The Color Master

Wordkeepers

I can’t remember the words of things. The words for words. I have lost my words. What’s this from? Is it the Internet? Texting? E-mail? I see it in kids, too; it’s not an aging thing. An aging issue. I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, “You mean the scale?”

“Yes”—I said, beaming, pumping his hand—“the scale!” As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.

At the doctor’s office, I told my doc that it was sore.

“What’s sore?”

I pointed to my neck. “This.”

“Your throat,” he said.

“Of course,” I said.

We went over my symptoms. He gave me a subscription.

With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works. At the shoe store, I watched a lady walk up to the mini socks and point right at them, and the salesguy knew just what she wanted. Plus, who knows what those flimsies are called anyway.

“Cavemen point,” said Susan, my neighbor, one Saturday morning. “You can always point at what you want, but you’d be returning to Neanderthal standards.”

“Well, maybe we’re going back to caveman times,” I said, pouring a circle of wet pancake into the pan. “Tech forward, language back.”

“Reverting,” she said.

“What?”

“Reverting to caveman times.”

“That’s not my word choice,” I said, picking up the flipper thing. “I said ‘going back’ on purpose. I don’t like that word, reverting.”

“If it was on purpose, then fine,” she said, standing a fork on its end.

I flipped the pancake. “Oh, fuck off,” I said.

Once the edges were all gold, I put one on her plate. A perfect goldy circle. She smiled at me. But not a thank-you smile, no: a self-satisfied one. She always looks so smug. Smug, smug, smug. I like that word very much, and I won’t forget it easily.

Susan calls social Web sites silly distractions. She refuses to even look at an electronic book, because she says she must have pages, must. Fine; I read pages, too. I too enjoy the book smell everybody goes on and on about. Time for the perfumists to wake up, right? A perfume called Book? With its cologne follow-up, Newspaper? The question is, does she have to be so goddamn righteous about it? Does she have to raise her eyebrows like that, when I mention an app? She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind. She rolled her eyes then, way back into her head. She’s not even my girlfriend. We did sleep together once, right when I moved in, but then it sort of drizzled away. We both got busy and I woke up to the neighbor problem. The neighbor-lover problem. And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.

“Those breathing things,” a student of mine said last week, gesturing at her chest. She was trying to explain to me why she had to miss the history test. I nodded. I got it.

“Pneumonia,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I think so,” she said. “The doctor gave me drugs.”

“Drugs?”

She thought for a second. She made that little wheeze sound. “Antirobotics?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “So you will not become a robot,” I said.

“Hope not,” she laughed.

In the daytime, I work at a school where I teach junior-high-school history. I have been working there for eight years, since I had a crisis of identity in law school and realized I hated reading red and beige books. Teaching’s way better. I teach American history, and, true, we do spend a lot of time on the Revolutionary War, more than on any other war, but junior-high-school kids like the idea of people throwing tea in the water.

You’d think in school it might be better with the words, but it’s worse. When we have a good class discussion, my students will sometimes raise their hands with enthusiasticness, jumping up and down in their seats, but by the time I get around to calling on them, most of them say, “I forgot what I was going to say.” A good 50 percent of the time. I have taught now for a long time and this did not happen even five years ago. It is new.

“Where did it go?” I ask.

“Where did what go?”

“Your point?”

They shrug. “Don’t know,” they say. They hold up their cell phones. “Sorry. We are holding a lot of small things in our heads.”

“What things?” I say.

“Things,” they say. “In our …”

They point to their heads.

“We are holding a lot of them.”

I’d be irritated, except as soon as they leave I have a thing I am planning to do and I walk into the center of the room to do it and whatever it was flies away. Half my days I find myself standing in the centers of rooms.

In some study, they say phones and computers are replacing our cerebral cortexes, externalizing our thoughts so that we do not need to think them—the same way certain couples will have one quiet, meeky person who trails off all the sentences and one overeager type who leaps in to finish. We’re the trailer-offer, Google’s our jumpy mate. Susan is worried about this, but is it so bad? Sure, Shakespeare knew ten thousand words, or a million words, just a lot of words, and he was real good at what he did, but also no women were allowed in his shows and if you got sick with pneumonia you’d just die, probably in two days, and only half the children made it to age ten. So it’s a trade-off, is what I say.

Susan shook her head. “It’s no trade,” she said. She was over again, with wine. “Meaning,” she said, “you can improve your vocabulary and still get your amoxicillin and vote. It’s not like there’s a checklist and for each era we only get ten helpful options, and everything else goes to shit.”

“I like that word, option,” I said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Optional,” I said. “Opt. Opting. Nice.”

She poured herself a second glass of wine.

“I’m so sick of dating,” she said, leaning back in her chair and lifting up her legs to sit cross-legged.

“Online?”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Even me. Even me, online. Fine. I hate picking a name for myself, you know? Yesterday I saw a man and his Internet name was Fido. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“What’d you name yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“You have to name yourself something,” I said. “Or they don’t let you on the site.”

She finished her wine. Eyed the bottle. I refilled both of us, so it looked like it wasn’t just her.

“Wordkeeper,” she said.

“Your dating name is Wordkeeper?”

“Shut up,” she said.

“Sex-y,” I said.

“Well, maybe to someone it will be.” She took off her glasses, and touched the middle top of her nose, a geste she does that I do like.

“It has a little bit of a dom tone,” I said, sipping. “Like you’re hoarding all the words and you’ll give them out when you feel like it. Some guys will like that.”

She had her eyes closed. She was thinking something private.

“Some guys,” she said.

I went to open a bag of peanuts and poured them into a bowl. Susan and I have talked about dating since that one thing, but I have always said no. I’m not completely sure why. We’re like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.

“You know I can’t,” I said, putting the bowl on the table. “I’m your neighbor.”

“So?” she said. She opened her eyes. “We get along. I see you almost every day.”

“Too risky.”

“That is such bullshit!” she said. She glared at the table. She began to shell peanuts. “Are you just not … attracted?”

Susan is a good-looking woman, I’ll give her that. She wears blouses with one button unbuttoned right where you’d want that to happen. Her glasses make her look like you want to take off her glasses. She gets plenty of dates, or she could, if she wanted.

“You’re smug,” I said. I laughed at myself, surprised.

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘Wordkeeper’?”

“Is smug?”

I winced. “Yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”

“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. She swept her shells into a little pile.

I smiled, but not an agreement smile.

She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be,” she said. “I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m better than you.”

“It’s okay. You probably are.”

We sat there for a while. She liked to run her long nail down the length of each peanut and then open it up like a present.

“I suppose sex is all gesture,” she said.

“Not even really gesture.”

“I guess not. Not indicative at all.”

“No.”

She ate the peanuts. She was flushed from the wine. She wanted to take off her clothes, I could feel it, the same way she was undressing peanuts, and I felt it as cruel then, how I didn’t want to do anything with her. Maybe cruel to both of us. But the truth is, I just felt like I had e-mail to check. I could masturbate faster. It was easier, in terms of fallout. Who wants to be in an argument with a neighbor?

She held the bottom of her wineglass down hard with her fingers, like otherwise she might just fling it across the room.

I checked my phone. Sent a couple of quick texts. After a few minutes, she left.

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It’s no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, lets the texter/ former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can’t live propless.

It wouldn’t bother me except it bothers me. In the shower I gave myself a test. That stuff I put in my hair for suds? Is called shampoo. The silver tray hanging over the shower top? Is a caddy. The string I use to get crap out of my teeth? Is known as dental floss. She’s in my head all day, Susan, so why have sex with her too? All day I hear her chiding me.

She doesn’t come over for a few days, which is unusual. On Saturday I walk up to her place. I had a dream about her and it was nice, and in the interest of living in the moment, I made a tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries. I made them Friday night. Good chocolate. Good with wine. Organic strawberries, because they are very high on the pesticide list otherwise. She opens the door.

“Yeah?” she says.

She looks tired. Her hair is less planned than usual. I step in. I give her the tray.

“You brought me these?” she says, suspicious.

“I did.”

“What for?”

I was in the middle of her living room. I had had a plan, I knew that. But the rest of it had vanished.

The Color Master

Our store was expensive, I mean Ex-Pen-Sive, as anything would be if all its requests were for clothing in the colors of natural elements. The duke wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way; he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend, it would not do to give the duke a regular pair of lovely pure-gray-dyed shoes. So we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of rocks back with us, and then use them, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I see gray.

At the shop, in general, we build clothing and shoes—shirts and coats, soles and heels—we treat the leather, shape and weave the cloth, and even when an item isn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers do not have this kind of money, so the bulk of our customers are royalty, or the occasional wealthy traveler riding through town who has heard rumors of our skills.

For the duke’s shoes, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles and then add those particles to the dye-washing bin. This helped a little. We attended visualization seminars where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our decision about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate intensity, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.

She lives about a half mile away, in a cottage behind the scrub-oak grove. We summon her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she does not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat trots down the road and butts on the door. The Color Master set up our studio and shop in the first place, years ago; she has always done the final work. But she has been looking unwell these days. For our last project—the duchess’s handbag that was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose—she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering. Dark circles ringed her eyes. She is growing older. Also, her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, lying on the sofa all day long. She is certainly the most talented in the kingdom, but gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the king? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, fresh and delectable. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns, curves and indentations, shadow and light, and she could probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.

So we sent over the goat, and when the Color Master came into the studio, we’d just finished the fourth dyeing of the rock shoes. They were drying on a mat, and they looked pretty good. I told Cheryl that her visualization of the mountain had definitely helped. She blushed. I said, too, that Edwin’s contribution of the ground rock particles had added a useful kind of rough texture. He kicked a stool leg, pleased. I hadn’t done much; I’m not very skilled, but I like to commend good work when I see it.

The Color Master approached, wearing a linen sheath woven with blue threadings. Her face hinting at gaunt. She greeted us all, and stood at the counter where the shoes were drip-drying.

Nice work, she said. Esther, who had fronted the dyeing process, curtsied.

We sprinkled rocks into the dye, she said.

A fine choice, said the Color Master.

Edwin did a little dance in place by his table. The goat settled on a pillow in the corner and began to eat the stuffing.

The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them to the sunlight. She picked up a rock and looked at it next to the shoes. She circled both inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about one hundred and fifty metal bins of this dust in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing rich burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than soil. Someone else found a new blue in a desiccated pansy, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times.

The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled—blue? how does she know, blue?), and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins, where she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. While she worked, everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chitchat.

The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process generally took over two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant, and Esther would step forward, and the Color Master would coat the shoe to fasten the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence in the room, hear the great heavy lumbering voice of it.

