The Edge

The edge of the world appealed to me, because sometimes the tide washed up amazing artifacts, and because everyone else feared the edge, so I could be alone. My brother used to say that if that water even touched your shoe, your whole foot would wither and fall off, but the spray hit me full in the face a thousand times, and nothing ever happened. You taste salt, that’s all.

Nobody liked me going down there, but they pretended not to know, because almost always I could find something amazing, or useful, or, at the very least, metal, and bring it back to the safe zone. But scavenging was just an excuse. I went to the edge to sit on the twisted, charred remains of the old world, and to look out at the things left behind, tilted battered monoliths, frozen in their death march miles off the coast. The jutted from the water like broken blades of grass. Some people say that humans used to live in there.

Yesterday I found a broken plastic box, with wires and other old things jumbled up inside. It could be valuable. But the important part about yesterday happened after that, when Marina yelled at me from the last road.

“Hey, aren’t you scared of ghosts?”

Probably, it would have surprised me, since you get used to total solitude, but when you spend all your time at the end of the world, nothing can surprise you anymore.

“No, are you?” I turned back to the water, watched it dance around the shattered infrastructure. Every wave tore the crumbling remains down a little further. You’d think she would run away scared, but I heard her feet leaving the safety of the last road, crunching through the fragmented debris, and finally climbing up to sit beside me.

“They said I’d find you here.” But she didn’t chastise me, or warn me, or ask any stupid questions. She just said, “Thanks for saving my sister’s life.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. And I figured, if you found that thing down here, the edge of the world can’t be as bad as people say.”

Years ago, I had figured that out. “It’s spiritually bad; it’s not physically bad. Bad things happened here, but now nothing happens here, except for the ripples of that first bad thing.” The winds were strong and constant, but I could actually feel her body heat beside me, and in one second, I went from craving my solitude to requiring her company.

“You’re really brave,” she said. “They say the ocean ate the world here.”

I nodded. “Once. Not like it’s going to happen every day. It’s safer at the edge than the center, with bandits and mutants and fighting.”

“How do you find things?” she asked.

“Just look,” I said. “You just look.”

So she jumped down and looked and after a while she squealed, “Metal! I found metal.” The thing she found was so big we had to put my thing on top of it and carry it back to the center together. Before she went to tell her family what she had, she kind of bumped her elbow against mine, and it felt different from an accidental bump, like in a crowded market. It felt like a meaningful bump.

And today I’m sitting here on the same chunk of wreckage and looking out past the edge, but for once, I’m not thinking about the past. I’m thinking about the future. It’s different from being lonely with ghosts. Is there an opposite word, I wonder, a word for a thing that’s not dead and gone, but is still a kind of seed that hasn’t happened yet?

Artist's Statement

I made the mistake of telling Mr. Gibbons that I wished I could draw really well, so I could write a web comic. He said there were plenty of web comics that were nothing more than stick figures, and then he showed us one that was just dots. Talking dots. And then he made that our assignment for the next four weeks: to write a month's worth of our own comics.

I didn’t even know English teachers could do that.

So now I’m going crazy trying to find someone to do the homework for me. It’s got to be someone who’s good enough that it looks like I’m trying, but not so good that Mr. Gibbons actually gets excited about it or tries to put it in the school paper or something. And it’s really got to be someone who isn’t going to rat me out, because English is supposed to be my best subject.

I’d do it myself, really, I would. It’s not that I can’t draw stick figures, or even something better than that. It’s just that Mr. Gibbons is not an idiot, and if I do the assignment, there’s a better than even chance he’ll figure out who drew that caricature of him kissing the principal’s ass on the rear window of his car last year.

The Spring of My Content

At seven forty-five, he called the room, just like he promised the night before, and at five after eight, he knocked at the door. I answered, wrapped in the stiff white hotel towel, still damp and slightly steaming from the shower.

“I’m not ready,” I apologized. “I tried.”

“That’s OK.” He rubbed my chin and bent over for a fast, open-mouthed kiss. “We’re important. They’ll wait.” He sat on the bed, not talking about the night before, because that was something we didn’t talk about. We would have to spend the entire day not talking about it. We had spent years not talking about it.

