Willful Creatures

Job’s Jobs

God put a gun to the writer’s head.

I’m making a rule, said God. You can’t write another word or I’ll shoot you. Agreed? God had an East Coast accent, tough like a mobster, but his lined face was frail and ethereal.

The writer agreed. He had a wife and family. He was sad because he loved words as much as he loved people, because words were the way he said what he wanted about people, but this was God and God was the real deal, and he didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on it. So he packed up his typewriter and paper and tucked them in the hall closet, and within two days, to comfort his loss, went to the art supply store and bought oil paints and a canvas and a palette and set up in the garage among the old clothes and broken appliances. He’d always liked painting. He thought he had a good sense of color. He painted every morning for hours, until he started to paint something real.

He was working on his eighteenth canvas, blues and browns in sharp rows blurring in the middle, making a confrontation with black, when God entered his studio, this time holding a dagger.

Cut the painting too, said God. No words, no images. Or — He made a slicing motion near his stringy throat.

Why? cried the painter, already missing the sharp smell of the oils, how the colors mixed to become brand new again, an exotic blush of yellow, a bluish gray, a new way to show trees, with white! He missed the slow time he took washing his hands with turpentine, the way his wife praised the new rugged scent of him.

God lifted the dagger to the lightbulb of the garage and it glinted, unpolished silver, speckled with brown. Do not question God, said God.

So the painter packed away his paints, inside that hall closet, next to the typewriter and reams of white paper. He felt a deep pang, but within a week signed up for a drama class, held in a church where the ceilings were high, the air cool, and every scene took on particular gravity with those stained-glass windows acting as set. He played a few roles, and he wasn’t very good at first but was enjoying it anyway, shy man that he was, liking the way he would feel his feeling and then use it and look around at the other people in the class, faces split into red-and-yellow triangles from the windows, and see they were feeling the same feeling with him, how contagious it all was. He needed a lot of reassurance as an actor but he was starting to understand its ultimate camaraderie and loneliness, the connection which is tight as laces then broken quick as the curtain’s fall.

So of course one afternoon, walking out of the church, spanking a new script against his knee, he found God in the backseat of his car, gripping a bayonnet.

No more, God said. In my house no less, said God.

The actor started to cry. I love acting, he said. I’m just getting it right, he said. My wife thinks I’m coming out of my shell.

God shook his head.

Mime? the man pleaded.

God poked the actor’s side with the sweet triangular tip of the bayonnet.

The actor sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, already missing the applause, the sight of the woman in the front row with tears in her eyes that were from the same pool of tears he’d visited to do the scene, the entire town fetching water from the same well.

The actor was depressed for a while which his wife didn’t like much, but finally he slogged himself out of it and took up cooking. He studied the basics in the cookbook and told himself that patience was a virtue and would be put to good use here. Sure enough, in three months, he’d made his first soup from scratch-potato leek nutmeg-and it was very good. His wife loved it. You’re amazing, she told him in bed, his hands smelling of chicken guts; I married the most amazingly artistic man, she said.

He kissed her. He’d made a dessert too and brought it into bed-a chocolate torte with peanut butter frosting. He kissed her again. After two bites the torte fell, unnoticed, to the floor.

God was apparently busy, he took longer this time, but showed up after a big dinner party where the chef served leg of lamb with rosemary on a bed of wild rice with lemongrass chutney. It was a huge hit, and everyone left, drunk, gorgeous with flush, blessed. The chef’s wife went to the bathroom and guess who sauntered through the screen door, swinging a noose.

No! moaned the chef, washing a dish. No!

This is it, said God. Stop making beautiful food. What is with you?

The chef hung his head. Then hung up his spoons in the cupboard with the typewriter, paints, playbooks and wigs. With the pens, turpentine, and volumes of Shakespeare. The shelf was getting crowded so he had to shove some towels aside to make room. He spent the week eating food raw from the refrigerator, and somehow found the will to dial up a piano teacher. But right when he glimpsed the way a chord works, how it fits inside itself, the most intricate and simple puzzle, when he heard how a fourth made him weep and a fifth made him soar, the cheerleading of C major, the birch trees of D minor, God returned with a baseball bat tucked into his belt.

Don’t even think about it, barked God.

Dance? Rifle.

Architecture? Grenade.

The man took a year off of life. He learned accounting. He was certain this would be no problem, but after a few weeks the way the numbers made truths about people’s lives was interesting to him; he tried law but kept beginning a duet with the jury; chemistry was one wonder after another; even the stock market reminded him of a wriggling animal, and so of course, the usual: pins near the eyes, the closing of the job doors, the removal of the name plaque, the repeated signing of the quitting papers.

So the man sat in a chair. God had ordered him to stop talking, so he went to a park and just looked at people. A young woman was writing in a blank book under a tree; she was writing and writing, and he caught her eye and sent her waves of company and she kept his gaze and wrote more, looked up again, wrote more, circled his bench and sat down and when she asked him questions he said nothing but just looked at her more, and she stood and went away, got a drink at the water fountain, circled back. After an hour of this, she nodded to him, said Thank You, and left. The pathway of her feet looped to the bench and back and away and back, in swirls and lines.

Shut your eyes! yelled God.

The man’s wife was unhappy. She was doing all the cooking now and her husband didn’t move or speak anymore. She missed their discussions, his paintings, his stories, his pliés. She missed talking to him about her job with the troubled people, and how at certain moments there was an understanding held between her and the person, sitting there, crying or not crying, mad or not mad, happy or unhappy, bland or lively, and it was like, at that moment, she said, they were stepping all over a canvas together. It’s like, she said, the room is full of invisible beetles. Or faucets. Or pillows. Or concrete. She told him all about it and his eyes were closed but she could feel, from his skin, that he was listening. She went to him and undressed him slowly and they made love there on the sofa, and he hardly moved but just pressed his warmth to her, his body into hers, and she held him close and the man gave her all he could without speaking, without barely shifting, lips and hips, and she started to cry.

