Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

You do your thing, in the basement of the dorm, under the guise of doing laundry. It is but a ruse; the laundry pile consists of four shirts and a pair of pants, barely enough for a load. You’ve been invited to two parties on the eighth floor, but instead, you’re underground.

The elevator rarely sinks to the basement. The only people traveling to this depth are the janitors and the paltry few who don’t have weekly visits from prudent parents who arrive bearing neatly stacked piles of fresh clothes. Those would be the same parents who leave waving, whisking away bags of dirty laundry. Like your roommate’s parents, who are upstairs right now, writing your roommate another check while she complains of her struggles in Art History. You know the struggle has to do with the fact that the class is at eight am, far too early for her and her boyfriend to get out of the top bunk. The parents don’t know anything about the guy. She’s really a virgin. Sure.

Devouring caramel corn, you sit on a washer, suck down a vanilla milkshake, drinking as fast as possible, unafraid of the looming cold headache and try not to think of the girls at the upstairs parties. Other girls can have a few handfuls of corn, dress for the party, and enter the room laughing. Not you. You can’t stop now.

Underneath the dirty laundry, and inside the basket, juts out the yellow letter that arrived this morning: FALL 1985 MID-TERM GRADES, indicating “D” in three courses, an unopened box of mint cream cookies, the thick kind with a half inch of white soft yuck in the center, a bag of peanut butter chocolate squares, the cheap generic kind you buy by the pound, and a carton of sugar glazed donuts. A quart of milk sits exposed, atop the towels; no one gets weird over the presence of milk.

You pull out one item at a time, but not all at once. That would be giving yourself away, wouldn’t it? You imagine one of those lucky, skinny, and mind-boggling girls, who can eat a half a turkey sandwich and wrap up the rest for later, holding their tummy I’m so full. One of those girls might walk in to see you surrounded by food, shoving it into your face with both hands. But, you’re careful; anyone walking in will just see a package of whatever the current consumption item and a drink.

You stash the empty caramel corn bag behind the detergent and bring out the donuts. They’re softer and the stomach needs the softness to go with the rough of the nuts. Coming back up should be as smooth as possible; clumps stuck in the throat hurt and often make your eyes feel like bursting, like trying to vomit up a bowling ball.

You really should have drunk more liquid and chewed slower so this would be easier, but there is always this time element – an overwhelming need to become filled, quickly as possible. The high, if you call it a high, doesn’t start until the stomach feels like bursting. The cookies come next, and the milk is gone, so you snag a Pepsi from the vending machine and gulp it in four swallows with peanut butter squares. Not the best for downing; stickiness is hard to puke.

One has to heave everything, every drop, every pea size morsel; there cannot be anything left; the stomach must be absolutely empty when all is over.

In your haste to gulp the Pepsi, you fail to put away the boxes of cookies, both sit atop the washer, when a student walks in with an orange plastic crate of laundry. You swat the boxes right off into the garbage, instantly realizing it is a mistake, not to empty those boxes; now you’ll have to dig in the garbage to retrieve them when no one is around. The same garbage full of blue-gray wads of dryer lint. The girl smiles briefly, tosses her ponytail, and heads efficiently toward an empty machine.

Your stomach distends, but you can still stand up straight; there is room; not quite there yet. The student drops in her clothes and picks up a book. She doesn’t pay any attention, so you grab cookies out of the box in the garbage and high-tail it to the hallway, where just around the corner, you stuff your mouth. Why didn’t you buy ice cream? That always makes for the easiest purge.

On your way back in, she passes with that faint smile, the kind of smile that indicates she’s not really there, probably still in that book she was reading. She walks down and opens up the bathroom door. You need more liquid, but water isn’t gluttonous enough. You’re out of quarters for the machine.

But, there is a pile on the student’s dryer. You swipe one for a Mountain Dew  – too much Pepsi with chocolate makes for a foul tasting barf – dump it in the machine and swig.

She comes back to resume her studies, leaning over a washer and highlighting in a textbook, something you should be doing, but never ever do. You don’t even own a highlighter. Instead, you rely on common sense and a bit of natural smarts to get through college; lately your concentration level is minus zero.

With the student’s back to you, you resurrect the rest of the peanut butter squares and ditch back in the hallway again. This time you pace slightly as you eat, feeling the end coming. The burst of energy courses through your arms and you wish you could keep it- could take this energy to the gym. The surge won’t last.

At the water fountain, you swallow about a cup of water and stand up for it all to mix together into a mass for easy expellation.   If only the student doesn’t need to use the bathroom at the same time, doesn’t interrupt the big production, you’ll be safe. The best part about the bathroom in the basement – you know where every single toilet is on the college campus, which are the emptiest and least likely for interruption – is that it’s a single and it can be locked. No chance of disruption. Also, it’s down the corner, so the chances of someone hearing are slim. The empty hallway echoes as you unsteadily walk toward the bathroom. Your distended belly stretches painfully and you hold it up with your hand like a pregnant woman might do.

You lock the door and assume the hated position. Left hand holds the stomach and right hand is used for purging. Your pointer finger is cut up from rubbing on your teeth, it stands aside, healing. Middle finger for this one. At the sight of the toilet, you begin to cry and retch. How did I end up here again? It started ages ago on a quest for gorgeousness, for thinness. Tears blur the pieces of donut and caramel corn. The peanut butter squares catch as expected, too bad, they taste so good, so forbidden. As you choke on a hunk of peanut butter, the tears drain and you press against your stomach to help the vomit flow. Gagging, then a big hunk comes up, of course smaller than it felt in your throat. The roughness of it scratches the esophagus. Whisper and beg to stop. Please let it all come out, I’ll never do it again. You can’t keep any of the calories. More remains in the stomach. The shake and mint cookies. Your stomach feels as if someone punched you in the gut. Legs shiver as sweat dribbles down thighs.

The longer you do this activity, the harder it is. You don’t know if it gets easier for others, as you don’t know any, the habits are secretive; for you, it just gets harder and harder to vomit.

You lean your sweaty forehead on the back of the toilet, conscious of the fact that your face presses onto a toilet seat where who knows what kind of ass last sat. You rub the coolness of the toilet forward and back while whispering. Please stop me please stop me. The last of it comes up, complete with acid and bile. You slink against the door of the stall to quell dizziness. At the sink, you wash your hands over and over again with soap and scrub the outsides of a raw mouth. You rinse several times until the sharp taste is only at the back and then stop at the mirror to see red bloated eyes, and an ugly face.

You lift up your shirt and hold in your stomach to check the fatness. Disgusting. You creep into the hallway, as always prepared with a flu story, in case anyone heard. A dryer buzzes in the distance. You step weakly toward the water fountain, eager to put something in a tender stomach.

