashamedly gave themselves everything at the expense of innocent children starving and dying. Millie thought that if she carried the torch of the Lady with the Lamp, perhaps it would be best for the world to turn off the lights too.
 
The elevator doors opened. Two guards guided Millie through oak double-doors and down three marble steps into Theo’s loft. A burly man with short blond hair stood to meet Millie.
 
“Welcome, Millie. Trynik.” He paused his signing and extended his hand. She shook. “He’s this way. Hurry, he’s starting to fail.”
 
Theo shivered under a thin white blanket, a crimson circle highlighting the edges of his bandage. A heart rate monitor showed ominous indicators. He took shallow and infrequent breaths.
 
Trynik gave Millie a smug, expectant look. He had not been denied much in his life and now, even in a dire situation, Trynik knew Millie could make the improbable happen; he had all the money in the world, and he had overpaid for the result.
 
“You will save him, won’t you?” Trynik did not ask the question but stated it.
 
“I will try.”
 
Trynik glowered and walked to a winged chair in the corner of the room and sat, surveying Millie. She hooked up IV fluids to him and pulled away the bandage to reveal a gaping wound. She cleaned it and carefully began suturing him together.
 
After a few hours, the bleeding fully stopped. Although Theo never awoke his indicators improved and stablized. Millie knew that he would not wake for another day until his body recovered from the shock and from the seditives, but she thought his chances favorable.
 
Millie looked towards Trynik, who gave a contented smirk. She sat near Theo’s bed and looked out the window. The setting sun reflected red light off of a lake near the center of the town. Some men appeared to be fishing in it. Millie had never seen this much inland water in all of her life and nobody knelt down to drink it. The town had a surplus wasted solely on sport.
 
She felt a tap on her shoulder. “Will he survive the night?” Trynik signed. Millie paused before nodding her head once. “We have a room for you upstairs. You can rest there when you like.” She asked instead for a rollaway cot so that she could keep a vigil over the night.
 
She lay awake thinking of her colleagues’ pleas with her to stay in the town and refuse. She had been deaf to their reason, blind to reality. They sent a car so as not to send directions. No one she had met had ever spoken of The Oasis; she was sure Trynik would not let her be the first. She would live only as long as it took Theo to heal. They would silence Millie so the secret could never escape.
 
The night passed, and Theo remained moreorless stable. Trynik returned early the next morning, and Millie was already awake, if she had ever slept.
 
“How is he?” Millie stared, silent. Trynik repeated the question.
 
“I can save him, but under one condition.” Trynik’s smirk faded away from his face. He welcomed challenges but hated ceding power. “I will make him hear again.”
 
Trynik threw his head back and smiled. Millie’s blank expression remained unchanged. “You are here to serve, not to bargain.”
 
“I came offering my service, yes; not my life.”
 
Trynik smiled again and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a fountain pen and a leatherbound checkbook. He filled a check with Millie’s name, the date, and his signature, then sat next to her and proffered it to her. “Write whatever amount you like.”
 
She held the check in her hands for a few moments before handing the pen back to Trynik. She tore the check into eight pieces and threw the bits into the air. “A dead woman cannot be bribed.”
She removed a scalpel from her bag. She began cutting away Theo’s stitches. Trynik grabbed her arm and tried to wrest the instrument from her, but she spun towards him and shoved it near his throat. “You will see me die either way. Make this deal.”
 
Trynik put his hands in the air and backed away in surrender. He could have won in a fight, but he could not risk upsetting Millie if Theo’s condition worsened. He motioned for her to lower the scalpel, then walked towards Theo and placed his hands on his face. He gestured an incantation and waited, but Theo did not react. Even in his weakened state, his strength and will not to hear overmatched Trynik’s magic. Trynik motioned for Millie to join him. She gestured the incantation with him. Theo did not waken, but he grimaced and brought his hands towards his ears.
 
Trynik turned his back on Millie, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He left the room and did not return until the following morning, when Millie signalled to guards in the next room that Theo had awoken.
 
Two guards escorted Millie to the basement of the tower where she was tried for disobedience and attempted murder. Without any allowance for defense, she was directed to a waiting cell to await her sentence.
 