Afterward she pressed her head to his chest and told him all the things she had thought about, the particular flower he made her feel, the blade, the chocolate torte.

They slept on the sofa together.

God put the man in a box with no doors or windows. He tied his hands behind his back and knotted a blindfold over his eyes. He stuck duct tape over his lips. God said: Not a peep out of you. Don’t you interact with anybody. The man sat with his head full of dreams. He thought of flying fish and the smell of his wife’s skin: white powder and clear sweat. He thought of basil breaking open and the drawing of a tomato with red and black paint and the word tomato, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, and the perfect taste of tomato with basil, and the rounded curve of a man’s back, buttons of spine visible. He wondered where the girl with the half-blank book was right then. He thought of his wife making bridges of air over air. He listened to the sound of wind outside the box, loud and steady as his breath.

Dearth

The next thing in the morning was the cast-iron pot full of potatoes. She had not ordered them and did not remember buying potatoes at the grocery store. She was not one to bake a potato. Someone must have come in and delivered them by accident. Once she’d woken to meadows full of sunflower bouquets all over her house in glass vases and they turned out to be for the woman next door. Perhaps the woman next door had a new suitor now, one who found something romantic in root vegetables.

Our woman checked through her small house but it was empty as ever. She asked her neighbor, the one whose windows were still crowded with flowers, but the neighbor wiped her hands on a red-checkered cloth and said no, they were not for her, and she had not ordered any potatoes from the store either, as she grew her own.

Back at the house, the potatoes smelled normal and looked normal but our woman did not want them around so she threw them in the trash and went about the rest of her day. She swept and squared and pulled weeds from her garden. She walked to the grocery store and bought milk. She was a quiet person, and spoke very few words throughout the afternoon: Thank You, Goodbye, Excuse Me.

The next morning, when she woke up, the potatoes were back. Nestled, a pile of seven, in the cast-iron pot on the stove. She checked her trash and it looked as it had before, with a folded milk carton and some envelopes. Just no potatoes. She picked up all seven again, and took them across the road and pushed them one at a time into the trash Dumpster, listening as they thumped at the bottom of the bin.

During the afternoon she walked past rows of abandoned cabins to her lover’s house. He was in his bedroom, asleep. She crawled into the bed with him and pushed her body against his until he woke up, groggy, and made love to her. She stared at the wall as the craving built bricks inside her stomach, and then she burst onto him like a brief rain in drought season. Afterward, she walked home, and he got ready for his night job of loading supplies into trucks and out of trucks. She stopped by the cemetery on the way home to visit her mother, her father, her brother. Hello mother, hello father, hello brother. Goodbye now.

The next morning, the potatoes had returned. This time she recognized them by the placement of knots and eyes, and she could see they were not seven new potatoes, but the same seven she had, just the day before, thumped into the Dumpster. The same seven she had, just the day before that, thrown into the small garbage of her home. They looked a little smug. She tied them tight in a plastic bag and dropped them next door on the sunflower woman’s front stoop. Then she repotted her plants. For the rest of the day, she forgot all about them, but the next morning, the first thing she checked was that cast-iron pot. And what do you know. And on this day they seemed to be growing slightly, curving inward like big gray beans.

They were bothering her now. Even though she was minutely pleased that they had picked her over the sunflower neighbor, still.

“All right.” She spoke into the pot. “Fine.”

Oven.

On.

Since she did not enjoy the taste of baked potatoes, when they were done she took them into the road and placed all seven crispy purses in a line down the middle. The summer sun was white and hot. At around three, when the few cars and trucks and bicycles came rolling through town, she swayed and hummed at the soft sound of impact, and that night, she slept so hard that she lost her own balance and didn’t wake up at sunrise like usual but several hours into the morning. There was a note slipped under the door from her lover who had come to visit after work. He forgot to write “Love” before his name. He had written “Sincerely” instead.

Settling down to a breakfast of milk and bread, the woman looked into the pot almost as an afterthought. Surely they would not survive the oven and the tires and the road. But. All seven-raw, gray, growing. Her mouth went dry, and she ignored them furiously for the rest of the day, jabbing the dirt with a spade as she bordered the house with nasturtium seeds.

Later that day, she stapled them in a box and lugged them to the post office and mailed them to Ireland, where potatoes belonged. She left no return address. When they were back in the pot the next morning, she soaked them in kerosene, lit them on fire, and kicked them into the hills. When they were back again the next morning, she walked two miles with them in her knapsack and threw them over the county line, into the next county. But they were back again by morning, and again, and again and again, and by the twentieth day, they curved inward even more and had grown sketches of hands and feet.

Her heart pulled its curtain as she held each potato up to the bare hanging lightbulb and looked at its hint of neck, its almost torso, its small backside. Each of the seven had ten very tiny indented toes and ten whispers of fingertips.

Trembling, she left the potatoes in the pot and fled her house as fast as she could. She found no comfort in the idea of seeing her sincere lover so she went to the town tavern and had a glass of beer. The bartender told her a long story about how his late wife had refused to say the word “love” in the house for fear she only had a certain amount of times in a life to say the word “love” and she did not want to ever use them up. “So she said she liked me, every day, over and over.” He polished a wineglass with a dirty cloth. “I like you is not the same,” he said. “It is not. On her deathbed even, she said ‘Darling, I like you.’” He spit in the cloth and swept it around the stem. “You’d think,” he said, “that even if her cockamamie idea were true, even if there were only a certain amount of loves allotted per person, you’d think she could’ve spent one of them then.”

The woman sipped her beer as if it were tea.

“You say nothing,” he said. “I don’t know which is worse.”

On the buzzy walk home, she stopped by the cemetery and on her way to see her family she passed the bartender’s wife’s grave which stated, simply, she was greatly loved.

Back at her house, holding her breath, she sliced all seven potatoes up with a knife as fast as she could. The blade nearly snapped. She could hardly look at the chubby suggestions of arms and legs as she chopped, and cut her own finger by accident. Drunk and bleeding, she took the assortment of tuber pieces and threw them out the window. She only let out her breath when it was over.