You don’t look at the garbage can as you fold the laundry, the remnants of the binge are right there, a few feet away, but you fold and then give up, dumping all the clothes into the basket and walk out. The cold sweats start – the shakes are but minutes away. The student is still highlighting, oblivious. She is highlighting.

The stairs would be fantastic for the thighs, but the legs are flimsy. Where is that previous energy? Your hands tremble toward the elevator button as a wisp of a voice says, “Excuse me.” It could only be one person, the student you’ve stolen from. The student who is about to confront. Quickly, you try to think of a story, when she says, “I’m diabetic. I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m out of quarters and I noticed you have cookies. Could I have one?”

The cookies gone. Everything is gone. Her quarters are gone. “I think there are some left, but I threw them away.”

The girl rushes to the can and finds the carton. With her mouth full she grins, “Thanks, you are such a life saver.”

You hurry as much as possible for someone who is faint. In your room, you lie down on the bed, wishing for a couple of oranges and a salad, healthy non-binge items. You’re too powerless to get them, knowing that the depleted state will soon lead to an overwhelming urge to scarf down everything in sight.

Like it always does.

You curl toward the window, hugging the pillow and cry sideways, ignoring the roommate when she comes in to get her pass for dinner, pretending you’re asleep. She rustles around with papers, humming, and then leaves.

You roll over, stomach sucked-in and empty; if only you had the smarts to set yourself up with healthy food afterward and a big glass of water. You’re tired, but so hungry now that the stomach felt like its eating itself. You find your dinner pass, an extra sweater – you’re always cold lately – and stolen gum from the roommate, and head for the cafeteria where the all-you-can-eat buffet would be great if you could quit after one plate, if you could just have that salad, but you can’t. Impossible. You used to make promises to yourself to fill up only once, have four squares etc. Now you don’t even kid yourself. The buffet will be filled with starches, a table of desserts, an unlimited supply of ice cream.

So you walk slowly toward the door, down the hallway, ignoring energetic dorm-mates who laugh and bumble down the hallway, shouting after each other. With your head down and clutching the hot acidy stomach, you push the heavy door with a limp arm. A blast of cold air hits you and for just an instant, you’re glad, because you love windy winter weather.

If only someone would stand in the way, but no one notices as you pace toward the cafeteria. No one obstructs – you: the lifesaver. You: conscious of weary knees walking in the direction of more food.

Stefanie Freele was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the short story collection Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press) and the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review. She recently heard some superduper news: one of her stories has won the Glimmer Train Fiction Contest. Recent and forthcoming fiction can be found in The Florida Review, Word Riot, Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Whitefish Review, and Night Train. She has an MFA from the Northwest Literary Arts – Whidbey Writers Workshop. www.stefaniefreele.com

Read our interview with Stefanie here.

Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

My first night on Pleasure Island, I whiskeyed myself up on the deck of a condo and watched waves pound the beach where the bodies of Confederate and Federal troops had been blown to smithereens.

I’d promised Copeland—my former brother-in-law, the man whose condo I’d commandeered—that under no conditions would I drink. It was a stupid thing to say, but I’d said it early in the morning, which meant it didn’t count. Most mornings, I’m aswarm with promises. No more this, no more that. Of course, the changed man bit lasts about half a day. I blame the sun. Post-zenith, it tends to slope downwards. This downslope takes everything it touches and makes it boozeworthy. As my daddy used to say: drink, drink, and drink some more, for tomorrow we die. But tomorrow, more often than not, we do not die. Tomorrow we wake with blood in our shorts and a toothache of the heart, to make promises that seem keepable, until the downslope awakens our indefatigable whims.

My bottle was empty. I flipped it into the dunes, where it shushed in the grass. I felt grandiose, famished. I would’ve spooned the contents of a mayonnaise jar into my face if there’d been any, but Copeland stocked only salt, pepper, sugar, and chamomile tea. So I shuffled three blocks to a shack reeking of grease, ordered a cheese sandwich and a Wild Turkey, neat.

That night, this bar’s Magnavox blazed with some self-congratulatory bullshit about sexual predators. A host with a face based loosely on the face of a human had made himself available over the internet. There, he’d claimed to be a thirteen-year-old girl who wanted to party; now he hosting of a sting operation. Guys streamed into a McMansion and Host confronted them, and they either prayed for mercy or claimed they’d brought condoms and beer to teach the girls a lesson. Afterward, the cops, wearing bulletproof vests, threw them to the ground, read them their rights. I told the bartender the only way I’d continue to watch this trash was if Host snipped off their cocks and crammed them down their throats. Easy, my neighbor said, some young buck with clippered hair and tatted arms, the usual bozo who thinks because he’s lifted some weights he can police whatever vicinity he finds himself in.

I knew from experience that guys like him were all mouth and flabby muscle. Problem was, they hadn’t spent much time in the ring; their jaws were champagne-flute glass. So what if you were an old sack of jellied gristle. If you’d survived a few bouts and owned a switchblade you’d been carrying since ’82, you had a better than average chance.

“Once upon a time,” I said, “a bastard hacked my daughter to pieces.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the young buck replied.

“That’s not the story,” I said. “The story is that ten years later, I watched that bastard die. And you know what? I liked it. In fact, when they flipped the switch and his body started flopping, I cheered. But it turned out cheering wasn’t the thing to do. My rejoicing carved out a nasty hollow. It taught me something. Take no pleasure in the harm you mean to have done.”

“Sir,” the young buck said. “Get out of my face.”

I flipped out the blade. The guy raised his hands.

“That’ll do,” the bartender said. He was all skin and bones, with a face that suggested he might’ve tasted a restroom floor. And at the end of his tanned, hairless arm, there was a polished .38.

I tossed a ten on the bar, said keep the change.

~

Like a true hot shot, I woke up in the sand, among broken seashells and cigarette butts and ice cream wrappers and those plastic discs you snap on the tops of soda cups. I dragged myself into a sitting position, smacked ants from my legs, and stared at the churning sea. It occurred to me that Primordial Man might’ve watched a similar sunrise bleed across this same froth. He had not, however, smelled doughnuts, and that was one of a few things I could think of that separated his world from mine.

On the boardwalk, House of Doughnuts had raised its garage door and was ready to serve. The woman manning the counter was a tall, haggard granny wearing a knee-brace, already sweating. On wobbly legs tattooed with Looney Tunes, she retrieved a sack of fried dough for the last guy that needed one, a fatso wearing a red Redskins sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off, a man who nodded and smiled at me, making me feel shitty for having silently cursed his bovine physique.

“Need help?” Granny asked.

“I’m thinking,” I said. The menu couldn’t have been simpler. To eat: doughnuts, glazed. To drink: milk and coffee, small or large. They didn’t take American Express—only cash. I was about to ask for a sample, when a girl trotted in, maybe twelve, no more than thirteen. Blonde braids. Brown, calflike legs, unshaven, adorned with thousands of golden hairs. To say she was a duplicate of my daughter would be saying it wrong. She was my daughter. Which meant she’d either come back from the dead, or I was really bad off.