While Millie waited in her soundless, sightless room, Theo left the tower for fresh air. His mind struggled to place new sounds with familiar sights: wind rustling through grass, the splash in the lake as a fisherman cast his line. He heard something high-pitched, too, something he could hear in the distance but not see. As he limped towards the outskirts of the town he saw young children screaming in pain, digging at the ground for water. Flies gathered around a small body, sometimes landing unflinchingly on an open eye.
 
Theo had never seen this before and felt anger at the injustice. He stumbled to the center of town and retrieved a bucket of water before returning to the shoveling children. Their cries stopped, and they looked up in amazement at their hero. Even for a people that had not heard in generations, hope struck the sweetest chord anyone had ever heard.


​

It was only the three of us then. We were travelling tradesmen, but we had all we could have wanted. No one competed with us for food or shelter or clothing. Life was peaceful back then. Pure.
            A fire lighted our patch of desert. Only some sand, our blankets, and our trading bags. I watched the flames sparking towards the heavens, dancing upwards, and flickering into darkness. They seemed to light the stars. Javed sat across from me, cross-legged. His tight-fitting beard was framed by black hair cut just below his ears. He contemplated a private reverie and held a piece of blackened meat near his lips. We rarely knew his thoughts, but his reticence never bothered Freni or me.
            Freni cuddled beside me, her legs outstretching towards the fire, eyes gazing at the stars. Her red hair flowed to the sand and a smile played on her lips. I watched firelight twinkle in her gorgeous eyes.
            “Iskandar,” she whispered. That is the name I took back then. I leaned back until my eyes leveled with hers. I smiled as she asked, “Is there more food?”
            “Here, take mine. I’ve had my fill,” Javed grumbled. Freni leaned up to take it, thanked him, and leaned down once more to look at me. “I’ll unpack the tent.”
            Freni ran her hand over my chest and held my ruby necklace in her hand. She popped the last of the meat into her mouth, and with a half-smile pushed herself up. She skipped towards my trading bag, danced a pirouette near the fire, and hummed as she unfolded a piece of cloth.
            Always flitting this way and that. Always I watched her. Pretty.
            As soon as she’d finished, I collected stakes and a hammer from our bag. Javed held his own hammer, and I opened my palm to offer him a half-dozen stakes. He took them all in a manner that suggested he’d rather work alone. He preferred that, though it never seemed his kindnesses to Freni and me made him completely happy.
 
We left the solitude of that night’s patch of desert and walked into one of the surrounding town centers the next day, as was our custom. Javed, for all his silence, talked readily to merchants, and Freni, for all her carefree dancing around me, shied away from strangers – from the men’s lustful eyes, from cruel self-interest. Oh, no stranger admitted his feelings aloud, but behind pleasant words lived a secret that made liars of them all. And Freni talked only to people she trusted and locked herself onto me when new eyes looked on.
            Perhaps she accepted Javed only because he never spoke, and therefore never lied, and perhaps Javed spoke to strangers because he accepted their lies. He had secrets too, when at last he chose to share them.
            A solitary man came to our stall, owning nothing save a pouch of coins and cheap cloth on his back. He browsed our table, and his eyes lit up when he spied Freni and raised hopes of an instant attraction, a connection that might save him. He lifted a feeble hand, offering a halted greeting, and Freni, recognizing his manner, folded herself into my protective embrace. The man’s hand fell, his words stopped, and he looked quickly down at a table, then up at the impassive Javed. The man exchanged with him a few distracted words and some of his coins, and left with exactly what he needed but less than he wanted.
            Hectic days at a market place could discompose even Javed. On clement days when clouds shielded villagers from the sun, almost everyone nearby would come to stockpile meats and breads. Many times outside our own stall, men and women argued bitterly over the last loaf or the last slice of meat. Wounded and starving from a long journey, one man spent his diminished energy to yell at a sick-looking woman, who complained of her children’s hunger and the death of her husband, over his priority for the food that remained. Such arguments never ended rationally. Never was a compromise made or an understanding met, and even the cool-tempered Javed would raise his voice to prevent fights.
            Freni turned to me on such occasions. “I long for the night, Iskandar,” and I would draw her in close.
            “Sh. I know.”
            “These people are evil. Why can’t they love each other? Why can’t they share as we do?”
            “I don’t know, Freni.”
            “I love you.”
            “Sh. I know. I love you too.”
 