One piece of potato was left on the cutting board, so she ate it, and for the rest of the evening she swept the stone floor of her house, pushing every speck of dirt out the door until the floor rang smooth.

She woke at the first light of day and ran into the kitchen and her heart clanged with utter despair and bizarre joy when she saw those seven wormy little bodies, whole, pressed pale gray against the black of the cast iron. Their toes one second larger. She brushed away the tears sliding down her nose and put a hand inside the pot, stroking their backsides.

In the distance, the sunflowers on the hill waved at her in fields of yellow fingers.

August came and went. The potatoes stayed. She could not stand to bother them anymore. By the fourth month, they were significantly larger and had a squareish box of a head with the faintest pale shutter of an eyelid.

Trucks, big and small, rattled through the town but they did not stop to either unload or load up. She hadn’t seen her lover in months. She hadn’t been to the cemetery either; the weeds on her family were probably ten feet high by now.

With summer fading from her kitchen window, the woman saw her neighbor meet up with the latest suitor, yellow petals peeking out from her wrists and collar, collecting in clusters at the nape of her neck. He himself was hidden by armfuls of red roses. They kissed in the middle of the dirt road.

Inside her house, the woman shivered. She did not like to look at so many flowers and the sky was overcast. Pluck, pluck, pluck, she thought. Her entire floor was so clean you could not feel a single grain when you walked across it with bare feet. She had mailed her electricity bill and bought enough butter and milk to last a week. The nasturtiums were watered.

The smacking sound kept going on by the window. Wet.

It was lunchtime by now, and she was hungry. And you can’t just eat butter by itself.

She put the potatoes in the oven again. With their bellies and toes. With their large heads and slim shoulders. She let them bake for an hour and a half, until their skin was crisp and bright brown. Her stomach was churning and rose petals blew along the street as she sat herself down at her kitchen table. It was noon. She used salt and pepper and butter, and a fork and a knife, but they were so much larger now than your average potato, and they were no longer an abstract shape, and she hated potatoes, and the taste in her mouth felt like the kind of stale dirt that has lost its ability to grow anything. She shoved bite after bite into her teeth, to the sound of the neighbor laughing in her kitchen, through such dizziness she could hardly direct the fork into her mouth correctly. She chewed until the food gathered in the spittle at the corners of her lips, until she had finished one entire enormous potato. The other six crackled off the table and spilled onto the floor.

That night, she had a horrible stomachache, and she barely slept. She dreamed of a field of sunflowers and in each pollened center was the face of someone she once knew. Their eyes were closed.

At dawn, when she walked over to the stove, as she did every morning now, pulling her bathrobe tighter around her aching stomach, there were only six potatoes in the pot. Her body jerked in horror. She must have miscounted. She counted them over. Six. She counted again. Six. Again. Six. Six. Again. Six. Her throat closed up as she checked under the stove and behind the refrigerator and around the whole kitchen. Six. She checked all their markings until it was clear which one was missing: the one with the bumpiest head, with the potato eye right on its shoulder blade. She could feel it take shape again inside her mouth. A wave of nausea swept over her throat, and she spent the rest of the day in the corner of the old red couch, choking for breath. She threw up by evening from so much crying, but the seventh potato never came back.

The sunflower fields browned with autumn, and within a month, two other potatoes were expelled from the pot. There was simply not enough room for all six in the pot anymore. She had done nothing this time. She didn’t want to put them outside, bare, in the cold, so when they were soft enough, she buried them deep beneath the hibernating nasturtium seeds. They never came back either. The four remaining in the pot seemed to be growing fine but it was unsettling to look in and see only four now; she had grown so used to seven.

By the eighth month it was raining outside and she was having stomach cramps and the potatoes were fully formed, with nails and feet, with eyelids and ears, and potato knots all over their bodies. They rotated their position so that their heads faced the mouth of the pot. On the ninth month, they tumbled out of the pot on the date of their exact birthday, and began moving slowly across the floor. They were silent. They did not cry like regular babies and they smelled faintly of hash browns. She picked them up occasionally, when they stopped on the floor, legs and arms waving, but mostly she kept her distance. They tended to stick together, moving in a clump, opening their potato eyes to pupils the same color as the rest of them.

The four were similar, but you could distinguish them by the distribution of potato marks on their bodies, and so she named them One, Two, Three, and Four. Two also had a tiny wedge missing from its kneecap, in the shape of a cut square.

When she left to go mail a letter or pick up some groceries, the potato visitors went to the windows like dogs do, and watched her walk off. When she returned, they were back at the window, or still at the window, waiting. Their big potato heads turning as she walked up and opened the door. Eyes blinking fast to welcome her home. She went through her mail and fell into a corner of the rotting old red sofa and they walked over and put rough hands on her shoulders, her knees, her hair. The five of them spent the winter like that, together in the small house, watching the snow fall. She tried to send them outside, to find their fortune, but they always turned right around and came back. They only slept when she slept, making burbling noises like the sound of water warming up. They were dreamless, and woke once she awoke.

On the first day of spring, the bountiful neighbor came over with lilies woven into her hair, asking to borrow some matches. The woman had the four hide in the bathroom. She tried to talk to the neighbor but had very little to say and instead the neighbor filled the small house with chatter. The neighbor was in love! The neighbor liked the weather! The neighbor asked to use the bathroom and the woman said sorry, her bathroom was broken. The neighbor talked at length about broken bathrooms, and how difficult, and if she, the woman, ever needed to use her bathroom, she was welcome anytime. Thank you. You’re welcome! When the neighbor left, the woman’s ears were ringing. She went into the bathroom to pee and was somehow startled to see the four still in there, blinking beneath the silver towel rack.

“Get,” she said, brushing them off. “Get away from me. Go!”

They bumped out the door and waited in the living room. She put them in the closet and went about her day, and there they stayed, waiting, until the guilt drove her to let them out. The following morning, after a sleepless night where they gazed at her with white pupils, she pushed them out the front door to the side of the house where there was a strip of dirt that the neighbor could not see. The woman picked up her gardening shovel and dug a hole in the earth, as deep as her knee. She looked at One.

