Six times a year we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices project. We are proud to announce Kenyan writer Billy Kahora as our latest writer to be featured. Click here to see a full list of stories, and here to read more about Billy Kahora, including an interview.

That last Sunday of 2007, just a few days before Jimmy Gikonyo’s eighteenth birthday – when he would become ineligible to use his Nairobi Orphanage family pass – he went to see his old friend, Sebastian the gorilla. Jimmy sat silently on the bench next to the primate’s pit waiting for Sebastian to recognize him. After a few minutes, Sebastian turned his gaze on Jimmy and walked towards the fence. The gorilla’s eyes were rheumy, his movements slow and careful. Their interaction was now defined by that strange sense of inevitable nostalgia that death brings, even when the present has not yet slipped into the past.

Jimmy removed the tattered pass from his pocket and read the fine print on the back: This lifetime family pass is only for couples and children under eighteen years of age.

There was a sign on the side of Sebastian’s cage: ‘Oldest Gorilla in the World. Captured and Saved from the Near Extinction of His Species After the Genocide in Rwanda. Sebastian, 56. Genus: Gorilla.’

The Sunday Standard beside him said: Nairobi, Kisumu, Kakamega and Coast Province in Post-Election Violence After Presidential Results Announced.

That Sunday morning was strangely cold for late December. When Jimmy looked around, every one of the animals seemed to agree, each exhibiting a unique brand of irritation. 11 a.m. was the best time to visit the orphanage. The church-going crowd that came in droves in the afternoon was still worshipping, so the place was empty.

He had come here first as a toddler. They acquired their family pass in the days when his father was a trustee of the Friends of Nairobi National Park but his father soon found the trips boring, and for some years, Jimmy had come here alone with his mother.

When Jimmy was twelve his father left them, and Jimmy began to come on his own, except for the year he had been in and out of hospital. That year, he borrowed a book called Gorilla Adventure by Willard Price from a school friend. He had read it from cover to cover, in the night, using a torch under the blanket and eventually falling asleep. He woke up to find the book tangled and ruined in urine-stained sheets. He had received a beating from the owner that had only increased his love for the mountain gorilla. For the rest of his primary school years he would take the lonely side in arguments about whether a gorilla could rumble a tiger, or whether a polar bear could kill a mountain gorilla.

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Granta.com’s New Voices series showcases original fiction from emerging writers. The latest story in this series is ‘Beginning, End’ by Jessica Soffer.

You were born. You named yourself. You walked your turtle. You went to school. You had dirty feet. You lay in a field. You piled into the Vanagan. You carried signs. You grew long legs. You met someone. You were just a kid. You didn’t keep it. You got into college. You moved east. You shaved your armpits. You took up jogging. You discovered hairspray. You crossed your legs.

I saw you at that party, holding a rock in your fingers. I popped a mint. I cleared my throat. I had pennies in my loafers. I ate red meat. I could change. I told you, I would change. I knew by your face, you weren’t so sure. I was drunk. I wasn’t your type. I kissed you on the Lakefill. I lifted a lash off your face. I didn’t tell you, my parents belonged to a country club. I had season tickets. I thought, you looked so clean, you smelled like stems.

I walked behind you. You led the rallies. I lost my mother. You rubbed my back.

We got a place. We read a lot. We rescued a dog. You worked at a shelter. I was a terrible handyman. My father called friends. We moved to the city. We ordered in. We picked up dry-cleaning. We hailed cab after cab. We were promoted. We hardly saw each other. I drank too much. You wouldn’t kiss me. You said I was my father. I stood there, half-listening, sick of your hoping. You said, you weren’t angry just tired.

We got a bigger apartment. We ran along the pier. We ate organic. We tried for a baby. We tried again. You took hormones. You pushed me away. I moved out. I slept with our dermatologist. You buried our dog. You forgave me. You cut your hair. I moved back in. We almost adopted. We went to counseling. We got a puppy. We held hands on the bird trail and the puppy scampered ahead.

We wore pyjama sets. We saw Spanish films. We took our time at the market. We got a stationary bike. We feared the wind. We helped each other dress. We went to Tuscany. You wanted to stay. I bought you an MG. You named it Brando. I got mugged in broad daylight. I shattered a kneecap. We had to wonder.

We bought some land. It gave us hope. I loved the farm stands. We moved in April. You bought second-hand books. You painted the bathrooms. I planted tomatoes. We sat on the porch. We had soil in our fingernails. We let it be. We reminisced. We didn’t miss it. We left the door unlocked. You found a lump. I took you to the doctor. You had to drive. I blamed the hormones. I blamed that commune. I blamed soy. I blamed the sun. You took long baths. Your hair fell like feathers. I did the laundry. I managed your pills. I spoon-fed you yogurt. You asked for nothing. You gripped my sweaters. I didn’t sleep. I watched you breathing. You were quiet as a plant. You were the same but with a different face.

I always knew, you said, that I’d go first. You weren’t looking for an answer. I couldn’t say it anyhow. I couldn’t commit you to it. You were a shell.

Now, I think we should have adopted. We should have stayed in the city. We should have made more friends. This house is too big. You picked all the colors. Your earrings hang from a lamp. Your socks stiffen in the hamper. Your bookmark stops midway through. I sleep with your wallet. It sticks to my cheek like dead skin. Still. I try to walk every morning. I make big portions and freeze them. I donate to our college. I’ve been meaning to volunteer. I’ve been avoiding classical music. The best hours are at night when I can’t be sure if I’m dreaming.