As years inexorably passed, Freni became ill. As her fever and cough worsened, Javed and I feared the worst, although we assured Freni she would recover. We gave her nearly all the water, and when she would accept food, let her eat most of our portions. When her appetite slackened in the last days, she refused even a morsel. On the morning of the day she died, she announced her readiness to leave. I told Javed, and we agreed to stay with her at the camp and not go into town to trade. Freni died just after noon.
            “Iskandar? Iskandar!” She pleaded with all the strength she had left, and I felt as though a knife ran through my side. I ran to her where she lay and squeezed her hand. I wanted to tell her everything would be fine, but I could not coax sound past the lump in my throat. Freni raised her free hand limply and let it fall upon the necklace on my chest. “I love you,” she murmured. She tugged on the necklace and brought my lips to hers. She pulled away to gasp for air, and it was her last deep breath.
            I buried my head in Freni’s hair. I wanted to say so many things to her, but no words formed. I held her tighter and tighter, hoping that my caress could convey my love for her and my gratitude for her company.
            Inevitably, I felt Freni’s slow exhale blow past my ear and heard no inhale. I felt her heart beat against my chest, but her pulse slowed and stopped. I wanted to see her spirit dance upwards and light the stars. The sun beat down, yet a chill wriggled down my spine.
            Javed put his hand on my shoulder, but I could not look at him. I do not know how long we stayed before he grabbed a shovel and chose a burial place safe from marauders. I asked him to mark the spot, for I wanted time alone with her. I removed my necklace and lifted her head but stopped: I wanted to engrave the necklace with our initials first. I whetted a knife and carved “I.F.” into the gold backing. Around her neck I hung my token. It did not glow nearly as brightly as her vibrant hair. I kissed her forehead and held her hand. We remained until sunset.
            “Iskandar.” Javed crouched by my side. I heard him force the shovel into the ground beside him. I slowly rose with tears streaming and left the scene for an indescribably long time.
 
Javed and I continued travelling and trading. Merchants mouthed pleasant-sounding lies about their sympathy. I was not sure how Freni would have reacted. I expected a hug that did not come, and its absence stung me.
            Javed and I still set up tents every night, and we still ate full meals, but the stars stopped twinkling and the fire no longer danced for me. I thought only of the darkness to which each spark inevitably surrendered. Javed continued brooding, and for the first months after Freni’s passing, I joined him.
            Javed broke the silence with a rasp. “You … You miss her, don’t you?”
            I looked him in the eye. “Yes,” I whispered. Silence.
            “I wish I did.” I did not quite know what he meant. “She made you feel alive, didn’t she?”
            Over those past few months, it is true, I had not had much feeling for anything; nothing seemed to matter as much since she had gone.
            “I suppose she did. Yes. She did.”
            “I wish I felt something like that. The best things are worth missing, I think.” Again a silence, then, “I do not know if care about the memories of an old man, but I am sure you remember the day you travelled into the city alone, and I stayed behind with Freni? I cannot remember what you were intending to do … ”
            “I had to take one of the bags to be mended,” I smiled, remembering Freni’s bright hair and warm smile on the morning I bid them both good-bye.
            “That’s right. I remember now. I enjoyed her company that day, even though I’m sure she found me frightful.” He chuckled.
            “No, no; I am sure not! I am sure she found you … reliable.”
            “No need to be gentle. I was silent until lunchtime. Surprise! Then I figured I had known her for a long time, and although I’d been next to you and her the entire time I always felt solitary. I decided I would tell her.”
            “What?”
       “About everything. About her and you, and how I wish I could confide in someone. And how I hate the lying merchants as much as she does, even though I deal with them. And how I hate the lusting men, both for her sake and because no woman ever looks at me like that. No one needs me, not even you, Iskandar, and I daresay you’re the best friend I have.”
            His words shocked me. I valued qualities of his which the merchants left unnoticed. His silence conveyed a certain arrogance to many, but Freni and I knew him to be humble and generous. “No, Javed; I do need you!” I kept from him that I mourned alone until that night, and would have healed alone without his talk.
            He averted his gaze and smiled wryly. “I am too quiet to have found someone to love me, Isk. And now I’m an old man, and it’s far too late.”
            I did not reply, and he finished his food in silence. When he rose, his shoulders seemed to stoop more than usual, and he fumbled with his hammer while erecting his tent as though he had lost the dexterity of his youth. He was indeed aging.
            I finished my food and arose as sprightly as I always had and built my tent with an inexhaustible deftness.
 
