Some people taste good. This is a fact. Flesh in the flavor of lemon meringue, expensive, organically sourced jerky, nachos where each chip’s been perfectly curated (bean, salsa, jalapeño, ooze of melted cheddar). Enough of these foods exist to render cannibalism moot, though fetishists, deviants, abound. A nibble too far (how many licks does it take to reach bone … ).  Every so often the papers publish a gorging, which, thankfully, is inherently consensual because we all know a tasty person who doesn’t want to be eaten exudes a certain sourness (spoiled milk, rancid butter, cake taken from the trash frosting side down).

Synthetic humans are readily available too, that first edible sushi display turned phenom. You can buy a leg that tastes of banana, a breast like veggie lo-mein, a cheek done up like chocolate pudding, all manufactured and shiny in wax paper. Like marzipan fruit, only they are knuckles, toes, knee pits flavored like their predicated human source.

This isn’t an allegory or a metaphor, it’s real life.

Like people everywhere, we hate randomness, we want to know why one person tastes like Michelin-caliber Beef Wellington and another, plain human. (That bland, flavorless nothing.) And so, nature vs. nurture theories abound. One’s potential tastiness determined in no small part by: what a mother in utero eats; the father’s spunk; the amount of sun a pregnant belly receives; the nursery height relative to sea level; the amount of mold in the air on the third new moon; the color binky first sucked; the type of flooring in grandmama’s kitchen; the first grade teacher’s hairstyle; how far you make it in the spelling bee; one’s first masturbatory exploration; whether one enjoys gym class; and so on.

Because eventually we all ripen into who we will be (around age seventeen for most of us), and some of us taste like food and most of us taste like human, i.e., nothing. And what’s fair about that?

“Why do you care about all this?” my boyfriend Ryan asks me.

We’re at the table sucking the pits of cherries, eating the meat around the tiny stones.

Why shouldn’t I care? is what I think, but instead I say “I don’t care, not really. It’s just an observation. I’m allowed to observe, aren’t I?”

Ryan rolls his eyes and pulls me to him, kisses the stubble on my cheek, my flavoring, he likes to call it, cruel joke. “You taste like you and that’s why I love you.”

“You’d love me even more if I tasted like butter pecan.”

Ryan pulls away, pops a cherry into his mouth. “You’re wrong. You’re delectable just the way you are.”

And am I? Can it be true? I watch him pluck the pit from his mouth and place it with the others. Future trees, landfill fodder. “Well it’s not like I have a choice.”

Ryan sighs and reaches for another fruit. “But I chose you—isn’t that the point?”

I used to think I tasted like melon. After a long jog I’d lick my own salty shoulder, and the barest something would be on the tip of my tongue. I was nineteen then, past the point of ripening, but still holding out hope. I’m thirty-four now and still sometimes wonder whether I could bloom late. If anyone can.

Occasionally, weak-willed folks will hit up the Sephora, the Ulta, for the latest vanilla scent, a natural strawberry lip balm, or coconut body butter. Slather themselves up to feel sated, or so I’m told. The surgery route is still in experimental stages, and I’ve heard the outcomes can be dicey (patients asking to be fried chicken ending up as bland seitan and so on). Folks with less means have been known to hit the Kroger, the Food Lion, buy the meat rubs, the tenderizers and slather them on like tanning oil. But there’s no faking it. We all know a genuine from a pretender.

I’ve not been desperate enough to try these paths, though I’ve dreamed myself Raisin bran, chicken korma, hot dog, plenty of times. And when I wake up, the reality of my plainness flavors the day. All that I’m not, obscuring whatever it is that I am.

And so I’ve come to think any fakery would only underscore the absence. Pretending I’m someone I’m not, worse than the reality of being just me.

A sign of my maturity or the concession of not living out my dreams.

For my thirty-fifth birthday, Ryan tells me he’s cooked up something special. We’re drinking coffee in the kitchen. My birthday is a good two weeks away, and I think about asking why he’s giving me this hint when he knows it’s my nature to overthink—but then a wink and a kiss and he’s out the door, off to his job at the think tank where he researches energy efficient food production. It’s summer which means I’ve nowhere to be, school out of session, and my hours briefly my own.

I teach high school English. A career in education is one way to live vicariously through the burgeoning taste potential of our youth. Not a source of pain and envy as one might expect but a sobering. Because most of my charges wind up ordinary (occasionally inconsolably so) and who better to shepherd them through this realization than their teacher, the flavorless man.

Ryan appreciates my work as a teacher, suggests it’s healthy for me, exposure therapy, though I’m not always honest in my schadenfreude but who is?

Ryan and I met through an app three years ago, and we’ve been living together the last two. His profile on the app, though misleading, caught my attention.

I’m a sundae, I’m a banana split, devour me, please.

Hot fudge or caramel I’d replied, and he’d sent me an emoji of the shh face that confirmed my suspicions. It was all a joke, but it didn’t mean he didn’t want to be loved. Consumed is how he put it. I want to be everything to someone, in a healthy way of course.

And I knew what he meant. That was my dream too. To be everything. The main course. To be enough.

I finish my coffee and pick up my copy of Tender is the Flesh, and then I lie down by the window in the patch of sunlight to ferment, to waste away the day.

I learned the hard way not to date a taster (what they’re called colloquially). My ex, my first real love, was a grapefruit. Timothy. Smelled of sweet citrus, eternally sun-ripened and juicy with the tiniest hint of sourness to bring me back to earth. How many days lost to my nose pressed against his smooth chest, my teeth nibbling though never breaking flesh (he wouldn’t allow it)? How much weight I lost forgetting to eat because he was the only thing I desired?

We were so happy, I thought. He even allowed that I could be melon-esque, melon light. Kissing me and breathing me in and satiated by me alone. He loved me, I thought, the way that I loved him. Until one day.

“You’re obsessed,” he said to me. “You don’t even see me.”

“I see you plenty,” I said. “I love you more than real food. I love you more than Starbursts. I love you more than my mother for god’s sake!” I leaned in and kissed his shoulder, scraped the flesh just barely with my teeth. The faintest zest.

“But you don’t love me. You love that I’m a grapefruit. Do you know how alienating that feels? How humiliating? You don’t even know my favorite book, or movie, or pizza topping!”

It’s hard to be delicious. It’s not like I don’t understand that. (Though did I then? What was I able to admit?)

“But it’s so special what you are. Why can’t that be enough? I adore you! I worship you, peel and all.”

“But I’m Timothy. I’m me. And you, Aaron, are superficial.” You make me wish I was unflavored—did he say that or was it a dream? The way my yearning could make another person disavow their truest self.

We kept dating for another month or so, me pleading and pretending (badly) that I wasn’t who he knew me to be. But eventually he left me. Moved out. Is married now, to a man with terrible allergies, I’ve heard. Someone who rarely smells often can’t taste what’s right in front of him, but happier than me maybe. Probably? Both of them.

His husband richer in flavor than his wildest dreams—a Floridian grove, a California backyard—and yet all he sees is the man, just like any other.

The birthday arrives and it’s a weekday, a workday, so I have to wait until the evening for Ryan’s return. I’m watching television when I hear the key in the lock. On the couch drinking a club soda with a splash of cranberry juice, reclining, not in repose because I think that conjures a certain premeditation and I am myself when Ryan walks in with my surprise in tow.

“What’s this?” I ask.

Ryan, grinning, pushes a body in front of him, and immediately I’m overwhelmed. Kalamata olive. Tart. Specific. Oily but only just.

“This is Ken. Ken, meet Aaron, the birthday man.”

Ken smiles at me, dark-haired, semi-wrinkly, black button-down, loafers just perceptibly scuffed. “Aaron.” An unexpected deepness to his voice or pitted to be this way.

But my focus is on Ryan. Because I can admit it’s a fantasy (for who is it not?) but it’s never anything we’ve discussed in practical terms. “Hello, Ken?”

I make eyes toward the kitchen and Ryan, smiling, shakes his head. “An amuse bouche, baby. A little treat. Just enjoy it.”

Ken, awkwardly, joins me on the couch, a cushion apart. His olfactory a bit overpowering if I’m honest, but I’m drawn to him all the same.

How much of attraction is longing for who we ourselves wish to be? A brief eclipsing by the beauty and avowal of another. “And where did Ryan find you?”

“Would you like something to drink, Ken?”

Ken nods, asks for a beer, and Ryan slips away to the kitchen.

“An app?” I continue. “That would be the natural assumption.” (Edibles, a favorite, all the parameters and safe words mapped out in legal terms).

Ken shakes his head and a waft of brine comes my way. “No, actually. I work on the floor above Ryan. We’re elevator buddies.” He explains to me the path toward their acquaintanceship, the occasional coffee or lunch shared in the cafeteria, then Ryan’s confession of my obsession, his entreaty for this surprise, and Ken’s willingness to partake, his curiosity. “My girlfriend doesn’t like olives—that’s how I knew she really loved me. She won’t even nibble, unless it’s—you know. But I’ve always been curious about what it’d feel like.”

