In every story Clarissa began, or even thought of, someone had recently died. There was no other story for her: someone loved, someone irreplaceable, had died, and how did one go on? She told herself it wasn’t because of Jared; it was because everyone dies, and how can one write anything that doesn’t acknowledge that?

For Jared, dying was rich in comic possibilities. He had the worst sense of humor; no joke was too corny for him. “Treat each day as if it were your last, and one day, it will be.” They were jokes he would have told their child, if they’d had one. So he told them to Clarissa, daily, to her anguished moans and protestations: “What’s brown and sticky? A stick.”

Clarissa flew overnight from Boston to Dublin. She faded during the long line going through Customs, twisting through the cavernous, windowless room. She caught a bus to Monaghan, and finally a taxi to the artists’ residency. She was here for two weeks, a trip funded by the university where she taught, to finish a novel. The estate house, in Gothic Revival style, was impressive; the grounds green and rolling down to a tidy lake. Her head swam as the Director showed her around the place, rushing her past the artist studios, making jokes in his Irish accent that left her bewildered. When she made it to her room, she collapsed.

After a time of staring at the posts of the four-poster bed, feeling all the mistakes of her life, including the decision to take this trip to Ireland; her failures in her professional life; her personal unworthiness, and the sense of loss and aching loneliness at the center of it all that she tried not to look at head-on, she fell asleep.

When she woke, it was nearly time for dinner. She opened the drapes and stared at the well-tended gardens in light constantly shifting from clouds moving overhead: early roses, lavender, and lilies. She showered, put on her black dress, and brushed her long brown hair. Maybe there would be single men at dinner, devilishly handsome Irish men or Brits, intrigued by an American woman. She leaned close to the bathroom mirror, drawing a fine dark line around her eyes.

There was just one man at dinner, a white-haired man who sat next to her. He was the husband of the woman across from Clarissa. Painters, they each had a studio in the building that used to be the stables. The man leaned in to Clarissa to hear her speak in a way that reminded her of her father. His wife leaned forward to talk with Clarissa, once reaching across the table to touch her hand. Later Clarissa struck up a conversation with a dark-haired, intense young woman sitting next to her, an essayist from Dublin. The wine helped Clarissa feel loquacious. In this setting, no one knew of her failures, losses and mistakes, or that the novel she was working on was going nowhere. She told the woman, whose name was Siobhan, about her tenure-track position at the state university in the Midwest, and about her two close male colleagues. “They’re both very well-published,” Clarissa said. “And they’re friends.”

“Oh, dear,” Siobhan said, in a way that made Clarissa feel she understood more than Clarissa said; understood something of the paternal tone of the older colleague, and the mild flirtatiousness of the other. Clarissa didn’t want to complain about these men; they were her friends and colleagues, and it was important to keep positive in the workplace. As her mother used to remind her, no one is perfect. “Not even you,” she would say, looking pointedly at her daughter.

There was just one person who thought Clarissa was perfect, and he was gone.

In the morning Clarissa stared at her fingers, resting on the laptop’s keyboard. Left index on F, right index on J, waiting to be told to move. The novel waited on the lighted screen, truncated, partial, and longing. She’d started writing about a young woman who wanted to be a gymnast, but the story shifted until the young woman was older, and had lost her lover in a fire. Clarissa thought this turn might be a bad idea; it seemed obvious to write about a woman who had suffered a great personal loss, but it was all she wanted to write. It was the experience she knew best. Her fingers hesitated on the keys. She wanted her character to grieve, and then fall in love again, and discover she was loved in return. The thought made her embarrassed. Surely that wasn’t enough to write about; surely she needed a darker, more complicated vision.