We continued our trading business for the next several months. Merchants offered sympathy less often, and although I thought of Freni, my recollections stopped producing tears. Javed and I worked and ate in silence. I regarded him as having a certain dignity, and I  wanted to bestow something upon the man who would never have anything.
            In the course of things, Javed grew ill and, in the course of things, passed on to Freni. I buried the man who had lost his life – the only gift he ever had – and taught me what it was to have no one. Impossible.
           
I, older than both of those departed, resigned myself to the fact my time was coming. I stayed in an isolated part of the desert and waited for days, months. But illness did not plague me. Youth did not abandon me. I came to the devastating realization I could not die. I wandered for I know not how long. Was I cursed? Blessed? Was there a purpose in my immortality?
 
For what I think was the next thousand years, I wandered from village to village, city to city, continent to continent. I remained unmarried, but I regret there were stretches of decades when I spared not a thought for my first true love or my life of trade with Javed. The cause of my immortality lay beyond my comprehension, and my life became unbearable, but eventually my thoughts belonged to them, and I longed to return to that time. Might seeing them, somehow, allow a conclusion, if not for my strange life, at least for my grief?
 
After a series of occupations, I found myself working as an archaeologist, and my university commissioned me, by coincidence, to excavate the desert I had once traded in.
            “Frank,” called Turner, using my name of my current lifetime, “take these.” The anthropology head slapped a plane ticket on my desk. “You fly out tomorrow. We found another burial ground out there.” My heart beat quickly, and I thanked him, a strange curiosity overtaking me. Perhaps my time for reconciliation had come.
            On arrival, Sue nearly ran me down at the runway. “Frank, Frank, you have to come over! You won’t believe what we found – the way these people were buried, the sand mummified them. We have two-thousand-year-old people perfectly preserved.” I almost did not want to go. I was scared she was there. I was scared she was not.
 
I looked through about fifteen graves before I saw the woman with red hair. Her eyes were gone, the skin on her face was cracked, her nose pinched, her neck contracted. It could have been her, it could – but what was the amulet on her neck?
            The ruby necklace was too much of a coincidence. I felt as though someone grabbed my shoulder, forced my knees into the sand beside her, and my hand onto the necklace. I turned it over, and saw the unmistakable “I.F.”, though the letters were now outlined in greenish rust. I whispered her name.
            “What’s that?” Sue asked.
            “Nothing.”
            “Wow, she is the prettiest one I’ve seen here so far. Dr. Turner is gonna be stoked. He would have been content with a bit of research, but we can mount an entire exhibit with the stuff we found.”
            I had no words. I was thankful Sue left and no response was required.       
 
We brought Freni along with a group of “treasures” on the flight back with us. I resented the idea of presenting her and the others at an exhibit for careless outsiders, those self-interested merchants of History. And poor Freni. She hated strangers, and             I felt duty-bound to protect her from them, although I had no power to stop the exhibition from going forward.
            The exhibit premiered sometime in March, and I made a point of showing up early to miss not a moment of the night’s odd eulogy. I expected to be the only one to care. I arrived before anyone except Turner, who stood guarding the entrance from public view.
            “May I go in?”
            “Yeah, Frank, go ’head. Good work on this. You’ll make me look good in front of the board again this year. Oh, take this, before I forget.” He removed a few pages from his briefcase and handed them to me. “These are lab results for a test that Sue ran on some of the fragments found in an adjacent burial site. I need you to look at these tables tonight – your expertise is invaluable, and we’re gonna be grilled in tomorrow’s meeting.”
            I accepted the packet. Probably I would look at it, but I needed to go inside to protect Freni, at least symbolically, from the greedy eyes of indifferent strangers.
 