By the time Ken finishes speaking, I’m directly beside him, having moved ever closer subconsciously and now we’re thigh to thigh. He blushes slightly, and I think about the heart inside his chest like a vibrating pit. A little shaking stone.

“And your girlfriend doesn’t mind?”

Ken nods, earnest. “She knows I’m here.” Then a bashful shrug. “I think it turns her on.”

I take a swallow of my soda water. I want to ask him the questions I always want to ask—what’s it like to move through life in this way? Outwardly anointed, aromatically special? But I don’t want to fanboy him, and I worry maybe he’ll express what I don’t want to hear—what Timothy used to say to me: you get to be whoever you want, but I’m this way always, the first thing people notice. Maybe all they’re willing to notice.

“Are you afraid it’ll hurt?” The wrong thing to say but I’ve said it.

At some point, Ryan has reentered the room, and I sense his presence on the leather chair to my left, but I don’t turn to him. Don’t want to know what he’s thinking.

“You can smell that I’m not, right?” Ken says, and he takes a sip of beer and then leans toward me.

Our faces were close already and now they’re closer. Inches apart, really. I lean in ever so slightly. How it was with my first kiss with Timothy, an ever gradual coming together until we were one. (Or I was one with him and he was himself alone beside me.)

Ken rubs his cheek against mine, and Ryan exhales quietly, aroused or in awe. Consumption isn’t inherently sexual. Of course, for some it is, but not for me.

We nuzzle like cats, Ken and I, like animals, like mother and child.

My eyes are closed. I press my forehead to Ken’s neck, my lips making first contact, the hint of my tongue on his collarbone and it’s Greek salad, it’s antipasti, it’s heaven. I don’t bite, just press my mouth, and his thin skin drugs me with its heady tang.

“Where should I bite?” I whisper into his ear.

Ken’s fingers in my hair, he moves his lips to my cheek and whispers back, “Here. Just a little bite. Just be gentle.” Then he takes my hand and places it on his shoulder. Taps my finger on the bicep. But before I can bite, he holds my chin in his hand, makes me look at him.

“No one has ever seen me so clearly, Aaron. I can sense it.”

Once and only once Timothy let me take a bite. This was on our second anniversary, after dinner at the fanciest restaurant we’d ever been to together—suits, caviar, bowl-sized glasses of Barolo. We took a car home, and he lay his head on my shoulder. I know you’re still hungry, he said to me. Though I wish you weren’t.

Back in the apartment he fashioned us cocktails, gin, chartreuse, splash of soda.

What is it that makes you so fascinated by us tasters? He asked me and not for the first time, but this time, I tried to answer him.

I don’t know. I guess. To be so completely something. Obvious, definable, true?

That makes me sad, Aaron, you know why?

I didn’t but I held him, pulled him close because I did love him. I did.

You think I’m a grapefruit, but I’m not.

And then he unbuttoned his shirt and lifted the hem. And then, what? What do I remember?

This was around the time I had a student, Alice, who had woken up to discover she was a croque monsieur. The smell so pervasive, she threw up a little, she told me. Crying in my classroom. You’ll get used to it, I promised her. This is big, this is special. You can do anything! What I wouldn’t give to be you, and she looked at me, her tears salty, probably also a little sweet. What if I’m still not enough?

In the bedroom, I put my teeth on Timothy’s belly, and though he tried his best not to be—he was terrified, and the foulness of the rotten fruit, its spoil was all I could taste.

Though, I didn’t spit him out. I held him in my mouth. Pressed my palm against the tiny blip of blood, and he cried against me, into my ecstatic embrace. What I could not hide.

I want to tell you that Ken was mealy. Unspecial. A kalamata from a cheap jar forgotten on the grocery store’s lowest shelf, rancid and not at all buttery, but that’s not true. Ken was a decent olive. Not the best I’ve ever tasted, but not the worst either. (Despite the ow ow ow that punctuated my tiny, albeit painful, bite).

Afterward as I chewed the little morsel of olive-flavored flesh, while Ryan attended to the pea-sized wound with antiseptic, gauze, a band-aid, Ken droned on excited, drunk-seeming though he’d had the one beer. Likely high on the drama, the attention. “Wow wow wow! That was—incredible!” and he waxed on about the feeling of it, not just pain but something greater, rapture? Importance? He left shortly after (though not soon enough) to report back to his girlfriend and so it was me and Ryan alone in the living room.

“Let me taste you. I mean, why not? You got your turn.”

I study Ryan, his not-so-neat beard, his skinny neck, his bright, wholesome eyes. “But I’m just me? And you’ve never shown interest.”

“Not melon?” he winks and I feel something then, a tremor or a vibration.

“All right.”

Then he’s beside me, this newest love of mine, partner, and friend. He whispers where? and I tap my forearm, the fleshy, muscly part and he nods. I smell him next to me, breathe him in—the soap we share, the titch of sweat, that warm baked-pizza mouth-breath that made me first love him. Whatever the inside of him is that I only rarely get to partake in. Then the flesh of me in his mouth.

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I tell him. “Dig in.”

Flesh, blood, veins, fat, skin. And how is it, I long to ask.

“You’re disgusting,” he says to me. “You’re everything I want.”

You’re you.

When Abe was seven, he and his best friend, Robbie, a redhead with more freckles than face, discovered a path behind Mr. Given’s barn. The path curved around the base of a hill that was covered top to bottom with golden Marguerite blooms. The blue of the summer sky made the flowers seem yellower than anything Abe had ever seen. The breeze made them shimmer. It looked like the hill was cheering, like it was celebrating the path alongside it. Or so it seemed to Abe.

“That must be a magic trail,” Abe said. “I bet it just appeared, special for us. If not, we’d have heard about it for sure.”

Abe mostly knew the path wasn’t magic. Mostly. It had probably been worn into the ground by Mr. Given’s sheep. Just a few feet away a pile of fresh droppings buzzed with flies and that didn’t seem magical at all. Abe liked to tell Robbie that ordinary things were magic. A few weeks ago, it was the TV set with the zigzag crack across the screen that they found tipped on its side in the gully by Ruffin Road. “That TV picks up programs from outer space. If we hook it up, we’ll see game shows and soap operas from the planet Jupiter.” Before that it was the strange little rainstorm that came in the middle of a sunny day and lasted exactly as long as it took the bell at Saint Bernadette’s to ring the noon hour. “If we fill a Coke bottle with the magic rainwater and drink it all in one go, we’ll grow a foot in a week.”

When Abe said these things, Robbie’s eyebrows arched, his greenish-brown eyes opened extra wide, and Abe could tell that for a few moments Robbie believed in magic. This made Abe happy because when Robbie believed that a broken TV could pick up game shows and soap operas from the planet Jupiter or that magic rainwater could make them grow a foot in a week, it was easier for Abe to believe. Abe liked to believe in magic sometimes.

“If we follow that path, something wonderful will happen,” Abe said.

“Nah!” Robbie said. He pushed Abe’s shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Then Robbie shaded his eyes and stared at the trail as it disappeared behind the celebrating hill. “I do kind of wonder where it goes.”

There was a cluster of freckles on the back of the hand that shaded Robbie’s eyes. Abe especially liked these freckles because they were in the shape of The Big Dipper. “I know where the trail goes,” Abe said.

“Behind the school?” Robbie’s breath smelled of the peanut butter and honey sandwich he had for lunch.

“Nope.” Abe stepped over the pile of sheep droppings and started walking along the trail. He let his hand brush the top of the marguerite as he went. The flowers were soft and warmed by the sun. “It leads to someplace wonderful.”

“Oh jeeze-if-you-please.” Robbie ran up behind Abe and half-tackled him, sending them both into the waist-high marguerite. “You are such a goofball.”

“No, you’re a goofball.”

“No, you are.”

The two boys pretend-fought for a while, but Abe didn’t want to spend much time pretend-fighting. Pretend-fighting was silly while hiking along the path seemed important and adventurous. Abe wanted to get to it.

While the boys walked, they sometimes tossed rocks, sometimes pointed out strange-looking clouds, sometimes talked, and sometimes didn’t. Abe liked all of it. He liked the sway of the oatgrass, the purple of the lupine, and the way the sun shone on Robbie’s red hair.

They went all the way to the edge of the pasture where there were no buildings, no fences, and no sounds except the wind and the birds. Just past a stand of laurel trees they saw a glint and glimmer.

“What’s that?” Robbie said.

“Don’t know,” Abe answered.

On the other side of the trees, they found a dark jewel of a pond. Small but deep.

“Want to swim?” Robbie said.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” Abe said.

