The Preface to...

It's the epilogue to
nights watching the shadows of ceiling fans
with pounding temples and eyes that won't close.
To writing bucket lists
with an eternity of time to check off the empty boxes
and quieting the ticking of crocodiles
because they were never loud enough to be frightening.
To waking up in a cold sweat
when you remember that tomorrow's exam will decide your fate
To believing in things like algebra
and iambic pentameter
and theoretical physics
and fate.
Because it seems so much is beyond your control
your arms don't reach that far
and there must be something else conducting
the rhythmless crescendo of unanswerable questions
that play on repeat when you lose count of jumping sheep.
To being the victim of yourself
to writing poems about epilogues
to running out of ink in the pen you've been using since middle school
to shouting at the crocodiles to tick louder,
you're waiting,
but hiding under polka dotted sheets your mother washed
when finally, they do.

And it's the epilogue to nothing,
just like it's the preface to everything
because the clocks aren't broken even when they're sleeping
and you will always count sheep while you stare at the shadows of ceiling fans
and the headlights of passing cars.
There will always be the bucket list of things you can't do yet
but will do someday, or so you tell yourself
because it's not your fault the boxes stay empty
or are being filled with the hand-me-downs of faces that come and go
come and go like fifteen year old dreams you can't remember by your next birthday.

But something's gotta give, so surely there'll be an epilogue.
And ending and a beginning
to how you hurt and how it's everyone's fault but yours.
And you will write it on the same day you write the preface.

A Game of Limbo

It happened when I was surfing. The waves were perfect, on whatever day it was. Back home, they throw around the exact time and date, they engrave it in stone, it stays there for the rest of forever, the day Danny Barco died. It's like some sort of gloomy holiday, and they don't write it on their calendars, not because they won't remember, but because they will, and a reminder would feel like a slap in the face. So I don't know for myself, ironically, exactly what day it was. It was summer, I was surfing. I know that much. And the waves, man, they were perfect. “NEXT!” The line shuffles forward. I'm towards the end, I just got here. Like the line for the teacups at Disney World, I thought. Shoulda got here sooner. Except something told me maybe the concept wasn't interchangeable here, you know, the lines at the Disney World teacups and the lines at the Pearly Gates. Yeah... I'll call them the pearly gates, I don't know what else to call them. There's really no way to describe them, or to describe any of this. So I'm just going to call them the Pearly Gates, and surely you've got your own complex idea of what they're supposed to look like, so you can set the stage for yourself. So the guy in front of me, he's wearing a firefighter's uniform, carrying his helmet in the crook of his arm, with ash and soot along the contours of his face. He turns to me groggily in his heavy, scorched boots, a look on his face that resembled the physical appearance of a perpetual shoulder-shrugging sigh, and said “so whaddya in for?” like we were cell mates in a jail sentence that just went on and on forever and ever, so we better go easy on the smalltalk before we run out of topics all together. “Ah, surfing accident.” “Yeah? Where at?” “Oh, just off of Honolulu. Vacation with some guys.” “No kidding. Christ, I've always wanted to go to Hawaii.” I looked around us, bemused. “Ya think it's okay to say that in here?” “Say what?” “You know...” my voice dropped. “Christ.” The firefighter laughed, slapping my back until a smile creeped up on my lips. He threw his head back, and I was positive it was the first time he'd so much as cracked a green since he'd gotten here, however long ago or not that was. “Boy, we're dead! We can say whatever the hell we want!” “But, you know, shouldn't we wait until after we cross through them gates up there...so we don't end up wherever the hell we might end up...” He shook some ash off his pant leg, his smile wrinkling the burns on his face. “If that's the case, then I'm practically certain there's no one in Kingdom Come at all, and everyone's wishin' for ice water in the basement.” He went to work at scraping the smoldering remains of his deathbed off his boots, as if he'd only just noticed the tiny flames still licking at his pant legs. I looked down at myself. I was still wearing my blue striped trunks, and that was it. My feet were scraped a little, but it looked like whatever bleeding that had ensued had stopped by now, and there were a couple scars and cuts along the upper half of my body, one on my neck that stretched down to my chest, another jagged on my ribcage. I touched my face, and my hand didn't come back bloody. I took that as a good sign, though, in retrospect, I'm not sure why I thought it would matter in any way whatsoever, because surely we were all past the point of caring. “So, uh, I take it you died in the line of duty?” The Firefighter turned around, sweeping his hands together as soot fell from his skin. “Yeah, yeah.” He said. “Admirable, eh?” “More admirable than fallin' off your surfboard and drowning.” His eyes squinted and he bit his inner lip, looking at me. “You know, I used to think so, too. That it was important to die for a cause.” He hook his head almost imperceptibly, and scraped a layer of ash off his arm, before stopping suddenly, as if caught off guard by what his body was doing. He straightened himself with a sort of finality, before speaking again. “But you know, I don't think it really matters. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I guess we'll see on judgment day.” “Guess there's not much time to wait, then.” I said, nodding at the Gates up ahead, and he laughed, slapping my shoulder that somehow didn't ache despite the scratches and bruises. “So,” he said, low, his lips barely moving. “What about the rest of them?” “What are they in for?” “Yeah, what are they in for?” I thought about it, and about how it almost seemed like everyone in line had their cause of death written on their foreheads in thick magic marker, and your imagination could fabricate all the little details, but it really didn't need to, because life is simple that way. You die when you're surfing, and you're walking around up here in Limbo or whatever and you're wearing torn swim trunks and there are some cuts and scars along your bare torso and your hair is grimy with saltwater. You can look at the dead surfer boy and in an instant you know, you say “he died when he was surfing, or jet skiing, or swimming” or whatever, the concept is still pretty much the same. And you look at The Firefighter and you can pass your eyes over him in under a second and you know. You don't know the details, but in his case, you don't want to. So you move on down the line. After a while, you stop thinking of everyone in the line as the last thing they did or didn't survive, because all the stories run together, and you begin to understand that it doesn't matter one bit if the man with the cane and cardigan died of cancer or a heart attack, or if you died surfing or jet skiing. So that part of the time wasting passes into something else, and now you and the Firefighter and a Soldier in camouflage and a Little Girl in her pink pajamas and an Old Woman with a quilt around her shoulders are sitting and there's a lull in the conversation when Saint Peter, I think it's Saint Peter, calls out “Number 987850! You're next!” and the Little Girl in the pink pajamas looks down at the slip in her hand with the number on it, and her hand is sweating. “Hey, sweetheart, it was really good talking with you.” The soldier says, and he's speaking real soft and his eyes are almost wet. The Little Girl looks up at him and says “Do you think I'll make it in?” and the Old Woman takes her hand and kisses it until the Little Girl giggles and then says “Honey, you'll make the most darling little angel! Save me a sit, will you?” The Little Girl's eyes begin to brighten again and Peter's impatient up there, his voice on edge when he calls out, again, “Number 987850, please make haste to the Pearly Gates! 987850!” The Soldier, he gets up and he walks with her, because the Little Girl, she's shaking like a leaf. The Old Woman and the Firefighter and me, The Surfer, listen in while Peter and her begin talking. “What's your name, Little One?” he says. “Lucy.” She says. “Lucy Annabell Forrests.” “Hmm...” Saint Peter is stroking his chin and tapping his foot. “And are you the granddaughter of a Mrs. Annabell Forrests, Lucy?” Lucy's eyes light up and I swear she grows three inches taller. The Soldier stands off to the side and watches her, smiling at her when she looks at him. “Yes! That's my Mimi! Is she in there? Can I say hi?” “Soon enough, Little One. But first I just want you to answer a few very simple questions, okay?” “Okay.” “I want you to tell me, Little One, why you deserve to come in.” Lucy looked at the Soldier, who was looking at Saint Peter, and his eyes were drooped. He smiled at her, and with this encouragement, she turned back to the Gatekeeper. “Um...I...” The Soldier stepped forward. “She deserves to come in because she is a little girl who would like to see her grandmother. That's why she deserves to come in.” Saint Peter raises his eyebrows at the Soldier, crossing his arms and twirling the Keys to the gates in his fingers. “But why does Lucy think she should come in?” She looked up at her new friend the Soldier again. “I think I should come in because every night me and momma prayed for Jesus to forgive our sins and I tried real hard not to sin real bad even though Pastor Mike says everyone does it and Jesus forgives all of us. So I think I should come in because I think Pastor Mike was right, you see.” Saint Peter smiled, and the Soldier looked at the Little Girl, and his eyes flickered with all of the things he was still capable of feeling in this purgatory while he watched the little dead girl barter her way into heaven. “That was very good, Lucy. Can I ask you just one more question?” Lucy nodded, her head careening over the top of the gate, I think in some sort of vague hope that her Mimi was waiting just on the other side, and she could see her if she looked hard enough. “Do you think coming here was a bad thing or a good thing?” The Soldier stiffened, his mouth wavering open and close, as he knelt down to Lucy's side. “Don't make her answer that.” he said. Peter twirled the keys. “Please.” He said. “Let her speak.” Lucy looked up at the Soldier and she said, very small, “...I don't know.” “You don't know?” “...I think it was a bad thing.” “Speak a bit louder, my dear, I can't quite hear you.” The Soldier pleaded with the Gatekeeper. “Please, don't make her answer this.” “Lucy can speak for herself, young man.” Peter said. “Perhaps she would like some more time to think about it? She's got...” he paused. “Well, she's got all the time in the world.” The line began moving forward again, and Peter prepared to call out the next number as Lucy and the soldier were shuffled again, towards the end of the line. “Wait!” Lucy called out, squirming out of the Soldier's grip. “I think it was a good thing.” Peter paused before reading out the next number, kneeling to the Little Girl's eyelevel. “And why is that, my dear?” “...because...because now I get to see my Mimi.” Peter smiled and stood back up. He twirled the keys in his fingers before unlocking the Gates, and we all stood back to see what was beyond them, but we saw nothing but white. Swirls of it, just swimming in a vast emptiness, and we deflated in curiosity. But Lucy, she jumped up and down and clapped her hands, and her smile ambushed her entire being. The Soldier let go of her and stood, watching her. She was gazing into the expanse, and we could tell that she was seeing much more than the white, she was seeing her heaven, her own Kingdom Come, her own universe waiting for her to step inside. “Goodbye, Lucy.” The Soldier said very quietly as she stepped away from him, and she turned around to face all of us and said “My Mimi is over there!” before skipping away from us forever. The Gates closed again, and the Soldier looked at Saint Peter. “That wasn't right, you know.” The keys stilled in Peter's fingers. “Young man, she was happy. Did you not see her smile?” “Yeah, I saw it. But it was still wrong.” Peter pulled the next number and unfolded it to begin reading. The Soldier said “There was nothing good in her coming here. She is a Little Girl, and...and...” Peter stopped him. “And she got to see her grandmother again.” “But she would have seen her later! Later, when it was time...she, she still had people on Earth to meet! Friends, teachers, boys, I don't know, a husband! Her kids...” He fellto his knees, his head in his hands. “It wasn't fair! It wasn't her time! There was nothing good from this!” Peter said “Who are you to determine when exactly her time is?” he read out the next number, and an old man, the one with the cane and the cardigan, stepped forward. The Soldier said “There's no good in it, damnit!” he was crying, his fists pounding at the white ground. “THERE'S NO GOOD IN IT!” The Firefighter nudged me. “I've been here a while, man. The trick is not to be that guy.” He nodded at the Soldier. “The Trick, I've noticed, is to be the Little Girl.” I watched the Soldier shake while the line moved on without him. “But maybe he was right...” I muttered. “I mean, what good could possibly have come from that kids death?” I thought about Mitchell Collins, a boy I'd known in elementary school. When he was hit by a car and killed when we were in the second grade, it was my first experience with death. I was confused, and scared, and I couldn't sleep for over a week, even though me and Mitchell were never really friends, more like acquaintances who occasionally shared pb&j's at recess. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought Mitchell was there staring at me, mangled from where he'd hit the windshield. When I went to school and saw his empty desk, it was like he'd been sucked right out of the universe, like he'd never existed at all. No one talked about him, the name Mitchell Collins was like some sort of weird tabboo, and the school guidance counsellors said it was okay to be sad, and that we should all talk to our parents about how we felt. So I tried that. I slept in my parents bed for most of my second grade year, while I tried to understand that Mitchell Collins, the kid that used to make fart noises with his armpit in Music class, simply no longer existed. He was the empty desk, and he was no more. When I thought he was staring at me when I tried to sleep, I'd open my eyes, and there'd be nothing but air in front of me. And I didn't understand why he had to go away. One night, when I'd woken up with a nightmare, my dad went to heat me up a glass of milk and honey, and my mom said “Everything happens for a reason, Danny. And something good comes out of everything bad, even though sometimes it's hard to see the good, okay?” I said “Okay” and drank my milk and tried to go back to sleep, but I kept thinking about what the good thing was that had come out of Mitchell Collins's empty desk. And maybe I just lacked some sort of perspective, and my mom and Saint Peter knew something I didn't, but to this day, I still can't figure out what the good thing was. Because now everyone was silent in music class and I had uneaten pb&j's in my lunch pail. Anyways. The line shuffled forward and we got closer and closer, and still the Soldier sat off to the side, and something told me he'd be there for a while, in this limbo, if that's what it was, waiting to muster up whatever perverse sort of strength that a little girl in pink pajamas had, but a grown man in combat boots did not. When it was the Firefighter's turn, we said farewell, and he patted my shoulder, and said “Maybe I'll see ya around.” “Yeah.” I said. “Take care of yourself.” He laughed at this, patting my arm. “Yeah, man, I'll take care of myself.” So the game of Limbo continued, and Peter said “Hello, young man. What is your name?” The Firefighter, I guess he was smart, and he knew the trick. He knew how to be the Little Girl instead of the Soldier, and he told Peter “The good in me dying in that fire was that my kids didn't have to spend their golden years taking care of their slowly dying Pop. And God knows that was coming, what with all the ciggies...” he let out a laugh. “Anyways, they can live their lives without their Old Man's burden. And that's good enough for me.” When he passed through, I went over and sat next to the Soldier. We watched in silence as the line stayed the same length forever as more people kept showing up and more people kept passing through the gates, or down the elevator. Some of them were the Soldier and couldn't see any good in what had happened to them, but they tried, anyway, because compromises were a small price to pay in exchange for skipping out on eternal damnation. And people kept dying, and the line kept moving on, always the same length, always moving on, interminably and inevitably. Eventually, my number was called, and I stood to go, Peter tapping his foot in impatience while I made my way to the front of the line. “Hey.” The Soldier called out, and I turned to him. “There's no good in it.” He said. “But there is fairness. It's terrible and there's no good in it, but it's nothing if not fair.” I paused, and Peter called out my number again, while the Soldier nodded at the Gates. “Go.” He said. “Make up an answer and tell it to him. But don't believe for a second in what you're saying.” When I made my way to Peter (“Finally!” he'd said, crossing his arms.), I told him the good in my dying young was that it happened while I was doing something I loved. That I was lucky to go out while I was happy. It worked, and now I'm sitting with my grandparents, and we're happy, because it's impossible to be sad over here. In a way, all the stories were right, and there's this revelation and suddenly a lot of things you spend your life questioning make some sort of sense, and even if they don't, you're at ease with the idea that some questions are unable to be answered. That's the difference between the stories and the reality of it: not everything makes complete sense once you're in heaven. What does make sense, is the idea that not everything does. And that is enough. Eventually, I crossed paths with the Firefighter again. There was no soot on his face, and no flames at his pant legs. We embraced, and he asked about the Soldier. “I haven't seen him.” I said. “Have you?” He shook his head. “Did you talk to him before you came over?” “Yeah, he told me to make up my answer, but not to believe it for a second.” “And did you listen to him? Do you believe in your answer?” I thought about it for a long time, before finally saying “No. No, I don't. I think it would've been better for me to happy and still alive than to die being happy. Does that make sense?” The Firefigher clasped my shoulder. “Makes perfect sense. The most sense anything can make!” and I thought about what else the Soldier said, about nothing of this being good, but it being fair, nonetheless. And I understood that maybe that's why he was still over there, still playing Limbo. Because he believed that everything was fair, and in return he believed that it was only fair that he never be saved, that he never be perfectly sinful, that he never wins the game, how low can you go, not low enough. “Anyways, it was nice seeing ya, man.” The Firefighter said, before moving on. “Yeah, you too. Take care of yourself.” And I thought about Mitchell Collins, and the good that might have come. And because I was in heaven and I understood that nothing made sense and that made sense and I was content with all things unsensical, I stopped wondering if there was good in all things bad, because I knew that the answer was irony and a contradiction and the very opposite of everything, and I was okay to ignore it. I was okay to close my eyes and not see Mitchell Collins, who sometimes visited me now, and we talked about all the things he missed growing up, and I was okay not to see his empty chair. Because there was good in everything, if you looked hard enough. And finding that good was wonderful, because it made everything easier. But the Soldier was right. And our answers were a barter. And there's nothing good about a Little Girl in pink pajamas dying, even if it means she gets to see her grandmother again. And there's nothing good about a little boy who used to make crude noises in music class getting run over by a car in second grade. And there's no good about a father leaving his children behind in a house fire, and there's no good in any of it. But it's nothing if not fair. So we go back to our streets of gold, because we don't have to play limbo anymore. And behind the gates, there's a Soldier, and he keeps playing, how low can you go, until eventually, he is going to give up and he is going to take off his combat boots and put on pink pajamas. Because God knows it's easier that way.

