Books We Are Reading This Winter –– Upcoming Novels November 2021

The Lowes shaped cruelty into a crown, and oh, they wear it well.

A Tradition of Tragedy: The True Story of the Town that Sends its Children to Die

The Lowe family had always been the undisputed villains of their town’s ancient, bloodstained story, and no one understood that better than the Lowe brothers.

The family lived on an isolated estate of centuries-worn stone, swathed in moss and shadowed in weeping trees. On mischief nights, children from Ilvernath sometimes crept up to its towering wrought iron fence, daring their friends to touch the famous padlock chained around the gate—the one engraved with a scythe.

Grins like goblins, the children murmured, because the children in Ilvernath loved fairy tales—especially real ones. Pale as plague and silent as spirits. They’ll tear your throat and drink your soul.

All these tales were deserved.

These days, the Lowe brothers knew better than to tempt the town’s wrath, but that didn’t stop them from sneaking over the fence in the throes of night, relishing the taste of some reckless thrill.

“Do you hear that?” The older one, Hendry Lowe, stood up, brushed the forest floor off his gray T-shirt, and cracked each of his knuckles, one by one. “That’s the sound of rules breaking.”

Hendry Lowe was too pretty to worry about rules. His nose was freckled from afternoons napping in sunshine. His dark curls kissed his ears and cheekbones, overgrown from months between haircuts. His clothes smelled sweet from morning pastries often stuffed in his pockets.

Hendry Lowe was also too charming to play a villain.

The younger brother, Alistair, leaped from the fence and crashed gracelessly to the ground. He didn’t like forgoing the use of magick, because without it he was never very good at anything—even an action as simple as landing. But tonight he had no magick to waste.

“Do you hear that?” Alistair echoed, smirking as he rose to his feet. “That’s the sound of bones breaking.”

Although the two brothers looked alike, Alistair wore the Lowe features far differently than Hendry. Pale skin from a lifetime spent indoors, eyes the color of cigarette ashes, a widow’s peak as sharp as a blade. He wore a wool sweater in September because he was perpetually cold. He carried the Sunday crossword in his pocket because he was perpetually bored. He was one year younger than Hendry, a good deal more powerful, and a great deal more wicked.

Alistair Lowe played a perfect villain. Not because he was instinctively cruel or openly proud, but because, sometimes, he liked to. Many of the stories whispered by the children of Ilvernath came from him.

“This is a shitty idea,” Alistair told his brother. “You know that, right?”

“You say that every time.”

Alistair shivered and shoved his hands in his pockets. “This time it’s different.”

Two weeks ago, the moon in Ilvernath had turned crimson, piercing and bright like a fresh wound in the sky. It was called the Blood Moon, the sign that, after twenty years of peace, the tournament was approaching once more. Only a fortnight remained until the fall of the Blood Veil, and neither brother wanted to spend it in the hushed, sinister halls of their home.

The walk downtown was long—it was a waste of magick to drain a Here to There spellring this close to the tournament, and they couldn’t drive. Both were lost in their thoughts. Hendry looked like he was fantasizing about meeting a cute girl, judging from how he kept fiddling with his curls and smoothing the wrinkles in his sleeves.

Alistair was thinking about death. More specifically, about causing it.

The gloomy stone architecture of Ilvernath had stood for over sixteen hundred years, but in the last few decades, it had been renovated with sleek glass storefronts and trendy outdoor restaurants. Despite its disorienting maze of cobbled, one-way streets, questionable amenities, and minimal parking, the small city was considered an up-and-coming spot for the art and magick scene.

Not that the seven cursed families of Ilvernath paid much attention to the modern world, even if the world had recently begun paying attention to them.

The Magpie was the boys’ favorite pub, although no one would guess that from how infrequently they visited. Determined to keep their identities concealed and their photographs out of the papers, Alistair insisted they vary the location for their nighttime excursions. They couldn’t afford to become familiar faces—they’d been homeschooled for that very reason. The way their grandmother talked, one whisper of their names and the city would be raising their pitchforks.

Alistair looked grimly upon the Magpie, its sign a dark shadow in the red moonlight, and wondered if the trouble was worth it.

“You don’t have to come inside,” Hendry told him.

“Someone needs to watch out for you.”

Hendry reached underneath his T-shirt and pulled out a piece of quartz dangling on a chain. The inside pulsed with scarlet light—the color of a spellstone fully charged with high magick.

Alistair grabbed Hendry by the wrist and shoved the stone back beneath his shirt before someone noticed. “You’re asking for trouble.”

Hendry only winked at him. “I’m asking for a drink.”

Magick was a valuable resource throughout the world—something to be found, collected, and then crafted into specific spells or curses. Once upon a time, there had been two types of magick: frighteningly powerful high magick and plentiful, weaker common magick. Throughout history, empires had greedily fought for control of the high magick supply, and by the time humanity invented the telescope and learned to bottle beer, they had depleted it entirely.

Or so they’d believed.

Hundreds of years ago, seven families had clashed over who would control Ilvernath’s high magick. And so a terrible compromise was reached—a curse the families cast upon themselves. A curse that had remained a secret … until one year ago.

Every generation, each of the seven families was required to put forth a champion to compete in a tournament to the death. The victor would award their family exclusive claim over Ilvernath’s high magick, a claim that expired upon the beginning of the next cycle, when the tournament began anew.

Historically, the Lowes dominated. For every three tournaments, they won two. The last cycle, twenty years ago, Alistair’s aunt had murdered all the other competitors within four days.

Before they’d learned about the tournament, the rest of Ilvernath could only point to the Lowes’ wealth and cruelty as the reasons an otherwise mysterious, reclusive family commanded such respect from lawmakers and spellmakers. Now they knew exactly how dangerous that family truly was.

So with the foreboding Blood Moon gleaming overhead, tonight was a risky time for the only two Lowes of tournament age to crave live music and a pint of ale.

“It’s one drink,” Hendry said, giving Alistair a weak smile.

Although the Lowe family hadn’t formally chosen their champion yet, the boys had always known it would be Alistair. Tonight meant far more to either of them than a simple drink.

“Fine.” Alistair threw open the door.

The pub was a cramped, slovenly place. The air was thick from tobacco smoke; rock music blared from a jukebox in the corner. Red-and-white checkered cloths draped over every booth. For the sociable, there were billiards. For those keeping a lower profile, there was a pinball machine, its buttons sticky from whisky fingers.

The Magpie was flooded with cursechasers. They traveled the world to gawk at magickal anomalies like Ilvernath’s, such as the curse in Oxacota that left a whole town asleep for nearly a century, or the curse on the ruins in Môlier-sur-Olenne that doomed trespassers with a violent death in exactly nine days’ time. Now, the tourists clustered in groups, whispering over well-worn copies of A Tradition of Tragedy. The recent bestseller had exposed the death tournament and Ilvernath’s surviving vein of high magick … and had catapulted their remote city into the international spotlight.

“I didn’t believe that the Blood Moon was actually scarlet,” Alistair overheard one of them whispering. “I thought it was just a name.”

Gunnar’s arm was gone—everything below the elbow. Though Erlend’s mama had bundled it in calico bandages, I kept imagining his injury and what he must’ve endured during the accident—the sound of the snap, the jolt of pure agony, the hours he’d likely suffered until Herr Doktor Engen arrived to treat him. Gunnar Fuglestad was my best friend since childhood and one month ago he’d almost died.

The bleeding didn’t do him in, but the septic infection nearly did and now his skin shone pale as a corpse. Gunnar: a corpse. The vision struck me like a rifle-ball to the gut.

