Short Story: “A Dog’s Faith”

Note: This story is written, in a strictly limited way, from the point of view of a character who is being a bad friend to somebody in a sensitive situation (questioning one’s gender identity). Due to the writing style, the narration reflects this character’s viewpoints rather than my own. I feel the need to clarify this from the get-go because I know that there are people who find my own approach to issues of sexuality and gender validating or even inspiring, and I do not want to create a nasty surprise or the appearance of betrayal as these readers encounter Hayley Weingarten’s less-than-generous behavior around those topics.

1. 

Hayley Weingarten secretly liked to think of herself as a good person, secretly because she did not want to be thought of as the sort of person who self-identified as a good person. She was sixteen and had never done anything particularly wrong in her life, unlike some. She went to church and youth group, she did well in school, and her classmates liked her; one of the “popular crowd,” she was nevertheless spiritually and culturally out of step with the rest of that group. She never had to be told to take Buster for a walk; only seldom did she have to be told to sweep the kitchen before going to bed or to cook dinner with Dad every Tuesday and Friday.

            Her twin sister Bethany was in the Abstinence Club. Bethany was in fact abstinent as far as Hayley knew. There were those in the Abstinence Club who weren’t—Hayley could think of three pregnancies that she knew of, one for each year she had been in high school so far. The first girl had had an abortion because her parents told her she was “the exception that proved the rule”; the second girl had miscarried relatively early in the going but still told the school about it and damn the opprobrium (Hayley respected her for it); the third girl was going to have her baby any day now and had dealt with all sorts of horrifying social brutality ever since the beginning of the school year (Hayley loved her for it). She supposed this abysmal track record was less because the purity culture people were uniquely hypocritical and more because being in the club put a target on your back for school lotharios like Ryan Rappaport and Jacen Calvert. Hayley had herself kissed Ryan Rappaport at a party once, but nothing more had come of it and the next week she had stomped on his foot for reading her notes over her shoulder in math class.

            Hayley’s pastor, Pastor Dave, liked the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector and brought it up at least once every couple of months since the congregation had voted to secede from the Disciples of Christ and thus from having to use the Revised Common Lectionary. Every time Pastor Dave brought up this parable, Hayley felt a thrill of uncertainty about her life. She liked feeling these thrills more than she liked the glib certainties of her time outside of church. This was part of the reason why she was so punctilious about getting to church every week.

            One time Hayley and her best friend, Charlotte Rice (whom some called “Charizard,” much to her delight), went to the Great Escape and Splashwater Kingdom with Charlotte’s goth cousin from the city Amelia Greenberg. Amelia wore this bizarre bathing suit with strips zigzagging all up and down her sides. Hayley spent half the day being concerned about Amelia’s tan lines and the other half racking her brain trying to figure out why Amelia’s suit came across as lewder than her own even though it covered more. “Have some of the Living Water, Charizard,” Hayley said to Charlotte, splashing her in the lazy river. Amelia, whose mother was something called a baalat teshuva, ignored her.

            Another time one of Amelia’s goth friends, Gwendolyn Fisher, stayed over with Amelia at Charlotte’s house and invited Hayley over to watch something called Crimson Peak. Hayley kept wondering what Pastor Dave would think of the movie if he were here with them, but she enjoyed it anyway.

            And still another time, Hayley and her other best friend, Lara Fielding, who was a senior, went on a medium-to-long-distance car journey to an abandoned insane asylum (by this point Hayley had started to suspect that Amelia Greenberg was rubbing off on her). They had only just gotten there when an alarm on Hayley’s phone went off and reminded her that she had to hightail it back home so she could take Buster to the vet for his regular checkup. When she eventually got him to the vet, about five minutes late, the news was not to Buster’s advantage.

            “Buster has liver failure and he has three weeks to live,” said Dr. Chandler.

            “Liver failure isn’t necessarily fatal for dogs, though, is it?” asked Hayley, trying not to freak. “I’ve seen special dog food for such dogs as this at Wegman’s.”

            “I’m sorry that you have to be here to hear this news by yourself, Hayley, but, while it wouldn’t have been fatal if we’d caught it sooner, the timing here seems to have been incredibly bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if Buster’s problems had started within a week or two after his last checkup. If we’d rescheduled that one to be even slightly later, I probably would have been able to catch it in time. As it is…” Dr. Chandler drummed the table gently with her callused fingers. “All I can say is keep him comfortable. If you want to make another appointment to have him put to sleep in a couple of weeks, then, I mean, be my guest, but you don’t have to; if you don’t let him overextend himself he could be reasonably comfortable until close to the end.”

            “I’d rather he die at home, thank you,” said Hayley as politely as she could muster.

            When she got home, she went straight up to her room without telling Mom, Dad, or either of her siblings what was the matter. Her younger brother Josh found her up there when he went to check on her halfway through dinner, over two hours later. She had her fingers knotted in Buster’s tangled fur and her head resting on his big belly, listening to his breathing.

            “We’ll leave a pork chop in the fridge for you if you want to heat it up later,” Josh said gently.

            “Thanks.”

            “Do you want me to leave this light on or…?”

            “No. Turn it off, please. Thanks.”

            Josh turned out the light and left the room. He left the door open the tiniest crack. By eight-thirty Hayley was sound asleep.

            She woke up to seventeen text messages from Lara. The first said:

Lara YESTERDAY 8:55 PM: Hayley, I don’t mean to freak you out but I’ve been giving this some thought for a few months now and I think I might be trans.

Hayley couldn’t deal with this right now. She skimmed through the rest. Lara clearly need help and/or support, and she certainly did not want to leave such an important suspicion to the tender mercies of Pastor Dave, but dealing with Buster was going to be enough of an emotional lift for her for at least the next month or two.

            Never having been sure what exactly to make of “the trans issue” (Hayley thought of all controversial subjects as “the X issue” regardless of whom she knew personally whom they affected), she noted the time—a little before five—and sent Lara one text in response before going back to sleep.

Hayley TODAY 4:52 AM: Not that I don’t sympathize, but is there any particular reason you didn’t bring this up on the road trip?

The possibility that Lara had just started thinking about this since midafternoon yesterday did occur to Hayley, but she would rather not entertain the possibility because she didn’t like to think of Lara lying to her about something like this.

            About three hours after this, her parents came and woke her up. Buster by this point could tell that Hayley was upset, and had started intermittently licking her hand, warm comfort in the half-sleep of morning. She held on to him in a world where there was no Lara and no liver failure. It had been less than a day and already her collapse was almost entire. If she was lucky this meant that she would bounce back from it faster than usual too.

            “Hayley, honey, wake up,” Mom said, sympathetically but reproachfully. “It’s time for church. –and then maybe you can tell us what’s wrong?”

            “Yeah,” Hayley grunted. She got up and pulled off yesterday’s clothes as soon as Mom closed the door. She had not showered, nor had she changed into her nightclothes, nor had she brushed her teeth, nor had she had anything to eat since lunch yesterday. She hoped church would cheer her up at least a little, but she did not think so, and she felt bad for hoping so; that was not what church was for.

            Church did in fact cheer her up at least a little; the music was a little more ceremonious than usual, for one thing. Hayley had a private taste for the rote and ritualized that she could normally only feed on Sundays where she visited the black Baptist church two towns over with her friend Amanda Harwell, but today the music ministry had sprung for “When I survey the wondrous Cross” and “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” so she could get some of it right here at home. The sermon was on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, which had always given Hayley a spine-tingling feeling, a feeling that she had only just recently started to like. She guessed Amelia Greenberg really was rubbing off on her.

            For the rest of the day she did in fact hang out with Lara. Lara, apparently, had taken Hayley on the road trip partially in order to talk about this with her; she had been hoping that Hayley would come up with some sort of Christian rationale for putting her concerns and questions to rest. When Hayley had had to hurry home, though, Lara had driven around for a while by herself and then, looking for some more information on her phone, had decided that there was more to this than she had thought or than she had wanted Hayley to tell her that there was. She had been alarmed, almost frightened, and had decided to tell Hayley before anybody else because she thought that, after the day that they had spent together and after Lara’s own ulterior motives for that day, Hayley deserved to know. She had texted Hayley at around the same time in the evening that she normally did, and had freaked out after not getting a response and kept texting her until she gave up for the evening.

            Such was Lara’s account. Hayley was inclined to take her word for it and apologized for not being there to help her through this. She told her about Buster, but Lara still seemed hurt.

            “Hasn’t Buster been having health problems for a while now?”
            “Yes, but you…when your pet gets a death sentence, you don’t just walk it off just because the pet was already sick or old.”

            Lara looked like she was about to shoot back some rejoinder but instead she let her hands fall to her sides and said “I know. I’m sorry.”

            “Anyway,” said Hayley, as businesslike as she could, “all I feel like I can say for right now is that if you think there’s something to this then it’s totally not my place to contradict you, but, like, I think you might want to wait a little while before making some sort of sudden move here. Because your thoughts here about this, about the likelihood of this, changed pretty radically during one day.”

            “I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. I thought I told you so.”

            “Yes, but had you been going back and forth on it?”

            “Not really. I was just going back and forth on it today.”

            Hayley racked her brains for something that she could say that would be of help. What she came out with was an unbearable cliché but she said it anyway. “‘I praise you,’” she said, “‘for I am wonderfully and fearfully made.’”

            “Thanks,” Lara said unironically after a few seconds of silence. “Can you maybe go ahead and think through how you feel about this a little more before we talk about it again?”

            “Of course I can,” said Hayley, and squeezed Lara’s hand, feeling for a split second firmer and more stable than she was.

2.

Hayley’s first line of attack was talking to her biology teacher, Mrs. Ryder. Mrs. Ryder was about thirty, and Hayley guessed that she counted as “a Millennial,” but she had her life much more together than the media kept bloviating that people that age did or were supposed to. Until late last school year she had been Miss McCarthy; her then-boyfriend and now husband was somebody named Charles who was an accountant in one of the small cities to the north. She had long, pin-straight brown hair and her faculty bio page listed “split ends” as one of her dislikes.

            “I don’t think I’m the best person to be discussing this with,” Mrs. Ryder said, leaning back in her chair and fidgeting with a pencil as Hayley stood supplicant before her desk. “With a lot of these ‘identity things,’ as you call them, there isn’t a whole lot of reliable research being done on biological etiologies because the subjects are so politicized. That’s what makes them identity things.”

            “There are biological, uh, etiologies for homosexuality though, aren’t there?” asked Hayley.

            “There are more firmly established correlations with certain traits that are known to be biological, yes,” said Mrs. Ryder. “It’s possible that these things are epigenetic rather than genetic, or possibly a combination of biological and environmental factors. I don’t think there are comparable studies that have been done on transgender subjects, mostly for ethical reasons; it’s hard to find control groups if all the people you’re studying are undergoing some sort of hormone treatment.”

            Mrs. Ryder seemed to be implying here that she thought that there were people who went through transition who really should not, and that seemed reasonable to Hayley; hadn’t she heard rumors that the Stantons recently considered putting their son on puberty blockers after he said he had a crush on a boy? But April Hooper had been kicked out of the GSA for trying to start a discussion about incident, and April was unpleasant and bigoted enough on a whole host of issues that Hayley could believe that she had had it coming. She hardly thought that Mrs. Ryder was comparable.

            “All right,” said Hayley. “Thanks for listening.”

            “Before you go,” said Mrs. Ryder as Hayley turned to leave, “we need to discuss one of the marginalia that you wrote on your evolutionary development quiz.” Hayley made a little questioning sound in her throat. “You wrote ‘but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to believe this’ next to your answer on question thirteen. I gave you full credit, but I just wanted to check in with you about this—you do know that there’s no ‘supposed’ about believing things, don’t you?”

            “Oh, but there is,” said Hayley.

            Hayley’s next order of business was to get Buster some of the special dog food to see if she could prolong his life or at least prolong his comfort for any longer than Dr. Chandler had said. He enjoyed the car ride over to Hannaford with her (she didn’t have time to make a trip to Wegman’s on a school night). She did not know if he would enjoy a similar car ride again. For several minutes after getting the dog food and before driving home she just sat there with her hands knotted in his fur again, gently kissing him over and over again on his upturned head as he gave long slow laps underneath her chin. Then she drove home, playing one of her old indie rock CDs at what she would normally consider a too-low volume and nursing the holes in her heart and mind with one of the prayers that her youth minister, Dan, had taught her. “Lord, please pour out Your goodness and mercy on my head as You anointed King David’s head with oil…

            “Oh fuck you,” Hayley blurted out as somebody cut her off pulling into her neighborhood. She honked her horn hard, and a girl she recognized from the halls and from the one meeting of the Abstinence Club that she had attended last year glanced at her apologetically across the intersection.

            The next day this girl approached her between second and third period. “You’re Hayley Weingarten, right?”

            “Yeah. Didn’t you cut me off at Hemlock and Hawthorn last night?”

            “I did, yeah, sorry.” The girl proffered her hand. A purity ring flashed on her next-to-last finger. Weren’t those things supposed to go on the left hand? “Teresa Russo. Nice to formally meet you.” Hayley noted with some envy, another sin to pile on top of last night’s swearing, that Teresa was wearing a t-shirt for some mid-2000s anime that, paired with the rest of her outfit, she somehow managed to make look chic.

            “Is there anything in particular that you want?” Hayley asked as politely as she could under the circumstances.

            “Just to apologize and to tell you that your friend Lara Fielding seems pissed at you for some reason. I overheard her crap-talking you to Jacen Calvert. I dunno why.”

            “Jacen ‘CE’ Calvert? Seriously?”

            “On the other hand I think she might have some angle,” Teresa mused. She ran a hand through her obnoxiously thick, fine hair. “She’s probably trying to take herself off Jacen’s hit list or something.”

            “Oh. Well, in that case I can’t say I blame her.” Hayley doubted that this was actually true but it also did not seem like Teresa was misleading her on purpose or trying to spare her feelings. This girl was too good-natured for the Abstinence Club. She was also probably too good-natured to be a teen driver. The reason why Lara might actually be mad at her, of course, did not really bear thinking about, at least not yet. Hayley still had research and prayer to do.

            Hayley did not think about Lara for the rest of the school day, but when she got home she started researching Christian perspectives on this other than the Stantons’, which was self-evidently (at least assuming April Hooper wasn’t full of it) appalling, and Pastor Dave’s, which she was going to leave in reserve as a last resort. She had a taste for greater systematization than the usual Evangelical internet bickering provided, so first of all she looked up what the Catholic Church had to say about this. The first thing that she found was an infuriated headline from a couple of years ago that read: “POPE FRANCIS COMPARES TRANSGENDER PEOPLE TO ATOMIC BOMBS.” She was next to dead positive that this was excessive hyperbole on the headline’s part, and if not, it certainly was on Pope Francis’s; she opened the article in a new tab, bookmarked it, closed it, and moved on. The second thing that she found was that something called the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which Benedict XVI had apparently led before becoming pope, had decided a while back that a specific transgender man in Spain, and possibly transgender people in general, were not suitable candidates to be godparents. (Hayley thought about her own godparents and had to confess that she had no idea what the problem was.) The third thing that she found was that Pope Francis had said—more recently than the atomic bombs thing—that trans people should be fully welcomed in the Catholic Church. But she knew enough about Pope Francis to know that when he said that about a person or a class of people it did not necessarily mean that he approved of them.

Hayley TODAY at 5:45 PM: Hey, are any of your Ab Club friends Catholic?

Bethany TODAY at 5:47 PM: i think terri russo is? idk, sorry, i’m not as into the ab club as i used to be

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: good, they’re haters and losers (as our ~esteemed president~ would say).

Hayley TODAY at 5:48 PM: Terri seems okay, though; I ran into her in the hall today and we chatted for a few minutes. Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 5:49 PM: np

Bethany TODAY at 5:54 PM: why do u ask?

Hayley TODAY at 5:57 PM: It’s nothing, I just had a question about Catholicism and wanted to ask somebody we know instead of just going to the Church of the Transverberation and asking a stranger

Bethany TODAY at 5:58 PM: makes sense

Bethany TODAY at 6:00 PM: ill text u her #

Hayley TODAY at 6:02 PM: Thanks!

Bethany TODAY at 6:08 PM: np

Hayley spent about an hour and a half doing homework and the rest of the evening after that trying to figure out how to ask Teresa (or “Terri,” evidently) about this without outing Lara. Was it “outing” if the person being outed didn’t know for sure? Either way, it was still a dick move. Eventually she decided to pull the old “asking for a friend move,” let Terri suspect what she may, and explain in person if Terri questioned her.