“Get in,” she said.

He stepped into the hole.

“Lie down,” she said. He looked up at her with wondering eyes and she filled the hole with dirt over him.

“Go back to where you came from,” she said, as she shoved more dirt over his grayish body. She looked at Two. Built another hole. “Go,” she said, “and don’t you come out,” and her voice shook as she said it. Two hopped in without pause. As did Three and then Four. She filled the holes up fast and then strode into her house and locked the door. Fine, she said to herself. Fine. Fine. FINE. She ate dinner alone and slept alone and woke alone, and the cast-iron pot was empty when she checked. They wouldn’t fit in it anymore anyway. She couldn’t even eat them now, could she? They would just walk right out of the oven, right out of her mouth. Go back to where you came from, she told herself. Thank you, Goodbye, Excuse me. She swept endlessly, and trucks moved past her window.

In the morning, with spring rolling off the hillsides in bright puffs, she went outside to the strip of dirt. No movement at all. She set a rock at each site, one rock for One, two for Two, etc. She sat for long spells, over the course of the next week, and watched the sky drift overhead. It all felt very familiar, and she recognized the shape and texture of her life before, but it was as if someone had put her old life in the laundry and washed it wrong. The color was slightly off. The sleeves were now too short.

At the end of the week, she kicked off the stones and got out her big shovel. Her neighbor was hanging up clothing on her laundry line, green dresses and blue scarves. The wind whisked her hair around.

“How’s that broken bathroom?” she yelled.

“Oh,” said the woman. “Well. There never was any broken bathroom.”

The neighbor raised her eyebrows.

“I was hiding my children from you,” said our woman.

“Children? What children?” said the neighbor, wrapping her neck in a rose-colored scarf. “I had no idea! How sweet! How many? Where are they?”

“I buried them,” said the woman, waving her shovel.

“You what?”

“I buried them,” said the woman. “And now I am going to dig them back up.”

She went to the side of the house, and dug up One first. He sat right when the shovel touched his arm and dirt fell from his face and legs. He blinked at her, as if no time had passed at all, and she held out her hand and pulled him out. She dug up Three, and Four. She thought briefly of leaving Two there forever, letting weeds grow all over him, but the other three were looking at his spot expectantly, so she dug up Two too.

The woman looked at each in turn. The layers of dirt became them.

“Okay,” she said.

They stepped into her open arms, solemn as monks. As they nestled and burrowed into her neck, the neighbor poked her head around corner of the house, draped in a clean sheet.

“Oh!” she said. “Look at this!”

The woman glanced over with Three on her back and Four clinging to her shoe.

“I didn’t think you could be serious,” said the neighbor.

“I am always serious,” said our woman.

The neighbor crouched down and smiled at Four. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked. Four looked past the neighbor and then climbed onto our woman’s back, pushing off One who fell lightly to the ground.

“They look so pale,” said the neighbor, her voice unsure where to drop, into which voice box positioned between curiosity and righteousness. “You might want to call a doctor,” she said. “I know a good one, who can be here within the hour.”

Four curled his hand around our woman’s neck, and began tugging on the lobe of her ear. Our woman barely smiled at her neighbor. It was a smile not made of pity, and it was not made of envy, even though the two had merged, for years now, on her lips. This smile instead was built of a weariness, of the particular quiet of the body after a long bout of weeping or illness. Certain things endured, and somehow she had ended up with four.

From the ground, Two leaped up to swing gently from her wrist.

“They need no doctors,” she said, walking to her front door. “Trust me.”

Inside, the woman dressed the group in clothing even though they had no hair or blood and would never look normal, dressed or undressed. Still she put them in pants and shirts she had sewn herself; in hats and shoes and belts.

She took their slow-moving hands and walked out the door again. They blinked and ducked under the lemony March sun. Already, like clockwork, the very first buds of green were pushing up from the soil, a ring of nasturtiums and dead potato babies to border her house. Halfway down the block, she turned and glanced at the neighbor, who was wearing a straw hat now, planting tomatoes. The four glanced with her. Thinking of the doctor had been a kind idea; she would thank the neighbor later. Living next to abundance was not so awful after all. It was contagious, in its own way.

The rest of the town was quiet and drowsy as the five walked past the cemetery, where they waved to the headstones, and over to the edge of the county. The air smelled ripe with spring. At the county line, the potato children stood by the fence posts and laid their hands on the dirt. They seemed interested, even pleased, by the new setting. They had no traumatic recollections of their past week buried alive. Instead, they brought fingers dusted with soil to their noses and smelled appreciatively.

They all crossed over, and began walking. A farmer pulling a wheelbarrow full of corn stopped and said hello.

“Good day,” said the woman.

His eyes flicked to the bluish figures at her side, but he was a polite farmer and didn’t say anything.

“How’s the corn?”

“Fine,” said the farmer. “Should be a good growing season. Good weather.”

He kept his eyes steady on her face.

“These are my children,” said the woman, giving him permission to look. “Children,” she said, “say hello to the nice farmer.” The four lifted their hands to touch him, and the farmer, familiar best with things of the earth, felt a wave of fluency, inexplicable, wash through him. His own son ran to catch up with them. “Here’s mine,” he said helplessly.

She shook the boy’s hand, the boy who was fixed on looking at the potato children, and who, the way children do, immediately felt entitled to touch their nubbly elbows.

“Do they talk?” asked the boy, and the woman shook her head, no.

“Do they have magic powers?” asked the boy, and she shook her head again.

“They stay,” she told the boy.

The farmer touched each potato child on the shoulder, and then waved goodbye to return to his work. He gave his son the day off. “Enjoy yourself,” he said, surprised by the pang of longing in his voice. The group walked around the county, trailed by the farmer’s boy; most things were very similar here except for the one movie theater showing a Western. In the interest of novelty, they all went to see it. The farmer’s son ate popcorn. The cowboys rode along the prairie. There was a shoot-out at the saloon. The potato babies found it all amazing, and although they could not eat the popcorn, they clutched handfuls of it in their fat fingers until it dribbled in soft white shapes to the floor.

