I take the bus into town, it’s a double decker bus. I cannot sit up top because my daughter is in her stroller, everyday. I sit at the base of the stairs, in the child and old people section. I look at this sign.

The sign says, No Standing in the Upper Saloon. And I imagine how good it must feel to stand in the upper saloon. The bus driver is unable to see you, winding on these curving roads. Holding a bar or something like it, and swaying slightly in your knees. I imagine wind through my hair. No one is freaked out at you completely feeling it in the upper saloon, because they understand and feel it too, even if trying to hide it.

Since I’m unable to go there, it’ll be this way for me, forever. I think about the upper saloon of my life while I sit in the lower saloon. The lower saloon is full of things I already know. I’m sitting with all my daily features. My endless, insatiable feeling of want, is one of them. My inability to act on my potential. My fear of limitless capabilities. My dreams that I fear won’t come true. And my fears that I fear will come true. This black and white sandbox that the lower saloon is. How do I get to town differently? With the capabilities I have, I must get there by staying here.

I learned how to make a leathery pancake, by surprise, actually. It required no effort, no putting myself in the deep end sort of thing. No bracing myself and jumping into the cold water. I was making breakfast for my daughter and just ran out of oil. It was a natural process. Now why can’t my neuroses reveal themselves and leave like that? Why can’t I be surprised by finding them out, fully knowing them, and just let them off the bus? My insatiable want manifests in physical things, objects, clothes. It’s not in ideas, or songs, intangible things. And nothing would be wrong with that, if it didn’t bring me the suffering that it does. I feel this monkey on my back, screeching at every shiny object and making me put it in my mouth, swallowing it. It doesn’t fit in my intestines. It hurts when it comes out.

I write to feel something more magical about this very mundane, old feeling. I write about it so that I can see it from another point of view. I watched an interview with Sophie Calle, and she said that “Sometimes you suffer, and it offers a boulevard of pleasure.” This reminded me of what a professor had said, that “Shame can be a good thing.” These two sentences feel intertwined, because they offer an entrance into the passengers I stay furthest away from.

When we moved here I figured we’d be closer to the sea, have the experience of the sea near us, the way it affects people and the land. But we’re by the rivers, and living by a river is very different. In Ireland there’s faeries by the river. They take children in if they get too close. There’s beings from the other world swirling in the water. I run with stories often but this one is so believable. The rivers run fast and turn as they move. They are wide and high, they are wild rivers, they are like small seas. They flow so loud sometimes you have to wait to speak when walking with a partner. I’d never seen rivers like these. And the bogs that live next to them. Sometimes when I walk with my daughter through the marshes, it’s like the land is steaming. I get spooked at times, not  of faeries or supernatural beings, but from the loud chirping of life. It has its own space and time. Plastic bags and bottles lay on the branches like lost teddy bears. The river tries to tug them in but they won’t budge, its filtering out the non-child entities. We could do a clean up of the river bank, the bogs and marshes, but I’m too scared it’ll eat me. I’ll sink into the scenery and become one of the tree limbs crawling out of the mud. My daughter would turn into a shape of a baby branded onto a tree.

The old men and women love to touch her face. I understand why but I worry they haven’t washed their hands after going to the toilet. She doesn’t like it neither, I haven’t figured out a way to politely say no thank you for her. I hope she forgives me or that this dynamic won’t grow into something else when she’s older. I thought we’d stay here, but it’s too small, the countryside is hard when you’re not a local. The cars are stacked on top of me like tin spiders. I worry about the car exhaust for my daughter. There’s no public transport. The cows moo at night when I’m awake and breastfeeding her. I see the stars so clearly here, when I’m up at three am, feeling the mooing in my mattress. I’m close to life here. But I miss the city, I like to see faces on bodies more than in the bushes, or in the air, observing me on my walk. I’ll take this time with us. It will always be important even though it will be brief.

It feels like rolling on apples, they’re poking my back and keeping me slightly off the ground. I buy clothes, they dress me in comfort and make me warm. The wool makes me sweat, I always over anticipate the cold. I look at my baby’s face. She’s on the ground. She’s playing with a piece of paper. I try to play with it too. Do the same movements. Propel it up and down through the air. Hit it. Make holes in it. Put it in my mouth. I want to be comforted by more invisible things, and smaller, more affordable (of my money and time and emotional space) things. She’s fascinated by our mouths, wants to see what’s inside. She loves to scratch our tongues, she scratches her own. She’s really wild and free, she’s never known isolation. She’s never alone, and she never has to be, not if she doesn’t want it. I remember my parents saying that life was hard, and it gets harder the older you get. I’ll never say that to her, because it doesn’t have to be true. I’m trying to get closer to life, be free of my little apps of comfort, because I don’t want her to shrink herself for small freedoms.

The heaviness in deciding for life or non-life is something I don’t think we even decided. Wilma was crawling around our bodies and apartment like a loving hugging spirit since we had first met. We even wrote her name over and over in notebooks a year before the knowledge of her was in my womb. She decided for us when we met. She has been present the entire time, it has nothing to do with her existence, since that has always been inarguably alive, but it has to do with ourselves being the protectors of her being. Of her alive being. It’s easy to care for a non-life, one that exists at night, visits you as feelings around the arms, these creatures don’t expire, they don’t need the way we do once alive, they are unkempt and completely safe, it’s the coming here that unfurls them into a shape that is recognizable, and therefore temporary, and therefore precious. My daughter will spread her life all around the world, but right now she is a tendril, a tiny experiencer of the world as it is now. It is a different world for her than it is for Vinny and I. She knows things from her point in history that we don’t know, and we know things that we have been told. I remember being young and knowing I knew nothing that was being discussed on the news, but I had access to a feeling world much different from my parents. I felt they were reciting a script but I had actual access to its mother, without names and titles or anything identifiable. The night time talk show hosts could’ve been in anguish over their breakfast tasting bad, it all was the same to me. Pain and discomfort had no real hierarchy. We will witness this in Wilma, her setting foot upon equal earth, she the understander, and us the rememberers.