The Skydiver

The funeral was in a stuffy room with thick velvet curtains that blocked the sun from creeping in through the dusty windows. The wallpaper was a pattern of roses that looked as dead as the body in the casket, and the smell of all the wreaths and boquets the mourners toted along was nauseating. It seeped up through your nose and gripped you by wrapping itself around your lungs and reminding you “Hey, buddy. This is what death smells like. One day it will be the only thing you can smell anymore, and you'll smell it forever and ever, so you better get used to it. “ I guess I got used to it. But it's a hard smell to become accustomed to, because it doesn't want you to become familiar with it. It wants to sneak up on you one day and catch you from behind and knock the wind out of you, and then after its had its laugh, it wants you to forget about it completely, so that the next time it comes knocking it's just as much an unpleasant surprise as the first time. Death and its smell, they like to keep their distance, because that way they can be stronger and stronger on the occasions when they do show up. I guess me and Death, we're rivals. We don't play by each other's rules. So the funeral was stuffy with the familiar smell of death. Lizzie nudged me, pulled on my sleeve. Her head barely reached my elbow. “Dad.” She whispered, loudly. “Dad!” “Shhh, what?” “It smells funny in here.” “Yeah, just ignore it.” She rumpled up her nose. “I can't.” “Well try.” She groaned, dropped her arms to her side and started picking at the lace on her dress. Her mom had parted her hair in the middle this morning, tying her bangs off to the left with a little pink bow that matched the ones on her shoes. All around us, women were squeezed into long wool dresses with ill fitting sleeves and men in black suits patted their backs while here and there they sniffed into kleenex scented with roses and death and cried to themselves about how abstract the most concrete of ideas somehow sensibly seemed. Me and Death, we got this way with each other because my job was to figure it out, you see, and it doesn't much like that. It resists it, it doesn't like people prodding at it, it's like the fish in the aquarium. It gets pretty pissed when you keep on tapping at the glass and shouting at it in a language it doesn't speak. Death, it kept tapping it's fingers against my tank, and so I tapped back, and we fought with each other through the thick plexi glass of understanding like little kids with their fingers half a centimeter from each other's noses when their parents say “Stop touching each other” and they think they've found an ingenious loophole to their request. I was a probate judge, responsible for cleaning up after the mess of someone's departure. Death came along, and I waved my hand like it was nothing more than the mundane and inevitable happenstance that it was, and I hardly winced at the smell anymore, because I'd memorized it, and now I was the one who could sneak up on it, instead of the other way around. Death doesn't like that very much. It keeps pulling it's tricks, trying to come up with new ones to catch me off guard, but it never does. I've heard it all. Last week, I sat at my desk with my file of incoming cases, rubbed my temples and inhaled the scents so familiar they hardly existed at all, and surveyed the aftermath of Death's most recent attempts at cunning trickery. “HA!” It laughed, dancing all around my office. “I got you this time!” I reclined back in my leather chair, threw my feet up on the cherry desk and sipped at my black coffee. “Good try, but you'll have to try harder.” The file was filled with cancers and crashes, heart attacks and heartbreaks. There was one about an old man that had died without writing a will, a depression era matress stuffer with a small fortune under his floorboards and seven children to fight over it. This one was especially dull, and I looked my old spar Death in the eyes and laugh full on in its smug face, “Really? This is all you got?” He reclined back across from me, picking at his nails. “Just you wait.” But he'd already lost that game, whatever it was. So there was no use in waiting or playing anymore. “Dad. Daaad.” Lizzie yanked on my sleeve again. I was trying to listen to the service and be respectful to the mourning family and friends, despite the heat of my black suit and incessant monotony of the ministers droning voice, saying the same thing over and over again at every service my career required that I attend. “What?” “I don't like being in here.” “No one does, Lizzie. You just have to hang in there.” She rubbed a hand over her dress, sighing. “Can we go outside?” My wife elbowed me in the ribs. She was dabbing at her eyes with a floral scented tissue, her ankles crossed neatly infront of her, arms hugging her purse so hard her knuckles turned white. “Just go, take her outside.” she said, before turning her attention back to the service. Up front, standing before the casket shrouded in its own personal garden of roses and gardenas, the minister was reading a poem, looking into the crowd with a mask of detached sorrow and pity stretched across his features. “And while I'm at it,” He read. “Thanks to everyone who happened to die/ on the same day that I was born./ Thank you for stepping aside to make rom for me/ for giving up your seat/ getting out of the way, to be blunt...” It went on like that. Thanking Death for its gratitude, for it's artificial rose petal aroma, and there wasn't a dry eye in the room. The real Death, he lounged, pretended to dab it his eyes, waved its hand like it was flattered. “Come on, Liz.” “Finally!” I pulled her out of her fidgeting folding chair, past the mourners in their mindless competition of grief, and out of the stuffy home. It was sunny outside, but storm clouds billowed on the horizon. We should be safe from the rain as long as we went back in after a few minutes. We sat on the concrete steps of the Home, atop a freshly sweeped WELCOME mat, under the shade of a looming willow tree that cast shadows across her face. I pulled a bottle of bubbles out of my pocket, I always kept them there when I was going anywhere with Lizzie. She got bored easily, and when she got bored, she got whiney. I blew them into the air and she ran around to pop them all with her fingers before they floated too high for her reach. “Whatcha thinkin' bout?” She asked in her singsong voice while she chased after the rainbow spectrumed soap bubbles between us. “Just work and stuff.” “Ooohh. Will you tell me about it?” “It's all pretty boring. Money and stuff.” “And dead people, right?” “Yeah, and dead people.” “Hmm.” She chased bubbles for a while in silence, and the storm clouds got thicker overhead. “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “It really smelled in there.” “Yeah, it did.” “How come?” “Oh...I think it's all the flowers. And the chemicals.” “The ones they put on the dead person?” “Yeah, the ones they put on the dead person.” “Oh.” She popped more bubbles, getting bored after a while and sitting down next to me. “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “How come people gotta die?” I looked at Death, lounging in the shade of a cherry blossom tree across the lawn, smirking at me. “Well go on,” he said. “Answer her that one.” I cleared my voice and waved him away. “Well, Lizzie, that's a tough question.” She wiggled her toes in her pink ballet slippers with the ribbon that matched the one in her hair. I hesitated before continuing. “I'm working on a case right now, Liz, about a guy that died when he was skydiving and didn't have his parachute on right.” She looked up at me, her eyebrows scrunched together. “It was a, uh, really windy day, and he had always wanted to go skydiving. Have you ever heard of a bucket list?” “No, that sounds stupid. Is it a list about buckets?” “No, it's a list about all the things you want to do in your life. Like skydiving. A lot of people want to skydive before they die, I don't know why. It always seemed dangerous to me.” “Then why's it called a bucket list?” “I don't actually know.” “Hmm.” “So, this guy always wanted to go skydiving. And one day, he and all his friends decided they'd do it. So they made an appointment at a place that gave you a lesson on how to do it, and then took you up into the sky on a big orange helicopter, and tied you all up in skydiving gear or whatever, and then let you jump, just like they'd taught you in the lesson. But this guy, the guy from the case, he was real young, only about twenty six, and the guy from the skydiving company didn't clasp his parachute to his outfit right, and part of it got stuck. So when it came time for the guy to pull open his parachute, it wouldn't open, and he crashed.” “And he died?” “Yeah, sweety. He died.” “Oh.” she thought about it for a while and I blew more bubbles for her to pop. After a while, she said “But how come he had to die?” “Well...” I blew another round of bubbles and thought we better head back in soon before it started raining and she ruined her pretty dress. Her mother would never let that one go, God forbid. “I guess maybe it's like the poem the minister was reading when we left.” “The one about the guy wrting a thank you letter to the mailman?” “Yeah, but not that part. The part at the end, where he thanks the person that had to die to make room for him to be alive.” “So the skydiver had to di.e so a baby could be born?” She let bubbles fly past her. “I don't know, Liz. That's a way to look at it, yeah. Everyone has to go away eventually, sweetheart.” “So there's room for other people to have a chance?” “I suppose so.” “Oh.” She popped bubbles again, a crease above her nose as she thought it all through. “But how come there can't be room for everyone?” She said, her voice heavy. “I don't know, baby girl. There's just not.” She bit her lip. I'd worked as a probate judge for fifteen years, and as I've said, me and Death, we're well aquainted. We're rivals, chasing each other like dogs chasing their own tails, and we think we have each other figured out, we think we understand it now, but then someone breaks the rules. Someone steps out of the lane, and then we're back chasing each other around in circles with distance between us that never meets. People called me, they were always crying. Death was never very polite about when he paid his visits, and he never called ahead. He came in the night and left before you could wake up, and then you're calling me, and you're crying. You're saying “Hello, this is Judge Ellison, right? Yes, my name is Something Something from Somewhere Somewhere, my Something/Someone just passed away, yes yes it was so very sudden, it's so hard to believe they're not here, you know, Mr. Ellison, they had money/real estate/ something something, you see, and I have this many brothers/sisters/somethings, and my Something Something, the one who has passed, yes, his/her will is missing, you see, or they don't have one/ I'm unsatisfied with what it says...yes, thank you, Mr. Ellison, it's so nice to hear a kind voice in all of this...” And I'm nodding, and my feet are up and I'm writing down what you're saying. Then you come into my office. It's been a couple weeks, you're still crying, but it's the kind that's purely for the sake of not wanting to appear heartless, and you're dabbing at your eyes with a tissue you carried in your purse/pocket. So I get to know the corpse, my old friend Death stands over my shoulder and looks down and sneers and says “I seem to have made this pretty hard for you” and I say “Nothing I can't handle, ole chap. Screw off.” And across the desk you're rambling about the dead man blah blah blah blah blah. Me and the dead man, we become pretty tight. I kind of rob him of his privacy, but it's okay, because you're getting money/ real estate/ etc out of the deal, and he's dead, so we all figure it doesn't really matter. And then I get you what you want and the dead man goes back to being dead and Death says “One day I'm gonna make it impossible for you and you're gonna have to realize that he/she is gone forever and you can't undig that.” and I say “you're pretty insecure, eh?” and Death steers clear for a while, until the next day, when the same thing happens all over again. The case of the skydiver was a little deeper than I knew how to tell Lizzie. His name was Joey Bennett, and like I said, he was twenty six. He was in that helicopter with four other people, his best mate and his girlfriend, and the woman he was planning on making his fiancee that very day. The other couple, they jumped first, they held hands, and they laughed the whole way down and their parachutes billowed out behind them like they were supposed to, and they kissed when they landed. Then it was Joey and his girl's turn, and at the last minute Joey suspended himself over the side of the helicopter, and before he jumped he turned back around to look at the girl, she was a pretty blond, and she smiled and said “I'm so nervous, Joe, oh my God,” and he said “before we do this I have to ask you something,” and she said “is now really the time?” and she was laughing and she said “okay what is it?” and he said “will you marry me?” and the girl was crying, but it was a completely different kind of crying than was practiced by my clients, and she said “jesus, yes, oh my god, yes I'll marry you,” and the skydiving teacher shouted “JUMP!” so Joey jumped and then the girl followed him and when it was time to pull her parachute, she looked down and realized that joey hadn't pulled his. She tried yelling to him but he couldn't hear her, and then she saw him pulling at every string he had, tugging and tugging, and nothing happened, and he looked up at her and he was crying and he said “I love you” and even though she couldn't hear him through the raging wind soaring past her as she floated down, she saw the words formed by his mouth, and when they landed, she felt like she'd died, too. She told me all of this while she sat in my office across my desk, Joey's parents sitting to her left. They were arguing over who should have Joey's house, his family or his would be fiancee, and I sat there staring at the whole lot of them, thinking that Joey's world was a completely different one than the one my last client lived and died on, and all of my clients were born into their own worlds and went on creating them and creating them until they died in them, and that world popped, and it wasn't just a person or a life that had ended, it was a whole universe, and maybe that had to happen so that another universe would have the room to build itself up around its edges but maybe that's only something we say so that somehow it will make sad sense, and that's what I tried to tell Lizze. She popped bubbles. I blew more, and told her maybe death was like popping bubbles. “Maybe all the people could fit, but all the worlds couldn't, you know? So we have to pop some of them.” She thought about it. “I guess that makes sense.” I blew more bubbles. She popped more bubbles. “It doesn't have to make sense, sweetheart. It's okay for it to not make sense.” Death leered under the cherry blossom tree, came and sat between us on the WELCOME mat under the willow. “Toldja one day I'd pull one over on you.” he sneered. I waved him away. Lizzie got up and walked around a bit, hopscotching along the sidewalk while she thought quietly to herself about the things that were actually very simple but for some reason are very impossible to understand. Maybe because death has been around for so long, just lounging under cherry blossoms, we think that we should understand him by now. But that's the thing, he's always there, so as a result, we're not always here. Our bubbles pop or we don't attach our parachutes right and so we don't have much time to make sense of him. So his smell is never familiar, no matter how hard we try to figure out what it's made of. “Liz?” “Hmm?” “You know we love you, right? Mommy and me and everyone else?” “Yeahhh.” she says, picking at the grass at her feet. “And you know that just because sometimes the bubbles pop doesn't mean they weren't really great bubbles while they were around?” “Yeah, I got it, Daddy. Love you, too.” “It really doesn't have to make sense right now.” She plucked at the grass at her feet, stomping the dirt off her toes. “Yeah. I know.” It started to sprinkle, and I took her back inside before it started pouring, back into the dried rose wallpaper and cherry blossom candles and tissue dabbing cryers. We sat back down, and my wife cried into my shoulder, and I patted her back. Death leaned over my shoulder. “That was a good story you told her out there, man.” he whispered. “The one about the Skydiver.” “Yeah.” I said. “Most of them are.” “Your stories?” “The lives. The bubbles.” “Ah.” Death leaned back, propping his feet against the back of the chair in front of him. “Funny, though. I don't really recall that one ever happening.” “Maybe you're just getting old. There're a lot of skydiving accidents. They all probably run together after a while.” “No...no...” Death scratched its forehead. “I never forget a name. And I don't recall making aquaintance with a Joey Bennett, at least not yet...” He eyed me, smiling. I shrugged. “Well, either way, it's got all the proponents of a good