Just the other day, I was moving the dust. The house was whipped by thunder. I covered my head. My arms were wet wood. I didn’t think of God. I got onto the floor. Before, I’d sat here like this. You were falling asleep. You put your hand on my shoulder. Isn’t it something, you asked. I knew what you meant.

Granta.com’s New Voices series showcases original fiction from emerging writers. The latest story in this series is ‘Dragon Island’ by Laura Fellowes.

This is a wartime story. It is the spring of 1943 and Europe is burning; look down and see. In the cities at night, bomb blasts expose streets in quick flashes. Their fires light what they destroyed with an orange glow. By day the cities are grey, covered with piles of rubble and dust, their outlines blurred by rising towers of smoke.

Swing round the globe and zoom in on a patch of deep turquoise blue somewhere south of Japan, east of the Philippines, north of New Guinea, west of Hawaii. An island shaped like an hourglass sits tiny in the middle of these huge rolling seas, in neutral territory far away from the ack-ack of the guns and crashing of bombs. Rustling palms cover the island with green, except for a belt of grey rock at its middle, and headlands at each end which top and tail the island with white beach. Tides creep back and forth from these two shores, so that it looks to us as if the hourglass is being constantly turned. There is a gentle music to the island’s sounds, the wash of waves on sand punctuated by sweet staccatos of tropical birdsong. Paradise.

But if this is a wartime story, where are the soldiers?

Draw closer in over the northern bay, where the tide is out, the hourglass newly turned. Look to the edge of the green canopy where the sand meets the trees. Jutting from under the palms is the prow of a long, grey upturned boat, which goes back five or six metres into the jungle. Lying next to it, half covered with sand, are a bunch of rifles. Further back towards the rear of the boat is a large crate filled like a bursting toy chest with bigger guns, ammunition, trolleys and tripod legs.

Look further back amongst the palms, to a line of twelve grey tents facing the shore. The soldiers are inside these. It is midday and the sun is high and too strong even for these men, adapted though they are to its heat with their olive skin and black hair. Two men in one tent sit sleeves rolled up playing a game with dice and a wooden box. In other tents men lie on their backs in dirty vests sleeping or smoking, sit back to daydream at a well-thumbed photograph, perhaps crouch forward to doodle on the magazines they brought when they arrived on the island two and a half months ago.

Time has stretched in the days they have spent here. Like the pages of their magazines, the soldiers’ memories have curled and faded in the sun. Their bodies quickly forgot the efficient hours of military training, embracing days of simple emptiness structured by feeding, cleaning and resting. Orders were to monitor the surrounding seas for three months and they haven’t seen so much as a sailboat on the horizon, so have long since given up the lookout.

One man is out of his tent. Look to the hem of turquoise sea along the right shore of the island and you will see him. Fishing from a small rowing boat, an awning of canvas tied to three metal poles protects him from the sun. He sits back, occasionally bringing his hand out of the shade to swing the nose of the boat with an oar stroke, allowing the tide to carry the boat away from the beach and along the curved side of the hourglass towards the south end of the island.

The boat’s floor is half silver with fish when he hears voices. At first the man thinks he must have drifted back north, but then with a shock realizes they are foreign voices. He jumps bolt up and spins around, slips on fish, grabs on to the sides of the tiny boat and grips rigid as it rocks violently from side to side. Steadily the rocking subsides and he understands that he is safely out of sight as the shoreline and seas are as empty as ever. For a moment he imagines that he himself conjured the voices, but then hears them again, carried from the southernmost beach, just around the corner of land he is drifting towards. He quickly sits and rows close into the shoreline, moors just behind the headland and creeps squinting through the trees, until he finds a place by a fallen palm where he can watch, unseen, the action unfolding in the bay in front of him.

A boat. Five men. The first things our watcher registers are the painted symbols and dark green uniforms that mean This Is The Enemy. The tide is drawing back from the treeline and a small patrol boat is being hauled ashore.

Two soldiers are unloading a crate. They talk loudly to each other and one is smiling, though our spy reads the expression as a grimace. These must be the voices he heard from his boat, they are jumbled and streamy, he doesn’t understand the language they are speaking.

[shutup hasker
its true
you’re kidding
i’m not she told me about it this island’s called dragon island…they say there’s real dragons that live right in the middle … they used to hunt them … she told me her dad used to do it
she was fooling with you … dragons don’t exist
I’m tellin you … they do in the south pacific]

There is a whipped-up feeling in the man’s stomach, He drops the rope into the boat, steps in after it and begins to row back to his camp. He has no idea how long he has been away but it is beginning to grow dark.

He rows up to the north shore, to break news which will tear faster than a forest fire along the line of tents in the trees there. But for now the story stays at the southern tip of the island.

Pull yourself down to where the beach meets the undergrowth, where something else is watching unseen, from the trees, as these soldiers bring their boat ashore and unload the last of their provisions.

Come closer.

It is a dragon, but don’t let your imagination make a myth of it. This creature looks more like an armadillo with its heavy, humped body mass and ridiculous-looking overbite. Also, it’s only about a foot tall, not even as high as a man’s knee. The bulk of the mammal is craggy with beige scales, those around its cup-shaped ears are pointed and stick up forming a sort of spiky ruff or collar. This and its fat claws are the only features that might indicate a threat to anything bigger than a dung beetle. And even these aren’t dangerous in a dragonish sense — the collar is an obsolete heirloom from fiercer ancestors, and the claws are only used for digging and foraging for insects, which it does constantly. Nevertheless it is a dragon, and the last of the species that gave this island its name.