He watched the towel slip to the ground as I knelt to dig around in my bag. My naked body, softer and slacker than it had been all those years ago, still held his attention. “Oh!” I cursed, softly. “I was going to iron this blouse.”

And he leaned down, plucked the wrinkled fabric from my hand. Still kneeling on the ground, I watched him slide an ironing board from the closet, an iron from a clip set in the wall. He unfolded the ironing board, plugged in the iron, and watched me drying my legs as I watched him. By the time I’d extracted bra and panties and stockings from my bag, he was pressing my blouse, thick hands dwarfing the iron so you could almost imagine him smoothing the wrinkles with the strength of his fingers.

“Thanks,” I said. “If you couldn’t guess, I suck at ironing.” And he nodded his head, a silent acknowledgment that spoke of all the things we could not talk about.

There, I felt a heat that surpassed the greatest moments we had shared, dozens of nights in dozens of hotel rooms. Now, the pure and unadulterated care of his big hands, ironing my little blouse because he wanted me to look professional at his side, although I was anything but, overwhelmed any false detachment. Naked, I smiled, my eyes gulping up the scene as I struggled into the stockings.

If I could have held that moment, isolated it from all others and stretched it into infinity, I might have chosen to live there, in the small quiet gesture of his love.

Grow! Grow! Grow!

There is a kabalistic belief that beside the least blade of a grass, there floats a tiny angel, trumpeting the message, “Grow! Grow! Grow!” Some take this as an expression of the ubiquitous divine that compels all life, but others argue for a literal interpretation.

Lirzazel paused in the threshold, grasping the edges of dawn, and hovered with one foot in night and the other in day. Then he stepped through to sunlight and took up the trumpet. “Morning! Awaken! Live!” the trumpet said. The spirits of the night departed.

A single dewdrop clung to the green stalk. Would it run down to the ground and become one with the soil, or evaporate and become one with the air? Could that mere piece of grass incorporate its moisture through osmosis? Lirzazel blasted the trumpet again. “Drink! Live! Grow!” the trumpet said.

Through the rising sun, the trumpet sang a morning song, a photosynthesizing song, and a heliotropic song. The blade of grass perked up, stood straight, and struggled against gravity and entropy to continue the act of self-creation and reach for the light. The little angel sighed into the trumpet and the spirit-brass hummed back, “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

After noon, the angel wiped its metaphorical brow and watched the white light flood the field where it worked. The blade of grass groaned under the searing power, and the angel drew creative inspiration from the divine and played a drinking song, encouraging the grass to suck up moisture through its roots. The grass pulled at the soil and waved gratefully to Lirzazel. Lirzazel played a green song, ending with a chorus of, “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

Just before dusk, a rabbit nipped off the tip of the blade of grass. The creature hopped away, and the grass shuddered. “Heal!” Lirzazel’s horn sang. “Heal and grow! Grow and heal!” The grass bowed in gratitude.

Lirzazel could have played long into the darkness, but angels of the day did not do that. Just as another chorus of “Grow! Grow! Grow!” ended, a spirit of the night tapped Lirzazel’s metaphorical shoulder.

“Quittin’ time,” the night spirit said. “I’ll take it from here. See ya tomorrow.”

Lirzazel let the horn drop from the metaphorical mouth, nodded at the night spirit, and crossed over to the other world without lingering on the threshold of dusk. Home, the angel withdrew the equivalent of a beer from the ether and stretched out on a cloud, taking a deep, reflective sip. The angel couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

Bras Are Burning

I read an article denying that women’s rights activists ever burned their bras in the sixties. This upstart historian insisted that “bra burning” was simply a figure of speech, coined by a journalist after the fact, meant to mirror the symbolism of the young men who burned their draft cards to protest the Viet Nam war. He said it never happened, that women never burned their brassieres to protest the inequalities of gender in our society.

I tell you, that historian was dead wrong. I was there. In the sixties, we burned our bras all the time. Not in the first part of the decade; in the early sixties, all we ever burned was the steak, and that was our silent rebellion against the drudgery of men, housework, and stereotypes. But, by nineteen sixty-five, we had moved on to our Maidenforms.

When we exhausted the contents of our underwear drawers, we stormed Woolworth and absconded with any undergarments we could find there. Later, we took to hijacking delivery vans and burned bras by the carton, first in fifty-five gallon oil drums, and later, for greater efficiency, in our own furnaces. In the late sixties, it was not unusual for a crusader to heat her home entirely with purloined underwires. We were burning those contraptions in bulk.