story. Life, Love...” He chuckled. “Even me!” “Yep. Even you.” “It's funny, sometimes, you know? How stupid the endings to so many good stories are!” “Yeah.” The minister was wrapping up the service. “So much potential...a really great bubble, so you say. Then it pops all because someone forgot to properly attach a parachute! It's dissapointing, really.” Death laughed, crossing his arms behind his head. The minister closed the service, and we all muddled around the Home, awkwardly hugging and shaking hands, offering condolences. I told Lizzie to be polite and be quiet for a while, and she tugged on my sleeve again. “Daddy?” She said. “Hmm, baby?” “I know the bubble thing doesn't really make much sense, and neither did that poem, but I think I get it a little better now.” “Oh?” “Yeah.” I stood off to the side after a while, holding her hand. We ambled over to the table that held the dead person's pictures, and a copy of the obituary. We were just teaching Lizzie to read this summer, so I picked her up and pointed at the words to see if she could sound them out without my help. Her teachers said she was coming along promisingly, and would probably be able to help the other kids next year when they were having trouble. We started reading. “Daddy?” “Hmm? “It smells so weird in here.” “I know, sweety. It's the flowers and the chemicals.” “The ones for the dead person?” I squeezed her hand. “Yeah, baby. The ones for the dead person.” “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “It's not the guy from the skydiving lessons fault, I don't think. That the guy, Joey, died, I mean. I don't think it's the parachute guy's fault.” “I don't know, honey.” “Well, I don't think it was.” My wife came over, still dabbing at her eyes. “Oh, you're reading!” She said, trying to sound cheerful. “That's great!” She stood next to us and Lizzie went on reading the dead person's obituary, us helping her when she stumbled over words. Death and me, we're rivals. We chase each other like a dog and his tail. He comes up, pats my shoulder. “You're taking this rather well, my friend.” “Yeah well, you've slipped, mate.” He stepped back. “What? I don't slip.” “But you do. You never give warning calls. You sneak right up behind people. But me, you let me memorize your scent. That was your first mistake.” He shook his head, sadly. “Maybe so. But Judge Ellison, does it really matter? If we're friends or not, you and I? I'm still here, mate. I'm still poppin' bubbles. Messin' up parachute strings...forgetting to clasp life jackets...” Elizabeth Anne Ellison, age 6, passed away last Sunday, June fourth, at 1:26 in the afternoon by cause of drowning while she was swimming with her mother and father, Nicholas and Mellissa Ellison, at the backyard pond of an Ellison family friend, and had forgotten to reattatch her life jacket upon returning to the water... “You're right.” I told Death. “It doesn't matter one bit.” I kissed Lizzie's forehead before they closed the casket. Mellissa cried, they were always crying, when we walked out of the Home with the dusty rose petal wallpaper and terrible velvet curtains, over the WELCOME mat and willow tree and cherry blossom branches. Death strolled behind us, as he always does, and he said, again, “Man, I really did like that story about the skydiver. But I dunno, maybe it WAS the parachute guy's fault? Maybe he should have double checked?” “Screw off.” He laughed, scuffling along on the pavement. “I'll see ya around, Nick. I'll see ya around. But hey, I toldja I'd get ya, one day. What'd I say?” “Yeah.” I tell him, popping bubbles while we walked. “You told me.”

The Hole in the Dandelion Tree

June 13, 1991 “Come on, Ellie! You've gotta learn to walk eventually. I can't just carry you around the whole rest of your entire life!” She was getting real heavy, and even though I was getting stronger, I wanted her to grow big and strong, too, like me. I set her down in the grass, her wrinkly trunk drooping while she pouted. “Oh come on! You can do it! Just run, run like me!” I runned and twirled all through the field, stirring up the white dandelion fairies and letting them dance around my feet as I laughed and danced. “See, Ellie? It's easy!” I watched her trunk perk up a little bit, her feet kick at the dandelions just a little. “That's the ticket! Yeah!” Mr. Hopper bounced around at Ellie's feet, his long ears dancing with the sway of the long grass that tickled my ankles. Ellie was just a baby, and all of our friends were excited that she was growing so big and strong. “Why, you're the best dancer in the whole field!” said Mr. Hopper. “No I'm not! Not as good as Tommy!” “Well, that's just because I'm more nimble!” The alley cat purred, licking his feet. “All cats are! But you've got your own special talents, Ellie!” Ellie's trunk perked even higher. “Really? Like what?” “Weellll...” I said, picking a bouquet of dandelions, which was a hard job because as soon as you went to grab another flower, the one before it had already floated away, “Like being the nicest kindest funniest elephant in the whole world!” I stuck my little dandelions behind her floppy ear, and she giggled. “The nicest!” sang Mr. Hopper. “And the kindest and funniest!” said Tommy. I pulled them all into me, even though they were getting big. I buried my head in Tommy's soft calico fur, nuzzling Mr. Hopper under my chin, and laughing at the tickle of Ellie's trunk wrapping us all up. And it was very lovely, today in the big green field with dandelions and our tree so close by we could collapse into its shade as soon as the sun got even the slightest bit too hot. I wish that every day of every lifetime were as sweet as this one. So as the sun started to go down we climbed up to the biggest branch of our tree, where we could all fit perfectly, and probably still would even when we all got really big. That's how big our tree was. It was like a castle, only better. It was my favorite place in the whole world and I never ever wanted to climb down. “Do you promise this will be the best summer, Adam?” Ellie said quietly, while I wrote in my notebook and Tommy and Mr. Hopper slept at our feet. “The best summer ever. Promise.” “And we'll get to play everyday, right? Because you don't have to go to school?” “Right,” I told her. “Not until fall.” “When the leaves change?” “When the leaves change.” “Oh.” She said, swinging her trunk gently beneath the rustle of the branches. “I hope the leaves never change.” “Who ya talkin' to up there?” I dropped my pencil. A girl I'd never seen before was looking up at us through the leaves. “Who are you?!” demanded Ellie, waking up the others. “This is our tree!” “Be nice, Ellie,” I said. “Who's Ellie?” “ME!” Ellie shouted, stomping her foot and raising her trunk. “I'm Ellie!” “Who are you?” I asked the girl. “I should ask who YOU are.” She said. “Not actually though. I was here first.” “How old are you?” “Seven.” “Seven and how many days?” I counted on my fingers. “seven and sixty one days.” “Then I was BORN first!” “What?! That doesn't count!” “Does too! I'm coming up there!” “No there's not room, actually...” Tommy purred, hardly paying the rest of us any attention while he groomed his paws, lazily as always. “Okay but there's not much room.” But then she was there, perched on the branch in front of us like she'd done it a thousand times. She didn't even have to ask which places were best to put her feet while she climbed up, she just knew. “There!” She exclaimed, sweeping dirt off her shorts. “Easy peasy!” She was super small, so skinny it looked like she sure needed a good supper, with hair as long as her whole back and almost as white-blond as dandelions. She needed a bath, too. And some shoes. Her bare little toes were as muddy as Tommy's tail when he plays in the brook. “Who are you?” I asked again, pulling Ellie, who didn't seem very happy about our guest, into my side. “Who are YOU?” She said, shooting her left eyebrow way up her forehead. “Adam! My name is Adam and this is my tree.” “Who were you talking to, Adam?” “Me!” Ellie snapped. “He was talking to me, of course!” “It doesn't matter!” I said to the girl. “Just tell me who you are!” Ellie's trunk sank lower than ever. “How come she can't hear me, Adam? How come? How come you won't tell her it was me?” But I just pulled her closer to me. “My name's Elsie Marie Clovers. I live over the hill. Just a mile exactly.” “Well I live at the bottom of the hill, actually. Just a mile exactly.” “Well, then, Adam. I guess this tree is both of ours.” “No! It's our tree!” Ellie stomped her feet, her trunk flailing. “You can't show up and take our tree, Missy! Don't even think about---” “Fine then.” I stroked Ellie's trunk, and Mr. Hopper whispered to her quietly that it would be okay. She should just relax. There's enough room in our tree for one more, surely. “Fine then.” Elsie Marie Clovers sat down across from us, leaning back into her branch and looked up up up, up into the sky. The sun peek a booed through the big green leaves, making her face a kaleidoscope. In this light you could see her very differently. “Adam? Adam how come she can't hear me?” Ellie tugged on my notebook, making me look at her. Tommy had already curled up in Elsie Marie Clover's lap, and Mr. Hopper was hopping from branch to branch, nibbling on a leaf here or there. I looked at Ellie and scratched her floppy purple ears. “Don't be sad.” I told her. “You just have to make her listen.” “There you go talking to yourself again.” Said Elsie Marie Clovers. “...Wait, what's this?” She picked up Tommy, jostling him awake. “Hey!” he screeched. “Can't an alley cat catch a Z or two around here?” “Be gentle!” Ellie shouted. “It's...it's Tommy.” I finally said. “He's my friend. Listen!” “Listen to what?” My cheeks got hot, and Ellie watched me patiently, almost pleadingly. “Just listen to him.” “Hello!” Tommy exclaimed, licking her face. “I'm Tommy! Now if you don't mind, I was enjoying my nap.” Elsie watched as he curled into her lap, a smile bigger than any I'd ever seen slowly creeping onto her lips beneath the leaf kaleidoscope. “All you had to say is you were talking to your animals.” She said. “Can you hear me, too?” Ellie carefully stepped towards her, her trunk pointing straight ahead. “Of course, silly!” Elsie giggled. “What's your name?” “Ellie. But don't go forgetting that I'M the most important girl around here, Missy. Just cause there's two of us now.” Elsie smiled, and reached out to pet her trunk. “Never!” She said. “Besides. You're FAR prettier.” Ellie's trunk lifted high over her head, and little by little, she stepped closer and closer to the new girl, warming up. Tommy slept, Mr. Hopper hopped, and Ellie snuggled beside me as I started writing again. “Whatcha writin' anyways?” Said Elsie Marie Clovers. In the patterns from the leaves on her face it was hard to tell which lines were made of shadows and which were made of dirt and which were made of sad things. But I think I saw a line made of sad things, small and thin, beneath her eye, glinting in the sunlight between the leaves. “Oh...um. It's nothing really.” I fumbled to close the notebook before she could see, but she scooted over and snatched it right out of my hands. She was sitting real close, and I could see the Spot of Something Sad real clear now. I'd never gotten a scar. I wondered how it got there. She flipped through the pages, reading each word very carefully. Dirt from her fingers smudged the corners of the pages where she turned them. Her eyes got real serious at some parts. Her toes curled and uncurled. The sun was going down. She tossed it back to me after a while, smiling. She didn't ask questions or tease me. That's how I knew that the stranger I just let into my tree wasn't so bad. As tree stealers go, she could have been worse. “My name is spelled E-L-S-I-E.” She said. “Huh?” “Just in case you ever wrote about me.” The sun was dipping farther and farther behind the hill. “I've gotta go home now, actually.” I helped Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper climb down the tree, my face growing hot again. I don't know why, but I didn't really want Elsie Marie Clovers to see what I did next. “I guess we'll see you tomorrow.” I said. “Yeah, probably. Probably tomorrow.” She looked sort of sad but I didn't ask why. Her eyes looked sleepy. She climbed across one of the big branches, and swung her legs over the side. Her hair flew behind her as she jumped, dandelions whisking around her and floating over her head as she landed. We all watched them fly away but we were not sad when we couldn't see them anymore. There were plenty more where that came from. “What are you standing there for?” She said. “I don't know. What are you standing there for?” “I asked first.” “I'm just getting ready to go home.” “But you're waiting for me to leave first, that's why you're just standing there.” “No, that's stupid.” “No it's not.” “Yeah, it's not. Whatever.” I bent down to the side of the tree trunk. “I just wasn't sure I wanted any old stranger, and a GIRL, to know about my secret hiding place.” “A GIRL!” She snorted. “I'm not just a girl. I'm actually Wonder Woman.” “Yeah right.” “No, really! Didn't you see me fly from that branch?” “You just jumped! Anyone could do that!” “Not actually, though.” I groaned. “Just don't go telling about my hiding spot. And don't go looking in it, either. You can play in the tree all you want I guess, but stay out of the hiding spot.” “What is your hiding spot, anyway?” I lead her around to the other side of the trunk, and Tommy crawled into the big, empty hollow. “Whoa.” Elsie peeked inside. “Night night, Ellie.” I gave her a big squeeze, scratching her floppy ears. “I'm real proud of you for running like that today, Ells. It was real good.” I kissed her trunk as she yawned, and settled down next to Tommy. “Night, night Adam. Bye, Elsie...” And then she was fast asleep, her trunk snoring just quietly. “Come on, Mr. Hopper! It's time for bed!” “Alright, alright!” He bounced in after them, shaking grass off his ears. “See ya, tomorrow, guys!” “Will they be okay here all night?” Elsie whispered. “Yeah, of course. This is their favorite place.” I stuffed my notebook and pencils into the big envelope with “TOP SECRET” written across it. Mom had helped me write it so it looked neat. I nestled the envelope in next to Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper while they slept, smiling at them real quiet before turning back around to Elsie. “Okay bye.” I said. “I'll race you home.” “One mile exactly in both ways? Do you promise you're not lying?” “I promiseee! Gees!” She shoved my shoulder lightly, rolling her eyes. “Fine.” I grinned. The sun had almost set. I needed to get home before it got dark out or Mom would be real mad at me. We turned back to back and she started counting down from ten. “Ten...nine...eight...” I didn't get to say a bedtime story to Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper. I'll tell two tomorrow. “seven...six...five...” I turned my head around a little bit to look at her. Her eyes were squinted tight and she was staring down the hill, I supposed to where her house was. Out of the shade from the Big Tree, I could see the scar on her cheek even better. “two...one...GO!” And I felt her kick away as I stood there, before I I eventually realized I was late. And I started running, farther and farther away from Elsie and Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper, but closer and closer to my house, and them closer and closer to theirs. I looked back after a while, and I couldn't see her anymore behind the hill. And then I realized that we were running in opposite directions and we'd never know for sure who won the race. So I stopped running, and just walked. I thought about Wonder Woman and dandelions and baby elephants learning to run, and the scar on a seven and something day old girl's face and I didn't know what it all meant. So I just walked. And my friends slept in their tree. And somewhere over the hill, she was running. Maybe she was walking now, too. But I don't know. I think she probably kept running. ~ ~ Two years later Elsie was as much a part of our tree as the rest of us. We were nine and something days old now, which was really old, actually. I was a lot stronger and Elsie was a little taller and her hair was a little longer. Our feet were a little dirtier, and Ellie wasn't a baby anymore, and Tommy was even lazier than ever, and Mr. Hopper's bright green hair was getting less bright with every day that he played in the dirt on days that it didn't rain. We were sitting in the tree on the first day of summer, when the sun had just came up, and Tommy and Ellie were still asleep. Mr. Hopper was running around eating a breakfast of leaves, Elsie was lying on her back with her hair flipped over her face, braiding dandelion stems into it. I wrote in my notebook and glanced at her from time to time, careful she didn't notice. Suddenly, she jumped up. “Come on, everyone! We've got a job.” And just like that time on the first day she showed up at the tree, she swung her legs and leaped off the big branch like she was flying, swatting dirt off her shorts when she landed, gently on her toes. I picked up Ellie and Tommy, while Mr. Hopper skittered behind us. I don't really know why we followed her or why we listened to her. But it just seemed like the thing to do. Ellie ran after her, her ears flapping.