Three fat flies buzzed at the window in front of her, trying helplessly to get to the garden. The window was closed but she saw it could open at the top, with a lever pushed straight out. Standing on the chair, then climbing onto the desk in her bare feet, Clarissa pushed the window open and secured it. Climbing down, she took a piece of paper from the desk, and pushed its edge gently against one of the flies. She finally got the fly to step onto the piece of paper, and remain there while she climbed back on the desk and tapped it out the window. “There you go, dummy,” she said. She climbed down and back up again with the next fly, and the third. Standing on the desk, tapping the paper out of the crack of the open window, she watched the fly zoom away into the overcast sky, then looked down to see a man, standing in front of her on the garden walk.

He turned away with a smile, embarrassed to be caught watching. From his position on the sidewalk it would have been hard not to notice her, standing full-length in front of the window and reaching up. Still, it had been worth the effort to stop hearing their anxious, desperate buzzing. She sat back on her chair, pushed it up to the desk, and looked at her keyboard.

None of her characters died of cancer, which is what her fiancé died from; she chose more dramatic deaths. Fire, or car crashes, or suicides; something sudden, rather than the slow, sad slog that had been the approach of Jared’s death. She hadn’t really known he was going to die, even though she should have known, until all of a sudden it was time to call his parents. She had never found the right time to tell him that, when he got better, she wanted to try for a child. It was what he’d wanted, all those years, a decision they disagreed on that kept them from settling on a date for a wedding. She was in grad school, then starting a stressful new job; where was there time to be a mother? Then, when she felt ready, he was dying, then suddenly their story was over.

She didn’t want to write a character as stupid as Clarissa had been. She wanted her character, Amanda, to be perceptive, intuitive, and courageous. She wanted someone to fall helplessly in love with Amanda, and for Amanda to fall in love also, after she finally determined the man was for real. Like Jared had been for real. It had taken a long time for Clarissa to finally believe that, and to trust.

There were new people at dinner that evening: a couple of women who were sharing a cottage and working together on a play, and the man who’d seen Clarissa at the window. Shaking her hand, he said, “I’m so sorry about earlier. I couldn’t help watching; I thought you might fall forward through the window, and I would need to be there to rescue you.” He had gray streaks in his dark curly hair and a bit of softness around his middle. Clarissa thought he was British, but he said his accent was originally Australian. “Tempered by years of living in Dublin.” His name sounded vaguely familiar, Dillon Burnham. He asked her name, and what she was working on, and saw him search his memory for any trace of her.

“You wouldn’t have heard of me,” Clarissa assured him. He sat next to her at the table. Throughout dinner she was aware of him, of his arm close to hers. She talked with one of the playwrights. Carol and Isabel were from Belfast. Carol talked about the community theater she worked with, the plays she’d written, their progress on this one.

Clarissa knew she should talk of her own work, but she didn’t want to; it felt private to her, wrong to discuss. Instead she asked more questions of Carol, and nodded thoughtfully, pretending to listen.

Clarissa slept deeply, waking only once when she opened her eyes to darkness, forgetting where she was, what this room was, what this building was. For a brief moment, she thought Jared might be lying next to her in the house they used to live in together, and reached to feel for him. It wasn’t until she was standing in the dark room, feeling the walls, that it came back to her: she was in Ireland, at the Artist Residency. That was her desk, that was the door that led to her bathroom.

In the morning, she was glad she didn’t have to talk to anyone when she helped herself to the food set out on the counter; she was not a morning conversationalist. Jared was more energetic in the morning, but had learned to save conversation, and especially jokes, until later. That was one of the things that it takes time to learn about a person. She didn’t know if she could ever do that again: take the time to adapt to someone, to their snoring, for example, and have them take the time to adapt to her. She thought of the things she did that used to annoy Jared: take too long to leave the house when they were going out, always remembering one more thing she needed, or a last-minute change of shoes. They were getting over these minor irritations, finding ways to reach their affections around the things that irritated them, and Clarissa had just begun imagining what it might be like to have a child with this man, when he became ill.

But for that short time their relationship had been a success for Clarissa, a flash in her life. So brief, it seemed now, the five years they’d been together; a gasp, a kiss, a moment, and it was over, Jared gone as if he’d never been.