So a dragon watches, camouflaged, from low down in the trees. To its small obsidian eyes there is no distinction between the types of new thing it is seeing. Crates, bags, men, tents, are all shapes, some moving, some still now but moving before. All have the novelty of unfamiliar patterns on a familiar background, but this newness has no import for the dragon whose habit of thinking defensively is long dormant. The only thing it perceives as a solid form is the upturned boat — it can see that the boat is dark inside like the place where it sleeps, and therefore recognizes it as a cave.

The tide is far out, the beach is wide and the shadows are getting longer so the dragon turns and starts to shuffle back towards its nest — a small tunnel-like cave in the huge weight of rock at the island’s centre. The island swings into night as the dragon noses its way home, all the way rootling the earth for worms and bugs.

Cut to black-haired, tin-helmeted soldiers creeping through the jungle. It is now midnight, and they are moving down the island from the north. The moon has made bottomless black pools of the jungle’s shadows, and turned its leaves a silvery blue. The soldiers hear their own isolated sounds: the irregular sawing of breath (out-in. out-in.) and stumbling little crashes of boot on undergrowth. In the spaces between there is the constant revelry of the jungle. The chorus of insects, bats and tree frogs they hear from their camp every night is amplified and surrounds them. Each man stares wide-eyed into the blackness. The soldiers feel exposed and want to be back in the stitched safety of their tents.

Retreat Is Not An Option. News of the enemy landing has set a military machine in motion. The camp’s captain heard his voice call out old orders, the men were automatic as they fixed bayonets on to sandy, sea-salted rifles, buttoned their crumpled jackets and assembled on the beach. Each tried to collapse his soft habits of peace and force up a new frame of mind, one that can hold ideas of confrontation, attack, and his own possible death. The idea of refusing to play never seriously suggests itself.

Now the machine is rolling down the island in its obedient advance towards the newcomers at the south shore. As it gets to the central and narrowest point of the island, the soldiers step out from under trees to see a rising tower of granite stretching high up above the jungle canopy. The rock face is iridescent with moonlight and looks almost like an apparition Soldiers move forward and put their hands to its surface, which feels warm and definite. Rock juts out into the sea at either side, there is no way to get around it or over it. They have been stopped! Men slump against the base of the rock, their breath becoming even with relief (in and out and in and out and…).

They are allowed a moment to relax.

Before one wanders off to relieve himself and returns to say that he has discovered a tunnel running through the rock. It is the same fisherman-soldier who witnessed the troop landing on the south shore.

Silent, they follow him to a man-sized fissure in the granite, which gives way into a low cave. Moonlit palm trunks are clearly visible through an opening at the far end. The fisherman stands by and makes a weak gesture with his hand, as if to say, ‘You see?’ The group’s captain gives him a cold look and steps sideways through the sharp triangular gap in the rock. The other men watch on.

It is completely black inside. The cave’s floor is bumpy with huge boulders, and the captain picks his way along like a blind man, tapping ahead of himself with the butt of his rifle. It is dry, but smells nesty, as if something has been living there. The ceiling lowers and his helmet scrapes along powdery rock, he inhales and spits out dust. He is through most of the tunnel now; the soldiers watching can see his silhouette against the far oval of light at the other end. It is clearly big enough for a man to fit through.

The captain turns and begins to feel his way back. Something moves on the ground to his right, he backs up to the other wall and stabs wildly at the sound with his bayonet. There is a grunt and a creature shoots out the mouth of the cave, he sees it for a second in the moonlight. It is the size of a monkey but scaly, he thinks it must be a small crocodile. He rushes, stumbles and trips towards his soldiers at the other end.

Now they feel even less like fighting. Within a few minutes the captain has his men collecting boulders and rubble to block up the tunnel. They will leave the island at first light. The fisherman is ordered to row round to the south shore and scupper the enemy boat so they won’t be followed.

Soar up the wall of granite and over the top of its splintered peaks. For an instant you see the shape of the island, two fans of forest opening out from the crown of grey stone below.

Come down to the jungle floor somewhere south of the rock. Follow the dragon as it wheezes through the undergrowth. Blood leaks from a wound in its back and, in the monochrome light, coats its tail an inky black. Its clumsy tilting shuffle would, in a more agile animal, be called a run. And yet it moves fast, and also straight. Nose up, collar at the ready. The dragon’s habitual foraging has been eclipsed by an ancient response to fear, pain and danger. It cannot see well in the dark but knows what it heads for—to make a new nest and refuge in the other cave.

Reaching the upturned patrol boat, the dragon finds the widest opening and burrows in. Follow it to the end of the boat, where it presses itself against a corner, and uses its claws to rake and plough up the earth into a compact circular ridge around its body. Then hunches down and shuts its eyes. Its heart pulses violently, its hump quivers, and a screaming pain floods through from a wound it isn’t flexible enough to tend to.

When the fisherman’s bayonet slides under the end of the boat it slices through small square scales and a tough layer of outer flesh into the dragon’s stomach. As the rifle is used to prise the boat up on to its side, the blade cuts down and out of the dragon’s underbelly, releasing it and making a right-angled wound that immediately spews blood. The dragon hurls up at its attacker gripping on with gnarled claws and opens its beak to roar, baring four peg-shaped teeth. This is the first time in its life it has done something dragonish.