“What are we doing?” She shouted. “Wait! Don't crush them!” Ellie stopped quickly in her tracks as Elsie dove to her feet. “We want to save all the dandelions. We can't crush them.” She bent intently to the dandelions, closing her eyes and smelling them as she gently pulled as many as she could hold into her hands. “Everyone grab as many as you can,” she said. “But be extra super gentle.” “What are we going to do with them?” Tommy meowed, with a yawn, as he stretched out his back. “We're gonna make a dandelion tree.” And everyone smiled including the sun, and it was the best kind of warm. We picked every fluffy white dandelion we could carry, leaving the yellow ones to sleep and keep growing. Elsie sang from across the field, her voice the wind blowing dust from the ground. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night...take those broken wings and learn to fly.” She bent and nestled a handful of flowers behind Ellie's ear. “All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.” Ellie giggled, and Elsie kissed her trunk. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night...take these sunken eyes, and learn to see...” Her scar hadn't gone away in the two years since we'd met. It faded a little. But sometimes it was even more vivid than before. You couldn't see it when she was happy, but sometimes you could see it when she was smiling, and this is how you would know her smile wasn't really real. You could see it when she slept in the tree and the shade darkened everything, but brightened the scar. You could see it when you turned around in the last few seconds of her countdown, before she started running, and her eyes were squinted. And you could see it when you went home and realized you didn't actually know where she went to up the hill, and if she kept running or started walking. You could see it now, when the sun was hot, and the yellow of dandelions cast rainbows under her chin, and her eyebrows were furrowed together in the middle and her eyes looked quietly sad but you didn't know why and probably wouldn't ask. “...you were only waiting for this moment to be free.” We were all quiet, shielding our bouquets under our shirts to keep the wind from blowing them away before it was time. “That's a pretty song, Elsie.” Tommy purred, nodding against her ankles in the overgrown grass that swallowed them, and almost reached our knees. “It was my mom's favorite.” That was the first time we'd heard of Elsie's mother. She didn't talk about her family or what she ran to at the other end of the hill when we raced in reverse. And we didn't ask. So we just smiled small and stayed quiet, while she sang and we saved dandelions from wind, or so we thought, because eventually they'd blow away, anyways, and we could not stop that from happening. Elsie braided the stems into chains, chains that I swear could reach both ends of the hill if we stretched them out. We wrapped them around the trunk, Mr. Hopper running with one end up the tall branches and poking them through leaves and moss and hollows in the bark, until every branch was the stem of one giant flower and the midday sun as we finished shone through the white cotton so very bright, but soft enough that it would not hurt our eyes. “The white dandelion tree in the yellow dandelion field.” Elsie smiled. We all smiled. We climbed and felt the wisps beneath our fingers, a shade confused with light in the most splendid of ways. “They'll all blow away eventually, though, right?” Tommy sad solemnly, staring from Elsie's lap at the umbrella of white above our heads. “Everything blows away eventually.” She said. “But there will be flowers in our tree so long as we're together.” I watched from the biggest branch of the white dandelion tree as she and Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper chased each other laughing through the yellow dandelion field. And I wrote in my notebook. And I thought about Elsie Marie Clovers' scar and the end of the hill I'd never been to. And I tried to calculate in the margins of the page exactly how long it would take for every little seed to blow away and begin again somewhere else. But once I thought I had the answer, no wind came, and the flowers stayed put for longer than I thought to be possible. “Hey!” I looked up from what I was writing. Elsie climbed up the tree, and sat down across from me, leaning her head against a branch. The others still played below us, and we watched them for a minute, smiling. “Did they miss me?” She whispered finally. She was looking down at them, her eyes bent sad, her lips frowning, her scar shining. “Yeah. They kept asking where you were.” She bit her lip, and I think I saw her eyes get wet. I twirled my pencil in my fingers. “Where'd you go, anyways? Why didn't you come back here for so long?” She looked at her toes. “It was only a couple days.” “Yeah but that's a real long time. How come you're talking about it now, anyways? It was weeks ago.” “Yeah but that's a real short time.” I shoved her. “But where'd you go?” She lied down her stomach, her hands under her chin, watching them run and play below us. “I don't know. Lotsa places.” “Was it a vacation? Did you stay in a hotel?” “No, I didn't stay anywhere, actually. I usually don't...” “What do you mean?” Below us, they were arguing about whether or not it was fair to play tag with Mr. Hopper, who could jump a lot faster than the others could run. “Doesn't matter.” I said. “You should just tell them before you leave again. They'll miss you.” She smirked. “You'll miss me, too, stupid.” I think I blushed. I looked down at my notebook and tried to hide behind writing. “Whatever you say.” She shoved my shoulder. “Yeah, whatever.” She fell asleep after a while, under the heat of the sun through the dandelions. Ellie and Tommy curled up next to her when they got tired of chasing Mr. Hopper, and he furrowed into her lap and slept, too, the afternoon sun casting shadows on their faces and changing all the colors to something calm and warm and quiet. And I wrote and wrote. And in the margins I drew pictures of them, asleep in the Dandelion Tree. A few weeks ago, we came to the tree, and Elsie didn't. And she didn't come the next day or the next day and they all worried, but I worried even more than them, even though I wouldn't admit it. We all talked about where she might be and what adventures she might be having, and what we'd do when she came back. And then after a couple days we found her braiding bracelets made of grass in the middle of the field and they all ran to her and tackled her with hugs and she giggled and kissed their fur, and I shoved her and told her she was stupid and probably shouldn't do that again because it really worried our friends. And she smiled and rolled her eyes and Ellie asked where she'd been and she said she was “away” and that she didn't feel like talking about it, but we didn't have to worry, because she would always, always, always come back. But we still worried. That's what friends do. So I drew her scar, right under her eye. And I drew flowers beneath her chin. And things were warm. And there were dandelions over our heads. But everything blows away eventually. ~ ~ When were thirteen Elsie Marie Clovers got another scar. She ran to the tree an hour later than usual and flung herself into my bewildered arms. I sat there, stunned and confused, while she cried. Eventually she pulled away, and I saw that her forehead was bleeding, and that she'd gotten blood on my shirt, but that didn't matter. “What happened?!” “Just help me!” She cried. “There's...there's glass in it I think...I don't know, I need help...” I held her shoulders. “We can take you to my mom. She always knows what to do when---” “No!” She wiped roughly at her eyes, trying to catch her breath. “No, we can't tell your mom.” “Why not?” “Because we can't! Look, can you just help me or what?” She was trying not to cry anymore, but she couldn't help it, and I understood that. “Just...just pick the glass out.” I tried to wipe the blood off the cut, and eventually it stopped coming. It wasn't very deep, but it was long, right across her hairline where it could easily be hidden if she cut her bangs. But I secretly hoped she didn't do that. I'd rather see her scar than not see her eyes. “It's okay...” I murmured. “It's not very bad.” She winced as I gently pulled out the little shards of glass, tossing them over the side of the tree. “Geez, Elsie, what happened?” “It was an accident. I know it was an accident.” “Yeah but--” “It was an accident okay?” there was an urgency in her voice that I didn't understand. Like so much of her, I wanted to know exactly what put it there and why and how to make it better, but there was so much I did not understand and would not understand, and even though I'd spend the better part of my life trying to figure those things out, I probably wouldn't get anywhere, because at the end of the day we'd be running in opposite directions and she'd know exactly where I was ending up and I'd never know for sure the same for her. When I was sure all the glass was out, I tore off a piece of my shirt and held it to her forehead to stop the bleeding. Her face was splotched with tears, her lips quivering. “Thank you, Adam.” “No problem.” “I'm sorry I run off all the time and don't tell you where I'm going.” “Yeah, well.” “And I know you worry. You can't blame the animals anymore.” I thought for the first time in months of Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper, asleep below us in the hole in the dandelion tree. Tears welled in her eyes and I didn't know if it was because of the scar closing on her forehead, or because the dandelions we'd coiled around the branches yesterday were almost all blown out by now, and the old stuffed animals didn't help us make them, and somewhere over the years we started forgetting to wake them up. And then I did something really crazy and stupid. I kissed her forehead, right under the cut that would become her second scar. “I'll always blame the animals, idiot.” She laughed. And I laughed. And before the last bushel of dandelions could blow away we made another chain, and another, and another. We climbed the tall branches Mr. Hopper used to jump so easily, and at the end of the day I put my notebook in the big envelope and hid it beneath Ellie's head in the little hole, where everything was safe, no matter what. Elsie took my hand, as we looked at them. Tommy's fur was matted, and dirty. Mr. Hopper's ears were drooped, mud on his paws. Ellie's trunk was wrapped around all of them, a wilted, decaying bouquet of dandelions nestled behind her ear. So we let them sleep, protecting my notebook, our castle, and everything that ran exactly a mile up and down the hill in either direction. And we knew we'd all be safe so long as there were dandelions in our tree. “You know, our races are actually pretty stupid.” I said, as we walked across the yellow dandelion field and the sun went down. “Yeah, I know.” “So how come we still do them?” “Because all I know how to do is make dandelion chains and run away from things.” “That's not tr--” She smirked, kissed my cheek, and dropped my hand. “Ten...nine...eight...” I rolled my eyes, shaking my head. I looked back at her scar, scars. And for the first time, I could not see them. I think that means that she was happy. “Six....five...four...” “I'm so gonna beat you.” She laughed. “two...one...GO!” And I felt her kick off, felt the grass sway against my ankles as she ran in the other direction. I waited for a second, turning around and watching her run, her long hair Wonder Woman's cape trailing behind her, before finally, I smiled, and ran off the other way. I didn't know if she'd be there in the morning, or the next one, or the one after that. I didn't know where she was running to right now, or ever. But she said she'd always come back. And I believed her when she said it. The next morning, she didn't show up. I sat in the tree writing, by myself, while the animals slept below us and I forgot to wake them up. I waited for her to show up, but I guess I wasn't surprised when it didn't happen. I drew her in the margins. I covered the tree in dandelions because so long as there were flowers in our tree, we'd be together. I had to fool myself this way. I had to make it true. “You're right.” I said to no one, because she wasn't there, and she was the only person I really wanted to talk to. “I do worry. I worry more than you'll ever know, actually. Me, not the animals. Me. I worry. I worry about you all the time. Even when you're here.” But she couldn't hear me. And one by one flowers flew away. And in the morning I'd be there to put them back. Even when she wasn't. ~ ~ I woke up to the sound of someone knocking on my window. I sat up, and saw her, perched in the tree outside my bedroom, seventeen years old, and still barefoot and smiling. “Jesus, Elsie, where the hell have you been?” I whispered as I opened the window and she gracefully climbed in. “Be quiet, we can't wake everyone--” She kissed me and cut me off. “We're fine, Adam. Besides, your mom loves me.” “Yeah but I don't think she would love you breaking into my room in the middle of the night.” “Whatever, stupid.” I rolled my eyes. “Where were you, Elsie? You were gone for over a week.” I watched her as she sat down on my bed, and unzipped her backpack, not answering. “Do you remember these?” And one by one she pulled out three stuffed animals, wet, dirty, moth eaten, but the most familiar faces in my universe. Ellie the purple elephant, Tommy the calico cat, and Mr. Hopper the green rabbit, all sat before me on my bed, in the light of the moon through my open window. The moonlight reflected off her eyes and glinted off the scars she tried to hide with makeup, but that I'd always see, because I'd memorized their exact placement, and I remembered the days she'd gotten them and what she'd looked like when she came running to the big tree, running to me instead of away from me. “Oh my God...” I picked up Ellie, her trunk waterlogged and heavy, her button eyes still perfectly intact. “I can't believe I just left them there...” “They were guarding the Dandelion Tree, of course.” She said. “They were perfectly safe.” She came and curled up next to me, still rummaging around in her bag. “And this...” She tossed the big, manila envelope, heavy with notebooks and pencils, into my lap. “You didn't look at these, did you?” “No,” She said. “I didn't think you'd want me to. I mean you were writing in there just last week and you've had it for as long as I've known you, and you've never let me read it, so I didn't think you wanted me too...” I reached over and stuffed the envelope into the drawer on my nightstand. “Yeah, well...I mean, it's not top secret or anything, despite the label.” I grinned, and looked down at Mr. Hopper, whose paws were so muddy you could hardly tell they were ever green. “And yeah, I still write in there sometimes.” I combed through her long hair with my fingers, stroking it out of her face and behind her ears. She bent her cheek into the palm of my hand, looking at me. “What do you write about?” She whispered. “I don't know. Lotsa things.” “Me?” “Never.” She smiled, nestling down next to me. “And what do you never write about me?” “Well I never write about how crazy and insane and absolutely lovely you are, that's for sure.” Her scars were visible, even though she was smiling. After ten years, I still couldn't figure out how to make them go away. “I love you, Stupid.” She said. We lied there in silence, the moon casting a light across the tattered stuffed animals at our feet almost reminiscent of the sun through the dandelions in our tree on ten different summers that all ran together as one. “Els, is it always gonna be like this?” I whispered. “Like what?” “Like me always asking where you were instead of how you are, never knowing if I'm kissing you goodbye, or if you'll be back in the morning.” “You know I'll always come back.” “Dammit, Elsie, that's not the point.” “I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. But you just don't understand--” “I just don't understand what, Elsie? What it's like to be you? You're right, I don't. But that doesn't mean you can't just let me try.” “I know. I'm sorry. “Because I'll never fully understand you, but that doesn't mean I don't worry about you when you're gone. And yeah, I can't blame the fucking animals, anymore. I get that now.” we were quiet, and tears ran quietly down her face, paving through the dirt in her skin. “I can't help it sometimes.” She said. “I know I never talk about my family and you never ask, but it's because that's what I'm running from, okay? And all those times when we were kids and we'd race home in opposite directions, you'd come here and your mom would have dinner on the table and you'd take a bath and read a bedtime story and fall asleep in your room just down the hall from your parents, and I'd run until I got tired, and then slip in through the window when I was sure my dad was passed out in front of the TV. And there would be the nights when he was drunk enough to be dangerous but not drunk enough to knock himself out, and I'd get hit for running to the tree and not telling him where I was going, or he'd throw a bottle at my head when I slept in too late to leave the house before he woke up, and you and that tree and those stupid stuffed animals were the only thing that ever made me feel like I didn't have to run away, but then I'd let myself get happy for a minute, and forget that my mother was dead and that my father was a lunatic and I'd have to run away for a while until I was properly sad again, okay? That's where I was, Adam. I was fucking running away from you because you made me happy and that scared me because everything that ever makes me happy ends up either dying or throwing bottles at my head. So I'm sorry I worry you. I'm sorry I fuck everything up. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.” She collapsed into my chest, her sobs wracking her body, and I held her and cried into her hair, because I didn't know what to say, and there was nothing to say, and if there was, I didn't know how to say it. I closed my eyes, and Ellie curled up between us, Tommy nestled against Elsie's face, and Mr. Hopper furrowed between our arms. And I think Ellie said something like “I hope the leaves never change.” And even if she didn't, that's how it felt. Summer was short, and life was the longest thing there was. Sometimes we wanted to run away from it. And sometimes we wished it would last forever. After a while, Elsie looked up at me. “Adam?” “Hmm?” I wiped her eyes with my thumb. “Tomorrow, can we put dandelions back in our tree?” “Absolutely.” I started singing, quietly into her ears, until she fell asleep. “Black bird singing in the dead of night...take these broken wings, and learn to fly....” I wrapped my arms around her, Ellie wrapped her trunk around us, and we slept and dreamed of dandelions. “...You have just been waiting for this moment to be free.” But everything blows away eventually. When I woke up, she was gone. I don't know what I expected. It made sad sense. The shape of her body was still imprinted in the blankets next to me, a hollow in the pillow where her head was. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, looking at the bottom of my bed to see that Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper weren't there anymore. I looked on the floor to see if they'd fallen, but they weren't anywhere. And here I was, the summer before I left for college, frantic because I thought I'd lost my stuffed animals. Panicked, I reached over to the nightstand and flung the drawer open. The envelope was still there. Everything was still inside it. So I threw clothes on, stuffed the envelope into a backpack, and walked up the hill to our old tree, the sun just coming up. When I got there, I wished the leaves would never change, because she was there, and I wasn't imagining it, and she was covering our tree in dandelions. “I thought you ran away again.” I climbed up to her. She smiled. “Did you worry?” “Of course I worried. Are you okay?” She took a deep breath, squinting in the morning sun. “I ran. I didn't run away, I just...ran. And I turned around before I got far enough away to want to keep going.” We were quiet. I helped her braid flower stems. “I'm glad you came back.” “Yeah well, I'll always come back.” “I know. I love---” “I think I'm pregnant.” My hands stilled, but hers kept braiding. I stared at her scars. “Actually, I don't think it, I know it. That's why I ran away last week. I was scared. And then last night when I came back, I was too scared to tell you. So I told you about all the other times, and pretended like that was enough, but it wasn't. I'm pregnant, Adam.” But after a while, I realized I wasn't looking at her scars. I was just looking at her. Not what happened to her, but her. Just her. And I don't know why it took me so long to understand that. “You're...” “Yeah.” “And it's...mine?” “Of course it's yours, idiot.” I went to her. “I wish you'd have told me.” “Because you worried?” “Because I worried.” “And now you're gonna have someone else to blame worrying about me on.'The animals worried about you.' 'The kid worried about you.'” “No.” I kissed her forehead. “No, just me. It was always me.” She was crying. “I want it to be as safe as Ellie and Tommy and Mr. Hopper.” “It will be.” “Do you promise?” “I promise.” “I put them in the hole in the tree this morning. In case you were wondering.” “I know. Where else would they have gone?” “I love you.” “You're safe here, you know? You don't have to run away anymore​.” But she fell asleep. And I let her. I took out my notebook and wrote, her head in my lap. I drew her in the margins. We had a long time before the dandelions would blow away. But they'd blow away eventually. I flipped to the first page of the notebook I'd had for ten years and still hadn't quite filled. “Why, you're the best dancer in the whole field!” said Mr. Hopper. “No I'm not! Not as good as Tommy!” “Well, that's just because I'm more nimble!” The alley cat purred, licking his feet. “All cats are! But you've got your own special talents, Ellie!” Ellie's trunk perked even higher. “Really? Like what?” “Weellll...” I said, picking a bouquet of dandelions, which was a hard job because as soon as you went to grab another flower, the one before it had already floated away, “Like being the nicest kindest funniest elephant in the whole world!” I stuck my little dandelions behind her floppy ear, and she giggled. I rewrote that part, in the back, to where we were now. “Why, you're insane, and crazy, and absolutely infuriating. But you're the most beautiful person in this whole field, and this whole country, and this whole world.” I said. “No I'm not. Not hardly.” She said. “Well that's only because you can't see yourself when you're asleep in the Dandelion tree and there's light on your face, and flowers in your hair and I'm worrying about you when you're gone.” Her smile grew wider. “Really? And what do you worry about?” I picked up a bouquet of dandelions, which was a hard job, really, but you made it easy, much easier than it actually was. “I worry that you're not happy. That's all I worry about.” I stuck my little dandelions behind her ear, and she smiled. “Everything blows away eventually.” I said, even though she couldn't hear me. “But I hope you stick around for a while.” I fell asleep next to her. She stayed for a while. We had a baby girl. But everything blows away eventually. I watched each dandelion seed float off, one by one. Eventually there weren't any left. They were all flying. And I didn't pick more. And neither did she. We watched as they left. I let them go. Eventually, I had to let them go. And they promised they'd come back. But I can't wait around forever. ~ ~ June 13, 2007 “Come on, Bunny! Just take this and run it up to the tallest branch, and we'll have a dandelion tree just like the one my daddy drew in this notebook!” I showed him the page, careful not to wrinkle them. Bunny and Alley Cat and Alfie all smiled at each other even though I didn't really know why. “No problem!” Bunny said. He took the flower chain I'd been making all morning, and the others helped him coil it around the big tree like they'd done it a thousand times before, even though I knew that was probably impossible. “Good job, guys! Whoa!” I clapped my hands, and Ally Cat jumped into my arms, licking my face. They were all pretty old, my animals. But they still loved to play. “We made a dandelion tree, just like the picture! It will probably all blow away real quick though...” “No,” said Alfie, with a smile. “I reckon they'll stay for longer than you think.” Her trunk was high in the air, dandelions behind her faded purple ears. We all climbed up the tree, and I put Daddy's notebook back in it's envelope. He didn't know that I'd found it, even though I used to see him writing in it sometimes when I was littler. The light shining through the dandelions was the prettiest color. It made my friends smile real hard, and look at each other real happily, but I didn't really know why. “I love you guys.” I said, lying down in our tree and looking up through the dandelions. “We love you, too, Ellie!” Alfie said, snuggling next to me. We rested for a while in our dandelion tree, before we heard branches rustling. “Hey!” Someone said from below. We looked out over the side. A woman with blond hair a real similar color to mine was looking up at us. Alfie and Bunny and Alley Cat looked at each other, and then back at her, smiling extra big. “Who are you?” I asked. “I'm a friend.” She said. She was smiling, but her eyes looked like they were watering, and I didn't know why. There were little scars on her face. “Think I can come up?” “Well...we don't usually let strangers into our tree.” “Think you can make an exception?” Alfie looked at me and nodded. “I guess so.” I said. “But there isn't much room.” “Oh, there's plenty!” Alfie giggled. “Plenty of room for one more.” The woman climbed up like she'd done it a billion times, which was also impossible. “What's your name?” She asked. “Ellie.” I told her. She smiled extremely big. “That's a really lovely name.” there was a crack in her voice, like she might start crying, but I also didn't know why. “Thank you.” I said. “What are you doing in my tree?” “I used to play here.” She said. “When I was your age.” “Really?!” I said. “Did you live close by?” “Exactly a mile up the hill...well actually, I lived here. In this very tree.” “You did?!” “It was my favorite place in the whole wide world.” She leaned against a big branch, and smiled up at the dandelions. “Did you do this?” She said, pointing at the flower chains. “Yeah. It was real hard. But my friends helped me a lot.” Bunny slowly hopped over to her, and there were real tears in her eyes, no mistake, but she was still smiling super big, so I didn't know what kind of tears they were. She picked Bunny up, and kissed his ears, even though they were dirty. “That's Bunny.” I said. “Bunny, eh?” She wiped a tear. “I used to know a rabbit just like this one. I called him Mr. Hopper.” “Hey! That's what my dad calls Bunny! He wrote about it in his notebook.” “His notebook?” “Yeah, but I can't show it to you, because it's Top Secret. It says so on the envelope. I don't think he knows I have it.” I shoved it under me, just in case. I shouldn't have said anything. She was crying a lot now, but I think it was the happy kind, because even though there were tears coming out of them, her eyes never stopped smiling, and she kept petting Bunny and Alfie and Alley Cat like she'd known them for years and years, which was another impossible thing. “Will you please let me see the notebook, Ellie?” she said. “You won't get in trouble if you let me. I promise.” “How do you know?” “Well, I don't.” She said. “But just trust me.” “Let her see it, Ells!” chimed Alfie. “It'll be okay.” I wasn't so sure, but something in the way she said it made me believe her. So I pulled it out and handed it to her. “Just be real careful. It's kinda old. We can't get it dirty.” She nodded, and I let her read the words my daddy had written, only some of which I was able to read yet, myself. I was only in second grade. I was learning pretty fast, though. I watched her flip through each page, smiling at some parts, laughing at others, and crying quietly through most of it. She read each word carefully, and stroked each of the margin drawings with her finger. She touched the pages with dirt smudges in the corners, and stared at each eraser mark, every word crossed out and filled back in. “Do you know my Daddy?” I asked. “A little bit.” She said. “It's been a long time, though.” “How long?” “Too long. Far too long.” She smiled at me, as she turned the page, scratching beneath Alfie's trunk the way she liked it. “Hey, Ellie. Who's this?” Daddy had climbed up the tree, and was staring at the woman. He didn't look angry that a stranger was in my tree with me. I don't really know what he looked like. But he stared at her, and at the animals, and at me, and the notebook. I couldn't figure out what he was feeling like, and usually I could. “I convinced her to let me up.” the woman said. “We were just talking.” Daddy sat down between us, picking up Alley Cat and ruffling his fur. “He could really use a bath.” he said. “I used to call him Tommy, you know?” He laughed. “I bet he likes both names.” The woman said. “Yeah. I bet he does.” Daddy's face looked a lot like the woman's right then, but I think the way his eyes were wet were a little less happy than the way hers were. I think there were other things in the way he was smiling. Things I didn't understand. “Ellie, do you think you could take Alley Cat and Bunny and Alfie down to the grass and play for a while?” he said. He didn't look at me or the woman, but at the notebook she was holding. He didn't look angry, though. I don't really know exactly how he looked. I took my friends and we climbed down the tree. We ran far enough away that they wouldn't think I was listening, but that I could still hear them if I listened real hard. So we sat and started weaving dandelions into chains, playing I Spy, and I tried to hear what they were saying as best I could, even though I probably wasn't supposed to listen. “Why did you stop writing about me?” The woman asked him. “Because eventually I had to stop waiting for you to run back home.” “But I always come back.” “Yeah.” He said. “You always come back.” It was quiet. The wind blew a few dandelion seeds around our faces, and Alfie sneezed when they got too close to her trunk. “Did you teach her to do this? The dandelions?” “No, actually. This is the first time she's done it...she must have seen it in the notebook. I thought I had it hidden.” “In the hole in the Dandelion Tree?” He laughed, and looked up through the branches. “Yeah.” He said. “In the hole in the dandelion tree.” “There's no safer place on Earth.” “Obviously, there is.” He laughed. “Or it wouldn't have been found.” “You know what I mean.” “Yeah. I always know what you mean.” “I'm sorry.” “For what?” “I thought you always knew what I meant.” “I want to hear you say it.” “I'm sorry for running away again.” “She worried about you.” She laughed and I could hear the tears in her throat. “Yeah? And the animals, too?” “Yeah, they missed you, too. You should have warned them.” “I should have. I'm sorry.” They were quiet for a while. Bunny and Alfie were arguing over whether or not the rose they had I Spied was considered red or pink, and Alley Cat was stretched out in the sun, probably going to fall asleep, like he always did. I listened real closely for them to start talking again. “I worried about you, too.” “I know.” “Not just Ellie and the animals. Me. I worried. I worried a lot, Elsie.” “I know.” “So why'd you do it?” “Because I wanted you to run after me, Adam. I wanted you to lace up your goddam running shoes and zip your backpack and come chasing me. You can't just sit here and deliberately forget to braid the flower chains and give up when they all blow away. You have to save them.” “Why do they have to blow away, though? Why can't they stay? Dammit, why do they have to leave?” He was crying, staring at her, and she was crying too. Alfie tried to distract me so I'd stop listening, but I couldn't help it. So she let me listen. “Because they're scared. They're scared of saying goodbye so they fly off before they have to.” They were quiet for a while. “I spy...something...red!” I said. And they all started guessing. “The flower bush over there! The cardinal in the tree!” “No...No... It's the spaghetti-o stain on Alfie's trunk, sillies!” “You can stay, if you want.” I heard him say. “There will always be flowers in this tree so long as we're together.” “I can't promise they'll stay put forever. They've got a tendency to float away.” “Then I'll catch them. Every last one of them, I'll catch them.” So Alley Cat slept in the overgrown yellow dandelion field, and Alfie and Bunny and I chased each other around until our knees were grass stained, and our cheeks were sunburned, and Daddy and the woman joined in, and we ran and laughed and played until the sun started to go down, and the dandelions started floating up from the branches. And then when it was time to go home, we lined up side by side, the animals and notebook in its envelope asleep in the Hole in the Dandelion Tree. I held daddy's hand on one side, and the woman's, whose name was Elsie, on the other. “We're gonna race.” She said. And Daddy smiled bigger than I'd ever seen him smile. And she started counting down. “When I say Go...ten...nine...eight...” Daddy squeezed my hand. I looked up at Elsie's face. There were tears on her cheeks, glistening atop a thin line beneath her eye that must have been a scar. But I knew they were happy tears. They were the happiest tears I'd ever seen. “six...five...four...” “Are you ready?” Daddy whispered. “You bet.” I said. “I'm so gonna beat you.” “three...two...one...Go!” And we flew, like dandelions in the wind, all of us, in the same direction, never letting go of each others hands, because actually, it didn't matter who was winning, anyways. I knew the dandelions in our tree and in our field were all going to blow away faster than we could replace them. But that was okay. I thought about what Daddy said. There would be flowers in our tree so long as we're together. And that was enough for me. So we just ran.