The girl ordered a dozen doughnuts. Looney Tunes Legs fetched them in no time. So. Not a ghost. I was bad off. Worse than I’d thought. She unwadded a few bills for the granny. I followed her out. I tried to stay at a safe distance, or maybe I didn’t, because I caught up to her, tapped her shoulder. She whirled around; a braid-tip brushed my outstretched hand. A harrowing sight I made for sure, a scorched lump, aglitter with sand. But she didn’t scream. Squinting, she waited for me to explain.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For a minute I thought, maybe.”

“What?”

I knelt. The earth was tilting. The Lord, I figured, trying to knock me down. “I thought,” I wheezed. “You were somebody.”

“You okay?” She pulled a phone from her hoodie pocket. “I can call 911.”

I shook my head. “It’s just the downslope.”

She frowned.

“Forget it. I’m old,” I explained.

“Angela,” a voice said. A man stood at the other end of the alley.

“You don’t look that old,” she said.

“Angela Simmons!” the voice said again.

“I gotta go,” she whispered. She jogged toward the voice, which belonged to a dude laden with muscle, wearing a baseball hat, sunglasses and Croakies. He yanked her by the arm, a gesture she’d hold onto, to fuel some misplaced father-hate. She couldn’t understand how he needed to feel like he was in charge. Like he had the power to save her. It was a feeling no man could spoil. Unless one came along and did.

I pledged to stay away from the boardwalk. Half an hour later, I still hadn’t left. Slumped in the bucket seat of a race-car game, watching the monitor advertise itself, I was going nowhere, fast. I had yet to make my mark. Across the room, a toddler sporting fake fangs rode a mechanical, sombreroed donkey. The girl, the one from before, stood beside him. She looked bored. She wiggled a foot from one of her sandals, used it to scratch the back of her other leg. She caught me watching and raised her hand. I didn’t wave back. She approached.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked. This touched me. It angered me.

“You shouldn’t talk to people like me,” I said.

She blinked her blue eyes. Her tongue poked the inside of her cheek. My chest prickled, as though a fuse had been lit there. “What kind of person are you?”

“The kind to avoid.”

“Do you know Jesus?” she asked. She had a plastic spider ring on one of her fingers. Her lips gleamed with gloss.

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Well, you should know that He’s real and He loves you.” She opened a coin purse smothered with stickers of wild safari animals, retrieved two quarters and dropped them into my slot. “People should stop being afraid of each other,” she said.

On the screen, numbers counted down: three, two, one. A green light lit up, and all the cars but mine took off.  I stomped the gas. “It might seem okay to think that now,” I said, “but what if the unthinkable had a mind to descend?” She didn’t answer. I glanced behind me. She was gone. The little mechanical pony was still going, riderless. My car—a yellow Lamborghini—burst into flames.

At House of Doughnuts, a new waitress manned the helm. Buxom was the word for her, big in all the places where you want big to be, except for the eyes, which were about three sizes too large, and a chin that seemed embarrassed by its weakness. The eyes I could deal with, as long as I didn’t have to look into them. Her flesh was a luxurious brown, peppered with melanomas. Brown hair waterfalled to her ass, shivered when she walked.  I waited on a stool. She took care of the others, approached me.

“Where’d Looney Tunes go?” I asked.

“Looney Tunes?” she repeated, frowning and grinning.

“Tall granny? Had Bugs and Taz waltzing across her calves.”

“Mom?”

“Really?”

“That’s what we call her. I’m filling in. What can I get you?”

“One quart of whiskey.”

“How about a large milk?”

I gazed, unabashedly, at her bosom. “I haven’t got a dime,” I said.

Gloria winked. “How about we say this one’s on me.”

Gloria had an apartment two blocks from the beach. She’d refused to retire to my condo because it belonged to a man she didn’t know, who rented to people she didn’t know, particles of whom had likely been shed throughout, and she didn’t much care to breathe these particles, or converge with possible secretions. She’d seen a 20/20 where they hired a forensics team to dig around in a hotel room post maid-service. The team had discovered unfathomable particles and unspeakable secretions, and now it was difficult—impossible, even—for Gloria to inhabit private places where other people had lived.

The funny thing being this: she was a bird lady. I should’ve guessed by her dangly turquoise earrings she shared an apartment with such plumage-shedding, shit-producing creatures. The fecundity! I took a whiff before my eyes adjusted to the dark, and despite the tweets, thought pachyderm. The day before, Hurricane Season had officially begun, so Gloria whipped up some Category Fives—glorified Long Island Iced Teas. Gloria reheated a pot of vegetarian jambalaya; Michael, the African Grey parrot, perched on my shoulder and nibbled my ear. I was smitten. Okay, Gloria said, tell me your story, so I did, touching on my time at a boy’s school, how I’d pursued acting, made it as far as a toothpaste commercial, tried my hand as a stuntman, broke both my legs, met my ex-wife at a rodeo, tried real estate, made a fortune, went bankrupt. In short, I told her nearly everything. As a rule, I won’t bring up my daughter with people who don’t already know, unless I feel like wasting half a day circumnavigating their sympathies; it’s like letting someone else tear the scab off a wound that won’t heal. Instead, I told her what seemed as true as anything else: that my daughter was here on Pleasure Island, that it was a complicated story I might share someday, the most important part being that she’d been sent to live with another family, who’d insisted I never contact her again. Gloria pretended to believe me, inquired as to my condition, which I assured her was tolerable. We ate. We drank. We nuzzled. I was pleased to find Gloria’s massive legs were as muscular as they looked. I buried my face in her breast, which ponged of coconut. With her legs, she embraced me. I pumped like a drunken teenager; she acted like it was just the thing. Maybe it was. When the blubbering began, she didn’t inquire. She lapped at my tears, begged me not to stop.

Big surprise: swinging a metal detector feels too much like work, only less fruitful, especially if the battery’s dead. I’d found one in a closet at Copeland’s, figured it’d transform my pathetic beach-amble into something purposeful.

Also I’d filled the pouches of my shorts with airplane bottles of slightly impressive whiskey, charged to a credit card that was about forty dollars from maxed. I tinkled as I walked. Waves ate the beach. In fifty years, I predicted, all this would be gone. Then, I revised that figure to include the phrase “or less.”

The girl and her people lounged near the boardwalk, not too far from what appeared to be a family reunion of black folk, some of whom were playing volleyball without a net, while the less physically inclined—the swollen and possibly handicapped, wearing massive T-shirts—wallowed in the surf. The girl lay on a towel, next to a smaller boy who’d dug himself an impressive hole. Her parents, youngish and athletic, sat in the shade, wearing sunglasses with silver lenses. Their clothes rippled in the wind. Fifteen feet away, I swung my detector over a mound of incandescent seaweed, reading their lips. I didn’t catch much, except for when the father yelled at the kids, reminding them that if they wanted to see Bodyworks they had twenty minutes of beach time. I’d seen a flyer about this thing. People had died, science had claimed their bodies, stripped them of their flesh, snatched out their arteries and organs, shoved it all into the spotlight of a traveling freak show.