I had to sit down.

Near the foot of Erlend’s four-poster stood a dainty slipper chair. Quietly, I pulled it close to the side of the mattress, nearest to where Gunnar lay beneath the quilts. As I settled onto the ornately patterned seat, I wondered why Erlend had asked me to come to his house to resume our theater rehearsals if my scene partner remained not only abed, but also terribly debilitated.

Looking over Gunnar once more, I sighed in relief at the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Though it’d only been a month since the accident, it felt like an eternity since I’d last seen him—the longest we’d been apart since we first became friends. Erlend’s parents, the Fourniers, had taken him in upon hearing about the calamity at the Fuglestads’ farm, but each time I had tried to visit, Fru Fournier insisted Gunnar was quite unwell and quite unable to see anyone. Now, finally, I knew what she meant. Quite unwell meant Gunnar’s arm was quite missing and the rest of him quite unconscious. I wiped my sweating palms on my skirt.

Breeze from the Norwegian Sea usually subdued our summer heat, but this morning’s air settled into an oppressive swelter. Despite the temperature, Gunnar slept beneath a blanket of silk jacquard, his head tilted to the side, his ginger lashes heavy and still. A scab, shaped like a falcon in flight, spanned the width of his forehead; a yellowing bruise marred one cheekbone. Sweat sheened upon his brow and corded his blood-red hair, and yet, somehow, he still smelled like cinnamon and rain.

With my brown huckaback pinafore and Gunnar’s many-hued wounds, the two of us seemed so out of place in the expanse of Erlend’s bedroom—double doors on one side, portière on the other, imported piano, ski medals, rococo mirrors. The refined luxury forced me to find things I hadn’t noticed about Gunnar Fuglestad before: the rough orange stubble on his jaw, oddly precocious for a boy who’d only just turned seventeen, and the hardness that remained on his face even in slumber.

With a steaming forehead and a twinge of guilt, I found myself thinking about the play. If Gunnar were to recover in time, his Benedick would have one arm. It might still work. Much Ado began with men returning from war, so Benedick could’ve lost his limb in battle. Gunnar would likely have a number of clever ideas on how to play the part one-handed. He’d make it brilliant.

The tip, top, tip of Erlend’s slippers echoed through the bedchamber. A flush of heat invaded my chest. Sounds coming from things I couldn’t see always made me anxious as a cornered hen. I was born with an unhearing left ear, so I’d developed a habit of turning to the right until I’d find the source of a sound. Erlend tried to keep me from doing it on stage. An actress needs to face the audience, he’d say. But even after weeks of rehearsals, I still fought the urge to face my castmates. And in real life, where I’d be unrehearsed and unscripted, I’d always turn right, then right again, and right once more until I could finally identify the location of the noise-maker. Twisting in my chair now, I spotted Erlend standing in the doorway, script pages folded in his hand.

Erlend. Glorious Erlend.

Only recently, during rehearsals, did I realize he was handsome. Before, I’d have used other words to describe his face: pleasant, kind, sweet. From his French papa, he’d inherited a deep bronze complexion—an anomaly in this land of sunburn and freckles.

“Thank you for coming, Asta.” His tense gaze landed on Gunnar’s sleeping figure. “Has Fuglestad dozed off again?”

I nodded.

“Hell.”

I turned back to Gunnar. Above his wraps, the short sleeve of his undershirt stretched thin and tight around his bicep. A rumple of pulled-away blankets revealed the beige twill of his trousers. He must’ve dressed prior to my arrival. Perhaps the effort of it had been too much.

“Look.” Erlend shoved the pages into his desk. “I’m sorry. Maybe we shouldn’t rehearse today. Clearly, he needs more rest.”

If only I’d known he was this bad. If only I could’ve done something. I got up and joined Erlend on the far side of the room. Hoping not to wake Gunnar, I kept my voice so quiet I nearly mouthed the words. “Has he been like this since the accident?”

“He looked better this morning,” Erlend whispered. “That’s why I sent for you. Fuglestad insisted—he wanted to start rehearsing again.”

Gunnar insisted? How could he insist on anything? The poor boy lay still as a carcass.

“Erlend”—I spoke as softly as I could—“what happened to him?”

What little I knew came from town gossip: Something occurred up at the Fuglestad farm; Sigrid died and her two boys, Fred and Gunnar, were injured. When the Fourniers ventured up there to see how they could help, they came home with Gunnar, who lingered near death for almost a month while Fru Fournier tended to his sickness—clearly the result of his mysteriously mangled limb and Herr Doktor Engen’s befouled amputation.

“Erlend?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

There were a million other questions I wanted to ask, but the strained look on Erlend’s face dissuaded me—for the moment, at least. While I liked to think of Erlend as my friend, being the theater’s director separated him from the rest of us. Maybe it was the mystique of his family’s wealth, the precision of his tailored garments, or the way he seemed so much older than his eighteen years, but something about Erlend Fournier remained beyond reach.

Watching me, Erlend bit his lip. “His mama was killed.”

“Yes, I’d heard that.” It was what everyone in town had been saying, but no one would tell me how. Now, Erlend’s unease suggested he didn’t know anything more than I did. He’d gone to their farm, though. Surely he had to have seen something.

“And his younger brother?” I asked. “They say he was injured as well.”

“Papa and I told him he’d be welcome to come here, but the boy maintained he needed to stay at the farm and tend to the animals.”

All this uncertainty surrounding the Fuglestads pulled my insides into knots. I needed Gunnar to be safe, forever—away from whatever tragedy unfolded at his family’s place up on Old Viking Road.

Erlend would protect Gunnar. Of that I had no doubt. But what about Erlend’s parents? They were wealthy and generous, but that didn’t mean they’d be interested in taking in this ginger-haired heathen as their permanent ward.

“Will he stay here?” I pressed. “Will you get to keep him?”

“Keep him?”

“He can’t go back.” Though I’d never been to the Fuglestads’ farm and didn’t know much about their family life, I did know what everyone said about Herr Fuglestad—that the man was a drunk. Was he violent? Had his fury been what injured Gunnar? I made my voice firm. “He can’t go back to his papa.”

The rustle of bedclothes stopped me from saying more.

“Asta.” Gunnar’s deep voice rattled like pebbles inside a tin can. “You’re making me sound like an orphaned kitten.”

I rushed back across the room and to his bedside.

“Baby kitten!” I squealed, attempting to pet him, attempting to bring a smile to his bruised and sleep-swollen face—attempting to quell my own worry.

He shielded himself with a pillow as I pawed his head. “Yes, and this kitten”—the pillow muffled his words—“has caused the Fourniers too much trouble.”

Erlend stepped closer. “You’re not the trouble, Fuglestad. It’s Pastor Odegard. He’s the troublemaker.”

“Odegard wouldn’t be making trouble if your parents hadn’t brought a heathen into their home.”

Smiling now, I lowered myself back into the seat. Gunnar’s family never attended church and, much to the town’s dismay, didn’t hide their pagan practices. “Making trouble?”

“Since Mama’s been taking care of Fuglestad,” Erlend explained, “we haven’t been to church and Odegard’s been saying things about the theater.”