When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rocklike, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.

Done, she said.

We circled her, bowing our heads.

Another triumph, murmured Sandy, who cannot color-mix to save her life.

The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?

Will you walk me home? she said in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.

I would be honored, I mumbled. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.

I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually request an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me in the first place.

At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had an allure I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know that there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, knowing how her husband had gone off to the war years ago and never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how, long ago, she had fled her own town for reasons she never mentioned. Plus, she had a thick cough and her own money questions, all of which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.

Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.

Yes?

There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.

What is it? I said.

I don’t know yet, but start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.

Excuse me?

Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.

Are you confusing me with someone else? I asked.

She laughed.

Do you mean it? I said. Are you ill?

No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.

But I’m not very good, I said, twisting. Like at all. You can’t die. You should ask Esther, or Sven—

You, she said, and with a little curt nod, she went into her house and shut the door.

The duke loved his shoes so much he sent us a drawing, by the court illustrator, of him floating, it appeared, on a pile of rocks. I love them, he wrote, in swirly handwriting; I love them, I love them! In addition to a small cash bonus, he offered us horse rides and a feast at the dukedom. We all attended, in all our finery, and it was a great time. It was the last time I saw the Color Master dancing, in her pearl-gray gown, and I knew it was the last even as I watched it, her silver hair swirling out as she glided through the group. The duke kept tapping his toe on the side, holding the duchess’s hand, her free one grasping a handbag the perfect pink of a rose, so vivid and fresh the color seemed to carry a sweet scent even across the ballroom.

Two weeks later, almost everyone was away when the king’s courtier came riding over with the request: a dress the color of the moon. The Color Master was not feeling well, and had asked not to be disturbed; Esther’s father was ill, so she was off taking care of him; Sven’s wife was giving birth to twins, so he was off with her; the two others ahead of me had caught whooping cough; and someone else was on a travel trip to find a new orange. So the request went to me, the apprentice. Just as the Color Master had hoped.

I unrolled the scroll and read it quietly by the window.

A dress the color of the moon?

It was impossible.

First of all, the moon is not a color. It is a reflection of a color. Second, it is not even the reflection of a color. It is the reflection of what appears to be a color, but is really in fact a bunch of bursting hydrogen atoms, far, far away. Third, the moon shines. A dress cannot shine like the moon unless the dress is also reflecting something, and reflective materials are generally tacky-looking, or too industrial. Our only options were silk and cotton and leather. The moon? It is white, it is silver, it is silver-white, it is not an easy color to dye. A dress the color of the moon? The whole thing made me irritable.

But this was not a small order. This was, in fact, for the king’s daughter. The princess. And since the queen had died of pneumonia a few months before, this was a dress for the most important woman in the kingdom.

I paced several times around the studio, and then I went against policy and tried knocking on the door of the Color Master’s cabin, but she called out in a strong voice, Just make it!

Are you okay? I asked, and she said, Come back once you’ve started!

I walked back, kicking twigs and acorns.

I ate oranges off the tree out back until I felt a little better.

Since I was in charge, due to the pecking order, I called together everyone that was left in the studio and asked for a seminar on reflection, to reflect upon reflection. In particular for Cheryl, who really used the seminars well. We gathered in a circle in the side room and talked about mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals, and then we did a creative-writing exercise about our first memory of the moon, and how it affected us, and the moment when we realized it followed us (Sandy had a charming story about going on a walk as a child and trying to lose it but not being able to), and then we wrote haiku. Mine was this: Moon, you silver thing / Floating in the sky like that / Make me a dress. Please.

After a few tears over Edwin’s story of realizing his father in the army was seeing the same moon he saw, we drifted out of the seminar room and began dyeing the silk. It had to be silk, of course, and we selected from the loom studio a very fine weave, a really elegant one that had a touch of shimmer in the fabric already. I let Cheryl start the dyeing with shades of white, because I could see a kind of shining light in her eyes from the seminar and even a luminosity to her skin. She is so receptive that way.

While she began that first layer, I went to see the Color Master again. I let myself in this time. She was in bed. It was shocking how quickly she was going downhill. I got her brother a glass of water and an apple-cheese snack—Angel, he called me, from the sofa—and then I settled next to the bed where she lay resting, her hair spread over the pillows in rays of silver. She was not very old, the Color Master, but she had gone silver early. Wait, can we use your hair? I said.

Sure. She pulled out a few strands and handed them over.

This’ll help, I said, looking at the glint. If we try to make this into particles?

Good, she said. Good thinking.

How are you doing? I asked.

I heard word, she said. Moon today, sun soon.

What?

Sun soon. How goes moon?

It’s hard, I said. I mean, hard. And, with your hair, that’ll help, but to reflect?

Use blue, she said.

What kind?

Several kinds. Her voice was weaker, but I could hear the steel behind it as she walked through the bins in her mind. Don’t be afraid of the darker shades, she said.

I’m an awful color-mixer, I said. Are you in pain?

No, she said. Just weak. Blue, she said. And black. She pulled out a few more strands of hair. Here, she said. And shavings of opal, do we have those?

Too expensive, I said.

Go to the mine, she said. Get opals, shave ’em, add a new bin. Do you know the king wants to marry his daughter? Her eyes flashed, for a second, with anger.

What?

Put that in the dress too, she said. She dropped her voice to a whisper, every word sharp and clear. Anger, she said. Put anger in the dress. The moon as our guide. A daughter should not be ordered to marry her father.

Put anger in the dress?

When you mix, she said. Got it? When you’re putting the opal shavings in. The dress is supposed to be a dowry gift, but give the daughter the strength to leave instead. All right?

Her eyes were shining at me, so bright I wanted to put them in the dress, too.

Okay, I said, faltering. I’m not sure—

You have it in you, she said. I see it. Truly. Or I would never have given you the job.

Then she fell back on her pillows and was asleep in seconds.

On the walk back, through the scrub-oak grove, I felt as I usually felt, both moved and shitty. Because what she saw in me could just as easily have been the result of some kind of fever. Was she hallucinating? Didn’t she realize I had only gotten the job because I’d complimented Esther on her tassel scarf at the faire, plus I did decent work with the rotating time schedule? Who’s to say that there was anything to it? To me, really?

Anger in the dress?

I didn’t feel angry, just defeated and bad about myself, but I didn’t put that in the dress; it didn’t seem right. Instead, I went to the mine and befriended the foreman, Manny, and he gave me a handful of opals that were too small for any jewelry and would work well as shavings. I spent the afternoon with the sharpest picks and awls I could find, breaking open opals and making a new bin for the dust. Cheryl had done wonders with the white, and the dress glowed like a gleaming pearl—almost moonlike but not enough, yet. I added the opals and we redyed, and then you could see a hint of rainbow hovering below the surface. Like the sun was shimmering in there, too, and that was addressing the reflective issue. When it came time to color-mix, I felt like I was going to throw up, but I did what the Color Master had asked, and went for blue, then black, and I was incredibly slow, like incredibly slow, but for one moment I felt something as I hovered over the bins of blue. Just a tug of guidance from the white of the dress that led my hand to the middle blue. It felt, for a second, like harmonizing in a choir, the moment when the voice sinks into the chord structure and the sound grows, becomes more layered and full than before. So that was the right choice. I wasn’t so on the mark for the black, which was slightly too light, more like the moon when it’s just setting, when the light of day has already started to rise and encroach, which isn’t what they wanted—they wanted black-of-night moon, of course. But when we held it up in the middle of the room, there it was—not as good as anything the Color Master had done, maybe one one-hundredth as good, but there was something in it that would pass the test of the assignment. Like, the king and princess wouldn’t collapse in awe, but they would be pleased, maybe even a little stirred. Color is nothing unless next to other colors, the Color Master told us all the time. Color does not exist alone. And I got it, for a second with that blue, I did.

Cheryl and I packed the dress carefully in a box, and sent off the pigeon with the invoice, and waited for the king’s courtiers to come by, and they did, with a carriage for the dress only. After we laid the box carefully on the velvet backseat, they gave us a hunk of chocolate as a bonus, which Cheryl and I ate together in the side room, exhausted. Relieved. I went home and slept for twenty hours. I had put no anger in the dress; I remembered that when I woke up. Who can do that while so focused on just making an acceptable moon-feeling for the assignment? They didn’t ask for anger, I said, eating a few apples for breakfast. They asked for the moon, and I gave them something vaguely moonlike, I said, spitting tooth cleanser into the basin.

That afternoon, I went to see the Color Master to tell her all about it. I left out the absence of the anger and told her I’d messed up on the black, and she laughed and laughed from her bed. I told her about the moon being more of a morning moon. I told her what I’d felt at the blue, the feeling of the chord, and she picked up my hand. Pressed it lightly.

Death is glowing, she said. I can see it.

I felt a heaviness rustle in my chest. How long? I said.

A few weeks, I think, she said. The sun will come in soon. The princess still has not left the castle.

But we need you, I said, and with effort, she squeezed my hand again. It is dark and glowing, she said, her eyes sliding over to lock onto mine. It is like loam, she said.

The sun? I said.

Tomorrow, she said. She closed her eyes.

When I got to work the next day, there was an elaborate thank-you note from the castle with a lot of praise for the moon dress, in this over-the-top calligraphy, and a bonus bolt of fuchsia silk. The absentees were returning, slowly, from their various tangents, when we received the king’s new assignment: a dress the color of the sun. Because everyone felt a little jittery about the Color Master’s absence and wanted to go with whatever—or whoever—seemed to work, I was assigned to the order. Esther told me congratulations. Sandy took over my rotating schedule duties. I did a few deep knee bends and got to work.

I liked that guy at the mine a little bit, the Manny guy, so I went back to ask about citrine quartz. He didn’t have any, but we had a nice roast-turkey lunch together in the spot of sun outside the rocky opening of the cave, and I told him about the latest dress I was making for the princess.

Whew, he said, shaking his head. What color is the sun?

Beats me, I said. We’re not supposed to look at it, right? Kids make it yellow, I said, but I think that’s not quite right.

Ivory? he said.

Sort of burnt white, I said. But with a halo?

That’s hard work, he said, folding up the cloth he used to hold his sandwich. He had a good face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind.

Want to go to the faire sometime? he asked, looking up.

The outdoor faire happened on the weekends in the main square, where everything was sold.

Sure, I said.

Maybe there’s some sun stuff there, he said.

I’d love to, I said.