Eventually, the practice diminished after a few entrepreneurs decided to cut out the middleman and set fire to the factories where our undergarments were produced. There was an arson trial, but the women were exonerated, arguing that bra burning was protected expression under the first amendment. At that point, though, the project had lost its shock value. Those few that remained trapped by the confines of rigid gender roles went back to burning steaks, although most of us continued to burn the Sears Roebuck catalog, just as a matter of habit. To this day, I will toss Victoria’s Secret advertising fliers directly into the fireplace. My granddaughter asked me why, and I shuddered to imagine a generation of girls growing up without understanding this pregnant moment in the history of women’s rights. I blame those misguided, misogynistic historians.

Nah, I’m kidding you, really. I’m only thirty-five; I didn’t even need a bra until nineteen eighty-seven, and, at thirty bucks a pop, I can’t afford to be setting those things ablaze. Anyway, my rack tips the scales at a thirty-six double D. There’s probably some kind of local ordinance prohibiting me from going out without support. I could cause a car accident.

Once an Artist

The stunning oil and acrylic landscape leered down at him from the studio wall: the last canvas. He had distributed the rest long ago, but he couldn’t let go of this one. The way the towering spires of Atlantis shimmered under the crashing waves of the Maine coast, their fantastic majesty almost hidden beneath the prosaic view from the window of his boyhood home, remained to taunt him in middle age.

Looking out this window, now, revealed a trio of languid contractors scraping on the new masonry wall. He wondered what it might feel like to work outside, then returned to his desk.

The email on his screen waited patiently. “We love the new design! But we’d like it a little smoother around the edges, with straighter lines. Can you tweak the colors, too? Something brighter, maybe, but not too bright. Also, let’s keep it abstract. The bump on the top left almost suggests a strawberry, and we don’t want that association.”

And he opened the client’s file, smoothed the edges, straightened the lines, tweaked the colors, and erased the bump that almost suggested a strawberry.

The next email explained that five thousand dollars had been deposited into his PayPal account, and that they appreciated his excellent work. He double checked. Yes, five thousand dollars had been deposited in his PayPal account. He could not recall his excellent work. The next email was another logo request.

Interruptions usually set his teeth to grinding, but he didn’t mind the doorbell’s two-toned chime just now. It took a few minutes to descend from the attic to the front door, where the contractor, cap in hand, asked him to come inspect his new wall, and then asked for four thousand dollars.

“Let me go get the checkbook.”

Then, nothing disturbed him, except for the fabled, half-seen impression of Atlantis peeking out from the big landscape on the wall. But he drew logos for a living. Expressive, eye-catching logos. Once you started, you couldn’t stop. You had to pay for equipment, upgrades to your home, things starving artists didn’t care about, like nice shoes and flattering haircuts. So he couldn’t be an artist anymore. He had to work.

When the sun set, he did not adjust the lights in the studio, but sat quietly in the dark, his eyes trying to pick out the secret elements of the landscape. Much later, he felt his way to the closet, and things crashed to the floor, bounced off his middle-age knees. With the gait of a somnambulist, he dragged things down the stairs, through the pain, and out the door.

Many hours later, the sun rose on the man who used to be an artist, paint-spattered and curled up in the dirt. The new masonry wall had disappeared. In its place stood a fresh, slightly-shiny representation of the heavens as seen by a medieval philosopher, depicting the planets in their vast spheres, the paths of fiery comets, and the careful hand of a divine creator hiding amongst the multitudes of numinous stars.

Last, Best

After the accident, I drifted apart from Sean, which used to be a terrible thing to say about your twin brother, but we were all drifting then, the entire human race.

Anomie, the news anchors called it, back when there were still news anchors, and news for them to report, and people who cared to hear it. We couldn’t get anyone to take care of Sean, give him therapy, prescribe his meds, because every, almost everyone had just ceased caring. Mass suicides stopped being news. Cities burned, farms lay fallow, ships ran aground. It happened so fast, in just a few years, and I thought, well, maybe we’ve just run our course.