Afterward, the farmer’s son ran home for dinner, and the family of five crossed back over. The sky was darkening with clouds, and halfway home, it began to rain. The woman tried to huddle the four under her arms, but they resisted, and held their bodies freely under the water. They seemed to enjoy it, tilting their faces to the sky. She had never seen them wet before, and rain, falling on their dirty potato bodies, smelled just like Mother at the sink, washing. Mother, who had died so many years ago, now as vivid as actual, scrubbing potatoes at the kitchen sink before breakfast. How many times had she done that? Year after year after year. Lighting the new fire of the morning. Humming. Her skirt so easy on her waist. Her hands so confident at the sink. They were that memory, created. Holding their potato hands up, they let the rain pour down their potato arms, their potato knees and legs, and the woman breathed in the smell of them, over and over, as deeply as she could. For here was grandmother, greeting her grandchildren, gathering them in her arms, and covering their wide faces with kisses.

The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers

Let’s face it. The dead bodies were clearly acts of easy murder, done by the husband to the wife, then the wife to the husband. I found them face-to-face, cold, on the living-room carpet. There is nothing here to solve. The only mystery I can see I have addressed in my report, which will soon be on the desk of my superior, and has to do with the number of salt and pepper shakers in a household of two people. Fourteen seems to me excessive. That, in my opinion, is the living core of this mystery. If you want a motive, I will write it out: the husband hated his wife because she had stopped speaking to him years ago; the wife hated the husband because he was stupid with their money. All this has been verified by various neighbors, relatives, and friends. No one I spoke to was particularly shocked by the double murder, seemingly planned on the same day which, if nothing else, seems to show a sense of kinship between the two. But! No one, including the neighbor, the doctor, and the bosses, understood why two people who paid a live-in chef to the very edge of their budget, and whose blood pressure kept climbing up the ladder into the red zone, would collect salt and pepper shakers, in ceramic, wood, glass, and metal. Does this mystery put anyone at risk? No. Will I get reprimanded again for not sticking to the outlines of the report? Of course. But I believe that mysteries surface in unexpected forms, and if I am to be a genuine investigator, then I must follow what I feel needs investigation.

I spent the night in their house staring at the rows of salt and pepper shakers while the bodies were being examined at the morgue. The cook was away for the night, and I slept in the guest bedroom, on top of the comforter, not moving any evidence but just resting and listening, as the only way to get a true feel of a house and its residents is to stay in it overnight. This model was fairly standard for the neighborhood: one story, ranch style, two bedrooms and an office. The pictures on the walls were restful landscapes, and in the guest room, I slept beneath a watercolor of horses running. Every piece of furniture and decor was slippery to the mind and would not stick. I can hardly recall the sofa or the chairs, so unobtrusive was their style, and so involved was I with examining those shakers. Several pairs were masterfully crafted, with zigzag patterns of mahogany and oak, or cut diamonds of crystal, and must have cost quite a pile. One was a humorous set, each a green ceramic frog: salt with a cane, pepper with a hat. Each held varying levels of grain. The house grew so quiet that I could hear the movement of cats next door, paws treading softly on the sidewalk.

In the morning, I awoke to a call from the coroner. He confirmed that the husband was knifed in the stomach at five p.m., while the wife had been poisoned at a quarter to three, with a poison that took exactly 2.5 hours to kick in. They both died within about a minute of each other. Her late lunch had been a small chicken potpie, unsalted, a green salad, peppered, and a glass of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. He had skipped lunch, worried as he was about the exactitude of the poison, which he had slipped into her water bottle. Her fingertips, as she carefully cut and chewed her chicken and carrots, were covered with bandages from all the blade-checking she’d done over the course of the morning. She was described by several sources as a thorough type.

The coroner is an upstanding fellow. He fought in Vietnam and raises orchids. I thanked him repeatedly but he gets embarrassed by gratitude and hung up.

After I ordered in a bowl of tomato soup and a sandwich, I spent several hours in the living room, sitting with the stain from his wound. It spread over the carpet in a curling line, as if he’d put his arm around her with his blood.

Now, she could not have known she was poisoned when she knifed him, as he had chosen a poison that is silent and causes no suffering, and he had hidden the bottle somewhere very difficult to find, as we had not yet found it. In fact, their greatest difference was revealed through their choice of murder weapon, in that she wanted to make him suffer and be aware of her murderous inclinations, choosing the overt and physical technique, while he selected the secretive method, one of the few available where she would die without fully realizing what was happening. He perhaps was more ashamed of his loathing, and also he did not want her to feel pain. Their greatest similarity, however, was revealed in their choice of occasion, since each conceived of the exact month and moment of death fully independent of the other. Certainly that was something. And I imagine that as they lay on the carpet next to each other, one bleeding from the gut, the other foaming from the mouth, they saw something meaningful and linked in the eyes of the other. The nature of hate is as elusive as love’s. I for one am just pleased they did not have children.

Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my lunch and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend who was half asleep, and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. Curious. I had not met her yet; she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning the following morning to begin the slow process of packing up her bags. This couple had not been exceedingly wealthy, but the luxury of a live-in cook was something both felt was important to their happiness. So they shared a car, and rarely ate out or vacationed.

I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible accomplice, particularly now with that poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous atop the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.

“The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate which she handed over to me.

“Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”

“Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model ideal. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt-she intensified the existing flavor-and he was pepper-he added a new kick-and that every fine table needed both.

“In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”

“No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.

She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and before I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”

“Did you have any reason to dislike either one of them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”

“Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”

“Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself with a full head of very brown hair in the photo album, serving plates of cake, “and that was their gift to each other every single anniversary.”

She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.

I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years …”

“Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.

“What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew sensitive to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.

“After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”

“Truly?”