We began the first round of dyeing at the end of the week, focusing initially on the pale yellows. Cheryl was very careful not to oversaturate the dye—yellow is always more powerful than it appears in the bin. It is a stealth dominator, and can take days and days to undo. She did that all Saturday, while I went to the faire. It was a clear, warm afternoon, with stands offering all sorts of goodies and delicious meat pies. Nothing looked helpful for the dress, but Manny and I laughed about the latest tapestry unicorn craze and shared a nice kiss at the end, near the scrub oaks. Everything was feeling a little more alive than usual. We held another seminar at the studio, and Cheryl did a session on warmth, and seasons, and how we all revolve around the sun, whether or not we are willing to admit it. Central, she said. The theme of the sun is central. The center of us, she said. Core. Fire.

Careful with red, said the Color Master, when I went to visit. She was thinner and weaker, but her eyes were still coals. Her brother had gotten up to try to take care of her and had thrown out his back to the worst degree and was now in the medicine arena, strapped to a board. My sister is dying, he told the doctors, but he couldn’t move, so all they did was shake their heads. The Color Master had refused any help. I want to see Death as clearly as possible, she’d said. No drugs.

I made her some toast, but she only ate a few bites and then pushed it aside.

It’s tempting to think of red for sun, she said. But it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange, and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white.

Not bright white, she said. The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way.

Yeah, I said, sighing. And where does one find that kind of white?

Keep looking, she said.

Last time I used your hair? I said.

She smiled, feebly. Go look at fire for a while, she said. Go spend some time with fire.

I don’t want you to die, I said.

Yes, well, she said. And?

Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I’d heard mentioned but never noticed. So I decided it made sense to use all of them. We hung the dress in the center of the room and all revolved around it, spinning, imagining we were planets. It needs to be hotter, said Sven, who was playing the part of Mercury, and then he put a blowtorch to some silk and made some dust materials out of that, and we redipped the dress. Cheryl was off in the corner, cross-legged in a sunbeam, her eyes closed, trying to soak it up. We need to soak it! she said, after an hour, standing. So we left it in the dipping longer than usual. I walked by the bins, trying to feel that harmony feeling, waiting for a color to call me. I felt a tug to the dark brown, so I brought a bit of it out and tossed it into the mix; it was too dark, but after a little yellow-white from dried lily flowers, something started to pop a bit. Light, said Cheryl. It’s also daylight—it’s light. It’s our only true light, she said again. Without it, we live in darkness and cold. The dress drip-dried in the middle of the room. It was getting closer, and just needed that factor of squinting—a dress so bright it couldn’t quite be looked at. How to get that?

Remember, the Color Master said. She sat up in bed, her silver hair streaming over her shoulders. I keep forgetting, she said, but the king wants to Marry His Daughter. Her voice pointed to each word, hard. That is not right, she said, okay? Got it? Put anger in the dress. Righteous anger, for her. Do you hear me?

I do not, I said, though I nodded. I didn’t say I do not, I just thought that part. I played with the wooden knob of her bedframe. I had tried to put some anger in the sun dress, but I had been so consumed with trying to factor in the squint that all I really got in there was confusion. Confusion does make people squint, though, so I ended up fulfilling the request accidentally. We had sent it off in the carriage after working all night on the light factor that Cheryl had mentioned by adding bits of diamond dust to the mix. Diamonds are light inside darkness! she’d announced at 3 a.m., a bialy in her hand, triumphant. On the whole, it was a weaker product than the moon dress, but not bad—most people don’t notice the variance in subtlety, and our level of general artistry and craft is high, so we could get away with a lot without anyone’s running over and asking for his money back.

The sky, the Color Master told me, after I had filled her in on the latest. She had fallen back down into her pillows, and was so weak she spoke with eyes closed. When I held her hand she only rested hers in mine: not limp, not grasping.

Sky is last, she said.

And death?

Soon, she said. She fell asleep midway through our conversation. I stayed all night. I slept too, sitting up, and sometimes I woke and just sat and watched her. What a precious person she was, really. I hadn’t known her very well, but she had picked me, for some reason, and that picking was changing me, I could feel it; it was like being warmed by the presence of the sun, a little. The way a ray of sun can seem to choose you as you walk outside from the cold interior. I wanted to put her in that sun dress, to drape her in it, but it wasn’t an option; we had sent it off to the princess, plus it wasn’t even the right size and wasn’t really her style, either. But I guess I just knew that the sun dress we sent was something of a facsimile, and that this person here was the real sun, the real center for us all, and even through the dark night, I felt the light of her, burning, even in the rasping heavy breathing of a dying woman.

In the morning, she woke up, saw I was still there, and smiled a little. I brought her tea. She sat up to drink it.

The anger! she said again, as if she had been dreaming about it. Which maybe she had. She raised up on her elbows, face blazing. Don’t forget to put anger in this last dress, she said. Okay?

Drink your tea, I said.

Listen, she said. It’s important, she said. She shook her head. It was written, in pain, all over her forehead. She sat up higher on her elbows, and looked beyond me, through me, and I could feel meaning, thick, in her, even if I didn’t know the details about why. She picked her words carefully.

You cannot bring it—someone—into the world, and then bring it back into you, she said. It is the wrong action.

Her face was clear of emphasis, and she spoke plainly, as plainly as possible, as if there were no taboo about fathers marrying daughters, as if the sex factor was not a biological risk, as if it wasn’t just disturbing and upsetting as a given. She held herself steady on her elbows. This is why she was the Color Master. There was no stigma, or judgment, no societal subscription, no trigger morality, but just a clean and pure anger, fresh, as if she was thinking the possibility over for the first time.

You birth someone, she said, leaning in. And then you release her. You do not marry her, which is a bringing back in. You let her go.

Put anger in the dress, she said. She gripped my hand, and suddenly all the weakness was gone, and she was right there, an electric pulse of a person, and I knew this was the last time we would talk, I knew it so clearly that everything sharpened into incredible focus. I could see the threads in the weave of her nightgown, the microscopic bright cells in the whites of her eyes.

Her nails bit into my hand. I felt the tears rising up in me. The teacup wobbling on the nightstand.

Got it? she said.

Yes, I said.

I put the anger in the dress the color of sky. I put it in there so much I could hardly stand it—that she was about to die, that she would die unrecognized, that none of us would ever live up to her example, and that we were the only witnesses. That we are all so small after all that. That everybody dies anyway. I put the anger in there so much that the blue of the sky was fiercely stark, an electric blue like the core of the fire, so much that it was hard to look at. It was much harder to look at than the sun dress; the sky dress was of a whole different order. Intensely, shockingly, bluely vivid. Let her go? This was the righteous anger she had asked for, yards of it, bolts of it, even though, paradoxically, it was anger I felt because soon she would be gone.

She died the following morning in her sleep. Even at her funeral, all I could feel was the rage, pouring out of me, while we all stood around her coffin, crying, leaning on one another, sprinkling colors from the dye bins into her hands, the colors of heaven, we hoped, while the rest of the town went about its business. Her brother rolled in on a stretcher, weeping. I had gone over to see her that morning, and found her, dead, in her bed. So quiet. The morning sun, white and clear, through the windowpanes. I stroked her hair for an hour, her silver hair, before I left to tell anyone. The dress request had already come in the day before, as predicted.

At the studio, under deadline, Cheryl led a seminar on blue, and sky, and space, and atmosphere, and depth, and it was successful and mournful, especially during the week after the funeral. Blue. I attended, but mostly I was nurturing the feeling in me, that rage. Tending to it like a little candle flame cupped against the wind. I knew it was the right kind, I knew it. I didn’t think I’d do much better than this dress, ever; I would go on to do good things in my life, have other meaningful moments, share in the experience of being a human being in the world, but I knew this was my big moment, and I had to be equal to it. So I sat at the seminar with half a focus, just cupping that flame of rage, and I half participated in the dyeing of the fabric and the discussion of the various shades, and then, when they had done all they could do, and the dress was hanging in the middle, a clear and beautiful blue, I sent everyone home. Are you sure? Cheryl asked, buttoning up her coat.

Yes, I said. Go.

It was night, and the sky was unlit under a new moon, so it was up to me to find the blue sky—draped over us all, but hidden. I went to the bins, and listened for the chords, and felt her in me. I felt the ghost of her passing through me as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue, a little of so many other colors and then so many different kinds of blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all—we shake our fists at the big blue beautiful indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.

Of all people to take back? How impossible to understand that I would never see her again.

When the sun rose, it was a clear morning, the early sky pale and wide. I had worked all night. I wasn’t tired yet, but I could feel the pricklings of it around me, peripheral. I made a pot of coffee and sat in the chill with a cup and the dress, which I had hung again from a hanger in the middle of the room. The rest of the tailors drifted over in the morning, one by one, and no one said anything. They entered the room and looked up, and then they surrounded it with me. We held hands, and they said I was the new Color Master, and I said okay, because it was obvious that that was true, and though I knew I would never reach her levels again, at least for this one dress I had. They didn’t even praise me, they just looked at it and cried. We all cried.

Esther sent off the invoice pigeon, and, with care, we placed the dress in its package, and when the carriage came by, we laid it carefully over the backseat, as usual. We ate our hunk of gift chocolate. We cleaned up the area around the bins and swept the floor of dust, and talked to a builder, a friend of Manny’s, about expanding one of the rooms into an official seminar studio. The carriage trotted off, with the dress in the backseat, led by two white horses.

From what I heard, soon after the princess got the third dress, she left town. The rest I do not know.

The rest of the story—known, I’m told, as “Donkeyskin”—is hers.

A State of Variance

On her fortieth birthday, the woman lost the ability to sleep for more than a single hour. She did not accumulate a tired feeling; in fact, that one hour served the purpose of eight, and she awoke refreshed. But because that hour was full of only the most intense, involving sleep, the sleep beyond rapid eye movement, the consequence was that she had no time in her sleep hours for dreams. So, during the day, she would experience moments when the rules of the world would shift and she would see, inside her teakettle, a frog floating, dead. And then blink and it would be gone. Or she would greet the mailman and he would hand her a basket of seawater, dripping, with stamps floating wetly on top. And then she would smile and bring in the mail. These moments sprinkled throughout every day; she still had a driver’s license and wondered if she should revoke it herself, as the zombies who passed through the crosswalk and disappeared into the lamppost were confusing.

She assumed she would die at eighty. She figured this because the sleep shift began on her fortieth birthday and all her life, things had happened symmetrically like that. Her birthdate was 11.25.52, and that was not notable until she realized that she had been born in Amsterdam and there the day comes first: 25.11.52; the address of the only house she could afford for miles and miles was 1441, on a street named Circle Road on the edges of Berkeley. She had a son the day her father died. Her son’s face was almost a perfect mirror of itself, in such a way that one realized how imperfections created trust, because no one trusted her son with that perfect symmetry in his face; contrary to the magazine articles that stated that women would orgasm easily above him, beneath him, due to that symmetry, no—his symmetry was too much, and women shied away, certain he was a player. Certain he would dump them. And because no one approached him, when he did have girlfriends every now and again he would dump them, because he found he did not trust them either, because they were always looking at him so furtively—making, with their faces, the action of holding up your hands in front of your chest to block a blow.

