Breadcrumb #630

ALEX BUXTON

Death rested the end of his scythe in the dust and said a silent prayer for the small body in the canyon, still some way off. He looked around. It was hotter than hell out here, and twice as dusty. A dreadful place to be wearing black.

‘Are you Death?’

A small voice at Death’s side brought him back to the present.

‘Who are you?’

The little girl pointed to the body up ahead, and then her own face.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’

Death craned his neck.

‘Oh, yeah, of course.’

‘If you can’t see from here, we could go closer.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ said Death hurriedly. ‘We don’t have to go closer.’

“It was hotter than hell out here, and twice as dusty.”

‘Do you kill people with that?’

She was pointing to his scythe now.

‘Not really, people are generally already dead by the time I get there.’

‘So what’s it for?’

Death shrugged.

‘It’s good to lean on sometimes.’

‘What don’t you want to go closer?’

Death squinted into the midday sun. Flies were starting to settle on the little girl’s corporeal remains.

‘I don’t really like dead bodies.’

The girl didn’t say anything, she just stood looking at herself lying amongst the rocks.

‘No offense.’

The girl looked at her feet.

‘Well,’ said Death, ‘we need to get going,’ and he started off through the desert.

After a few seconds the girl trotted after him.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

Death scratched his head. Why did everyone ask that?

‘I don’t know,’ he answered truthfully.

‘Will my parents be there?’

Death did a quick mental calculation.

‘Not for a few years yet I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’

There was silence.

‘Your grandma’ll be there,’ Death eventually offered, in an attempt to cheer her up.

‘Yeah?’

After that Death had run out of things to say.

They walked on through the stifling heat. It really is hotter than hell out here, Death thought to himself.

Eventually, the girl piped up again.

‘How much further is it?’

‘We’re nearly there,’ Death told her. ‘Not far to go now.’

The silence alone could kill you in a place like this.

Death found his mind wandering. He looked at the baked, red rocks all around them, carved smooth by millenia of winds, and wondered if, if he was mortal, he’d find them beautiful. He poked one moodily with the end of his scythe as they passed.

‘Will you hold my hand?’

Death left the rocks alone and looked down at his companion.

‘I’m scared.’

Death reached out a hooded sleeve and felt her small hand tighten around his.

‘Your hand feels funny.’

‘Sorry, they’re not really meant for holding.’

‘That’s alright.’

They were at the door now. Sensing their approach, it opened for them. The girl stopped. They stood together, looking at the door.

‘I can’t go with you, it’s against the rules.’

‘Are you sure?’

Death nodded.

‘When will I see grandma?’

‘I don’t know.’

The girl still didn’t move.

As gently as he could, Death put his arms around the little girl and picked her up. He could feel her wrap her limbs around him, burrowing into the space where you’d expect to find a chest with a beating heart. He wondered what that must be like. Softly, he stepped forward towards the door.

‘It won’t hurt.’

She nodded against his neck as he reached through the door and put her down on the other side. As he withdrew his arms she opened her mouth to say something, but before she could make a sound the door closed, and Death was left alone once more in the desert.

He stood for a minute, trying to think of something to say back, then started off again through the dust.

• • •

Breadcrumb #622

WILL BREDDERMAN

"We meet here."

The spot was on the edge of her family's property and mine: a break in the green dusk under the maples and the tangles of wild grape and rose. Kim picked the place that August day, but I was the one who'd discovered it the summer before. I'd read enough books—more than anybody in the third grade—to know that clearings in the woods were special, the sites of secret gatherings, the opening scenes of adventures that pulled you from your dull rural life into the world of action that thrummed just out of hearing and sight. 

With my back seared from hours bent over the baked clay soil of our farm, and with a new school year looming, I was ready for my adventure to begin.

And so, it seemed, was Kim. She was a year ahead of me and a girl, so we hardly talked at school or on the bus that took us ten miles there and back. But she was my closest neighbor and the only one near my age on our road, so between June and September she came over in the mornings and evenings to help me feed the rabbits and chickens. She stayed home for the day's molten core, though, when I picked beans or weeded peas or raked hay all alone. I was an only child, and both my parents had jobs.