I had a dream yesterday during a nap that I sat around a breakfast table with many other new parents. The sun was shining on the wood table, the hair on their heads were illuminated, it was celebratory. Everyone laughed quite loudly and an acupuncture needle poked my heart. We’re all ignoring the heaviness, I thought. And the dream became a very dangerous feeling, like I was witnessing the barbarism that has become a daily norm. The daily encounter was an ignorance of the seriousness of life versus non-life. The way wars extinguish people and children, deciding for them that their non-life may begin. I would like to think we have autonomy but it seems only some have access to that way of life. I used to think that feelings that I experienced had their own autonomy over me, but as I grew I realized that I gave them the space to be there, which relieved them like a dam being broken does to water, and then they were bled out and I felt I was in control again. But a child under war, one who cannot decide to stay or leave, cannot free the dam. They are the dam itself, propped into place by a crude architect and chopped like they don’t matter forever. But they do matter forever and they do exist forever. There’s no such thing as non-existence, it’s all sitting around us like invisible meals, hungry at their own beauty. Because we can be taken out of view does not mean we can be taken out of mattering.

I am thinking of a girl who existed ten thousand years ago, a shy girl who stayed close to her family, who sat by a tree and played with the dirt on her toes. I am thinking of her hair and her face, one made by her parents, not by herself, the self she was given versus the self that she gave. I am her friend for a moment by this tree. I am reaching out to her and our shared non-liveliness. I will be imaginary sooner rather than later. I will be a memory, whether fictive or not, I will be there. There is no way to extinguish what came before me, and we came before ourselves, in our mother’s hands and father’s feet, and the chain walks with us, embracing us, until we dissipate. I know what it’s like to be invisible and so do you, we do it every night when we dream. My invisible sagas that inform my visible ones.

Gretel made the same breakfast daily, which the two of them ate together, discussing their plans and who they saw in the grocery store. The meal consisted of a spinach smoothie, oatmeal, and a piece of toast with butter, cinnamon, and sugar sprinkled on top. It made Gretel so happy, she fell asleep dreaming of her breakfast. Simultaneously worrying she hadn’t bought enough ingredients to make it perfect. But she always had just enough to make it right. Hansel ate because she had to eat, to be a well-performing human being. She liked flavors mildly, only partaking in meals because she had to, not because joy erupted out of it as it did for Gretel. Flavors bloomed for Gretel like an orchid grew out of her tongue every day.

The two worked at the pharmacy down the street from their condo building. It took about fifteen minutes to walk there. People’s faces were painted as murals all over the large buildings that led the way to work. Hansel thought they were dead people, and Gretel said, “No! Don’t say that!” And Hansel thought, why would that be a bad thing? She had grown resentment towards her sister, noticing her inability to handle mortality had grown after the death of their forties'. The two were fifty-three and aging very differently. Gretel had grown all gray, her curls looked as if they held her still fervent innocence, her crow's feet wrinkling like someone pinched them into place. She was a bit large in her stomach, which she minded severely, tugging at herself in bed, running past the mirror. Hansel had a permanent bob cut and still used box dye. The artificial black was blaring in her work uniform, her shirt the color of a red that had grown tired from the sun. A weathered beach towel left at the bottom of the pile, a type of red. She was blasted with sun damage and had nearly no body fat. Her fingers permanently smelt of PallMalls.

The walk to work strolled the twins past the rows of homeless people sleeping in the sun, dogs sat around their shoulders like living scarves.

“They’ve become like furniture,” Gretel said to Hansel. She watched a fly land on a man's foot, itching itself on him.

“You probably wouldn’t like to be called that,” Hansel answered.

“I don’t think I’d be offended, what’s so offensive about being called a chair? I would probably find it too ridiculous.”

“You look like a sofa from an old man, the way you sit in your bed all weekend long, how does that feel?” Hansel felt mean words drop out of a deep well of anger, reserved to surprise her.

“That was uncalled for.” Gretel had a childlike way of recoiling into herself. Hansel hated it.

“If we ever lost the house I think I’d find my own place.” Hansel was on a roll with the cruelty today.

“Now that doesn’t even make sense.”

”Why not? Maybe that’s what we’ve needed all these years.”

Gretel went quiet and gray in the face, like the pavement she walked over. Hansel regretted it but not enough to say sorry, at least not now.

The two walked by Elena, a woman they often had small talk with on their way to work. Elena held a sign that said, “I still have hope, do you?”

The pharmacy was open 24/7 and therefore susceptible to high rates of break-ins. Desperate people came in around three in the morning or later, and either sloppily harassed the worker on duty while they secretly called 911, or they came in groups, mostly sober, and with something specific that they wanted. Hansel and Gretel asked to not work the night shifts for this reason, so it was mainly staffed by the younger employees, ones who were nocturnal and unphased. The two had been employed there for eleven years and had sufficient health care, a retirement plan, and a general enjoyment of the work itself. Gretel liked to roll her fingers over the bottles like they were loaves of bread, feeding the people, she thought. The long names sounded like spiders or the harmful effects of spiders, maybe. Hansel enjoyed hearing the customers' information, specifically their birth dates. She’d internally clock how many spring births had come in that day, and tally up who had the closest birthday to herself. She’d remember, at the end of the day, the faces of her birthday twins and neighbors.

That morning, at around ten, a man with a limp walked in. His name was Henry and Hansel recognized him. He would come in every week or so, filling prescription after prescription, being in poor health. Hansel remembered he had hypertension, diabetes, vitamin deficiencies, depression, and anxiety. Or at least the meds he took treated those things. Hansel and the man talked this one morning, for the first time, about things other than birthdays and names.

“A shame about the death on the corner.” Henry started.

“I’m sorry?” Hansel replied.

“Oh, you didn’t hear? A young man was shot on this corner last night at around eleven pm. They are ruling it suicide.”

Hansel thought, who the hell commits suicide in public? Then her mind went to potential political protests, like self-immolation.

“Was it political?” She asked.

“Now why would it be political?” Henry responded.

“Now why wouldn’t it be?” Hansel didn’t like him very much, she realized.

“Just a man with a limp in his heart.” Henry’s face was half frozen from a paralysis or so it looked like. Maybe he had endured a stroke.

“Have a good day now, take care of yourself now.” Henry winked at her and Hansel felt haunted.

Her eyes were tired already and a mild headache loomed over the front of her forehead. She wished for a day off, maybe two. A sick day without any guilt, and without Gretel checking in on her with her eyes. Yellow splotches from water stained the ceiling panels made out of styrofoam. Horrible, horrible, bad, and bad, she thought to herself.