            She sent a text right before she went to bed, and woke up to Terri’s reply (how early did this girl get up in the morning?! About quarter of six, apparently).

Hayley YESTERDAY at 11:14 PM: Hey, it’s Hayley Weingarten. I got your number from my sister Bethany. I wanted to know if you know anything about the Catholic Church’s positions on transgender issues; I have a friend who’s, I guess the term would be questioning.

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: I’m not really an expert on that, I hoope your friend is okay though! Want me to pray for them?

Terri TODAY at 5:51 AM: *hope

Hayley texted Terri to yes, please pray for Lara, then went down to breakfast.

            “I know I don’t have any chores this week ‘cause of the situation with Buster,” she said over breakfast, “but Dad, I was thinking I could help you with dinner tonight anyway?”

            “Actually,” said Mr. Weingarten, “your mother’s cooking tonight. I have to work late.”

            “I’d be happy to have your help, Hayley, as long as you’re okay with pork chops again,” Mrs. Weingarten said.

            Hayley shrugged. “Sure,” she said. At this point Buster came downstairs and started begging. Hayley didn’t have the heart to withhold just a little bit of egg white from him.

            The rest of Hayley’s week, which was the last week before spring break, was mostly centered on Buster. Terri accosted her on Thursday to let her know that she was praying for Lara (Terri did not know it was Lara, so she was just praying for “Hayley’s friend”), and Lara told her later the same day that her feelings were still veering rapidly back and forth and that she had not told anybody else yet. Hayley wondered what that might have to do with the strange incident with Jacen. Jacen himself had started to look at her with an odd glint in his eye, less predatory than judgmental, as if Jacen had any room to judge anyone.

            Buster got worse, but still seemed in good spirits, although it might just be that Hayley wanted desperately to believe that he was. Hayley tried not to think too much about Lara or Terri or Jacen or anybody else when she was with him; she was taking him for two walks a day now, one before school and one after. She knew that it would by no means avail him as she wished it would, but she believed that he deserved at least this much time for joy squeezed into his life before the end. Still he sensed her upset; he kissed her to sleep every night, and woke her up by nuzzling her in the morning. His eyes, deep brown, got deeper and darker, as if he was passing out past the breakers of some shallow twilit sea; when he looked at her, she felt, uncomfortably, as if one eye saw her and the other eye saw the hereafter. Once or twice each day he would whimper piteously for a few minutes and then fall silent, but other than that he was his usual gamboling woofing self, which arrested Hayley’s grief and made it harder for her to accept what she knew intellectually was bound to happen soon. By the time the last bell rang on Saturday, confusion had set in; she knew that she was ignoring Lara, and not only Lara but Charlotte and her other friends too, but she figured they knew, from her or from one another, what was going on, and in any event Lara had asked her to give her some more time on her own before bringing to her what she called her “findings.”

            Finally spring break came and Hayley could devote her whole day to Buster. After service on Sunday she asked Pastor Dave to meet about Buster at some point during the week; he asked her if she wanted advice or comfort, and she told him that she was getting all the practical advice she needed from Dr. Chandler and from her family. “Mostly at this point I just wanna be told that things’ll be all right,” she said.

            “All right,” said Pastor Dave, clapping his hands down on his bejeaned knees as he sat, in a posture oddly close to being prim, across his office from Hayley. “That I can do.”

            “Thank you,” said Hayley, and scheduled a meeting with Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, before the youth group’s Bible study that she sometimes went to. She would have to figure out how to avoid the youth group after the meeting because she really did not feel like getting dragged into fellowshipping with them right now. Maybe in a month or two she would be more inclined towards that sort of enforced joviality again.

            She went for four walks with Buster on Monday and three on Tuesday. She worried that she was tiring him out too much, and Dr. Chandler was noncommittal when she called to ask her whether that might be the case, but she figured that Buster was enjoying himself and would not get to enjoy himself for very much longer, so it was, to her at least, worth their while. She kept cycling back around to that over and over again, that simple brute and brutish fact of the impending absence of Buster. She had been away from Buster for a week or two before—a family vacation to Ireland when she was eleven, a school trip to the nation’s capital over spring break last year. Both of those times somebody had been there to watch Buster and call or email her to give updates on how he was feeling and tell him anything cute or funny that he had done that day. The voyage on which Buster was now embarking would never return to port and he would need to go alone. Hayley had had Buster since he was newly whelped and she was newly four; there had been life before him, but she remembered it only in minuscule snatches, like still snapshots, playing blocks with Bethany or pouring sand on Charlotte’s head in the daycare playground. One of her earliest elaborated memories was of watching Buster eating, sitting there in a row with the rest of John Conway’s Rottweiler mix’s litter, and pointing a stubby little four-year-old finger to him and saying “That one.”

            “He doesn’t have an immortal soul,” she asked Pastor Dave on Wednesday afternoon, “does he?” The question tasted flat and fake in her mouth.

            “Hayley,” said Pastor Dave, “have you ever read Lewis’s The Great Divorce?”

            “I can’t say I have,” said Hayley. “I’ve read some Lewis, but not that one.”

            “It’s a tour of heaven and hell. It’s like The Divine Comedy except instead of Virgil there’s a Victorian writer named George MacDonald. Anyway, in The Great Divorce there’s a character who comes from heaven to try to talk to her husband in hell. Her name is Sarah Smith and she has this whole train of animals following after her, because the love that she had for them, so to speak, hallowed them and brought them up to heaven with her in the form of the feelings that she had towards them. So even though Buster doesn’t have an immortal soul in the same way that you and I do, your love for him might mean that he’s with you in heaven in some way when you get there—according to Lewis, anyway. Does that help at all?”

            “To an extent. You’ve told me in the past that in heaven nobody would want to see anything but God. I’d interpret that to mean that I shouldn’t care.”

            “Well, don’t interpret it that way. I mean, you’re going to want to see your human loved ones in heaven, right? Even if you’re all focusing on God together, I’m sure you’ll be glad that they’re there. I don’t see any reason why God wouldn’t show you Buster again if you wanted to see him too.”

            “Okay. That does help. Thank you.”

            Hayley went from Pastor Dave’s office to the church library to look for The Great Divorce. She found it wedged in between The Weight of Glory and something called Letters to Malcolm, and checked it out for two weeks. She bumped into Dan in the parking lot, started to make some excuses but then decided to be honest with him about the situation and about why she wouldn’t be at youth group for a while, then went home and started reading. When she eventually got to “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them,” she gently shut the book and opened Code Name Verity, which Ms. O’Hare was having them read for their historical fiction unit in English. The book was by any imaginable objective metric way more depressing than The Great Divorce, but she realized as she was reading it that she was using it as a perverse form of escape from the Buster situation, itself almost a welcome distraction from the Lara situation. She felt unkind towards herself for thinking of her dog’s impending demise as a welcome distraction from anything. Her head and heart hurt too much to stay awake, and she lay down to drift off through the dusk.

3. 

To say that Hayley had a long day on the first Monday after spring break would be to say that cutting one’s own head off is awkward. Apparently over break Lara had come to the decision to start telling people about her musings and questionings. Hayley spent half the day trying to get the Ryans and Jacens of the school (Jacen having turned on Lara again) to lay off of her and half the day remonstrating with Lara to keep thinking things through carefully before spreading this like wildfire. “You’re going to get a lot of unthinking attacks and a lot of uncritical support,” she said. “I don’t think either of those things are what you need right now.”

            But Lara seemed to want the unthinking attacks and uncritical support. She had always been comfortable in extremes. In seventh grade she had written a piece of expository writing for history class that seemed to excuse Stalin; when she was told to edit the piece to be more morally responsible, she had said that Stalin was worse than Hitler and there had been no good reason to ally with him at all. In freshman year she had gone from thinking Taylor Swift was a maggot breeding in the body cavities of the dead to thinking she was the best female act ever, and last year she had gone back. She had gone from thinking people who liked exploring abandoned insane asylums were overly-gothic lurid creeps to dragging Hayley to one the other weekend, even if she had had an ulterior motive for so doing. So she would, apparently, rather deal with Ryan and Jacen, or with Rick Neville and Autumn Baker-Noel, than with Hayley. Hayley tried not to find this too offensive or too personally hurtful.

            Over the first half of that week Buster’s health kept declining, but it was a managed decline. He was only in the mood for one walk a day, on which Hayley took him punctiliously every day first thing after school. She called Dr. Chandler and she said that probably his other systems were starting to fail. On Wednesday she squeezed in a short appointment in which Dr. Chandler gave Buster a twice-over and gave him about a week.

            “That’s…what, four days more than your last estimate?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Is it okay if I count those extra four days as a victory?”

            “It’s more than okay. Honestly, I’m not sure that Buster’s physically in any better shape than I thought he was; what’s been keeping him going this long appears to be his love for you.” Hayley wondered how that fit in with what Pastor Dave and C.S. Lewis had said about how Buster might or might not fare in the world to come. She did not see any use in bringing that question up with Dr. Chandler, who she was pretty sure was an agnostic, possibly an atheist. “You know, if it helps,” Dr. Chandler said, “I do believe that people and animals that we love can outlive themselves, so to speak, in the form of the love that we have for them.” She got up and looked out the window over the parking lot; probably she was trying to be mildly, but perhaps only mildly, dramatic. “I would say the same thing to a farm family with a beloved cow,” she said, “or a marine biologist who was very much attached to a whale.”

            Oh. Perhaps there wasn’t so much daylight between Dr. Chandler and Pastor Dave after all. Hayley nuzzled Buster, and smiled a secret smile into his fur.

            On Thursday she ran into Terri Russo again. Some of the same people who were attacking Lara were attacking Terri, apparently.

            “Why?”                                                                                       

            “Just bog-standard racist abuse about my Mexican mom.” Terri shrugged. “I’m used to it by now.”

            “I didn’t realize you were Latina,” said Hayley. She did not want to say so directly, but Terri looked pretty white to her.

            “It’s okay,” said Terri. “I look pretty white to most people. My mom is one of those high-status Mexicans whose ancestry is mostly European anyway. She met my dad when he was studying abroad in Monterrey in college.”

            “What’d your dad go to college for?”

            “Well, Spanish.” Terri laughed a silvery laugh. “I’m thinking of doing pre-med. I had pretty bad tonsillitis when I was a kid and had to be in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for a while, so I kinda wanna be an ear, nose, and throat doctor.”

            “Did you live in Philadelphia?”

            “Until I was ten, yeah. There’s some things I miss but I actually like parts of small-town living better so I don’t mind it up here.” Hayley wasn’t actually sure if she would consider where they lived “small-town” or “the suburbs.” It was an interesting question. “What about you? Do you have any ideas for college?”

            “Don’t tell anyone I said this…”

            “Of course not…”

            “…but I’m not sure college is right for me. I’m sure I’ll end up doing it, just because it’s the only way you can really get ahead comfortably in this country anymore, but if I didn’t feel the need to do it then I’m not convinced I would think to do it on my own.”

            “That’s fair. Would you want to get married straight out of high school if that were still a thing?”

            “I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t really wanna come across as one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types but…I think there might be a part of me that I don’t really feed or pay much attention to that actually is one of those self-absorbed ‘travel the world’ types.” Hayley laughed a little. “Don’t hold it against me?”

            “I won’t. Don’t worry.” Terri leaned against her locker with a similar sort of restrained drama to her posture that Hayley yesterday had seen in Dr. Chandler. “By the way, your friend wants to talk to you. I’m not sure why but it seemed urgent.”

            “Thanks,” said Hayley. “Which friend?” She was pretty sure this was Lara, but she wanted to make sure.

            “Charizard Rice,” said Terri.

            “Crap,” said Hayley. “I’ll see you later.” She skittered off to talk to Charlotte before the next period started.

            She found Charlotte sitting with her arms folded in the woodshop, her back to the jigsaw. There was a sour expression on her face and Hayley was reminded immediately, without Charlotte having to say anything, of her many and various blowings-off of Charlotte over the past couple of weeks.

            “I’m sorry,” she said before Charlotte could say anything.

            “I accept your apology,” said Charlotte thickly, “but could you not at least have told me that all this stuff was going on for you? Like, the thing with Lara is one thing”—Hayley took as neutral a mental note as she could of the fact that Charlotte was still calling her Lara, as opposed to using her last name like some people had started to—“but could you not at least have told me about Buster being sick?”

            “Buster is dying, not sick,” said Hayley.

            “I know that. I had to hear it from Bethany of all people.” Charlotte leaned forward on her stool. “Hayley, I accept your apology, but I have to say I’m pretty damn pissed. We were going to go grab dinner together at Red Papaya at some point over break, remember? And then ice cream at Carlton’s. You could have at least explained to me what was going on. I know you’ve been blowing off youth group too and that’s fine, I get that, and I’m pretty sure Dan gets it, even. But for crying out loud, Hayley, we’ve been best friends since kindergarten.”

            “I know. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

            “Give me a few weeks and I’m pretty sure I can,” said Charlotte. “We’ve had these fights before.”

            And they had. In fourth grade Charlotte had copied off Hayley’s pop math quiz and they had both gotten detention even though Charlotte had been looking over Hayley’s shoulder without Hayley’s knowledge. They had not spoken for about two weeks after detention ended. In the summer before seventh grade Hayley had yoinked one of Charlotte’s CDs because she was envious that Charlotte got to play it over and over again while Hayley had to wait until her birthday, which was in about three weeks, to get it. That time they had been on the outs until Hayley’s birthday party, at which she had given it back with a tearful apology. (That time, Pastor Dave had actually consented to hear a confession of sin to make Hayley feel better, even though only God could take away her sin.) This was not new, and they were more mature now. Hayley had the utmost trust in Charlotte and in their friendship as they left that room.

            On Friday and over the weekend she realized that the same could not be said of her friendship with Lara or with any of her other friends. Lara started telling people that Hayley was holding up her process by not having gotten back to her yet. On Monday Hayley found a note in her locker that Lara had apparently left there last Wednesday and that Hayley had for whatever reason not seen until now; it had fallen through the grate on her locker down, somehow, towards the back of it, behind her schoolbooks and where she kept her thermos.

Hey, I’m ready to talk about things with you. What have you been finding out? What are your own feelings? –Fielding

Things came to a head on Tuesday of the second week after spring break. Hayley made some time to take a walk around the school tennis courts with Lara during their lunch hour. The tennis courts were not yet in frequent use because the delayed and rainy spring, and there were only a few brave people out practicing their serves. They spoke in low, hushed voices.

            “I still don’t really know what to make of things,” said Hayley. “I’ve been so preoccupied with this thing with Buster, you know.” Lara nodded understandingly. “To be honest, I do still think of you as Lara. I don’t have to anymore if you don’t want me to, but it’ll take some time for me to stop. And I’ll need to figure out how I should think of you on my own. It’d have to be something we’re both comfortable with.”

            “I understand.”

            “I might need to talk to Pastor Dave or at least Dan about it. Although I’ve been trying to avoid discussing it with them because I don’t wanna rock the boat.”

            “It seems to me like you’ve been trying to avoid discussing it period,” said Lara waspishly.

            “I mean,” said Hayley, “I guess I have. And I’m sorry for that, I know this is important to you. But like I told you last week I really think you should give this a little more time yourself. You can’t make these decisions rashly.”

            “Isn’t that just for your own comfort, though?” asked Lara. “I mean, I’m comfortable with this.”

            “You were going back and forth on this as recently as spring break! Look, I’ve got two more days or so with my dog, and then I really want to discuss this a little more with you before either of us comes to any conclusions. I want to discuss it a little more with you, and I do want to discuss it with Pastor Dave or Dan, and I’m sorry about that but I can’t just switch a flip—sorry, I mean I can’t just flip a switch in my brain that—that—”

Lara stared at her for a few seconds, then muttered “Give me a break” in a bizarrely apologetic tone of voice and started walking away. She walked right onto one of the tennis courts and started talking to a girl whom Hayley recognized as Autumn Baker-Noel—one of the popular group to whom she had been closer last semester.

            For the rest of the day Autumn Baker-Noel and the other popular people, with whom Hayley had never exactly been as thick as thieves but among whose number she was aware that much of the rest of the school for whatever reason saw her, avoided her and in some cases glared at her. Given Autumn’s political views and the clout that she held with the rest of them and that Lara had recently begun to hold with her, Hayley was not surprised. And yet it felt odd to have something like a decisive break with these people to whom she had given so little thought anyway over the past month or two. It was as if, upon finding out that she had unexpectedly inherited a small fortune, she had immediately had to spend it all on a sudden health crisis.