Once in June I got to spend an afternoon at her house. It was a double-wide, my dad said, though all I knew then was that it had air conditioning and satellite TV, which made it an enormous improvement on our old farmhouse in my view. Laughing at a cartoon on some exotic station, we woke Kim’s dad and he slapped her and threw us both out.

Standing in her driveway after, her face burned red all over except for the livid handprint on one cheek, and her breath came thick and damp through her nose. So I showed her the secret clearing, and we spent the rest of the daylight building a fort there out of tree branches. We tried giving it a thatch roof tall enough to stand up under, like the hideouts kids built in movies and books, but the walls and ceiling kept lapsing and we never managed more than to crawl inside. 

Every evening after chores, we'd run there to play, telling a story where we were a brother and sister hiding from monsters trying to catch us. 

"We meet here."

It was me who suggested running away before the start of school: I didn't want to go back to the smell of paper and pink soap, to slow boring lessons and no friends. But Kim grabbed on to the idea. 

We'd leave the last night of vacation, she planned it. For a week and a half, we stowed clothes at the fort, scrap by scrap. I stuffed socks and underwear in my pockets every morning before going out to work, and once my parents left I'd run down t-shirts and jeans, a sweatshirt, my winter coat. I figured I'd time my return to just before Christmas. I knew from books that you always came home after an adventure, and everybody always was so glad to see you they forgot to be mad. And school would be easier to take if I went back in January, I thought.

Then, the last Friday of summer, my mom said something alarming as she crossed the kitchen on her way to work. I was at the table with my bowl of cereal.

"Make sure you bring all your good clothes down so I can wash them before school.”

I almost dropped the jug of milk. Soon as her Dodge slipped across the front window, I hurried for the clearing, pants snagging on rose barbs and cable-like vines along the way.

I was piling pants and shirts out of the fort on my shoulder when a voice caught me from behind.

"What're you doing?" 

I turned. It was Kim. The clothing slid down my back to the ground.

"I, my mom, she—" Kim had an angry-looking welt on her arm. I stared at it. She saw where I was looking and turned, so her face and one shoulder pointed at me.

"You're wussing out?" She had both fists curled tight and quaking, and her breath sounded wet again in her nose.

"No!" I stepped back, startled by her blazing face, almost tripped over the mass of laundry. "I have to bring these up so my mom can wash 'em. I have to, she told me! But I'm gonna bring 'em back."

"You told her about the plan?"

"No!"

She eyed me darkly. "I'll go without you, you know. I mean it."

"No! I'm coming! And I didn't tell nobody. Cross my heart."

Her eyes held mine a second longer, then trembled away.

"Okay." She bit her lip. "Remember: Monday night at eleven. We meet here."

The weekend passed in drags and jerks. It seemed I barely opened my eyes on Saturday morning before closing them that night. Sunday ground by: an eternity at church, then lunch punctuated with constant awkward questions from my mom—"Are you excited about school?" "Do you know who's gonna be in your class?" "How come you and Kim don't hang out once the summer's over?"—then an afternoon with my dad pitching hay in the wagon while oily tractor fumes glittered in the early September sun.

“It seemed I barely opened my eyes on Saturday morning before closing them that night.”

Labor Day we drove an hour out to the lake. The parking lot shimmered with windshields and swells of liquid heat. On the narrow band of sand, sun-drunk toddlers spun round their mothers' chairs, hairy dads strode in the water with kids hanging on their shoulders and hands, teen girls in bikinis lounged on towels. My mom propped her chair on the beach, lifted her face to a sky like blue fire, and immediately fell asleep. 

My dad and I waded into the gentle spill of green-brown water: warm at the surface, frigid against my toes and shins. Eventually my dad retreated back up the damp slope with a few words of caution, leaned his head against my mom's legs, and drowsed.

I splashed and paddled around, hoping to win the interest of one of the gaggles of kids nearby. Then, amid the glimmer of lake and sand and sun and sky, I thought I saw Kim. She was maybe a hundred feet from me, and farther into the water, head bobbing on the dappled light.

"Kim!" It seemed that she turned, but when I took a step toward her I slipped on the mossy rocks at the bottom and the lake struck my face, shot up my nose. I stood, spluttered, looked up and saw a dark shape that looked like the back of Kim's head drifting toward where the water turned to a sheet of crumpled foil and stretched toward the green hills.