I approached the girl’s father. “Excuse me,” I said. “You believe in reincarnation?”

“Huh?”

“I didn’t believe in it, either, until recently.”

“Oh,” he said, raising his book.  “We’re not interested, thanks.”

“Your daughter,” I said. “I had one like her.”

“Excuse me?”

“Keep an eye out. Because you never know. The worst stuff you’ve never thought is out there. The worst doesn’t wait for an invite, either. If I were you, I wouldn’t sleep a wink.”

“Get the fuck away from my family,” he said. He rose from his chair. This guy, unlike the guy from the bar, could’ve put me in my place. Instead, he unsnapped his phone, and punched some numbers. “I’m reporting you,” he said.

“Good,” I said. Message delivered. Whether he listened or not was up to him. Only he could protect that angel from the hands of an animal who had nothing left to live for, except to hold another man’s daughter in his arms.

What I found, with the detector turned on: squat.

At Copeland’s, I opened a little book that’d been left, by his wife I presumed, for renters to record their flattery. Everyone loved the beach! And the house? The décor was fab! Michael’s seafood was awesome. House of Doughnuts rocked! Boy, were they were going to have to lose some weight after THIS vacation! I read every word of that shitstorm, a testament to the sweet oblivion of the unscathed, and spent the rest of the day trying to generate some compliment to pay Pleasure Island. I came up with one thing only, though my hand wouldn’t write it: I want you to sleep in my arms.

The next day, Gloria asked if I wanted to go see the bodies. Had I mentioned this to her? I had not. I took it as a sign and said yes. We drove her Cherokee to a convention center in Wilmington. Gloria looked alive and trashy in a way that commanded attention but caused people to ask: did that just happen? Bangles in her ears, a low cut top, shorts so short she had to keep tugging to keep her cheeks in check. I placed my hand on her lower back, to let everyone know whose side I was on.

A laminated card reminded viewers these bodies were not the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners, merely unclaimed Chinese. Every one lacked flesh. Their musculature had been stripped away, in some cases flayed. I remembered a dream where I died but the electricity stayed on in my brain. No body movements, eyes open, stared at what was in front of me. I imagined every body here cursed with a similar power. Bodies dead, brains alive, flickering with a lesser consciousness, a perpetual state of perplexedness.

“My God,” Gloria said, to the flesh of an obese cadaver, which had been sliced into three sections to illustrate how fat was stored.

A woman in front of us, wearing a fanny pack, pointed to the ceiling, where a fleshless, bug-eyed woman with outstretched arms levitated. With my eyes on her teats—two blind and withered globes—I nearly tripped over another of the skinless bastards. It took me a second to figure out he was kneeling in prayer. His held his heart—or maybe somebody else’s—in his hands. “Promise me something,” I said.

“Shoot,” Gloria replied.

“If I die in the next ten minutes, have me burned to a crisp. Fertilize your garden. Line your bird cages.”

“Please.”

“I suppose you’d prefer me to get all dolled up, stuff me into a box?”

“I’d prefer you to be eaten,” she said. She grabbed my hand, started gnawing an index finger.

“I don’t expect you’d like my taste.”

“Not by me, retardo,” she said. “Birds.”

“Yours?”

She shook her head. “Too finicky. Turkey vultures, though? Turkey vultures would get the job done.”

I took a break from the exhibit to conjure a vulture-beak. It scooped out one of Gloria’s eyeballs.

“You okay?”

I wasn’t sure. I felt like I had somewhere to get to, someplace I didn’t want to visit. I pointed to her purse. “You got any booze in that thing?”

“You want a Midol?”

“I’m not menstruating.”

She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead, pronounced it clammy.  “I could really use a drink.”

“Take deep breaths,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

I nodded.

“Think about something nice.”

My daughter appeared. She was a baby, maybe four. She was asking me how much I loved her. This was a game of ours. A pastime. She’d ask how much, I’d yell a gazillion! I’d ask her how much she loved me and she’d yell sixty! Wow, I’d say, sixty’s a lot.

“Is sixty a lot?” I ask.

“It depends.”

“Wrong,” I say. I swallow. The back of my throat tastes like snot. “Sixty’s not a lot. Sixty’s nothing. I’m ten years from sixty now. That’s six times the number of years my daughter breathed the air of this earth before she was slain.”

I hadn’t meant to include this part. But I’d been staring at the muscle-threads of a man carrying his own skin—like a coat—over his arm, and my mouth, as usual, had a mind of its own.

Halfway through the exhibit, Gloria and I found an oasis: a bamboo café. At the counter, an adolescent boy with a Mohawk dispensed coffee and offered us free chunks of nut-infested brownies. We sat at a wobbly table, its unwiped surface agleam with the residue of spilt beverages. I took one sip, and scalded my tongue. The story arrived like a deluge.

Once upon a time, a man and a woman made a child. The child wasn’t perfect. In fact, the child was, for the first two years of its life, a terror. Never satisfied, threw tantrums, the whole bit. Toddlerhood, however, transformed her. She learned how to speak. She didn’t lose the mean-spiritedness, which she’d inherited from her father, but she loved to talk, to tell her parents how much she loved them. She loved to love, loved to be loved. She’d don her Snow White mask, listen to the man’s heartbeat through a fake stethoscope, shake her head gravely, and say: you haven’t had enough kisses today.

One day, another man—a neighbor, no less—invited this child into his truck. Something had happened, he’d said, to her parents. But nothing had. What’d happened was he had dreamed of performing unspeakable acts upon the girl’s body, before her death, and after.  And that’s what he did. Six days went by. On the seventh, a fisherman found the girl’s hand bobbing in a river. Cops were summoned, parents were summoned, the body was identified, the predator nabbed, the funeral performed and forgotten.

In the years that followed, the woman was the one who proved herself. She wept often, but not always. She slept at night, got up in the morning. She found ways to go on, move on, get past, overcome. Meanwhile, the man lay in bed, grinding his teeth like he had a mouthful of glass. She’d tell him to go on, and he’d go on, out somewhere, into whatever building had its doors open and encouraged the worst habits money could buy. Eventually, the woman moved west with an aspiring soul-winner, sent postcards from the desert imploring her ex to get personal with the Lord. For a while, the man did get personal. He cussed the Lord like you would a family member. Then, one day, the Lord broke the news: a daughter who’d been hacked to pulp can’t be buried. You will carry the pulp with you.  That pulp was your heart. It would lend no hand with sympathy.

It wouldn’t let me die.