Soldiers inside their tents in the south bay hear sounds that feature briefly and formlessly in their dreams before waking them up. They unzip canvas and emerge disoriented. It is still night but the left horizon is flat and luminous with an approaching dawn. The tide is drawn back and they come out from under the trees to see a comedy being played out against the shoreline:

A man is running left across the beach.

He kicks his legs up and flaps his arms, as if hopping across hot sand. A tin hat bounces off his head as he runs. His mouth makes a silent theatrical ‘O’. The men start to laugh.

Making clumsy lunges at his ankles is an absurd looking creature, the size of a monkey but possibly some kind of big lizard, the men think, although its protuberant nose looks like an anteater’s snout and its body is bloated and humped.

The animal gallops, rocking back and forth implausibly fast. The men laugh harder. It appears to be serenading the man in a high falsetto as it charges, nose up, squealing at his heels. It is bleeding visibly from a wound in its side.

One of the men by the trees grabs a pistol from his tent and trains it on the creature. His fellow soldiers begin to holler and whoop with the thrill of a hunt. They cheer as a shot pings across the beach. It misses and they whoop louder. The soldier feels the sport of it and fires off a round. With the last shot, the animal stumbles and its squeals become gurgled and weaker.

The running man now stops and turns to stab, lowering his bayonet to knee height and pointing the blade backwards. The creature runs straight on to it. The squealing stops. Everyone on the beach looks at where the squealing has stopped and sees the beast impaled. The man holds it to the ground for a second on his blade and then discards the heavy bulk, pushing it away with his foot. This is the end of the dragon’s story.

The soldiers by their tents are howling with laughter. They are still laughing as they begin to register the black hair, grey uniform and gun. Slowly the man on the beach raises his hands above his head. Even now this looks like the preliminary to a bow rather than a gesture of surrender.

The fisherman looks at his audience with his arms raised. His audience and also his enemy, who are mostly topless, dishevelled and sunburned. The enemy looks back at him. For a moment they size each other up.

Nobody moves. The intruder holds a rifle but the others are within a few steps of tree cover and more weapons of their own. The men by the trees are breathing with the quick chestfuls of recent laughter. This can’t be battle – they aren’t even properly dressed! This is a confusing crack in the protocol. Not knowing what to do, they wait for an order.

But nobody speaks for fear of snapping the silence. In fact if you were to close your eyes the beach would sound empty, there is only the chirrup of dawn birds and the constant, regular, never-ever-ceasing sound of tide lapping the sand.

Eventually, and very slowly, the fisherman pushes his left hand forward in a signal to the men under the trees. Then, very slowly, and with eyes still fixed on them, he lowers his right arm and places his rifle in the sand at his feet. Then with arms raised, he begins to make little sidesteps across the beach towards the headland. All the time he does this his eyes are on the men under the trees, who do not move. When he reaches the edge of the beach, he slowly backs up over the headland, eyes locked forward and moving in small, silent backward steps.

As he disappears the sun comes up and floods the beach with orange light. The other soldiers left by their camp in the trees watch the spot where he vanished long after he has gone.

By midday both shorelines are empty; boats, tents, men, gone. From above, the island looks very similar to the way it did at the beginning. Grey rock, green trees, white beach and turquoise sea are squarely hit and robustly coloured by the twelve o’clock sun. Soldiers’ footprints have already been erased from the sand at the north shore, where a wide crescent of new beach makes the hourglass top heavy.

But on the south beach there is a stain of red like a bullet wound at the edge of the incoming tide.

Come closer.

The dark humped shape of the dragon’s ruined body lies on its side, amongst scarlet pools of its own leaked blood that billow out like the petals of a poppy. As you watch, waves begin to lap at the edge of the flower, diluting its redness into the sea. The water reaches and swathes the dragon, eventually lifting its heavy bulk which begins to twirl and buffet in the swell. Rough waves wash away old blood, leaving scales polished and shining. The tide pulls back and takes the dragon with it, gathering up, claiming the body. It is borne away, bobbing and tilting into the bay, glinting prisms of sunlight on its wet hide. Before long its familiar shape merges with the other fluid ovals of light and dark in the ocean. And the tide keeps turning and turning.

A crowd of Granta readers braved the icy streets of downtown Manhattan last Tuesday evening, for Granta’s first-ever New Voices evening at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. The reading featured one of Granta’s most celebrated authors, Jayne Anne Phillips, alongside two young writers from the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. American editor John Freeman opened the evening with a smile. ‘Rutgers in the house!’ he declared, and the New Jersey contingent cheered.

The reading opened as Erin McMillan read from her short story, ‘Crossing Cut Creek’. The story follows an eleven-year-old narrator as she obsessively catalogues the world, struggling to comprehend her mother’s problems. Read an interview with McMillan here.

Next, Evan James Roskos read his short story, ‘Conspiracy of Males’. The New Jersey native turned his young protagonist’s insecurities into a vicious chorus. Read an interview with Roskos here, and watch his ‘Conspiracy of Males’ video below.

Jayne Anne Phillips read from her most recent novel, Lark & Termite, an excerpt of which appeared in Granta 82.