“From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”

I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.

“And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.

She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”

“We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.

She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.

“I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped that I would be able to fix it all. I tried,” she said. “It is a chef’s job, this,” she said, squeezing lemon juice into a pitcher.

She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing pitcher of lemonade with a wooden spoon.

“But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the saltshaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.

“So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”

Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.

“Sir,” she said, “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”

I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.

“Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.

It was not the chef. I believed her fully. The evidence was in. But if the mystery was solved, both big and small, then why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking over and over. He had a new case for me. This one involved a homicide on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It will solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepperlike” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.

I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the chef retired from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their union had come full circle, and perhaps it was the sting of that bittersweetness that killed them most, crueler than any knife or poison.

The Leading Man

The boy was born with fingers shaped like keys. All except one, the pinkie on the right hand, had sharp ridges running along the inner length, and a point at the tip. They were made of flesh, with nerves and pores, but of a tougher texture, more hardened and specific. As a child, the boy had a difficult time learning to hold a pen and use scissors, but he was resilient and figured out his own method fast enough. His true task was to find the nine doors.

• • •

Door one he found as a kid; it was his front-door key. He did not expect this because it seemed so obvious but one day he came home from school and was locked out; his mother, usually home, had just begun taking some kind of sculpture class and was off molding clay and forgot to leave a key under the welcome mat. So he was unwelcome, in his own home. He cried for a bit and tromped on some pansies as revenge and got so frustrated staring at the lock, such a simple piece of metal separating him from his palace of food and bed and TV and telephone, that he stuck the index finger of his right hand inside. It shoved deep into the lock, bumping around, trying to find a perfect spatial match. Nothing clicked. But he’d enjoyed the sensation so he tried the middle finger next. Too big. The pinkie on the left hand: too small; it wiggled inside like a wire. It was the ring finger on his right hand that slipped inside, easy as a glove, ridges filling the humps and the boy settled it deep, rotated his entire hand, heard the click, and the door opened cleanly. Inside. He ripped his finger from the door and let out some kind of vicious delighted laugh.

When his mother came home, two hours later, hands red with clay, he pulled her straight to the door and showed her the trick. Shove in, turn, click, open. His mother kept laughing. And I didn’t even want to buy this house! she said, holding him close. And to imagine, what if we hadn’t? The boy shrugged. He had no idea how to answer that question.

The second key fit the lock of the bank deposit box that held all the securities of the family. The two had gone on a trip to the bank and the boy was bored in the room of security boxes while his mother spoke worriedly with an accountant. He stuck the pinkie on his left hand into their security box and ta da. He was very surprised. So was his mother. I didn’t especially like this bank either, she said. Can I have some of this money? the boy asked, looking with interest at the large piece of gold sitting in the box like a glowing turd. No, she said, but I’ll buy you a burger. They went to his favorite burger joint where the lettuce was shredded and the soda ice crushed, and she told him about how she was making a clay version of him. It’s you, she said, but you are surrounded by doors. You are standing on doors and wearing doors and your hand of keys is held up like a deck of cards. The boy splayed his fingers out on the table. Gin, he said.

The third, fourth, and fifth keys opened his camp trunk, the neighbor’s car, and the storage room of the school cafeteria, respectively. He opened the cafeteria door one day at school when he was wandering around, not wanting to go home yet because there was nothing to do and no one to be with. All the other kids were off playing sports. The boy opened the back of the cafeteria with his right pointer, to his own almost dulled surprise, and sat with the frozen chicken nuggets for a while. It got boring quickly so he went home, opened the door with his other finger, and watched TV. His father was away at war. No one knew what war it was because it was an unannounced war, which made it worse because he could tell no one because that would cause great governmental problems. So he just held on to that information and when his friends asked where his dad was on Open House Night at school, he said, He’s away on business. He wanted to yell out, The business of saving everyone’s life! but he knew that would cause further questions so he kept his mouth shut.

His mother brought home the clay sculpture. It was about two feet tall and looked very little like him, and the doors resembled flying walls. One day when he was home alone and she wasn’t back yet, having enrolled in another course, this one called How to Make Glass, he threw some baseballs at the sculpture but the clay held strong. The boy was twelve now. His hands were growing, but his fingers still fit the same locks. Somehow they stayed the size they needed to be, while the rest of the hand-palm, knuckles, wrist-grew with him.

The sixth and seventh keys fit doors in France. His mother and he went to Paris to visit his father who was on leave from the mysterious war and together the three of them had lunch at a café surrounded by iron lamp poles and they ate crusty bread and soft cheese with red ripe tomatoes. His father looked older and stronger than ever, with big arms and a ruddy tan, and the boy stood next to him and wanted to push all his keys at once into the man’s palm, to click and turn his father open, to make him tell what was happening. Secrets. His father and mother shared a room in the hotel and the boy had the room next door, with its strange-smelling comforter and a weird phone that had numbers in different configurations. He learned how to say Ou est la porte? which means Where is the door? and the porter at the hotel, after ignoring the question for the first five times, finally showed him a door, standing alone, on the lobby level, hoping to shut the boy up. Using the middle finger on his left hand, the boy opened to reveal just a closet, empty, with a few clothes hanging up and several swinging hangers. The porter babbled in amazement, Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?! and took one of the hanging shirts straight away to the maitre d’ at the restaurant who had been bemoaning the loss of it for more than a year and the boy said, to no one, I suppose I’m just going to sit here, and he went inside the closet and curled up on the floor. The porter, when he returned, brought the boy a glass of wine and a piece of apple. When his mother found him, asleep on the floor of the closet, she hugged him for a long time, and he showed her how his hand was international.

At the Louvre, the boy felt the pointer finger on his left hand itch after greeting Mona Lisa under glass. He found the docent room the way a hound finds blood, and played gin rummy with a pooped guide whose earrings were little diamond stars. His father was off doing military business that day. When they returned to the hotel, the mother angry at the boy because he’d vanished, they found the father weary on the bed, looking worried, his ruddy tan fading like a bright couch left too long in the sun.