Gloria’s fingers—her talon-like nails shellacked with paint—fanned her eyes, as if casting a spell on her face. Her lips turned inward.

“Don’t,” I said, “You’re not pretty when you cry.”

“Baby,” she replied. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’d have to die first,” I said.

Gloria put her lips to my ear. “I want you inside me.”

“I’ll allow it,” I said, “on one condition.”

“Anything,” she said.

“No matter what transpires, you won’t shed a tear.”

She said she’d promise me nothing. I knew then she was mine.

~

We had a whole floor to get through—bodies playing poker but not, bodies running but not, bodies conducting an orchestra and posing like the Thinker and riding the flesh-stripped bodies of horses but not—and then, after the exit, the harsh light of a downsloping sun.  How much of us it would fail to reveal? Only time would tell. Right now we had bodies to view, some whole, some not, some torn down the middle. We had bloated hearts and charred lungs and shriveled peckers to size up. We had shudders to inhabit. We had conversations to overhear: my uncle had heart disease; epidermis is your largest organ; I knew someone with a hydrocephalic child; I happen to think we’d be beautiful without skin!

I looked for the girl I’d seen before, the one who looked like my daughter. I told Gloria what she looked like, told her to alert me should one like her make an appearance. Look out for braids, I said. Strawberry-colored barrettes. Baby fat. Brown limbs and crooked teeth. A propensity to rely on fingers when counting. An insatiable love for animals, especially those injured, made lame, or missing a leg or three.

I had no reason to dream. I had no business envisioning a new era, where everything vital would come back from the dead. But, I told myself, I was keeping my eyes open. Peeled, as they say.

But back at her apartment, Gloria wanted them shut. She had a present for me, and this present required a blindfold. I lay prostrate-side-up on her floor, like she asked. Also: my clothes were gone, removed by Gloria herself. I was a little afraid, and said so.

“Don’t be,” Gloria said. I heard bird-peeps, the squeak of cage doors flung open. “Relax,” she said.

“Impossible,” I replied.

“Then pretend. Pretend like you know how to relax.”

“Play dead?”

“Exactly.”

Soon, they were upon me. Their tiny bird-feet. Their claws. Their beaks, nibbling and nibbling. The little wings, feather-kissing my flesh.

“Move your hands,” Gloria said.

“I wish for that part of me to remain unpecked,” I said.

“Leave that to me,” she said. She climbed aboard.

The birds tweeted. One nipped at my ear, another at the cloth above my eyelid. Gloria rocked and rocked.

“Are we… too old… for babies?” I asked.

“Let me… get back to you…”

“Keep… getting… back.”

“Keep… inquiring.”

The air pulsed with bird wings. I hadn’t known she had so many. Maybe they weren’t all hers. Maybe they’d flown through the open windows, from all directions—from the land, from the trees, the sky, the sea. The screeches they made! A cacophonous song—one that, I suspected, was imploring their winged brethren to abandon the dead and rotting things of the world, so as to observe our fervent wallowing. We were, I was sure, a sight to behold: two withered creatures, laboring and laboring, blind with the belief we might make something new.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of FUTURE MISSIONARIES OF AMERICA, a story collection. He is the co-editor, with David Shields, of Fraudulent Artifacts: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Dubious Documents, forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Previous work has appeared in Paris Review, Epoch, Tin House, VQR, Colorado Review and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech and is at work on a novel. Read more of his work at http://www.matthewvollmer.com and visit his blog at http://matthewvollmer.tumblr.com.

Read our interview with Matthew here.

Illustration by Morgan Maurer, 2011

It had been years since El played a game of chess on an actual chess board with actual pieces, and even longer since he had chatted easily with a woman, and yet there he was, in the ornate living room of an old Victorian home in Lexington, Kentucky, seated in an overstuffed chair across from Tess, a tall-ish, athletic-looking woman of about his age, mid- to late-fifties, though he’d have guessed when he first met her that she was younger.

She sat across from him in another overstuffed chair, looking down to the slate table between them at a handsome antique chessboard and pieces. She wore faded blue jeans and a thin pale-yellow turtle-neck sweater that hid the loose folds of her neck, where, he had noticed the night before, her age did show. In her eyes he found a mix of intelligence and weariness he associated with successful women. He’d just explained that all the chess playing he’d done lately had been on a computer screen, with anonymous opponents from all over the world, and she’d said huh, as if it amazed her anyone would want to spend his time playing chess with someone he couldn’t see. They’d been talking like this, sharing little bits and pieces of their lives, for the past day and a half, since they’d been seat-mates on a flight out of New York to Roanoke, Virginia––a flight that had been diverted because of fog. They’d wound up in the Lexington airport late in the evening, and when flights there were grounded because of snow, they wound up sharing a cab to the same Bed and Breakfast a few miles from the airport, where they wound up sharing nightcaps in Tess’s room, followed by more easy conversation that lasted for hours and ended with them making love and falling asleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning, to El’s surprise, there was very little awkwardness. They’d risen, showered, dressed, and then gone down to breakfast chattering away, talking about everything in the world, from their histories and their lives to politics and science. It was as if neither of them could talk fast enough. Turned out, they both lived in TriBeca, relatively close to each other: El on North Moore Street, Tess on Leonard. They were both divorced, El for the six years, Tess for ten. El had been married for a dozen years before the divorce, Tess for more than twenty. They both had grown children: Tess, two girls and a boy; El, a son and a daughter. Tess worked in fundraising, El was in sales.

After breakfast, they’d retired to the living room and spent most of the rest of the day in front of an open fireplace, and every hour or so one or other of them took a chunk of wood from a stack on the red brick outer hearth and tossed it into the flames. Late in the afternoon, when it was clear there would be no flights out of Lexington until sometime the next day, the woman who ran the B&B, a grandmotherly figure with a balding head of gray hair and a belly that made her look impossibly pregnant, asked if they’d mind if she left them alone for awhile while she went to look after an elderly friend. Now it was late afternoon, the light outside gray and solemn, and they were alone in the house, midway through a chess game neither of them cared much about, a game that was meant only to provide an occasional diversion from their ongoing conversation.

Tess looked up from the chessboard, out a bay window overlooking a sloping hill and a trail that disappeared into a line of snow-covered trees. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, “before it gets dark.”

“Seriously?” El looked out the window again, as if he might have been missing something. The snow was still coming down, though lightly, and there looked to be a foot or so on the ground. The scene was peaceful if dark––gently falling snow over fields and woods––until a gust of wind sent furious white swirls spinning into the trees.

“You’re a big guy,” Tess said. “You can take it.”

El said, “Looks awfully cold out there,” and then opened his arms and gazed down at himself, at the thin, dressy slacks and black shoes, at the white cotton shirt with fine blue stripes, more appropriate for a board meeting than a hike in the snow.