I called her name again, started swimming her direction. The dark shape kept drifting, rising and settling with the rhythm of the lake. I thrust myself forward, inhaled more water, reached with my feet for the bottom and felt nothing at all. The lake's chill spread through my stomach and lungs. I struggled, thrashed, somehow got myself horizontal and swimming again.

Finally the dark shape loomed into view. It wasn't Kim's head. It wasn't a person at all—just a branch with some dead brown grass hanging off it. I looked back and saw how far I’d gotten from shore: I couldn't pick my parents out in the crowd. My heart sounded like a freight engine, I turned and strained toward the shallows. My legs grew heavy, my arms cramped, my chest felt like it might split with the effort. Water filled my ears and eyes and throat with each stroke. And with each stroke my energy ebbed away. Why fight any more? I was going to die: I accepted it. Finally, I let myself sink.

The lake's ripples rose over my chin, my lips, the tip of my nose...and my feet touched bottom. It was shallow enough I could walk.

I shoved clumsily past several families and straggled gasping onto the beach, my teeth rattling like a handful of dice. I spotted my mom and dad still sleeping, and weaved across the hot sand toward them, coughing and hunched. Finally I reached their chair and dropped on my knees.

My mom's eyes opened. "Ready to go, honey?" 

In the truck I ate a hamburger and passed out. When I awoke everything was dark. I sat up sharp, heard footsteps and my dad's voice downstairs. I looked around: my bedroom. I could just make out the Mickey Mouse clock on the shelf. It was a little after nine.

For an hour I sat in the dark, listening to my dad curse and cheer a static-hoarse baseball game on the TV below. I couldn't turn my light on, since I guessed my mom was upstairs already and would see from across the hall. Every time I blinked, my lids felt thicker, stickier, my eyes stayed shut longer. I tried holding them open till they burned. To focus I counted to a hundred,  a thousand, got bored and then started again.

When Mickey pointed to 10:37 the TV's knob clicked off, and the stairs strained as my dad climbed to bed. 

It was 10:56 by the time the handsaw rhythm of his snores drifted from across the hall. I swung my legs out of bed and stood up: the floorboards squealed as loud as I’d heard them in my life. The noise petrified me, but I glanced at the clock and hurried to my closet, grabbed the plastic bag I’d stuffed with clothes. Luckily, I was dressed still.

I edged into the hallway, tiptoed over the gripes and groans from the stairs, slipped through the kitchen to the back door. The knob whined, the hinges howled, but I got it open enough I could slide into the mudroom, where a breeze sighed at the screen separating me from the outside.

I ran across the blue gloom covering the yard, sweaty despite the chill. I’d be a minute or two late for sure—would Kim wait for me? Cold constellations loomed above, clouds swam across an all-but submerged moon. 

I reached the silhouetted trees, plunged into the brush. It snatched at my bare arms and clothes. I tripped twice, sprang back up. At last I reached the clearing.

It was empty.

“Kim,” I tried, weakly, then listened. Nothing but gurgling frogs and the dry rattle of bugs. 

Panic wracked my insides. She’d left without me! But she couldn’t have gone far, I realized: I really was just a minute late. She’d planned for us to cut through the woods to the road, follow it till it flowed into Route 20, get a ride from a truck driver like on TV.

“Kim!” I called, and listened again. I should have heard her crashing through the undergrowth.

I went and squinted into the low latticed shadows of the fort, reached inside—and pulled out her bags of clothing and food. She was late too, then. I sighed, sat down on the carpet of dead leaves and bark. And I waited. And waited.

Kim grew up to be one of those teenagers who hung out at the gas station and smoked cigarettes: she’d glance at me when I went in to buy a Mountain Dew or whatever and look away like I bored her. I'd see her riding around sometimes with a twenty-something guy who owned a motorcycle. Could be the same guy with a motorcycle my dad says is living with her in the double-wide now. I ran away by myself, eventually.

But right then I neither knew or even could imagine any of that. Right then, I was just a kid, sitting in the dark, repeating three words.

“We meet here.”