I walked to where she lay at the end of the exhibit, this portal through my past. I sat on a bench across from the display case and stared at her profile. I had written the sign that lay on the glass above her:
            Notice the expensive silk dress, blouse, and robe, as well as the ruby necklace. This woman had status and wealth, and her survivors wanted her remembered. Here lies a woman well loved.
            A middle-aged woman was first to walk by, and intoned the words on the sign with an unfittingly haughty air. She turned to her family and asked a boy, “Isn’t she beautiful?” Not knowing what else to do, he shook his head in agreement. Neither cared for the person, just for her red hair, her pristinely preserved face, her clothing.
            A stream of a thousand people passed through, cooing in amazement, or shrugging indifferently, or sometimes ignoring her. At the very end, a young man passed through, and he and I were alone with her. He stood and read the sign and looked down at her face.
            “‘A woman well loved.’ Hm. That’s sad. Who loved you? What became of them? What’s your name? What’s your story?” He muttered these things over a period of minutes, all under his breath. “You’re not just an exhibit, are you? I’m sorry.” He rose, and noticed me. He gave a quick nod, and apologized for thinking himself alone. I nodded in reply, and he left, leaving Freni and me alone.
            “I’m sorry, Freni, but at least they’re not all liars, hm?” How I wanted her to face me, to lift her arms and embrace me, to kiss me. “I’m sorry about the others, Freni. ‘I love you.’ Sh. I know. I love you too.”
            Finally I turned my back and slowly crossed to the exit. I needed no further reminder of what I had always carried with me. A mark, a yearning. A stamp on my soul of a time I could never return to.
            Snow piled near the street, yet a warm breeze rippled my hair. Was I imagining? I closed my eyes and I heard her breath. I knew her touch. I felt her kiss. At last.
            I was home.

but I'm scrolling through pages
and pages of my friends' tripe
            a shopped photo of a repulsive homemade omelet
            a muddled political rant
            an update about a vacation I don't care about from a couple I forget having met
and then, like a shark too smart to fall for the bait but longing to be caught,
I'm clicking links of vapid headlines not worth recounting,
desperate to experience anything besides swimming another lap in the same lonely circle
when I inevitably find myself coming back to photos of us
            here, with your windblown hair whipping my face
            here, with your younger face nuzzled against mine --
I can still feel your touch when I see you here, flying towards me at the speed of light
though we will never see each other in a thousand years.

I'd rather be outside
sitting with you on the ledge of that castle
            wherever that was
than stumbling through the graveyard of our lives
            wherever this is.
           

My friend Shane and I have been working on a fun, comedic novella for the past few months, and we're nearing completion! Shane and I met in Ireland a few years ago, and we've been collaborating on this book from opposite sides of the pond since New Year's.

This book cover is but a draft, but we thought it was about time to spread the word of our story about a writing group that (kind of) saves the world from aliens.

We'll be posting more updates soon!

Here is a song I am about to finish.

I will begin at the end, but the end is much like the beginning. Things have a way of coming full circle: from dust we were born, and into dust we shall return; from nothingness the universe was created, and into nothingness it shall someday dissolve.

So here I am, for now, breeze stroking my face and oceans rumbling beneath. Pigeons roost in the crags of the cliff or cruise seamlessly through the air. The sunlight is warm as it spills out from behind a cloud.

I feel free because this is where I belong, because the Earth is my mother and she understands me. Every atom in me swam in that ocean before coming together to make me. And today I will give myself back to her, and she will accept and caress me until she too breaks apart in a billion years.

I do not feel sad about this. I have made this choice. Everything ends; that is inevitable. Possibly it is sad that everything will die, but it is not sad that this is my time.