            “Sorry to see what’s going on with your friend Fielding,” said Terri to her at the end of the day. The fact that Terri was calling Lara, Fielding, somehow felt like a criticism of and a vindication of Hayley at the same time.

            Hayley shrugged. “It’s going to take a while to sink in. Besides, these are my last days with my dog. I’d do well to take more of my cues from him than from anyone else.”

            “I haven’t met your dog,” said Terri, which seemed like a statement of the obvious to Hayley. “Would you like to introduce us before it’s too late?”

            “Sure. I’m cooking with my dad tonight so it’d be good to have someone over to appreciate it. Do you have any dietary needs?”

            “Not any needs, but I don’t really like seafood besides white fish, and I’m not really crazy about spicy food. Heresy for someone with a Mexican mom, I know.”

            “You’re in luck; we’re cooking up some trout and throwing it in a stew with vegetables and pasta.”

            “Sounds great.” They had to part ways soon, Terri to the school bus and Hayley to her car. “Oh, by the way! You and Charizard Rice are besties, right?”

            “Not at the moment, but I have hope that we will be again. Why?”

            “Nothing, it’s just, my priest knows her cousin Amelia’s mom through this Catholic-Jewish dialogue group they’re in, so I could get in touch with Amelia if you’d like to spend more time with her sometime. I think I once overheard something about you going to Great Escape together?”

            “Sounds great,” threw back Hayley. “I’ll text you my address right now. Do you have a bike or something so you can come over in, say, two and a half hours?”

            “Yep, I have a three-speed bike. See you then.”

            Terri got on the bus and Hayley drove home to spend one of her last nights with Buster.

4. 

Buster started moaning and howling at all hours around midnight on Wednesday night. When Hayley wrapped him in a towel and started giving him some water with an eye dropper, he started feeling a little better. He lingered through Thursday and gave up the ghost in the wee hours of Friday morning, just as Hayley had made up her mind to skip school tomorrow and make an emergency appointment to have Dr. Chandler put him to sleep.

            They buried Buster in the back yard on Saturday. Other than Mom, Dad, Bethany, and Josh, Terri showed up, as did Charlotte, willing to make an overture towards Hayley but now unsure about restoring their old closeness after having heard a possibly exaggerated version of the conversation with Lara (or Fielding) from someone in Autumn’s circle. Terri had loved the dinner on Tuesday and asked if they could make it a weekly thing. Hayley was too inarticulate from tears to say yes right away—homework and other things might get in the way—but she made it clear that she thought it was a nice idea.

            “You’re welcome to sit in on Mass at Transverb sometime,” Terri said to her quietly. “Although I understand that you probably shouldn’t take communion.”

            “And you’re welcome at my Oak Lawn youth group when I start going again,” Hayley managed to say back, “although you might not like it if you’re not up for arguing over whether Stranger Things is ‘more Christian’ than Westworld.”

            “Oh, you bet I have my opinions on that,” said Terri.

            “Great,” said Hayley. “See you there.”

            She did feel badly about Lara (or Fielding). She would be following things assiduously. She would need, moreover, to cling harder to the Gospel now. She was not sure how to feel about that.

Fielding TODAY at 4:44 PM: Hayley Weingarten and Terri Russo are friends now

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: yeah I know

Autumn TODAY at 4:45 PM: what about it?

Fielding TODAY at 4:48 PM: nothing, I’m just glad H. has someone drama-free to be friends with now

Rick TODAY at 4:52 PM: Is it really “drama-free” though? Terri’s in Ab Club, isn’t she? I thought Hayley hated those people.

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: she does but I don’t think terri’s crazy aobu thtem either

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *abut them

Autumn TODAY at 4:54 PM: *ABOUT them, sry

Autumn TODAY at 4:55 PM: anyway I guess I’m happy for them?

Fielding TODAY at 4:57 PM: yeah, things have worked out pretty conveniently for Hayley from the looks of it

Fielding TODAY at 4:58 PM: even though I don’t think anybody else really likes her very much now (which is reasonable tbh)

Fielding TODAY at 4:59 PM: it kind of pisses me off honestly that the timing here was so bad. What with her dog I mean

Autumn TODAY at 5:00 PM: don’t let it get to you. these things happen.

Fielding TODAY at 5:00 PM: thx

Short Story: “Changeful Northern Skies”

Rot was setting in all over Toby Walker’s house. Evil, blue evil, spread like a flow tide over the wooden wainscotting and along the wooden beams. None of her efforts to get it dealt with had panned out, and even her best friend told her that her front door stank of mildew. It was the end of a very wet October, and her yard was filled with rain-speckled muted-colored leaves.

            Toby’s house, whose pipes groaned and sang with steam on chilly nights in seasons other than summer, had been in her family since 1842 and had last been substantially renovated during her early childhood. Tobias Walker IV, Toby's late father, after whom she was yclept Toby though formally monikered Tabitha, had taken seriously the history of their family and their home. He had spent tens of thousands that he had earned snorting coke on Wall Street making it a fit house for a modern family. That family’s now last-living representative strode out to the mailbox that dove-grey autumn morning over a carpet of yellow birch leaves, pale spears the shape of the population pyramid of a medium-HDI country. Black spots freckled them leprously.

            Toby checked her mail. There were three pieces of it. The first was a card asking her to subscribe to a progressive Christian magazine named Relevant. “If you have to say it about yourself,” Toby muttered, “it’s not true.” The second implored her to vote for the man who had been chair of her town’s select board for fifteen out of the past twenty-one years. “If you were going to lose then you would have by now.” The third was a letter from Rachel Dembitz, an accountant in Dunnet Landing. Toby’s accountant. Estimate $11,500 to repaint the house; $6,000-7,000 to redo the front door; another $7,000-$10,000 for the solar panels that you want. Toby said, “But do not harm the oil and the wine.”

            She sighed. The misty air cleared for a few short seconds; it was not a change for the better. Toby thought about the cost of the solar panels. This was after tax incentives; she had discussed that with Rachel before. The thought made her feel sick to her stomach; she took one cigarette out of the pack in her pocket and lit it, a bad habit that she had picked up from her grandmother. In her grandmother’s days and then in her father’s this house had been part of a farm. That farm had now been sold off, most of it; what was left was an acre and a half. What was, or were, left on that acre and a half were a couple of small yellowish cats and one unpromising-looking goat. Toby called the goat Poor Richard. She associated him, because of his name, with the Old Farmer’s Almanacs that she still bought out of habit every fall. Poor Richard and Poor Toby would, because of these solar panels, likely become poorer before much longer.

            Under a changeful sky, Toby trudged inside and called Rachel. Rachel was the only Jew who lived in Dunnet Landing, and likely the only Jew who had lived there since Stan Roth’s early death twelve years before. It was a Saturday morning, but it was unlikely that she had ventured the ten or twenty miles to drive to synagogue; the pandemic had broken down Rachel’s observance just as it had that of so many other once-religious people. Indeed, Rachel picked up her phone.

            “So we’re looking at thirty thousand or so,” Toby said. It was not a question; there was no need to confirm. Rachel’s numbers either were right or they were not.

            “We are,” said Rachel with a heavy sigh, a sigh much older than her own thirty-one years. Older than her thirty-one. Not as old as Toby’s twenty-nine. Life was full of ironies. “Do you want me to come over?” Rachel went on. “We can discuss this in person. I want to show you how I got to these numbers.”

            “I trust your numbers.”

            “I’d still like to come over, as a courtesy,” said Rachel.

            Toby sighed. “Okay. I’ll put on some tea.”

            She took her time making the tea in her chilly kitchen with its blond wooden floors and six-gas-burnered stove. She lit the gas ring under the kettle and it started to sing just as Rachel’s car pulled up the driveway. The car was silvery with a faint pungent chartreuse undertone that Toby had always found a little alarming. It was an old Subaru, as was Toby’s own car. Toby’s was dark blue.

            Rachel came to a stop and stepped out of the car. A pump-clad toe teased one of the cats as he ran up to nuzzle her. Her cumulonimbus of dark hair looking the exact same shade as her dark conservative professionalistic skirt suit, Rachel treaded over the birch-leaf carpet and knocked on the door to Toby’s mudroom.

            “It’s open,” Toby hollered, and poured two cups of cinnamon tea as Rachel came in and kicked off her shoes. Toby smiled. “You always class up the place,” she said.       

            Rachel shrugged. “I am here on business, technically,” she said. She took a bobby pin from her sleek gunmetal-grey purse and pinned back a corkscrew of blackish hair. “So,” she said. “Thirty thousand dollars.”

            “Thirty thousand dollars,” Toby agreed. “Give or take. It’s not pretty.” She paused, then said, “Do you want to record this?”

            “I guess I should,” conceded Rachel. She pulled her phone out of her purse, set it down on Toby’s many-scarred pinewood butcher’s block, and pulled up some recording app while looking worriedly at the signs of damp that clustered like cobwebs in the corners of the kitchen’s lowish ceiling. “Rachel B. Dembitz, CPA, October 30, 2021,” she intoned. “Meeting with Tabitha M. Walker to discuss price estimates for repairs and climate-proofing on her house.”

            Climate-proofing. What a way to think of it. It horrified Toby even though it was she who had decided that it was needed.

            Rachel and Toby had met in college; they had bonded over their complicated middle names. The M stood for Mehitable, the B for Berenice.

            “The figure we’ve been throwing around is thirty thousand,” Rachel said. “This, of course, is an estimate.”

            “Yes,” said Toby. “Not even a mid-range estimate, necessarily.”

            Rachel nodded and took a sip of her cinnamon tea. It had not steeped for long enough, and the water had been a little too hot when Toby had poured it into the cup. The flavor thus was unbalanced, yet Rachel loved it. She loved visiting Toby at home. Loved, indeed, Toby herself, in ways that Toby did not love anybody. Toby’s first love was the house, the house of which she was both begetter and begotten. She inhabited the house as a place of safety, like a womb; she put work and money and feeling into the house, like a germ plasm.

            “Do your reasons for wanting to do all this work come down to wanting to save yourself and the house more money later, or is it morally imperative to you that we get it done now?” Rachel asked. “If it’s just a matter of foresight, it may be prudent to wait until you have, frankly, a stable career situation and some net worth that isn’t all in the form of the house itself.”

            Toby shrugged, thought for a second, then said, “Morally imperative isn’t how I’d put it but I do think it’s important to get it done ASAP.” She pronounced ASAP as a word rather than as four letters, the way her father and grandmother had pronounced it. “The climate itself sure isn’t waiting till my career is going better.” She reached over the butcher’s block to where the 2021 Old Farmer’s Almanac rested. She picked it up for the first time in over a month. “This thing is the least accurate I’ve ever seen it,” she said. “I only bother to read it for its har-har little articles these days.”

            “Like reading Playboy for the articles?” Rachel asked with a smirk, then, unwilling to let her friend get away with one little jab when two would do just as nicely, “When was the Old Farmer’s Almanac ever accurate anyway?”

            “Not the point,” said Toby. She set the almanac down, almost chivalrously, on the butcher’s block between them. Its off-yellow cover was rippled and pilled a little after ten months of sitting in a dank kitchen, with the rot that wound in the times between Toby’s uses of the sterilizing stove. “I think it’s urgent. Yes.” She gestured at the almanac; the hole drilled in its top right corner looked almost as if a worm had chewed through it. She gestured at the ceiling; the rot in the corners was easier to see now that the light was turning from morning to midday. “Does this not look urgent to you, Rachel?” she asked.

            “It’s not my job to tell you that, only to tell you what it will cost. Please don’t get frustrated with me for that.”

            “I’m not. I’m sorry.” Toby shook her head and lit another cigarette. Rachel noticed that she was allowing her own tea to get cold. “Thirty goddam grand,” Toby said.

            “Thirty goddam grand,” Rachel agreed.

            That should, perhaps, have stymied them, or at least given them more pause. Yet Toby’s attention was stuck, bizarrely, on that full-moon-shaped worm’s-hole bored in the corner of the almanac. It reminded her of a keyhole, a keyhole to be opened with a key to thing she longed for most. Rachel’s eyes tracked Toby’s, followed Toby’s to that hole. To it and almost down it. Two sets of eyes gazed with fixity for several seconds at that dark little corner of the world’s many-sided agony. It was a corner that seemed to hold some better possibility inside it. It felt as if there was something at the bottom, something within the lunar phases and sidereometeorological pseudoscientificities of the almanac, something brighter and sharper than the surface of Toby’s kitchen’s butcher’s block. The hole in the almanac was a black hole with promises of something radiating out of the singularity, but radiating slantwise and obscurely.

            Then Toby picked up the almanac, flipped through it almost as a tic, set it down again, and the moment was lost.

            “You hoping the almanac has some financial advice in it?” asked Rachel, but it did not come out of her mouth as though it were a joke.

            “It’s not that I can’t afford the thirty grand,” said Toby.

            “No. I know it’s not that,” Rachel said.

            “You’ve run the numbers? You’ve made sure that I can, technically, afford it right now?”

           Rachel nodded. “I have and you can,” she said, “although you’re going to have to either pinch pennies or get a much better job.”

            Toby sighed. “That would be the case no matter what I did with the thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “All right. Make a note that we discussed this expenditure and I authorized it. I assume I’ll be recouping some of it come tax season, at any rate.”

            “Have you run this by Tucker and Jordan?” Rachel asked. Tucker Littlepage and Jordan Blackett were the executors of Toby’s father’s estate.

            “I did and they said there wasn’t anything legal that would tie this up,” said Toby. “So we can go ahead.” She stood up and adjusted one of the cuffs of her thick blue-black-orange flannel. “This conversation is tiring me out,” she said.

            “You’ve barely touched your tea,” Rachel said.

            Toby shrugged. “Guess that didn’t even occur to me,” she said, although it had, and she had no explanation for it, really. She picked up her cup, now closer to room temperature than hot, and drank it in three or four quick despairing gulps. She looked down at the surface of the butcher’s block again. The cup had left behind it a damp impression or allegory of a washed-out crescent moon.

            “Is there anything else that you need right now?” asked Rachel, tapping her phone for the time. “If there’s not, I’d like to get going; I want to see if the Hannaford in Deephaven has some yahrzeit candles.”

            “Oh, right, it is that time of year, isn’t it?” said Toby with a plaintive feeling. She had met Rachel’s grandfather only twice and only dimly remembered him, but for Rachel he had been a pillar of the earth for a quarter of a century before the demise.

            Sometimes Toby thought that it seemed Rachel envied her, in between the more frequent moments of pity. Here in this house she was ancestor-named and landed, undisplaceably cocooned in a soggy but history-laden husk. All around them was changing, changing, mixing and changing. Being unstable, changing and decaying. Toby guessed that Rachel might find it easy to see her, falsely, as changeless.

 ❦

Toby did not do much with the rest of the day. She had a one-hour online English class with a twelve-year-old boy in mainland China whose parents were paying her handsomely for it. It felt good to Toby to use her certification, and the boy, Weiyu, was charming and a good learner. If Toby could have had more regular hours doing this, and could have done it in person instead of on video calls, she and Rachel would not be concerned about the state of her career. But the hours were scant and the videos were laggy and Toby ended the lesson with Weiyu far more tired than she had hoped. By this time the sun was setting and it was time to take some butternut squash soup out of her refrigerator and warm it up for dinner. The soup had come out a little thinner than she usually made it, and once warmed up was better with a squeeze or two of hot sauce.

            The pipes by this point had started to sing, groaning into their song far earlier in the evening than they ought. It was usually around midnight that the teakettle-like keening started, or later even, as Toby lay wakeful in the room that had been hers since her father’s penultimate heart attack. For the singing to start at not even eight disquieted her somewhat. It seemed a little too early in the year too; the evening was not particularly cold. She hoped there was nothing wrong with the furnace. That would be the last thing she needed. What would happen to the bills alone would set her other expenses back weeks or months. She pulled out her phone and began to draft an email to Rachel about this. Then she read the email and saw that it looked whiny and put her phone aside. She was sitting on her big old couch now facing the empty table across the living room where her television had been before, on a whim, she had put it upstairs. One of the cats jumped up to sit there.

            Toby’s cats were named Simpkin and Tom Tildrum, on her distant cousin Mattie’s recommendation. Jordan Blackett called them Infer and Imply because he couldn’t tell them apart. Toby could tell them apart because Simpkin was a little lighter in color and behaved somewhat more respectably; Tom Tildrum cavorted and gamboled, not so much almost like a dog as almost like a pony. He was doing just that right now on the ratty rug between Simpkin and Toby, and watching him do it was getting on Toby’s nerves.