He told his mother he could not seem to meet a woman who had a core strength to her, and his mother, studying geometry at the kitchen table with cutouts of triangles and squares, said she was sorry for what her pregnancy had done.

“What did it do?” he asked.

She held a mirror up to his nose. He saw his face in the hinged reflection. “What?” he said. Then she did it to herself, and the sight of his mother in perfect matched halves so disturbed him that he went and made himself a huge ham sandwich.

“So what are you saying?” he asked, mouth full of meat.

“I am saying that your face repels trust,” she said. “Because it is too exact. I am saying,” she told him, “that I will die on my eightieth birthday, because I stopped sleeping at forty.”

He knew, in a vague way, about the sleeping. The shapes on the table danced in front of her and slipped into her mouth, large mints. Then they were regular again. The mirror on the table was a mouth. She put a finger in and it bit her, wet. She’d finally told her son about the sleeping when he complained that she had made him too many colorful crocheted blankets and he had no more room for them in his apartment. “Take them to the shelter,” he’d pleaded, and then asked, “How are you making all these anyway? Are you taking drugs?” (He himself had been taking overdoses of B vitamins to relieve stress to take the edge off how he felt when he smiled at another person who seemed to have an inordinately tough time smiling back.) His mother had laughed. She told him not about the dreaming aspect but about the one hour, the way she didn’t feel tired, and how it began promptly on her fortieth birthday.

He finished his sandwich and touched the blob of mustard left on the plate with the tip of his finger.

“Are you saying you believe in some kind of grand plan?” he asked. “Because I never thought you raised me to believe in any kind of overarching concept.”

“I’m just noticing the patterns,” she said. But her voice was so doubtful that he made a mental note with the sponge in his hand to be sure to be there on that eightieth birthday itself, so that she would not try to do anything herself, so interested in the pattern that she might let herself be a sacrifice to it.

Neither missed their father/husband, who traveled so often he was unrecognizable when he returned. He came back from the latest trip with his hair dyed black and a deadly cough that landed him in the hospital. He lay there for weeks and weeks, and his hair grew in long and brown. The cough got worse. Above him, before death, stood his symmetrical son, whom even he did not trust, and his wife, whom he could not sleep next to anymore, as she read until all hours and wanted to talk to him and had forgotten that other people needed more than an hour. She resented the world, he felt, resented that all people were not exactly like her in this way. She was so lonely for those seven hours, and when he awoke he always felt that she was slightly blaming him for sleeping. After she had turned forty, he traveled more, for years, so that those eight hours could be his alone, and in different cities he loved different beds—his mistresses not flesh and blood but made of pillows and sheets and the wide-open feeling of waking up without alarm or expectation. As he died, as he looked at these two people he loved most, he only thought: What a curious pair they are, aren’t they? And then it was the white light, and he felt fine about succumbing to it. He was not, by nature, a big fighter.

A year or so after his father died, the son felt a strong desire to get his mother a suitor, so that she would not lean on him as the main man in her life. He knew a son’s role could be confused that way, just as he’d felt the tugging from inside all those crocheted blankets, and he was too keenly vulnerable himself to the attention. He could see it, marriage to Mom, never official or blessed, and yet as implicit as breakfast or dinner. He did not want that. For all the lack of trust the world had bestowed upon him, he still had hope that something would happen to his face that would soften its appearance to others, and allow him into the palm of true love. So he went on a dating search for his mother. He answered several personal ads on Craigslist for men who were looking for women that sounded, more or less, like her, and so he wrote them, explaining that he was looking for his mother, and invited them, one by one, over to the house on 1441 Circle Road, under the guise of landscape gardener. The men were skeptical about the idea, which seemed untrustworthy, and even more skeptical once they met the kid, who seemed untrustworthy, but they all fell for his mother, almost elegantly, and in contrast to the general lore that good men were difficult to find, here were four, almost instantly, who were ready to take her mourning and knead it into their hearts. Two became her weekend companions: one on Sunday day, one on Friday evening. She did not tell them of the sleeping, or of how, when she was watching a movie, another movie often superimposed itself onto the screen, so that when he asked, after, how she’d liked it, she wasn’t sure which movie he had seen and which was her dream addition.

The son now had some space to do things. His father was gone. Which was sad, but his father had never trusted him, and that had always been a problem. He went to the Grind It Up coffee shop down the street from his apartment in Oakland and ordered himself a raisin scone and a black tea. Then he sat down at the table of a large man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. This man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.

“Yes?” the man said, moving his newspaper aside.

The young man didn’t move. He sipped his tea.

“I’m sitting here?” said the man. He was a big man too. He took up most of the table. There were plenty of other free tables in the café. The young man trembled inside, but he kept his hand steady. He steadied his symmetrical face.

“You a homo or something?” asked the man.

The son didn’t respond. But he could see the man digesting the face, the perfect face, and the man lifted the table gently, and the scone slid down into the boy’s lap, and the tea wobbled, and the boy just put the scone back on the now slanted table and kept his eyes on the scrawny facial hair of the man.

The man, Marty, was tired. He did not want to fight. He had done that so many times before. He was tired of it, and he was taking classes now, and they told him to acknowledge how he was really hurt inside, not angry at all. He read his paper high over his head and stopped looking at the young man. So it was a homo. So he was picked up today at the café by a homo. This was new for him. He decided to do what that lady said, and try to find the humor in it, and when he did he really did find it funny, and behind his paper, he started to laugh.

Well, the young man was stuck. He’d wanted a hit, a real hit, a hit that would complicate his face. Finally he put a hand on the man’s newspaper, folding it down. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just want to get hit.” Marty laughed and laughed some more. His arm tattoo read Skull Keeper, and had an illustration of bones wrapped in ribbons. “You want to get hit?” he said. “Too bad. I’m done with that shit.”

“Please?” said the young man, and Marty said no, but the tight businessman eavesdropping at the next table with an iced mocha blend said he’d do it, sure, a hit?

“Right on the cheek,” said the young man, and he asked Marty to oversee, because now he trusted Marty far more than the tight businessman, whose smile was far too pleased at the idea. “Let’s all go out back? Please?” he asked Marty, who folded up his paper and agreed, because it was the modern world, and he was old but open-minded, and being the protector was a better role for him anyway, maybe a role to consider, in fact, for the future. And the tight businessman looked so tightly delighted, and the boy said, “Cheek, please,” but he did not know the tight businessman had poor centering perception, and had never, in fact, hit another man, although he’d wanted to, his whole life, ever since he had been teased every day on the walk to school by that bastard boy Adam Vermouth, who had told him in a squawking voice that he was useless, useless, useless. The tight businessman played with his hands as fists all the time at the office, but when put in the actual situation, aiming for the cheek, what he got instead was the nose, and he slammed the boy straight on and broke the bone, blood pouring out of his nostrils. “Okay?” said Marty, holding his arms out flat like a referee. “Are we done?” “That’s good,” gasped the boy, reeling with pain, and the tight businessman was just warming up, was dancing on his toes, ready to pummel this handsome young man into the brick of the café’s back wall, but Marty clamped one soft big paw on the businessman’s shoulder and said, “You’re done now, son.” The tight businessman relaxed under Marty’s hand, and the young man, too, relaxed under Marty’s voice, and later, Marty did decide that it had been a far better day for him, being the fight mediator, the protective bulldog, and when he told the lady he had figured something out, tears broke into his eyes, like eggs cracking, bright and fresh. She was proud of him. He was such a good man inside, underneath all the butt kicking and bravado.

The young man, bleeding all over the wall, waved off offers to go to the hospital or the doctor. “No, thank you, thank you,” he said, stumbling inside, using up a pile of brown recycled napkins, then holding the café’s one pint of coffee ice cream to his nose, and the businessman kept saying, “It will heal poorly,” and the young man said that was the point. And he shook the hand of the tight businessman, who was feeling cheated, as if he’d had a taste of nectar he could hardly even feel in his mouth. The young man waved at Marty, who was at the pay phone telling about his revelation, and he headed home. There, he tended to his nose for days, hoping and hoping, and he went over to his mother’s on the day he was ready to really look at it straight on, ready to remove the Band-Aids making a little pattern all over his face. She was in the kitchen, eating jelly beans off the counter—eating them even when they turned into tiny tractors and then back again—and she helped him peel each Band-Aid off, one at a time, and then they both went to the bathroom mirror. She put a hand on his shoulder. They stared at his face for a long, long time.

What had happened of course is that it had healed symmetrically. The nose was severely broken and bumpy, but the bump was a band over the middle of his nose. It had complicated the vertical planes of his face, but horizontally he still matched himself exactly. The young man’s eyes filled, and he felt the despair rushing into his throat, but his mother, wiping his cheeks clear of the leftover crusted blood, breath smelling of jelly beans, listened to the story and laughed, and said, “Son, my sweet, sweet son, it’s just that you are a butterfly. That’s just what you are. I don’t think you can do anything about it.”

Finally, he was eating a hamburger one afternoon and, licking the ketchup off the knife, he cut open the side of his lip. It was a small mark, but it needed stitches, and when they took out the stitches he had a small raised area above the left side of his lip which provided the desperately needed window. He met a woman—Sherrie-Marla—in a week. True, about a month or two later, she, while kissing him passionately, bit the other side, creating an identical mark. She dabbed ice on his lip, apologizing, and he dreaded it, dreaded her change, his eyes filling with tears in advance of her leaving, but the fact was, Sherrie-Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn’t flinch. His face was him to her now; it was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he’d needed to alter.

His mother came over for brunch with her Sunday suitor, and when she saw Sherrie-Marla take her son’s hand and kiss it on the thumb, a circle completed inside her.

In bed, after the brunch, Sherrie-Marla turned to him with clear eyes, touching his lip wound with her fingertips, her head propped on her open hand.

“You have movie star lips now,” Sherrie-Marla told him, smiling, as he leaned in to kiss her, tenderly, her kisses very, very gentle on the sore area, just pillows in the air between them.

Her own face was wildly asymmetrical. One eye much higher than the other. A nostril tilted. The smile lopsided. The front right tooth chipped. The dented chin. The larger right breast. The slightly gnarled foot. It had caused her her own share of problems. We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all. It opens its arms, in its unevenness, and he, the butterfly, flew inside.