A wise man once said that death is the great equalizer, only the way we die makes us unique. My death is an expression. It is the pain from a punch to the gut and the ecstasy of a lover’s kiss.

It tells a story I have told myself often enough, but every storyteller needs an audience. This story is not told in a traditional sense. There is no silver screen, no stage, no lights, no music, no actors, no script. The set is my apartment room and the props are my possessions: photographs and trinkets amassed over a quarter-lifetime.

I can imagine the way my room looks. Before this morning, I barely left the room except for food and such. Besides that, the door was always locked and windows always drawn. Today when I opened my room, I saw light from Mrs. Riordan’s room creep out below her front door. She had lived in that same room since I moved in, and when I introduced myself to her that first day, she seemed nice enough but somehow uninterested. All she did was stare as if I had to say more than my name to be welcomed. I was taller and stronger, but I froze up anyway. It wasn’t her fault, but maybe that’s what made me realize I was more comfortable alone. I never knew what to say, and I could not bring myself to say goodbye to her except by waving.

My front door and windows are wide open now. Pictures and journals are displayed on my living room coffee table. I made the rest easy for the movers. Lamps are boxed, clothing and small furniture all packed. I want people to focus on the highlights of my life.

There was an old, framed caricature hanging on my wall. I had debated throwing it away for years, so it spent several days lying face down under my couch until I longed to see it on the wall once more. So then I hung it up yet again, and hated the sight of it, so I removed it. This went on several months, up and down, up and down, until I compromised. I hated looking at it, but I needed to know that I still had it and would always remember it. I laid it on my couch, covered it with canvas, and taped it. But the canvas pieces were too small, so I covered the rest of the damned thing with tape. It was sloppy, but it did the trick. When I could not see the image anymore, I hung it up for a last time. I still thought about it frequently, but the covering pleased me. The memories that image conjured worried me less, became a little less present in my head.

The caricature had been hanging like that for several years before last night, but of course everything dies. The tape gave out sooner than expected. The canvas layers started peeling back, and the image revealed itself once more.

I know I could have bought more tape or a bigger piece of canvas but I didn’t bother. I don’t think I wanted to. I could have tried the hiding trick again, but my failures couldn’t be contained by canvas or tape or by anything. I don’t belong, and this was failure’s way of telling me the time had come.

Last night I opened the blinds for the first time in – I can’t even remember how long. Street lights glistened off blacktop below, wet from what must have been a drizzle. There was no one on the street, but then I didn’t know how late it was.

I crossed over to the caricature and grabbed the peeling end of the tape. I yanked it, and the corner of tape came off. I tore off a piece of the canvas, but too violently. The drawing slipped off the wall, and an edge of the plastic frame smashed against the wood floor and shattered the glass. The paper was still intact, but I was furious, not at the dying tape or peeling canvas, but at my carelessness.

The caricature of a couple peered through the shards. A girl with curly brown hair and accentuated gap teeth grinned. She had her arm around me – some weird looking kid with clunky glasses and a humongous nose. I guess I’m not that gawky in real life. After all, it was just a caricature from a carnival booth. But so was her arm around me. I remember it, but it must not have been that sincere; we got close, and then said maybe fifteen words to each other after that. I hate that caricature of Rachel and me. It stirs up too many memories. I stormed over to the window to take my eyes away. The street light across the way had burned out since I last saw it, but maybe I imagined it. The Earth is such a lightless place at night.

Rejection became the norm after Rachel left, and no one filled the emptiness. I had two other close friends, but they moved away for work. There is one photo lying on the coffee table of a childhood friend who was killed by some punks from the city. The killers were never found.

I knew him better than Rachel, but she opened my eyes to things I never would have noticed. The wonder of a sunset’s warm farewell; the magnificence of a bluebird’s caw, barely audible overhead; the beauty of a purple flower swaying in a breeze, as the one at my feet is doing now.

I remember saying goodbye to her and watching the train round the bend out of sight. The world she had showed off lost its magic, and the caricature became only a reminder of the world I want to give myself back to.

Sartre writes that hell is other people. I think that hell is made up of the wrong people and heaven is made up of the right people. I don’t have friends from either side. And now I’m looking at the sea ripple far below me. This is it.