My smile fell. Anything Odegard had to say about the theater wouldn’t be good. With its opulent fittings and spacious foyers, the Fourniers’ playhouse was the only structure in town made of white stone rather than wood. During the warm seasons, enormous planters of red roses lined its portico while a cast-iron fountain dribbled melodiously upon the shaded terrace—such a contrast to the surrounding plain houses, which weren’t adorned with anything more elaborate than a few small window boxes stuffed with myrtles. Had it not been for Herr Fournier’s fortune and unending desire to provide his only son with such spectacular indulgences, the theater would’ve never been built, much less produce enough kroner to remain in operation. Was the pastor’s dissatisfaction over the extravagance of its appearance, the antics of its players, or the fact Erlend Fournier—the eighteen-year-old theatrical genius who’d served as our leader for the past five years—favored art over hunting or fishing, and made no effort to hide his interest in literature while other boys engaged in roughhousing and team sports. With Odegard knowing Erlend’s influence on so many of us, the pastor once remarked on the dangerous trend toward softness amongst the young men of our generation and, though he didn’t mention Erlend’s name, the reference was undeniable.

Perhaps I noticed such things because I, too, was quite different from everyone else in town. When I was a schoolgirl, the other children asked if I was an elf or a fairy. Mama said it was because I had thin lips, as if the large space between my unmatching eyes and the white chunk in my brown hair weren’t far more talked about than the fact my mouth lacked a Cupid’s bow. Herr Doktor Engen called what I had a condition, but never gave it a name or a remedy. Not that I needed one. I had something better than two working ears and same-colored irises. I had my best friend, Gunnar Fuglestad, to keep me company. We were alike, in a way, though I couldn’t fully articulate how other than the fact that his heathenism and my appearance meant we were both on the outside of everything. Being peculiar in the eyes of our schoolmates had a way of making us understand certain truths a great deal more than everyone else.

But Erlend hadn’t finished what he was saying about Pastor Odegard and the theater.

I tipped back in my chair, making a creak. “The pastor has been talking about the theater? What’s he been saying?”

“That it isn’t a proper place for children,” Erlend said. “That the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles promote false gods and unnatural passions. That we have young ladies with hammers building sets alongside the young men. Not to mention the rumors of parties and alcoholic spirits.”

Though usually timid in Erlend’s dazzling presence, I ventured for intimacy, feigning shock, and then bringing a hand to my mouth. “Where would a bunch of youngsters obtain alcoholic spirits?”

Erlend bestowed me with a wicked smile.

They rode for hours, through the night and into the dawn, stopping for nothing, not even to rest the horses. They knew what hunted them. A threat that could neither be seen nor heard nor felt, until one turned around and there it was. Too late to run then. Plague was spread through the air, you see. Everyone knew this.

Jehan struggled to stay awake on her horse. Weariness dragged her chin to her chest before she caught herself, jerking upright in the saddle. Bleary eyes took in the tall, stately cypress lining their route and the sun rising above the mountains in the east. Ten guards rode before her, ten in back. So few of them remained. The others had been left behind in towns and villages along the way. Her people. Shed like snakeskin.

Dead like snakeskin.

Jehan could not think of them now. If she did, she would scream. On and on forever. And that would not do, here, in front of the others.

Mari was alive. This she could give thanks for. Just then, Mari looked over from her own horse. She wore a traveling cloak the same midnight blue as Jehan’s. Her hood had been pushed back, and long dark hair blew free in the wind. The smile she gave Jehan was tired but reassuring. Not long now, she mouthed.

Despite everything, Jehan smiled. Mari had been saying the same for days. Not long now. Almost there. Jehan started to tell her so just as one of the guards ahead slid from his horse. He did not wake and catch himself but fell out of the saddle entirely, hitting the earth with a thud and the unmistakable sound of bone cracking.

“Stop!” Jehan shouted.

Dust rose, pebbles flew. The cortege ground to a halt. Without waiting for assistance, Jehan dismounted. She grabbed Mari’s hand and they raced to where the Brisan ambassador already knelt by the fallen guard.

The ambassador flung out an arm to ward them off. “Stand back!”

He was normally a mild-mannered man, gray-haired and dignified. The ferocity of his tone stopped them in their tracks. That, and the panic that lay just beneath the surface. They obeyed. Jehan, Mari, the guards, the envoy from Oliveras. The old nurse and the court painter, wringing their hands in dread.

As for the fallen guard, he sprawled on his back, barely conscious. From the way one arm lay on the ground, the angle hideous and unnatural, Jehan knew it was broken. Just as she understood shattered bones were the least of his troubles. Sweat poured off a face that had turned a familiar mottled red. Pity filled her, sorrow too, but not surprise.

“Plague?” Jehan asked quietly. Mari’s hand tightened in hers.

“He’s feverish.” The ambassador busied himself removing the guard’s tunic. Rather than yank it over his head and broken arm, he took a dagger from his belt and sliced through leather and wool.

Mari reasoned, “A fever, then. It doesn’t mean…” She trailed off in dismay as the ambassador pushed aside the guard’s tunic, exposing the pit of his arm, where a boil the size of an egg nestled among downy black hairs. A strange gurgling sound emerged from it. The boil shivered and pulsed, as though the blood and pus and poison within were living things struggling to break free.

Sickened, Jehan stepped back. Everyone stepped back. Fear sent shivers racing up her spine and trailing along her limbs. Plumes of smoke rose in the distance. Another village burning its dead. Jehan could almost taste the bitterness of the ash, thick at the base of her throat.

The ambassador remained crouched by the guard’s side. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they settled on her. Red-rimmed from exhaustion, the smudges beneath grown darker with each passing day.

“Princess Jehan. This can go on no longer. You must leave us.”

Jehan exchanged a quick, startled glance with Mari. Jehan said, “What are you saying? Leave whom? And go where?” All around them were anxious mutterings.

“We’re hindering you.” The ambassador stood, knees cracking. “Every one of us is a threat. Go with Lord Ventillas. Take Mari, take the women—and find King Rayan.”

“Father, no!” Mari burst out. A look from the ambassador had her swallowing her words.

Jehan had no intention of riding to the capital of Oliveras without him. “And leave you here? Of course I won’t go—”

“Princess Jehan.” The ambassador spoke with steel in his voice. “How many years have we been at war with Oliveras?”

A history lesson? Now? “Why does that matter?”

“How many? Tell me.”

Jehan could not remember the precise number. Who could? Everyone watched, waiting, and a mortifying heat spread up her neck. Mari squeezed her hand. Under her breath, for Jehan’s ears only, Mari murmured, “Fifty-two.”

Jehan squeezed back. One could always depend on Mari. “Fifty-two,” she repeated in a louder voice.

“As many years as I’ve been alive.” The look the ambassador gave her and Mari made it clear he had not been fooled. “I’ve never known a life without war. Countless dead. Your brothers. My sons. This war ends the day you marry the king. You must survive this journey, and your odds are greater if you move quickly. If you avoid all threat.”

A traveling quarantine of sorts. It made sense. “But why won’t you come? You’re the head of this delegation. Father sent you.”

Beside her, a hitch to Mari’s breath. She knew the answer to Jehan’s question. She saw it on her father’s face.

“I cannot.” The ambassador pushed aside his collar to show the boil just beneath his ear. Like an overripe berry, wine-colored, ready to burst.

Jehan bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. Mari’s hand slipped free of hers, but when her friend stumbled forward, Jehan caught her arm and dragged her back.

The ambassador did not look at his daughter. Instead, he watched Jehan intently to see what she would do. Church bells rang out in the village. Tolling endlessly. A warning to all who heard to keep away. They would find no shelter there. Fighting a rising panic, Jehan thought about what the ambassador’s illness meant. For all of them. She hated Oliveras, this kingdom where she would be queen. It had brought nothing but pain and death to those she loved. She wanted to go home, to Brisa. But she had promised her father. She had given her word. Very quietly, she asked, “What will you do?”