Clarissa took the time to look up on her laptop poems by Dillon Burnham. He was quite accomplished, with several well-reviewed books and a major British award. It was strange to be reading the words of someone who was in one of the rooms next to her, just beyond a wall. The language of the poems was vigorous, with exact, unsentimental observation of nature. She particularly liked one that came around to the subject of death, and the loss of the loved one’s eyes. She thought the writer of that poem must understand loss. It helped her move back into the novel; she imagined Amanda remembering her dead lover’s eyes. Clarissa made those eyes gray, the same color Jared’s eyes had been.

At dinner Clarissa sat between the two playwrights. They were a couple, she presumed, thought she wouldn’t have guessed that either of them were gay. Carol had curly red hair and Isabel was tall and thin, graceful, with long blond hair. Isabel took an interest in Clarissa’s work, asking her what it was like to teach creative writing in the United States.

Clarissa was aware of Dillon Burnham at the other end of the table, glancing their way. After dinner, Carol and Isabel stood and apologized for leaving: “Back to work!” Carol said, dropping her napkin on the table.

“She’s a rough taskmasker, she is,” Isabel said, and followed Carol out the door. Dillon moved to sit next to Clarissa, bringing his bottle of wine with him. He filled Clarissa’s glass. “Cheers,” he said, and raised his glass. “How’s the writing going?”

“Let’s not talk about that,” Clarissa said. “I read some of your poems,” she confessed.

She watched a faint pink spread up the sides of his face. “Oh, no,” he said.

“They are quite beautiful.” She couldn’t remember the name of the poem, but said “My favorite is the one about the eyes.”

He raised his glass again. “Here’s to the writing of Clarissa, of which she doesn’t wish to speak. May her characters suffer a better fate than her namesake.”

He was referring to the heroine of the novel by Samuel Richardson. That Clarissa was abducted and raped, but fought for her virtue to the end. “My parents had not read that book,” she said, “Or they might have thought twice about naming me.”

“It is a beautiful name,” Dillon said.

Outside the glass doors, the evening was soft and gray, bushes shaking in the wind. “Would you walk down by the lake with me?” Dillon asked. They filled their glasses and walked down the gravel path to where the lake shone, one white swan drawing lines across its surface.

“This is simply ridiculous,” Clarissa said. Dillon looked at her. “All this.” She gestured with her wine glass. “The building, the lake, the grounds. Ridiculously beautiful,” she said.

They stood by the water, watching the swan cut the lake in half with a smooth line. Dillon taught literature at Trinity, and played the cuislenna, an instrument he described as a small Irish bagpipe, but he didn’t mention a wife. Clarissa kept thinking of the eyes of the poem, and of a pair of gray eyes she couldn’t forget. She wanted to tell him of her sorrow, and see if he had something similar to share. Jared’s death had occurred just nine months ago. Long enough to grow a baby, if she’d been able to do that. She stood tense, and instead of saying anything about eyes, blurted out, “Did you hear about the black swan that walked into a pub?”

“No . . .” Dillon said, turning to face her.

“The bartender says, ‘Hey, I named this pub after you!’ The swan says, ‘What, Dave?’”

Dillon chuckled politely. Clarissa felt a flush of embarrassment. What had gotten into her? After a quiet moment he said, “The lake is just the color of a Turner watercolor, don’t you think?”

Clarissa bit her lip, searching her memory for Turner’s watercolors. When she confessed that she didn’t have a clear image of Turner’s paintings of lakes, Dillon said he would show her one. He wanted to go fetch his computer now, but she said no. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Eleven o’clock. We’ll meet in the kitchen.”

They said good night in the darkened kitchen. Clarissa impulsively reached over and took his hand. He was so kind, his eyes looking down at her warmly. “Good night,” she said. “It was a pleasure.”

He took her hand to his lips and gave her thumb a quick kiss. “Dear Clarissa,” he said. His low voice rumbled through her. She slipped away to her room without saying anything else. There would be tomorrow to talk.