“Ha!” Quick as lightning, Robbie stripped off his sneakers, his shorts, his t-shirt, and his underwear. He stepped onto the low arch of a very large rock at the edge of the water. “Hey, tadpoles!” he said and pointed.

Abe felt bashful and didn’t know why. At day camp all the boys had to shower together in a locker room by the lake after every swim lesson. They’d all be naked and squirming in the big, steamy room. That didn’t make Abe bashful at all. But Robbie didn’t go to day camp. He’d spent the summer with his grandparents at their cabin near Lake Tahoe. Abe couldn’t say why his best friend made him feel shy about taking off his clothes, but it was true all the same.

He untied his sneakers and set them aside. He took off his t-shirt and folded it neatly. Same with his shorts. A warm breeze sneaked past the elastic of his underwear and swirled on his secret skin. It felt so good that it made Abe bold. He kicked off his underwear, stood next to his best friend on the very large rock at the edge of the pond, and there was nothing between the two boys but the breeze.

“Look! That one sprouted a leg,” Robbie said, and crouched down.

Abe crouched too. He slid a fingertip through some glittery dust. He found a glossy black stripe embedded in the rock and traced a circle around it. Then he noticed the freckles on the back of Robbie's hand. It was the cluster that looked like The Big Dipper. Abe skimmed his finger from one freckle to the other and slowly traced the constellation on Robbie’s skin.

Robbie watched Abe’s finger as it moved from one freckle to the next. “Huh,” Robbie said, and he sounded surprised. Abe traced The Big Dipper again and again. When he stopped, Robbie said, “You don’t have any freckles. Guess I can make any shape I want.” Robbie traced a triangle on the back of Abe’s wrist.

Abe wanted to say, I think this is the wonderful thing, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Robbie said.

“It tickles,” Abe said.

This was not quite true. The skin under Robbie’s touch felt something like ticklish. But Abe got sick of being tickled after a while. Robbie tracing a triangle on his wrist felt so nice Abe couldn’t imagine ever wanting him to stop.

He noticed a small crumb in the corner of Robbie’s mouth and very gently brushed it away with his thumb.

“You missed some,” Robbie said.

Abe didn’t argue even though there were no more crumbs. He pretended to brush one from the other side of Robbie’s mouth.

He could smell Robbie’s peanut butter breath, the spice cabinet scent of his scalp, and a faint whiff of freshly toasted English muffins, which Abe thought was probably the smell of Robbie’s freckles. This, Abe wanted to say. This must be the wonderful thing. But before he could get the words out Robbie scooched his hand that was resting on the very large rock so close to Abe’s that the outside of their pinkies touched. Then Robbie lifted his pinky and hooked it over Abe’s.

“Are we?” Abe’s voice had gone croaky. He had to swallow and start again. “Are we making a promise?” He asked this because sometimes girls hooked their pinkies when they swore things to each other and a swear was a kind of promise.

“Don’t know.” Robbie said. “Maybe.”

“What are we promising?” Abe asked.

Robbie shrugged. Then slowly and one at a time, Robbie twined the rest of his fingers between Abe’s. When he was done, the two boys were holding hands. “Ha!” Robbie said.

Then Abe said, “Ha!” And the world seemed yellower, bluer, greener, pinker, browner, whiter, the world seemed more itself than just a few moments before.

“We’re definitely making a promise,” Robbie said.

“An important promise,” Abe said. “Even if we don’t know what it is.”

Robbie held their joined hands chin level, leaned close, and blew across their fingers. The warm air streamed over their hands and into Abe’s face. When it touched his cheek, Abe’s whole body shuddered. “Why did you do that?” Abe asked.

“It’s what my mom does,” Robbie answered. “She says it makes a promise official.”

“Maybe I should too.” Abe puckered his lips and blew. “Whatever promise we made, it’s for real now.” He lowered their hands, and the two boys’ faces were closer than they had ever been. Yet it seemed they might get closer still. Abe leaned in. Robbie too. As their foreheads touched, the shadow of a large bird passed over them. The boys blinked like they’d woken from a deep sleep. They looked up. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead. It let out a piercing cry that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“He’s watching,” Robbie said. “Think he’s watching?” He pulled his hand away from Abe’s and stood. Abe gasped because the hand that had been holding Robbie’s felt suddenly cold and empty.

Abe looked up at his naked friend as he stood on the very large rock. He saw Robbie’s freckles and the places his freckles weren’t. He saw the downy hair on Robbie’s legs and the way his toes curled as his weight shifted. He saw the lines at the corners of Robbie’s eyes as he squinted into the sun. He saw the funny dimples on Robbie’s elbows. He saw that Robbie had an outie. Abe thought all of Robbie was beautiful.

A mysterious craving opened in Abe’s chest that made him want to touch Robbie, to memorize him. This craving extended beyond his friend to the very large rock, the wriggling tadpoles, the glistening pond, the swaying laurel trees, the white clouds, and the blue stretch of forever with the hawk circling and watching. Abe craved all these things, but he didn’t want to have or own them. He wanted to join them. He wanted to let the edges of himself blur into the edges of them. This yearning made a secret part of Abe feel like crying even though he wasn’t sad.

“The hawk is paying special attention,” Abe said as he stood next to Robbie. “He watched us make a promise and now he’s going to make sure we keep it.”

Robbie’s eyebrows arched up and his greenish-brown eyes opened extra wide. “You think?” He took hold of Abe’s hand again.

“Yeah,” Abe said. “I do.”

Robbie made a song of it. “I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.”

This made Abe think of his Aunt Justine’s wedding because Uncle Johnny, her fiancé, was so happy that when the time came, he said I do over and over. The whole congregation laughed. Throughout the ceremony, Aunt Justine and Uncle Johnny held each other’s hands like they would never ever let go. This is what Abe thought getting married was about—a way for two people to hold hands forever, even when they weren’t touching. Abe could only think of one person he wanted to hold hands with forever.

“Want to get married?” he asked Robbie.

“What?” Robbie pushed Abe’s shoulder with his free hand. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t mean Mom and Dad married,” Abe said. “Not in a church married.”

“What other kind of married is there?”

Abe thought about this. “Maybe hiking a magic trail married? Or blue sky married?”

Robbie bit his lower lip. “What about secret pond married? Or a hawk flying in circles married?”

“Sure,” Abe said. “And standing in the sun with my friend married. That’s the best kind.”

The boys laughed as if this was the funniest thing in the world. But Abe was serious. He wanted to marry Robbie, and the magic trail, and the sky, and the pond, and the hawk, and this day that kept getting more and more beautiful.

“How?” Robbie asked when his giggles died down. “I mean, how?”

Abe looked at the loamy soil, the swaying trees, the clouds, and the hawk, hoping to find an answer. Sunlight glinted on the pond.

“What if we held hands real tight and, at the exact same time, we both jumped into the water? While we’re jumping, we’ll yell, We’re Married! We’re Married! as loud as we can so the hawk is sure to hear it.”

“Okay,” Robbie said. He edged his foot forward until his toes touched the water. The sun reflected off the pond in wavy lines of brightness that drifted over his face. “Sure.” He turned toward Abe. His smile was like a sunrise.

“Okay,” Abe said. “On three.” He swung their arms wide. “One.” Even wider. “Two.” Wider still. “Three!”

The boys jumped. The moment they left the rock, just as Abe and Robbie began to shout, the hawk let out another cry. The voices of two boys and a bird made a dissonant harmony that twined through the laurel trees, infused the pond, and stilled the breeze. In that raucous moment Abe was certain that this was the best thing that had ever happened in the entire history of the world. The very best, most wonderful thing. Abe was sure of it.

I watch my sister in the Gaokao factory because I know there is no need to pray. Teachers in hunt of their yearly bonuses blow air horns outside her ten-square-meter room at four forty-five a.m. My sister, looking like something other than my sister, removes herself from bed, her hair immaculately straight, faintly aware of a resident assistant nudging her roommate to verify life. I can’t quite recall my sister’s name. I only notice it when she does, sparingly, in wasted moments that collect as evidence against her future.

May has come, and everything else has left. She has not showered since April 21 and will not do so until the two days of silence at the end of the first week of June have passed. Months ago, she reduced her thirty-minute lunch with friends to twenty minutes, picking at food and flipping through a review packet. I slip through 3011 today and see she’s opted in: an IV drip lined with glucose, electrolytes, and saline hangs over her shoulder. When her eyelids become too heavy, an instructor swoops as if to catch a teetering vase and pinches the back of her neck. 

Down the hall, the boy she kissed in the corner of the fried dumpling restaurant last summer is unraveling. He’s staring at the blank backside of a photo-scanned textbook, snickering. Those around him only know to regard him as strange, except for a math teacher with bifocals who presents him with soothing rose tea. A reddish ink mushrooms around me at the sight of such a specimen in the selfsame halls that claimed my greatness.