“Gretel, I am going home. I don’t feel well.” She said to her sister.

“Really? I feel fine.”

“Well, that makes perfect sense because I said I don’t feel well.” She was sour like spoiled milk and only getting worse.

“Okay, clock out. If you need anything just ring me and I’ll get someone to take it over.”

Hansel nodded and took her handbag and walked through the aisles to the door. The Easter bunny was committing acts of grandeur everywhere, being that it was mid-April. The confetti colors zoomed past Hansel’s eyes and she felt like they were digging into her, shreds of chemical vibrancy.

Outside she tried to observe where the crime scene had been. But she saw no police tape or blood or evidence of anything dramatic having taken place. The pavement was smooth and black and hot, it’s the normal setting. The temperature rose off and distorted everything above it, like invisible slithering snakes. Hansel had loved looking at that as a child and now it wilted her inside. Punctured the headaches further, and shriveled her feet, or so it felt. She missed the feeling of being small inside of cars’ back seats, heat almost able to smell, dust rising. It was how she imagined an incubator to feel.

The normalcy was stunning. The palm trees swayed slightly. Seagulls prodded the trash cans for food. The sky was clear, only blue. Condos rose above her and she could see figures going about their days within the glass walls. Picking up and putting down cups. No privacy because glass was cheap to build with. How did I get here, she thought to herself as her headache accompanied her walking pace. She walked by Elena again and now her sign was flipped around, asking for a dollar, the clock had started for Elena’s day. Elena looked at Hansel as if they had talked that morning for a long while about sadness and the way it fixes itself upon you, all sea-urchin-like. Hansel was scared of the intimacy and pulled out her phone, pretending to answer a call. She felt similar to a puppeteer and quickly placed her phone back in her handbag as soon as Elena was further behind. Families began to gather on the seashore, placing their picnic baskets and towels out by their preferred spots. The little children were throwing their bodies around in the sand. Permanently celebrating something, Hansel thought.

Her condo entrance appeared as if the walk had not occurred or required any physical labor. As if she had somehow glazed through those fifteen minutes past. Hansel heard the neighbors yelling, as they always did, the man much louder than the female. Hansel wouldn’t be surprised if he hit her, it sounded like that in his voice. The glowing seashell sconces lit up the pathway to her door. Hansel shook off her shoes and began to cry quietly, holding in each breath until it refused to be held in any longer. Gasping, she began to strip off her clothes, and ran towards the bathroom, desperately needing a bath. The water was just what she had hoped it would be. The perfect temperature, and loud, filling the tub quickly.

Hansel plopped herself in, plunging her head under the water and letting her eyes shut, her hair floating in front of her face. The world shriveled into a walnut, condensing everything into one room, one darkness, as if it had all grown hard. She thought of penises and their will to grow. She thought of nipples growing against the wind. She thought of the hair on her head that grows despite the dyes. She thought of the marriages happening despite rising divorce rates, despite rising sea levels. She thought of the dark at the end of the day, consuming the world like a mother’s skin over a growing child. She thought of the death that would eventually claim her, despite her will to live. And she felt strengthened

Ladies had swarmed the town because of the incredible dirt. They had all wanted to buy a piece, hearing that the soil was ripe and expansive. They wanted slots by the sea, despite the rising water levels. Daddy said they had enough money to not care about drowning. Their life had a raft secretly placed in their basements. Floatation devices that were low in stock. I had heard one of the rich ladies discussing her favorite book. Another lady said, Oh, I have that one in the first edition, signed too. The other lady said, and that means what? I thought to myself that it‘s a hindrance to be smart if you‘re in the pursuit of wealth. You don‘t need thoughts when pursuing things, to want to buy empty land, dreaming of a potential all for oneself. Their minds were as blank as the dirt, daily consumption of shiny objects kept them sufficiently empty.

Daddy and I ate egg yolks with sugar all over it. He‘d break the circle and spin the orange around with a fork. It tasted like sweet boogers. The light was all over Daddy‘s face, he looked as if he was turning orange like an egg. I got nervous over salmonella every time we ate it but continued because the routine was nice to have, even if it included some fear. Daddy said that where we live there isn‘t any salmonella, because the chickens are so free and fulfilled that poison doesn‘t touch their kids. I saw how the chicken lived, I believed it, but my fear of poisoning persisted. Fear doesn‘t go away with facts, fear is only taken out by something completely unknown. Something my mind can‘t comprehend, like those moments that last five seconds, where life feels utterly yours. Fear is the same but in inverse.

At night, the incredible dirt is tilled. Some animal does it, but we don‘t know which one. We wake up with lines running through the whole thing, symmetrical and precise. I get worried that the animal has planted things in the field. That its buds will break open as soon as spring hits. But year after year, no heads emerge. Moles will make mounds, and their pink fleshy, and fanning hands make appearances like a Broadway singer. So jazzy and inviting. They‘ve never seen their own hands, being that they are blind. Daddy is originally Australian, and he talks frequently about going to school in the bush. The bush? I‘d ask before I knew what it was. In the bush you‘re blind, Daddy would say. In the bush, everything is the same. I knew the moles making mounds felt similar to daddy. Their only calculator of a different life is their sense of touch, with no vision for confirmation. Their lives lead off of inklings, which I guess isn‘t too far off from how I felt. It was all the same when I thought it down and down and down. It all folded together nicely, like some magical intelligent design. My daddy said be careful of that sort of thinking. He said that‘s how narcissism is birthed, through thinking these patterns were made for us to feel satisfied. I tried to explain to him that they weren‘t made for my satisfaction. He made a, Hmm, sound. He didn‘t agree.

Angelina wasn‘t my mother, but she became my mother through proximity and her closeness to Daddy. She had long grey nails that looked like teardrops off her soul. She had gone gray at twenty-three and it suited her well. Her face always blushed and peachy, shining through her wisps of dead hair. She was kind and she and Daddy loved each other very much. I heard them laughing late at night, as I was tucked away in my envelope of a bed. I saw them in my mind wrestling and rustling in the princess bed made of oak. Rugs hung on my Daddy‘s walls, even the ceiling. His bed frame was cloaked in red fabrics, it enclosed them into a musky quiet dusk, never letting in full light. I wanted so badly to sleep there, but with my mother, if she had ever existed properly.