Americca

When we came home from the movie that night, my sister went into the bathroom and then called out to our mother, asking if she’d bought another toothpaste as a hint.

I know I have major cavities, she said. But do we really need two?

Two what? asked my mother.

Two toothpastes, said Hannah.

My mother took off her jacket for the first time in hours, and peered in the bathroom, where, next to the grungy blue cup that holds the toothbrushes, there were now two full toothpastes.

I only bought one, she said. I think. Unless for some reason it was on sale.

We all shrugged in unison. I brushed my teeth with extra paste and went to bed. This incident would’ve been filed away in non-memory and we would just have had clean teeth for longer, except that in the morning there was a new knickknack on the living room side table, a slim abstract circle made of silver, and no one had any idea where it came from.

Is it a present? asked our mother with motherly hope, but we children, all too honest, shook our heads.

I don’t know what that is, I said, picking it up. It felt heavy, and expensive. Cool to the touch. Nice, Hannah said.

My mother put it away in the top of the coat closet. It was nice, but it felt, she said, like charity. And I don’t like too many knickknacks, she said, eyes elsewhere, wondering. She went to my grandmother and brought her a lukewarm cup of tea, which Grandma accepted and held, as if she no longer knew what to do with it.

Drink! my mother said, and Grandma took a sip and the peppermint pleased her and she smiled.

Happened again the next evening when, while setting up for a rare family dinner, my mother stood, arms crossed, in front of the pantry.

Lisa, she said, you didn’t go to the market, did you?

Me?

Hannah?

No.

John?

No.

Grandma never shopped. She would get lost in the aisles. She would hide beneath the apple table like a little girl. Our mother, mouth twisted to the side in puzzlement, found soup flavors in the pantry she swore she never would’ve considered buying. She held up a can of lobster bisque. This is far too bourgeois for me, she said. Wild rice and kidney bean? she said. Lemongrass corn chowder?

Yum, yelled Dad from the other room, where he was watching tennis.

Hannah paused, placing spoons on napkins. I don’t really like soup, she said. I shook my head. Not me, I said. I definitely hate soup.

Our mother tapped her fingers against the counter. What is going on? she asked.

Hannah lined up the spoon with the knife. We’ve been backwards robbed, she said solemnly.

I laughed, but her eyes were serious.

All’s I know is, she said, I did not buy that soup.

Neither did I, said Mom.

Neither did I, called Dad from the other room.

I could tell I was still the main suspect, just because I seemed the most interested in all of it, but as I explained repeatedly, why would a person lie about bringing food and new knickknacks into the house? That is nice. That is something to get credit for.

Dad cooked up the corn chowder after he found an enormous piece of gristle in his mustard chicken. We all watched him closely for choking or poisoning, but he smiled after each spoonful and said it was darned good and very unusual. Like Southwestern Thai, he said, wiping his mouth. Like … the empress meets Kimosabe, he said. Like … silver meets turquoise, he said, laughing. Like … We all told him that was enough. Hannah checked the inside of the can for clues. After dinner, Dad collected water glasses from the rooms, singing.

That night, I kept a close eye on the back door, but it stayed locked; I even fixed a twig at its base to see if it got jigged during the night, but in the morning, all was just as before. I was walking to the bathroom to get ready for school when Mom cried out, and I ran over, and she was standing over the kitchen table, which held an extra folded newspaper. Hannah found a third pewter candlestick that matched the previous two, standing tall in the bookshelf. We ate our breakfasts in silence. Although getting robbed would be bad, there was nothing appealing about getting more items every day, and I felt a vague sense of claustrophobia pick up in my lungs, like I might get smothered under extra throw pillows in the middle of the night. And we couldn’t even sell the new stuff for extra cash, because everything we got was just messed up enough to make it unappealing—the pewter candlestick was flaking into little slivers, and the silver circle thing had a subtle, creepy smell.

For the first time in my life, I cleaned my room after school. I threw out tons of old magazines and trash and dumb papers for school with the teacher’s red pen stating: Lisa, we all know you can do better than this. While cleaning, I found a new mug on my side table, with a picture of dancing cows holding Happy Birthday balloons. It could only have been purchased by Hannah, but when I showed it to her she started to cry.

They’re trying to kill us! she said, sobbing, wiping her nose on her T-shirt.

Who? How? How are they trying to kill us?

The people bringing this stuff in.

But who’s bringing it in? I asked. We’ve been home the whole time.

Ghosts, she said, eyes huge. She stared at the mug. It’s not even your birthday, she said, not for months and months.

I stuck the mug in the outside trash can, along with the extra newspaper. I kept my eyes on all the doors. The twig stayed put.

We had a respite for a week, and everyone calmed down a bit and my mother went to the market and counted how many cans, so she’d know. We ate the food we bought. We stared at the knickknacks that represented our personalities. All was getting back to normal until the next Sunday, when Hannah opened the towel closet and screamed at the top of her lungs.

What? We ran to her.

The towel closet had towels in it. Usually it had small thin piles—we each had a towel and were expected to use it over four days for all towel purposes, and there’d be a big towel wash twice a week, one on Thursday, one on Sunday. We never stuck to the system, and so generally I just used my towel as long as I possibly could, until the murky smell of mildew and toothpaste started to pass from it onto me, undoing all the cleaning work of the previous shower.

Now the towel closet was full, not of anything fluffy, but of more thin and ugly towels. Tons of them. At least ten more towels, making the piles high.

Well, I said. I guess we can cut the Thursday-Sunday wash cycle.

My mother went off to breathe in a paper bag. Hannah straightened taller, and then put one towel around her hair and another around her body, a very foreign experience in our family.

I’m going to just appreciate the gifts, she said, even though her face looked scared. I’ve always wanted to use two at once, she said.

At school the next week, it was past Halloween and we had to bring in our extra candies for the poor children of Glendora. Bags and bags came pouring in, and aside from candy, I brought in an extra bag of stuff full of soup cans and knickknacks I’d salvaged from the trash. Everyone in the family felt funny about it; maybe it was like passing on something toxic. But at the same time, throwing out whole unopened cans of lobster soup struck my mother as obscene. How often does a homeless woman who lives nowhere near salt water get lobster? she asked, hands on hips, as I packed up the bag. We nodded. We liked how her guilt looked in this form of benevolence. I repeated it to my teacher. It’s not a Snickers, I said, but it’s got a lot more protein.

I believe I saw my teacher take that soup can for herself. I watched her closely that week, but she seemed fine, and my dad had never had a single negative symptom from his lemongrass corn chowder. I didn’t eat any Halloween candy. I didn’t want anything from anyone else.

I got a note from the shelter saying my bag was the best.

Hannah got a boyfriend. She didn’t tell anyone, but I could tell because she was using so many towels, making the bathroom a pile of towels, and for some reason I knew the towels were happening because of a boy. Why did she need to be so dry all the time? I asked her about it, when she came home for dinner and looked all pretty with her cheeks bright like that. I had to set the table because she was late, and she apologized and said she’d take dish duty for two days.

It’s okay, I said. Who is he?

She blushed, crazily. Who is who?

The reason you are late, I said.

I had to study.

Mom stood in the door frame, but she wasn’t listening.

How was your math test? Mom said, brushing the side of her hair with a soupspoon.

Okay, said Hannah, glaring at me. I got an A.

What did you hear? she asked, dragging me aside and cutting into my arm with her budding nails.

Nothing, I said. Ow. I just guessed.

How? she said.

No reason, I said. Towels. Who is it?

She said no one, but then she barely ate at dinner, which is rare for her—usually I have to fight my way to the main dish to even get any, because she is so hungry—and that let me know she really liked him.

Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.

We didn’t get any more items for a few weeks. I started to miss them. I mean, I felt like I would die of claustrophobia and I had become paranoid about all things new coming into the house, including the bathwater exiting the faucet tap, and I had made a checklist for market items, shopping items, and all school items, but when I opened the refrigerator and saw all the same old stuff, I wanted to cry sometimes.

I left a few baits: I cleared my nightstand of all things, so that it was ready for a deposit. I bought a lobster soup with my own allowance, which made my mother shriek, but I assured her I’d bought it and I’d even saved the receipt to prove it. I brought it out of my bedroom, and she stared at the curling white paper and then looked at me, in the way she rarely did, eye to eye.

Are you okay, Lisa? she said. Ten-year-olds don’t usually save receipts.

I’m trying to trap a ghost, I said.

Would you like to go to the mall? she asked. Her eyes were tired. She looked pretty with tired eyes, so I didn’t mind so much.

We went to the nearest mall, over in Cerritos, which had been built twenty years ago and was ugly. I liked that about it. It was like a relative nobody liked but everybody still had to be related to anyway. We went to the kids’ store and she bought me two shirts, one orange, one red, and then I got very attached to a particular cap with an octopus on the cap part, and I felt if I left it in the store I might dissolve. I didn’t have much allowance left due to the spenditure of the lobster soup, and so I asked my mom as nicely as I could if I could have an advance and get the octopus cap because I loved it very much.

That? She was holding the store bag and trying to stop the salesperson from talking to her by staring out the door. Thanks, she was saying, thanks, thanks.

I love it, I said, putting it on my head. It was too big. I couldn’t see well underneath it.

Please? I said.

We just got you two new shirts, she said. Do you really need a cap?

It’s good for skin cancer, I said. Of the face.

She laughed. She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her job trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad’s job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn’t think of how. That afternoon, I didn’t want to bother her more, but I wasn’t certain I could leave the store with that cap still in it. If someone else bought it, I might tear in two.

I will pay you back, I said. I swear. Or we can exchange it for one of the shirts?

She got me the cap because I hardly ever asked for much, and at home I slept with it on, and wore my new orange shirt to school and back, and I was ready to charge ahead into my afternoon activities when I noticed the octopus cap on my dresser.

I thought it was the one on my head, except then I realized that that one was already on my head. So this had to be a new one? I took the one on my head off and held them both side by side. Two octopus caps. I had two now. One, two. They were both exactly the same, but I kept saying right hand, right hand, in my head, so I’d remember which one I’d bought, because that was the one I wanted. I didn’t want another octopus cap. It was about this particular right-hand octopus cap; that was the one I had fallen in love with. Somehow, it made me feel so sad, to have two. So sad I thought I couldn’t stand it.