John Freeman joined the writers on stage for a conversation about creative writing MFAs and individual process. Phillips now helms the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. She handpicked both McMillan and Roskos for Rutgers, and smiled like a proud mother as her two young protégées fielded questions about the MFA experience. Granta will continue its New Voices feature when Granta.com is relaunched later this month. To read all the New Voices stories, click here.

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘If I Could Tell You’. Read an interview with the author, Soumya Bhattacharya, here.

You are five years old now. As I write this, hunched over my laptop (the same one on which I sent the emails from when you were born), I can see you asleep.

You thrash around a lot in your sleep these days. Perhaps you have unpleasant dreams that you cannot remember when you wake up. Which is just as well. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, with a single cry, piercing, plaintive, an ascending note that terminates abruptly: ‘Baba’. You are afraid of spiders, cockroaches, stray dogs, men with beards, the darkness. I then hug you and massage your back. You snuggle closer and fall asleep again, your head buried in the crook of my arm. I let you be there for a long time. Awake and anxious, I smell your hair.

Now, as I write this letter, I can see that you have moved over to the very edge of the bed. You are lying crooked, one arm thrown over your pillow, one leg dangling. Your hair, grown long (I have to take you for a haircut tomorrow, I have to find time, I have to force myself to get out of the house), falls in a gentle wave over your forehead. I write by the dull, blue glow of the screen. It is hard on my eyes, but I have grown somewhat used to it. I make the letters bigger (150 per cent); I enlarge the point size (eighteen). It still hurts my eyes, but only a bit. I don’t very much care. Through the heavy curtains in the room, a lozenge of light falls on the sheet. It lies across the back of your thigh, lighting up the picture of the tiger on your pyjama bottom.

I look at it. And I return to the screen. At the top left hand corner, the cursor blinks as if mocking me for staring too long at the screen. It is a silent reproach for not writing. But I must write.

The story I shall tell you in these letters is about failures. It is largely a story of hope thwarted, of promises broken. One of the reasons I wanted to write to you was to explain; but it was also to understand. Through writing, I hope to glimpse, before it is too late, some sort of pattern or structure to the random events of the past few years. Words mean more than anything else to me. Perhaps they will to you too one day when you read this.

I must get on with this. I have until daybreak, before you wake up and need to be taken to school. There isn’t much time left.

In our flat in Calcutta, there was little space. Or at least less space than your mother and I thought was adequate for a growing child. The lift, which started up (when it did at all) with a judder and a rumble, often got stuck between floors; we used it at our peril. Fortunately, its door was sliding (or grinding: it never had the smoothness and efficacy associated with anything that is supposed to slide); if it had opened outwards, it would have banged into the main door of our flat.

That door opened into our living room. It was long and narrow, not so much a room as a corridor, with two bedrooms off of it. Well, one and a half bedrooms, really. The half bedroom was yours and, despite being so small, looked invariably cheerful: your toys and books and DVDs made a happy clutter (efforts to get you to put them back on their shelves failed every night) and gave the tiny room a warmth and a colour that the other parts of the flat lacked. They made up for the crack running down through the centre of one of the walls and the plaster that had, in the monsoon before we had moved in there, begun to peel, clinging to the original brickwork in bloated clumps.

To us, you seemed no less happy in our flat than you probably would have been in Il Palazzo, the new set of apartment blocks coming up across the road with its marble floors, its balconies wider than our bedroom, its plate-glass windows running from ceiling to floor and the vines and creepers hugging its terrace, the venue of loud barbecue parties in the mild winter.

You seemed no happier than the children who lived further up, on the pavement where the lane met the main road. They lived in makeshift homes with yellow and blue tarpaulin sheets for roofs. The drama of their lives – daily squabbles, a game of football and meals (which were cooked for them in clay ovens and served to them on dented, twisted-out-of shape aluminum utensils that had once been circular) was conducted under the incurious gaze of people hurrying past. The exhaust fumes of thousands of cars smothered them in the evening rush hour. I would observe them whenever I walked past. Mostly, they seemed to be smiling.

If it’s true that we spend much of our adult lives trying to make sense of our childhoods, to look back and make the connection between how what we were then made us who we are now, how will you later remember these years in Calcutta, your years of first, rapid, change in a city that had changed so much over the years that it was unrecognizable from how I remembered it?

Shortly before you turned three, your mother and I began to talk about putting you in school. This, as every parent in India knows, is not quite as simple as it ought to be. There are many more applicants than seats in reputable private schools and for a month every year, one could always tell it was admission time by the long queues of anxious young men and women at school gates, by the traffic jams on the roads near the big schools and, glimpsed from a car or bus if one happened to be passing, the bewildered expressions of tiny children in school playgrounds, holding on to parents’ index fingers, unsure of what was supposed to come of this odd, slightly scary experience, of so much waiting, of the first exposure to pressure.

A neighbour in our quiet lane was putting his child into school too. Having lived in Calcutta all his life – and having friends and relatives who had all done the same thing before him – he looked upon this process as an ordinary rite of passage.

‘So which ones are you trying?’ he asked me cheerfully one morning when we met in the market nearby. Calcutta had now many supermarkets with their sanitized, airconditioned aisles and clingfilm-wrapped, sliced-and-diced vegetables but the old markets, where generations of men had gone to shop every morning, building generations of rapport with particular fish or vegetable or fruit sellers, refused to give up in the face of the new competition. It still was a very Bengali ritual, this setting off in the morning for fresh fish that would soon be heard sizzling in a pan of mustard oil. It conformed with the idea of masculinity the Bengali delighted in: the provider in search of daily food.