Daddy told me about her like someone talks about an uncle twice removed who lives in a different country. She had died during childbirth, during the birth of me. Daddy said I came out smothered in blood and quiet. He said my eyes perused the room and peered over at my mother like a suspicious priest. He said I could tell she was dead. She died quickly, inside of a bathtub in an old home they used to own, that I‘ve never seen since. Daddy said her last breath was within her last push, and I always worried that she was transferred into me. That her soul swept into my body, hence my attitude. My first experience was not even my own, just a reattachment into that familiar room. Her death, my birth, like an elbow holding an arm to itself, latching onto the next predictable movement.

Daddy didn‘t even tell me her name, just the story of my birth and how she left this world. I asked him questions and he said he didn‘t know any of the answers. I knew that he was lying and that he was in pain. So much pain it shut him up and rotted parts of him like an abandoned home. I worried about what went on beyond the world I knew of him, the silent island world that floated in him.

So I had no mommy, I had an Angelina. I liked her enough but I don‘t think we ever shared a deep love, not like the one I had on reserve for my real mother. I was waiting on her, even though she was certainly, very, very, dead. Angelina knew my distance and respected it, which let me trust her a little. She never forced us to partake in mother-daughter adventures like nails getting done and cafes and hair salons. I was grateful for that. We sat apart from each other in the living room which always smelt like an old man‘s beard. She would sometimes cock her head towards me and I would look up but her eyes were still glued to her book. She had an effect of staring, even when her eyes minded to their things. Like an owl, perched and hidden in obvious trees.

Daddy had retired from a successful building business. He was an old man by the time I was twelve, already sixty-seven. We had money in a way that wasn‘t like our neighbors, or so I felt. The houses lay within lines and a monopoly of other building companies had taken over the aesthetic of our town. The houses curved like a sad smile over the doorways and were made out of bright brown wood. Hedges protected the million-dollar estates from other eyes, even though there was never much to see, not even many people permanently dwelling within the town.

During the summer the population rose to around two hundred thousand inhabitants, and in the winter it lulled at around two thousand. The wealthy ladies would parade in on holidays and long weekends. They drove big cars that stilted high off the ground, walking far above my head like big dogs. The ladies wore fur around their necks and when they walked by me I smelt them. They always smelt like a burning candle, and I didn‘t know how they managed to find a smell that could be so strong and so lasting. Maybe their spray intervals were more frequent than mine. They had blown out hair and plastered faces and when their babies were with them, they never held them. A lady who didn‘t seem wealthy at all walked behind with the wailing tots, shushing them and rocking them. The ladies who helped had sad eyes and you could tell no one had asked them a good enough question for a long time. They looked in love with the children, and I bet they had ideas about the real mothers, like how they weren‘t fit to be mothers.

I asked Daddy about why people have children when they don‘t seem to enjoy it once the babies are there. He said that they like the story that children provide for them. I thought of the story I provided for my father, and if that was something that he liked having, and if we were that different from the wealthy ladies. I told him that and he said I‘m sure we're more similar than I‘d like to admit. I thought that was probably true.

The wealthy ladies had large friend groups that flocked to the incredible dirt. Plotting land and placing sticks in the ground, marking where their future homes would rise. The contractors followed them, writing notes with their large tough hands. The actual builders waited in trucks and when the time to build came, they worked without gloves in freezing temperatures and smiled like the ladies who helped the children. A shutdown face, because it probably only opened at home. There was not a place to be open, not around the rich ladies. Daddy said they probably would put people in cages for the fun of it if they could. He told me people did that at the border and I looked up pictures online. I saw a dead child floating in the water, face down, and turned off the computer.

The incredible dirt was protected by the town, but the laws were bending and mayors were filtering in and craving more, and more. So quickly, the zoning laws were changed, and the first house was put up on the lot. They implanted grass into the soil, into a perfect square, and their dream home sat in the middle of the bright green. What a mediocre vision of a dream, I thought. It was the neighbor's dream or the other neighbor's dream. It was all indistinguishable. That first family never introduced themselves, and I could see them in their kitchen, through our windows. They had fought like cats, vicious and quick, and all was forgotten within seconds, or so it seemed. The dirt around them and the night met like a kiss. The house appeared as if it were floating and lonesome. I didn‘t want to stay here, in this town, with these women. I didn‘t want to become one of them.

Angelina and I left out plates for the stray cats and sometimes raccoons and possums would come by, hogging up all the food and water, but they needed to eat too. I once thought a possum was our cat, Stanely, and I made kissy sounds and called for him. My flashlight shone towards the eating sounds and a big bare tail showed itself to me. Slowly the pointed face turned towards me, very curious, very kind. I felt bad for finding the possum so ugly, but I had expected Stanley. I ran inside, scared that he would chase me. I wondered if this would happen to the rest of my world when I eventually left the town with the incredible dirt. I would find the rest of the world unpolished, even though I rejected the shiny parts, detested them, and wanted to find a way to cut them out of me if they had begun to grow. When we took trips away, I found the world utterly upsetting. The ugly was never hidden like it was in our town. In the big city, everything was out, like bathrooms without walls. I had become a princess.

I didn‘t want what the wealthy ladies had, I didn‘t want to become an island. I didn’t want the ugly either. I dreamed of a place that maintained beauty without the necessity of cruelty. Daddy told me, there‘s a secret in your heart that everyone wants to know. I would get it out of me, and create a place where the glory came without whipping.

Eventually, the incredible dirt was filled. Homes and homes piled onto it like lazy cats, sprawling everywhere and always asleep. Daddy and I tried to walk to the sea again, maybe a path had been cleared, paved through the monstrosity of wealth. We made it very far, so far I could see the waves of the sea in the distance, although very blurry. They lapsed onto each other, the big rollers, the water looked so cold and brutal. The winter sun was pale. The trees were barren and the wind howled like an old person moaning. We walked home, into our enclosure, and we discovered that the incredible dirt was gone.

There’s a thicket in the backyard where the cat gets caught. At night Joy can hear him whimpering and she closes her eyes hoping it’ll go away. Not because she feels bad for him, but because she doesn’t want to get up and save him. Poor little bastard, he isn’t a smart cat, but he deserves sympathy. Joy doesn’t think so, she thinks it’s cruel to pick and choose who deserves sympathy. She feels no sympathy for the fallen squirrel, so why should the cat take priority. James, her brother, disagrees wholeheartedly. He even thinks it’s psychotic. The cat feels the siblings' beliefs and lingers by James more often than Joy. James falls over the cat as he is his shadow, always growing out from under James’ feet. James trips on him and apologizes with his hands holding the cat's face. He kisses his nose. I love you, I love you, thank you for forgiving me, he says to the cat. 