In her room Clarissa lit a low lamp and looked at herself in the mirror. The evening had gone well, except for that ridiculous joke about the swan. In bed, she lay in the darkness, smelling the faint scent of laundry detergent on the sheets, feeling the sensation of her hand being brought up to his lips. As she was beginning to drift off, she heard a familiar voice say, What do you call a fish with no eyes? And the answer, Fsshh.

In the morning, Clarissa looked up more of his poems, but she refrained from looking up Turner’s work. A few minutes before 11:00, Clarissa wandered into the kitchen and sat casually at the table by the glass doors. The room was empty but for a staff member wiping up the floor with a mop. Clarissa poured herself another cup of tea, added a drop of cream, and sat back at the table.

She heard a door open in the hallway, footsteps, and the white-haired man she’d met her first night shuffled into the kitchen. He waved, then went out the door and down the gravel walk. The day was overcast again, though a suffused light came through the clouds. She could see figures down by the lake, people walking, but she couldn’t make them out, then their heads dipped below the rise of the lawn.

At 11:20, Carol pushed open the glass doors and entered the kitchen, her red hair wild around her face. She went over to the coffee machine and pushed the button for espresso. “How’s it going?” she said to Clarissa.

“Well enough. Is your work going well?”

“It has been, yes. Isabel seems to have taken off . . .” Carol glanced down toward the lake. “Taking a walk, I guess. Oh well, I need a break too. My husband is waiting for a phone call.” She sipped the espresso. “Don’t want him to think he’s forgotten, now, do we?” Behind her, the couple walking by the lake came into view again, this time close enough for Clarissa to see that it was Isabel and Dillon, walking slowly, thoughtfully, deep in conversation.

Back in her room, Clarissa looked up the painter J.M.W. Turner on her laptop. His paintings seemed to be mostly of the ocean, many of them set in Venice; only one reminded her of the lake at all. It was called “The Blue Rigi,” and was an image of a Swiss mountain, Mount Rigi, as seen from Lake Lucerne. The gray and blue colors were similar to the colors of the water last night. The painting reminded her of sadness.

She opened a new file. Jared’s eyes were gray, she wrote. They reminded me of a smooth gray stone. When he opened them in the morning, he would make a joke. He would be sick, about to vomit, knowing he was to die soon—and he would make a joke. A terrible joke, but a joke nonetheless. “How does a train eat? It goes chew, chew.”

She would write Jared alive on the page, for herself if for no one else. There was no more of him left in the world, no child with his smile. She would recreate him, breathing, making stupid jokes for her, Clarissa, just to get her to smile. Dillon Burnham wasn’t what was important to her life. She would smile when she created Jared again on the page, smile when she remembered his terrible, terrible jokes. What did the finger say to the thumb? I’m in glove with you. She would write about the way he tried to pretend he didn’t feel too bad, even as he grew pale, and the pain made him pant for breath. He did that for her. She would write about his death, how she told him to close his gray eyes and rest, not knowing he would never open them again. She would spend this entire residency writing Jared alive again, and then letting him die, and when she was ready—when she was good and ready, not a moment before—she would say goodbye.

   

Patricia O’Donnell is the author of the newly released novel, The Vigilance of Stars. Her other books include the novel Necessary Places, the memoir Waiting to Begin, and the short story collection Gods for Sale, which won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award. Her short work has appeared in many places, including The New Yorker. She is a professor of Creative Writing in the University of Maine at Farmington’s BFA Program. 

Abel’s twin sister had died a modest death, not the spectacular one friends and family feared, or privately expected. An aid worker traveling the world should perish operatically, from the sudden outbreak of civil war or the contraction of a rare deadly virus. Yet Ariel died during a work meeting when she leaned too far back in her chair and fatally struck her head. Abel’s parents phoned him at his own job to deliver the news, and for several long moments he stared out the window, waiting for the words to resolve into meaning. In that period of shock his thoughts drifted in and out of arguments he’d had with Ariel over the years, and it occurred to him that he finally had proof his job ensuring regulatory compliance at Deloitte was indeed the better career. Here were comfortable chairs made to lean back. Here was a floor that could hurt no one, covered as it was with a plush carpet. He thought, miserably, that for once he could have said what she did every time they argued about career choices: “I win.”