Crazy ideas had crept into my brother’s head through the cracks left there after the crash. Next door, a young mother left her baby to bake in the sun, while she jumped off the roof, and Sean hammered all night long, constructing a rainbow bridge from the shed to the garage, and I wandered off, because I didn’t feel, yet, like killing myself, and I wasn’t going to stay there and watch my brain damaged brother create more insanity.

The woods were all right, and the mountains, places where animals still ran and plants still grew, but whatever disease had infected us spread. Something ate away at the wilderness, sucked up the moisture, and receded, leaving yellow dust in its wake.

For years, I had felt content enough to eat berries and leaves, snare small animals and pretend not to witness the decline of human civilization, but one day the desert took over. Looking up, realizing nothing remained, I felt what the others had felt. Finish it, I thought. You’re just prolonging the inevitable. Your species is done for.

“Don’t do it,” a voice said, although no one had spoken to me in many months. He seemed almost to float over the sand, this tall, elfin interloper, pale of hair and skin, like a man cut from the same fabric as the desert. “We aren’t many left, but it’s not over. It isn’t.”

So I shrugged and followed, since nothing remained here.

“We need men like you,” he said as we walked. “Survivors. We’re rebuilding, regrouping. You’ll see.”

And he opened my eyes to the little signs my death-hungry mind had missed when I decided to end it: trees that still lived, grass pushing through rubble, small birds. And soon we came to some ruins, what had once been a city, and I saw women, the first women I had seen in so long I could not remember, sweeping away rocks and hanging out wet laundry, hammering posts and climbing poles.

“We had to go up, a little,” my rescuer said. “Elevate ourselves this time.”

Over our heads, a scaffolding trailed like a vine, wooden planks and walkways twenty feet above the ground. “Come on up,” a man, sunburned with a devil-may-care grin, called to me from the sky, and finally my heart woke, shook off the anomie, and longed to answer.

“Never mind him,” said my guide. “You need to meet the big man. The architect. The inspiration for everything.”

And we walked on, past more and more scaffolds, until we stopped, and there, dangling from a wooden ledge, hung my brother.

“Sean?”

“I figured it all out,” he said, thumping his chest.

“You did this?”

“Someone had to. We needed a better way. Had to create something new. A fresh start for all of us. You’ll stick around this time, won’t you?”

My eyes swept over the funny playground rising up from the ruins of the past, and my brother’s eyes, sparkling with possibility. That small, devastating moment, the cracking of my brother’s head, had blossomed into our last, best hope.

“Where do I get a hammer?”

Wheels

The boys scooted their new racecars over the stone pavilion, and, on the far side of the pavilion, two little girls watched with round, solemn eyes. “Let’s go,” the girls’ mom said, over and over, but they kept their attention glued to the boys, their fast little toys, the smooth movement of the wheels.

The boys’ father noticed, smiled, remembered. The girls’ mother tapped her foot, repeated herself, and shrugged. The man tried to meet her eye, but she just dug through her purse. He shrugged himself. She was young, pretty, and probably married. He was a middle-aged widower, with raw, limp limbs and a belly that would have been attractive on top of a muffin, but did not have the same effect beneath his paint-spattered T-shirt.

Again, the woman urged the little girls, but their eyes only pointed to the smooth rolling cars. True north, the man though. He didn’t understand these performance moms, always in a hurry to load the kids into the minivan and haul them to the next activity. His boys could scoot their racecars around here all day if they wanted.

In her lifetime, he had laughed at his wife’s minivan, but after her death, he had sold his own sporty two-door Mitsubishi and held on to the Grand Caravan. And before that—long before that—he had first caught her eye leaning against his old Camaro. Girls liked that car. They couldn’t help but look at a man in such a smooth ride.

It dawned on him that boys liked cool cars, and girls liked boys with cool cars. And women would look at him again if he drove something a little more adventurous. A motorcycle, for instance. The helmet would cover his hairline, and the leather jacket would camouflage his gut. His boys made motor noises with their mouths and laughed as they crashed into each other, not noticing the girls being dragged off by the young mother.

They wouldn’t nap anymore, his boys. Their mother would have known how to lull them to sleep, but the secret eluded him. When they got cranky, he loaded them into the minivan, drove them across town, and bought them both two-wheelers.