The sibling’s mother has a store in the town below the mountains. It sits in the valley of the mountains, wheat grows around it, and its wooden frame is old, at least one hundred years old. Rot is growing at the base and their mother, Liza, ignores it as she ignores each indifference in her life. To Liza, life is a sedentary, non-moving entity. Life had arrived, and there it stayed, standing in the door frame. Liza sells locally grown beets, mushrooms, and spinach. She sells canned fish and candles, freshly baked bread, and during the summer months, handmade quilts from another local. Joy likes to sit in the back of the shop, soaking in the smell of it. The newness of non purchased products. She hopes no one will come in while she works behind the register, so it can just be her and the store and the items, all a potential for her. 

James presses his fingers into his stomach because there’s a hardness in there, and he doesn’t know if it's cancer or not. He’s twenty five and weighs one hundred and sixty pounds. He runs three times a week, up and down the mountain which spans out about to be five miles one way. He doesn’t eat sugar, only sometimes a little bit of honey in his tea. He used to smoke in high school, which now figures to be his biggest regret, and is convinced that he has smoked the cigarette that would get him permanently sick, so now he runs from it. He had read once, five years ago or so, that cancer can be released through sweat. Thus came the incessant exercise. His family's backyard holds an impromptu gym. The weights are rusted and stain James’ hand. He drinks water like a panting dog. It drips down his chin and droplets dry out on his t-shirt. 

James and Joy’s father, Ciaran, is from Ireland. He watches James work himself out, tire himself out, and fall asleep on the couch before the sun has set. James’ pupils swing back and forth beneath his eyelids as he dreams. Even in sleep he cannot rest. Ciaran lifts his head and puts a proper pillow under it. He places the blanket over his son, tucking his hands under it. He holds his hands each time, long enough to remember them until he can see them again. He holds mental molds of his children's hands in his mind. The hands they used to have, the pudgy dirty young hands, reaching out of the car window. And their hands now, their adult hands, the ones that’ll wrinkle deeper and begin to fold. Ciaran drinks when everyone is asleep. He waits like someone who doesn’t know how to sleep waits for sleep. It takes forever and then arrives, and before you realize it, it’s the morning, and you must start over again, and you’re not even refreshed, equally as exhausted as before. Ciaran keeps a notebook of how many days he can go without a drink. He had reached five days last year, when his mother was visiting. She is a sharp, witch-like woman. With an intuition like a parasite, nothing was ever hidden from his mother, Ella. She liked to see him doing well, but he was never doing well, not ever deep down did he find a place of sanctuary, so she spent her time with him trying to convince him into health. She couldn’t say anything that would actually erupt Ciaran’s misery, and she knew that, but a mother can never stop trying. Ella lived down in New York City, having left Ireland at the time of James and Joy’s arrival on earth. She despised upstate New York, and made it obvious at any opportunity she had.

”Meth-head junkie vibe, even in the wealthy parts,” she’d say to Ciaran at the breakfast table. 

“I like the pace, mum.”

”Well, the pace doesn’t like you very much. Hah!” She’d respond and laugh at her son's ruggedly aging face.

Liza and Ella had a friendship that was barren of fun. They discussed the children exclusively. They had nothing else in common. Ella believed in God as a punisher, and she saw Liza as someone who was going to be punished. She saw the day that God would come down to her, and unleash what God was always sitting on. The truth would come and set Liza’s life on fire. When Ella was younger she had been a good girl. She had listened to every order her parents had given her. She had married into a good family. She had kept her home clean and herself occupied with the church. Ciaran was her gift from God, and then Liza came along and soiled her gift with dirty hands. It was not God’s will, she’d say to Ciaran, she should’ve never become your wife. Ciaran didn’t know where to start, so he didn’t. He watched the discord sing in his life and the song was perfectly suited to his misery. He’d let it sing.

James had his father’s skill for seeing everything. Every duty that was available, every spec of dirt, every impossible beauty, all of it happening, and none of it happening for him. Joy had Liza’s talent for constantly being out of reach. The two women existed in the opposite place of the two men. Their plateau was flat and sunny. It was as it was. There was no speculation of anything else. The wind blew through the trees and moved the branches, let the leaves fall on the ground, as it did through their hair, and they aged with a grace that was as unafraid as acceptance. Sure, everything could be questioned, but the answers found would never move the moon into the palm of their hand and so they lived that way. In the scale of possibilities. The spout of the family spoke of sick things in the night, and placid things in the day. It went on that way, until it didn’t.

The world is sweet and dark and my eyes are closed within my bed. My bed is my skin, it smells like my mothers chest. I see her skin tags and wrinkles and tug them and suddenly they are my landscape. My world is her skin, her lines are memorized in my body memory. In my memory I see my smallness in comparison to her. I see how sacred our difference was. I’ve grown up and now, our equalness is mundane. Childhood has become a sensory deprivation dome. I go there in the small parts of my life, and it illuminates the big parts of my life. It is unending. Elongating my meaning like the hair of my mother. Her hair never seemed to grow. My mother’s contagious pain.

She laid drunk in my bed and slapped my face in continuous waves. I cried into her arms and asked her to stop hitting me.

“I’m not hitting you”, she responded and slurred her words.

“Why are you crying?” She asked me.

She laughed at me as if I was laughing back. As if we were adults in conversation. Dancing over something we were both in on. 

Another adult came in and tried to cheer me up, but he had drunk too much as well.

He sang a song about pee trickling down onto my head. I slept in a bunk bed, Ella above me, pretending to pee on my head. They laughed and I remember being conscious about forcing myself to laugh, as my mother laid upon me, like a fish forgotten by a fisherman that wanted to be caught badly.