My sister strains to merge with the marks on her paper. Beneath, a boarded-up fraction of herself worries about our mother stricken with the later stages of breast cancer. The exam will not only determine which college she’ll attend and her social status thereafter but may also hold the power to sever our mother’s tenuous connection to the mortal realm if she fails.  The Gaokao looms with its massive treaded tires and big barrel projecting toward her tiny pre-bursting head, and the truth lies somewhere behind it.

My sister takes the review packet to the restroom, compulsively uttering each line of text. She squats, picking at the corner of two stuck-together pages, loses her balance, and kerplunks in the pool of piss. The review packet is papier-mâché. The skirt of her Hengshui uniform is soaked, and she sits there, stunned, trying to figure out how to factor this into the Gaokao. Her name is Yang Miao. 

Someone in the adjacent stall stifles tears, and the sniffles sound familiar. Sound ancient. Her best friend of seven years, from before grade twelve, whom she begged every god that she could beat. A smile creeps into her cheeks. On the way back to the classroom, she steps over my ironed-out entrails, a pale yellow running down her skirt and painting her socks.

Not until nine p.m. does a teacher come to her side. Another student must’ve complained that the stench disrupted their studies, but she refuses to retreat to her dormitory to change her uniform. The teacher notices the flimsy, piss-stained review packet coming apart in my sister’s hands and draws out a sigh. He sends her into the hall with her IV bag, where she slouches against a poster announcing, “I will win the test,” and studies the remnants of the review stuck to her fingers like puzzle pieces until another teacher drops off a new copy.

An image recurs the more exhausted she becomes. Our mother, once incapable of sitting still, reduced to a moan in the bedroom. Propped up against the headboard, breasts swollen, a frail reflection of what Miao expected. Moaning in pain, moaning for her boy.

I watch my little sister because I have no hands to pray.  My mind, what’s left of it, disassembles and bobs, spreading away from itself. I see my sister, and I see that she is unified on the third-floor corridor of Hengshui High School. The classmates that shuffle past her might as well be ghosts.

She’s greedy for sleep and takes it as soon as her head smacks the pillow in her unwashed uniform. In the next building over, the boy she kissed is running down the hall, throwing fists at room doors, lit cigarette between his fingers, shouting that he knows how to beat the Gaokao. That he’s figured it out. Two resident assistants chase him, but he slips away with a new moon grin and two pupils like the recesses of outer space. I know he saw my blood with those eyes. Figured it out. He ends up scaling a gate and splitting his left tibia on the other side, loosening a cry equally composed of liberation and terror. The other boys sleep soundly.

She awakes to find a new uniform neatly folded on the bedpost of the upper bunk. The answers to chemistry questions infiltrated her dreams and she practically prances to school knowing that she won’t need to lose a minute of the day on anything that doesn’t matter.

A boarded-up fraction of my sister worries about our mother dying, but our mother died on Valentine’s Day. Our father told her otherwise in March. Said she was on the mend with a voice tough like a calloused palm to hide the fear of anything disrupting Miao’s one-pointedness. He’ll enlighten my sister around the next time she bathes.

In one month, she will sit down for the Gaokao with other students vomiting on their test papers and ambulances packed outside on standby. Construction will have stopped, couriers and test drivers will be told to avoid testing centers, and Hebei Province will observe its closest thing to a holy day. Maybe she’ll see the desk I left my soaking heart on. Perhaps she’ll see the cross-sections of my brain lining the A4, oozing the good fortune I left with it.

For now, I watch and savor every moment of perfection. She will walk the halls of Tsinghua University, gain employment as a biochemical engineer, and incrementally but surely lose herself to mediocrity as it had taken me. Until then, she is unspoiled. I watch because I have no hands to applaud. The best I can do is pass a cold tendril of gas over her shoulder to remind her that I’m here and intend to be evermore, cherishing the magnificence I gave my life to honor, communicating, I hope, that it doesn’t have to end. The Gaokao can be forever.

NutritionNow App is Open:

Reviewing Today’s Meals. Breakfast: 1 savory protein-dense bar, 1 scoop of water-soluble fiber added to 1 glass of healthy-bones solution. 1 pouch of sublingual slow-release caffeine. Lunch: 1 salty-sweet extended-energy bar, 1 …

System Interruption. Priority given to the following App: “Sterile Environments Security Forces Employee Notification System.” Override?

Yes.

Override completed. Fingerprint required.

Fingerprint processed.

Opening “Sterile Environments Security Forces Employee Notification System.” Complete.

CODE RED IN PLACE AS OF 1400. BE ON ALERT FOR PERSONS WHO MAY ATTEMPT TO INOCULATE THE CLIENT’S PROPERTY WITH BIOLOGICAL AGENTS, TYPE: FUNGAL. THREAT: CREDIBLE. SECURITY PRECAUTIONS: HAZMAT. WEAPON PACK-OUT: ARMED.  SEE ATTACHED FILES FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

Opening File Attachment. Complete.

File 2450. Type: Correspondence. Mode of Delivery: Electronic mail. Identification: Encrypted. Clearance: Top Secret. Priority: ASAP

To: UNAFFILIATED

From: UNAFFILIATED

Subject: Intercepted Mycelial Message (Translated via Botanical Intelligence)

Dear (ANONYMOUS LOCK IN PLACE),

Please consider carrying the recent comm (translation attached) with you on your trip to Old Roger’s Christmas Farm. Preliminary impression is that the message contains a high quantity of flOral history. Various guilds(?) are described. This may prove useful to you in your current field work. I suspect your counterparts would consider the data especially valuable. As usual, please be discreet.

Safe travels,

(ANONYMOUS LOCK IN PLACE).

Opening File Attachment. Complete.

In the eighth volume of Le Monde Primitif, published in the late 18th century, French pastor and occultist Antoine Court de Gebelin described the ostensibly ancient Egyptian origins of the Tarot, thus initiating a European fascination with playing cards that elevated them from mere amusement to divinatory tool. A Coptic lineage (of Gebelin's invention, and therefore not alleged but fantasized), invoking—among much else—the Book of Thoth, Qabalistic symbolism, and the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus steadily coalesced around the cards. A successor of Gebelin's, Eliphas Levi, wrote, in 1896, “An imprisoned person with no other book than the Tarot, if he knew how to use it, could in a few years acquire universal knowledge, and would be able to speak on all subjects with unequaled learning and inexhaustible eloquence."

The French artist Marcelle Leroudier purports to be unconcerned with this dubious history. Born in 1959 in Paris near a principal entrance to the vast catacombs at Place Denfert-Rochereau, Leroudier was attracted to the Tarot at age 13 not by the famous Rider-Waite deck but by the claustrophobic and irresistible renderings of Frieda Harris. "Her depictions for Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck were more entrancing to me than a reading of the cards themselves,” Leroudier said in a 1981 piece in Argile. “I recognized, even as a young girl, that Harris had discovered the soul of the oracle in her paintings, and I resolved to find an equally singular path into that mystery."

Leroudier’s father is a surgeon; her mother, also a painter, is from a prominent Polish-Jewish family that settled in Paris before the First World War. Leroudier entered the École des Beaux-Arts at 17, where she was awarded a scholarship and three certificates of merit. She works in watercolors exclusively and focuses solely on interpreting the Tarot. She has credited Goethe’s notions of projective synthetic geometry as decisive in her development. “I have always believed parallel lines eventually meet at some infinite point,” is the sole statement of explanation Leroudier offered as accompaniment to the catalogue for her 1983 exhibition at Marseille’s Atelier 9, “The Death of the Magician: An Insomniac’s Prophecy.”

A visit to Bologna in 1981 introduced Leroudier to the Tarocco Siciliano cards, a Portuguese-suited deck comprising 63 cards rather than the standard 78 and featuring the now-defunct Latin suits of cups, coins, swords, and clubs. “The knaves in these ranks are female, joining the queens in dominating the face cards,” Leroudier notes in the Argile article. “The women prevail. I like to think a woman could get away with murder in the realm of those cards.”

Leroudier’s decks generally suggest the Tarocco Siciliano format. Notably, Leroudier has incorporated four unconventional suits in her renderings—stone, knot, grass, and blood—suggestive of an affinity with the Lisbon Circle. Leroudier has offered no comment on this.

An interest in Anthroposophy, begun in 1982 when Leroudier attended a series of lectures on Rudolf Steiner in Madrid, fortified her intuition that Frieda Harris was both her muse and semi-doppelganger. “Harris’s grounding in synthetic geometry came from a study of Steiner’s philosophy she undertook in the 1930s,” Leroudier has said. "I wasn’t aware of this in my teenage years, and when I learned of it, I felt as though she and I had traveled the same spiritual terrain.”

The largesse of an anonymous patron representing (in Leroudier’s formulation) “an international organization,” allows her to enjoy an artistic and financial freedom she has described as absolute. "I can produce as I choose," she has said, “and I can live how and where I like.” She is said to have created 63 copies of a custom Tarot deck for use by members of the Lisbon Circle.