            Toby refilled the cats’ dry food and slouched up to her bedroom. There on her narrow bed lay a stack of papers that she had found in the attic yesterday. They were old, from probably around the time she had been thirteen. Aced English assignments, journals from family trips to Disneyland and England, fanfiction where Toby was secretly Maximum Ride or a fourth Baudelaire child or an Eva pilot. All mildewy and smelly. Rank, flecked, sloppily bound and interlaced with evil like the interlaced buriedness of last year’s layer of leaves.

            She went downstairs and came back up again holding the yellowish almanac. She flipped through it a bit. September and October will be cooler and rainier than normal, said the forecast for the Northeast, and Oct. 2021: Temp 44° (4° below avg.); precip. 5.5” (2” above avg.). 1-9 Rainy periods, cool. 10-12 Snow showers, cold. 13-19 Rainy periods, chilly. 20-23 Sunny, cool. 24-31 Periods of rain and snow, cold.

            It was not entirely wrong. It had indeed been a drippy autumn so far, though not a cool one. But there had been no snow showers and no cold to speak of around Columbus Day, and in the middle of the month the temperature had now and then scraped seventy-five. There had been a couple of hard overnight freezes within the past week, but only overnight and only a couple.

            Toby lifted the almanac up in front of her and, through the hole bored in it, looked at the stack of childhood papers on her bed. She wondered if this was the image of the keyhole that she thought she had seen earlier. Perhaps it had had to do with looking through that hole at a part of herself and a phase of her life that she had, so to speak, loved and lost. Yet she did not think so; the papers on her bed just looked like papers, not like the kind of inexhaustible treasure hoard that dragons guarded in old-fashioned picture books.

            She wondered if the almanac itself had more to say, perhaps, about some other world than this. Maybe somewhere far beyond whatever walls separated this universe from void, in some nearby universe some other Tabitha Walker was looking at an almanac identical to this one. It was even possible, Toby thought, or hoped, that her other self in that other world had for the past year been looking out her window or going for walks or bike rides or swims in the weather that that almanac described.

 ❦

And indeed she had. As Toby Walker drifted off to unpleasant sleep on one side of the great divide, the barrier of the walls of spacetime billions of parsecs away, another Toby Walker on the other side of that divide stood out in her front yard in the vague light of a distant telephone pole, smoking a cigarette and peering at the stars. The streetlight was further from her house than from that of her counterpart, and the light it cast was warm and pointed solely at the ground; the stars were brighter where they had just come out from behind the flurrying clouds. The ground under that Toby’s feet was the yellow-and-black carpet of leaves that neither Toby had raked in several days. Yet on this side the yellow and black were freckled with thin silver snow.

            She could see the Andromeda Galaxy, very near the zenith, flanked by Alpheratz and Schedar. Towards it her grey-blue cigarette smoke rose palely. The Andromeda Galaxy was, for Toby, a difficult object; she had to tilt her head back and forth to make sure that it was not a smudge on one of the lenses of her glasses. Alpheratz and Schedar looked brighter than usual, likely because the select board had voted recently to further dim down the streetlights on the roads leading away from town. Toby checked her watch. It was a little before eleven. She thought she should probably go the barn and make sure the chickens were settled in for the night before she went to bed.

            The chickens were at this point the main part of the Walker Farm that was even slightly profitable; most of the rest was either protected wetland or preserved in amber as a sort of petting zoo or living museum of Toby’s grandmother’s time, which suited Toby just fine. The Partial Hydrocarbon Ban Treaty had been controversial in her area for all sorts of reasons, and had indeed had serious negative effects on its agricultural productivity in the traditional sense, but the agrotourism had helped offset that and now that Toby’s house was in a few different guidebooks she could usually count on giving three to five tours of it a week.

            The chickens were good and fed. She went into her yellow kitchen with its flickering lamps and its oven hot with the heat of roasting winter squash. Outside the snow was starting to drift down again. She was glad that Rachel had come to visit earlier in the evening and was probably back at the train station by now; it was not the kind of night to get caught outside late in one of the traps that the train station provided these days. Toby still had a car and would have been able to pick Rachel up and get her back to the train station herself, but it would have been a pain for Rachel to get in touch with her to inform her that she needed her to do so. She anticipated a phone call from Rachel when she arrived back home safe in Dunnet Landing, or from somewhere in Deephaven if she still needed to make a late-night run for a yahrzeit candle there.

            Eventually she did call, but by that point it was very early morning. The sky was as dark as it was going to get and about to start getting lighter. Briefly Toby resented Rachel’s call, but then she remembered that at any rate she would have had to get up in ten minutes anyway if the big rooster Fabio had anything to say about it.

             “I’m in Deephaven,” Rachel said, “safe at Peri Oler’s house for the night. Remember her?”

            “I do,” said Toby. “You used to date her, didn’t you?”

            “That’s the one, yes, although right now she has me on an air mattress, which I think is reasonable,” Rachel said. “I got the yahrzeit candle right before the coast bus stopped running. Now I’m just out in her garden looking at the stars.”

            “Not snowing there like it is here?”

            “No, although it was a few minutes ago. I can see this very faint trail of stars in the middle of a sort of…it looks a little like an L or a right triangle. The trail of stars is the hypotenuse. That’s Coma Berenices, isn’t it?”

            “It sounds like it, yes,” said Toby, and smiled. “The Tress of Berenice is what Joyce calls it in Ulysses. The ‘heaventree of stars’ scene; do you remember?” Rachel made a murmuring, affirmative noise; they had met in a modern Irish lit elective. “Berenice,” said Toby, “like you.”

            “We made a pact!” Rachel said. “I was going to learn to like Berenice only as long as you learned to like Mehitable.”

            “I have learned to like Mehitable. I even put flowers on old Mehitable Smead’s grave in the graveyard on my walk the other day,” Toby said. “Dried annual honesty; seasonable.”

            “Fair’s fair, I guess. Just don’t make that crude joke about Peri’s name.”

            “You were the only one who ever found ‘Peri Oler’s areolers’ funny, Rachel; not me,” said Toby, and Rachel laughed.

            They chatted for a while longer and then Toby went out to the barn to try and make Fabio shut up. Then she went back inside and went through her mudroom into her chilly back-house. There she stood looking east over the fields at a long low line of fluffy sheeplike clouds underneath which the sun soon started to rise. They drifted on, pale dusty purple limned with pinkish gold. Japanese irises under warm-colored stage lights, perhaps, or a rose-gold wedding ring on the finger of a frost-giant bride.

            Pinkish gold, too, was the snow that had fallen during the night. There was about half an inch of it, coming partway up the sere leaves of faded green grass. It was rheumy and so thin that it would all but certainly be gone by the time she went to vote on Tuesday even if the temperature did not rise overmuch. Yet something about having snow on the ground on Halloween morning made Toby think that the world had a seemliness to it at the moment.

            She wondered at the fact that Rachel had been able to see Coma Berenices from Deephaven, especially in the pre-dawn hours. It was possible that the sky had been lightening somewhat even then. More light began to enter the sky before one tended to notice a change in color, and Deephaven was more than dozen miles to the east. On top of all that, Coma Berenices was not a particularly bright constellation, and she remembered that when they had been in that Irish lit class together reading the scene in Ulysses Rachel had remarked that she was astonished that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus had been able to see it from a house in the middle of Dublin. That had been in the days of unrestricted streetlight use and almost-constant nighttime driving even around Orono, in the relative wilds north of Bangor. Toby and Rachel had themselves had to traipse out into the woods and crane their necks right at the zenith to see the Milky Way, back then. They had been good nights, but cold ones.

            Toby glanced up at the clock that she had put up in the back-house back when she had given up on trying to slow it down. It read about seven-thirty, which meant that it was probably about quarter past. At this point it was unlikely that she would get back to sleep. So she traipsed into the kitchen and put on a teakettle. The sweet smell of the purplish gas that her stove now ran on flitted into her ear like a singing bird. It reminded her of an automaton, or of Pinocchio or the Tin Woodman maybe. It was a conquest of nature that was also a surrender to nature, or a return to it anyway. She lit the gas ring with a long wooden match, extinguished the match by waving it around absentmindedly for a few seconds in the kitchen’s chilly air, and lowered the kettle gently onto the flame.

            “Need to buy the new one,” she muttered to herself, looking at the 2021 lunar phase calendar that was thumbtacked to the bulletin board that hung next to the kitchen sink. Toby’s interest in stargazing came and went; it was not as much a part of her life now as it was of Rachel’s, which was another good reason why the stars were so easy to see from Deephaven and from Dunnet Landing now. Even so, when she was interested, it was nice to be able to tell at a glance what the moon be bright enough to drown out, and the moon itself seemed lovelier as she got older. It was loveliest on evenings where it rose full above the sere eastern fields. Toby liked to plan to be home on those evenings.

            Moreover having a calendar like this in the kitchen was something that her father and her grandmother had done, another small piece of whatever heritage she had from them. More and more these days she felt that thin warm line connecting her back through time, and yet more and more she felt almost as if she did not need it, as if feeling that connection made her more herself in a way that lessened her reliance on things past. She guessed that this was what people meant when they talked about “living in the past” versus “living in the moment,” and it surprised her sometimes that she was drifting in one direction rather than the other as she got older. She wondered if she would feel the need for the moon calendars more if she was not such an early bird about getting them, if it would feel less like a mildly obnoxious chore and more like a dangerous and high-stakes imperative if she had started thinking about this in the middle of December rather than at the end of October. It wouldn’t surprise her at this point in her life.

            Rachel had said recently that she too had of late felt calmer, more relaxed, and less like she was on the brink of something disastrous that she was running out of ways to forestall. She felt more at-home in the world too, something that she had once, when younger, despaired of, because it was the backcountry and there was antisemitism around. With Rachel, in addition to whatever social or political peace of mind she had come to nowadays, it maybe had to do with the fact that her career was going pretty well. Todd & Dembitz was now Dembitz & Associates, because Rachel’s mother had been able to talk her out of naming it Go Time Accounting instead.

            At about nine o’ clock, with Toby still musing on Go Time Accounting and what a dumb name it would have been, the phone rang. Toby answered. It was the woman herself. “Did you sleep?” she asked Rachel.

            “Yes, a little,” Rachel said. “I’m on the bus back to Dunnet Landing now. I still need to actually do the…” She stammered a little, tongue-tied probably from the lack of sleep. Toby assumed that what she was trying to articulate was something about the yahrzeit for which she had bought the candle. She had given up trying to understand some of the reasons behind Rachel’s comings and goings. It often seemed that the woman had taken slower and more complicated means of travel as a challenge and a call to adventure rather than an inconvenience. Toby envied that; not even she had been able to do her likewise.

            “Please tell me you’re planning on getting more sleep tonight,” said Toby, feeling a little like a prudish mother, a role that, truth be told, she found it fun to play sometimes. Rachel thought for a theatrical moment, laughed, and told her so. Toby was glad to hear it; she was glad to hear it after the stage pause too. That showed a playful attitude that, until recently, Toby had worried that her friend had lost a long time ago.

            “I probably shouldn’t spend a ton more time on the phone right now,” Rachel said. “I’ll call you when I get home safe.”

            She hung up. Toby spared a moment’s thought, maybe prayer but maybe not, for her safety. She did not normally do it, and Rachel did not require it, but right now it felt appropriate somehow. Then she went out to check on her old car and her gasoline allotment and took a drive into town. The general store was open from nine to one on Sundays and they would probably have the 2022 moon calendar and the 2022 almanac still. It would be good to have those on hand before November started.

            Toby pulled her old green Chevy out of her long gravel driveway with its dusting of morning-lit new snow. She set off down the road between trees with frost-rimmed branches and leaves that were rufous and gold.

Note: June 13, 2022: I gave this story a new title two weeks after running it. It was written, and initially published on this site, as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

Short story: “Strategy of Tension”

One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.

            Rosie’s current short story was inspired by something she was reading in her coursework about “Operation Gladio,” a NATO stay-behind operation that had been meant to keep Italy in the Western Bloc, ideally with a deeply entrenched center-right government (only some of which had gone according to plan), during the Cold War. The preexisting literary chronicler of this history in Italy par excellence was Umberto Eco, who had been dead for several years but who appeared as a character in Rosie’s short story through the conceit that the British novelist Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and for all Becky knew possibly of Nights at the Circus as well, was contacting him via Ouija board. Waters, as she appeared as a character in the context of Rosie’s story, was exploring a departure from her usual subject matter, which was apparently woebegone British lesbians of past generations, to write a political thriller about a series of unfortunate events in the late 1970s in which Aldo Moro, an Italian political leader who had forged a power-sharing agreement between the Catholic center-right and the Italian Communist Party, had been kidnapped by Marxist hardliners, then abandoned to his captors by the rest of the Italian political establishment. At some point in this series of events a professor at the University of Bologna, Romano Prodi, himself a future Prime Minister of Italy, claimed to have contacted a then-recently-deceased politician named Giorgio La Pira in a séance and obtained from him the address where the Marxist hardliners were holding Moro. Such was the subject matter of Waters and Eco’s book in the context of Rosie’s story.

            Gorging herself on metafiction like this as she did, it was a miracle, Becky thought, that Rosie had time to go to class and do her research on top of these stories and her musical pursuits.

            “La Pira might be a saint one of these days, you know,” Jerry said to Rosie at one point.

            Jerry, Becky’s other roommate, was in full Yirmiyahu Polen. Like Rosie, he was a New Jerseyite by birth and to a certain extent by temperament, but at the time that the three of them had met at UMass he and his family had been living in the Amherst area for about three years and his parents had become heavily involved with a group that styled itself “Ethical Warrior Activists.” Certain other people involved with Ethical Warrior Activists—not Jerry’s parents—drove around a truck festooned with bumper stickers that said things like “Jesus Hearts Wikileaks” and “Hearing Crazy Voices? Turn Off Fox News,” the first of which had aged poorly in relation to the second. Jerry’s birth name was Jeremy; he had changed it to Yirmiyahu, which was the Hebrew form of Jeremiah, to follow through on a promise made to a Chabadnik rabbi over vodka shots on Purim. To this day he was perpetually mildly astonished that somebody named Rebekah Zylberberg was not actually Jewish. He had come to Rome a year and a half after Becky and Rosie, to work for some sort of think tank focusing on Christian-Jewish reconciliation. His music taste extended to “Video Killed the Radio Star” and some but not all music from early-2000s Japanese video games. He voted absentee at his parents’ address and had voted for Ted Cruz in the last Massachusetts presidential primary, then been a Hillary Clinton-Evan McMullin swing voter in November.

            About three days into Rosie’s work on her Sarah Waters Umberto Eco story, she suddenly asked Becky and Jerry to show her how to make a recipe for a sort of fish stew that they had found in a Sephardic Jewish cookbook earlier in the year and more or less regularly made for themselves, Rosie, and on a couple of occasions Rosie’s other friends ever since. They got the fish from a grocery store in Ostia whose regular clientele included seventy-year-old Communist Refoundation Party voters with full beards and man buns, svelte drag queens in lacy black minidresses and six-inch stilettos, and, on one occasion, the distracting lead singer from the band Lacuna Coil. The fish was made with a sauce that had a tomato base and several spices that in American cooking would have been associated with sweet fall flavors like apple and pumpkin. All three of them just called it “the tomato and cinnamon fish” rather than whatever the cookbook called it. Becky and Jerry had memorized the recipe very quickly and now felt comfortable making their own minor alterations to it, some of which they were happy to teach to Rosie if she wanted.

            “Okay, Rosie,” said Becky to Rosie, “at this point you just let it simmer and stir it intermittently. It’s supposed to cook down into a thicker sauce than it is currently. And we should be cooking the fish at the same time, ideally, but it doesn’t necessarily matter if we leave that for later in the process.”

            “Do we add any more seasoning?” asked Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “it’s supposed to taste mostly like the tomatoes and cinnamon. Trust us on this; the flavor combination is better than it sounds.”

            “I know. I’ve had it numbers of times. It’s just that I associate cinnamon mostly with these Christmas cookies my mom’s cousin makes,” said Rosie.

            “Yes, I think all of us have that mom’s cousin who makes Christmas cookies somewhere in our family tree,” said Becky. “Except Jerry—”

            “I do have an aunt on my dad’s side who always overdoes it with the blintzes on Shavuot,” Jerry said. He had, for this project, furnished the recipe, but was currently lounging on the couch in the living room into which the kitchen opened in a natural manner, listening to Billy Bragg, to whom somebody in his think tank (of all people) had recently introduced him, on those earbuds that Becky could never get to sit in her ears properly. “By the way,” he went on, shouting over the music as if the others could hear it too, “did you know that Rosie is in love?”