The Disney Police

The Disney Police

If the Waldorf people hadn’t gotten to us first, we’d never have figured it out, but Caytlynn started preschool in an atmosphere devoid of those influences. You know—influences that have kids clamoring for a T-shirt, or cereal box, or cheap plastic toy because some corporate entity spent millions ensuring that your child recognizes, adores, and identifies with their licensed character.

Caytlynn didn’t know anyone with a TV, couldn’t name the popular branded figures, and never begged for colorful garbage. At six, she was into insects, and asked for magnifying glasses, butterfly nets, and bug books. We were the family with the home haircuts, dressed in natural fibers, picnicking in the park while our child observed ants.

Judy, the widow next door, wore polyester pantsuits and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She offered unsolicited advice regarding ladylike behavior along with small presents—Spongebob taffies and Barbie flip-flops.

“Aren’t you a little angel?” Judy asked.

Caytlynn puffed out her chest. “I’m an entomologist.”

In a pinch, we left Caytlynn in Judy’s care for fifteen minutes here, an hour there. “What did you do?” we’d ask later.

“Watch TV.” Caytlynn would shrug and go back to her mealworms and beetles. “Can you cut an apple, Dad? They’re hungry.” Later, she added, “I think she’s lonely.”

“The mealworm?”

“Judy. Maybe I should go there. I mean, not just when you can’t find a babysitter.”

Jennie smiled, pleased to have raised such a compassionate child, and arranged for her to visit on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Caytlynn watched TV to be polite and thanked Judy for increasingly elaborate presents: Mickey Mouse ears, Hannah Montana CDs, princess costumes. Then she came home, asked Jennie to give the silly things to Goodwill, and informed her that we must plant milkweed to attract monarch butterflies.

The only weird thing about Judy was the night Jennie reminded me, at one a.m., to take the trash out, and I clearly heard a man’s voice, stern and low, from Judy’s kitchen. “If you can’t seal the deal, we’ll send someone who can.”

“They’re tough,” Judy said, her voice strained. “Intellectual.”

“Take this,” the man said, and handed her a wrapped package. Rectangular. About the size of two DVD boxes. “And finish it, or you’re through.”

That Wednesday, Caytlynn came home from Judy’s with two DVDs: A Bug’s Life and Antz.

On Sunday, Judy accosted me over the forsythia hedge. “I’m worried about your daughter's imagination.”

“Because she thought Antz was unrealistic?”

Judy shook her head and toddled up her driveway.

Two weeks later, a moving van pulled up to the house. “Moving in with my daughter,” she said.

“She never said she had a daughter,” Caytlynn observed. “I hope the new people have kids. Or a spitting cockroach.”

But the middle-aged woman in the polyester pants suit who waved over the forsythia hedge a few weeks later brought neither children nor Blattaria, only an open invitation to sample her gluten-free, vegan macaroons. Mary’s association with Caytlynn seemed natural, for she was unafraid to help our daughter collect cicada carapaces and arrange them according to size. Now and again she presented Caytlynn with a realistic plastic toy insect.

“The tops are all right,” Caytlynn said, “but the bottoms are wrong.” Still, she lined them up on the windowsill, cautioning visitors not to examine the anatomically incorrect undersides.

Still, we wouldn’t have caught on, until the day Caytlynn called out to me from Mary’s bedroom window, “Dad! Dad! Mary fell down! And she’s talking funny! I called 911.”

“She’s burning up,” I said when I got over there, so I opened her hall closet, looking for a washcloth to cool her fevered brow, but found no linen.

Her closet contained row upon row of plastic toys. One shelf held dozens of the semi-accurate insects, along with the characters from A Bug’s Life, but there were lines of Tinkerbells, scores of princesses, stacks of plush cartoons characters.

On the bottom shelf, my daughter’s name jumped out from a green file folder. My heart stopped.

The file contained pictures of my daughter running through meadows with butterfly nets, squinting through her microscope, climbing trees; charts of her likes and dislikes; her schedule, my schedule, and Jennie’s schedule; what we ate for dinner, movies we’d attended, our browser history, and on and on. Records going back years, from Caytlynn’s first day at Waldorf.

Beneath that, a dog-eared handbook—Creating Collectors: Enforcing Commercialization. It began, “Enforced commercialization builds a sturdy economy through strong habits of consumerism fostered prior to the age of 8. The Corporation’s efforts toward conspicuous consumption encourage the consumer to create interest channels based on collectability.”