Approval flickered over the ambassador’s expression. He studied the woods beyond the road. “We’ll stay here, make camp.” Glancing down at the doomed guard, he added, “No one will take us in as we are. If we can, we’ll follow.”

“When you can,” Jehan corrected.

“When,” the ambassador agreed. Humoring her, she knew. And now he looked past her. “My lord Ventillas.”

The sober Oliveran envoy was a younger man, not yet thirty. He stepped forward. “I’ll see them safe, Ambassador. You have my word.”

“Brisa is indebted to you.” The ambassador bowed. “May God grant your honor many years.”

“And yours.” Lord Ventillas returned the bow, deep and formal.

Within minutes, a much smaller cortege prepared to ride. Mari stopped her mare as close to the ambassador as she dared. “Father.”

The ambassador stood with a dying guard at his feet. Jehan heard him say, very softly, “Mari, you are your father’s heart. Be brave, my girl, for me.”

Jehan could bear to watch no longer. She spurred her horse down the ancient road lined with cypress. Tears blinded her. She did not look back to see those she had left behind. She did not look back to see if her friend would follow. All their lives, where Jehan went, Mari always followed.

I shouldn’t be here.

It’s stark daylight. The evergreens cut sharp silhouettes, arrowheads piercing a pearl sky. Someone will see the woman standing on Forge Bridge and they’ll call the police or try to save me themselves.

No, they won’t. This is Black Harbor, a purgatory where people mind their own. I could scream bloody murder, and it’s not that no one would hear me—someone probably would—but they would write me off, convince themselves that I’m just a rabbit being eaten by a hawk or something.

My heel catches in a knot in a railroad tie. My hands slam on the corroded iron tracks. The skin on my palms tears, the metal like dry ice. Standing back up, I slip off my pumps and set them aside. In my gossamer-thin nylons, I edge toward the middle. It’s the first time I’ve been here in almost ten months. It feels wrong and yet a little bit like coming home. I know this place. The trees with their wet, charred-looking trunks; the smell of fish scales and soil; the coal-blackened bridge that looks like the exoskeleton from some prehistoric beetle, stretching from bank to bank.

Coldness pricks the soles of my feet. I’m still wearing the clothes from my interview earlier this morning.

You’ll have problems here, they told me.

They were a trio that operated as one: a man whose mustache resembled a wire brush my dad would use to scrape coagulated oil off his workbench, and two women; one was fox-faced and squashy, the other wore her black hair pulled into a tight bun and teal, bullet-shaped earrings.

Barely an hour ago, I sat at a large pine table in a nondescript room, wearing the only blazer I own. The lake effect punched through the cement walls, slithered through the seal of the lone window. I wondered if the room was ever used as an office, or reserved solely for interviews, because what would anyone do in there besides slowly go crazy?

When the door opened, I watched them filter in like smoke. My chair screeched as I stood to shake each of their hands. I smoothed my skirt as I sat back down, brushing off a sliver of chewed fingernail.

They stared at me, their clinical smiles simultaneously out of place and yet perfectly in consensus. The man spoke on behalf of all three of them as though they were a modern-day Greek chorus. They asked where I’m from.

“Not here,” I said.

The vulpine lady’s smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips.

“Where is home?” the man asked.

H-O-M-E. I typed the word on my lap, beneath the table where they couldn’t see. It’s a habit I picked up somewhere along the way of wanting to be a writer, this compulsion of secretly transcribing conversations. I found liberation in letting my fingertips dance, unbridled by the fear of anyone ever reading the words they spelled.

The man gave me a measured look over the rims of his glasses and I wondered if he could see my fingers moving after all, the tendons in my forearms faintly twitching. Perhaps this was the behavior people noticed when they diagnosed me as strange.

Home. That was a thought. Home was a dirt road that wended its way through a field of oats and barley to a house at the edge of the woods. Home was my dad’s rusted pickup truck, the bed of which I would lie in and stare up at the stars on warm summer nights. Home was the apple orchard behind the house and a maze of Dad’s wood carvings—trees and railroad ties whose armor had been sculpted away to reveal the spirits within: wolves, owls, wise men. Home was the spruce tree tattooed on the back of my arm, just above my elbow, the one I always kept covered when visiting Tommy’s parents.

Home was, “Three hours north.”

They looked impressed, as though I’d walked the 160 miles to get here. “What brings you to Black Harbor?”

“The lake,” I said, and explained that my husband is an aquatic ecologist. He was hired by the City two years ago because the lake was, and still is, devouring the shoreline. Every other day, the news chronicles people’s yards precariously disappearing. All those sediments and landscaping chemicals can’t be doing the aquatic ecosystem any favors.

The two ladies shared a smile, and I reminded myself that they had no idea what it was like up north, where jobs are scarcer than striking oil.

The man spoke again. “If you choose to accept this position, Mrs. Greenlee, everything you type must be treated with the utmost confidentiality. You can’t tell your best friends, your family, even your husband.”

“I’m good at keeping secrets,” I said.

“Your social life will suffer.” Another warning.

“What social life?”

They laughed like I was being ironic. The man leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his stomach. His tie scrunched to the side, revealing a coffee stain he’d no doubt tried to hide.

“This job is violent and graphic in nature. You’ll have to listen to accounts of things that are … traumatic … to say the least. It’s not for everyone.”

“Is anything?” It was the first time I’d asked a question instead of answering them.

He grinned, his lips peeling away from his teeth. “You’re a clever one, Mrs. Greenlee.”

There it was again. I’d seen it in print like on junk mail and bills, but it wasn’t often that I heard it spoken aloud: Mrs. How it makes one sound hideously domesticated, an unforgivable slaughtering of its better, more scandalous-sounding honorific, Mistress. Now, that was something I could get on board with.

I tried to smile back while I kneaded my hands in my lap, twisting my wedding band. The cold made it so loose.

I needed this job. And I actually wanted it, too. At least it was interesting, and it paid better than any of the others I’d interviewed for. As it turned out, jobs weren’t exactly plentiful in these parts, either. A hard truth I learned pretty quick after quitting the bookstore with nothing else lined up. Not my finest moment.

“It’s a shame putting you on nights.” The man chuckled. “Young kid like you. You’ll never see the light of day again.”

The ladies laughed, too.

“Irregardless, we could always check with the other transcriber and see if she wants to stay on the night shift. Some people like it.”

My insides wilted at his use of irregardless. “No, I’ll take it.”

He leaned toward me, and I got the feeling that the confidentiality agreement had already started. “Forgive me for saying this, Mrs. Greenlee, but you’re very pretty.”

I looked at the women. They just stared like they had since the second they’d walked in.

“You’ll have problems here,” he promised, and then slid me the pen to sign the contract.

It’s too fresh to even have been filed away, and yet the memory seems from another lifetime. The reality, though, is that I’ve just been hired as the new police transcriber and have two days to put myself together, a task that shouldn’t involve edging my way toward the middle of Forge Bridge.

Ever since Forge Fuels closed nearly fifteen years ago, resulting in practically everyone within a fifty-mile radius of Black Harbor losing their jobs, there’s been a localized epidemic of people jumping from the bridge—including the fuel company’s former CEO. That’s when Black Harbor really took a shit, as our neighbor, Old Will, put it. A former maintenance man for the coal giant, his hands are all jacked up from thirty years of turning wrenches. Now, he eats pain pills with his bacon every morning.