It was a year later when Abel arrived in Cambodia. He’d put off the trip in order to receive several vaccinations, including one against Japanese Encephalitis, though it was unlikely he’d contract it, and because he wanted to avoid the rainy season, and because he had always been afraid to fly, and because, most of all, he wasn’t sure if he could do it alone. His bravest moment in life had been accepting an internship in New York City immediately after graduating from the University of North Dakota. It was his first offer and he wasn’t sure he’d get another; He had been terrified to walk the block and a half between his apartment and the office for at least half a year. The internship turned into a job, and since then, his only trips were back home to Grand Forks. He’d never visited Ariel at any of her postings, though she visited him at least annually.  

His plane touched down at 9 p.m. and he hired a motodop, as recommended by his travel guide.

“English?” the man asked. “French?”

“English,” Abel said. “Or American.”

“Oh. Comedian. You speak Comedian.”

Abel wished he was the kind of person who could seize the moment and extend his half-hearted joke into a playful exchange. Instead he named his guest house and handed the man a printout of the address written in English and in Khmer. Through the busy city center the man bobbed and weaved, and Abel held him around the waist, as he saw was the custom for men and women alike. The driver’s body was relaxed and safe. He delivered Abel to the right address and Abel clutched his backpack to his chest as he watched him go.

It was hot. The lane was quiet and pockmarked. Vines strained against the tall cement fences. The heavy air smelled of jasmine and garbage and bore the sound of a million tiny wings.

Was it jetlag or something else that woke him at dawn? He wandered out to the porch and saw for the first time what Ariel must have seen every day, early riser that she’d been. A watercolor sky. Thickening haze. Trees and tall grasses wet and bright.

And there at the far end of the porch was Ariel herself, sitting in a wicker chair. She wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt and was pouring cream into a glass of ice coffee. It moved through the liquid like it was alive. Another glass sat on a low table in front of a second chair.

“Coffee?” she said.

Abel wanted to scream in her face. Pour out his tears. Embrace her and never let go. But the setting was so calm, her posture so relaxed, that the impulse evaporated. In its place: a pointless flicker of hope.

Ariel pushed a list across the table. “Can you get me this stuff?”

The curvaceous Khmer script was indecipherable to Abel.

“Ok, but – ”

“Go to Orussey and then go to Tuol Tom Poung.”

“Ariel, can you just – ”

“Hey, want to see something?”

She reached into a backpack. When she turned back she was wearing the wooden mask of a demon. One eye was closed and slashed across the eyelid, the other wide open and bulging. From bright red lips poked two fangs.

“Boo!” she said.

Abel stared at her.

“I’m a ghost!”

“No kidding.”

Ariel shimmied and wiggled her fingers. “Ooooooo,” she said. Then louder, leaning forward. “OOOOOOO!”

“Okay! Jeez.”

“According to folk tales here, if you shake your bare ass at a ghost, it will get scared and go away. Isn’t that great?”

Abel’s laugh was genuine. “Would that work on you?”

“No.” Ariel took off the mask.

Abel stood at the curb to hail a tuk-tuk and another guest house resident came to stand beside him, a white woman in a white linen dress with a white leather purse and a big floppy straw hat. Abel fidgeted and hoped she would leave him alone.

“It is so, so hot out, isn’t it?” she said. She retrieved a fan from her purse and thworped it open with a flick of the wrist. She held it before her face and waved it with a fussy little motion.

“It’s so nice to see another expat here,” she said. “I’ve been here for a year now, volunteering.”

Abel’s smile was a closed door. He scanned the traffic.

“You’re going to love it,” she said. “It’s so pretty, there’s a ton to do. Oh – there’s an expat party every second Tuesday at Sunny’s, so that’s coming up and everyone goes. You should come!”