“She’s got everything,” Tess said. She jumped up from her chair, as if officially announcing the game of chess was over, and she motioned for El to follow her. “Look at this.” She opened a door off the foyer to reveal a closet stuffed full of winter gear in a variety of sizes: coats, scarves, boots, hats, gloves, multiples of everything. “Elwood,” she said, using his full name, teasing a little. “They have actual real woods here in Kentucky. Right out there, in fact.” She pointed out the bay window.

El wrapped a long green scarf around his neck and foraged through a line of winter coats, looking for something that might fit him. He was six-one and bulky, with thick legs and heavy thighs. “Did I tell you I played point guard in college?” he asked as he tried on the only coat he could find that would reach down to his waist.

“Really?” Tess said. “I love basketball. Were you good?” Then she added, quickly, “I mean, you must have been good––”

El laughed and said, “That’s all right.” He was struggling to get the coat zipper up over his belly. “I was too small to get much playing time, but when they let me on the court, I usually did pretty well.”

“Did you like playing?”

“Loved it,” El said, and left it at that. He took a step back and opened his arms. The coat was too small for him, but he’d managed to get it zipped up and buttoned.

“You need to put a second pair of pants on over those,” she said. “Do you have anything a little sturdier?”

“Pants?” He shook his head. “I’ve got another pair of dress slacks.”

“Better go get them,” she said. “The wind will whip right through those; might as well be naked.”

El said, “Fine. I’ll be a well-dressed woodsman,” and he went back up to the bedroom, where he found a heavier pair of socks and put them on over the first pair, and then struggled into a second pair of pants.

Before leaving the room, he looked at himself in a free-standing, full-length mirror. As he expected, he looked ridiculous: a big guy with a round face framed by a full head of gray hair, wearing a too-tight winter coat and a long green scarf with gray dress slacks, two pair. He smiled, amused at the figure he cut––and then his thoughts took a quick turn back to basketball. He had been modest with Tess. He hadn’t told her that in high school he’d been the team’s leading scorer sophomore through senior year, and that one college scout who watched him play said he had the sweetest three-point shot in the region. Still, he had no offers from Division I schools. Too small. He’d heard it over and over, through high school and college. Too small. After high school, he traveled halfway across the country to play for Oklahoma Wesleyan, a good Division 2 basketball school––only to get limited playing time, because, of course, he was too small to compete against the bigger, stronger players in the league.

Too small. The words were lodged somewhere deep inside him like slivers of heat. He told Tess he loved basketball, but his feeling for the game, back then at least, was something more than that. His whole life was immersed in basketball. When he wasn’t playing, he was practicing. When he wasn’t practicing the game, he was thinking about it. He did only what he had to do to get through the academics in high school, and the same in college. He was a good basketball player, and he believed that would be his future. In high school, he believed he’d be recruited by a division 1 team and go on to play in the pros. When that didn’t happen and he went on to a division 2 school, he believed he’d be noticed there and go on to play in the pros. When that didn’t happen, when he finished college having spent infinitely more time on the bench than on the court, he found himself ill-prepared for the work world. He wound up in sales by default, and he’d been in sales ever since. When he thought of basketball now, it was often with anger. His coaches and team mates, his parents and his friends, they’d all tried to tell him. He was too small for the pros. It wasn’t going to happen. He’d never forgiven them for being right, nor himself for not proving them wrong. His memories of basketball were buried in him like flames, like a roiling circle of heat.

Downstairs, he found Tess in front of the bay window, bundled up in a red quilted ski jacket, a white knit cap with ear muffs, and a long green scarf identical to the one he was wearing. “You look like a Christmas tree,” he said, and then laughed at his own joke.

“I put out some boots,” Tess said, “that look like they’ll fit you.” She pointed to the closet.

El said, “perfect,” as he slid his foot into a boot. A moment later he’d donned a knit cap and gloves and was heading out the front door with Tess behind him.

“Cold,” Tess said, announcing the obvious. She pulled her hat down over her forehead and wrapped her scarf over her face so only her eyes were exposed.

They waited together for a moment on the front steps of the house, looking across a snow-covered lawn that descended to a blacktop road. A plow had gone by less than an hour earlier, and the road was slushy with patches of ice and snow. Beyond the road was an open field surrounded by trees.

El said, “Sure you want to do this?”

Tess said, “I bet you it’ll be warmer when we get into the trees and out of the wind,” and then she lurched forward, down a pair of steps and toward the driveway.

“That’s a theory,” El said, following her, “but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

On the other side of the house, as they trekked over snow toward the tree line, a gust of wind kicked up and seemed to cut right through El. He stopped to tuck his pant legs into his boots, and when he looked up Tess had turned her back to the trees and was waiting for him. She pulled the scarf away from her face to reveal a smile. “Hey!” she called. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

El gave himself a moment to take in the white expanse of field enclosed by towering green-and-white speckled trees, their branches loaded with powdery snow. He jogged to catch up with Tess. When he reached her, he put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. She felt solid in his grasp, her body slim but muscular, and they continued trekking together through the snow toward the trees.

El’s marriage was largely a disaster, but as he walked through the cold and wind with his arm around Tess, his thoughts returned a moment to the good early days, when he had been in love with his wife, when they used to take long walks and talk about their future. El hadn’t had a loving thought about his wife in so long the memory left him feeling first disoriented and then sad. She had turned both his children against him. She had cost him a fortune in lawyer’s fees. She’d wound up with the house and most of his retirement fund, so that now he’d never be able to retire comfortably. He was distant from his children, money was tight, and he’d be working in sales until he got too old to do it anymore. After that, he didn’t know what would happen to him.

“Look,” Tess said. She pointed to a gap in the trees.

“Trail head.” El squeezed Tess’s shoulder and then let her loose. In the last several years, he had trained himself, with the help of a therapist, not to think much about his wife. There had been a point, before he started seeing a counselor, when he’d been so eaten up with bitterness he’d found himself thinking about murder and suicide, about killing his wife and his children and then himself. That he could even entertain such thoughts had frightened him into counseling. His therapist put him on medication for a couple of years, and that had helped––and now he lived an essentially solitary life that revolved around work. When he met people, it was through work. When he did anything social, it was through work. He had a distant, formal relationship with his children, and though he would have loved something more intimate, he didn’t know how to make it happen. He hadn’t spoken to his ex since the last time they’d met in a lawyer’s office, six years ago.

Once they were in the woods and out of the wind, it turned out Tess was right, and it was noticeably warmer. Tess leaned back against a boulder and undid her scarf, which she had wound around her neck and face. “Isn’t it great to be out in this?” she said. “I love Manhattan, but, wow . . .” She gestured to the snow-covered trees and the scattering of rocks and boulders all around them. “I’d forgotten how beautiful.”

El crouched in front of her and wrapped his arms around his knees. “But it’s still cold,” he said, “really cold.”

“This world . . .” Tess said, and she turned to look out through the trees, toward what appeared to be a meadow, some forty, fifty feet in front of them, at the bottom of a hill.