My discovery of the bridge had been an accident. Shortly after we moved to Black Harbor, I took to the running trail in the woods across from the duplex Tommy and I split with Old Will and his son. The path stretches and winds through the entire city, but I keep to a five-mile strip that spits me out at Forge Bridge. It called to me like a siren that day, and has every day since. I was already halfway across when I suddenly felt its railroad ties beneath my feet, and I stared for the first time into the cruel black below. Everything went silent, then, as the river demanded something of me. Just one piece. A tribute in exchange for it letting me remain above its obsidian surface.

I’d given it the only thing I could spare from my person, a corded bracelet with my name spelled in yellow and emerald beads. A gift from our honeymoon from a man who walked the shore selling conch shells. Untying it had felt ceremonious. My skin burned where the hemp cord had begun to chafe. I tossed it and watched it twist and writhe like a worm falling from a hook. Then it hit the water and disappeared into the pitch-black water.

I’d smiled afterward. I did. I remember I stood there with the mist soaking my hair, my red long-sleeve clinging to my body. Anyone else might have cried, but the euphoria that flooded my veins was almost too much. It was a rush of accomplishment similar to typing a period at the end of a perfect string of words, a unique thought that existed in print because of me. There is truth, I think, in writers desiring immortality—not for ourselves, necessarily, but for our words, our thoughts, our ideas to live on long after we’re gone. We are addicts, forever chasing the impossible dream, and walking off the bridge—away from its pull—offers a glimpse of it, this ability to cheat death.

The next time I visited, I surrendered a glass shamrock my mother had given to me before she left. Taking it from my book crate had felt like stealing from myself. When I stood on the weather-soaked ties preparing to toss it, I touched it to my lips, not to kiss it but to feel the warmth left by my own hand, perhaps to prove that I am alive and that the items I relinquish to the water never were.

Sometimes I wonder what’s become of the things I’ve given. I like to imagine they’re rinsed clean and moving on to a better place, but a small part of me knows that they’re probably wedged between slick, slimy river rocks, stuck in Black Harbor forever. I wonder about the other things they must encounter—fishing lures and beer cans, muskellunge and minnows, bodies before they pop up to the surface.

My scarf rips free of my jacket as though volunteering to be the next tribute, but the thought of the chill biting at my neck dissuades me. Mylar crinkles in the same wind that rocks me backward, deflated foil balloons tugging at rain-washed, curling ribbon, their length stripped of pigment by the elements and punctuated with broken ends, like an em dash at the end of an unfinished sentence. Below them, a teddy bear leans against a pole, its lavender fur matted and raindrops glistening on its button eyes. Minding my steps, I pick it up and press it to my chest, my chin resting on its plush, wet head. It smells like rain and noxious air and a little bit sweet like maple.

I take a breath and listen as the air whistles through my nose. I can hear the river beckoning me to come closer. Looking down, I watch the river lap against large, snow-encrusted rocks—a monster sucking clean the bones of its prey.

It isn’t fair that the bear is here, in Black Harbor. It could have been anywhere, belonged to anyone who wouldn’t have abandoned it to the wind and the rain and the toxicity that flees the rails of the bridge, fine black spores like gunpowder infecting the air we all breathe, filling all the cracks and fissures of the city. It coalesces to create a gritty film over the place that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide.

I look at my pumps leaning cockeyed against the track. Do they say that here, cockeyed? Or is that another up north word I brought with me? Raindrops glisten and slide down their plastic sides. I’ll need them for work. I start Monday.

Jump, whispers the river. Its voice is a chorus all smashed together; but unlike the three people I met earlier, I can discern each individual fighting to be heard. Voices climb on top of one another, like bodies grappling, trying to claw their way out of the water. They’re lost forever, all those people who jumped. They’ll never leave Black Harbor. Instead, their voices will lace the river, calling to souls like mine to join them in their misery.

My imagination puts me there, next to him, the body I saw one cold April morning. His face was bloated beyond recognition, eyes milky like roe. Dark hair clung to his skull like kelp on the side of a boat’s hull. In my mind, I am floating, staring up at the underbelly of Forge Bridge, at the woman who stands barefoot on the railroad ties, wondering what it would feel like to jump. The corpse and I bump gently against each other like buoys whose anchors are sunk too close in the muck.

I shake the dark fantasy from my head. I’m still up here. Not down there. There’s no dead body in the water, either. Not today. A shiver trickles down my spine. The hair on the back of my neck stands on end. My fingertips are too frozen to feel the bitter bite of the air as I surrender the teddy bear and watch as it falls end over end, finally splashing facedown. I will it to go on and be free. To ride the current out of Black Harbor and wash up anywhere but here. But it just spins in a lazy circle, caught in a relentless whirlpool, and the truth hits me as cold and hard as though I am the one who hit the water. One of these days, I’ll have nothing left to give but myself.

I was made for him.

It is morning, which is to say, it is the beginning of all things. It is bright and it is sharp and it is perfect and so is Sophia, who wakes alone to this singular thought, as she does every morning; to this honeyed, liquid thought and sunlight and sparrowsong and the softness of green shadows in a house that is far too big for her. Not that she complains—oh no, never, not Sophia, in whom the organ of dissatisfaction was somehow absent from birth. Her husband spoils her and she is grateful. But she never needed anything so grand! None of the other houses on their street are half as luxurious or imposing. And it is a long street, very long and very fine.

Sophia runs her hand over the place beside her where her husband so rarely sleeps these days and thinks it again, with as much joy:

I was made for him.

She moves in this echoing house like a flicker of a goldfish in the depthless trenches of the sea. Her long hair, bright and fine as cherry bark, snakes through a mountain of pillows. The dawn comes dancing in, as gold as you please, through vast crosshatched windows curtained in tapestries. Her bedside candle has burned down through the small hours to a thick, craggy nub. Her colorful blanket, still smooth and neat, for Sophia never has never had an anxious dream in all the deep violet nights of her life, streams away from her in all directions: a vast, peaceful province peopled by intricate embroidered roses, tatted lace peonies, quilted moonflowers, trailing ribbon-stitched clover, and the little cliffs and hollows of Sophia’s rich body beneath the down.

Even the bed is so much bigger than she could ever need. Especially since she sleeps alone more nights than not. Her husband has important work and it never ends. Even when he is with her, he is always on call. Sophia does not mind. She has never minded. She keeps her own company very snugly and very well. There is something decadent in having this sea of silk and wool and wood all to herself. Sailing it into the unconquered country of her sleep like a pilgrim of the night. It feels like getting away with something, to have so much.

Getting out of bed is something of a mountaineering expedition. Her husband made her a little staircase down from the mattress to the floor so the delicate bones of her ankles never get jangled once. Sophia flexes her flat, golden-brown stomach and swings herself over the side, her smooth feet hitting the top stair with a satisfying sound, like a cup setting into its saucer.

She fetches her robe from a great brass hook in the wall. It is the color of earth before planting. It shines with quality. She knots the sash around her strong waist. It is too big for her. She drowns deliciously inside it. She does not need a robe. It is warm here and she has nothing to hide. But she enjoys the slippery kiss of it against her skin all the same.

Like everything else, it was a gift. From him to her. The world flows in that direction. Him to her. A river of forever.