I took the new one, left hand, to the trash, but then I thought my mom might see it and get mad that I’d thrown out the new cap she had especially bought for me, so I put the one I loved on my head and put the one I hated in the closet, behind several old sweatshirts. I went out to play wearing the first one. I played kickball with Dot Meyers next door, but she kicks cock-eyed and it was hard to see out of the cap, and when I went inside I scrounged in the closet for the second cap and it fit. That’s what was so sad. It was the right size, and I put it on, and it was better. I put them both on, one after the other, because at least by size now I could tell which was which, but it was just plain true that the one I loved did not fit and kept falling off and the one they brought did fit and looked better. Dot Meyers thought I looked dumb in a bad-fitting cap, but she’s dumb anyway and can’t spell America right.

I saw Hannah kissing a boy I’d never seen before, outside our house, in the bushes.

That night, I put a bunch of stuff in Hannah’s bedroom to freak her out, but she immediately recognized it all as mine, so it just wasn’t the same.

I wore the good new cap to school.

I ate the lobster soup. I liked it. It had a neat texture. I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got. I liked the remaining wild rice one that hadn’t made it into the Halloween bag; it was so hearty and different. I used the cow cup I’d salvaged from the trash, and the truth was, I liked the cow holding a balloon; it was cute. When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.

Mom came home from taking a class called Learning How to Focus Your Mind, and she seemed kind of focused, more than usual at least, and she sat with Grandma on the sofa and talked about childhood.

After a while I sat with them. There’s nothing to do after homework and TV and creaming Dot Meyers.

You were a quiet child, said Grandma.

What did I like to do? asked Mom.

You liked to go with me to the store, said Grandma.

What else? asked Mom.

You liked to stir the batter, said Grandma.

What else?

I don’t know, said Grandma. You liked to read.

Even as they were talking, I saw it happen on the dining room table. Saw it as they were talking, but it wasn’t like an invisible hand. Just one second there was a blank table, and I blinked, and then there was a gift on the table, a red-wrapped gift with a yellow bow. It was in a box, and I went to it and sat at the table. I knew it was for me. I didn’t need to tell them, plus they were talking a lot, plus Dad was at work, plus Hannah was out kissing.

It had no card, but it was really good wrapping, with those clean-cut triangular corners, and I opened it up and inside was a toy I had broken long ago. Actually, I hadn’t broken it; Hannah had. It was a mouse, made of glass, and Hannah had borrowed it without asking and dropped it in the toilet by accident—so she said—and broken off the red ball nose. I had been so mad at her I hadn’t spoken to her for a week and I’d made a rule that she couldn’t come in my room ever again and I asked Mom for a door lock, but she didn’t think I really meant it so I got one myself, at the hardware store, with a key, with money from my birthday, but I couldn’t figure out how to put it on. Here was the mouse, with its nose.

What was next? Grandma?

Thanks? I said, to the air.

I took the mouse and put it on the shelf it used to be on, next to the mouse that had no nose, retrieved from the toilet. The mouse without the nose looked pathetic but a little charming, and the mouse with the nose? Well. It had never been in the toilet.

When Hannah came home, I showed her. Mom’s taking a new class, I said. That’s good, she said. Her face was flushed. She seemed relieved, once she paid attention, that the new mouse had arrived. Sorry about the toilet thing, she said, for the fiftieth time. It’s cute, she said, patting the new one.

Let’s flush it down the toilet, I said.

What?

My eyes were pleading. I could feel them, pleading.

Please, Hannah.

Hang on, she said. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face and spent a minute in there with her crushiness, and then opened up. I brought both mice in.

Both, I said, the old and the new.

Fine, she said. Whatever.

How’d you do it?

I just dropped it in, she said.

On purpose?

Yeah.

I didn’t blame her. Right now, it seemed like these mice were just made for the toilet. I sat next to her on the edge of the bathtub, and dropped in the new guy. He floated around in the clean white toilet water.

Flush away, said Hannah, her eyes all shiny.

I flushed. He bobbed around and almost went down but didn’t. He was slightly too big. The toilet almost overflowed. But still—the nose.

That’s just what I did, she said. She was putting on lip gloss and smacking at herself in the mirror.

I picked up the wet new mouse, and broke his nose right off. It took some pressure, me holding him good in one hand and then snapping it off. You can ruin anything if you focus at it. There, I said.

I put both mice in the trash, and washed my hands. Hannah broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks later because he’d started calling her honey, and I got picked for the kickball team, and we didn’t get any more gifts. Not for years.

Mom found some work downtown as a filing clerk, and Dad almost got that promotion. Hannah went to college nearby but she lived at home because of the price of rent. Grandma got older and eventually died.

When I was about to graduate high school, I did notice a packet of yellow curry in the pantry while I was rummaging around, looking for a snack. It was in a plastic yellow envelope that just said Curry on it in red letters. I asked my mom if she’d bought it, and she said no. Hannah? No. Dad? No. I don’t like curry, I said out loud, although I’d never tried it. As an afterthought, I brought it with me to college, where I had a scholarship, so I was the first one to leave home, it turned out, and it sat in the cupboard in the dorm for four years, alongside the oregano and the salt and my roommate’s birth control pills. I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the noxious carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.

The Devourings

The ogre’s wife was a good woman. She was not an ogre, but she was ugly, by human standards, and she had married the ogre because he was strong and productive, and together they had made six small ogre children. The children all took after their father. She had not expected otherwise—one look at his giant teeth, height, and huge features, and she knew his genes had to be dominant.

Years earlier, she had left her own village by choice, traveling up and over the green and rising hills in search of a life for herself, and when she had met the ogre in the tavern, him stretched along the entire side wall, his voice scratched from cigar smoke, she thought she might give the alternate world a chance. Everyone in her hometown knew of the ogres, living up on Cloud Hill like that. With their magical boots, and that hen.

With also, she wondered, a range of appetites? Later that night, at his home, the ogre had been surprised at her willingness to take off her clothes, since he’d been rumored to eat people for dinner. As she unlaced her blouse, he touched fingertips to her trembling bare shoulders and explained in his low gravel that he only ate human beings he did not know. I know your name now, he murmured. I know your travels. You’re safe. Her eyes were closed, and when she revealed her breasts, he sighed. They were sculpted by a different artist, he whispered to her, with a subtler tool. His desire was too much for her at first, overwhelming, but she soon grew to love him and his body, its giant harshness, its gentle gruffness with her. Next to him, she felt herself so delicate. At school, she had been the roughest-skinned, the one with the drooping features, the one no one could ever imagine that way, in a bed. She did not care about not being pretty, but she wanted to be seen as a future woman, as one who could participate, and no high-school boy could take that leap. The ogre, however, found her nothing short of revelatory, and the first time he entered her, he shouted with joy.

One evening, after many years of contented marriage, the children tucked in their bed, asleep, snoring faintly, wearing hammered gold crowns with their nightshirts because their father wanted them to feel like royal ogres in their dreams, a human girl and her siblings knocked on the door, frightened. They were lost, and the ogre was out at the tavern, and the ogre’s wife opened up, and there they were—a group of six live human kids, with bright hair and red felt hats and snapping eyes, reminding her so sweetly of her long-ago nieces and nephews. The ogre’s wife disliked firmly only one aspect of her husband: his interest in eating the children of humans. It could’ve been me! she told him once in bed while he twirled and twisted her hair over his fingers. She could not bear to turn the children out into the ogre-filled night, so she hustled them inside and in a fierce whisper told them they could hide in the same giant bed as her own children, but not to make a sound, not a peep!

When the ogre came home, late, he smelled them, of course; how could she have imagined he would not smell them? She was half-asleep, twisted in the sheets, and hoped desperately that he would just crash out on the sofa in drunkenness. What she did not know was that, earlier in the night, the smart little girl leader of the human group had swapped their six red felt hats with the six golden crowns on the heads of the deep-sleeping ogre children, and when the ogre cackled hungrily, bumbling around the house, hunting for the source of the scent, he, of poor eyesight, of booziness, of delirium, ended up eating all his own children due to the swapping of those hats.

In the early morning, the human children ran off terrified, giggling.

We skip ahead five years, because five years were full of nothing but searing pain and tears. Five years of lying on the bed unable to move, slogging up to do the basic functioning needed to hold things together, then back to bed. Five years of scathing bitterness at ogres, and also at humans, at where she came from, and the worry that had led her to open the door; I should’ve let him eat them first thing! she said, weeping into the down of her pillow, though she felt sick anytime she had even gotten the hint that her husband had eaten a child. But her own! There were two that she mourned the most, much as she hated to admit it to herself, but she had loved Lorraine and Stillford best, the two most-complex-looking ogre faces, who had emerged post-utero like gnarled wood knots, and who had turned out to be all sweetness in nature. How they had loved their human mother. They nestled on her lap and nudged their big heads into her shoulders. They were gentle during the breastfeeding, unlike their siblings. Ogres grew teeth early, and she had to stop feeding most of them or they would’ve ripped off her nipple, truly. She, many times, ran to the bathroom with blood streaming from her breasts from a careless slash, a little ogre child happily lapping up the red drops on the sofa. To those she gave formula. But she was too softhearted to decide for them all; for each new child she risked her breast, and Lorraine and Stillford had been different, angled their teeth just so and suckled like little human babies, and perhaps held within their selves some of her human genes that knew not to tear at the gentleness offered. Now they were dead, digested in the system of their father, who had been so angry he split a bone out of his neck while overclenching his jaw and had to go to the hospital, where he broke four beds and injured a nurse. He was angrier than ever these days, and their marriage and its focus and tenderness had faded. His favorite had been Lutter, the super-ogre demon child, who was so kinetic she rarely saw him still, and who had scraped the walls into shreds with his nails and twice tried to swallow his mother whole. She had let him train with her husband only, and why Lutter, even in his sleep, had let himself be eaten, could only have been due to the deep dreamy trust he felt of the smell of the mouth he was entering, a mouth he knew from its firm position over his shoulder, telling him instructions on how to rip through cartilage and sinew, and an inability, due to that core of trust, to imagine his fate could end this way.

After enough time had passed, she was able to get out of bed for hours at a time. She could go to town and engage in minutes of small talk. She could sit outside on the porch and watch leaves twist on the birch trees. She could read a short article in the newsletter. On this day, a day of change, she cleaned the house, top to floor, using swaths of cloth that grew dark with dirt and dust. She swept tumbleweeds of lint out the front door, and poured scrubbing detergent into all the sinks to scour the vast yellowing basins. At the market, she bought root vegetables by the dozen and chickens and sausages. She stuffed the chickens and made a stew and fed her husband, who came home ragged from his work climbing mountainsides to look for caves packed with jewels and gifts like the magical harp that that thief Jack had stolen from his brother years ago.

We are pillaged, constantly, said the ogre, laying his loot in a sparkling heap by the door. And they fear us?

He kissed her on the ear, and sat down to roll a cigar out of crisp brown paper and a fist-sized wad of tobacco.