If there is a divinatory power in her cards, Leroudier claims she is a hopeless channeler. "The images themselves possess sufficient power, I feel. I cannot read the future, and I don’t want to. My art is the only magic I have.”

Leroudier has spent portions of her years in Santiago over the past half-decade. She has an affinity for absinthe, hashish, and nude bathing; she attends the opera, boxing matches, and lectures arranged by a Chilean Theosophical society; she frequents used bookstores and strip clubs. She has, apparently, produced no new illustrations since 1985. Sembla Intelligencer, April 4, 1988

Today my therapist tells me I might try combing my hair every night before bed, so that I’m not too tangled to wake up. It’s the funniest he’s ever been.

I see this as a hopeful sign.

He doesn’t crack a grin, because he’s my therapist, and has been cast in a humorless role. Also, he’s not very funny.

I’ve been cured for a few years now, I want to say. I’ve been sitting here on sticky tape for a long time, fella, how about we head over to Mr. Ant’s for martinis?

***

I grow silent for an entire session, which is more interesting than being silent with my husband.

Even when I’m silent, he’s a ball of light. Even when he sighs as if disappointed, he lights up the office.

Memories of contentment are meteorites that zip around me so fast I miss them, I say.

Wobbling on his sofa, I feel like his 2:45 egg that has long ago hatched.

***

Too often I stare at his full lips and wonder what he looked like twenty years ago.

Again, I have flopped down in his office on a Tuesday at 2:45 with my Victorian baby smile, no words alive in my mouth.

He looks inside the doorways of my mind as if he can see me standing there, younger and leaning. He offers me his extra-soft Kleenex eyes.

***

I make a note of the profound things I’m not going to say while waiting in his art nouveau lobby. There is a built-in kind of snobbery in a doctor/patient relationship. It’s like hunting for treasure in a Cracker Jack box and never finding it.

There is puffy skin under his eyes. A muted desire, in the intensity of his gaze, for some kind of narrative “reveal”.

Today, I have questions about his own damn home life. Suspicions of a partner who loves him like a difficult dog. I think about wearing red lipstick next time. And perhaps, an art nouveau hat!

***

On a regular Tuesday at 2:45, the sun shines through the window of his expensive lobby like a blood bubble. When he walks in to retrieve me, he wears a halo around his head, like an out-of-focus ghost reflected by the centre point of pain.

Today my therapist is a silvery-haired con artist, a broken promise, a shroud made of male water ripples.

Today, what I’m seeing is light that left his orbit many years ago, and it’s as if I’m looking at both of us way back in time.

Finally, I form the words “it’s time” on my lips, roll them around inside my mouth like an egg. I’m wearing a chartreuse smile, and from some other planet, I can tell that he recognizes it. Once again his sofa is a crust of trees on a broken shore.

Oh, the plague times. The day we watched Stevie through Nikita’s window like we were watching some viral video. That’s exactly what it could’ve been. He was lying down in his front yard, ranting paranoically about his victimhood, and ours too, and everyone’s, under the persistent decline of social capital in the United States. This, while he tended to his feet, which were bleeding. He had been out there on his lawn for an hour and was racking up a mean sunburn. Meanwhile his Shih Tzu was sitting nearby on the stoop, panting, with a very low IQ look on its face. It was all quite distasteful. The kind of thing that certainly would have made the rounds.

It was Nikita's idea to interview Stevie. For our podcast. Stevie was not our friend. If anything, he was our rival, philosophically. But given the spectacular performance we had already witnessed, he seemed like the type with opinions, the type with whom an ardent chat would get the people going. Nikita was clear on this matter. And when it came to the pod, I deferred to him.

So, we went out, explained the sitch, shook hands, put some socks on Stevie’s bloody feet, and carried him into Nikita’s den, where we got down to business. This I’ll get to soon.

Leading up to the day of Stevie’s interview, I’d been joining Nikita on the hot roof of his rented bungalow. Up on Nikita’s roof, we’d drink beers and brainstorm what ideas we should talk about next in our mission to get to the heart of things. Then we’d bang out a pod and drink a few more brewskis. Our listeners (we were up to 626 on the day we interviewed Stevie) loved us very much and told us so. They told us we couldn’t be stopped, like we were some cultural force. We named them, our listeners. We called them the Goon Squad. And the Goon Squad was right, in a way. We couldn’t be stopped. I mean, we recorded the joints then uploaded them. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. No one’s stopping that.

When a plague hits and all you can do is chill—no bars, no sports, no symposiums, no nine-to-fives, no munches—everyone starts brimming with ideas. Our big idea was to bounce our big ideas off each other and record it, which turned out to be a great idea. People were hungry for pods during the plague.

We got our pods out there fast, directly into ears, whereupon the Goon Squad had realizations like, Oh my god, I was thinking that exact same thing. It only took a few weeks until we were certified members of the intelligentsia. The key to it all was to figure out what people were thinking before they figured it out themselves. And we had it down to a science. It felt like science, actually. Like we were engaged in some big experiment. That was a theme for one of our first pods. How these scientist motherfuckers were out here killing the game. Think about it. There’s not enough time in the day, and death is programmed into our genes, and everyone desperately wants to be loved. And so, the scientists are like, Fuck it, here are some cute robots to vacuum your floors right quick, and here are some glow-in-the-dark rat clones that can smell cancer right quick, and here you go we made some sexy sexbots for your tiny little computers. Maybe what I really mean to say is, early on it felt like we were on the cutting edge of something.

Anyways, whenever we were up on Nikita’s roof, lounging on our sides, drinking our booze, shooting the shit like Socrates and Alcibiades, inevitably, a man from across the street would appear. Noshing on some ambiguously brown bar, he’d drag his fat Shih Tzu by a sixteen-foot retractable across the burnt lawn to his mailbox where he’d chew open-mouthed and pretend to rifle through the spam he inexplicably never removed, while sneaking furtive glances at us.

Then, after a week plus of his silent, devious glancing, the man started taking our picture.

Smile boys, he would say, still chewing his brown bar, capturing us on his Google Pixel.

These were plague times. Everyone was doing loony shit. So, we put up with it. We even smiled. And the man took his pictures and scurried off, yanking his dog meanly along.

But he kept at it, for weeks. We started flipping him the bird. I mooned him once, full booty cheeks. We tried pelting him with the hard seed balls that fell from the American sycamore hanging over Nikita’s roof. The balls would explode on contact with a dandelion-like puff and he’d just laugh, like we were his own spunky meddlesome children. All the while he kept his phone camera trained on us, recording.

I’ve got you now, he’d say, playfully.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Just ask him to stop. We did! But he did not stop. He just launched into explanations on some JD level shit, about his moral imperative to document our moral failures, and then threatened to call the cops.

Just because you’re more afraid than ever doesn't mean you can invent your own ethical code and expect us to follow it, Nikita barked back once.

We have important work to do, I added. We’re brainstorming. We’re getting to the heart of things. We’re trying to make progress, through dialogue. We have a burgeoning podcast.

And when your grandmothers catch this plague of yours and die, will it all have been worth it? he responded, bitterly.

It’s not our plague, said Nikita.

And all of our grandmothers are dead, I said. We have zero grandmothers.

No wonder you're so ill behaved, he said.

I complained to everyone about him AKA Nikita, my girlfriend, Camellia, and my parents. My parents are kindergarten teachers. They are expert handlers of irreconcilable disputes.

Just ignore him, they offered. He’ll get bored of you.

Invite Nikita over to your place, they offered. You have a home too.

But Camellia lived at home and Camellia hated Nikita. He never asked her any questions, and she found most of his deeply held personal beliefs obnoxious.

Camellia was not in the Goon Squad.

For a week after this tête-à-tête, we took my parents’ advice and ignored him. Like he was just another neighbor. Like he was a popup requesting we disable our pop-up blocker (lol wut).

Instead of filming us, he started staring, with the dumb face of a plotting novelist, working us into some private scene of his.

And that brings us full circle, to the day this man came on our pod.

One day, Nikita had enough of this man’s staring, and he threw an empty beer bottle at him. Then, without looking away from us with his plotty eyes, he’d removed his slippers and stepped, defiantly, as if it were a righteous act of protest, onto the shards of the shattered bottle. Oh, if only we had a video. More clicks than all the pods we’ll ever make. The political chicanery. Karen bro channels Tibetan monk.

Afterwards, silently, within the primordial dankness of Nikita’s den, we watched the man rant and writhe on his lawn and privately thought our own sad and guilty thoughts.

I broke the silence. Nikita, I said, Do you think we were being too masculine with him?

What? said Nikita.

Hasn’t this all been a bit too masculine? This little war of ours.

I don’t think that’s the right word, he said.

Masculine, I thought. Arguing it was the right word felt too masculine too. What a catch-22.