On the airplane home, the mother cried and the boy went to the bathroom and thought of his father as he peed, and then when he flushed he sent his pee like a message to his father because he imagined it flying out of the plane, free of him, into the world.

Go win the war, the boy thought, and come home. Or, he thought, don’t win the war and come home. Or, he thought, don’t come home but make Mother stop missing you. Or, he thought, make me stop missing you.

He rubbed his keys against his palm. He was almost thirteen. He washed his hands with the lavender airplane soap and returned to his seat.

He didn’t fit his eighth key until he was twenty years old.

His father did come back from the war after another year, but he was not the same man. He was scared of noises and he had a strange white blindness that he experienced when the day got too hot. The family considered moving, over and over, to cooler quarters; considered it, then unconsidered it. The boy took drama classes but always played the funny weird guy and never the leading man. He watched his mother take How to Make Glass II, the second in the series of five, and one afternoon she came home with a tote bag full of huge clear squares. She said this was her final exam for the class, and she’d gotten an A. Look, she said, pointing, no bubbles, she said. The boy asked her what they should do with it now that she’d made it. She said break it. So they took it outside and broke it in two and then his mother looked sad and sat down and the boy broke it in four, then eight, then sixteen, and his mother was still sad, she started to weep, softly, and the boy shattered the glass into hundreds of pieces.

His first girlfriend bought the chastity belt as a joke. He couldn’t open it. They scrambled around, used the tin key that it came packaged with, opened her up, had sex anyway. Her underwear was thin and full of holes and the boy kept it that night in his bed, after they had parted, and thought about the way she butted her head into his shoulder like a goat. When they broke up, he walked to the bank and put the underwear in the safe deposit box right on top of that one piece of gold. His mother never said a word about it. The bank had changed ownership by now and had a new color scheme-navy and dark green-but the lock was exactly the same.

His father went to the hospital for the blindness. He told the doctor that he saw whiteness everywhere, as if he’d been driving in the snow for days and days, and that he couldn’t find his balance or his peace. The hospital gave him painkillers and sunglasses. The boy’s father sat in the kitchen with a cup of milk in a mug, his palm covering the opening so he wouldn’t have to look at its white flat top and he said, It’s not like I saw anything that horrible. The son said, Really? and the father said, Son, the truth is I can’t even quite remember what I saw. Is it bright in here? he asked. The son looked outside at the setting sun and the lucid calm of dusk.

The eighth key fit the cabinet at a weaponry store. He went there for his college war survey class to learn the difference between muskets and spears. The man who owned the weapon store had a big belly and cheeks stretched over his face like poorly upholstered furniture. He would be hard to make in clay. The man was reading a book called How to Meet Girls, and when the boy asked to see some stuff, the man said he’d lost the key to the back cabinet where the small revolvers lived. The boy felt his finger itching, walked over, and opened it himself. The man’s cheeks raised a full inch on his face, furniture renewal. The boy shot some targets and felt like a soldier and wrote a brilliant report. He read How to Meet Girls cover to cover.

His mother came to his college graduation. His father could not because the light of the sun blinded him and seeing people all dressed in one kind of uniform reminded him of the army and made his head feel like it would explode. I can’t stand it, he told his son. All those bodies on the lawn in black graduation gowns. It’s like one huge goddamn foxhole. His mother wore a dress she’d made in her sewing class, with contrasting patches of velvet, burlap, silk.

He went to France for a graduation present. He returned to the Louvre, deciding he wanted to play more gin rummy. He located the door, but when he stuck his finger in the lock, it didn’t fit anymore. They had apparently changed locks since his last visit. This made him feel unsettled, as if kicked out of his own home. He wondered if that finger would find a new lock now. He thought: Yes. And no. And I don’t know.

He met a French girl named Sophie, sitting in a yellow-and-brown wicker chair at a café, eating a butter-and-sugar crepe. He fell in love with her within a couple of days. She puffed her lips when she spoke, like the French do. In bed, he put his finger inside of her, the ring finger on his left hand, the finger that means marriage, as if to turn her inside and unlock her body. She came fast; she was loose and loving, and loud, and luscious, but she hadn’t been locked, either. I love you, she told him, after a week, with a thick French accent, lips puffing. He decided to stay for the rest of August. They made love all the time and he told her his “uncle” couldn’t see because he’d watched bad things in the war and Sophie said, What war? and the boy shook his head. I don’t know, he said. Some war somewhere kind of near here.

When he left France, Sophie said she’d write but she only sent one letter total. He returned to his hometown and found an apartment near his mother and father. He went to the man, still sitting around the kitchen.

Do you know who were you fighting? he asked.

Some other guy, said his father, stirring his tea.

What did you see? asked his son.

Not much, said his father. Some blood, he said. I think something got taken away from me, his father said. I think they took something from me but I never even felt it happen when they did.

The boy placed his right hand of keys into his father’s open palm: the security box, the neighbor’s car, the closet in France, the docent room at the Louvre that had been changed.

You say you’ve opened eight so far? said his father. Which is the ninth?

The son waggled his ring finger on his left hand. Well, go open some doors, his father said, squeezing his hand. The one you open with the ninth key will be connected to the woman you will marry. Maybe.

The boy took his hand back, and agreed that would be very sweet, if it worked out like that. He had been feeling a vague dissatisfaction at the mundane nature of the other eight keys. There was a report on the news that NASA had lost the key to the space shuttle, and so the boy called up right away and offered his assistance. The whole flight over he had the national anthem singing in his head. NASA took him straightaway to a sealed white room with serious people who shook his hand and had fierce eye contact, and members of the FBI lined the walls in case he was a terrorist in disguise. The boy tried all his fingers twice but none worked. The NASA people shook their heads, and he heard someone say, I told you so. He had a fleeting feeling of terror that the FBI might arrest him for something his father had done and an even bigger wish that an FBI man would arrest him, take him aside, and tell him what had happened. What is the greatest mystery of your family? he asked the older lady on the flight home, as they watched the movie without sound, and she looked at him thoughtfully but never answered. At home, he shoved his finger into every door he could see for a few weeks, but decided to stop, as it was starting to make him unhappy, and signed himself up for a sculpture class.