El pulled himself upright, embraced Tess, and kissed her. Tess seemed surprised at first, but then she put her arms around him and kissed him back.

“This is crazy,” El said. “Don’t you think?”

“What is?”

“Us,” El said. “This.” When Tess didn’t answer, he said, “Is it just me?”

Tess watched El for a moment, her eyes on his eyes, and then she kissed him again. “It’s all crazy,” she said. She reached for his hand and pulled him along.

El followed Tess on the trail, which curved around one boulder that was several feet high, and then between a pair of boulders that formed a narrow corridor and opened onto a steep downhill slope to the meadow. When the wind stopped for a moment, the woods grew suddenly quiet. El let go of Tess’s hand, possessed suddenly of an urge to touch the ragged surface of one of the boulders. As Tess continued down the hill, he took off one glove and pressed the palm of his hand to the rock. It was cold and solid. What else did he expect? Still, he held his hand against the stone and pushed his fingertips into the gritty surface. How long, he wondered, had this boulder been here, unmoved and unmoving? A few hundred thousand years? Millions? He rummaged around in his memory of geography classes and came up with an image of mountainous glaciers slowly retreating, gouging holes in the earth and leaving huge boulders scattered like pebbles.

Tess waved from the bottom of the hill. “Come look at this,” she called. “It’s lovely.”

Before El reached Tess, midway down the hill, it occurred to him the meadow wasn’t a meadow. It was too big, and there was something about the way the trees on the far side, now that he could see across . . . the trees all descended to the open space. It reminded him of his visits to the ocean in Oregon, the way the mountains descended to the sea. There was a space of perhaps two or three seconds between the moment it first dawned on him there was something odd about this meadow and the moment he realized it wasn’t a meadow at all, but a pond, a large pond surrounded by woods––and in those two or three seconds, Tess stepped out onto the ice and her feet slid out from under her.

El yelled “Wait!” and started to jog down the hill. He had only taken a couple of steps when he tripped on something, a rock or an exposed root. To keep his balance, he reached for a tree and slammed sideways into it, and then lost his balance anyway and tumbled and rolled for several feet before finally coming to a stop. Through all this, he was keenly aware of the bulk of his body: it felt like a great weight, utterly beyond his control, radically different from the body of his youth, the one he could hurl about on the basketball court so athletically. He didn’t know what shocked him more, the fall or that sense of his body as lumbering, uncontrollable bulk.

“It’s all ice,” Tess said. She had pulled herself to her feet and was looking up the hill. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s a pond,” El called back to her. He wiped blood from the side of his face. First he thought he must have gotten scraped up when he hit the tree; then he realized there was too much blood, and he had gashed himself somewhere.

“You think?” Tess said. She was crouched and looking at the ice under her feet, her arms spread for balance. “Guess so,” she said.

A gust of wind came up and sent a spiral of snow across the pond as Tess took a careful step toward the shore and most of her body disappeared under the ice. El didn’t hear anything crack. There was no sound at all. One moment Tess was upright on the ice and the next she was submerged to her shoulders.

Tess said “Oh,” and then “Lord,” and looked up at El as if she were embarrassed.

At the bottom of the hill, El got down on his knees and worked to extricate a long branch from a pile of icy brush. The gloves were interfering with his grip and so he pulled them off and tossed them onto the ice. Tess had said only those two words—“Oh,” and “Lord”––and then she had gone silent as she struggled to pull herself out of the water, pushing her body forward. She appeared to be trying to walk, and slipping with each step. Her body lurched upright and then fell forward three times in quick succession, and then she stopped, her eyes open in a frightened glare, staring up the hill. She seemed to be conscious and aware. She was breathing hard, but she wasn’t moving or speaking.

When El, at last, was able to pull the branch free, he lay down on his belly and extended it to Tess. The ice was cracked and shattered now all the way to the shoreline, and he could see that the drop off was steep. Tess was only ten feet in front of him and the water was up to her breasts. “Take it,” he yelled. Tess clutched her heart with one hand and looked at the branch as if she couldn’t quite make out what it was or what to do with it. Her free arm rested easily on a heavy chunk of ice pressed up against her chest. “Take it,” El repeated. “I’ll pull you out. Grab hold of it.”

Tess looked at El and then at the shore, and then she lunged at the branch, reaching for it with both hands. For a second she managed to grab hold of it. One moment her arms were wrapped around the branch, her whole body leaning over it––and the next moment she was gone, disappeared under the water.

El shouted her name and rose to his knees. An instant passed then that felt more like several minutes. First, he explored his options. He could try to run and get help––but that would be the equivalent of leaving her to die. He might try lying to himself, he might try rationalizing––but he knew if he left her there, the only point in returning would be to retrieve her body. Or he could go in after her. He’d have to submerge himself in the water, pull her out, and then carry her up the steep hill, across the long field, and back to the house. He figured the chances of succeeding were exceedingly small. But maybe. Maybe he could do it. There was at least a chance.

Still, kneeling at the edge of the water he hesitated. His thoughts flew in a heartbeat first to his ex-wife, whom he saw in his mind for a moment vividly, her expression tender and concerned, and then to his children––and in a flash of memory he recalled his daughter falling from her bike, her legs and face scraped and bleeding, and how desperately she’d wrapped her arms around his neck as he carried her home. Both these /images came to him in the instant’s hesitation before he stepped into the freezing water.

The shock was stunning. It hit him like a body blow, as if he’d been slammed into a wall. After his first step he was in up to his waist, and the next step he was under water, struggling to make his brain work, commanding his feet to feel for the ground, his arms to search for Tess. Then, a heartbeat later, there was no thought at all, only a panicked, urgent thrashing until he found Tess and pulled her to the surface choking and spitting. Her body seemed impossibly heavy, as did his own, the two of them weighed down by thick layers of soaked clothes. They were surrounded by chunks of ice and slushy water, and El had come up facing the opposite shore, so that what he saw in front of him was a wide expanse of pristine snow surrounded by trees. He leaned back, his arms around Tess’s waist, and slipped and fell with his first attempt to take a backward step toward the shore. As he went under, his hip smacked into something hard and unmoving, and the impact was dull and sharp simultaneously––a dull thud and a sharp shock of heat shooting up his spine. When he found footing again and came up out of the water, he was facing the shore, his arms still fast around Tess’s waist.

They were close to solid ground now, only a few steps, only a few more feet––and El wasn’t at all sure he could do it. His arms and legs felt stuck, unmovable, his arms wrapped around Tess as she continued to cough and spit while laboring to breathe, his legs planted under the water. With a grunt he gathered all his strength and surged forward, pushing Tess out in front of him, heaving her toward land, and then he was under the water again, his feet slipping out from under him, and when he broke the surface for the second time, he saw Tess clawing her way out of the pond, pulling herself to the shore. With what strength he had remaining, he flung his body toward her, pushing through chunks of ice that pummeled his chest and legs, until he was finally beside her, and he managed to pull both himself and Tess all the way out of the water before collapsing onto his back and breathing hard while he waited for his heart to quit its terrible pounding, to slow down enough that he could manage something more than his own hard breathing.