In front of us, on raised dark cement platforms made smooth by use over the years, fresh vegetables gleamed in wicker baskets. They had been sprinkled with water to make them appear fresher than they really were. The market was a huge cavernous hall, dark at all times of the day. Every stall had a light bulb, suspended from the ceiling by a very long wire, to illuminate its products. I was trying to count small change, the intractable coins refusing to emerge from the folds of my pocket, while simultaneously trying to retain balance after being jostled by a fishmonger hurtling towards his stall with a basket of fish on his head.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘Aren’t you putting Oishi in school? Which ones are you trying?’ he asked again.

‘Er, we’ve been thinking about it. We have not decided yet.’

‘Thinking about it?’ His outraged laugh turned into a cough. Regretfully, he stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette on a pool of water beneath the basket of vegetables.

‘You won’t decide, dada, where you put your daughter in. The schools will – whether they want to take her at all. Let me give you some advice,’ he said and lit another cigarette.

Advice is one thing that I used to get a lot of in Calcutta. You always get a lot of it. Especially if you don’t want any. The Calcuttan may not know what’s good for himself (if he did the city would not have gone into a decline for much of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s) but he always knows what’s good for you.

‘She’s three, isn’t she?’ he asked, making it sound like a reproach.

I nodded at him, smiled at the shopkeeper. I’d finally managed to disentangle the small change.

‘La Martiniere will give application forms to children who are not more than two years and four months old, you see. So that’s one top school gone.’ He waved his hand. Goodbye, top school.

‘Southern High you can still try. They have increased their capacity.’

I had heard of Southern High, knew it was a good school but had never thought of it as a hydroelectric plant.

‘Then there is Chatterjee Memorial and Calcutta Girls. Check, she may be too young for Calcutta Girls. There just aren’t enough schools, dada, what to do? The boys’ schools are fine but we don’t have boys,’ he said smiling.

He told me then of the coaching classes that he had been sending his daughter to. They were tutorials, run by former (and very often current) teachers from the nursery sections of schools, where the children were groomed in the art of answering questions that were likely to be asked and taught how to conduct themselves in interviews.

‘Arrey, it’s a tough world,’ my neighbour said, stooping slightly to give me a reassuring slap on the back. ‘One school will ask her only her name. Another will ask her to identify animals or birds or fruits or vegetables from a picture book. The teachers know which school has what style, what they want. Valuable tips they give, dada. How will a child cope if she doesn’t get tuition?’

‘Do they have tutorials for parents too?’ I asked.

‘Yes, good point. The parents all ask questions at the end of each class. I know, my wife always does. But I’m giving you sound advice. You are already late. Pick up the forms today.’ And with a shuddering cough that convulsed his spry frame, he disappeared in the direction of the fresh stall, the empty plastic bags that he had got from home especially to put the fish in billowing on either side of him like grimy sails.

‘We are already too late. We should pick up the forms today,’ I told your mother once I had returned home.

She looked up from her chopping board, the new knife poised over circular chunks of beet. She was slicing them thinner. The beets were so red that they looked as though they might bleed.

‘That sounds like something I told you ten days back,’ said. ‘You didn’t seem too concerned then.’

‘Yes, I wasn’t aware of the fact that it might turn out to be so difficult.’

‘And how has awareness dawned this morning? Surely nothing to do with the fact that I have been asking you to do this for ages?’

I felt like saying that I could do without the sarcasm, but I knew better than to snap. Your mother and I saw the matter of your school differently. She wanted you to go to a fine school, one that people (though we didn’t really know that many) would see as a badge of privilege. I thought it didn’t matter.

She believed that a good school would shape you, help you turn out better, make you the right sort of friends. As far as I was concerned, you could go anywhere and it wouldn’t make a difference. I didn’t think much of Calcutta’s schools. I felt that if you really had it in you, had any talent at all for anything, you’d make good one day. It would show, no matter which school you happened to attend. I’d gone to a posh, private school, said to be one of the best in India, with exacting standards in studies and sport. And look at how things had turned out with me.

I’d rather that you remained at home for at least another year and carried on with your eclectic education in popular culture. Because I loved popular music and because, from when you were a year old, I had sensed that I wouldn’t be able to listen to any if I didn’t have you on my side, I had told you stories about rock stars while playing their music to you, shown you their pictures, taking care to make up and weave in father-child motifs into the stories: how Bono always took his children to his gigs; how proud Kurt Cobain was of his little girl, Frances.

While your mother and I were talking, you were lying on your stomach on the floor, a couple of feet away from us. Your legs were raised from your knees, your head tilted at an angle. Your hands were still so small that it was hard to tell from this distance that you had knuckles. You were colouring in a picture with a new set of felt-tipped pens. A girl in an orange swimsuit beneath an impossibly low sky. There were black squiggles that suggested crows, and flowers, their petals huge and bulbous, perched on top of tiny spindly stems. I couldn’t see much of your face because your hair, unbraided, fell over it. I looked and looked at you.

You would never be the same again as you were at that particular instant. A father’s life is split between the joy of watching his child and the anxiety for the passing of each moment. Every single thing that you ever did every day, was unique, unrepeatable. Not one of those moments would come back again, in quite the same way. Each was lost no sooner than it happened. When I looked at you like this – self-absorbed, unaware of being so closely watched – I was frightened by the impermanence of it all.