And bookmarked and underlined, page 144: “In cases where the subject’s parents have successfully resisted commercialism (c.f. “intellectuals”) operatives may befriend subjects via academic interests to establish trust before embarking on standard enforcement techniques. See appendix of educational toys.

In the madness that ensued with the arrival of paramedics, those incriminating publications disappeared. Mary disappeared, too, once the ambulance doors closed. A month later, a kindly, middle-aged woman in a polyester pants suit moved next door, but Caytlynn was forbidden to talk to her.

The Postmodern Prometheus

For all that six long years had unfurled since the passing of my darling Evangeline, the ocean’s damp seemed to cling to her porcelain skin and dark, curling tresses. I dismissed the illusion as a trick of the cryogenic chamber’s glass cover and glanced at the radar animation on the computer monitor. Outside the lab, the sky squeezed out a thin crackle of lightning.

For six long years, I had perfected my method, on frogs and rats, cats and dogs, chimpanzees, and finally, an executed convict. His remains, having outlived their usefulness after nine successful attempts, chilled in the chamber beside Evangeline’s. His temperature reading held at five degrees below zero. The display on my beloved’s clicked up from eight to nine.

The storm drew closer. There were injections to be given, electrodes to attach, connections to be adjusted, all with the greatest of care.

An hour later, the process well underway, the pounding on the lab door began. “Vick, please open this door.” After so many years of being ignored by my supervisor, I had no trouble ignoring him at the moment of my greatest triumph. “Tell me you’re not doing what your FaceBook page says you’re doing.”

Electricity flowed through the conduits. My eyes remained glued to the stark, smooth flesh of Evangeline’s face, marred only by the oxygen tubes snaking from her perfect mouth and nose.

“It’s not science,” the voice beyond the lab door hollered. “It’s an affront to science. You’ve got to let this go, Vick. It’s disgusting.”

But love would not be swayed, and love was undying. Thunder argued overhead, and the mechanical bellows massaged her adorable heart beneath her perfect breast. A final stab of lightning lit the windows and it was done.

The veins pumping beneath the white cheek filled it with a pretty blush, her eyelids twitched, and her hands, with frantic convulsion, ripped the oxygen tubes from her face, ripped the mechanical bellows from its mount. My Evangeline lived.

Her wide eyes gaped behind the glass panel. Anticipating the shock and fearing her fear, I ripped the cover open.

A low, gagging noise emanated from her throat. She half sat up, then scuttled back. “Oh, god,” she moaned, her voice faint and hissing. “Oh, god. I’m in hell.”

“No! Evangeline! You live! I have stolen you back from the arms of death. For you, I have conquered mortality. We shall never be parted again.

The pounding on the lab door increased in volume. Many men and women demanded entry, like the proverbial angry mob bearing pitchforks. They called themselves scientists, but, no better than ignorant peasants, they would not understand.

Unsteady, like a child, she clambered from the chamber, fell, and glared up at me from all fours on the lab floor, hissing, “Pervert! Can’t you take a hint? I committed suicide to get away from you! What do I have to do? Immolate myself?”

“We were meant to be together.”

She tried to dash for the lab door, which shook with the rage of the crowd outside, but she could not control her newborn muscles and collapsed like an invertebrate. She must rest, convalesce on beef tea and my undying love. In her weakened condition, she needed me more than ever. “Help!” she screamed and crawled past me, this time catching her hand on the locked door and turning the deadbolt. It swung open and she fell into the arms of another.

She disappeared from view as the fools descended upon my equipment.

The Weight

165 lbs.: Daniel can’t stop watching Connie’s ass, like two helium balloons stuffed into her size 16 Levi’s, as they march down the football field during band practice. He clenches his drumsticks so he will not squeeze her instead. On the way off the field, some jerk in the bleachers spits on her.

180 lbs.: It’s OK to talk to Connie in chess club, because only geeks go to chess club. It’s OK to invite Connie to his place, because nobody can see them eating together, since his kitchen’s in the back of his house.

195 lbs.: Daniel almost wrecks his dad’s car while fantasizing about prom. In his imagination, Connie wears a backless gown, revealing ample ass cleavage. He screws her in the limo once on the way to the dance, and once on the way back. In reality, he takes Tina Gillespie, who weighs exactly half as much as Connie. Connie stays home.