Of Flight 11, Buildings Falling, and Other Terrors

We were awake early. Not much was said. We did not look at each other, Omari and I. We spoke only to Allah. We asked for salvation, for this day in history to be successful in His eyes. We were not scared. We could not be scared. We were men, we were not children. It was for the name of Allah. It was all for Allah. The Nissan Altima we'd rented had an air freshener hanging from the mirror, vanilla scented. I flicked it with my fingers, watched it spin and sway on it's fragile strings. America, the world, hung from fragile ropes. Today we'd cut them. ~ ~ ~ “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” They were in turmoil. They could not have understood that this was for Allah, that this was good, this was planned, this had to happen. They could not comprehend that this was not murder but sacrament. That we were not killers, but messengers. “Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves.” I held the microphone in my hand, staring out the windshield at the heavens we would all be so blessed as to roam in a matter of moments. Allah wafted through embassies, seas and atmospheres, through walls and engines and windows, and accompanied us. We cowered before him. He reclined in the faith that we would obey his demands. And he waited. Omari knelt before him in prayer. He was not afraid. He could not be afraid. There was nothing to fear. We were on our way to Allah. But we are human, Omari and I. You cannot blame us for sweating. Outside the cabin, the Americans cried, screamed. Some tried to revolt. Some stared out the windows. Some made phone calls on hand held devices and sobbed at whoever was waiting on the other line. It would not matter. We were going to Allah. But they could not have understood. Allah was smiling. He was waiting and he was calm. He was calm but never pleased. We must always be vigilant and pleasing. We must never mistake these roles. This is another thing the Americans could not have understood as they sobbed into pieces of metal and plastic. That they had mistaken their role as underling. The target loomed on the horizon, beacons. To us, of promise. To them, of doom. They could not have known otherwise. Omari sweat, trying to conceal this sin in a mask of prayer. Behind us, Allah watched and waited, counting what we knew were redeemers, but would be noted as casualties. He was not afraid. For once we were pleasing him. We could relax in his presence. We were doing what he wanted. We were thin and fragile strings with little substance or bone. He could crush us with a twinge of his fingers, a flick of his eye brow. I sat before him, and I dared to look my King and savior in the eye. He was amused. People screamed behind us. People cried behind us. “Having second thoughts, my child?” People stopped screaming and started embracing. They were accepting what could not be argued. “This is the right thing. This is what you were made to do, child.” Omari's prayers made sounds, echoing off the dashboard, sweat pooling at his fingers. People cried, people screamed, there'd be no acceptance. They could not understand. The sound of it drummed along my ears, their fear and despair wrapping themselves around my bones and strangling, shaking. Their panic surged through my veins, and I willed the torment of their screams to escape me, but louder and louder and louder they grew. Hands clamped across my ears I looked at Allah smiling at me and I knew that he could not hear. He could not hear the screaming. The buildings would fall and he would not feel the weight of it. People would burn and he would not know the sting of it. Screams would enrapture whole worlds and he would shroud himself in silence so easily, so damned easily. “Fight in the cause of me,” he said simply. I could count the bricks on the towers now. I could see people through the windows. I saw a woman at a desk. A man at a machine. A man at the telephone. A woman staring at me, through the glass, her mug of coffee dropping and shattering while she stood, unable to move. I looked at Allah. Omari closed his eyes. All in the name of Allah, all in the name of Allah, all in the name of Allah. Behind us, they screamed a scream you have never heard. They cried in ways I did not know to be possible. “Do you hear them?” I asked Him. But Allah only smiled. So Omari flew the plane. Buildings falling. People screaming. People dying. I went through windows. I went through walls. Bodies in pieces. Bodies that did not exist anymore. I found Allah in the fires. He said “No, child. I do not hear what is insignificant.” Omari's fingers flew through air, one by one. The woman's coffee mug was dust in his nails. I looked at Allah, square in the eye. I told him, “I was wrong. You were wrong. We were all wrong,” because the screams were inside of me. The fire licks beneath my skin as I deteriorate. “You were wrong. This was wrong,” I scream, the sound of it inaudible beneath the noise of the Hell we have created in the name of Heaven, because the sounds of apology and motive cannot silence the sounds of death and the finality of desolation that would be unforgivable. So buildings fell. Planes obliterated themselves. People screamed, halted to a silence. Ringing in me. The sounds of it pounding, blaring within me long after the people watching from below stopped listening. “You were wrong.” is what I tell him. “This was wrong.” But we crashed planes. We collapsed buildings. We silenced screams. And it was too late for a change of heart.

The Impossible Language

Le Petite Livre For My Child Chapter One Once upon a time, in a kingdom very far away, there lived a Princess named Annabella who had dark hair and fair skin and eyes that were as dark as the night sky but as bright as the stars. She was no longer a child but not yet a woman when she convinced herself she had fallen in love with a traveler from another land. His name was Henry. He was as handsome as a King, but as privileged as a beggar. There was once a night when Annabella was fourteen and he was sixteen when he showed her his sword and taught her how to wield it. Her skirt swayed atop the floorboards and the sound of it and their dancing footsteps echoing off the ceilings was their music. There need not be another sound; this was enough. He would take her outside in the middle of the night and teach her about the stars that dimmed in comparison to her eyes, and about the planets with their own atmospheres and kingdoms and people and stars, and in his whispered “iloveyous” were also whispered“I'm going to build you a rocket ship, and I'm going to take you where nobody else has ever gone and I'm going to love you on this planet where it is only you and I and the more we love eachother the brighter our star will shine when you look at it from the garden miles and miles and miles below where the 'Iloveyous' were whispered in the first place.” So Annabella believed him, and he believed himself, too, and the only people that did not believe in their incandescent love were her parents, who saw his ragged shirt sleeves and dirt smeared cheeks and nothing else. So the beautiful Annabella tore her dress and tangled her hair and ran through puddles, and then the two of them ran away to where Henry had come from, and so it was easy for him not to look back, and she tried to be just like him and look only forward, as well. He took her to a place called America, where they spoke in tongues she did not understand and laughed at the nonsensical words she tried to speak to them. She would say Bonjour and understand, after a while, that their ears did not understand her, her purpose, her manner. And finally there came the day when every star in the sky burst and showered down around her as she watched men in uniform carry a wooden casket they insisted her Traveler boy was inside of down marble church steps and to grave yards that made her eyes very very dim. She cried and she pleaded for them to understand that they had made a mistake, that Henry was not in the casket or in the ground, that he was in the sky in her eyes, and he was so very much alive, and it was impossible for him to die because their love was infinite. But they laughed at the words they did not have the time to comprehend, and after every star and every moon had finally gone dark in her world, she stopped weeping. But it takes a very long time for every single star to go out, and so she wept for a very long time. She stayed in America, because when she had allowed herself to fall in love with the traveler boy she had also allowed herself to begin a new life, free from the constraints of corsets and powdered noses of Paris, and money was very hard to come by when you were an eighteen year old girl who spoke no more than five words of the country's tongue. Annabella knew very little of the world or of the stars, but she knew of love, and she knew of its fallacies, two, and she knew that if she needed it badly enough, money would come to her. So she summoned it, and men in alleys summoned her, also, and they tore her dress and her heart and her conscience and every piece of her, until all of these tattered pieces eventually came together to form something new and whole and unbreakable in its very fragility; a baby boy. She named me Henry, after the man she imagined would have been my father, had the stars in her eyes not fought as they crossed. So America stretched on, and so did her corsets, night after night, me watching, silently, cold and scared from keyholes or doors left just barely ajar. My mother, the once beautiful young Annabella, crying silently, being paid for her beauty and clean body, lonely men in tattered clothes paying for the shoes on my feet or the bread on our table. And there were nights I remember vividly so many years later, when our illegitimate breadwinners paid visits to me, too. One man, in particular. A tall and slender man with blonde hair and boots polished so perfectly I could see my reflection in the toes, so different than the others, so much luckier and so much meaner and so much more a devil because he could afford so very much and he chose my mother and her ten year old child. He would tell me not to make a sound and he would do things to me I did not, could not, will never understand, the same types of things I pretended I did not see him doing to my mother while she closed her eyes and dreamed of me and money. And I knew that without me, without the way I needed shoes or food or clothes, she may not need this man or the others in her life, and I felt as though I would have to live my entire life looking for ways to repay her. I am a man now, somehow a father, even, and I know I would never, no matter the consequences, want my child to feel as though he must repay me for being his father. But I cannot shake wanting to fix things for her, take them back because I know they are my fault, no matter if she believed they were or not. A little boy cannot look at his mother crying beneath a man she does not love for the sake of her child, and forget the way it looked. They pulled her and pushed her and she was silent because she did not know the words with which to speak to them, her tongue could not form the correct syllables of their crude English, and it did not matter, because if they could have understood her, I do not believe they would have been happy. But here is another reason I want to repay her: they could understand me. I'd grown up in this land, I was not foreign like my mother, the words I heard in markets or in schoolyards found ways to attach themselves to the words I learned at home, and I could understand the men, and my mother, too. But as the one with shined boots and blond hair killed bits and pieces of us off part by part, I said nothing. My mouth stayed closed, even when words boiled behind my teeth. There was so much I could have said and so many things I wish I would have, but I chose to make words impossible, and it did not matter that I could understand two languages, I spoke neither. By the time I was twelve, I'd forgotten what it felt like for words to vibrate between my lips, fly into someone's waiting ears. I was silent in a world where I understood too much, and she was silent in a world where she understood too little, two silent mouths in a screaming country, who could not even speak to eachother for fear of missing a consonant. So we spoke, my mother and I, through the mouths of other people. Writers, authors, storytellers, I'd go to the library and pick the thickest book I could find and when the men left us both alone, I would curl into her side as we spoke every word we could find into eachothers eyes instead of ears. I circled SORRY she circled Q and U and O and I until she had made a word, and I didn't know how to tell her what I was sorry for, and if I could have found a way, maybe we would have circled different words. So I circled LOVE, and I circled A and M and O, U, R, until she understood. And in circled letters of an English encyclopedia, she wrote me entire stories in French, about princesses named Anabella and Kings named Henry and love that was infinite, and I wrote her stories about kittens because kittens made her smile, and about rockets to stars, because stars made me see what her smile maybe used to look like, before me, and before she had to circle letters this way to be understood. We told eachother fiction because fiction was malleable and reality was not, and we needed to be able to control things for once. So we used words that no one else knew in a language no one else spoke to write about lives that no one actually lived. We wrote until we fell asleep. We did not let the other see us cry. We wrote until we forgot our language was as far away from home as fiction to reality. We wrote until we'd stopped noticing we were writing, words coming and frothing and boiling with a fluidity we'd forgotten how to speak with our mouths, and in the absence of inhibition or strangling thoughts, words flew out that we didn't know we were thinking in the first place, and if we had, maybe we'd have stopped ourselves from saying them. So we wrote until we fell asleep. And I dreamed about the stories. And I don't really know if she dreamed at all. But if she did she wasn't thinking about the stories. She was thinking about the nightmares she'd wake up to, not wake up from. a French mathematician and physicist of the late 19th century introduced an important insight in which he attempted to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to discover which geometry applies to space by experiment. He considered the predicament that would face scientists if they were confined to the surface of an imaginary large sphere with particular properties, known as a sphere-world. In this world, the temperature is taken to vary in such a way that all objects expand and contract in similar proportions in different places on the sphere. With a suitable falloff in temperature, if the scientists try to use measuring rods to determine the sum of the angles in a triangle, they can be deceived into thinking that they inhabit a plane, rather than a spherical surface. In fact, the scientists cannot in principle determine whether they inhabit a plane or sphere and, Poincaré argued, the same is true for the debate over whether real space is Euclidean or not. For him, which geometry was used to describe space, was a matter of convention. Since Euclidean geometry is simpler than non-Euclidean geometry, he assumed the former would always be used to describe the 'true' geometry of the world. To my child, your father writes books for you and I write letters to you. This is how it goes, it seems, though we didn't actually choose for our lives to end up like this. This is what we deserve for allowing our mouths to close and our eyes to shut when we looked at eachother. We forgot we had options, so we copped out. And my baby, I'm so sorry. I don't think you'll ever read these letters. That's another thing I would not have chosen if I'd realized I was choosing. But how could I not write them. And how could I not hope. When I met your father I was eighteen and he was nineteen. I never stopped talking, and he never started. I talked enough to fill both of our silences. I said The weather's really lovely. I used to think raindrops were little fairies. Did you ever believe in fairies? I had a professor that looked like Tinker Bell. Peter Pan was my favorite book when I was nine. I kept a copy under my pillow. That's how I found out about the tooth fairy. I felt my mom move the book out from under my head. She denied it, of course. Typical. I don't know why parents are so desperate for their kids to believe in fairy tales. And he said nothing, but because this was him, and he never said anything, anyways, I could not have understood that maybe I'd said something to add to the silence. But I know now that there are a lot of ways to subtract from zero, and I'm an expert of this art. Your father wrote books for me, too, a long time ago. This was how we fell in love. He was quiet with a stewing mind too thick for me to stir and I never stopped talking about little nothings that did not equate at all with what I was feeling. That's the kind of person I always was, I couldn't help myself. I talked to fill silences. But sometimes silences can't be filled, and I only made them bigger. But he wrote to me what he wouldn't say, or at least parts of it. He wrote about your grandmother leaving her home in France for a love that could not last in a country that could not comprehend a single word she said, about selling her body to feed her son. About the summer he stopped talking. About talking to his mother by circling letters in encyclopedias. And I always thought this was very, very sad. Two people that love