There was a secret drawer at the top of her dresser. I found what I now know is a pipe and I suspected something private would happen with the object. I saw the holes, the tube, the cavity that transported something. It was spoonish yet holey and I couldn’t imagine just what it could be useful for. I played with it in my hands and felt frustrated that I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. It’s so far gone, this memory of being unable to understand something so obvious now. All that is unfamiliar to me is now big and expanding, like death and jobs. But then, when I was small, the confusion was everywhere. They could be bought and consumed. I miss being afraid of what confused me, instead of the current glaze my eyes cast over tortured people and objects. I watch people smoke crack on the train and I hold my breath in case of a second hand high, but I do not question it in the way a child does. Confusion was the sign of care. Now it is known and sad, and I care but I don’t ask questions. We walk away, life is shedding and less sacred than it used to be.

*

Her father killed a raccoon with his bare hands in the ocean. He held its head under the water and waited until its body stopped seizing. I wonder how he felt permission to do this, if he ever did feel justified in doing so. If he looked over his shoulder as he killed it, worried about the tourists looking onto the local, killing a thing in public. 

He was a hypocrite. Her father voted for the better of the people, not for the better of the rich. He was slow living. He wanted good things, but maybe only for himself. She thought about her father as one thinks about seasons. How they have favorites and not so favorites. She missed how he was when he was warm, he was quiet and fighting in private, like a dying bear. He was guilty but acted innocent and gained sympathy as big men do, when they are visible with certain amounts and sides of pain. But secretly, his daughter saw his pain as clearly as possible. There was no lens of adoration or hatred. It was plain as a boring day, as unspecial and insignificant as all other pain. 

He lumped together gulps in his throat like war wounds. He acted as if he were amputated and the head of a veteran parade. The glory that surrounded him wasn’t honest and it was very bright. He ate at it like sandwiches from a tired hand. I think of him as being forever babysat by strangers, a man like this is never in real danger and forever a danger to others.

Her mother resented his comfort fiercely and loudly. And as much as they came to hate one another, they were very similar. They acted as a mirror of ugliness that keeps punching itself, smashing glass into its knuckles. Her mother played songs loudly and drunkenly in the kitchen. Her father sat in his own rage like it smelt luxurious. He waited to decide how to punish her. With his hands in front of his face, and his legs propped starkly against the ground. He was sure his violence was justified. What a loud bitch she was. She was violent too, it seemed others forgot, her father thought. He’d strike her as if the invisible eyes were turned off in his presence. He’d forget his violence because her steps were quicker and far more in frequency. She’d move around him like a debt that couldn’t stop growing. He’d ignore the calls, the begging to pay back what had been spent too quickly and outrageously.

The unabashed violence persists. The violence he would commit against animals and wives, it's a shared language, like grief. They feel entitled to their rage, because to them it is not rage. I wish to create a haven around the world of unashamed violence. I wish to make it a ball and send it off to another universe. To catapult into silence. Into the unknown that no one knows of anymore, not even remaining a confusion.

*

Adult suffering is much more similar to a book rather than the actual act of suffering. It is stationary and confined, a begging history. The memory of being a child and being in pain keeps it in its category. I beg my mother to be kind, to be affected by the world, and to be radicalized into a greater joy rather than a much more solitary, stagnant, dark pain. 

When the house was sold strangers wiped down our heights off the walls and I saw through the front door. It was new and white everywhere, how I imagine the hospital room where I was born. Where I became true, rather than a thing my mother craved. She craved me to make her real. What a dangerous job, to make someone real. One is bound to fail. Always, always failing.

 I wish the light in those walls, the one that bounced off of the paint could eat me whole. It was always round, like my old life. I wish it absolved my small toes into its loving face and took me there, that place I always suspected was real and always around the corner. The forgiveness of my imagination lulls me. Like dreams, I see my imagination as inarguable. It is a story that happens to me continuously. I am made up of what is real and totally not real. 

I listen to my mother’s favorite musicians on the bus. My body looks as if its dancing but its being thrown around by the cracks in the street. I lean against my neighbor, slightly, so she suspects its by accident. I need a hug, from a woman older than me, who smells like her, who is similar in her laughter. She shines towards me in her light and I disappear. 

Lucy fears suffering. She dreads it. So she continues to hide away in her house. She wishes she had the consciousness of many things that she can see from her window. The plants on her neighbors balcony. The cat on her neighbors balcony, fenced in by a net which doesn’t look very sturdy. She wishes. She is the human form of an eyelash. She is what is wished upon. She is not the answer. She is sure of that.

When things change for Lucy, she doesn’t expect it. She doesn’t expect her small motions made in her steaming pot of uncertainty to be actual movements. She didn’t think that they had much throttle. But they had seemed to accumulate and she was brought out of her water. She oddly misses it sometimes. Even though it had sat for so long and the temperature was cold by the end. She is what is wished upon. She is the surface that we all stare at and hope will talk, but has no words. She knows this, and yet she doesn’t.

Last time that Lucy suffered was when she saw her life as a limp penis. She had been sleeping with a man who had no real wishes for anything, for others, he was similar to a dog. Utterly present. Lucy was jealous sometimes. She was never here. But she saw him undress one night and it was so large and still. Nothing about her had stirred him up even though they had been kissing, they had been passionate. It was dropped and hanging. She wondered what she had done wrong. It smelt like fish. I hate you she thought before trying to get him hard, really hard. After she had achieved what she wanted, and they had sex, she remembered how she wanted sex to be before she ever had it. She wanted an obtuse feeling that her and this other person were one. Unanimous agreement of life. The same birth, the same death. Having sex was experiencing the disappointment of birthdays. That’s not sex, it isn’t! She thought to herself. She saw herself as that disappointed penis. Working hard and wanting to be more, but something was forever pulling her back. Like hair being washed under the bath faucet.

There’s less air on earth now. The trees have been cut down. I’m afraid of flying in an airplane for my responsibility towards the world. But I want to go many places, Lucy thinks. Everyone is tired she thinks. Everyone feels like me. Because I’m what they wished on. I’m just feeling what I heard.

Lucy grew old, Lucy changed, Lucy learned how to grow along the comfort tree. The one that is fuzzy and purring. The familiar one. You know it deep in you, I would hope you do.

So we become this fuzzy movement, and this thought horse occupies me like a job that I enjoy.

I see these gorgeous things, I feel so free when I am on my horsies. I feel infinite, I feel unmovable. We run so fast that we become a ring of light. I am dismembered from what I’ve been in the past, what I currently am, what I could potentially become. I am dissected meaning, held by the meaningless fleetingness that carries me like birds do with sticks. I shudder and my boyfriend shakes my shoulder.