Well, I have made a decision, I said. From now on, I am going to be less masculine.

If anyone was being too masculine, it was him, said Nikita. ‘Oh, look at me, I’m such a tough guy. I can step on glass.’

Well, regardless, I would like us to be more feminine, I said.

That’s not a choice we can make, he said. Besides, what does that even mean? And also, have you seen all the hot guys these days? Being feminine is masculine now, bro. Everything comes down to what women think is hot.

Save your cynicism for the pod, I said, hardening my resolve.

Fucking Nikita. He was such a little devil sometimes. And yet I loved him for it. I love you, Nikita. I love you for your stridency. I love you for your provocations.

Chastened, I looked out the window with my chin raised. The man, still sitting in his yard, was now calmly picking the shards of glass from his red feet.

I’m serious, I said. I’m a new man from now on.

You’re being so stupid, said Nikita.

With that, he fell backwards, onto his grimy couch, lifting his hands in the air, like he was trying to disguise a fucked up dismount off a pummel horse. He even looked at me as he did it, like I owed him an appraisal.

This is what humans do, I realized. We turn nothing into something, then we look around for recognition. Despite my reliance on all that something, I’ve never been definitively convinced that it’s better than the nothing. Not unless there’s beauty involved, beauty or love. I thought all this, then thought, What a perfect topic for the pod. I made a note in my spiral bound.

Nikita was looking at me still.

Not a thing of beauty, I said. Four out of ten.

What are you talking about? he said.

Nothing, I said. You looked like you were doing gymnastics. I was giving you a score.

Then I had a sudden urge. Bravely, I obeyed it.

What if we reframed our pod like this, I suggested. We're a gay couple—you and me. We come out on the pod. The Goonies will love that.

No, they won’t, he said.

Well, the algorithms will, I said.

You save your cynicism for the pod, he said.

I walked over to Nikita and promptly sat on his lap, thinking I’d start our reorientation quickly and physically.

He stood up immediately, disgusted. I slid off him, onto the floor, right onto my tailbone. That’s not what I had imagined happening. Still, I made sure not to tear up, which was difficult.

Poor Nikita, I thought. If he was going to fight me every step of the way like this, the podcast was going to get chippy.

I walked back to the window and texted Camellia. Camellia, who is very hot and bisexual, would understand much better than myself what it was I was balking at in my interlocutor. She always did. She understood Nikita’s (and my own) flaws to a tee. That’s why I was always sending her secret vent texts about him.

Nikita has been such a republican recently, really holding back the pod’s pursuit of truth, I wrote her.

For while Nikita may have been good at getting to the heart of things, he was also bad at getting to the heart of things. Too rigid. The kind of person who keeps everything on his plate from touching. Queer it up, motherfucker! I wanted to say. Queer it up. I wanted to shove Nikita down onto the pastel yellow carpet that coated his house like a slime mold, mount him, and start riding him around the house like a Shetland pony, yelling, Yeehaw, yeehaw!

Let’s become Republicans, said Nikita.

Oh my god I knew it, I thought.

That's our angle, he continued. A two-man Colbert Report. We’ll interview everyone like they’re our loony liberal enemies. And we’ll start, he said dramatically, with him. He pointed a shaky finger at the man across the street. The Shih Tzu had wandered over to the man, and he was trying to shoo it away from all the broken glass around him.

You want us to pretend to be Republican on the pod? I said. The Goons will crucify us.

No, they won’t, he said. We can play both sides this way.

Let’s just say we’re protesters, I said. Two generic protesters, fighting the fascism ruining America. That has proper crossover appeal.

No, said Nikita in a final word kind of way. We will be ravenous Republicans who won't be locked down.

Okay, so how does he fit in? I asked, nodding to the man. We watched him again through the window. He was still lying there, yelling at his ugly dog, who just would not obey.

Okay, okay, said Nikita, bad idea. We’re not Republican but we’re not gay either. Why don’t we just keep being ourselves for now. We’ll keep being ourselves, and we’ll ask that guy who he is, let him be whoever he wants to be.

This sounded agreeable. I rubbed my butt, which was still throbbing. I tried to remember the revolutionary impulse from a moment ago that had led me to imagine myself riding Nikita like a Shetland pony through his filthy house. But I couldn’t remember. The true cause of our secret urges will remain forever repressed, I thought.

Meanwhile, Nikita was talking, probably raising lots of salient points.

Okay, okay, okay, I said.

He stopped and smiled.

And so, we were in agreement. We would interview the man without any pretense.

My phone buzzed. Camellia.

Stop hanging out with that loser, she wrote.

Sorry, Camellia. Goon Squad til I die.

We hustled out the front door and crossed the street to our fallen subject. His dog, the poor thing, had returned to the front stoop and was shaking with fright. Although it was quite old. And it did have that horrible problem with its face. So, maybe the shaking had nothing to do with fear. Maybe it was muscular dystrophy.

Nikita and I were looming above the man, like two giants above a helpless villager. He looked up in search of mercy, or for an explanation of our breach of the long established divide between us. Why had we crossed the street?

Nikita extended the olive branch.

We’d like to say that we are sorry, he said. And we’d like to make things up to you.

Okay, said the man. Financially?

More like, spiritually, I said.

We’d like to invite you onto our podcast, said Nikita. We’d like you to give the world your side of things. You can say anything you want.

Anything? he said.

Almost anything, I said. As long as it doesn’t fuck with our ratings.

We have a decent audience, said Nikita. For an hour they are all yours.

I don’t know. I’m not that interesting, the man said.

That’s okay, said Nikita.

Neither are we, I said.

I mean, I do believe in aliens, the man said. And I was on the World Series of Poker. And my father stormed Normandy. But I’m not sure if I—

Don’t worry about being interesting, I said. Just, try and keep in mind that there are algorithms involved here. That’s all we ask. Other than that, just be yourself.

Okay, the man said. I can do that.

So, what’s your name, asked Nikita.

I’m Stevie, he said.

Nice, I said.

With that we all shook hands, even though Stevie’s were quite bloody.

I gingerly slipped socks onto Stevie’s feet. Then Nikita and I wedged our shoulders under Stevie’s arms, which he held out in a Christlike manner, and we carried him to Nikita's den.

Yes. Yes. Very good, he said, with haughty appreciation as we placed him on Nikita's infamous couch. We moved the bongs and video game controllers out of his way so he could lay down.

Nikita got a roll of paper towels from the kitchen, which was just visible through a little portal in the dividing wall. On the ledge of that little portal Nikita kept a pot full of soil, roach butts, cherry pits, gum, etc. plus the crispy, mysterious skeleton of a long dead plant. A mascot of sorts. Nikita called it The Compost. And when he passed the paper towels through the portal he accidentally knocked The Compost off the ledge right onto Stevie, who immediately started sputtering, trying to get the soil and such out of his mouth.

Drink, cried Stevie.

I hopped to, started wiping the mess off of him, while Nikita, red-faced, apologized profusely and quickly got three cans of beer, a generic seltzer, and divvied.

Stevie chugged the seltzer, burped, and sighed with relief. I passed him the paper towels which he received gratefully. He removed the socks I’d put on him and wrapped his feet many times over in paper towels, then slid the socks on over the new bandaging.

While Stevie finished refreshing his dressings, Nikita and I fetched our notebooks. Nikita’s, a leatherbound fatty with a dragon on the cover. Mine, a spiral bound cutie, like a waiter's order book. Like all podcasters, we were well aware of what Plato said of the written word. No man of intelligence will venture to express his philosophical views in language, especially not in language that is unchangeable, which is true of that which is set down in written characters. Our impetus for the pod in the first place. But both of us had awful memories. And so, we liked to record our thoughts to make sure we addressed them on the pod. For example, earlier I had scribbled this reminder: the pursuit of beauty.

And so, with Stevie’s wounds dressed, his face no longer soiled, and his thirst quenched, and our notes in hand, Nikita asked, Shall we begin?

Let’s get it, I said.

Sure, said Stevie.

And we began to record.

Nikita: Welcome to the pod, Stevie.

Me: Welcome to the pod.

Stevie: Thanks so much for having me.

Nikita: Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to the listeners.

Stevie: Okay uh, hey y’all, I’m Stevie. I've lived across the street from these boys for nearly a year now. Ever since the plague started, these two have been climbing onto their roof and looking in through my living room window like creeps. We've had a few arguments about it over the last month or so. And then just when things started to cool down—what’s your name?

Nikita: Nikita.

Stevie: Nikita threw a beer bottle at me. For some reason I decided to take off my slippers and step on the broken glass. Now my feet are bleeding, and I’m sitting on their stinky couch, with my feet wrapped in paper towels, talking to you.

Me: Just for the record, I don't live here. It’s not my couch.

Stevie: Right. I knew that actually. Every other day you come and park your ugly pick-up truck on the sidewalk. That's another reason I started confronting them. It seems like they don't give a fuck whether or not they spread the plague. Nor do they care about people with disabilities trying to scooter down our community’s sidewalks.