Though his body felt exhausted beyond functioning, his mind apparently was still working methodically. He entertained a dim hope that someone might have seen them struggling in the water. They were, after all, nearby a small American city: they weren’t in the middle of the wilderness somewhere. Perhaps someone in a house on the other side of the pond, some kids out playing in the snow––perhaps someone saw them and was at that moment on the phone, dialing 911. Then, if they could hold on, others soon would be hurrying down the hill to take them away in ambulances––and all would be well. Maybe. El entertained these comforting thoughts until his heart stopped raging in his chest and he was able to turn over onto his side, where he found Tess, still on her back, breathing a little easier, looking up into the trees as if she saw something interesting there.

“Tess,” he said, his voice raw. “Tess. Can you hear me?”

Tess nodded and turned her head to look at him. “I can’t move,” she whispered. She added, almost inaudibly, “I can’t move my body.” Then her lips moved again, as if she might have thought she was speaking, but all that came out was a whisper of breath.

“Our clothes,” he said. “They’re weighing us down.”

Tess looked back at him, but made no effort to speak.

“Okay,” El said, with no idea what he meant. He struggled and managed to get himself sitting upright. His arms and legs felt as though they weighed tons, and it took him forever, fumbling with numb fingers, to get the zipper of his jacket down. By the time he had managed to get out of his coat and unwrap his tangled scarf from around his neck, he was exhausted again. He waited a moment and listened, his sodden jacket and scarf already beginning to freeze where they lay beside him in the snow. He had hoped to hear the sound of an engine in the distance, or the sound of boots trudging through the snow, or, best of all, maybe voices, voices calling for them.

But he heard nothing of the kind. Snow had started to come down harder and the wind blew constantly at about the force of a light breeze––and what he heard was the soft whisper of snowfall in the woods, and wind soughing through trees.

His first plan had been to carry Tess up the hill and back to the house––but that was impossible, and he understood that now with certainty. He could barely move himself, let alone carry Tess. He considered trying to get Tess out of her wet clothes, which he could see were already stiffening as ice crystals formed on the outer layers near her neck and wrists. He couldn’t figure which would be better for her, to leave her packed inside of wet, icy clothes, or to leave her further exposed to the wind and cold with them off. While he tried to consider that question, he noticed his thoughts had started to move sluggishly, and that in turn frightened him into moving.

“I’m going,” he said, meaning he was going to get help. He pulled himself to his feet and looked up the hill, which seemed to him now mountainously steep. He turned back one more time to Tess, stretched out on her back in a bright red jacket and green scarf, her hair stiff with ice, a light layer of bright new snow untouched around her. He thought to shout something reassuring to her, but he couldn’t come up with words, and he realized he was at least a little dazed now and his mind wasn’t functioning entirely right––and again that realization provided the surge of energy he needed to push himself forward and up the hill.

His exhaustion was overwhelming, like nothing he’d ever felt before. Even in his days playing basketball, when he’d sprint from one end of the court to the other at full speed until his legs finally gave out, when he’d fly up and down the stadium stairs, or work the weight machines until his arms were rubbery––none of it was anything like the exhaustion he felt climbing that hill. Each step required all his remaining will. Every time he fell, he tried to fall forward, so that when he got up again, which he did, over and over, he’d made a little progress, moving himself farther along––and in that manner he made it to the top of the hill, where he could see through the trees to the open field behind their B&B. In another fifty feet, he’d be out of the woods––and even if he couldn’t make it all the way across the field, he still might be seen by someone, by the old woman who owned the house, by kids out playing, by a car passing on the road. If he could make it out of the woods, he told himself, his chances were better, and if he could make it all the way to the house, he might yet still save himself and maybe Tess, maybe Tess also could be saved.

With those thoughts rattling around in his head, he stumbled forward, pushing himself one step at a time, and not until he reached the pair of boulders that formed a narrow corridor, did he allow himself to fall to his knees and rest a moment . . . just a moment, out of the stabbing wind, within the protection of the two ancient rocks, the one he had touched with wonder a million years ago, when the earth was still young and much was possible; when Tess, a woman who had appeared out of nowhere in his life and with whom he had been peacefully cuddled in the warmth of a down comforter the night before; when Tess, who was beautiful and smart and funny; when Tess was a dozen feet in front of him and ambling down a hill toward the pond that they both thought then was a meadow. He was at ease there, between those rocks, and suddenly, overpoweringly sleepy. When he thought about the intense desire to sleep that was overcoming him, and when he realized at the same moment he was no longer kneeling, but rather he was stretched out on his belly between the boulders, he had another, brief, panicky moment. He knew he had to pull himself up to his feet, he had to get up and keep moving, and he pushed his mind back to the /images that had come to him in the moment before he stepped into the water, in that moment when he made his choice to go in after Tess. He remembered his children and his wife, and his daughter’s arms around his neck as he carried her home.

One more time, then, he struggled to pull himself to his feet, and when his body wouldn’t move, he struggled harder, he struggled with all he had in him; and at the moment when he was about to give up, when he was on the verge of resigning himself to sleep, at that moment, suddenly, miraculously, he was fine. He was saved, both he and Tess. Together they walked away from the cold, out of the woods and over the surface of the pond. All around them, pristine snow gathered. When the wind blew, it danced in circles and sailed off into the stands of surrounding trees. They had both taken off their clothes to free themselves of the sopping, burdensome weight, and they walked easily over the ice, sure-footedly, side by side, leaving a trail of mist behind them, falling off them like smoke. The mist coming off Tess was white and wispy, while the mist off El was thick and swirling and tinted red. He saw himself then as if from above, a big man, bulky, walking beside Tess on the pond, leaving a cloud of red mist behind him, as if his body were casting off heat and leaving behind a trail of flame. He continued watching calmly, the bodies beneath him on the ice growing smaller and smaller as he rose higher, until they were merely points of light, and then they were nothing at all.

Ed Falco‘s most recent book is the short story collection, Burning Man, from SMU Press, in which “The Athlete” first appeared. Other recent books are the novel, Saint John of the Five Boroughs, and the short story collection, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, both from Unbridled Books. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, TriQuarterly, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, among others. As an award-winning playwright, Falco is the author of Home Delivery, Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha and Radon.  In the summer of 2001, Falco worked with artists and actors from the United States, England, Greece, Bosnia, and Germany in an international theatre project meant to explore the healing power of drama. Ed lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he directs the Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and edits The New River, an online journal of digital writing. You can read more about Ed and his work here.

Read our interview with Ed here.