I’m in Germany on a highway towards my apartment. Fields are on both sides of us, windmills turn in the air, so large and so ugly. All the farmland is trimmed and the sun is setting behind the trees that keep multiplying behind my head. I don’t feel particularly hungry but my mouth tastes as if I forgot to have breakfast, only drinking coffee. My boyfriend sits next to me like a gatekeeper. I watch him calmly swim through motions within his own mind. Bop around to the music he listens to. So happily I feel he can sit. So herded his thoughts, like sheep getting ready for sleep. I feel protected by his content stoicism. I worry I will become exhausting, to his sweet mind. This thing that needs walls, and that he will become sore from my thrashing. Even if I don’t tell him how I lose myself daily, pouring into myself over and over like a smoker of thirty years, committing their daily routine. Even if I don’t tell him how far I walk everyday, I’m scared the distance will supersede my mouth and he’ll feel it. I’m worried my being is a crime.

The sunlight is now nearly all gone. I hope as it leaves it’ll feel like a meal slowly disappearing into a stomach. Full and hidden. The warmth of the orange color has gone and now the sky is like a depressed baby blue. Really pale and boring. Fading into white. It’s funny how the night doesn’t turn the sky white. The gradient would make more sense to me. My images have faded and I’ve become infatuated with the gum being chewed in between my teeth. How it’s adding to the sour taste. The wrapper sits in front of me, bright pink with drawings of bubbles around the font. I feel as if it should be illegal to sell an image so lovely. The product never complies to its form. The lovely pink fluff of dead sugar weeps in between my teeth, milking in and out from behind my tongue. Pink stuff and more pink stuff. Maybe my cavity has come loose. It’s too painful to chew this hard.

There’s a man across from us who seems to be drinking alcohol from an open container. I think about how his mouth must feel, the characters occupying his mind today. How differently the bus must look from where he sits, from where he has lived. I want to ask his liver questions, his colon next, inspect his mother’s bedroom. How deeply she made him feel loved. If he’s ever been married. What the first letter of his name starts with. I wonder if intention goes further than effort. If intention does a better job at writing than my words do. If my imagination is only the architecture that holds my treasures. The basket that carries my eggs.

My apartment is sitting cold with the window left open. I haven’t been home in around six days. I left the window propped because my rug smells of piss. My boyfriend and I found it for cheap at a flea market and washed it a whole day long. But when it dried it collected the piss drip and now the ends of it are soiled. I think about my feet being the collector of my emotions, a thread spinning in what I experience. I have a strong desire to wash my rug again, and the bus seat starts to feel too tight. The print of generic bus seat pattern transports me to the feeling of being an alive corpse, wrongfully trapped in the morgue. An ignored aliveness. A very quiet aliveness.

The man drinking the open container goes to the bathroom for much longer than I expected and I worry he’s vomiting. Only because that’s my biggest fear, and I would hate for this crotch like bus to start to smell in that way. I am not worrying out of selflessness, out of an extended hand, but rather the worrying imp in my ear. My boyfriend’s laptop is somehow still alive, and he’s been doing work on it for over an hour. He’s studying to become a lawyer and he has to review German law everyday before the test. He does around 150 flashcards per day. I wonder how he does it. How he balances such a hefty task of doing what you don’t want to do. I think he wants to become a teacher, not a lawyer. I commend his commitment. I wonder if he’d be this committed if we were long distance. If I actually moved to London, something I dream about frequently, most likely daily. Dreaming of a savior within city planning. My horse neighs. I accidentally poked his side with my shoe. The dream is aggravated. The motion spits out at me. I gurgle back out again. We weave this motion like ducks prodding their heads under the water. The disturb is smoothed through me and my horse’s laughter at the image of us being ducks. I worry I am delusional.

The light is long gone and the yucky baby blue has soiled into a darkness in the middle. My eyes stare into the depth of the blue but I can’t trace a center since the bus moves too quickly. I’d like to find a distinguishable surface on a very plain same-thing. Same-thing is a word I’ve made up for an object that seems to be one, but is actually many many many ones. The sky is so much. I wish for it be a soup I could drink from, on special occasions. Why do we have nothing to do with big things. Why do they never come down and touch us. What a boring distance.

My boredom has been bigger lately, and I think I’m losing my ability to toss it up, as if it were a hoolahoop falling down around my hips. The boredom must not be taken seriously, a fatal mistake I make daily. The little death I experience daily is from seriousness. Crushes me and I watch my matter run away from itself, hiding behind the trees in the forest over there. My nose wrinkles from the smell. Is it from the neighbors house, is it from the sap of the maples, is it from the dust flying around my head. I ride my horse until I ride another.

The stethoscope was comforting. Doctors knew where to go. They were the real psychics to Sarah. They could map out her life, unlike any other occupation. Their hands were safe. She never thought of marrying one though. Her spiritual friend in high school had said they were most likely to die younger than others because of how much sickness they had seen. It was absorbed within them. A family friend had been a doctor until he died from ALS. Sarah thought of his generosity like shillings thrown into sewage mistaken for a well. She thought of the confusion of Gods. Like old men sitting at cluttered libraries as the sun set in February. 

Sarah had got a cat as soon as she moved into her first college dorm. She brought it to her makeshift home and cried incessantly, wondering why she had insisted upon this purchase. She’ll just die like me, Sarah thought, feeling postpartum guilt. She held the cat and cried while the cat froze, feeling very uncomfortable. Sarah felt its vertebrae and remembered that spinal cords are the same consistency as toothpaste. The two adjusted and warmed to one another. Sarah forgot about the cat’s upcoming death as she did her own, and then she remembered again. She slept with her cat as if she were holding a wig, the acrylic smells of non-life. She settled her fears of her cat’s mortality by facing the cat with an attitude of impartialness. 

She grew into a woman who saw life as an assault. She became jumpier and jumpier and eventually found a therapist. She bought a gun and concealed it within her waistband. She grew paranoid like a vine inside a nuclear waste vat. Her shrink said, “So there is fear, there’s nothing we can do about that.” Sarah saw it diagnostically and pursued the life over there that was ever elongating like a healing bone. She felt her pulse galloping within her neck. She triple-locked her doors and washed laundry daily. The world exploded like popcorn on her flesh. She was in fear as constantly as things died. It was like she could see it happening in real-time. Even locked indoors and distracted, she worried the quick stride of fragility was fucked upon every surface within her. She saw the lapping of her days. The sailing life that swam away, the childhood that she never started with. The bone stretched further. Magic was fear. It was all contagious and fat.