Nikita: Thanks, Stevie. Stevie here has been taking pictures of the two of us for a good while now. He's called us all sorts of nasty names and seems to spend the bulk of his free time acting paranoid. We asked him to leave us alone. And for a while he did. But he would just stand in his yard staring at us. Then today, he threatened to call the cops on us. So, yeah, I lost it a little bit. But as he said, he stepped on the glass by choice. A very strange thing to do. It looked like it really hurt. So, we figured we'd have him on the pod and find out more about how this weird motherfucker gets down.

Stevie: So, what is this podcast about anyway? Who’s your audience?

Nikita: We have about 600 loyal listeners per episode right now. The Goon Squad.

Me: Shouts to all the Goonies.

Nikita: Usually, we just talk about whatever's going on, the stuff we've been thinking about—science, the internet, the plague, random thoughts we have on the roof, how to make society better, women, Netflix—

Stevie: Women?

Nikita: Women.

Stevie: Women are strange, aren’t they?

Me: Let’s not talk about that, actually.

Stevie: You said I could talk about anything I wanted.

I paused the recording.

This is sucking, I said.

What do you want from me, said Stevie.

Truth, said Nikita.

Beauty, I said.

Yeah. We want you to be like the person who stepped on the glass, but like, for the whole interview, said Nikita. You're being too meek.

Don’t the meek inherit the earth? he said.

That's good, I said. Talk about your beliefs, your mission. What is your mission on earth?

What do you mean: My mission on earth? said Stevie.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nikita sneakily resume the recording.

Stevie: I’m not an alien.

Me: Are you sure about that?

Stevie: Well, I mean, no.

Nikita: You think you might be an alien?

Stevie: No. I’m just not sure. As in, I’m not certain. Are you certain you’re not an alien?

Nikita: I’m pretty certain.

Me: Yeah, I am definitely not an alien. One hundred percent earthborn.

Nikita: Wow. We might be interviewing an alien right now. This is suddenly very exciting.

Stevie: You might be, but I really don’t think so.

Me: Yeah, I did not see this coming.

Nikita: Okay, Stevie, if that is your real name. Let’s talk about America.

Stevie: Okay.

Nikita: What’s wrong with it? And you’re not allowed to bring up any wars. War on Drugs included.

Stevie: The Ku Klux Klan still exists. That’s pretty bad.

Me: Wow, that’s a good one.

Stevie: Gas is expensive.

Nikita: Not compared to literally everywhere else.

Stevie: I mean, what about Iran? Russia? Venezuela? Iraq? Libya? Kazakhstan? Russia?

Me: What do all those countries have in common?

Stevie: I have no clue.

Nikita: You said Russia twice.

Stevie: Okay.

Nikita: Why don't you tell us something true about yourself?

Stevie: My feet hurt.

Me: What were your parents like?

Stevie: They’re still alive, asshole. They live right across the street, with me. That’s why I don’t like you two swapping spit on that roof every day, ginning up plague in the neighborhood.

Nikita: We’re not gay, Stevie.

Me: Or are we?

Nikita: So, what do they do all day while you’re out causing mayhem?

Stevie: My father is semi-retired, but he trades gold. And my mother was a receptionist at a dentist until she got fired three weeks ago.

Me: Actual gold?

Nikita: So, you still live with your parents?

Stevie: They live with me.

Nikita: That’s sweet.

Me: I’m sure they’re proud of you.

Nikita: Wait, what do you do? Do you have a job?

Stevie: I’m a professor.

Nikita: Of?

Me: Please don’t say philosophy.

But before Stevie could answer there was a hard banging at the door. The three of us looked across the room. Through the bay window, we could see a cop car parked with its lights whirling, at the end of the driveway. There were two officers at the front door.

Me: Shit.

Nikita: Stevie, did you actually call the cops on us?

Stevie: Yes, I did. And I’m a professor of trade law.

Nikita: Fuck your job. Stevie, what the fuck.

Stevie: I warned you.

Me: I’m gonna answer the door.

Stevie: Ask them if they have a warrant. Don’t let them in without a warrant.

Me: Thanks, Stevie. What, do we owe you two-thousand dollars for your legal counsel, Mr. Law Professor? You study international trade. What do you know about cops?

Nikita: I’m gonna stop the recording. Stevie, you really fucked up the pod, bro.

You’ll be fine, Stevie said.

I opened the door. Both cops were wearing surgical masks and face shields. And they had Stevie’s dog with them, of course.

Hello there, I said.

Is this your dog, the female cop asked.

No, that’s Stevie’s dog, I said, and gestured towards Stevie, who waved from the couch.

Chrysanthemum! said Stevie. Is she okay?

Chrysanthemum whined pitifully. Her tongue flopping about.

Yes, said the female cop.

I presume you’re the Stevie who called us, said the male cop.

That’s me, said Stevie.

Are these the boys you said posed a danger to public order, said the female cop. Chrysanthemum started to lick the air around her.

Indeed, said Stevie.

Can we come in, the male cop asked.

No way, said Nikita.

Do you have a warrant, I said.

No, said the female cop. 

Chrysanthemum was licking the cop like a madman now. The dog couldn’t get enough of the taste of this cop’s forearm.

Then, yeah, that’s a no, I said.

Sir, are you in danger in any way, said the male cop.

No, no. I’m safe. They invited me to be on their podcast of all things. We were just recording when you arrived, said Stevie.

So, why are we here, the female cop asked.

If I thought long and hard about my answer, I’d probably say, Because I was lonely, said Stevie.

He was having a spiritual crisis, I said.

He thought we were responsible for his feelings of helplessness and isolation, said Nikita.

You were being quite rude and provocative, said Stevie.

We said we were sorry about that, I said.

We told him sorry already, Nikita explained. He must have called before we apologized.

Can someone please take this dog so we can leave, said the female cop.

I can’t stand, said Stevie. My feet are injured. 

I was about to reach for the dog when my phone chimed in my pocket. I started to reach to take it out, but then I thought better of it. The cops might think I was going for a gun or something. I asked the cops for permission.

By all means, said the male cop.

It was a text from Nikita: DON’T LET THEM SEE THE BONGS!!!!

Sorry, I sent that a few minutes ago, said Nikita. I forgot weed was legal for a second.

I looked at him and laughed.

Hello, said the female cop. 

Oh right, I said. I took Chrysanthemum from her.

Thank you, she said. Please don’t waste our time like that again. All of you. And take care of your dog, sir.

Yes, ma’am, said Stevie.

With that, the police left and we all sighed with relief. A brief high overtook us and we submitted to it. A contagious laughter passed back and forth between the three of us, like we were three little cells, exchanging calcium ions, trying to find our equilibrium. Chrysanthemum licked at my bicep like I was made of meat. I carried her like a child across the room to Stevie and placed her on his lap where she immediately started going buck wild, as buck wild as the old girl could. She squirmed around on his chest and licked his face with reckless abandon. She loved him. He was her world. He gave her life, quite literally. 

And I saw then that Stevie was crying. And I saw how vital Chrysanthemum was to him. And how much she loved the taste of his tears.

The bond between human and dog should give everyone great hope for the future of our species. I realized this, watching Stevie and Chrysanthemum. Yes, here was a light on the horizon. The future. If we could be in their hands. Maybe we would see ourselves through.

How could you be lonely when you have her? said Nikita.

My sweet friend. He was tearing up too.

Well, for one, she prefers my parents, said Stevie. It’s hard with them. They aren’t warm people. They think I'm a deeply flawed human being. And they think by dedicating myself to the study of tariffs, that I have somehow wasted my one and only chance on earth. 

At least they don't think you're an alien, I said.

If they understood the hazards of over-implementing tariffs, they wouldn’t be so condescending, he said. But they’ll never understand.

Maybe we can help, said Nikita.

Yeah, I said. Teach us.

We’d love to understand, said Nikita. All the Goons would.

Shall we continue the pod, I asked.

Yeah, shall we continue, asked Nikita. 

Stevie started spitting and laughing. Chrysanthemum had slipped her tongue into his mouth. 

Yeah, said Stevie. This is so much better. You, stop it, silly.

He tried to stop her by hugging her tight. But Chrysanthemum would not stop. She was determined to lick his mouth. And so, he kept laughing. And we did too. We were all laughing quite loudly as Nikita pressed record. And so, here is the podcast as the world would hear it.

Nikita: Stevie, did you actually call the cops on us?

Stevie: Yes, I did. And I’m a professor of trade law.

Nikita: Fuck your job. Stevie, what the fuck.

Stevie: I warned you.

Me: I’m gonna answer the door.

Stevie: Ask them if they have a warrant. Don’t let them in without a warrant.