            “Jerry!” snapped Rosie in a way that confirmed it. She turned to Becky and there was a slight flush rising on her cheeks, visibly spreading over the course of seconds.

            Becky was not too surprised, but she was a little more surprised than she thought she probably should have been. It was a rare thing for Rosie to express strong emotions other than feminist outrage, thirst for love in the abstract without any particular object or target, and something that bore the same surface resemblance to religious ecstasy that dolphins bore to certain smaller and more docile sharks.

            “It’s with Maddalena,” said Rosie. “Maddalena Galluccio.”

            “Yes, I knew which Maddalena,” said Becky fatuously. “How many Maddalenas do we know?”

            This made things stranger, she thought to herself as she continued explaining the stirring and simmering to Rosie. Maddalena Galluccio was a little younger than them; she had just graduated with a baccalaureate in music and dance from some university in Abruzzo earlier this year, then moved to Rome to hack it in the arts scene here, a program of life that had not gone as planned so far in part because she self-described as a “bad Catholic” and made sure everyone knew it. Like many bad Catholics, Maddalena had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of the sanctity of human life; also like more bad Catholics than was commonly supposed, she had apparently been an intense supporter of the center-right coalition at the last election. The idea of Rosie being in love with Maddalena was in and of itself unsurprising and felt what Becky’s junior-year medieval lit professor might have called “behovely,” but it was behovely in the same way as were songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town played in a Polish fusion restaurant. It was a complete mystery to Becky whether or not Maddalena had any interest in women.

            It was while eating the tomato and cinnamon fish for dinner with Roman artichokes and hazelnut candy later that evening that it became clear to Becky from context that Jerry had some pretty fond feelings for Maddalena Galluccio also, and had probably brought up Rosie’s feelings in order to castigate his own.

            “What do you find so appealing about Maddalena, Rosie?” Becky asked as they ate the fish.

            “She just intrigues me,” said Rosie. “She’s an Italian original; I don’t think I could find her even in Seaside Heights.”

            “That’s racist,” said Becky archly.

            “Maybe so but I do feel that only she could be the way she is. Anybody who’s had a weird enough childhood and is afraid of their parents in just the right way can be a Rosie or a Jerry or a Becky, but it takes a special kind of person to be a Maddalena.”

            “If you say so.”

            “The first time I ever really noticed Maddalena,” Jerry cut in, “was that incident with Pedro a couple months ago. Do you remember that, Becky?”

            “All too well,” said Becky.

            “Surely ‘Pietro’?” said Rosie.

            “No,” said Becky, “his name is Pedro. I think he’s from Valencia. He’s a year older than Maddalena and first met her when she hiked the Camino de Santiago when she was twenty. I think they online dated for a while but the relationship didn’t survive the transition to meatspace when he moved to Rome. I actually wasn’t privy to what exactly happened with the two of them and Jerry, though, only that Jerry went out to Maddalena’s apartment late at night and came back muttering something about how attempting to attribute emotional significance to performing mitzvot is a form of idolatry. I think it behooves Jerry to give us the details.”

            “Well, there’s not a whole lot to tell,” said Jerry. “Maddalena and Pedro were both at a party somewhere near the Piazza Barberini and Maddalena had a little too much to drink and looked like she might hook up with this guy who looked a lot older than her and seemed aggressive. Pedro got really concerned for her so he roofied her.”

            “Oh God,” said Rosie with a revolted look on her face.

            “Hold on,” said Becky. “I’m interested in this ‘so’. He got concerned for her so he roofied her? Is ‘so’ really the word you want here, Jerry?”

            “Yes, actually,” said Jerry. “He took her back to her own apartment, put her to bed fully clothed, then sat in her kitchen and made himself an Aperol spritz and sat there nursing it like Humphrey Bogart while he waited for her to come to. At a certain point I came over because I’d arranged to watch a movie with her that night; she’d made two commitments for the same night, or something. I didn’t know her well yet at that point. She came to and Pedro explained the situation to her.”

            “And how did Maddalena, uh, react to this, this…you know,” said Rosie, so confused and disgusted that abstract nouns failed her.

            “She was a lot calmer and more philosophical about it than I would have expected, personally,” said Jerry. “She acted a little like she was a noble lady and she was giving us an audience.”

            “Oh, God,” said Rosie again.

            “We ended up watching a Rossellini movie and eating jam sandwiches,” said Jerry.

            “Oh,” said Rosie.

 ❦

At this point something in the living room moved, possibly in a draught, in such a way that Jerry’s phone started playing, out of nowhere, a song that he had paused before dinner.

In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded

By the resumption of nuclear testing, and he is reminded

That Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell

At the first hurdle.

“Oh, sorry,” muttered Jerry, and went to the living room to turn his phone off.

            “This fish really is very good,” Rosie said to Becky while he was gone. “Not to be self-aggrandizing or anything but I think I did a really good job for my first try.”

            “I do too,” said Becky. “The spices in the sauce actually ended up really well-balanced.”

 ❦

“I know you’re not as stoked for L’Italia del Treno as I am, but will you watch it with me when it airs?” Jerry asked Becky over lunch the next day while, as was supposed, Rosie was reading a book for one of her assignments.

            “Stop saying ‘stoked’ and ‘L’Italia del Treno’ in the same sentence,” said Becky. “It’s making me crazy.”

            “Well, will you?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            “Rosie wants you to tell Maddalena she has feelings for her,” said Jerry a couple of minutes later, with a forkful of puttanesca halfway from his plate to his mouth. A caper slid down to the bottom of a trailing bit of spaghetti and then dropped gently off back onto the plate. “Don’t ask me why.” He took the bite, then another. Becky looked down at her strangozzi alla norcina, a recipe that she had picked up on a weeklong trip to Orvieto with some classmates last summer, with the sudden, unaccountable, barely even excusable, more than slightly queasy feeling that she would move heaven and earth and give up love and sex and morality alike for a milkshake and fries.

            “Rosie,” called Becky, “Rosie!”

            “She’s out,” said Jerry. “I think she’s telling some of her IR friends about that short story she’s writing. I don’t think any of them know who Sarah Waters is but they know Umberto Eco and they definitely know Romano Prodi.”

            “‘Umberto Eco I know, and Romano Prodi I know, but who is Sarah Waters to me?’” snowcloned Becky.

            “I actually read some of that book Fingersmith the other day,” Jerry said. “It’s pretty good, although I wouldn’t recommend it to Maddalena.”

            Becky set down her fork, took a gulp of wine, and said, not doing much to hide her frustration, “Why the Christ is everything in our lives about Maddalena these days?”

            “Maddalena’s an intriguing person.”

            “Maddalena is a berlusconiana. Maybe she should read Fingersmith and then we can see what she makes of Rosie’s short story. Think of it as a Rorschach test for the twenty-two-year-old soul.”

            “Eat your strangozzi, Becky,” said Jerry.

            “Anyway,” Becky said, “I think I’ll give Maddalena a call this evening after my evening class and explain…parts of the situation to her. I’m pretty sure I do have her contact info in my phone somewhere. Do you think that would be a good idea?” Jerry nodded. He seemed a little too enthusiastic about being able to nod at this, an enthusiasm that Becky made a mental note to make a mental note of, but did not actually make a mental note of and had forgotten within thirty seconds. “Do you know if Maddalena is into women?” Becky asked.

            “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Jerry, “but I think it’s better to go straight to the horse’s mouth for these things. So to speak.” Becky wasn’t sure what was “so to speak” about it, since she guessed Maddalena could be considered a little funny-looking, but not in a John Kerry Sarah Jessica Parker “why the long face?” sort of way.

            This conversation petered off, and Becky did not think about it again until she actually did call Maddalena, at about quarter of ten that night. Maddalena’s phone rang seven times—at each time from the fourth onwards Becky kept expecting it to go to voicemail—but finally Maddalena picked up, and Becky could immediately hear that she was at a party, probably a hipster party given that a song that Becky could place as being by either MGMT or Metric was blasting so loudly that Maddalena had to shout.

            “Pronto?” shouted Maddalena.

            “Buona sera; sono Rebekah Zylberberg. Posso parlare con Maddalena Galluccio, per favore?”

            “Sono Maddalena Galluccio. Scusi—” There was a moment of pure, unadulterated hipster music as Maddalena seemed to move through a crowd to a somewhat quieter place, maybe a coatroom of some sort. “Mi dispiace. La musica è più forte. Lei chi è?”

            “Rebekah Zylberberg, un’amica di Rosaria Distano e Yirmiyahu Polen. Vorrei parlare in inglese, per favore.”

            “Sorry,” said Maddalena after a moment. “Of course. Yes, I remember you now; you are their roommate, right?”

            “Yes, that’s me. Can I ask if you’re at a party, Maddalena? I hear music playing pretty loud; is it Metric? MGMT?”

            “It’s Metric.”

            “Okay.”

            “I don’t think Metric and MGMT sound much alike. Do you?”

            “Okay.”

            “Yes, I am at a party. Why do you ask?”

            “Nothing, it’s just…” Becky sighed and steeled herself for what was for to come. “My roommate Rosie, Rosaria Distano, has a crush on you, it seems like,” she said. “She wanted me to get in touch with you and let you know.”

            Maddalena was silent for about ten seconds, then said, in a placid, contemplative tone of voice, “I’m sorry, but I’m not very interested in women in that way. Besides, shouldn’t someone who is almost twenty-seven years old be past the point of having her friends confess for her?”

            “Okay,” said Becky. Then something overtook her, spiritually speaking, and she said “Did Rosie ever tell you about the short stories she writes?”
            “Not in so many words, no,” said Maddalena, whatever that meant. “Why?”
            “Well, because she’s writing one right now that has—do you know who Sarah Waters is?”

            “No; should I?”

            “That’s for you to decide. You know who Umberto Eco was, though?”

            “Yes, of course; I have a couple of volumes of that history of philosophy that he co-edited sitting on my bookcase at home in Castrovalva. I—you know what?” she asked. “I think I would rather hear about Rosie’s short stories from Rosie, if that is okay with you.”

            “That’s fine with me, of course,” said Becky. “Now—listen, I’d sort of like to get to know you better, since Rosie and Jerry are both so fond of you.” She let this imply what it may. “Would you like to grab dinner tomorrow?”

            “Tomorrow? Sure; it is a Saturday night and I don’t believe I’ll be doing anything. I know a place in the Jewish Ghetto if you’re interested.”

            “Sure. Text me the name of the restaurant and name your best time and I’ll see you there.”

 ❦

They met at the restaurant, which was in a square with the grandiloquent name Piazza delle Cinque Scole Sinagoghe del Ghetto di Roma già Via del Progresso, and sat around for about five minutes looking over the menus after dismissing a smiling waiter who was trying to help them and seemed to love his job.

            “I like this place because it gets a number of totally nondeserved bad reviews online,” Maddalena said. “I don’t know why—maybe the people reviewing it are antisemites or maybe they have just been to much better restaurants elsewhere—but I like it here, it is one of my favorite restaurants in Rome, and there are usually not too many tourists, although on some nights there are.”

            “Isn’t the seventy-fifth anniversary of that Under the Pope’s Windows thing coming up this coming week?” Becky asked.

            “Yes, very much so, it is,” said Maddalena, “and I do sort of wonder, you know, how the Pope might react. It is such a black mark on his predecessor, even if it’s overblown by some histori—sorry, is this making you uncomfortable?”

            “Huh? No,” said Becky. “My Jewish great-grandfather actually had pretty good experiences with the Church during the War. But of course I’m aware that that’s far from universal. Speaking of the Pope,” she said after a stage-managed pause of only a couple of seconds, “what is this ‘spaghetti papali Francesco’ stuff? It’s an interesting thing for a restaurant in the Jewish Ghetto to be serving.”

            “It has ham and parmesan,” said Maddalena. “So it’s doubly not kosher. Triply, even, if they named it after the Pope.” She furrowed her brow as if trying to remember something, then said, with a fluttering giggle, “Don’t tell Jerry!”

            “I won’t,” said Becky. “Anyway, I think I’ll get this baccalà lasagna; that sounds interesting. You?”

            “Puttanesca, probably, for the primo piatto. Let’s split some of the artichokes.”

            “Yes, let’s.”

            “I don’t mean to lead Rosie into delusion or too much romance about what I am like,” said Maddalena when the artichokes got there. “I don’t want to be thought of as a shrinking flower because I am Catholic; honestly I would probably be the hugest slut if enough guys were ever interested.”

            “You mean,” said Becky with the same feeling overtaking her as when she had asked Maddalena about Rosie’s stories, “other than Jerry?”

            Maddalena was silent for almost half a minute before Becky made an inquiring sound in her throat and she finally answered. “Is Jerry also interested in me, then?” she asked.

            “Yes,” said Becky, remembering what she had said so dismissively to Jerry about this young lady the day before. “I think he started to be interested in you around that incident with Pedro and the roofies.” This was calculated to instantiate some sort of feeling in Maddalena, but Becky did not want to admit to herself what feeling that was.

            “I see,” said Maddalena, and then changed the subject to a rambling, unevenly-told story about something she had seen or done or read or danced in high school at whatever bumfuck nowheresville in the Apennines she was from. Becky tried to imagine Maddalena at an American high school, perhaps one in small-town Texas or somewhere like that. She was certain, in a flash, that she would have been one of those rarest and dearest creatures in creation, a cheerleader with an IEP.

            It was at this point that Becky realized that she felt, suddenly, the first stirrings of a sexual attraction to Maddalena of her very own. It was not like how she had felt attraction before; there was in fact something high-school about it; it felt off, like a store brand; it made her feel disproportionate, like a majorette. She listened to Maddalena talk excitedly about a vacation she would be going on in a couple of weeks—on whose dime neither of them seemed quite sure—and then their primi got there.

 ❦

“Maddalena,” Rosie said dramatically, sitting in her favorite chair with her legs at a bizarre angle and a hand flung over her eyes. “You will be in sunlight soon.”

            “She’s going on vacation,” said Becky.

            “Your twisting is done—you have the last thread of my heart.”

            “She’s literally going on vacation. It’s not even that far away. She’s going to spend a week half-conscious in a bikini on some beach in Tunisia, alone, and then she will be back in Rome and you can talk to her then.”

            “Oh, let me be dramatic,” said Rosie, and nursed her cappuccino. “She told me you told her about my story, by the way. And she told Jerry you reminded her of the roofie incident. Why exactly do you do these things to us, Becky?”

            “I’m not doing anything ‘to’ you. I didn’t think it would kill you or her to be told about or reminded of those things, geez. Besides, they’re relevant subjects if either of you want her to date you. They were to have come up sooner or later.”

            “Yeah, on my watch.” Rosie sighed. “It’s whatever. It’s just that this story is very personal to me, and…I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

            “Why this of all stories is ‘very personal to you’? No, I guess I don’t understand, and—” Becky cut herself short. She was trying to be humane and equanimous. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Besides, I think she is after all a little too young for you, anyway.”

            “Maybe so,” said Rosie. “And she’s a far-right Forza Italia fingersmith. But, you know, I love her anyway.” Becky immediately caught the allusion to the, in their circles, semi-set phrase far-right Tory wanker and now was not sure whether she had much more desire or much less desire to read Sarah Waters than she had had before.

            “It’s not the first time a friend of Berlusconi’s has taken an extended leave in Tunisia,” said Jerry, which Rosie laughed at and which went over Becky’s head. “Anyway, did she say anything about—?”

            “She said to take it up with her yourself,” snapped Becky. “She told both of you to take all this stuff up with her yourselves and she’ll decide what to make of it and what to think of you—of us—then.”

            “Becky,” said Rosie, softly enough that Becky could almost believe she was trying not to stir shit, “do you want Maddalena to think highly of us?”

            “Sure I do,” said Becky. She turned the question, and other potential answers to it, over in her head for a little while, then gave up on it and went over to where Jerry was fiddling with his phone trying to expand his musical horizons again. It seemed to be the same Billy Bragg song as before.

It’s a mighty long way down rock ‘n’ roll

From Top of the Pops to drawing the dole

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

If no one out there understands

Start your own revolution and cut out the middleman

Waiting for the great leap forwards.

“I’m going out,” Rosie said suddenly, frustratedly. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll be back mid-afternoon.”

            “Okay,” said Jerry placidly, much as Maddalena would say things placidly. “Have fun.”