Good stew, human, he said, after dinner.

Please don’t call me that, she said, for the hundredth time.

That’s right, he said, patting his belly. I’m sorry. Love that sausage, delicious. He lit the cigar and inhaled deeply.

She wiped the globs of leftover chicken off the dining room table with a sponge.

While he mumbled to himself, digesting, sleepy, she filled the pots with soap and water to soak, and ate a little bowl of the chicken stew behind the counter. She rarely ate at the same table as her husband anymore, as she now feared him during mealtimes, couldn’t stand to watch him slurp up animals with that vigor and those grinding, pointed teeth.

Husband, she said, putting her bowl aside. She walked out from behind the counter. I have decided I need to go on a trip, she said.

The ogre was finishing his fourth mug of wine. He liked the darkest wine, the red almost black.

Go where? he said, wiping his mouth. To see your family?

She shook her head. Her family lived below, in the people village, and last time she’d been home, before the devourings, everyone had lectured her on ogres and complicity and betrayal. She’d waved them off. He’s a good one, she had said. She had not dared show pictures of her children.

I’d like to see something pretty, she said. Maybe a lake?

There’s a river that’s supposed to be nice a few valleys over, he said, exhaling bracelets of smoke to the rafters.

Okay, she said. A river.

I could go with you, he said, turning a giant brown eye to hers. His eye like a pool hers could swim inside.

A mucky pool.

No, she told him. I need to do this alone.

He nodded. He understood. They both coped in their own ways. He had women on the side, ogre women, everyone knew. Maybe she didn’t know, but probably. After all, although being with a human was the ultimate in showing off both self-control and status, sometimes a man just wanted a woman like himself. There were no prostitutes in the ogre village, as it was a barter economy and females chose males with equal discernment, but there were a couple who liked this particular ogre, and every few months he’d make a little sojourn as a way to honor where he came from. It’s for my mother, he told his ogre-woman once, and she’d laughed and laughed, nude and mottled and calm, sprawled over a mattress, one arm crossing loosely over her forehead.

The ogre helped his wife pack up. He buttoned up her bag and told her he would miss her, which was true. From his plunder, he gave her a magic cloak that would turn her into the color of the dappled light that shot through foliage, and also a cake that would become more cake once she’d eaten half. He kissed her forehead, roughly, and she melted a little under his arms.

Do you know how long you’ll be? he asked.

I don’t know, she said.

Okay, he said. I’ll be here.

They spent the night almost close, her forehead pressed against the wall of his triceps. Come morning, she walked through the door and into fields of glistening green.

What marriage could recover? She did not plan on ever returning. The ogre wasn’t sure, but he thought it was unlikely. He was not insensitive, despite all suspicions. The day she left, he skipped work and went to the tavern for lunch and drank ninety-five beers. You’re a machine! the other ogres said, admiringly, as he slammed down another stein. Foam made an old man’s beard around his mouth, and he burped in an echo that trembled the hillsides.

She felt it, his wife, now miles away, following a winding path up and over lightly rolling hills covered in sage, and dandelion fields, and one meadow of sunflowers shuddering in the daylight. She walked and walked until dusk, trying to collect distance under her feet, and then she camped out under a shady elm with her checkered cloth. She unpacked some almonds and dried cherries and she also ate the cake, which would let itself diminish to half and then, under her bare eyes, build itself back up out of nothing, out of air, until it was a full cake again. She was grateful for it, but somehow it also bothered her. Finish, cake, she said, tearing off half, watching it rebuild. Finish! She tore off more than half, the whole, but the cake was unstoppable. Plus, she needed it. What, she was going to trap birds and roast them over a fire? She was a woman who shopped at a market with a wheeled cart and used honey-lavender soap. She drank from her water mug and refilled it at a spring at the edge of the meadow, and before she fell asleep, she sprinkled the remaining cake crumbs around her cloth.

In the morning, she awoke surrounded by expectant-looking crows. Enough! she said, shaking the cloth as they tottered away.

Really, she could’ve spent the rest of her life there, just sitting and feeding those crows and herself with the cake, but she wanted to reach the river.

When she heard a clip-clopping sound, she put on the cloak so that she looked like the dappled sunlight beneath the elm, a particularly glorious sunlit area that did not correspond to the rules of sun location in the sky, but who would notice that except a particularly astute observer of shadows? This was just a human horseman riding along in ogre country, looking to find some treasure, like his comrades who had come up here and survived. She watched him, his handsomeness, his vanity and sureness, his sculpted hair and cheeks, his strong hands, his proud red jacket, and she was reminded again why the ogres had attracted her, and why she had loved young Stillford so, his wet brown eyes searching out hers, those sharp, smiling, crooked teeth. The ogres knew they were ugly and in that they were decent. They did not ever think they could be like this man, she thought as he galloped off, tossing his head with pleasure. He ducked and rose over hills, and she saw it coming before he did, saw the ogre who ran the corner store just out on a pleasant walk in his seven-league boots, rounding the corner and—surprise! what a gift!—the man too late raising his gun and landing a shot on the ogre’s shoulder, which was nothing to an ogre, nothing a little mending at night wouldn’t fix, a little digging with a fork into flesh to expunge a bullet, and she watched in her cloak as the man was plucked from his horse and eaten whole. It was a horrible sight, one she had tried not to see for most of her wedded life, but on that day she found it almost comforting. Just to see it. Not comforting to see pain and death but just to see what she could not let herself imagine and therefore ruled her. She wept quietly under the tree as the ogre chewed. Then he walked off, rubbing his belly, wearing those boots, a little scrap of red cloth sticking out of his mouth until he reached out a tongue and licked it in, just like a human might do with a bit of jam.

The horse had run off, but it circled back after the ogre left, pacing in the field, then settling down, and after her shaking subsided, she walked over to where it was grazing. A couple of hours had passed, and the horse seemed focused on the grass, and calm. After all, the eating had been brief, and the man had barely had time to scream, and ogres were just about food, not about power play or torture. They were just endlessly large and hungry beings. She mounted the horse and rode lazily along, digging around in the thick leather packs on the side where she found some snacks—turkey jerky that she used to love, made in the village, and some peaches, a rare delicacy for her, as ogres couldn’t care less about peaches, and the fragrance consumed her mouth, like eating perfume, like kisses of nectar. She found a letter from a wife in royal-blue ink from a quill pen, wishing the man well. It was all awful, she thought, tossing the peach stone onto the green hillside, where it wedged against a rock, near some bees. Happy bees. She patted the horse’s neck. Now she and the widow had something in common. Though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton; it just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And, she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horse’s mane, it did not leave once lodged, did it, simply changed form and asked repeatedly for attention and care, as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider—smaller, sure, but never gone. Stillford, she thought to herself, as the sun grew high in the sky. My sweet Stillford, with his dirt art. My funny Lorraine, who danced to the lute so earnestly. Out of my body, these beautiful monsters.

It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce.

A few hours into the afternoon, during a nap on the horse, who was eating clover in the inverted bell of a valley, the ring of trumpets awoke the woman. She jerked awake, recalling the sound from her childhood, when trumpets were the way news was delivered, and sure enough, across the field emerged a troop of human men and women on horseback, some walking, two trumpeting, one waving a bright-red flag. From what she could recall, a bright-red flag meant war.

Ho, woman! called the strapping man at the lead, and she did not have time to put on her cloak; even if she had, they’d take her horse, and she liked having the horse.

They trotted over, a whole mess of people, and she hadn’t looked at so many human faces together in years. How refined they were! How tiny and delicate! Those dot nostrils! Their hairless hands!

Are you lost? the head man asked, not unkindly. He wore a helmet wrought with silver swirled markings on the sides that seemed to speak of royalty.

No, she said, thank you. I’m on my way to the river.

This is ogre territory! said the man, sitting straighter. You’re not safe!

He turned to the others, beckoning them closer.

No, no, she said, waving him off. It’s fine. I’m skilled at hiding. I’ve been living in this territory for years.

Ho! he said, digging his hands into his horse’s mane. Years? And survived? You must help us, then! We sent out a scout earlier to look for mines, and we have not heard back. Did you see anyone?

Of course, one careful look at the horse and all would be revealed, but the man was very focused on her face, as if he had been trained in it.

No, she said.

You saw no danger? said the man.

Nothing but crows, she said.

Ogres eat people, said the man, leaning in.

To her annoyance, her eyes thickened with tears.

Ah! You’ve seen something?

She shook her head, tucking her hands under the saddle and feeling the horse’s warm coat beneath her, the large and living backside. No. I just heard a story once, of someone getting eaten, and I found it sad, she said. The tears tracked her cheeks.

He nodded. They all had their own stories.

Our sentry is a good man, the man said, and he said he’d contact us immediately via light signaling with use of the sun and his mirror and we have not seen a thing. Ah! Is that his horse?

He glanced down, and saw the packs. She had in her lap some turkey jerky that she’d been eating earlier.

Oh, I don’t know! she said. She widened her eyes. Is it? I was just walking and came upon this horse and needed a rest. Hours ago. It did not have an owner.

The man’s brow furrowed. The horse, alone? Hours ago?

Alone, she said.

He consulted with a short man next to him on a taller horse, making them even.

You’ll have to come with us, the main man said.

Oh no, she said, slipping the turkey jerky into a pocket. I’ll walk. I’ll give you his horse. I didn’t realize it belonged to anyone recently. I thought it had been wild for a while.

No, said the man, firmly. We need you to come with us.

He gave a nod to his short man, who began to dismount.

The woman leapt off her horse, and backed into the meadow. The afternoon sun filtered through pine needles on high fir trees to the side, and with a quick move she had the cloak out of her bag and on and had turned into light and shadow.

Where’d she go? said the short man.

Witch! said the first.

The trumpets raised and blared.

The woman crept quietly to a corner of the meadow. Had any one of them been attuned to light, they would’ve seen one patch of splattered sun shapes moving along in a way that did not correspond to the breeze.

But they were not. They were preoccupied with what had happened. They had liked their handsome, courageous scout. They quickly assimilated the man’s packs and letters into their crew, and put a child who had been previously riding with his mother onto the horse, and the two lead men swore, and the woman watched silently from her spot in the meadow as they moved in a clump over the hills.

She stayed in the meadow in the cloak for hours, and the sun went down and lit the grasses with orange light, and she wondered about her husband, who was likely going to see one of his women on the side. Although it made her cringe inside, a fist in her stomach, there was also a distant relief in it, in people just doing what they needed to do. She found comfort in the way the grasses swayed, and murmured, and at dinnertime, in a little whisper, she asked the cake to change flavor, and, magic cake that it was, it shifted from vanilla pound to a chocolate Bundt, and she ate it with pleasure, plus some more almonds she had in her pocket and the remaining turkey jerky. Water from the spring. The moon rose in a crescent and crickets rubbed their wings together and in the far distance, now and again, she could hear the shining bleats of the bugles and trumpets.