eachother limitlessly but cannot speak to one another and will not even though, if they allowed themselves, they could. This seemed to me the dead end street of compromising happiness, of unfairness, of treachery. But it seems we've become this. We've become such traitors to what we deserve. Again, you won't read these letters. That was the choice we made in hopes that we'd forget about the first choice, the one we didn't think about nearly enough when we made it. We said we'd all be happier if you did not hear from us. That we could forget and move on and continue our lives of creating and filling silences. But we we wrong, honey. We were wrong, and I'm sorry, and you have every right to crave the letters we won't let you read, and hate us for having to write them in the first place. We didn't deserve the choice, but we deserve the consequences. So that's why he writes books for you. It's the same as when he wrote them for me. Because it is the only way. He could not speak to me because he had forgotten how. He cannot speak to you because I made the decision for him that he was not a father and I was not a mother and we did not need to pretend otherwise. So he writes to everyone in the world, in the vague hope that maybe you'll pick up a copy and know without saying that he loves you and he is sorry for the mistakes I made on his behalf. Fourteen days ago, after nine years of waiting, you found the book. I can't help myself, darling, I watch you. You go to the library on Thursdays at 4:15, just after your soccer practice. I know this because I, too, go to the library on Thursdays at 4:15, hiding myself behind shelves or computer screens, silently watching without speaking, so we're right back where we started. You're always wearing grass stained shin guards and jerseys, your hair tousled. The woman you call “mother”, I don't know if they've told you the truth yet or not, sometimes stands behind you with her hands on your shoulders, or twirling your hair between her fingers. Her dark golden hair matches yours well enough, and for a moment it all seems to make sense. A young mother and her handsome little boy at the library. And I feel out of place in this stage, my role unnecessary to the plot, and I want to rewrite my character out of existence in the pursuit that things would end with a happily ever after. But you're there in the fiction department and I'm here where things are so very deceivingly real, and there's always going to be that one member of the audience who cannot just pretend that my costume helps me to blend with the scenery. But you look happy. She calls you Andy. I like the name Andy. And honey, it fits you. You smile when she says something funny in your ear. She nudges you when she sees an interesting title for you to look at. But fourteen days ago she was speaking to the librarian at the other end of the building when you stumbled across the single copy of Le Petite Livre I had nestled between the books I'd seen you take out in the past, your favorites, I took the liberty of assuming. You looked at the cover for a moment, immediately flipped it over to read the back. I knew what it said, I'd memorized it. I recited it to myself when I woke up in an empty bed, when I got the mail, when I showered, when there were silences I'd run out of ways to fill. I liked the last line because it was a lie. “Speak and you'll be heard.” A lie from a liar who didn't listen to his own advice. This is what we all boil into. So you read the summary of a book about a fictional little boy with an aristocratic French mother and adventures between the lines of things already said, but what you were actually reading was “Dear Andy, I hear that's your name, I'm sorry this happened to us, and here's how it happened.” He didn't do a good job of remembering fiction versus reality. But maybe he did and the two just blur together after a while. But I want to show you my chapter. The one he didn't publish. I was young. That's not an explanation. That doesn't make anything better. That's not a reason. It's a cop out. I know that. But I need to fill silences. And I don't know what else to say. I was young. Eighteen. I'd known your father for four months. Month one I talked so we could get to know eachother. But I learned nothing of him because he didn't join in, and he learned nothing of me, because what was I saying to help him? I like root beer floats. When I was a kid I watched Jeopardy with my grandfather and he always ate cashews. The weather's bleak. This conversation is bleak. Maybe it's me that's bleak. I've turned everything fucking bleak. Month two he wrote me stories about his mother. He wrote so much about his mother. Like in telling me these stories there was something he gravely wanted me to understand, but I could not connect the dots. France. America. Henry. Rape. Prostitution. You. Silence. Silence. Everything's gone silent. What do you want me to say now? And that was where things got complicated: I didn't know what to say. Month three I told him I was sorry that sometimes bad things happen and no one ever deserves it and he circled in the newspaper HIS FAULT and jabbed a finger at his chest, and I said it was no ones fault that his mother was killed other than the killer's, and he pointed at HIS FAULT and I forgot to notice if he still pointed at himself, so I said Yes. His fault. It was his fault. Not yours. The Killer's. But this is what happens when we try to speak using other people words: we don't know for sure what they mean. So he pointed at OVER and I said Yes you can stop blaming yourself for what you couldn't control, it's over. But I don't know what he meant so I don't know if I responded correctly, does anyone ever respond correctly? We listen for what we want to hear, and when we get that, how do we know they meant it? It's an impossible language, love and living. Impossible but inevitable. And then month four came and for once there were a lot of things I didn't say, and the roles of ourselves started to reverse. He was circling a lot more words a lot faster, and I was seldom responding to any of them because I didn't understand a damn thing he tried to say and he wouldn't understand if I told him that, and even though he was fluent in two languages he was a foreigner to using them and if this was true then what was the point of him. And so then one sleepless night when I didn't speak and neither did he, you crawled inside me and tried to fill the silence but I stifled your sounds, because there were so many other things I could have done, but I was never one to think before I spoke or did. I hid behind big black shirts, pillows in my lap, circled PERFECTs and FINEs and NOTHING WRONGs. In eighteen years I'd never run out of things to say. I could tell the cashier at Pizza Hut my entire life story and somehow get her to tell me hers, I told him about my fifth grade crush on the boy from Phil of the Future, I told him how I organized my sock drawer, I told him about the carpet in the bedroom of my best friend from Kindergarten. I told him everything I thought to say, but this, this I could not tell him. My body refused to allow the knowledge of what was happening inside of me to translate into a communicable form and for the first time in my life, I could look in the mirror, and understand what it was like to be Henry Rousseau, with words brimming out of my every crevice only to be shoved back into the dark to fade away and lose meaning altogether. But then Andy, you came, and I could not hide it, but I tried, he knew what was happening even though I did not tell him because though he was mute his mind was unquiet, and he was only pretending to let me win at my own game. So here's the thing, I was young, and that's my only excuse, even though it's useless. I don't have an answer for you, and I don't even remember asking myself the question. You were there and then I was signing papers to send you away and then you were gone and I was back in our apartment and we were lying on our sides looking at eachother in a silence so heavy we nearly suffocated and somewhere across the city or the globe, I don't know which or why the measurable distance matters when what does matter is that my love should have been immeasurable, you were alive and asleep in someone else's crib or awake in someone else's arms. The point is you were not between us when you should have been and we both knew that but I wouldn't tell him and he wouldn't tell me that he knew it, either. He reached out and touched my stomach. And I knew that he knew. He said nothing. I said “Sorry.” He said nothing. I said “You could have stopped me.” He said nothing. I said “I guess I could have stopped you, too.” And he said nothing. And in the morning he did not look at me. And I heard his voice for the first time. He said “Sorry.” And I circled YOU And I pointed at the word to make him look. I pointed at him and myself and I don't know what I was trying to say. But the point is I said nothing. And he was gone. And so were you. And so was I. We're both sorry. That's the moral of what I'm trying to tell you, sweetheart. There are infinite words in our language, or any. But Sorry's the biggest. -Your mother. Amy I used to dream about growing up. I was never one of those kids who wanted to stay young forever. I believed in the future more than anything else, I believed in it too much, I guess. I had a romantic idea in my head of what my life would be. It didn't matter that how it was now didn't fork off in roads that would in any way lead to what I imagined. What mattered was that I imagined them anyway. Like the future, I believed too much in my imagination, but this idea was childish, and I wanted to be a grown up. So I tried to stop imagining and start living. Easier said than done. I flew through my childhood so fast the wind was tearing at my eyelids, so I didn't have much time to see what I was passing. I was pedaling too fast and I refused to use training wheels. I wanted to got to college in New York city, drink coffee on the subway, meet a boy with a briefcase full enough to pay for everything I wanted, marry him in Central Park, have two children with hair the same color as ours that I could lug around to piano lessons or soccer games or wherever it was he wanted to go. I wanted to leave my posh job at the Paper early to pick him up from school when his stomach ached. Take him home, heat him canned soup while we watched the Ellen Show from the living room couch. My husband would come home from work, singing as he walked through the door. We'd roll our eyes even though we loved the sound of his voice. He'd kick off his shoes, pull off his tie, undo his top two buttons, and collapse on top of us as the child giggled and tried to save his soup from spilling. The father and child would fall asleep to the television, hot with laughter, and I'd quietly get up to make dinner or take a shower or get to work on the latest hard hitting story I'd been assigned. The words would flow effortlessly, my story would unfold flawlessly, I'd be praised by the Editor in the morning over coffee, I'd be kissed as I walked through the apartment door in the evening. Life would be easy. Life would be simple. As black and white as a newspaper. That's what I wanted. I didn't want pink bicycles with streamers or rainbow wallpaper or hands sticky with glue and glitter. I wanted a type writer-esque dysfunction that I could write into perfection. But being a journalist is about getting the point across without planting flowers along the sidewalks. And life, I failed to realize, was having to fertilize the weeds until they became a jungle. So I sped through childhood and I blinked a lot and then it was over. I had the Journalism degree from Columbia. I had my dream job as Features Editor at the New York Times, in an office with a view of the Empire State building, where somewhere my husband sat in a black suit with a picture of me on his desk. I had an apartment twenty of my college dorm rooms could fit inside of. I had what I wanted. But I was missing the kid. The tickle fights before bedtime. The ears I would obligatorily tell to stay little forever, even though I thought this wish was petty. The little bath towel that had a hood and teddy bear ears I could wrap him up in so he wouldn't shiver while downstairs the father heated milk and honey in his son's favorite cup while shouting at the football game he didn't actually care about. I was missing the meat of my story. And I wanted to stop writing it and start reading it. “What's the Doc say?” my husband said into the phone. I could hear the microwave buzzing in the background. “He says we---why are you cooking? I told you I was bringing home takeout.” “Got hungry. I'll still eat. He said we what?” “I'm just saying we should have saved the left overs for—never mind. He said we need to 'explore other options.'” “Other options? The hell are other options? You have sex, you have a baby. And obviously that isn't working.” “You're making it sound like we should just give up.” “No, no.” I heard him take a bite of leftover lasagna. “I didn't mean that.” There was silence on the line. We met on the subway, just as I'd imagined. He'd joked about tourists. I'd joked about his Mets hat. He asked me out for coffee. I was three hours late to my interview with the Mayor of New York. It didn't matter. I could revise that part out in editing. Just like every other imperfection. I'd get the point across. I didn't need the extra words. We talked about everything. We pretended we loved everything about the other. It was the quintessential twentieth century marriage. It was everything I wanted and everything I understood without having to think about the words I was using. I could revise in Fact Checking. That's what I always did. I could make mistakes so long as I could fix them with white out and the backspace key. But our marriage was only colorful for as long as I could stand it. Then the blues started to turn into periwinkles and indigos and cyans, the reds to scarlets and crimsons and I wasn't permitted color in this issue so I had to turn things back to gray before I sent myself off to the printers. So I threw away my birth control pills, and we led eachother to bed, and we were quiet in the process. Because that's what it was to me, a process. For him it was making love, for me it was procreation and the mapping out of possible birthdays if we counted nine months from this night. And as this continued and the nine month deadline kept being pushed farther and farther back as we failed at what we were trying to do, I think it stopped being love for him, too. We were writing a story so vast and broad we were ants in comparison, and we didn't know what to say next, who to talk to, how to capture readers, how to pull it all together. We were floundering, missing deadlines, writing things we weren't proud of but refused to give up on. We believed in this story as if our lives depended on it, and maybe they did, because we made them that way. But we were running out of words. Conversations turned into “I'll get dinner tonight.” “How was your day?” “Fine. Yours?” “Fine.” “Your boss called.” “Okay, thanks.” “I'm heading into work early.” “Okay. I'll get dinner tonight.” and love and sex turned into this thing we reserved for that short period of time after dinner and before we were able to fall asleep that was mandatory and bleak and a process and a story with an angle determined before we did the research. And in editing I realized we weren't left with much to publish. We were a story without meaning. “So we can do what he says and 'explore other options'.” He was washing dishes in the background. “Do you really think it's worth it?” “Of course I think it's worth it.” “Okay.” “Okay. I'll see you at home.” We hung up without saying goodbye or I love you. Words without meaning. Things we meant but didn't say. Things we should have said. Infertile. That's the word we didn't use, among others. Not fertile, unable to reproduce, unsuccessful at achieving pregnancy. That's what it meant in black and white. I didn't understand the other colors. I was a journalist, remember. “You can always adopt.” The doctor had aged since we'd first started seeing him. We'd aged too. Our skin got looser. Our eyes got darker. The future I'd believed in my entire life stopped being the future and started being the present, and it wasn't how I'd pictured it, and just like I'd done every single other day of my existence, I sped through it with my eyes closed and waited impatiently for whatever was coming next, so long as what was happening right now could be over before I had the time to grow attached to it. I looked at the man I married, or at least at his face. Sex we didn't enjoy. Love we didn't express. Words without meaning. Things we meant but did not say. So two years later we were not in labor but in a court room. I was not giving birth but signing papers. The woman on the opposite side of the desk, with tired eyes and unbrushed hair and a cardigan two sizes too big had done these things for me, instead. She'd done what I'd been trying my entire life to accomplish, and she didn't care. She was lucky and she wished she wasn't. I couldn't wrap my head around what she was doing, what she was saying. She was a part of this story that didn't make sense. I wanted to delete her in editing. But I knew they'd bring her back up in the Fact Check. I didn't ask her why she didn't want him. I didn't ask her anything. I said “Thank you” and I shook her hand. She kissed her son's forehead and whispered something in his ear. And that was that. And we had a son. And she did, too. But that was off the record. We taught him how to eat, how to crawl and then walk. We waited impatiently for his first words and for him to