225 lbs.: The summer after his sophomore year of college, Daniel spots an inviting arch of flesh at the grocery store. He stays cool, jokes, bumps his hip into hers, and takes her to his parents’ house for dinner. When his parents go to bed, he seduces Connie in the basement. The second time they have sex, he begs her to get on top. “Won’t I hurt you?” she asks. He laughs.

250 lbs.: “What are we doing here?” she asks him. “Are we together or not?” All he can do is kiss her, mount her again, feeling like a mountain climber achieving the summit.

260 lbs.: “Why don’t you tell your parents we’re together, at least?” she asks him. He shakes his head. Two weeks later, she moves to California. He dreams of mountains for weeks.

310 lbs.: He ends up in San Francisco five times in the next two years, and she stays in his hotel room each time. She takes up most of the bed, and he fits himself around her curves as they sleep. Then he gets promoted and stops traveling on business.

270 lbs.: After a year with no contact, he surprises her. “You lost weight,” he says, unable to hide his disappointment. She kisses him in his rental car, and he relishes the crushing sensation. “Didn’t I tell you I’m married now?” she says. She comes back to the hotel anyway, but he can’t get his fill in a just couple hours.

300 lbs.: He hates the affair, but he can’t stop. She fills his imagination the way she filled the passenger seat of the rental car. He dreams about her, writes her steamy emails, which she deletes after reading, and waits.

325 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

335 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

345 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

350 lbs.: “We need to dial this down,” she tells him. “I love my husband. Sneaking around makes me sick.” He tells her how much he’s always adored her, how much he wants her at his side, always. “You had your chance,” she says. The earth moves as he watches her ass walk away.

Lady Long Legs

Saturdays were made for sitting on the front porch with your cousin, Maria thought, braiding each other’s hair, comparing nicks on each other’s legs, giggling over the boys who wouldn’t look at them now, because they were only eleven, but who would fall over themselves in a few years, when they were princesses at their double quinceanera.

“And then our double wedding,” said Stephany, “when we’re seventeen. Or sixteen, like abuela. And then have our babies when we’re seventeen. And they can be cousins together, like us, and ride bikes to Eegee’s, and sleep over.”

Maria rubbed at the red place, where she had dragged Stephany’s sister’s old Daisy razor over her legs, and smiled with satisfaction at the thin dotted line of blood that appeared there. “Mrs. Linsey won’t like that.”

Stephany evaluated the school counselor’s opinion of high school drop outs by spitting almost all the way across the yard. “Papi says it’s dumb to waste my time in school.”

Following the arc of saliva, Maria leaned forward. “Oh, look,” she said, “It’s Lady Long Legs.”

The cousins straightened their spines without thinking, then slouched into the porch rails, pretending to look anywhere but across the street, where the stately African woman walked with her head held high. She wore a blue print wrap skirt, a green print wrap shawl, and a red print head wrap covering every strand of hair. Her skin was just as black as coffee, and flawless, like a statue of the Virgin. Behind her walked four boys and one girl in descending sizes, but they dressed regular, with Spongebob and Batman T-shirts, and they didn’t have that beautiful walk, the proud long-leg strut that set Lady Long Legs apart from other women.

“You girls staring at that Sudan lady again?” Stephany’s mami was the very opposite of Lady Long Legs, short and rotund, with her straight black braid hanging all the way down her back. You couldn’t see her on the other side of the security door, but she could see out just fine. “Don’t you think she’s got enough problems?”

Maria stroked the air with one figure, tracing the noble gait as the woman passed. “What problems?” she asked.

“Refugee problems. Losing her home problems. Crazy people cutting each other up with machetes in her country problems.”

Stephany rolled her eyes. “How do you know Lady Long Legs’ problems?”

“’Cause I hear the news, mija. On TV.”

Sighing, Stephany whispered into Maria’s ear. “She’s got no problems, Lady Long Legs.”

“She’s too pretty,” Maria agreed. “And she has five kids.”

“You girls think you know everything. You got it all figured out. You come on in and figure out wrapping tamales, how about?”

“Mami, we’re busy.”