In the morning, she walked on. She could smell the river now, the heavy moisture, the damper grasses under her feet. The trumpets had grown fainter, and she imagined they were returning home to arm up and come back to try to defeat the ogres with guns and bayonets. Maybe they will, she thought, vaguely, though the ogres had magic and bigness on their side, and the humans had a hubris ogres did not. Ogres bumbled, and erred, but their weaknesses were not hidden, and this helped them, in the long run.

She ate her lunch (more dried cherries) and then took the cake out of her bag. Something about it still bothered her. I need to fight for my life a little harder than this, she told it. It was now a chocolate chip cake, and she felt bad for it, this cake so willing to change and please her, with no other beings around who could speak to it, and enjoy it, but she ate a small portion and then wrapped it in a checkered napkin and tucked it in the branched fork of a sturdy oak.

Here, cake, she told it, patting the napkin. You are to have your own adventure now. No matter what happens, you can grow again.

As she said it, as she stooped to shoulder her bag, she understood why she could not tolerate being around a cake that survived so repeatedly, and she stood, bowed at the branch, and walked away.

Finding food became much harder then. She rooted for berries, having learned years ago from her husband what was edible, but more times than not, the berries were bad. She ate a handful of sour ones in the afternoon, and dug up some old peanuts and a beet. Dirt filled the cracks in her hands. She found a strong stick and rubbed the end to a point with the paring knife she’d brought in her sack, and when she finally reached the river—dark blue, racing, stone-dribbled—after refilling her water (ogre-country water was always drinkable—something to do with the deep reserves replenished by the clouds), she saw a quick orange fish in the current and crouched down and, after dozens of tries, speared it. The fish flapped on her stick, and she knelt and prayed a thank you. She had only seen a fire built in front of her a few times, but she was able to wrangle together some sticks and fir needles and with the matches she had in her pack managed to get enough going to scorch the cleaned fish, though she missed many of the bones and picked them from her teeth in thin pullings. She let the fish guts molder in the grasses for another animal. Everything would get eaten in some way or another.

She slept that night wearing the cloak, a bright spot of dapple in the darkness. Soon into her sleep, she woke at the sound of rustling, and caught a bear cub next to her licking up the fish guts and eyeing her sunspot curiously. She removed the cloak and it scampered away. The next morning, she wrapped up the cloak and left it in another tree’s branches. She did not want help from magic. She did not want any more handouts.

She grew rugged and wiry in the fields, spearing fish, using up the last of her matches but not until she was sure she had figured out how to make a fire on her own, which sometimes took over an hour. Her legs turned leaner and tanner, and she squatted and watched the clouds and the river and felt her sense of internal time shifting. We adapt, she told herself repeatedly. This is what they mean by adaptable. The men rose up from the village with their spears and guns, and when she saw the glints of red and the banners of war she climbed a high tree and watched from a distance as the human forces with shining weaponry and brass charged into ogre territory. Into the thatched huts and the rickety tavern and the ogre game-field full of nets and balls woven from goat hide. She watched, again, as the ogres ate the men whole. They could eat and eat. She watched the ogres fall from the expert weaponry, and the sight of a fallen ogre enraged the other ogres and invigorated the remaining men, so the last phase was particularly bloody. Casualties were tossed off an embankment on Cloud Hill, and far below, people cried out and ran from the falling bodies.

On one of the days, she spotted her husband from the height of her best scouting tree, near the widest part of the river, where she’d set up a little daily life for herself that included hours of watching insects move grasses around or feeling the wind shift over her skin. Her husband, who had aged. She could see it in his limp. She missed him. She felt from his limp that he missed her. She had taken good care of him. He had been her one and only love. She watched as he swiped at the humans with swinging arms and ate two and then stumbled off and could not continue. The humans shot guns in his direction but he just swatted bullets like sport and the humans were radically outnumbered by that point and her ogre was one of the biggest. He limped farther away, and then twisted and turned, and his body moved in a way she’d never seen before, an uncomfortable jerking, an insistent movement from feet up to mouth, and he vomited up human—legs and arms and a head tumbled straight out of him. It was unchewed, the body—it was just parts and parcels of humanness—and the pieces lay there in the grass, glazed in a layer of spit and acid. Everyone stopped, for a second, seeing that: the man who had not been chewed, but had been split into parts, and was of course dead. The ogres held still, sweating, staring. The ogres had never seen an ogre throw anything up in their lives; they were nothing if not able digesters, and they shuddered at the sight of it.

On light feet, the woman crept closer. She ran through the grasses and leapt into another tree. The humans were muttering amongst themselves because although they had seen bodies eaten it was something else to see a body reemerge. The man’s parts were now moldering in the grass, perhaps for the same bear cub. When she was close enough, at a high perch, she found she could recognize the man. An uncle of hers, a distant uncle, her mother’s eldest brother. His twisted hand, his nose, that tweaked shoulder and distinctive jaw. She clung to the branch and thought perhaps her husband had thrown up the man because the taste had reminded him of his own children. Perhaps he had banged up against memory through an inexplicable familiarity. He had never told her he was sad. He had never expressed true regret. They had, in fact, never really talked about it. How to talk about it? How could she blame him, or could he blame her? Weren’t they both to blame for it, and also blameless? Who were the little human children who’d escaped, and where were they now?

The remaining ogres staggered off, and the remaining humans went to surround her dead uncle’s parts. It was a truce moment. There had been enough death, and the ogres were not going to be vanquished, and the remaining humans did not want to be eaten, so they put the uncle’s body into burlap bags and began the slow march home. Her ogre sank to the grasses on his knees and hung his head. He stayed there for hours, wilted, hunched, and from her perch in the tree, she sent him love. She made her love into a piece of the wind, formed from the air in her and placed on the air outside her, and sent it to him, even though it would be too diffuse by the time it got there. Still, even the bear cub felt it, trotting over to whatever remaining organ bits he could find, lifting up his nose to smell the new hint of freshness in the evening air.

The cake, at first, had remained in the tree. Lodged in the branch nook of the old oak where she’d left it. But various birds found it in a few short days—they could smell its bready sweetness from yards away—and they pecked so hard at the napkin that the cake fell from the nook and rolled out of the linen. On the ground, the birds pecked it into nothing. It replenished. They pecked. It replenished. The cake wanted to satisfy the birds, so it made itself into a seeded type, and the birds went at it with new vigor. The cake replenished. The birds were so full they hopped off, wobbling, but they returned with eagerness in the morning, and the next morning, and the birds that lived near the oak tree became fat and listless. They could hardly fly. All they did all day long was peck at the cake.

The cake had grown old. It had been made so many years ago, and it had been so many cakes in its time.

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

On her walk back, the woman saw it on the ground. She recognized her napkin, checked blue against the dirt. She was heading home. She was not sure if she could really return, or how to do it, but she wanted to try. She missed her husband, and the sight of him throwing up her uncle had filled her with a sore and tender love. There was the cake, in seeded form now, and she felt sorry for it.

With her pointed stick, she dug a hole in the ground. Now, dear cake, she said, gently burying it, patting the dirt. At least you can rest. At least you will not be endlessly pecked and diminished.

The birds found it in a day. A cake like that? Let that kind of thing go? They thought not. They scrabbled in the dirt and dragged it out with their beaks. They had missed it, for that missing day. They pecked with unusual ardor. A few worms had already attached to its bottom side and were eating it too, and the cake had formed its back side into a kind of dirt cake and its front into seed, and it would replenish itself according to the ratio of its eaters.

It went on like this for a while, and a few of the birds died early, from overeating and lack of flight. New birds came and went. Same with the worms.

The woman returned to her house, and her husband opened the door, widening it when he saw it was her, and they sat at the kitchen table. It did not feel wrong. She got up and took her items out of her dirty bag and piled them into the sink for laundry. That moment a few days later when their arms touched over by the guest room? They ate their stew bowls together. They walked formally into the living room, sat on a sofa, and stumbled through a conversation. At night, she climbed onto his chest to sleep and he held her in place like a belt. Later, they took a few trips to a waterfall, and a glacier, and befriended an ogre who ran a school. After many years, the woman died of natural causes, and a few years after that, the ogre died. Eventually, his mistresses died. Down on the ground, in the people village, over decades, the war men and women died. The human girl who had escaped her early death died, across the land, over by the ocean, in her shack of blue bowls and rocking chairs. The witch who had originally made the cake and made up the spell and given it as a gift to her beloved ogre-friend died.

The cake went on and on.

Time passed, and the climate shifted. The trees and grasses faded, and the land grew dry. Birds stopped flying overhead. Reptiles ate the cake but eventually died out. The worms dried into dust. A quarter mile away, the magic cloak had stayed stuffed in its tree, hidden from view over many, many years. Some wind had nudged it into open air, and now, half-tucked in the broken branches of a dead tree trunk, was a shining bright coat-shaped area of dappled light through foliage. It showed dapple long after the sun had stopped shining through any leaves, because there were no more leaves.

Neither could move, but the cake felt a sense of the presence of the cloak, and thought it might be a new eater coming to find the cake, and the cake, always wanting to please—the cake who had found a way to survive its endlessness by recreating its role over and over again—tried to figure out in its cake way what this light-dappled object might want to eat. So it became darkness. A cake of darkness. It did not have to be human food. It did not have to be digestible through a familiar tract. It lay there on the dirt, waiting, a shimmering cake of darkness. Through time, and wind, and earthquakes, and chance, at last the cloak fell out of the tree and blew across the land and happened upon the cake, where it ate its darkness and extinguished its own dappled light. The cloak disappeared into night and was not seen again, as it was only a piece of coat-shaped darkness now and could no longer be spotted so easily, had there been any eyes left to see it. It floated and joined with nowhere. Darkness was overtaking everything anyway. Pouring over the land and sky. The cake itself, still in the shape of darkness, sat on the hillside.

What’s left? said the cake. It thought in blocks of feeling. It felt the thick darkness all around it. What is left to eat me? To take me in?

Darkness did not want to eat more darkness, not especially. Darkness did not care for carrot cake, or apple pie. Darkness did not seem interested in a water cake, or a cake of money. Only when the cake filled with light did it come over. The darkness, circling around the light, devouring the light. But the cake kept refilling, as we know. This is the spell of the cake. And the darkness, eating light, and again light, and again light, lifted.