• • •

Breadcrumb #616

CHRISTINA ROSSO

I remember her appearing like a shadow at first. I was eight years old. Her body was washed in gray as though she was from one of the black and white movies my aunt let me stay up and watch with her sometimes. I could see right through the woman to the open window, the moon full and blue, illuminating her from behind. As she moved closer to the bed, she gained color and vitality. She was young. Maybe eighteen, maybe twenty, I wasn’t sure. Her black hair weaved in loose curls down the sides of her white nightgown. Her complexion was darker than mine, and reminded me of wet clay. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I named her the woman in white, and she was going to be my bride.

It took me nearly forty years to find her. I had even married and started a family. What else was I to do? I told myself I couldn’t keep chasing a ghost. 

Life was good. My wife was pretty and kind. Our children sprouted freckles across their noses and cheeks like their mother. Their hair was blond like hers. I wouldn’t say I was waiting for the woman in white. Yet she never lingered too far from my mind. 

    I had just started working as a radiologist at Crest Presbyterian Hospital. A woman entered the room for a chest x-ray. “Stand against the machine with your chin resting on the top. Closer. Yes, right there,” I instructed. “Stay still.”

“I wouldn’t say I was waiting for the woman in white.”

     When the x-ray was complete, she turned to face me. The woman in white. She was in a hospital gown instead of a negligee, but it was she. I opened my mouth, hoping my lips would form the necessary words. The woman began coughing, her body contorting with each bark. 

It flashed before me like a film reel. The x-ray would confirm her lung cancer had spread, estimating she had a few months to live. She would die less than two weeks later. Her parents, who had spared no expense on her medical treatment, would erect a grand mausoleum for her with two lion statues stationed outside the wrought iron gate in protection of their beloved daughter.

    Tears stung my eyes. I took the woman in white in my arms and rubbed her back until the coughing fit ended. During my shifts at the hospital, I walked past her room a dozen times until she was gone. 

    A week after she was laid to rest my feet led me to her. It was just past midnight. I patted the heads of each of the lions, the ones I had envisioned, the stone both coarse and smooth. “I’ll take it from here,” I told them. 

I took the crow bar from my bag. The lock on the gate whined and then crunched as it broke. I pushed past the gate, entering the mausoleum. Moonlight cast a spotlight on her coffin in the middle of the room. I went to her, easing the coffin lid back. There the woman in white lay, dressed in the nightgown she wore when she appeared to me all those years ago. I climbed inside, adjusting her so two bodies could fit. I pressed my lips to her cheek and closed the lid, darkness surrounding my bride and me.

• • •

Breadcrumb #524

CAT MULROONEY

Death. The body in its most natural state. The end of wanting. The quieting of the heart and its infinite cravings. Give me. Touch me. Love me back. See me. The body elegance of all that is gone. Exposed. Bones holding moonlight. Bones holding marrow like thin hives. Honeybees take sustenance here. Now, let me be hollow. Essential. Self. Death as downstream. In death, my body owes nothing. 

In love, it asks everything.

When a kiss opens up in the mouth. A kiss you’ve waited for and wanted your whole life. Mouth widens yes. Take it all in. The body would welcome death like a kiss.

But then there’s this. 

Then there’s her. 

Insecure about her square jaw. Her thick knuckles. Her body solid as a stone. Something I could lean on. Something that could bear my weight. Singing her body into mine.

Rhythmic. Percussive. Magic. 

I get off with just her breath on my neck. I get off on just the taste of her kiss. Tangled in her bedsheets. Her pelvis pressed to mine. Bone on bone. I lick the pale white peach fuzz on her jaw and taste metal. I hold her close afterwards because it always makes her cry.

The release.

The goodness.

The way girls like us don’t know what to do with that much tenderness.

Kindness makes us crazy. 

Love fucks us up.

I could touch a boy and never feel a thing. Embarrassed by their desperate bodies. 

It is different with her.

She measures the weight of my breast in her hand and calls it beautiful. She licks a river down my spine and makes me feel the currents. Water racing to the only logical destination. Yes. She presses into me and it is nothing but honeyspill to her wrist. Her touch of yes. Of sweetness. Of now. 

“Water racing to the only logical destination.”

Also, our words. The throb and hum of vocal cords. Before. Talk like breath. Talk like air. Empty and possible. Memories of no pain. Memories of not feeling like broken glass. I breathe her words in.

But calamity always comes to the sickhearted. 