Sarah considered suicide with only one thing stopping her. That she felt it was an admittance to what hunted her down. She played with the idea of killing herself and then would shudder as if it had gotten her. Look at what’s in front of you, count what you can hear, smell, taste, touch, her therapist’s words lopped through her ears as if she were a sailor in her ear canals. Sarah called her mother and admitted defeat. She was impounded, in a forgotten kennel.

Her mother called upon their family’s inheritance and Sarah was sent to a rehabilitation center for those who were chronic. The facility sat in California and she admired the bed sheets often. They were luxurious and smelt of florals. The rehab sat on seaside cliffs and it was civil. The anxiety that lurked as a closeted superpower had retired. Sarah sat slumped with ease in her finite rigid schedule. She felt longed for and loved and she didn’t know why exactly. She had made friends with similar problems and they all celebrated a similar change. Not knowing why she was better didn’t haunt Sarah, thankfully. She didn’t try to get to the bottom of it. She didn’t want to be removed from heaven with logic. She let herself be transformed with the singular step that had changed her shape entirely. She slept properly for the first time in her life. Thinking and loving on her breaths, seeing herself as a baby, sweet and soft on earth. In awe instead of in fear. 

She went on hikes with her friends, and they embraced a misfit persona. They laughed until they peed once about their neurotics like it was a delirium as fleeting as a stay at the circus. They ate candies and got drunk sometimes on the weekend when they could enter the wealthy, sheltered towns surrounding the rehab. They felt a large correction had occurred simultaneously. An editor had unmixed their sentences and things lay pleasant. Understandable. 

Sarah walked on the beach side and felt the morning cold in glee. Her heart had grown into a voice as silky as Mama’s arms. She fell off the side of a cliff one morning and died below on the rocks, splattered and porous and red. The quiet waves lapped on her fingertips. Her friend group cried within the shining halls of the rehabilitation center. The goodness interval had ended, and Sarah had died. They tried to console each other, patting down each other’s feathers. But they weren’t doves, they were roosters, so the screams resumed the next day. The only consolation was that Sarah felt joy towards the end. They concluded that that was bound to them as well. That their fear was magic that would sail them to the end of the world in a kindly wrapped baby Bjorn. That they would die having peace tug them to it, so there is peace, so there is also fear, they spoke. 

There was a neck that stuck out around the corner. I only saw the Adam’s apple and it stayed there in the air like a hummingbird. And snap, it pulled back and away and out. There were autumn smells and trash all over the street. The sun looked as if it had gained a cataract. The milky grey light had simmered all around the season. A dog the size of my mother walked and slobber fell in its grace. It laid in a turf yard, in front of the bicycle repair shop.

I walk because I have to, not because I enjoy it at all. I like to imagine fat falling off of me as I take each step, feeling my things bouncing. I don’t have body issues except for a normal amount. There are many whispering men in cities. They stand together as if they’re staring down a tunnel. Women never do that here. In the countryside in Germany, the men don’t move in herds. I see one or two along the shore. The metalhead citizens have skinny braided beards. Sometimes the hair turns brown instead of grey, as they age. I have assumptions about them, and my boyfriend says, “Metal heads are usually very kind people.”

I remember being on the school bus, around the age of twelve, the age when the metal heads appear. They stay in the corner like shy cats. They fall from that unaware place and start to figure out what is suffering inside of them. They’d part their hair differently because it was a symbol of their heart. They dress like their soul. Shopping malls take advantage of them and advertise cheap expressive clothes and “I Love Boobies” bracelets. They sit together in cafeterias with drooping postures. Pimpled cheeks and a desire to go home. That’s why they’re so kind.

My middle school lonerism grouped me into a non-category category. I’d sit with interchanging girls during lunch. In home education, I would sit with tiny girls who never spoke, jock boys, emos, closeted preteens, and smart kids. We’d never talk in our group work. We would sit around together, sit around our assignments, and teeter through things in our heads. We connected on something unknown to all of us. I took a test the school had given me, it was a job predictor. I had gotten the architect. My friend’s dad was one, and they had lots of quiet time, lots of space, and big trees all over their yard. I knew I was doomed for success.

My strawberry week, as they say in Germany, came very late. Which is hopefully a good indication that I will be a cancer-free person. At least that’s what my mom said it indicated. I started my period at age fifteen and had sex around the same time. The sex ripped me, literally ripped my skin. I remember feeling it shredding and lying next to a massive box of condoms. The sheets were clinical blue. He was on top of me. He was flying in the air and I was a breathing witness. I went home in his truck and checked my underwear. I was spotting and it looked like red ink. It looked artificial and malnourished. My mom felt something inside of me and asked if I had had sex. I was shocked that she somehow knew and denied. You never know when you’re taking part in something that will cause a before and after. I didn’t know that sex would be a continuous ripping the way it had been that night. I didn’t know it would whittle me into a sexless being. I would become a bar of soap, small and used. When I was purchased I was a magnificent statue of bubbles and boobs. Now I’m different looking and feeling.

When I was very depressing, I saw my life as a wall with holes punched through it. I figured the little life I had left inside of me would shine through the holes and cast faint beams across whoever I met. People noticed I was a fragmented emoter. They lingered in each pocket like a squirrel and wiggled out looking for a larger view. I was so sad for so much time. I don’t think sad is the word for it. More so without a reality.

My grandpa died and requested no funeral. He was my last elder and that’s natural, baby. They all go. But since his death, I have often wondered where he is. Not his soul, but his physical body. I think he was cremated but since no one has come into community for him, and since we are all estranged, I don’t know where he is. There’s nothing I have of him. I recorded some of his phone calls but I haven’t listened. He made lots of enemies and in his death, all that I’ve heard is declarations of his ridiculousness and selfishness. He’s back home now, and your words don’t affect him. But people are hurt. By the dead and living. We’re all half there and half here. I walk around and feel things move. I feel for my things. I watch people who are sick. I make something out of each day. I go fast to go slow. I remember what happens.

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