She sits down at a huge vanity, so big she must pile up throw pillows on the seat just to see herself in the wide mirror, a polished oval glass ringed in carved wooden branches bearing figs and plums. Sophia has never been one for too much makeup. Scrubbed skin and hair is more than enough, her husband always says. But a little color in the cheek never hurt anyone. He never needs to know. If he thinks a woman wakes in the morning with shimmering eyes and a perfect pout, let him.

She ties her hair back with a white ribbon, stark as bare bone against her thick brown hair. Outside the windows, finches and starlings and lorikeets warm up for their daily concert in the park.

Sophia’s long, clever fingers pull at the crystal knob on the vanity’s top right-hand drawer. With a thrill of pleasure in this thing done each day for herself and herself alone, she takes out her little secret luxuries: a bronze compact with the puff tucked neatly inside, three slender brushes tipped with soft tufts of rabbit fur, and three small matching pots: clay for cold cream, silver for rouge, and gold for eyeliner. Kindly Mrs. Orpington tucked them into her grocery basket next to the sweet potatoes and the eggs and the new butter. Her neighbors are always looking out for her that way. Shy little treats, shy little smiles, shy little waves from down the road.

Sophia paints herself slowly, subtly, every sweep of the rabbit bristles against her skin as electric as a summer storm.

Today, as she does every day, Sophia will descend the grand staircase into the house. It takes some time. The teak steps rise so steep and tall she must perch on the lips of them like a child, stretching her legs down to brush the top of the next one, and only then scoot down safely, then repeat and repeat and repeat until her toes finally find the relief of the parquet floor. Her man carved each of the twenty-eight stairs round the edges with a million detailed leaves she must polish (plus the round silver moons that crown the banisters) once a week. But today is not polishing day! She needn’t give one thought to the leaves and the moons.

No, today Sophia will clean the rest of the house. She imagines herself doing it before she begins, each task unfolding in her tidy mind as perfectly as a letter to herself.

She will sweep the floors with the heavy oak broom. Then she will scrub them with lemon water and good lavender soap she makes herself in their second guest bathroom so that the smell of lye will not trouble her mister. Only until the basement is finished! Then she will have room to spread out. Until then, Sophia is not allowed down into the cellar. It’s dangerous, he tells her. So much old equipment lying around. She could get hurt.

Sophia doesn’t ever want to get hurt. Or set one single soft foot where she is not allowed. What a thing to even imagine—just going right into a place he specifically told her wasn’t safe! She excises this paradox from her thoughts and replaces it with a pleasant anticipation of how lovely the cellar will be when he finishes it, how convenient and enjoyable she will soon find it to make all her little treasures in a space built just for her.

After the floors, Sophia will beat the curtains and the rugs until the dust motes twinkle like stars in the thick warm air. She will collect all her husband’s things from the sofas and the armchairs and the floor. It is laundry day, so she will wash all the linens and the bath towels and pin them up in the sun to dry from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. exactly. Then, she will rinse the breakfast dishes, arrange flowers from the garden on the table where her husband will see them as soon as he comes home. Orange roses for tonight, she thinks. Thorns carefully clipped off, of course. Plus white chrysanthemums and three bright fuchsia hibiscus branches. Yesterday was all lilies. Her sweetheart enjoys variety.

All this under her morning belt, she will eat a little spot of lunch, though a very little spot. He’s warned her that heavy lunches make heavy hips, and Sophia wishes always to be his light. Afterward, she will clean her plate and cup until they shine, make herself presentable, and go about her errands on this very special day.

For today, Sophia has been invited next door to 3 Cedar Drive to see Mrs. Lyon, Mrs. Fische, and Mrs. Minke for tea. She’s already wrapped up a little hostess gift for each of them. Sophia is the consummate guest, never a foot put wrong. Her husband laughs at the care she takes with such things. Such a silly little head my Sophie has on her shoulders. Stop worrying so. They all love us. We’re the life of the party. You don’t have to bring presents every time to everybody. You don’t have to bring any presents at all.

But Sophia understands in the palest cells of marrow of her bones that everything she does, from the speed of her gait to the gifts she chooses to the sway of her hair as she walks down Cedar Drive, reflects upon him. And they do love him. It’s so easy for him! The way Mrs. Crabbe tries to look busy to hide her blushing whenever he passes her in the garden on his way home from the office. The way Mr. Stagg fixes his hair and stands a little straighter when he ducks into their local for something cold and quiet. Sophia knows these are treasures that must be protected. She would never do the smallest thing that might risk how Mrs. Moray’s dark eyes widen and her breath quickens when she glimpses the two of them strolling through the market of a Saturday. Heaven forbid. She would rather die.

He will never know how the gentle determination of her carefulness stokes and keeps the love of their neighbors. He does not need to. Sophia doesn’t ask for praise or credit. Is he the life of the party? Or is she? Such questions! The party is alive, that’s what matters. And whichever way one slices such a rich cake, her company is much in demand. Her social calendar overflows like a cup of wine. Everyone in Arcadia Gardens clamors to have her round. The honor of her presence at their home. The pleasure of her business at their establishment. The profound distress the absence of her witness would cause at this or that small ceremony of life.

Sophia strives to make certain they never have cause to regret her.

She pauses in her thoughts. She reaches out her long fingers to touch her image in the grand mirror. The glass is so cool beneath her skin.

After tea, she plans a stroll round the park, then to Mrs. Lam’s to pick up a bolt or two of the new turquoise wool in stock, a quick pop round the shops for supper supplies, then home to prepare it all before sunset, when it is not permitted to be roaming the streets.

It will be a lovely day. They are all lovely days. That’s how lucky she is. That’s how beautiful Sophia’s life has always been and always will be. Not a minute unaccounted for. Not a season unsavored to the last dregs.

She is happy. Her husband is happy. The world is theirs.

I was made for him.

And then, for no reason whatsoever, no reason at all that she can think of later when she looks back and tries to explain everything that happened afterward and wishes so desperately that she’d never done it, so desperately that she almost faints away with the passion of longing to undo time and causality and uninvent the entire concept of furniture, Sophia looks down at the pull-knob on the top left-hand drawer of her vanity.

It isn’t crystal, like the right-hand drawer. All the knobs on all the drawers are different. Copper, amber, white Bakelite, pewter. It makes a very pretty effect, like everything else her husband builds. The towering bed, the dizzying staircase, the splendid mirror, the high hook for her long robe, the heavy walnut table downstairs—as tall as a plowhorse at the shoulder, where she will later perch briefly, swinging her legs in the air, and eat honey and butter on toast points before heading out into the buttery, honeyed light of the afternoon.

Sophia stares at the top left-hand drawer as though she’s never seen it before. It feels as though she hasn’t. She never uses it, after all. Three pots and a compact hardly require all six drawers to fill. But this is her room. Her place at the mirror, boosted by all those pretty pillows. Every day of her married life, she’s sat in this same place, tied her hair back with the same ribbon, and made herself into the same Sophia while the starlings sang. Every molecule of every object in this house is familiar to her.

So why does that drawer look so much like a filthy, ragged stranger standing suddenly in the corner of a brightly lit hall?

The pull-knob is stone. A rough, dull chunk of grey rock. She brushes it lightly with her fingertips. It is dusty. But Sophia allows nothing to gather dust. Not in this house. Not on her watch. Yet untold layers of dust particles float away into the shafts of sun like ash. Underneath, tiny ammonites press up out of the shale rock.

Sophia tells herself not to open it.

There is nothing inside, after all. She knows that! She knows the contents of every nook and cranny in this vast house. It’s just an empty drawer. No reason whatsoever to waste her time on such a lump of nothing! Not when there is so much to do today! Such a silly little head she has on her shoulders. Doesn’t he always say so?