Stephany’s mami banged the metal security door, so that it rang like a bell, and the girls jumped, giggled. By the time they regained their composure, Lady Long Legs had turned the corner, out of sight. Maria looked to her cousin, waited for Stephany to stand up. They both rose with queenly grace, making their spines straight, their legs long. The security door swung open, and they entered the house like royalty.

Wonderbuild

They were, collectively, four of the smartest guys you could expect to meet in any undergraduate program anywhere: Ed, the stereotypically nerdy white guy, studying physics; Lee, the stereotypically nerdy Chinese guy, studying political science; Ricky, the flamboyantly gay Mexican guy, studying performance art; and my little brother, Sol, the stereotypically nerdy Jewish guy, studying math. All seniors at a prestigious state university, all living in the same bachelor pad rental house off campus.

They supported each other like brothers, and were fairly outgoing and extroverted for a bunch of geeks. I visited whenever I could, and we would drink beer, push back the furniture, and dance in the living room, or eat foreign food and attend concerts, or sit around getting high and discussing the nature of the universe. Nice, gentle guys. Non-confrontational.

Lee wasn’t Lee’s real name, but most Americans couldn’t pronounce his given name. Still, he wouldn’t be Americanized, if he could help it, and spoke of his Chinese girlfriend back home. He couldn’t get back to her just yet, though. He needed his Master’s degree. He was the last of the group to hear back from his first-choice school, and announced their decision with a wide sweep of his arms when he saw me.

“So, where are you going?” I asked him.

“Wonderbuild.” He smiled.

“Wonderbuild?” I wondered. With his intellect, you’d think he’d be headed for a school I had heard of. Still, I liked the image it conjured in my mind. Wonder build. To build with wonder.

“Wonderbuild,” he confirmed.

“Where’s that?”

“Tennessee. You know this school?”

“Um…no.”

“It is a famous school. Wonderbuild.”

I glanced back at my brother, and saw him squinting sidelong at the other roommates. They shook their heads, shuffled their feet, looked out the window. “He means Vanderbilt,” my brother said, his voice quiet and embarrassed. The others hung their heads, avoided Lee’s wide eyes. He had been saying it for weeks. They hadn’t corrected him.

“I cannot say that letter,” Lee confessed. His jaw quivered.

“Vanderbilt. Wonderbuild. Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt,” I said to myself. “Here, put your teeth down on your bottom lip when you say it. Vvvanderbilt.”

“Vvvanderbilt,” he repeated. “Vanderbilt.” He nodded.

The other boys looked up at me, faces shining with approval.

“There,” I said. “Now you can go to Vanderbilt.”

Confessions of a Stock Footage Queen

Conventional prettiness meant a symmetry of features, I learned in high school. I read it in my psychology text. The more average the dimensions of ones face, the more attractive. And my face was conventional indeed. They called me pretty, very pretty.

And being pretty, and slender, and on the tall side, I found modeling work. It paid for my amusements in college: beer, road trips, cashmere sweaters. Even when I graduated, I never had a career. Just jobs that paid the rent—I was professionally pretty as a receptionist, a pharmaceutical rep, a restaurant hostess—with modeling to cover the extras. I never had a magazine cover. I scarcely had a magazine layout. I wasn’t quite tall enough, or striking enough, for high fashion. They didn’t offer me runway work.

But they liked my normal, average, pretty face, and they called me. Photographers dressed me up in goggles and a white coat and shot me marveling over Erlenmeyer flasks full of green food coloring or dry ice. They put me in pencil skirts and shot me smiling in front of chalkboards, surrounded by children. They wrapped me in military fatigues and shot me stalking through the forest, carrying guns.

Soon enough, my image came back to me: on the Internet, in advertising circulars, wherever fine clip art was required. My face went everywhere, places I would never go, showing me doing things I’d never really done.

When I moved through the world, I didn’t have the same versatility as my photograph. People looked and saw a conventionally pretty girl and wondered, “Have I seen her before?” and forgot all about me when I passed, because I was unremarkable in my prettiness, just another pretty girl. Merely pretty and no more. No one ever noticed me.

Sometimes I see girls with horrific scars, burns, or birthmarks, girls with unbelievable acne or giant, crooked noses. Sometimes I hear men mocking them when they pass, or children expressing astonishment. Sometimes I envy them.