fill the silence we were creating, but as the months became years, we stopped waiting, and the doctors told us that he was perfectly healthy, he could hear and see beautifully, and there was nothing awry in his brain or body that could physically prevent him from speaking, we just had to be patient and wait. But patience was a language I could not speak. And waiting was foreign. I love my child. I know he loves me, too. I am his Editor in chief and he is mine. I talk him to sleep and I tell him stories I didn't know I knew how to write, ones with flowers I didn't weed and people that weren't real and feelings that could be as editorial as I pleased and no one would write angry letters in response. He would smile when I used different voices for different characters. His face would stretch and his body would shake when he laughed, but you wouldn't hear the sounds. He drew a lot of pictures. He read a lot of books. We loved him and he became our reality. We loved him despite the fact that our story with him took a different angle than we anticipated. But we couldn't meet eachother halfway, my husband and I. We put every word we spoke and every emotion we felt into our child, and we didn't leave any left for eachother. “Honey.” I was knelt before him at the bus stop on his first day of Kindergarten. “You know that you can tell me anything, right? You can say whatever you think, and I will always love you no matter what it is.” he nodded his head, smiling quietly. “You don't have to be afraid.” he nodded. “Do you have your lunch?” He held up his brown paper bag, a banana sticking out of the top. “Do you have your notebooks?” he nodded. I kissed his forehead. “I love you.” and I knew that behind his barred teeth he wanted very badly to say something back, but he stopped himself before he could say it. And I didn't know what was happening to him or to me or to anyone. So I let the school bus take him away. And I went to work in an office where printers buzzed and phones rang. And I came home to the dishwasher humming along the walls and a husband who didn't sing when he walked through the door. Nothing was how I'd planned. Where could I have gone wrong. I'd written so many stories. Why wasn't this one working out? Why did I depend on ideas? Why did I decide the angle before I did the interviews? Why did I think life was a newspaper? Life was the farthest thing from a newspaper. I didn't let any flowers grow. I'd turned things black and white and read all over. “So what's for dinner?” “I don't know. What would you like?” “I don't care. What about Andy?” “Andy, what would you like for dinner, Sweety?” “Just write it down...” “Spaghetti, then.” “We had spaghetti on Monday.” “It doesn't matter, does it?” “I guess not.” “Right. It doesn't matter.” “Let's give you a bath, Andy!” “He had a bath this morning.” “He's got dirt on his face.” “He's a little boy, of course he's got dirt on his face.” “C'mere, honey, let me clean you up a little bit.” “There. That'll do. See, he's fine.” “He's fine. “He's absolutely fine.” “He's perfect.” “Absolutely perfect.” “Honey do you feel perfect?” “No one's forcing you to talk.” “We're all doing just perfect.” “Just fucking perfect.” “So spaghetti it is.” Andy Yesterday I read the book The Diary of Anne Frank and I really really liked it even though it made me very sad. I didn't like it because of the war things or the story particularly, but mostly because I think I'm a lot like Anne Frank in some ways. Apparently she was very dramatic and theatrical, that's a word I learned at my piano lesson. I'm not theatrical or dramatic, but what really hit me about her is when she said “I think a lot but I don't say much.” When I read that sentence in her diary, I understood Anne Frank a lot more, and also myself. And how even though maybe she did say a lot she probably wasn't really saying anything of real importance. She wasn't talking about what she was really thinking. And me, I guess I'm the same. I just don't know how to talk about all the things I'm feeling and I don't like when people talk about little nothings. So I guess I just don't talk at all. Mom and dad say it's okay, and that I can talk when I'm ready, but they took me to a speech therapist, anyways. Her name is Tracey and she talk and talks and talks. She asks me a lot of questions, about everything. About mom and dad and my house and my school and the kids in my class. I always write the truth, and it always puzzles her. I think she's waiting for me to write something that will give my not talking a reason. But the truth is I don't know the reason, or I do, but I don't know how to put words to it, even in writing. Sometimes there aren't words for feelings, and that's true for most of the things I feel, I guess. Or maybe I'm just scared. But anyways. At the library the other day I got out a new book. Mom said I only had a few minutes to look around because we had milk in the trunk and she didn't want it to spoil in the sun before we got home, so I had to hurry. She stayed at the front of the library so we could go right back out when I was done. I went to the back shelves to check in on my favorites, which is something I like to do every once in a while, though I'm not sure why. I went to the Magic Tree Houses, the Harry Potters, the Eragons, The Goosebumps. Everything was normal, except between two Goosebumps was a new book I'd never seen before, so I pulled it out. It was by some guy I'd never heard of named Henry Rousseau, and the title was in French; La Petite Livre. I don't speak french, but I think it means The Little something. I don't know the last word. The cover had a castle on it. It was probably a fantasy book because of the castle, and I like fantasy books a lot because I like to read about things I don't know about already. What's the point of reading about real life? You wont' learn a single new thing! “Are you ready?” On the way home mom played John Mayer on the stereo. I liked when she played John Mayer. My favorite song was Gravity. When that one came on, I looked out the window as it started to rain, and mom started singing. She was a good singer, but she only sang in the car and in the shower. I was the only one she sang to and that made me feel special. So I got even quieter than normal while the sky turned a calm kind of gray and the wheels sloshed through puddles and she sang softly out the windshield. Oh gravity, is working against me...and gravity, wants to bring me down... Mom and dad don't sing to eachother. I wish they did, I think they'd sound very nice together. I opened La Petite Livre to the first page. The dedication. For My Child The words were circled messily in red pen. I touched the page, the ink soaking through to the other side. I turned the page. Oh I'll never know what makes this man, with all the love that his heart can stand, dream of ways to throw it all away... My mom sang and wheels spun and pages turned and thoughts screamed but lips stayed together. Chapter One Once upon a time, in a kingdom very far away, there lived a Princess named Annabella who had dark hair and fair skin and eyes that were as dark as the night sky but as bright as the stars. She was no longer a child but not yet a woman when she convinced herself she had fallen in love with a traveler from another land. His name was Henry. He was as handsome as a King, but as privileged as a beggar. There was once a night when Annabella was fourteen and he was sixteen when he showed her his sword and taught her how to wield it. Her skirt swayed atop the floorboards and the sound of it and their dancing footsteps echoing off the ceilings was their music. There need not be another sound; this was enough. He would take her outside in the middle of the night and teach her about the stars that dimmed in comparison to her eyes, and about the planets with their own atmospheres and kingdoms and people and stars, and in his whispered “iloveyous” were also whispered“I'm going to build you a rocket ship, and I'm going to take you where nobody else has ever gone and I'm going to love you on this planet where it is only you and I and the more we love eachother the brighter our star will shine when you look at it from the garden miles and miles and miles below where the 'Iloveyous' were whispered in the first place.” So Annabella believed him, and he believed himself, too, and the only people that did not believe in their incandescent love were her parents, who saw his ragged shirt sleeves and dirt smeared cheeks and nothing else. So the beautiful Annabella tore her dress and tangled her hair and ran through puddles, and then the two of them ran away to where Henry had come from, and so it was easy for him not to Oh gravity, stay the hell away from me...and gravity has taken better men than me...now how can that be?... Words were circled, words were underlined, things were written in the margins. And the words in red told a story separate from the words in black, but both stories somehow worked together, and it was hard to tell which story was real and which was fake. It was like two people yelling two different things at the same time and your ears couldn't pick up what either of them were saying, you just heard noise and it wouldn't go away, and two people singing two different beautiful songs at the same time and it wasn't beautiful anymore it was just noise and it wouldn't go away and two televisions on in two rooms but loud enough you could hear both but it wasn't making sense anymore it was just noise and it wouldn't go away so you had to be as quiet as you could possibly be to try and make the noise go away but even then it was so loud, even with your hands tight over your ears it was so so loud and Oh gravity is working against me...and gravity wants to bring me down... And that's what it felt like in the car. The red pen marks screamed at the black letters and the black letters shouted back even louder and mom was singing to everyone and no one and dad was at home yelling at the football game and the rain was really loud on the roof, and the stereo sang even louder than mom, and everything was just so loud, and there was so much noise in the world and I wanted everyone to just be quiet for a minute, please just be quiet, I can't even hear myself think... “Is there anything you want to tell anyone, Andy?” the therapist pushed a dry erase board and marker towards me. I wrote I want to tell people to quiet down. “But if you won't tell them that you want them to quiet down, Andy, how will they know you want them to?” Dad tucked me into bed that night while mom did the dishes. He read La Petite Livre to me until I fell asleep. He muttered that the book was probably “too old” for me. I didn't care. I liked the story, even though it was very sad and very lonely and very scary and hard to understand. And I liked the story the red pen told, too. After a while the different colors, black and red, stopped fighting and started dancing. Black told a story about listening too much and red told a story about talking too much, and when you put them both together, it made sense. It was not a shout or a whisper, but a conversation. Both colors were very sad, though, that was obvious. They were sad at eachother, and at themselves. It felt like when I read the stories I made them feel better. They didn't have to be sad anymore. It was all okay. And when I read the last page I couldn't decide if they were arguing or dancing or just sleeping. There were blank pages at the end and red didn't write anything on them. And I turned them to try and figure out if they were hidden somewhere, but they weren't. It was just white. It was just quiet. No more arguing, no more singing. I didn't know if that was better or worse, but it felt worse, it felt empty, it felt sadder than red and black combined. So I started crying. And then I got out of bed. And then I did something really scary. But sometimes we have to stop the noise by adding to it. “He's asleep.” I took off my shirt, tossing it on the floor, even though I knew she hated that. She sighed and the sheets rose and fell with her breathing. That's all we'd say. That's not all that needed to be said. But it's all that was. I fell down next to her and I did something I hadn't done in almost ten years; I put my arm around her. For a minute it felt foreign. We were silent. Someone's car alarm went off down the block. Rain hit the roof. And then her head curved into my chest as she slept and I held her. And it wasn't like it used to be, where there were so many things we could have said but we didn't need to, because we didn't have to. Tonight we should have said everything to eachother. We should have said at least something. But we didn't know how. And we had to. “I'm sorry Amy.” I whispered. “I'm sorry, too.” she said or lied, I'm not sure. But it was something, and that was more than nothing. There were little feet shuffling across the carpet and climbing between us. His Star Wars pajamas glowed in the dark. His face was warm, and we pressed our cheeks against his as we held eachother. A dog barked in the apartment above us. Someone's car alarm was still going off. Rain hit the roof. The three of our heartbeats matched up. Amy stroked my arm. And then Andy whispered in a little, nervous voice, three words. He said “I love you.” And that wasn't enough, it wasn't everything he needed to say. But it was something, and that was more than nothing. And Amy kissed his cheeks as he fell asleep between us, and I smiled through tears into his neck. And someone's car alarm went off. And a dog barked. And music was coming from somewhere in the building. And these weren't all the sounds we should have made right then. But it was something. And that was more than nothing. To my child, Andy, I know you haven't read these letters, and you never will. But I think this might have to be the last one. You see, I will always love you. Always. Until the end of time, I will never stop loving you. But the thing is, if you knew this, it would hurt you. It would hurt you that I must love through unsent letters and red pens vandalizing your story books, instead of through hugs and hot meals and lullabies. And I don't want to hurt you, or me, either. So I'll stop now. But I'll never stop dreaming up things I wish I could say to you. It's unfair that I can't just say them. It's unfair I must imagine and not do. It's unfair, the world we live in, and the words it uses to spin. We're trying to live in an impossible world with an impossible language, and we get angry when we mix up the grammar. I'm sorry I don't have the book that can teach me how to speak and mean what I say. I'm sorry that's impossible for every single person on the planet, and that all your life, your going to meet people who lie to you, or say something wrong because they've mixed up the syllables. It's all very impossible, you see. Just like it's impossible that me writing these letters is going to help anything. So it's time it ended. But I'll always love you. I watch you, still, in the library, on Thursdays, at 4:15. Somethings changed in you, and also in the woman you call your mother, but I can't tell exactly what it is. But you're lighter, sweetie. I'm glad that whatever it was that made you lighter did its job. Every once in a while you come back to La Petite Livre on the shelf between Goosebumps and Eragon. You flip through the pages, your eyes catching on circled phrases. I know what we've written, your father and I, in the pages. But I don't know exactly what you're reading, and though I could spend my whole life wondering what you see, I can't. I have to move on. I have to let you live. I have to let myself live, too. When you left one day, I took the book with me. Don't worry. I'll return it. You'll never know it was gone. Your father and I sat across from eachother at a Starbucks table. We hadn't seen eachother in ten years. And now we looked at everything but the other. We looked at the baristas looking at the clock. We looked at teenagers taking pictures of their lattes. We looked at old men reading the paper alone. We looked at the artwork on the walls. We listened to people talking but saying nothing. We listened to whatever pointless song blared on the radio. We listened to so many sounds we heard nothing. I slid the book across the table to him. I pointed at FOR MY CHILD. He looked at the words. In red pen I wrote your name, ANDY, on the palm of his hand. He closed his fingers around you over and over again. I took his fingers, and we held onto you together. We looked at eachother in the eyes for the first time. You sweated beneath us. When we pulled our hands apart the red ink smeared onto my hand, too, illegible. We held onto our parts of you. I said nothing not because I didn't know what to say but because, finally, I did not have to say anything. He smiled and said nothing because the silence we made together was not loud or empty, but a tranquility we'd been waiting for since we'd met each other. A quiet where there was room for noise but loud enough you didn't turn up the volume. And he laughed a little. And I smiled. And we held you between our hands as we walked together down whatever street would lead us to the closest place that felt like home. And we didn't need to say anything. And the red and black words stopped arguing in my bag. You rubbed off between our fingers. When we pulled our hands apart, the ink was gone. And we didn't have to say anything. And neither did you. The language of love the language of letting go the language of giving up the language of moving on the language of forgiveness the language of saying what we mean the language of apology It's an impossible language but we can learn it together and I hope that's enough. I love you. I will always love you, Andy. -Your mother.