And then Sophia pulls the stony knob anyway, because it is her house and her time to waste and she has every right to both.

The drawer is locked.

But nothing is locked in Arcadia Gardens. It’s not that kind of neighborhood. They don’t lock their front door at night. No one does. It’s so unnecessary. They don’t even have a key to this place—the real estate agent didn’t mention one and after a while they just never bothered to have any made. They are safe here. That’s the whole point. Nothing can touch them here.

Sophia picks up her silver brush and jimmies the thin handle into the crack between the countertop and the drawer.

It doesn’t take much. Token resistance. The sound of the lock popping free is as satisfying as her shimmying, stretching foot finding purchase on the first step of the staircase.

Sophia blinks slowly and stares into the drawer.

It is not empty.

There’s a hairbrush in there. A hairbrush she has never seen before. And beside it, a lock of hair.

The brush is enormous. The back is made of antler or bone, the bristles no soft spring rabbit, but hard, sharp, wild boar. She picks it up and turns it over and over in her hands. The size of the thing makes her feel like a child juggling some forbidden adult prize she can barely hold on to. Someone has burned runes and designs and symbols Sophia cannot understand, except to think they are beautiful in a brutal sort of way, all over the handle and body of the thing: dark, angular, slashing. Maybe they’re letters. Maybe they’re stallions’ heads. Maybe they’re something very, very else.

But it is the lock of hair that troubles her more.

It is not her hair.

Sophia’s hair is soft and fine and curly and the color of good, sweet roasting pecans. The hair in the drawer is straight, coarse, and black as a secret. Each strand is so thick you could almost write with it. No one they know has hair like that. Not Mrs. Crabbe or Mrs. Lam or Mrs. Lyon or even beautiful Mrs. Palfrey two blocks over on Olive Street.

Like a horse’s mane.

Perhaps it is a horse’s mane.

But why would anyone tie the hair of a horse so lovingly, with a white ribbon just the same as the one Sophia uses to pull her hair away from her graceful collarbones every morning?

She puts it to her nose and smells the hair. The stench of it floods her brain and makes her gag: spices and rotting flesh and sour, private sweat and hot sands stretching away into a burning, lonely nothingness.

Slowly, as if underwater, as if someone else has been given run of her limbs, Sophia unties her own hair and begins to comb it with the great bone brush.

Tears float into the crescents of her eyes, and she does not know why.

In our office, there were sounds. One of the sounds was like a fighter plane taking off, the abrupt swirling of violent winds, the whoosh of air being displaced, but we all knew it was only the HVAC, which we pronounced in what we believed to be the expert way, H-vack, and so we did not worry about it in particular, we only complained. Indeed, the thermostat was an ongoing source of tension between us and the faces of the building maintenance crew, Barry and Terry. (We called them Berry and Tarry.) To them, depending on the season, we moaned of aching with heat or withering under cold.

We pay on the lease, and so we have the right to climate control, we said, and they nodded, and fiddled with the thermostat, and crawled into the ductwork while we typed.

We were perplexed at why it was so complicated. When we were in our own homes, we did not have this problem. We were able to adjust the temperature up or down to meet our whims, respond to cool weather with a pleasant wave of warmth, or to our night sweats with a blast of properly directed cold, smelling prettily of Freon. Yet, in the office, they worked regularly above us or in the mechanical room on the other side of us, their shared ladder like a bread crumb in a trail that would help them to find their way out from the innards of the building. The rattling of their wrenches, their urgent hammering, and their muffled swears could not rival the sounds of our fingertips on our keyboards.

The building was old and so some of the vestibules and corridors, we learned, were meant to be safe spots, built to function as a tornado shelter or to resist a bomb. Both weather and war were different when Denver’s oilmen’s club had raised the funds for the structure that eventually became our building. Their fourteenth-floor lounge was now a co-working space. And while we were not sure the aging construction could withstand cyclone or drone, they, the first owners, must have believed when the building was the tallest standing under Colorado’s big sky, that they were immune to bad luck because unlike hotels and apartments, they had included a floor thirteen.

One of my employees, Melissa, took the stairs every day, all the way to our place on the twelfth floor, because she was young and fit, hiking the stories with her gazelle legs and her curtain of curly hair. We all envied her slim thighs.

Business suddenly got very good. We doubled, and then doubled again. We put some desks against the backs of cubes and in our interior hallway. We had never done anything special, like decorate with inspirational posters or corporate graffiti, and after we crammed desks up against the wall and then added chairs and people, we noticed the nice side effect of mitigating unproductive queuing for the microwave.

Our operations were lean and our staff prolific, and for this we congratulated ourselves during the all-hands company update meetings. Our CFO, for one, was frugal. For example: she got her lunch packets at a grocery outlet, a month’s worth at a time, and her towers of low-fat chicken with broccoli and mild tandoori rice with chickpeas took up most of the freezer. If anyone was sore about it, they never said so. She had set an example by offering to accommodate two more desks in what had been her own private office, and we heard she was a good workmate—she brought snacks and didn’t take too many phone calls.

Still, we ran out of room and people who we assumed were the colleagues of B & T scheduled a demolition—demo, we called it, new authorities in construction lingo—and when we returned on Monday morning, one wall had been cut away to reveal another office space with the same white paint and same gray carpet—but smaller, like a fraternal twin who had gotten the bad half of the genes—with only a half row of cubicles and even greasier whiteboards. Though the furniture and decor were identical, it was empty of any evidence of recent work, and a fine layer of powdered gypsum that had sprayed from the contractor’s sawing of the drywall coated everything. It wasn’t the posh designs of the original oilmen, but it worked for us.

One thing that we all liked was that the demo had revealed a backup kitchenette for the microwave, complete with a tiny dorm fridge. One of us said we should put beer in it, like college, but no one ever put beer in it.

Along with Melissa, and Michael, and Sabine, we had a new COO, Dave. He was a raw vegan, and he also did not eat gluten or soy or nightshades. He loved filtered water. He did not drink alcohol, of course, because of its dangerous properties, but also because of the sugar. I only knew nightshades from fairy tales, but when I looked it up, I found peppers and tomatoes were in this category. We were okay with him because he was not jumping the queue for the microwave (because he frowned on the microwave). He put bananas and apples and oranges in the candy bowl on the reception desk, but the administrative assistant was very good at her job, and because no one was eating the fruit, each day Rachel, the admin, removed one or two pieces from the dish and discarded it in the ladies’ restroom, where the COO would not see it. I was concerned this was only attracting more roaches, but I complimented her on her thoughtfulness anyway. She kept the remaining candy in the dish at an even level, so it looked like no one had been touching it, even though she refilled the dish by the handful several times a day from a bag that the CFO had gotten on a trip to the grocery outlet.

At this time, things were not going well for me at home. I had a husband, and my husband was yelling at me—Yes, you are yelling; no, you are not just saying, you are yelling; can’t you hear yourself?—about my mood when I came home from the office, and the piles of whiskey and wine bottles collecting by the recycling—So take out the fucking recycling, I would think, but I would not say it, I would only shrug about the piles of clinking glass and about everything.

Even though I was on the other side of the office, the miniature side, everything felt larger. Melissa’s earbuds loomed, a bloom of creamy polycarbonate. The clatter of last night’s dishes and the filmy leftovers of half and fully articulated fights felt like curtains on rails too tacky to draw.