Sicklehearted. 

Love erodes my heart from a fist to a thin fingernail moon. Obliteration. Shadow black. Nearly new. I am a horrific creature. I forget my name and hers. I forget thin fingernail moons left on my skin. Hands contracting around my shoulders. Tattooed scab reminders. Someone touched me long enough to leave a mark once.

Our vigil at the river. Waiting for shooting stars. We swallow ecstasy like candy. Bourbon chasers. Beer cherry red. Blood red. Her mouth red.

I am so naked I take my skin off again. Shed it like a birch tree and lay it down in the black sand dirt of the riverbank. Just a body dancing. Splashing. Water cold and cleansing everything. John the Baptist. Reborn. Holier than Jesus.

Women in the water. Riverstones in my mouth. I suck them clean. Birth them back from between my lips smooth and round as vowels. Silent as prayers and the still pools we swim in.

Blood songs. Blood swimmers. Her bonewhite skin painted with mud. Swirls around her belly. Serpentine coils around her throat. Long mudraked arrows on her thighs. I read her holy sigils. Mysteries. Litanies. Her thighs part in indigo water.

The meteor shower never comes.

Or that’s what we tell ourselves, too busy charting the planetary pull of the other. When she sinks, her hair fans out around her. 

Water so dark I can’t see her.

School of fish. 

Someday I will forget this.

Maybe I already forget this.

She grows gills beneath her sharp jaw. She stays under so long she’s no longer human. I want to call her back to the rocks with me. Come back to me. But, instead, I swallow one smooth stone so I will remember. Her scales flash silver in black water.

I swallow the moment down. 

Swallow her down.

Come back.

We aren’t trying to die. But aren’t avoiding it either. 

There is nothing else anyone can do that will hurt me. 

Nothing left to destroy. 

She is part girl, part fish.

I am part girl, part dead thing.

Two girls high at the river.  

The stone lodges in my belly. Unmovable. Like my heart. 

She doesn’t come back. At least not to me. She suddenly knows about breathing underwater.

• • •

Breadcrumb #413

RACHEL LYON

Jim has been away from this neck of the river a good while. Back in the day he used to come all the time with Chapa. Chapa had wheels; he’d salvaged a beat-up old Chevy from the impound and spent a summer fixing it up. Half the passenger’s side door was rusted through and the Check Engine light wouldn’t turn off and there was just an empty socket where the E brake should have been, but it was effective. Saturday mornings he’d swing by Jim’s dad’s and lean on the horn until Jim ran outside, and they’d drive like the Mad Boys they were to the bend in the highway where the fence dropped off. You had to park on the shoulder and sort of skid down the sandy incline through the trees, and half the time Jim would come home with bramble scrapes all over his shins, but down here in the gully the river was icy clean, the narrow sky bright blue, the trout fat splashing silver, down here in the gully he and Chapa could dose in peace. If you timed it right, and took enough, and maybe wore the 3D glasses Chapa pinched from the drive-in off USX, by the time you were peaking the noontime sun would just have tipped over the edge of the ravine, flooding every shadow and dazzling the rapids. Chapa would whoop and jump from the bank and tear off his shirt and throw off his shoes and chase the sparkles that floated up off the river, gobbling each one up in turn—beautiful, thrashing wet—Look at me! I’m PacMan, man! I’m eating the sun!

    Today is a mild day at the tail end of winter, sixteen years since. Jim was supposed to have been in the air right now, en route to Florida from the Boston consulting firm where he just made Junior VP of Client Acquisition, to hang out at Spring Training with half a dozen of his most valued clients. But this year he’s postponed the trip a few days to come home. The occasion: yet another funeral. Two weeks ago Chapa’s old girlfriend Amber OD’d. OxyContin. The second in her nuclear family, the twelfth in his high school—that he knows of. Jim heard the news from his stepmom, who heard it from Chapa’s mom, Win. He never knew Amber too well but when he thinks of her the moments he remembers feel good and sad and real. How Chapa pined for her in ninth grade math class. How she once showed up at Jim’s dad’s in tears because she thought Chapa’d gone missing. Her mascara stain never came out of his Grizzlies jersey. How one velvet night they skinny-dipped, all of them—Jim, Chapa, Amber, and that other girl, what’s her name—and the girls slept sweet and quiet under a furniture pad in the bed of the Chevy while Jim and Chapa shared their last cigarette and made big plans in the cracking dawn. How just a year and a half ago, when Jim ran into her in the Hannaford’s near his dad’s, Amber dropped two shrink-wrapped chicken breasts in surprise, and laughed. How, when he invited her out for a beer, she confessed she was ten weeks sober.