            “I’m sure I will,” said Rosie. “You too.” Becky was not sure of the clusivity of this “you too”; she suspected, but as yet it was only a suspicion, that she might be excluded from it more specifically than she would have liked. Rosie left with a jangle of keys and a thud of her thick boots on the staircase. Becky flopped down into the chair in which Rosie had been sprawled and crossed her legs at the ankles.

            “So now what?” asked Becky.

            “What do you mean ‘now what’?” said Jerry, pausing the music. “We wait for Rosie to get back. I’m not going to continue this whole thing with you without her. Sorry to disappoint you if you expected me to.”

            “You’re being uncharacteristically snippy,” said Becky. “You sound a little like her. –I’m sorry,” she said, finally, before Jerry could say anything, then apologized again for not letting him speak.

            “I think I understand what’s going on here,” said Jerry without explaining what that might be. “I’m gonna call Pedro. Might be good to touch base with him again.”

            “Pedro? The Pedro who roofied Maddalena to keep her from having sex with someone?”

            “I mean, in the situation at hand, it was…” Jerry sighed. “Actually, you know what? No. No, it was still inappropriate; you’re right.”

            “I didn’t say anything.”

            “I could tell what you were going to say, and you would have been right.”

            “I’m just saying that if it’s a strong male friendship you’re after then there are much better people out there than this Pedro guy seems to be. Do you even know if you have anything in common with him other than being involved in that, uh, incident?”

            “Look, we all have fondnesses for people we’re not proud of having,” said Jerry. “You’re right that, that it’s…but yeah. You’re right. I’m going to call him anyway, though; there’s probably something in that situation from back then that’s worth repairing that’d be easier to repair talking to him than to Maddalena.”

            “I’m sure that’s true,” said Becky, who developed the sureness that it was true that she was claiming as she was saying the sentence claiming that she was sure that it was true. “Okay, yeah, why don’t you call Pedro?” She could not help but feel, and be unable to shake the feeling, that she was enabling him in something. It was not so much the fact that he was going to call Pedro that bothered her as the fact that he was going to call Pedro, to lead with the same proud-to-be-an-American, hey-ya over-intimacy with which she had led with Maddalena thirty-six hours ago.

            “I think I will,” Jerry said, “this afternoon.” Something in his voice sounded foggy, as if the idea had some sort of implication or connotation that he had not considered and did not want to. Becky contemplated the obvious but did not want to decide on it before Jerry did. Jerry, she suspected, might never decide on it, nor, maybe, should he. In spite of this, she did not feel the need to force something. She would also not tell herself what she would be forcing. Maybe Rosie and her tastes had rubbed off on Becky less than Becky had thought or hoped.

            “Jerry,” Becky asked, “where is Rosie going, anyway? Did she have some sort of power brunch?”

            Jerry boggled. “She’s at the canonization,” he said, and Becky swallowed something in her throat that had more power over her than it ever had before.

❦

This is the second in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.

Short Story: “Finger Food”

It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.

            “Why are you wearing a dress shirt and tie to eat dinner by yourself anyway?” she asked. “Did you come here wanting to impress a stranger?”

            “Business partner stood me up,” said Thad vaguely, wanting anything but to get into the situation with Jason in front of this woman. “Well, are you?” he asked. She raised her long, thick eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Impressed,” he said. “Are you impressed?”

            She stopped trying not to laugh. “I would have been impressed if it weren’t for the salsa verde,” she said.

❦

Over the next few months, and especially when they finally did start dating, Thad learned a lot about Zewditu that distinguished her very sharply from Noriko, and his present with her from his past with Noriko, in his mind. Zewditu was from Ethiopia but had grown up in Washington, DC; Noriko was from Fukuoka and had not left Fukuoka for any length of time until she had come to Boston for graduate school, at which point the winters had descended upon her with almost mechanical ferocity; she had always said during winter that she could never get warm, even in the unseasonable and in the context of world history deeply frightening January and February heat waves of the past two years. He had not been through a winter with Zewditu yet, but she told him that she liked the cold; it distinguished her adulthood from her childhood. And yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that she did not like Ethiopia or being Ethiopian. She listened to Ethiopian pop music, which Thad had not known existed, and took him to Ethiopian restaurants where he somewhat queasily watched her munch away at elaborate dishes with her fingers no more self-consciously than she had eaten the chips and salsa, or than she had eaten burgers and fries on the day they had driven out to the Five Guys in Framingham. Noriko had always been finicky and even when she ate sushi she was always very careful to use chopsticks; it had actually not been until Thad had seen some sort of video about sushi etiquette online that he realized that there were Japanese people, lots of them, who thought that using utensils with some kinds of sushi was a faux pas.

            Noriko was a Japanese Anglican, rare as hen’s teeth, and once she got started you could never shut her up about the self-righteous liberalism of North American Anglicans or the hidebound conservatism of other Asian and African ones. It had taken her and Thad longer than most young couples these days to sleep together but once they had started they had proceeded more or less as normal for their age, although Noriko made it very clear to him that she would choose motherhood if she got pregnant. (She had made, on a few occasions, nonspecific allusions to a miscarriage suffered after a hectic argument with her parents about an accidental pregnancy when she had been in her late teens.) Zewditu, by contrast, even though circumstances in her childhood had led her to be militantly secular as an adult in a way that made Thad vaguely but distinctly uncomfortable, had said outright on their first real date that she had no plans to “put out” any time soon, refused to use hormonal contraception if and when she did, and had never had a very high sex drive anyway. “You have two hands. Pick one of them and use it,” she had said when Thad expressed concern that infrequent sex might lead to an insufficiently close relationship. He tried to imagine Noriko ever encouraging him to masturbate and realized very soon that he could not under any circumstances.

            “He’s dating Noriko Kisui,” he had heard his friends say in awed tones for the first few weeks of his and Noriko’s relationship. They had been similarly awed when it had become manifest to them that breaking up after two and a half years together had been his idea, that her solution to the problem of their divergent career paths had been to get married so that their employers could not justify separating them as easily. He had actually been entirely willing to entertain the idea of marrying her; he had only broken up with her instead because he had an unshakeable suspicion that the real reason why she was suggesting it was to ratify or authenticate her guilt over having had a sexual relationship with him for the past two years, a suspicion that even if false would probably poison their marriage at the root. He had never heard “He’s dating Zewditu Gebremeskel” said in the same tones, and although he really did not mind this, he wondered, and worried for Zewditu’s sake, about the possibility that the reason had too much to do with her bushy eyebrows and jutting jawline.

            Zewditu was a cheaper date than Noriko. In addition to the Five Guys, which she had insisted on going to because it was near one of her bicycle touring friends’ house, she liked walking around Brookline and especially “people-watching” in Coolidge Corner.

            “Honestly,” she said to Thad one warm September day as they were sitting at the Coolidge Corner T station, “I am a little surprised that you didn’t marry her, you know.”

            “Why?” asked Thad, who was not sure that he wanted this brought up right now, especially since before today he had not seen Noriko (he still saw her socially) in more than a week and he and Zewditu had not discussed her at length in almost a month. “I just wasn’t sure she wanted it for good reasons.”

            “I know,” said Zewditu. “But, still, it’s not like it would have taken too much of your time and energy. Just go down to the courthouse and bing-bang-boom, you’re married. I guess she might have insisted on an Anglican church wedding, but even though my knowledge of Episcopalian weddings is rusty I can’t imagine they’re as much of sticklers for discernment as the Catholics or the Orthodox. It’s easy enough to get married these days and there are so few irreversible consequences of doing it that it really does surprise me that you didn’t just go for it.”

            “Do you think it would have been a good thing?”

            “For you? I don’t know; I don’t know Noriko.” Zewditu feel silent for a few moments, then suddenly grasped his hand tightly and turned to him with a wide-eyed, solemn expression. “I am glad you didn’t, you know,” she said. “I am glad you’re with me.”

            This was the sort of conversation he might well have had with Noriko as well. It had taken her longer to open up to him, but once she had, the acidity and incisiveness that was in Zewditu now had been in Noriko also. It was probable that, if their positions had been reversed, if Thad had been first with Zewditu and then with Noriko, then Noriko’s reassurance that she was glad that he was with her now would have come in a somewhat subtler form. She had always harbored a little bit of pride in her harsh tendencies. Thad had never been sure what to make of it or how to feel about it, other than that it definitely neither impressed nor appalled him. As with Zewditu, he had worried then that it was mostly the way Noriko looked that made his friends so awed that he was dating her.

            And what did he himself bring to either of these women? People said he was funny and he understood clothing and makeup, but Noriko had cared about clothing and makeup and Zewditu did not. He had some interest in “trends” and was also stably and almost impressively employed, but Zewditu cared about those things and Noriko had not. The interest in “nerdy” girls that he had had in high school and early in college, girls who had shared the interests that he had had at that time, had given way to his relationships, as a grown man who thought of himself as boring and consoled himself with the fact that it was not his job or his destiny to entertain people, with women who were “nerdy” mostly about things like classic big band music and, in Zewditu’s case, aerobic exercise.

            On this subject, when after a certain point Zewditu had a bit of a crack-up and had to change careers, she found work at a bike shop out in the suburbs in very short order, to the point where Thad had to wonder, at least idly, whether she might have had this bike shop in mind in case something like this happened to begin with. The next time they were together—in his apartment, listening to Gene Krupa at her suggestion—he asked her when and how she had gotten so into bikes.

            “I’ve just never met somebody as passionate about bikes as you, especially somebody who lives in the city.”

            “Really? Don’t more people in cities bike?”

            “I mean the sort of bike touring that you’re really into, not just biking to work. It’s interesting. I kinda like it.” Thad was saying this as someone who himself biked to work when the weather was good for it but didn’t get much use out of his bike otherwise.

            “Well, it’s something I grew up with, obviously,” said Zewditu archly. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. When you think Ethiopia do you not think bike touring?” She grinned anarchically and tilted her chin up a little.

            Zewditu wanted the people who worked at the bike shop and the people who were its customers to call her Judy. She said that the idea that Zewditu was the Amharic form of Judith was a common misconception—Thad had been surprised at first that any misconception about cognates of the name Zewditu was “common” but Zewditu had told him that there had been an Ethiopian empress with her name in the early twentieth century—but she asked people to call her it anyway so as to smooth over some of the possible clashes of culture or understanding that might otherwise befall her in the bike shop.

            “There aren’t too many people your age named Judy anyway,” he said to her.

            “There are some. I’m taking a chance on Newton people being less snooty about someone who’s named like a grandmother than about someone who’s named like a famine victim.”

            “I don’t think they’d’ve been snooty. They might’ve patronized you or pitied you.”

            “That’s another consideration that I have, yes.” Zewditu flopped down on the couch. “Is your work still going okay, Thad? I remember that the last time we discussed this there were some problems but you thought they should be dealt with without too much difficulty. How has that been going?” She turned that probing gaze on him again, and her lips quirked downwards a little. He did not know how he wanted to answer. The truth was that he was almost burnt out. He had, a few years ago, before his current career had begun, done some time as a substitute teacher for the Boston Public Schools, and had subbed mostly for paraprofessionals at the elementary school level. Chanting “I hear talking, I hear talking; I SHOULD NOT! I SHOULD NOT!” at seven-year-olds whom he did not recognize had not been the best job in the world but he found himself pining for it as his current job got further and further out of his ability to adjudicate or see the point of.

            Thinking of his stint in the public education system reminded him of that old Simpsons episode with the “Skinner and the Superintendent” skit (Skinner, with his crazy explanations! The superintendent’s gonna need his medication when he hears Skinner’s lame exaggerations! There’ll be trouble in town tonight!). His own schooling had been private from third grade up through college. There was a certain dirtbag style that he had picked up as a sub that he genuinely felt he had been lacking before, lacking as one lacked something that one should have rather than something that one should not, and he thought that it was this dirtbag style that had appealed first to Noriko, who envied it, and then to Zewditu, who shared it. (Or was it Noriko who shared it and Zewditu who envied it? His preconceptions of them, which might be mildly racist for all he knew, meant that he had a hard time telling.)

            One time he had asked Zewditu if there were any other sports that she was into besides bike touring and she had talked for half an hour about figure skating. Zewditu called hockey rinks “honky rinks,” which Thad strongly suspected was a Simpsons allusion of her very own, but she did like figure skating. He tried to get her to watch I, Tonya with him but she refused because she had heard that the movie took liberties with the music in some of the Historical Tonya Harding’s routines, so instead he had let her show him several hours’ worth of actual early-nineties skating routines on YouTube, all with elaborate running commentary on people whom he recognized no better than the seven-year-olds. “Nancy and Tonya were actually more similar than people think. Both were power-driven skaters rather than artists. Both were huge bitches.” “Surya kept getting underscored because of racism but there was some drama between her coach and her parents too, although part of that could also have been due to racism.” “You might recognize Brian because he’s a recurring character in South Park. At least that’s what I’ve heard; I’ve only seen one episode of South Park in my life.” She had these sorts of comments about everyone other than Kristi Yamaguchi, whom she seemed to hero-worship.

            She had two photographs hanging in her living room; Noriko had had one, of a Japanese Christian leader in the early twentieth century named Toyohiko Kagawa. Zewditu’s were of Vincenzo Nibali, who was an Italian bike racer, and an Ethiopian feminist activist named Bogaletch Gebre. Thad watched some videos of Vincenzo Nibali and had to say that he did see the appeal. He tried to watch some videos of Bogaletch Gebre too but found the subject matter too upsetting, which he was worried made him a little pathetic and unhelpful but which Zewditu said actually reflected pretty well on him. Of videos of Toyohiko Kagawa he had found none but he did still have on his bookshelf a short collection of Kagawa’s meditations on the Bible or on Christian doctrine or on something of that nature, things that Thad did not spend much time thinking about and that Zewditu held in patient but unapologetic contempt and that for Noriko been of supreme importance and well worth every scintilla of attention that one might give them.

            Trying to watch I, Tonya with Zewditu had been after it came out on digital media. When it had been in theaters he had seen it with Noriko, just a couple of months before the breakup. They had gone to the Regal Fenway because it had nice seats and a good selection of snacks and was a quicker ride in along the Green Line than the Tremont Street movie theater was. Neither Thad nor Noriko cared about any sport nearly as much as Zewditu cared about bike touring, bike racing, and figure skating, but Noriko wanted to see the movie anyway, and they had both ended up enjoying it. Somehow it had dripped out of Thad’s mind afterwards. He did not remember much of most movies that he saw anymore. Books stuck a little more firmly in his thoughts and recollections, but not by much, certainly not by as much as he would have wished. In any case he would often remember that something would be “relevant” to Zewditu or to Noriko, or even to Jason or one of his other male friends, but not remember why, beyond very general strokes. I, Tonya was about figure skating so Zewditu would like it. The Remains of the Day was about a butler so Jason, whose great-grandfather had been a butler to some minor Vanderbilt or Vanderbilt-adjacent person, would like it. The Old Man and the Sea was about fishing so Cousin Colin would like it. He was always trying to connect with people this way, but he could barely remember with what he was doing the connecting.

            Zewditu got him to go on a bike tour with her. A couple of days before they left Boston—he had taken a week off, and they were going to try to get up to the Lake Winnipesaukee area before leaving the bikes with a friend of Zewditu’s up there and taking a bus back—he had lunch with Noriko to catch up after hearing that she had started dating someone named Johannes. He did not find out much about Johannes other than that he was Catholic and that Noriko felt more comfortable living her life to his specifications than she had living her life to Thad’s, but he did find out a lot about Noriko. Not least of what he found out was that Noriko had seen herself as “living her life to his specifications,” something that horrified and ashamed him to think about but that he did not know how to dispute if that had really been what she had wanted to do. He wondered if Zewditu lived life to anybody’s specifications. He did not think that she did, but he would not have thought that Noriko did either. Was it something particular about or typical to being a woman, he wondered? He guessed it was; he thought he liked women who were past that, but did he really? Was he even able to say what he liked?

            The other thing that he noticed about Noriko was that she was much more annoyingly religious than he had remembered. She kept talking about things as “providential” or as being about “grace in the world,” grace that came down from on high and lent a sort of significance that she refused to define and claimed not to be able to understand herself to everything that she felt or thought or said or did or was. They were eating at a crappy little restaurant near South Station, a restaurant all the crappier for its strenuous avoidance of the normal aesthetics of crappiness, and she kept saying that everything he was doing with his food was convincing her that there was something important and delightful about the world that was happening to and through both of them. He would pour a few potato chips out onto his napkin before eating any of them. She would say that this was beautiful and spectacular. He would glance up at her with wide, surprised eyes, with his mouth full of second-rate parfait. She would pick imperiously at her salad with the fork with which she was judiciously eating it and, with laughter lines rocketing outward from below her eyes, say that part of her did still envy the people who got to have his graces in their lives every day. He was not sure if she was being sarcastic when she said this, nor was he sure if she thought that “his graces” were really his graces, really things that could be associated with or attributed to him except through at least partly uncalled-for conflation and oversimplifying. She was using the fork on her sandwich also, a characteristically Noriko touch that he realized with a start that he had missed for many months and did not miss anymore.