Your going to school was another of those irreversible things. It meant to me the end of something. I wasn’t quite sure what that was.

‘I’ll go tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘and see if I can pick up the form from Southern High.’

‘Sudden Aye, Sudden Aye, what’s that?’ You suddenly looked up from your picture, flung your felt-tipped pen aside and came towards me. You could go from complete repose to non-stop action in less than a second. If you were a car, your pick-up would be up there with the best in the world.

‘It’s a school, shona. You may go there.’

‘School, school. Will there be pictures at school?’ You wriggled your hands into the sleeves of my loose T-shirt.

‘Of course. As many pictures as you want.’

‘And music?’

‘Yes, some of that too, I’m sure.’

‘Can I listen to Bono at school?’

‘That we’ll have to find out,’ I said.

‘Phone first and find out when they are giving out the forms,’ your mother said. ‘You’ll probably have to stand in a fine queue a couple of hours before they start.’ The beets were done. Your mother was tossing them all into a pot. They landed with clangs – and then muted thuds as the pile began to grow.

As it turned out, your mother went to pick up the forms. Not just from Southern High but also from Chatterjee Memorial. I was busy trying out literary voices. I did that often, like someone shopping for clothes. The novel I thought I was writing was stuck. I didn’t know if I had my material. I didn’t know if I could ever find my voice. How did one do that? Did it come one day, unbidden? And did one know when it had?

At this stage I was writing a sentence, a paragraph, at most half a page, and then throwing it all away. I knew what I was doing was no good but had no idea if I would ever be able to do anything any good. My models (Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, V.S. Naipaul) were lofty; this made my efforts seem pathetic and inadequate.

I sensed sometimes that I was too much of an ingénue, that all the lessons I learnt through my close reading of writers I admired never showed up in what I wrote myself. But what could I do? I had staked too much on this endeavour. Returning would have been as tedious as going over. I see now that it may have been better to have abandoned the ambition. Perhaps things would have turned out differently then. But we never know, do we?

So I ended up every day, after the few lines on a page which I balled up and threw away, with a feeling of thwarted hope that coloured the rest of the evening, of misguided resentment against those who could call themselves writers.

So many people get published. Why can’t I?

But I am getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s return to how it went with your school.

‘Do you think you can go?’ I asked your mother, the cursor blinking in the middle of a sentence. I had written three. I had been at it for two hours.

‘Did you phone ahead?’ she asked.

I hadn’t. Well, I had but the office was shut and I’d got a recorded message. I had just thought I’d go and find out. And now that I thought I was getting ahead with my writing (it always seemed like getting ahead for a while and then like hitting a wall – every day), I couldn’t bear to.

I don’t know how your mother actually bore this, how she had the patience. I sometimes think she exhausted so much of her patience on me that she ended up being short with you.

‘No, I’d just thought I’d go.’

She looked at me, looked at the screen, at the unlit cigarette that I was trying to keep myself from smoking, and turned towards the wardrobe to get out her clothes.

‘Will you give her lunch then? I don’t know how long it will take.’

‘I love you,’ I said as she closed the door behind her. I don’t think she quite heard.

It took about four hours. She stood in a queue for three. The school authorities stopped giving out forms in the middle, during a lunch break, and resumed forty minutes afterwards. She stood there with the trams clattering along Gurusaday Road, the ice cream vendor coming and going as classes broke for lunch, and waited, parched in the fierce noon sun, unable to leave her spot for a moment lest someone else edged ahead of her. There was no sense of propriety in queues, no sense of fairness or courtesy.

There weren’t many forms, there were restrictions, the school wanted to limit the number of children it considered, other parents were saying, and so there would be many, who were at the back of the queue, who would return after waiting for hours without a form. She didn’t want to lose her place just because she wanted a drink of water on a scorching day.

The other school was not much easier. Well, it was, only a bit. It took her two hours to get a form this time. She returned triumphant, the form secure in her bag, her face red from the sun and the wait and the anxiety, burst into the room in which I sat trying to write, and said: ‘They’ll soon let us know when they’ll call us for the interviews.’

We were called a fortnight later. Southern High refused to call it an interview; they said it was merely an interaction between the children and their parents and a couple of teachers. We had taught you to not speak out of turn and to speak up if you were asked anything. (I was always going on at you to speak softly. And you did, mostly.)

The bleach-chlorine stench with which I associated my own school days was overpowering in the main hall. We were led to a classroom. The children had left – the interaction had been scheduled for three p.m., after school hours but the time when most of the three-year-old hopefuls who had turned up would have been having their afternoon nap. They sat, yawning and scratching their heads, slightly baffled, slightly apprehensive at this first crucial occasion in their lives when they had to prove themselves. We sat, all of us, in little plastic chairs meant for the children. The black board had ‘cat’, ‘bat’ and other three-letter words ending in ‘at’ written on it. A teacher turned up to say that it would take a while, that she was sorry things would get a little late, and did a roll call from a list of names she carreid with her of all the parents present. ‘The head teacher is there,’ she said in an awed whisper that hoped to make us understand just how seriously the school was taking the process of selection. ‘She has cancelled all her afternoon classes to do this,’ she said and jerked her head towards the room in which the interaction was supposed to take place.

You rubbed yourself against my knees. The single fan suspended from the middle of the ceiling desultorily dissipated the hot afternoon air. At the back of the class, where we sat, we needed to fan ourselves with a newspaper. I could see from the window what had once been a playground; now it was covered with rubble, with slabs of cement and mortar and bricks. The school was adding stories, expanding. That is why it had, as my neighbour told me, increased capacity.