A low hum started to permeate the office, and the conference room had a quality like old television sets being powered up or down—there was the sense of a frequency. Like a tube radio, Roger, the accountant whose father collected them, said of the interior corridor. In many of the cubicles, it was less vintage electronic and more preindustrial commerce, the muted snorting of horse breath and the muffled stamping of hogs. At least that is what I thought I heard.

In those days, B & T were even more challenged, with one side of the office polar and the other equatorial. We all noticed that the place the wall was removed was perfect, a conjunction of temperature zones. Yes, a bit gusty at the exact point where the two currents met, but certainly not unpleasant. Both my heavy knits and gauzy dresses seemed to fit here, and we started to hold meetings in the convergence zone to accommodate both sides of the office, and here, too, was where the hum was the least noticeable. We could hear it on either side of us, but at the seam, it was quiet.

Heather, our most talented analyst, had moved a portable, freestanding screen and positioned it in front of a projector. Once I had asked her if she thought I should keep growing my bangs or keep them short, and she made a spatial model of how it would impact me over time, and showed me how I had the potential for a neck injury, because I already had the habit of tossing my head to get the just barely too-long fringe out of my eyes. Heather was a risk analyst. “Don’t cut,” she had said.

Christian from IT added power strips and an Ethernet cord, and I did not contribute, other than to pantomime approval and ask Melissa to tidy up after the meetings, which she did not do, so I collected the scraps of paper and used coffee cups myself.

On the day my husband served me with divorce papers, the COO announced the official contraction. He said the markets had slowed, and that we had been somewhat untrue to our original governing policies and had grown too quickly. Heather had a chart that looked on one end like a highly manicured lawn and on the other, a lake full of milfoil.

It was our last meeting, and then those who had been on the list—Melissa, Michael, Tabatha, Mariette, Brian, Julie, Christian, Laird, Jorge, Dwayne, D’Shawn, Sabine, Trung, Roger, and Sommer—packed their desks into bankers boxes and rode the elevator down one last time, though Melissa, because she always took the stairs, said on her way out that it would be her first time.

Occasionally, I’d meet some of the fired employees for drinks, though never Heather, and I would tell them that the wall had been put back up, this time in brick, for ambiance, and the hum had stopped on the same day as the firings, and also, there had been more firings. We were back down to a half dozen, and the office was very quiet.

The H-vack was still a troubler, I said, but we weren’t spending too much time on it. We were trying to grow.

When Finn comes home from the hospital, I am in bed under the covers wearing my favorite flannel shirt and sweatpants, with my laptop balanced on my legs. Today has just flattened me. Finn sits down beside me, leaning against the headboard. His golden hair is wet, which means he’s showered before coming home from New York–Presbyterian, where he is a resident in the surgery department, but he ’s wearing scrubs that show off the curves of his biceps and the constellation of freckles on his arms. He glances at the screen, and then at the empty pint of ice cream nestled beside me. “Wow,” he says. “Out of Africa . . . and butter pecan? That’s, like, the big guns.”

We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves. Less than nothing, we also saw nothing as we crouched blindly in the unlit belly of our ark, 150 of us sweating in a space not meant for us mammals but for the fish of the sea. With the waves driving us from side to side, we spoke in our native tongues. For some, this meant prayer; for others, curses. When a change in the motion of the waves shuttled our vessel more forcefully, one of the few sailors among us whispered, We’re on the ocean now. After hours winding through river, estuary, and canal, we had departed our motherland.

The navigator opened the hatch and called us onto the deck of our ark, which the uncaring world denigrated as merely a boat. By the lopsided smile of the crescent moon, we saw ourselves alone on the surface of this watery world. For a moment we were giddy with delight, until the rippling ocean made us giddy in another way. All over the deck, and all over one another, we turned ourselves inside out, and even after nothing remained we continued to heave and gasp, wretched in our retching. In this manner we passed our first night on the sea, shivering with the ocean breezes.

Dawn broke, and in every direction we saw only the infinitely receding horizon. The day was hot, with no shade and no respite, with nothing to eat but a mouthful and nothing to drink but a spoonful, the length of our journey unknown and our rations limited. But even eating so little, we still left our human traces all over the deck and in the hold, and were by evening awash in our own filth. When we spotted a ship near the horizon at twilight, we screamed ourselves hoarse. But the ship kept its distance.

On the third day, we came across a freighter breaking through the vast desert of the sea, a dromedary with its bridge rising over its stern, sailors on deck. We screamed, waved, jumped up and down. But the freighter sailed on, touching us only with its wake. On the fourth and fifth days, two more cargo ships appeared, each closer than the one before, each under a different flag. The sailors pointed at us, but no matter how much we begged, pleaded, and held up our children, the ships neither swerved nor slowed.

On the fifth day, the first of the children died, and before we offered her body to the sea, the priest said a prayer. On the sixth day, a boy died. Some prayed even more fervently to God; some began doubting His existence; some who did not believe in Him began to; and some who did not believe disbelieved all the more strongly. The father of one of the dead children cried, My God, why are You doing this to us?

And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity’s eternal question of Why?

It was, and is, simply this: Why not?

Strangers to one another before we clambered aboard our ark, we were now more intimate than lovers, wallowing in our own waste, our faces green, our skin blistered by salt and baked into the same shade by the sun. Most of us had fled our motherland because the communists in charge had labeled us puppets, or pseudo-pacifists, or bourgeois nationalists, or decadent reactionaries, or intellectuals of the false conscience, or because we were related to one of these. There was also a fortune teller, a geomancer, a monk, the priest, and at least one prostitute, whose Chinese neighbor spat on her and said, Why is this whore with us?

Even among the unwanted there were unwanted, and at that some of us could only laugh.

The prostitute scowled at us and said, What do you want?

We, the unwanted, wanted so much. We wanted food, water, and parasols, although umbrellas would be fine. We wanted clean clothes, baths, and toilets, even of the squatting kind, since squatting on land was safer and less embarrassing than clinging to the bulwark of a rolling boat with one’s posterior hanging over the edge. We wanted rain, clouds, and dolphins. We wanted it to be cooler during the hot day and warmer during the freezing night. We wanted an estimated time of arrival. We wanted not to be dead on arrival. We wanted to be rescued from being barbecued by the unrelenting sun. We wanted television, movies, music, anything with which to pass the time. We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity. We wanted independence and freedom, except for the communists, who should all be sent to reeducation, preferably for life. We wanted benevolent leaders who represented the people, by which we meant us and not them, whoever they were. We wanted to live in a society of equality, although if we had to settle for owning more than our neighbor, that would be fine. We wanted a revolution that would overturn the revolution we had just lived through. In sum, we wanted to want for nothing!

What we most certainly did not want was a storm, and yet that was what we got on the seventh day. The faithful once more cried out, God, help us! The nonfaithful cried out, God, You bastard! Faithful or unfaithful, there was no way to avoid the storm, dominating the horizon and surging closer and closer. Whipped into a frenzy, the wind gained momentum, and as the waves grew, our ark gained speed and altitude. Lightning illuminated the dark furrows of the storm clouds, and thunder overwhelmed our collective groan. A torrent of rain exploded on us, and as the waves propelled our vessel ever higher the faithful prayed and the unfaithful cursed, but both wept. Then our ark reached its peak and, for an eternal moment, perched on the snow-capped crest of a watery precipice. Looking down on that deep, wine-colored valley awaiting us, we were certain of two things. The first was that we were absolutely going to die! And the second was that we would almost certainly live!

Yes, we were sure of it. We—will—live!

And then we plunged, howling, into the abyss.