I understand my time has come. I do not resent it. Some people find comfort here; others do not. I wonder how people do find comfort here. I wonder how my life would have been different if I had left the doors of my apartment open all the time and tried to make at least one connection. Memories I could not revisit tortured me and kept me from even wanting to try.

Would a life with the windows open have given me more will to go on? Or would I have thrown my life out of it sooner?

I almost wish someone had knocked on the door or pried my window open, had kept a lookout for his fellow man. I want to blame the negligent for everything. But I have only myself to blame for this fall.

And anyway, how many will even linger in the room I left open? People will come and go, glance every which way, leave their own messes and never really understand what I left for them. Rain will pour through the windows and puddle near the door, giving life to mildew in the carpets and mold on the walls. People who come after a downpour never stay long. Wind will destroy the roof, and snow will enter easily; floors rot, walls crumble, foundations collapse; furniture breaks, mirrors crack; photos fade, journals wash out.

Mrs. Riordan will live on that floor for the rest of her long life and never even enter my room. She had no connection with me during my life and she won’t have one after it. And when the next tenants inevitably move in, and if they trouble to ask about the man who used to live there, she will shake her head and mutter, “He was A Most Peculiar Man.”

A brown hood cloaked the man’s face, shielding his profile from unwanted eyes as he paced through a park. A fountain stood under a canopy of maple leaves. Its trickling water brought him solace as he approached.

            Two businessmen bustled past. Their briefcases swung by their sides as they discussed a matter in urgent tones. The chaos of northern city life permeated the calm of even this place secluded from honking cars on busy streets.

            The man turned back to the fountain. Although its stream appeared constant, he heard the trickle slacken to drips, then stop. The wind sang like a piccolo, its sweet tune overwhelming his senses. He shook as he gazed around him. He noticed a child near the fountain skipping, a woman in a hat and sundress laughing. To him their joy was silent.

            The wind intensified, howling a dread through the maple leaves. The man decided to escape and leave this behind. He ran from the park, accidentally nudging a passerby on the street. He muttered an apology but heard no words leave his mouth. The passerby glared but continued. The man bowed his head and began his trek, eager to escape the chaos of northern city life and leave his urban apartment behind forever.

A cottage now stood not fifty meters from him. He had walked weeks to reach this place. A frayed duffle filled with clothing and toiletries hung from his shoulder. He snorted as he climbed the stone steps. He had heard it said that folks go crazy within weeks of having no human contact, but he knew this rule did not apply. Solitude suited him – it always had.

He put a key in the latch and turned the rusted knob. The small door groaned in complaint but yielded after a shove.

“The place is in poor repair. No one’s been there in ten years,” he remembered the landlord saying a month earlier, his eyes veiled by a wide-brimmed cap as he proffered the key. The man recalled the quiet of the landlord’s office. Sparse lighting illuminated peeling paint. Wind could not enter this room. “Farming is a thing of the past ’round there. Folks packed up, moved up here to the North.”

“I hate it. The North,” the man replied. The North, home to people who focus only on their cell phones and laptops, connected at once with everything and therefore nothing, thinking skyscrapers and smog an Eden.

A rustic couch with torn cushions sat next to a dusty fireplace. He threw his duffle on a wicker chair near the door and flicked his hood from his face. A worn rug stretched from the middle of the room to the kitchen sink, above which sunlight leaked through a cracked window. He noticed a turn in the wall to the right of the kitchen sink. He walked towards the space and peered into the dining room.

Two children, perhaps brother and sister, sat upright at a small table. He stumbled back. The girl hovered over a small piece of paper she had drawn on, but the boy gazed at him with dulled eyes belying his youth.

“This is my house,” the man asserted, trying to appear commanding but sounding as if he were reminding himself of a remembered fact. The girl did not flinch, and the boy continued to stare. “Sorry, I … I’m not angry.” No movement. “I’m Ethan.” Still no movement. “Help. Can I help?” He advanced to their table and knelt.

The children could not have been more than eight, by his estimation, and the girl looked younger, perhaps six. He studied their faces as the girl’s eyes met his.