“Hm.” No tuk-tuks, no motodops, no taxis.

“Let’s see, what else. We hang out on Street 140. Check out Pontoon Bar. It’s a bar on a pontoon. Buy some lotus seeds and feed the monkeys as soon as you can. It’s so fun. And make sure you get a pair of shoes made. All the expats have some. They make them exactly to your specs.”  

Abel did not want to do any of that. He wanted to see what his sister saw in her last days, just a glimpse, maybe understand finally why she kept travelling so far from home. And then he wanted to leave. But suddenly he also wanted something else, some way to dispel the welter of anger he was surprised to feel. He met the woman’s eye after a beat.

“You keep saying ‘expat,’” he said. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“You know, someone who moves here.”

“So, an immigrant?”

The woman looked at him blankly.

“People from El Salvador, then,” he said. “Nigeria.”

The woman cocked her head. Abel pressed on. “You mean white, no?” His voice rose. “White people are so fucking special, so they get the special word.”

“I never really thought about it.”

“You never thought about it,” he said. “Cool.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting so mad at me for. I’m trying to help.”

Abel had never picked a fight with a stranger before, but it wasn’t fair this lady got to be here instead of Ariel, who had made fun of words like “expat” and phrases like “friendly fire.” He reached for the worst thing he could think of and ignored the tightness in his chest. “Well you should try harder.” He willed his voice not to crack. “Because otherwise what good are you.”

Stalls of spices, of vegetables, of freshly butchered meat. A vendor of deep-fried insects and tiny flattened frogs, tossed in oil and salt and eaten one after another like potato chips. A stall of hot peppers whose proprietor wore thick rubber gloves.

Abel wandered towards the back and found a series of food stalls around a big fire pit that filled the space with smoke. He greeted a vendor and pointed to a plate of food someone else was eating. With quick precision she produced another of the same: a wide eggy crepe filled with bean sprouts and leafy greens. It hung over the plate and he took a bite of one edge, as he would have a plain slice. The woman was looking past Abel at the next in line, so he moved on to a communal table and pretended not to understand when a table of English-speaking men asked where he was from. Two of the men had broken off from the others.

“At the beer garden, these girls – ‘Beer Girls’ – they come up and give you a massage, and if you give them more money, they’ll do more,” one in a suit said.

“Oh man, that’s awesome,” the other said and raised his hand to receive a high-five.

The first was distracted by his phone. “Wait – sorry bud,” he said. “I gotta head back. You go on without me.”

“Man, the embassy works you guys so hard.”

Ariel was waiting again in the early morning and Abel handed her the sacks of groceries. He passed her the list, each item ticked off.

“Thanks,” she said. “Now we can get started.”

The food came together like magic, neat cabbage-leaf parcels of minced pork and herbs, tied with a length of lemongrass.

“So on balance, ‘aid worker’ is kind of a misnomer,” she said.

Abel made a face. “What are you talking about?”

“‘Aid worker’ sounds nice, but it’s kind of bullshit.”

“But you worked for the UN,” Abel said. “That’s no joke.”

“It kind of is.”

“You guys went around, giving people money and stuff. That’s good, that gives people security. When you’re secure, you’re happy!”

Ariel’s hands were busy. The cabbage rolls multiplied by the hundreds. “There’s more to it than that.”

Another list. A different market. In the morning he found this one outside the center of town, near the Japanese Embassy. Rougher. Smaller. The tarps covering the outermost stalls were frayed around the edges and whipped the air. A storm was rapidly gathering in a sky that minutes before had been clear. The street emptied.

Abel bought a plate of food and sat on a stool to watch the rain fall in sheets. A tiny girl approached and extended her hand. Six years old? Five? She was dressed in rags and held a baby on one hip. Its arms hung limp and its mouth was open.