In the second class in the series on figure sculpture, the boy met a woman he wanted to marry. After a year, they married. They spent the gold piece in the safe deposit box on the wedding and did it up, and also did it dark so that his father could stand it. It was a night wedding. His father stood at the microphone and made a toast with his eyes closed. The son danced with his bride, luminous in her white dress; his father never once looked at the bride for fear his head would explode. That night, in the hotel room, the bride looked at the ring on his key finger and asked him what that one opened and he said he didn’t know. They made love in the big hotel bed with the strange-smelling comforter and fell asleep face-to-face, feet tangled together.

They went to Paris on their honeymoon and found the closet in the hotel that the boy, now a man, could open, and when the porter wasn’t looking, they snuck inside and made love. Due to the intrusion of the walls, sex was uncomfortable in the closet, so they ended up going to the front desk and getting a room anyway. There, on the bed in the hotel, the man told his new wife about his father and the war. He told her everything he knew which was very little but still, other than the quick “uncle” confession to Sophie, he’d never told anyone. He had to continually smother down a fear of the FBI busting into the wiretapped room and taking him to FBI jail as he spoke. The new wife was understanding but equally confused. We were at war then? she said. The man said, You are the first person I have ever really told. Her face was dim in the light of Parisian dusk, filtering through the windows and turning the room golden. He felt glad he’d married her. They went downstairs and had a feast of duck in apricot sauce in the hotel dining room and the porter, who was now significantly older, recognized him and gave him a free crème brülée. After dinner, the porter insisted he open the closet again, which he did, with embarrassment, because to him it still smelled like his wife’s desire and not like an abandoned closet in the least.

They found a good apartment in town, near his parents. They got a dog at the pound who had been abused but was responsive. His mother came over with teas from around the world and sat at the kitchen table in her patchwork outfits, and she and the dog got along. The son still tried to ask his father the right question that would reveal everything but all he ever got in reply was a sad shaking of the head.

On his thirtieth birthday, he was walking to work, to the factory where he broke glass for a living, when he heard screaming in the streets. He passed a TV in a bar, and the local news was explaining how a little boy was locked in a metal shed by accident and the door was too thick and couldn’t be banged down. The young man took a detour on his route and went toward the noise and the banging. Apparently the boy had been in the shed for hours and air would run out soon. This was a special boy too-the one known about town whose elbows were pointed in such a way that made it easy to open tin cans.

As he approached, the crowd, who knew him well, parted willingly when they saw him walking over. He could hear the boy inside the metal room, sobbing up the air. The young man with the hands of keys paused a moment in front of the metal door. He could feel his finger itching. He wanted to wait for a second and hold this moment, the moment before he became a finite person. He could feel the air ringing with it-his life span a life span, the world a round ball. The crowd screamed and the boy sobbed and the young man put the ring finger on his left hand in the lock.

Click.

Hero.

The trapped boy ran out crying, gasping, elbows in wings, and the town lifted the young man with the key fingers on their shoulders and they wrote headlines and gave him a medal and the mayor shook his now-complete hand.

After the award ceremony, he went to his parents’ house. His father was sleeping in a quiet dim room, and the young man slipped the medal over his father’s head. He’d passed many doors that day and thought: so I can’t open that one or that one or that one. From now on, all the doors in the world were as closed to him as to everyone else. The older man kept sleeping and the young man hummed a song to himself inside the cool dark room.

Hymn

The unusual births hit the town all at once. All the mothers, not recognizing their babies. Mine is so tall! said one, craning her neck. Mine so blond, said the dark next, squinting. Mine made of paper, announced a fleshy third. Mine built of glass? trembled another. One with a child who had no eyes, but ears so acute they could measure blinking. Another with a daughter who could, at will, turn into objects like brooms and light-bulbs. Soon, at the playground, the children could not recognize what made the other work, and they eyed one another from behind the swings, from beneath the tire sculpture.

When they were older, they took over the village and ran it perfectly. Little did their mothers and fathers know. That when they’d eaten the foods and breathed the air and felt the feelings and made the love that created their children, they were, for once, in perfect synchronization. The son of glass was a doctor, and all could see inside his body while he worked on theirs. The daughter of paper was a scholar, and each book became a part of her wrist and arm and breast. The blond son lit the town for those months when electricity was no longer an option, and the daughter of great height cooled the moon with streams of her breath when it grew too hot from a passing meteor.

The changeable woman was always on hand to provide the most needed machine or tool. The child with divine ears listened to the soil, and pointed to where he heard the seeds unfurling with pleasure. Plant here, he told the one with the longest arms who could reach straight into the heart of the dirt. In later years, that eyeless one sat beneath the forest of trees he could not see but could take deep inside his lungs, and when the sadness was unbearable, it was only he who could soothe the villagers. Who could hear the type of tears by the pace of the blinking, and know in which manner to offer comfort.

Their parents were gone by then. The world had fallen into sense and sorrow.

Mother, they said. Father.

This is our decision, they said, bowing to each other.

Once a year they stood together, holding hands as best they could, with the new babies crawling on the floor at their feet: the babies of many heads, the ones made of words, the clay blobs. The triplets of air who would rush past and sweeten your breathing. Who’s that strange one you made, Ma? Why, Pa. That creature is your own flesh and blood. Even though it has neither flesh nor blood; still, it is yours.

Then the grand feast, with food of all kinds, even for the several who did not eat food but survived only on the quality of listening. They usually hovered at the corners and when they grew wan and skinny, it was a reminder. To focus. On this day, they filled up visibly, fat and happy.

No one needed to say it, but the room overflowed with that sort of blessing. The combination of loss and abundance. The abundance that has no guilt. The loss that has no fix. The simple tiredness that is not weary. The hope not built on blindness.

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son; she is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside.

Amen.