Me: Thanks, Stevie. What, do we owe you two-thousand dollars for your legal counsel, Mr. Law Professor? You study international trade. What do you know about cops?

Nikita: I’m gonna stop the recording. Stevie, you really fucked up the pod, bro.

The three of us: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Nikita: So, tell us about the hazards of overusing tariffs?

Stevie: Well, first of all, [laughter], global supply chains rely on the smooth flow of goods across borders [laughter], which [laughter] can further exacerbate a distortion inherent to tariff use—the protection [laughter], the protection [laughter] of less efficient domestic industries, which [laughter], the protection of less efficient domestic industries which can have significant downstream consequences on innovation and [laughter]—

But it was no use. Chrysanthemum was relentless, so full of love and a desire to lick. We could focus on nothing else but her, our wonderful earthborn companion.

Piano, Wire and Bone

Eleanor first noticed she was losing her hearing in Mrs. Armstrong’s living room while tuning a hundred-year-old Steinway that had survived two wars and three marriages. The A above middle C whispered instead of sang, its frequency fading like a radio signal lost to distance. But when she pressed her fingertips against the piano's wooden body, she felt the note's vibration thrumming through her bones—all the times it had been played in joy, in grief, in love and loss.

Fifty-two years of piano tuning had taught her that every instrument holds memories in its wood and wire. She’d learned to read their stories through touch: the water stains from tears dropped during midnight sonatas, the worn keys that spoke of devotion, the dust in corners that whispered of neglect. But now, as her own hearing dimmed, these stories grew sharper, more insistent, as if her body was trading one sense for another more ancient.

The audiologist, a young woman with efficient hands, spoke in carefully modulated tones about hearing aids, about career changes, about “quality of life adjustments.” Eleanor nodded in the right places while pressing her fingers against the paper-covered exam table, feeling how its crinkles held echoes of every nervous patient who had ever sat there, as they waited for news they didn’t want to hear.

That night, at home, she placed her mother’s tuning fork against her sternum and closed her eyes. The vibration traveled through her like a tributary joining a river, awakening something that had always lived in her marrow.

She kept working. Her hands remembered frequencies her ears were forgetting—muscle memory trained through five decades of perfect pitch now translated through bone and skin. When she could no longer trust her hearing, she learned to trust the way each note resonated in different parts of her body: A minor in her wrists, F sharp in her clavicle, low C in the hollow at the base of her throat.

The pianos began speaking in dialects of vibration. A baby grand in a funeral home showed her every hymn it had played for the departed, its strings still humming with goodbye songs. An upright in a jazz club pulsed with the ghosts of midnight improvisations, blues riffs stored in its soundboard like vintage wine. A concert piano at the university remembered its first performance in 1943, when all the young men were away at war and women with factory-callused hands played Chopin like a prayer for return.

Her clients noticed nothing. Her fingers still found the perfect tension in each string, still brought harmony to discord. If she took longer now, lingering over each note to feel its story, they attributed it to age, to thoroughness, to artistic dedication. They didn’t see how she pressed her sternum against the piano's edge when tuning the lowest notes, or how she sometimes touched the strings to her cheekbones to catch the highest frequencies.

In her own living room, her mother’s piano stood like a family archive in mahogany and ivory. She'd grown up measuring her life by its songs—lullabies and lessons, practice scales and Christmas carols, wedding marches and funeral dirges. As she ran her hands along its familiar curves, she felt every note her mother had ever played pulse through her palms like an alternate heartbeat, a lineage passed through touch rather than blood.

The day she could no longer hear the highest notes, she discovered she could feel them in her teeth—tiny vibrations that tasted like childhood soprano songs. The lowest bass notes she felt in her chest and belly, each one a remembered lullaby. The middle register spoke through her fingertips, telling stories in frequencies her ears had surrendered but her bones remembered.

“The body hears long before the ears develop,” an elderly doctor told her, one who still made house calls to his patients like she did to her pianos. “In the womb, we feel sound before we hear it. You’re not losing music, Eleanor. You're returning to your first way of listening.”

When her hearing finally faded to a whisper, the music grew louder in her hands. Every piano became a palimpsest of sound, each one holding centuries of songs in its wooden memory. She learned to read them like braille, like sheet music written in texture and resonance instead of notes on a page.

Other tuners used electronic devices now, digital readouts that measured frequencies in cold numbers. Eleanor used her skeleton, her tendons, the accumulated wisdom of a body that had spent a lifetime learning the language of strings and hammers. In her dreams, she became a piano herself, her ribs strings stretched taut, her spine a soundboard recording every vibration of life.

Mrs. Armstrong called her back, a year after that first whispered A. “No one else gets it right,” she said, not knowing about Eleanor's hearing. “The piano remembers you.”

She still makes house calls, her tuning fork held against bone instead of ear. The pianos recognize her now, sharing their histories more freely—birth songs and death songs, love songs and loss songs, all the music that lives in wood and wire and memory. And if she takes a little longer with each one, it’s not because she's lost something, but because she's found a way to hear music that most people, with their functioning ears and normal auditory pathways, will never know exists—the songs that live between sound and silence, between touch and memory, between what fades and what endures.

Barboleta

The first time my grandmother ate a monarch butterfly, she was ninety-two and tired of waiting for death to find her.

“The toxins build up in their wings,” she told me, her English still thick with Portuguese after seventy years in Rhode Island. “Beautiful things should be poisonous, and poisonous things can carry you between worlds.”

I watched her pluck the butterfly from the milkweed outside her nursing home window, its wings still opening and closing like a confession, like the prayers she'd whispered over my mother's casket years before.

“Vovó, stop,” I said, but she was already chewing, orange and black disappearing between dentures I had paid for with my first real paycheck. She didn't die that day, or the next. Instead, her urine turned the color of marigolds, and the nurses called me in a panic. I told them it was a cultural thing—technically not a lie. In certain parts of Brazil, my grandmother had once told me, shamans consumed butterflies to absorb their ability to migrate between worlds, to carry messages between the living and those who had already departed.

By butterfly seventeen, the nursing home had installed a fine mesh screen over her window.

I brought her monarchs in glass jars. She lined the empty jars on her windowsill, twelve of them catching light like stained glass, while her roommate Mrs. Goldstein complained about the smell. There was no smell—just Mrs. Goldstein’s fear of an old woman who had decided how she would exit the world.

“They taste like cinnamon and dirt,” my grandmother said when I asked. “Like messages not meant for human tongues.” She had started wearing only orange and black, had paid an aide to paint her nails in alternating colors. The Portuguese word for butterfly—borboleta—now her only greeting to the staff who checked her blood pressure and clucked about her liver function tests.

I found the journal in her nightstand, pages filled with cramped handwriting documenting each butterfly: date, time, wing pattern. And questions: Can I feel it changing me yet? Am I light enough to fly? How many more until I’ve had enough poison to go? Will they recognize me when I reach them?

The nurses called me again after she ate butterfly thirty-three, this one from the garden where they wheeled residents on pleasant days. “She’s speaking in tongues,” they told me.

But it wasn’t tongues. It was Portuguese, words I half-remembered from childhood. She was reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, replacing every third word with borboleta. I sat beside her bed, trembling as I recognized fragments of my childhood prayers transformed into something ancient and wild. Her eyes, when they met mine, held galaxies of migration routes, centuries of journeys home.

By the time I arrived, my grandmother’s skin had developed tiny orange patches, barely noticeable unless you knew to look for them.

“It's working,” she whispered, squeezing my hand with surprising strength. “The migration is beginning. Soon I will join them—your grandfather, your mother. They’re waiting.”

The toxicologist I consulted seemed more fascinated than concerned. “There’s much about the natural world we still don’t understand,” he said quietly, looking away from his inconclusive test results. When I pressed him about the cardenolides, he only shrugged and mentioned something about belief systems and their effects on the body’s chemistry.

Later that night, my grandmother escaped. The night nurse found her window open, the mesh screen cut with nail scissors. They searched the building, the grounds, the woods behind the nursing home. They found one orange and black painted fingernail on the sidewalk, and a trail of what looked like fine dust leading toward the road. Butterfly scales, the lepidopterist later confirmed.

Police reports list her as missing, presumed dead.

I know better.

Each October, I sit in her empty room at the nursing home, where they’ve let me keep her things—the twelve empty jars, her journal, her collection of the pressed butterfly wings that somehow remained behind.

I open the window wide and wait. Eventually, they come—dozens of monarchs circling the room, their wings carrying the memory of my grandmother’s fingers, her determination, her refusal to end in a sterile room smelling of bleach and urine.

One always lands on my hand. I never eat it, just whisper to its trembling wings, “Safe travels, Vovó.” The butterfly lingers for exactly thirty-three seconds—one for each monarch that carried my grandmother home. And when it finally leaves, I swear I can hear my grandmother’s voice in the beating of its wings, promising that one day, a butterfly will come for me too. And when it does, I'll know to follow.