“Please,” she said in English. She patted Abel’s arm with a bird’s fluttery staccato. She shifted the baby to her other hip. Abel dug into his pocket and held out a dollar bill, worth many times over the local currency. She hesitated before taking it. “Please,” she said again. Abel thought back to his guide book; he was meant to turn away now to show he would give no more. The girl stood by his side for a long moment. A man from behind the counter glanced at Abel and handed the girl a skewer of meat, the same kind stacked high on Abel’s plate. The man spoke a few words to the girl and for an instant her too-adult countenance transformed as she smiled. Another child appeared and the two took turns eating and holding the baby. Its head lolled back.

An enormous pot simmered on the stove. Noodles gleamed in thick brown sauce. A whole fish was fried and golden, its skin slashed into diamonds. The kitchen smelled of freshwater and wood smoke, of oil and ginger and sweet grasses and history.

“The Khmer Rouge wiped out the country’s whole culinary tradition,” Ariel said. “And now people are trying to remember the old recipes.” She was issuing statements like this, one after another. “Did you know there was a big rock scene here before the KR?” Her face was obscured by steam. “Did you know the country was once a matriarchy?”

She sent Abel out twice more. Two more days of heat and humidity and grit in the folds of his skin. He went to the killing fields and stared at a tower of skulls. Afterwards he heeded his intense desire to stand barefoot in the fine dirt, to physically feel the earth beneath him more intimately than he could with shoes. He ignored the sidelong looks of other tourists.

“Hope you’re hungry,” Ariel said that night. “Dinner’s ready.” There was a long table that stretched forever, laden with endless plates of food. The Cambodian ones came first, followed by those of a dozen other nations, everything beautiful and enticing, valuable in a way Abel could not precisely explain. They sat facing each other and Ariel stretched her arms wide to indicate the bounty. She folded her hands in prayer and closed her eyes. “Dear God,” she said, and frowned. “Actually, what am I saying, it’s just us here.”   

When they were young, Ariel would always say “this is what heaven must be like” every time they went to Whitman’s Candy Store in Fargo, and in adulthood, she transferred the ritual to restaurants. When she visited Abel in New York for their 30^th birthday, she said it of a fancy uptown hotspot Abel chose in the hopes of pleasing her. But she would have said it of the corner diner. And now, here, in this dreamstate or purgatory or whatever it was, she said it again, and for the first time Abel did not think the phrase was sentimental nonsense. And then the forces at work transported him backwards in time, and he saw himself in the year since Ariel died, checking off his to-do lists, saving his money. He saw himself come straight home from work, night after night after night, double-lock his door, and sob.

In the morning Abel had coffee in the guesthouse café and watched fellow travelers discuss what they would do that day. Shopping figured heavily into their plans. Massages. High tea at the big fancy hotel. The dollar went so far here. They lamented the city’s poverty and promised to make donations. They considered visiting the genocide museum and decided against it. It was, after all, awfully grim for a vacation.

Abel wandered the streets without aim, around a wat where monks in orange robes played Candy Crush on their cell phones. He bought noodles from a food cart, tried to squat low to the ground and eat like the locals, found he could not. The beef and egg and chilies and fresh greens were straightforward and nourishing.

After nightfall Abel walked past a throbbing party and saw it was Sunny’s. Today was the correct Tuesday and the enormous outdoor garden was packed. The party was sweaty, loud, and it stank. He walked on and soon found himself along the Tonle Sap River. Past the Foreign Correspondents Club and its own hectic gathering. Past motodops. Past taxi girls dressed up and waiting. They walked expertly over the gravel in their stilettos. Abel crossed a causeway to the dark silence of the river’s other side. He stood on the shore. Let his eyes adjust. There ahead, the silhouette of a long canoe. The figure within flung a net wide and it slapped the water. He pulled it in. Repeated the motion. The sound was clockwork, a hand measuring time. The boat passed beneath the bridge. Then it was gone.

   

Whitney Curry Wimbish is an American writer living in Scotland. Her fiction has been published by MIROnline, and has received honorable mention in two Glimmer Train competitions. Her journalism/nonfiction has been published in The Baffler, The Financial Times, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in North American Review.