            “I’m surprised she wouldn’t watch it with you but I’m glad you and she are sharing your interests,” she said at one point, which got Thad to wondering what interests, exactly, it was that he really had to share with Zewditu. “Have you talked to her about your time as a sub? I always really liked the stories you’d tell me about that. That ‘I hear talking’ one was hysterical! I think she’d really like it.

            “I’m interested that it keeps coming up that she’s so sporty,” Noriko went on. “I know I was never really into sports until very recently, but in the past few months I’ve started fencing, just for fun. It wasn’t actually Johannes who got me into it but Kayla—remember Kayla? From the gym I did aerobics at for five seconds?” Thad nodded with recollection whose strength surprised him. “It’s something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but my knees weren’t good enough because of that injury. I’m better able to take the bouncing around now.”

            The injury was a story that, as far as Thad knew, Noriko had pretty much always enjoyed telling. She had been about seven or eight and playing some Japanese variant of duck-duck-goose that she had never really succeeded in explaining to his satisfaction. Something had gone awry and she had ended up chasing a boy her age halfway across the playground and into a thick stand of camphor trees; they had come across a protruding root, he had jumped over it, and she had missed it, caught her foot under it, and fallen on her face with a twisted knee. Such was the story that she had told so many times. This time, over this lunch, she supplied the further knowledge, hitherto unrevealed to him, that this had been the same boy as in the pregnancy a decade later. She volunteered also, and almost convinced Thad that it was related, and succeeded in convincing him that it was important, that she had at that time been strongly leaning towards the name Hikari.

            “Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bike trip,” Noriko said. “I’m not sure if it’s something I would go for personally but maybe if my knees keep holding up after I’ve been fencing for a while I’ll look into biking or running. I think it’s great that Zewditu is sharing so much with you.”

            “It feels a little weird to have this shared with me,” said Thad. “I don’t really know what to make of it, especially since she’s a pretty closed-off person otherwise. She doesn’t seem like she’d make a good shoulder to cry on after a bad day.”

            “And do you think I would have made a good shoulder to cry on, looking back on things?” asked Noriko. She asked it sharply and forcefully, with her forehead wrinkled and her lips slightly curled, but it was clear to Thad after long years of knowing her that it was a sincere question.

            “Honestly, no, I’m not sure I do,” said Thad. “I don’t think I would have either,” he added, to dig himself out of the hole a little, but from the at-peace look that pooled over Noriko’s face he got the distinct feeling that the hole was as deep in her eyes as in his own.

            “Maybe she’s sharing herself more fully with you than you think,” said Noriko.

 ❦

This comment came back to his mind a week later as they sat in a diner in Belknap County munching on poutine after the second-to-last day of biking. They had come up through winsome woods trending towards redness. Their bikes were locked up outside and Zewditu had her jacket tied by the sleeves around her broad, sweat-flecked shoulders. She was chewing more primly than usual, possibly because she had just been ranting at him about the concept of “ethical non-monogamy” and wanted to play the role of propriety some more. (“Ethics are morals for people who think Eliezer Yudkowsky has original insights,” she had said, whatever that meant.) On the table between them was a heavily dog-eared and marked-up copy of selected Zora Neale Hurston essays that Zewditu had been rereading on the road. Thad aspired to understand Zewditu’s political opinions someday.

            “I think I’d like to spend a day or two with Rick and Cara if that’s okay with you,” Zewditu was saying in between bites of poutine, wiping gravy from her hand with a coarse paper napkin.

            “Separate beds, I’m assuming?” said Thad.

            “Separate sleeping bags, yeah. We packed them for a reason. I don’t know that Rick and Cara have a guest room. They live in one of those A-frames you sometimes see thrown up around the edges of ponds in the woods. They’ve been married for longer than we’ve been alive and have been bicycle enthusiasts for longer still than that. They have a daughter in Hollywood and a son in academe.

            “If we did have kids, you know,” she said, completely without sneer, “I’d want them to have one foot in the real world.”

            “I would too,” said Thad. “If we did.”

            “If we might,” said Zewditu with a faint smile.

            He looked at her munching on her poutine again. The hand that she had once told him to use felt still and numb on the tabletop. For the first time he was filled with love for the woman sitting across from him.

❦

This is the first in a six-story cycle called Haters and Losers.

Short Story: “The Thought of Vinegar”

The child went home each night to a house in the cold hills. There were unseasonable storms and winds in the late evenings, storms and winds on which a witch might fly through an upright window to speak to the little girl in benign but frightening tones. The girl’s uncertainty is an uncertainty that a witch might like to solve, in her necromantic way and for her own fey or devilish purposes. The girl might, then, worry a loose strand of yarn at one of the cuffs of her sweater as she speaks to the witch, telling the witch that in her dreams she has other and better unnatural or supernatural friends.

“My mom says I won’t be seven for much longer,” the girl says. “I just have to wait for a little bit.”

“And how long has it been ‘not much longer’ for, for your mother?” asks the witch. “You’re not tired of being seven until she sees fit otherwise? You don’t wish to start the passage of time yourself, for yourself?”

The questions feel like being poked by pencils, the way the boy who teases her does at school. “It should be any day now,” she insists, “that I’ll turn eight.”

“Who will turn you?” the witch demands. “Who can turn you eight? Who is it who could allow or disallow the passage of time?”

The girl fidgets some more with the dark brown strand of sweater-cuff. “It just happens,” she says, “I think, I guess.” The small piece of off-black chocolate in the witch’s beckoning hand frustrates both of them and looks frustrated itself. For the child it always feels apprehensive to think that her apprehension might vanish. The invitation here is honest and because of this the inviter, the witch, is, for her own part, humiliated and offended, in the power of this child as she might be in the power of that which laughs in the cold marcescent trees.

After an interval the girl says “The lorries will help me get there. To my birthday, I mean.”

Imperiously, the witch declares “How silly! A lorry is a truck, isn’t it?”

“My lorries aren’t. They’re elephants, on dirtbikes. They bike up the stairs and ask me about my day.” The girl smiles at the witch. She is no longer fiddling with her sweater. “They’ll help me with this.”

“Feh,” says the witch—then, realizing to her horror that she really is being sincere with this little girl, “It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?”

Tomorrow the girl will go and take a math test at school, a test for which she will, in fact, have studied. It will be her eighth birthday. She will try to imagine what the witch’s chocolate would have tasted like, but for some reason it will be the taste of vinegar that comes into her mouth instead.

Short Story: “Quintessence”

Esteban Okada was born in Hakodate to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother, in a time of improving fortunes for Japan after the demographic and humanitarian collapse of the previous century. Hundreds of years ago Hakodate had been a flourishing seaport; now, it was close to a Democratic Alliance military elevator under the joint custodianship of Japan and Indonesia. It was around the base of this elevator that he and his friends had played in childhood, flying kites and antique model planes. He had been raised in his mother’s Catholic faith, still uncommon in Japan but not looked upon with as much suspicion as in some other Alliance countries. He discovered young that he was called to be a priest but was not ordained until he was past thirty, due to poor typing skills and reluctance to break an engagement to a famous young artist into which he had rashly entered.

When he was ordained, everybody figured that he would be a military chaplain; growing up in a space elevator community he had gotten a good head for the ins and outs of military life, and the Japanese chaplain corps was severely undermanned. This was in the time of the Alliance’s long war against the Australian-Martian coalition, which in a few years would end very abruptly and thus without showing many signs of ending any time soon before it did. Esteban had qualms about chaplaincy mostly due to a long-standing distrust of the wider society that the military represented and defended. He told this to one of his old seminary professors, an old nun named Tanizaki, and received from her the dressing-down that he had not known he needed.

“Okada,” said Tanizaki, “people like you and me need to keep in mind that the enormous structural problems of the last couple of centuries have for the most part been adapted to or solved. You and I may not like these adaptations and solutions. You were talkative enough in your Catholic social teaching class that I know good and well how you feel about them, and I feel the same way.”

“But,” said Esteban, taking a wild guess at where Tanizaki was going with this, “it’s still our duty to protect and minister to the society in which we find ourselves. I know that’s right; I know that’s the answer. I know what I should do.”

“I’m not telling you what you should do,” said Tanizaki in a sweet and likely tone. “If you have an objection to military culture itself then that’s more than reasonable. But if you’re concerned that the society around us isn’t up to snuff, then all I can say is that you’re not wrong, but even if God had not moved us to adapt but had sustained us in an existence that was just barely worth living, that would have been enough.”

 ❦

Jess Martinelli was from Earth, too, and was not as inclined to make negative judgments about the situation there as Esteban was. She was well aware that her ancestors had taken more delight in (for example) snowfall than she could, but she was more or less content experiencing it mostly in extreme weather events in which she took no real satisfaction or pleasure. She had joined the US Space Marine Corps right out of eleventh grade for the old classic reason, that young people like her were clean out of opportunities in her native Massachusetts, but the perceived abilities to screw and fight as she pleased were definite perquisites. That had been two and a half years ago. Now she was nineteen going on twenty and had been given positions of impressive responsibility faster than many people, Jess herself foremost among them, thought her levels of sagacity and insight merited. This was less because she was a great shot with a positron rifle, although she was, and more because occasionally-weeks-long voyages in deep space gave her ample time, in addition to her other leisure pursuits, to read and become well-spoken and knowledgeable.

Jess had first met Esteban about eighteen months into her USSMC career, when both of them had been stationed at the Democratic Alliance Combined General Staff headquarters on Titan. Esteban had been a Japanese- and Spanish-language chaplain, Jess an orderly for one Colonel Ridge-Roundel. Afterwards she had spent several months on the Galilean moons of Jupiter pumping hot lead into whom the news media characterized as radical Buddhist nationalists and she just thought of as “the terrorists.” He was still on Titan when she got back in contact with him and asked him to come with her on this voyage.

He asked her why she had volunteered for this voyage herself and she said that she wanted to do something romantic and exciting with her military career, even if it got her killed. He asked her why she wanted him to come along and she said that she wanted somebody to confess to so that, even if she did get killed, she’d have a fighting chance of making it out, so to speak, Alive.

“Okay,” he said in English in their third phone conversation, the one in which he actually agreed to do this. “That’s—can I ask if you actually feel bad about any of this, Jess? Your confessions won’t be valid unless you’re actually contrite.”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘feel bad,’” said Jess, and continued before he could groan. “I think I should feel bad, and I know I can’t go on like this forever, but I’m young and I’m not sure how I feel about living differently right now.”

“So you don’t dislike who you are, but want me around to stop you spiraling out of control?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

After a long pause, he said “All right. I think God can work with that.”

 ❦

“All right. We don’t have any clear idea of conditions at the other end of the bridge, so until further notice duties stay on the Ganymede schedule,” said Rear Admiral Kurtoğlu. “Day duties from 1330 to 0430, night duties from 0430 to 1330, meals at 1400, 1900, and 0200. You’ll be issued with atomic watches in case the main clocks stop working. Let me reiterate that this is the first time a naturally formed Einstein-Rosen bridge has opened in the Solar System and humanity does not have experience with this. Death, either immediately upon going through the bridge or at any time thereafter, is a live issue. This is a pun on the word ‘live.’ Rules for fraternization are according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice of the United States of America. Rules for…”

“Do you think she’s upset that we didn’t laugh at her pun?” Jess whispered to Lieutenant Raffalovich.

“I think she’s upset that getting us all killed isn’t a guarantee,” Raffalovich said.

 ❦

The bridge was just a hair inside the heliopause, which meant about a week of travel in a long-phase ship, most of which was taken up with exactly this sort of procedural briefing and babble. Esteban spent most of this time rereading some of his favorite spiritual classics, as well as a book of medieval Jewish mystical poetry that Raffalovich, the only actively religious Space Marine on this mission whom he knew personally other than Jess, had lent him. The book was ancient; the publication date was in the 1990s and it had a faded, tattered library checkout card on the inside of the back cover showing dates leading into the early 2000s. Esteban had seen books far older than this in church and university libraries and sometimes in the private collections of friends, but he had never felt confident enough in his ability to take care of them to buy any himself.

“Does that come on ‘film?” Jess asked him a few days in when she came by his quarters for confession. (She said that she preferred confessing anonymously or with an illusion of anonymity, but because they both knew who the other was and knew that nobody else on the voyage was likely to be confessing to Esteban, they had decided to dispense for now with screens and grilles.) “I’d like to read it but I don’t read paper books much these days.”

“I don’t know; sorry,” said Esteban. “It’s very, very used. Look at the publication date.” He held the book up and showed the title page to her; her eyebrows went up. “Raff lent it to me.” Jess made a polite sound of assent and Esteban, suddenly frustrated, got up out of his chair and looked her straight in the eye. “Jess, does it bother you that everybody on this voyage other than you and Raff thinks of me as dead weight?”

“I don’t pay much attention to what ‘everybody other than me and Raff’ thinks. Does it bother you?”

“Not in particular.” This might have been a lie but, if nothing else, he did not know that it was a lie at the time that he said it. It was later that night, at around 0945 when he got up for a midnight bathroom break and stood there in the dimmed hallway listening to the maternal thrum of the engines, that he started to wonder if it maybe bothered him more than he let on, and more than somebody like Tanizaki would be comfortable with it bothering him.

“Glad to hear it,” said Jess, in the moment as it were. She sat down. “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been four days since my last confession, and these are my sins.”

Esteban listened patiently, gave what advice he could, assigned a reasonable penance, and, once Jess had left his quarters and was out of earshot, groaned loudly and threw himself down on his bed with his left hand fanned over his eyes like a fainting grand dame in an old-time American stage play.

 ❦

Jess, along with everybody else other than Kurtoğlu and the madrigal singers who had to keep singing to give her some sense of the subjective passage of time, was in suspended animation when the Constantine Cavafy passed over the bridge. There had been experiments done with artificially instantiated Einstein-Rosen bridges in the past to establish a procedure for how to go about this, but Kurtoğlu had not been exaggerating when she had described the scale of this one, and its natural occurrence, as without precedent. All attempts to figure out where exactly the other end of it was had proven abortive. Certain of the more arcane and specialized radio telescopes had mapped small portions of the sky as seen from the other end, but the stars were too strange to make much sense of.

One of the singers, Lassalle, was the first to see the structure that awaited them at the other end and that had stymied the astronomers of Miranda. It was about sixty light-hours from them as they surfaced, and a little over a light-day across; it sparkled and shone, a battered sphere of crystal bristling with bright lights that had probably once been brighter still. Lassalle kept it in her heart until Kurtoğlu sent up the signal to stop the madrigals; they were several thousand kilometers clear of the bridge, and seemingly in relative safety.

When Lassalle told Kurtoğlu what she saw, and Kurtoğlu awoke some of the pilots to confirm it astrophysically, the admiral made an immediate decision to try to determine what part of space they were in before going any further. The pilots did untold calculations well into the hours by which they were expecting to have been able to wake up the rest of the voyagers. Eventually, rather than reaching a conclusion, they admitted failure.

“We seem to be in an entirely new region of space,” said one of the pilots. “We might be beyond Earth’s light cone, outside the observable universe.”

“Oh, dear,” said Kurtoğlu. She rubbed her forehead. “Is it worth trying to get messages back through the bridge to Ganymede to explain the situation?”

“It’s certainly worth trying. They might be garbled but hopefully somebody would be able to understand what we mean.”

“Great. Work on that. I’ll wake up the crew. Once you’ve got a message to Ganymede, plot an orbital course to start studying the object we’re looking at and see if it’s amenable to a landing party.”

 ❦

Jess and Esteban spent the morning of their first full day after waking up swapping book recommendations and jogging up and down the halls of the ship trying to get their circulation going again. It almost made him feel young again, and it made her feel all of her brief years. In the afternoon she drank space grog and hid in her room to avoid a Lithuanian shock-trooper whom she had slept with on a previous mission (Jogailė, maybe, or Jūratė?), then got started on Moby-Dick, which Esteban had told her she might find appropriate to their present situation. She gave up when she realized that he had probably been pulling her leg, but later, after dinner, she spent her last hour before bed trying to decide whether or not to pick it up again, and ended up getting through one more chapter before she crashed.