    She didn’t say anything about Chapa then, and he hadn’t wanted to ask. The truth is Jim came down for the funeral not for her sake—if he came for every funeral he’d be here every month, pretty much—but because he thought that for this one Chapa might come too. But Chapa was not among the mourners at the church today. He was not at the wake at Amber’s sister’s. And he is not down here in the gully now. Jim sits, disregarding his nice black pants, and takes off his ill-conceived dress shoes. He regrets wearing them. They pinch his heels, and he looked like a tool at the wake. Amber’s sister was wearing jeans, for God’s sake. When he offered his condolences she looked at him like a stranger. The sandy red soil is so cold it numbs his toes, but it is a relief to let his bare feet come in contact again with this earth he knows so well. He tosses a pebble and watches it disappear into the river’s sputtering folds. What kind of asshole has he become?

    He could have tried harder to get in touch with Chapa, but he left this town when cell phones were still luxury items, uncommon, at least among people like them, and anyway the truth is he’s been shy. He isn’t ashamed of how his life has turned out—he makes good money, has a bright young kid and a smart, no-bullshit wife—but whenever he’s thought of reconnecting with Chapa, when he’s thought of Chapa at all—Chapa with his shirt off, lithe brown body splashing; Chapa yelping, eating the sun—he’s felt a surge of emotion so electric it’s almost erotic. His eagerness embarrasses him. He has tried to explain this to Denise. But how to describe the Mad Boy who still lives so loudly, so colorfully, in Jim’s memory? How to describe the way one single boy—along with enough acid, most weekends, to kill a small bear—rewove the very fabric of his mind?

    The closest he’s come is a drunken confession one night after a boozy fundraising dinner for their kid’s charter school. A teenaged dance troupe had performed, and a couple of them had actually been really good, elastic joints and muscles like springs, and he’d felt her watching him watching them, felt his own sluggish, Jesus-aged body. On the couch afterward with the lights off, as they dutifully drank their water before bed, he buried his head in Denise’s lap and told her: “I loved him.”

    “Loved whom?” she said. Whom. She was a smart-ass like that, but he knew she knew who he meant. He didn’t reply. She put a hand on his forehead. “I know you did,” she said.

    “He opened my eyes,” Jim told her. “He made me see that the world is in our minds. That time is elastic. That space is infinite. That solid is just liquid, but slower, and that there’s infinite space between every atom, and that color’s just a bunch of vibrations.”

    “Uh-huh.”

    From his vantage point in her lap he could see up her nostrils, those twin tunnels that led all the way to her capable brain. “Listen,” he said. “What do you see when you see color?”

    She looked around the bedroom. “As I recall, these walls are Benjamin Moore Canyon Light. In the Pier 1 catalog the couch, I think, was called Sorrel. The curtains in the downstairs bathroom were, oh my god, Lady Slipper.” She made an amused sound through her nose.

    “I don’t mean paint.” He struggled up. “I don’t mean fabric swatches.” He pointed at the lamp in the corner, a cheap Ikea contraption that had never really stood up straight. “What do you see when you look at that light?”

    “I see a lamp. Which is missing a screw.” She patted his head. “Much like you.”

    “I see rainbows.” As if to demonstrate, he looked at the light and turned his gaze slowly toward her, then turned it back again, and the light stretched and unraveled into all its constituent colors, then knit itself back together. That was the grand synthetic beauty that Chapa helped imprint on him. “Even now, light has tails, color trails. I still see rainbows. After all these years.”

“That was the grand synthetic beauty that Chapa helped imprint on him.”

    A reasonable woman who thinks of color as a material that comes in flat, matte, and satin, a comforting practical woman, a fearless woman, Denise said, “That is because you are an acid casualty. And a goon.” But months later when he told her Amber had died it was she who encouraged him to go home for the funeral. “Don’t you want to see your friend Chapa?”