Ethan noticed a scar running horizontally across the girl’s left forearm. It looked as though a blade had sliced her, but only her lined face admitted pain. Their reticence reminded him of his own. He remembered sitting on the edge of his bed at their age, blood streaming from his forehead one of the nights when his father indulged. Those nights became more frequent after his mother skipped town and money got tight, and he forgot what it was not to feel pain and gave up on useless tears.

“What’s your name?” Ethan asked the boy. The boy tried opening his mouth, but stopped, clutching a laceration spreading beneath his jaw. He grabbed a paper card from his sister and scrawled four letters on its blank side with red crayon: N-E-M-O.

“Nemo?” Ethan asked. The boy grimaced as he nodded. “And your name?” he asked the girl, who looked at her wounded arm and back at Ethan, who repeated the question. Nemo took his crayon again and underlined his name, indicating she shared his name, the name of the Nameless, the No Ones, children abandoned and forgotten, as he was.

“You cannot stay here,” Ethan said. “I know who you are. I am one of you. I do not know how to help you – or myself.” The children bowed their heads, and Ethan bowed his. “Do you come from a house nearby?” Ethan had focused only on his cottage through the narrow opening of his hood, and did not attempt to look for any other place during his journey. The children’s head stayed bowed. Promising to find help, Ethan went outside.

The wind greeted him with its sweet tune as he looked beyond his cottage. A mile opposite the direction he had come lay a cottage like his, perhaps a little bigger, with a farmhand working its cornfield. At least, it looked like a worker, but he could not be sure at this distance. It may have been just a dried cornstalk, but the figure looked human. He would walk there, ask for help, though he resented the thought of meeting neighbors.

“No one’s been there in ten years,” he recalled the landlord saying. “Abandoned, all the locals say. Last folks there was a broken family.” The landlord’s baritone lowered. “Mother left. Drunken father.” He grunted in recognition as Ethan shifted his feet. “We know, don’t we?” Ethan walked back inside the kitchen. “And two kids.” Ethan reached his silent companions.

Rotting ligaments made a porch swing of the boy’s detached lower jaw while the girl’s detached forearm sprawled over the middle of the table, pinning down the card.

He shuddered while retreating toward the door, grabbing his duffle, leaving the door open behind him. The wind blared a crescendo from piccolo to flute to violin to cello to trumpet and ceased.

Silence.

He reached for his hood but dropped his hands, the better to behold the cottage, its door squealing on abused hinges. A tear formed as he crumpled to the ground. He pictured the fountain in the park where children yelped, women laughed, leather shoes scuffled along crowded sidewalks. He heard an infant’s wail, or perhaps his own. He lay between the pointless comfort of urban life and the escape of this desolation, his soul torn by the two.

The sun strikes a man-made world. Car horns
scream like frightful armies and buildings
jut like mountains with God’s natural ones
destroyed. Animals from different continents
claw at bricks and nets and glass, searching
for familiar homes while
children poke and prod
and gape and guffaw, for
they have all they want. The earth
quakes with dams man fills too full. When the sun
sets, man lights his own.
Halogen bulbs and street lamps
pollute the nighttime sky.

Yet in the center of this mess, the sun beams over the last perfect river.
Lush skyscraping trees shade wildlife on the bank.
A solitary man wades, fighting the insistent current.
With eyes closed, he repulses like a dual-poled magnet the chaos just beyond.
He furrows his brow and solemnly pleads to God to reverse the sacred current and
    renew His sacred world.
The man opens fervent eyes.

Just beyond, smoke
erupts from concrete volcanoes which man constructed in dirt. Soot
clouds the sky and covers cars, buildings, zoos. Lights
quit. Streets
darken. Stars begin to shine,
but the solitary man
watches as the smog
obliterates his sun.
His river no longer sparkles but turns an ominous gray.
His tears ignite with rage and join the river in its trail, while behind him
blare angry horns and laughing kids and desperate animals.
The man cried to God: Was peace but an ideal scratched in sand? But as the flood
    came, he knew
At least, at last, He had seized man’s power.