The day after that, Esteban tried to rustle up some people who were interested in coming to Mass and actually got a decent crowd, although not as many as at the Sunday Mass that he had said two days before going into the bridge. Raffalovich came out of curiosity and Kurtoğlu poked her head in briefly at one point in order to be seen. Esteban kept hoping Jess would show up but Jess was too immersed in the book by this point. Nobody came up for communion; the only reason Esteban could take it himself was that he had gotten a general absolution from his superiors in Tokyo before consenting to volunteer for this mission. He spent the rest of the day getting to know the only other chaplain on the voyage, a jumpy imam about halfway between Jess’s age and his own.

“I wish they wouldn’t be so secretive about what they’re expecting this thing to be like when we get there,” said Esteban to Jess one day about two and a half weeks into the voyage, with another week to ten days to go until they entered orbit around the shining sphere. “I really don’t think the tension on this voyage needs to be any higher than it actually is.”

“Really?” said Jess. “You think they’re being too secretive? If anything I wish they would tell us less. They can’t just dribble information down on us like they are. Either tell us conclusively that it’s some, some vast military space installation long since abandoned by long-gone forebears, or don’t bring it up. Don’t just say over and over again that you’re ‘studying the possibility.’ No matter how excited the materials scientists are about this thing.”

“Did you hear one of them yesterday,” said Esteban, “that awful pompous one with the 2040s Berlin hairdo? He was saying that ‘the history of the natural sciences has come to a crossroads’…because of this substance that he admits to having no idea about and currently no way of studying.”

“Yeah, I love it when these people act like they still need to shill for funding. I mean, I do feel bad for them—I went to a poor school in a poor state; I left for space as soon as I could; I know how it is—but you’d think they could be a little more honest about their intentions now that they’re working for the Combined Fleet and on an essentially unlimited budget.”

“Raff was saying to me that one of them told him that they’re concerned about being left in the dust by whatever studying this thing comes up with, and because of that they are trying to get a jump on it, so to speak, and position themselves as early experts on it. He used the term ‘paradigm shift’ even though nobody involved in this conversation thinks that ‘paradigm shifts’ are actually how science works anymore.”

“Really? Even Raff doesn’t think that?”

“Even Raff doesn’t think that.” Esteban raised an eyebrow and a cup of tea. (They had gone on a more casual schedule of duties a few days before, and he and Jess were spending their lunchtime in a tearoom instead of the mess.) “Is there any particular reason why that’s surprising? I don’t know him as well as you do.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I guess it’s just that from what I know religious people prefer to think of it that way, and I know Raff tries to be as observant as he can even if that ends up being ‘not very.’” Esteban wanted to ask why that was what Jess knew, but he did not. Jess poured some tea of her own. “By the way, this is the longest I’ve gone without needing to confess in a while. I don’t know if that means that I’m getting more virtuous or that my chances to misbehave are getting less frequent. I would honestly rather think it’s the latter.”

“Why would you rather think that?”

“Because I haven’t noticed myself trying to change. And I’m not a good enough Catholic to want God to change me without my noticing.”

“Do you wish you were?”

“Were what?”

“Were that good a Catholic.”

“I don’t know. I definitely wish I were that good a Marine.” Jess yawned, stretched her arms, and started walking around the tearoom. A gaggle of French and Italian soldiers looked up at her apprehensively as she passed them. Suddenly Esteban could almost hear the hum of the lights again. “So what do you think this thing is?” Jess asked Esteban abruptly when she sat back down. “Any predictions?”

“I think I’m going to bet carefully and go with the ‘military installation’ concept,” said Esteban. “Even if they haven’t said straight-out that that’s what they think it is, they seem to think it’s the likeliest, and some of them do seem pretty set upon the idea.”

“My grandma might say they seem ‘wedded to’ it,” said Jess.

“Yes, I think that works very well,” said Esteban.

 ❦

Esteban heard that if there was going to be a landing party then it was probably going to include Jess. He prayed many times that if Jess should be sent down she not insist on taking him along, but he prayed this always with the caveat that if he be called for this then he would accept it. This was a rote, correct thing to pray, and he was pleased, more or less, that the feeling, that the conviction that this was something good to pray for, came so easily to him. He was aware of Catholic priests in some of the early space adventure stories from way back when having harrowing experiences planetside, and some hackish part of him did worry about encountering some of those difficulties that one looked back upon in the literature. He also thought about the process of conversion. Assuming this was indeed a long-abandoned station, possibly millennia or even longer past all use and usefulness, the Democratic Alliance would probably plant a flag and slap some plaque on it much as the United States first had with the Moon. Thérèse of Lisieux almost three centuries ago had written of her (dubiously worded, perhaps even dubiously conceived) desire to “plant the glorious Cross on infidel soil,” but was what the mortal nations did any better? Or was it perhaps a fond fancy that it was acceptable for the Church to be like the nations in this way? It was not in any case as if Esteban would get any chance to leave his mark. It was not what he was here for. It was not what he wanted to be here for.

He prayed for a while to Thérèse for her intercession that he might accept his lack of power to make these sorts of claims. He prayed that he might continue to not want what he now did not want.

Moreover Jess had been giving him furtively guilty looks when they met up for tea, to the effect that she could probably come to confession again. She did not receive communion at their first Sunday Mass in orbit. When he had serious conversations with her she mostly just talked about how Moby-Dick was coming along. She was almost halfway through; normally she didn’t read quite this fast, but she had had death on the mind, and if this was to be the last novel she ever read then she wanted to read the whole thing.

The reason she had not been to confession yet was that she felt that going to confession, or even asking for general absolution, would be a sort of surrender to the possibility, what she felt deep in her bones was the probability, of death. If she did not go to confession or ask for absolution then she could believe that she had a better chance here than she really did. She was sure that if she told Esteban this he would advise her (as a friend) to come to confession anyway, because there was no telling when anyone might be taken up. She knew that this was right but she did not want to hear it.

The friendship that they had been developing struck both of them as honestly very odd. They had much in common, once one bracketed out age, sex, nationality, and characteristic failings. They were not the only people on the voyage who came to Mass but they were the only people who would have particularly missed Mass had it been absent. They liked books and tea. Esteban had become more easygoing about the pitfalls of the world as it was since he had become a chaplain and Jess had become more exercised about them since she had become a Space Marine. It made sense as a friendship but it still felt, to Jess, like there was some line that they were crossing; maybe Jess just thought this because she was not used to the idea of confessing so frankly or to someone who was coming to know her so well.

Word came that Kurtoğlu wanted to assemble a landing party comprising herself, Jess, and Raffalovich. “There’s something about this place, if my hunch is correct, that’s more along Martinelli and Raffalovich’s line of interest,” she said when Lassalle, by now a confidante, asked her why those two and not any of the shock-troopers or materials scientists. “Make of that what you will. We’ll go down with flags and some motorcycles. They’ll have the basic USSMC communications training already, I expect; they’ll be able to hail you in case of mishap.”

“Do you think Martinelli will want to bring that priest of hers?” Lassalle asked.

“I think she’ll insist on it,” said Kurtoğlu. “I’m fine with that; it might actually help repair relations with the Holy See.”

“Do you think that’s really an adequate reason? It seems nakedly political to put someone in that much danger because…”

“Oh, go talk to your imam about it. I’ve made up my mind.”

 ❦

Kurtoğlu gave the whole mission a briefing about what the spectroscopists and the materials scientists had determined about the object that they were orbiting.

“It’s definitely of some substance not found in the Solar System or by any of the Centauri probes. It’s hard and durable but completely transparent; what Captain Lassalle saw when we first came through the bridge were luminescent objects lodged in the outermost layer. It’s possible that there was an opaque coating of some kind that has since worn away. The outermost layer is stationary; the lower layers rotate on a shared axis, but at different speeds. The layers are impenetrable except for tiny pores through which we may be able to send a small craft carrying four people. If it proves workable, the landing party will comprise myself, Lieutenant Raffalovich of the USSMC, Lieutenant Martinelli of the USSMC, and Lieutenant Commander Okada of the JSSDF. Radio communications with Ganymede have been reestablished. I should mention that there are objects moving in the direction of the bridge that have yet to be identified. We will keep you posted on what these objects are as we find out more.”

“Well, that sure doesn’t inspire confidence,” whispered Jess to Raffalovich. “You looking forward to the landing party, Raff?”

“More than I was before, and I don’t know how to feel about that,” Raffalovich said.

 ❦

Esteban, Jess, and Raffalovich got a full inventory of everything that was coming into the object with them before they embarked. If possible they would use the pores to get all the way down to the innermost layer. The course would be autopiloted and all four of them, even Kurtoğlu, would be in suspended animation until they could not go any further. They had high pressure gear, breathing apparatuses, flags of the Democratic Alliance and of all individual countries participating in the mission (to no surprise of Esteban’s), and, most exciting to Jess, motorcycles to explore whatever surface they ended up on.

“I haven’t driven anything myself in months,” said Jess. “It’s been all piloted or self-driving since Titan.”

“I’ve driven around Titan, but not on one of these things,” said Esteban, who was a little more apprehensive but did have some dim positive recollections of teenage years spent tearing around Hokkaidō on his dad’s antique Kawasaki. “I look forward to it.”

They dressed in standard fatigues with steel helmets, generator belts, and, in the two Marines’ case, positron rifles, then filed into the landing craft. Esteban heard Jess’s confession, the same usual scenario, including the mounted frustration on both parts. Then they fell back into their slumber.

 ❦

They awoke lying on a green lawn with their breathing apparatuses on but not their high pressure gear. Jess awoke first, then Raffalovich, then Esteban and Kurtoğlu—all within what felt like a few minutes, but was according to the watch logs actually about forty. The craft, with its contents robotically disgorged and assembled on the lawn around them, stood about a hundred meters distant. A luminous object seemed to be lodged just under the horizon of whatever layer this was; it must not be moving, because the light did not change; they were on a twilit plain, stark and enduring. Stone circles surrounded them and crumbled battlements peeked out into their line of sight from off in the descending distance. In another direction there were what looked like they might be hills. Atmospheric composition earthlike, flashed a message on Jess’s visor. Gravity and pressure earthlike. Removing breathing apparatus.

She heard a clunk and unfiltered air rushed into her lungs. It was heady and faintly noxious—a slightly higher oxygen concentration than on Earth, maybe, plus the smell of something dead quite nearby—and felt like home.

“The descent took about nineteen hours and we’ve been lying here for about seven,” said Kurtoğlu when they finally stood upright, checking her watch. She walked over to the bundle of flags and, with much improvised ceremony, planted that of the Democratic Alliance and then that of Turkey. Jess and Raffalovich together planted Old Glory, Esteban planted the Hinomaru, and then the four of them took care of the rough score of other participating countries between them, in a line leading just about to the edge of the stone circle. The flags fluttered faintly in a slight whisper of breeze.

“Premodern earthlike civilization,” said Esteban, officially but, in his own mind and to Jess’s ears, with an unmistakable wonder. “A whole civilization at the core of an artificial structure, now presumably long-gone.”

“Probably because the main light source stopped moving,” said Raffalovich, pointing towards what for convenience Jess thought of as the “western” horizon.

Esteban had a flash of recognition and locked eyes with Jess. Neither of them wanted to say it.

❦

For another hour or two they explored the plains immediately around the stone circle, their motorcycles whizzing silently over the silent turf. The dead thing was a small animal, like a rabbit but adapted to the twilight. Something had killed it and left it uneaten and unwanted. Raffalovich elected to bury it, using a part of his standard toolkit that Jess could not quite make out in this light as a spade. After a few minutes spent sitting in the now-empty craft grazing on their rations, a message came in from one of the pilots.

“Admiral, we’re getting increasingly concerned about those objects that Ganymede said were incoming. We’re using the near-light-speed comm and we’re going to ask Ganymede to ask Brussels to investigate possible ceasefire violations.”

“Maneuvering out of projected flight path of incoming objects,” said another, calmer voice. “We’ll also make sure to tell Ganymede that you’re down there, as a precautionary measure. We might lose contact with you. Are you prepared for some period of independent action?”

“We are,” said Kurtoğlu. “We’re amply stocked with rations and conditions down here are earthlike enough that we may be able to find alternate food sources.”

“Conditions down there are earthlike? Did I hear you correctly, Admiral?” Jess and Esteban mimed raising their eyebrows to each other, as they imagined the pilot was doing.

“You did. Further descriptions to come. Good luck up there.”

The line went dead. It was not clear if Kurtoğlu had ended the call or if the call had dropped because of the Constantine Cavafy’s maneuvering far above.

“Well fuck me,” said Jess. “Raff, you know more about comms than I do; do you think it should still be possible to get reports on conditions down here up to them?”

“It should be possible once the instruments in our craft readjust,” said Raffalovich. “Not to usurp Admiral Kurtoğlu, but I’d like to suggest that two of us stay here with the craft and two of us explore further.”

“I’d approve that, but only if we’re in regular radio communication,” said Kurtoğlu. “Why don’t I and Lieutenant Raffalovich wait for the instruments in the craft to readjust, and Lieutenant Martinelli and Lieutenant Commander Okada go reconnoiter?”

 ❦

Jess and Esteban drove to the remains of a small town. There were rotting houses of clapboard and broken-down houses of stone, and a little square in the middle with a statue-laden fountain. The statues were chipped and worn but might well have once been human figures; something standing in the middle, still even in its half-ruin puissant and grandiloquent enough to be called kingly, had something like a creeper or an ivy growing tenaciously around it from a dirt-packed crevice about halfway up. The fountain was dry except for some dark damp at the very bottom of the basin, likelier to have been from rain than from anything else.

“We’ve gotten to a settlement,” Jess radioed to Raffalovich and Kurtoğlu. “We’re going to rest here for a few hours and then head back. There are statues here; the inhabitants seem to have been bipedal, possibly humanoid.”

“Fascinating,” said Raffalovich, who genuinely did sound fascinated. “Well, keep us abreast.” Raffalovich hung up.

“Do we want to talk to them again?” asked Jess.

“Yes, but not right now,” said Esteban. They sat down in the ruins of a little house. Next to them were earthenware jars. “Right now I want to know what you make of this place.”

“I think I know exactly what this place is,” said Jess. “I think we both do. I think people of centuries past would know.”

“I think so too. I wonder why Kurtoğlu didn’t tell us outright before we came down here. Heaven knows she shared with all and sundry every other suspicion that she had about this place on the way in. I wonder if she’ll share it with Raff while we’re gone. I hope so.”

Jess let herself slump to the floor and ran her hands over one of the earthenware jars. “I smell honey,” she said. “And honey doesn’t go bad.”

“Good to know,” said Esteban. “So, are you…?”

“Trying to wrap my head around it. You?” He nodded. “I wonder what this’ll mean on Earth if we make it back there.”

“Only the best, if it means anything at all, which I’m not sure it will,” Esteban said. “But, yes…if it means anything, it ought to mean the best…”

“You’re the one saying that? Aren’t you a third of a century older than me?”

“Do you think it’s a sentiment more appropriate to the young? I’m not sure I agree.”

  “Well,” said Jess, “this is a very, very old world. And I feel at peace here. I wonder what happened to the people who lived here.”

“A ‘paradigm shift,’ we can assume,” said Esteban. The sarcasm was unbecoming of him, and Jess told him so. “I feel bad for them. I am sure it was a wretched civilization, in common with every other.”

“Aren’t priests generally supposed to be on the side of civilization?” asked Jess.

“My mother taught me that,” said Esteban, “but she also taught me that a priest—a man, even, any man or woman or child—ought to call things what they are. And I feel very comfortable here too. But there’s something to the fact that it’s been abandoned for apparently so long that makes it comfortable. I wonder if Raffalovich feels the same way.”

“Did you bring that book of poems of his down here with us? I brought a hard copy of Moby-Dick but it’s in the craft. Although I’m not sure that’s the whale story that suits us the best anymore.”

“I didn’t bring the poems,” said Esteban. “I did, however, bring this.” He reached in the pocket of his fatigues. “One of the materials scientists scooped it up floating loose near the ship. It must have chipped off whenever those ‘pores’ of the Admiral’s were drilled. Let me show it to you. Then you can see how short life really is.” The way he said this was faint and odd but Jess trusted him enough by this point. She wished, in a sudden, idle, irrelevant flash, that with their honey they could have some tea, instead of just shoving it into their mouths like Winnie-the-Pooh as they inevitably would do.

Esteban held before her a chunk of glimmering crystal, transparent but just barely catching the light. As Aristotle and Ptolemy long millennia ago had predicted, it was moving in little circles over the surface of his outstretched palm.