    The name in her voice was jarring to Jim. It didn’t sound right. “I guess.”

    “The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve never visited the guy. I’m starting to think you made him up. Your magical Indian friend. Which, by the way, are you aware that the way you talk about him, it’s maybe a little bit racist?”

    Jim must have made a face, because she repeated herself, altering her emphasis.

    “Just maybe a little bit racist. How close were the two of you, anyway? Why have I never met him?”

    “I don’t know. We lost touch,” Jim said. “He isn’t on Facebook.”

    “Go home, Jimmy! Go see your friend. Take a selfie with the guy. I want to see him with my own eyes.” Denise is amused at best by Jim’s brambly thoughts, but because she urges him to confront his own mind, he knows she will always protect him.

    And because he knows she would be happy to receive a picture of him beside his old friend—he’s pictured the picture many times: both of them grinning, holding beers, Chapa taller and stunning, Jim balder and paler but made handsome by joy—he is all that much more disappointed today that Chapa’s not here. At the brief wake he did see Chapa’s mom, Win. How’s Chapa doing? he asked her, and Win squinted up at him, squeezing her left arm with her right hand, black lashes gray hair, too distracted by grief to be glad to see him. You know Chapa, she said, and Jim nodded and looked down at the ground, because you’re supposed to give people enough silence and space to keep their grief to themselves. Now he regrets not saying, Actually no, I don’t, not anymore, regrets asking how when he could have asked where. Could have asked for his number.

    Could he have asked for his number? Would that have been weird?

    The trouble is, Denise’s interrogation still rings in his mind. How close were the two of you, anyway? He’s not sure he knows. How many times did they get fucked up together in this very gully? Two dozen times? Ten times? Twice? Maybe Denise was right, in a way, and he has made Chapa up—not entirely—just maybe a little bit—just the same sort of way that a kid makes up an idea of his mother before he’s able to understand what kind of woman she actually is, or the way a person who’s never been to, say, India, pieces together his own mental collage out of, let’s say, some crowded street he saw in a film, rock-cut temples from an in-flight travel magazine, Bollywood, tigers, lotuses, the Taj Mahal, and a memorable GQ photo shoot of Priyanka Chopra. The Chapa he thinks he knows is not much more than a collage of teenaged memories, fantasies, the light trails he still sees, and his own dim understanding of history. Let’s not forget that Jim’s ancestors’ hands were stained by Chapa’s ancestors’ blood. Once in this very gully, tripping balls, Chapa told him: Your people massacred my people. If time is a circle, and time is a circle, Jimmy, you massacred me. Teenaged Jim looked at his friend lying there on the red earth, and as he watched, the earth became blood. It seeped out of and pooled around Chapa’s brown body, and Chapa was still, and Jim was dumbstruck by the violence from which he was descended. For hours he was convinced he had lost the ability to speak.

    In his memory the river is a stop-motion rainbow machine, but today it is muddy gray. Jim stands and rolls up his pants and wades into the shallows. The water’s so cold it feels boiling hot. Not only is the river less colorful; it is narrower now. The region has undergone a long drought. He is struck by the absence of life. The trees at the edges of the gully are still winter-bare, their black branches like cracks in the sky. A fish skeleton lies on the shore, in a bed of its own dried-out skin. Amber is dead and her brother’s dead, too, and so are twelve other people Jim once knew. And so is the fish, and so are the shrubs, and so are his toes, which have gone white and stabby, and so, in the end, is his friendship.

    And then, deep inside his memory, something is lifted. Some small corner of memory is peeled up, and he has a clear, true recollection. That day he tripped so hard he thought he was mute? He and Chapa were not alone. Amber was there. She was sitting beside him. She was watching Chapa, too. He remembers her bare ankles, the cigarette between her fingers, he remembers her narrow, love-struck, teenaged face. She loved Chapa as hard as Jim did. She kept him company in that embarrassing love. He wants to tell her so. He wants to thank her. He wants to apologize for leaving her out of the picture for so long.

    But he can’t, of course. So he wades back to shore. Brushes off his feet. Puts on his socks, one by one. He forces back on his two stupid shoes and turns back toward the rental car he left parked on the shoulder. He is numb, he is dumb. He is heading back to the airport.

• • •