‘How do children reach up to that board?’ you asked.

‘They don’t. The teacher writes on it.’

‘So where do the children here write?’

‘In their exercise books,’ I said.

‘Do the mothers wait in class?’

‘Janina, I have no idea.’ I looked at my watch.

Your mother was twisting her wedding band around.

Finally, they ushered us in. We sat on low benches without backrests. On the table in front of us, its wood chipped, someone had chiselled, Love Ramesh till I die.

‘This is not an interview,’ the head teacher said. ‘I want to emphasize that. This is only a happy occasion to meet all you parents and these lovely children.’ The corners of her mouth were turned upward in the simulation of a smile. The pallu of her cotton sari was starched and stiff. How often did she have to do this, I wondered. And would she rather have been taking the classes she had cancelled? Or would she just have cancelled the classes and gone home?

‘See, the purpose of all of us getting together here is to have a brief chat,’ she said. Getting together? Surely, she knew that people had stood in a queue for hours for the privilege of ‘getting together’? She sounded like an HR executive who was kindly trying to give an employee the sack. ‘We don’t want to choose from all these lovely children. So it’s just down to luck. It’s like putting their names into a hat and drawing some out. Will you please ask the children to come and play here if they like?’

They had set up a corner of the class as a play area, with soft balls and puzzles and papers and crayons. The parents nudged their children towards it. You trotted off, halting for a moment midway to throw in our direction a shy half-smile. Some of the children simply refused to move. They were waiting to be asked questions. A mother shoved her son, hard.

‘Now, now,’ the head teacher said, ‘please let them be if they don’t want to go.’ She didn’t miss a thing.

She then spoke separately with each set of parents. Which schools had they tried, what did they expect from the school which school did they attend, did they have any other children, how old were they and. She turned to us nearly at the end.

‘So, er, Mr…’ she looked at the list in front of her and found my name, ‘why are you keen that your, um…’ she looked around to check but couldn’t really tell.

‘Girl, my little girl,’ I helped her out.

‘Yes, girl,’ she seemed put off by this interruption, ‘your girl goes to Southern High?’

‘Oh, well, I am not really. I mean, I am but not, you know, dead keen or something. It’s just that the school is very close to where we live. And I think children shouldn’t be subjected to the torture of long car or bus rides to school.’

‘Ah, I see. Quite. And were there no other…?’

‘Yes, but this was the closest. Absolutely.’

‘Thank you.’ She moved on to the next parent.

‘You really didn’t have to say that, you know,’ your mother said once we were outside.

‘Baba, pinwheel,’ you said, gesturing towards a man selling pinwheels at the corner of the road. ‘There, there. Look at it spinning. We’ll switch on the fan once we are home and it will spin and spin. Right?’

‘Yes, sure,’ I said as we headed off toward the pinwheel-man.

‘Said what?’ I asked your mother.

‘All that stuff about close to home. I mean, you could have at least tried to seem a little more eager.’

‘What difference does it make?’ I asked. ‘Did you hear that fat bloke in the pinstripe? Gosh, it seemed as though he had been paid to write a publicity release for the school. Ooof. And what I said was true, wasn’t it?’

‘Next time, I’d hope you’ll be a little more economical with the truth.’ Your mother turned away and looked out of the window of the taxi, turning her face towards the heat which cannoned towards us through the windows.

You were standing on the seat on my side, holding your pinwheel out of the window. It turned, and stopped, and then turned again, sluggishly, in the reluctant breeze.

The Chatterjee Memorial interview (they were unapologetic, they didn’t pretend that it was an interaction) was two days later. By the time we arrived (again after the junior school was over for the day, again in the middle of an enervating afternoon) you seemed quite at ease with the process.

‘Will there be toys and crayons too?’ you asked.

‘Not sure,’ I said, trying to find exactly where we were supposed to wait.

‘And will the boy in the red shirt who was pushing me last time be here today?’

‘Not sure.’

‘He pushes very hard. If he’s here today, I’ll push him harder.’

‘There will be no need for that,’ I said hastily. ‘There will only be girls here today.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this is a girls’ school. Only girls come here. Can you see any boys around in the playground?’

‘Will I come to this school or go to that school? They had red chairs.’

‘Let’s see. We shall know soon enough.’

There was no proper area in which to wait. The interviews were being held in a classroom on the first floor, up a winding staircase with clippings from newspapers that remarked upon the school’s achievements pasted to the wall. The banisters were old; a couple of the railings were missing. We made you walk between us, well away from the railings, as we climbed up.

The classroom was off a wide verandah. All the parents were crammed in here. There was no place to sit. One of the men, his collar unbuttoned, seemed extraordinarily flustered. He had clearly come to meet this critical appointment in the middle of a busy working day. He was speaking on his mobile as he paced up and down. The sky was bleached of colour. Huge neem and peepul trees in the playground, their tops green cupolas, cast pools of shadow on the verandah. We tried to fit ourselves into those inadequate patches to keep cool. Parents kept going in and emerging from the classroom at regular intervals. You had gone quiet. I wondered if you were a little stunned by the heat.

Our turn came after about half an hour. Your mother squeezed my hand as we went through. It was dark inside the class, the shutters had all been drawn and the stale air, circulated by a couple of fans, seemed like a relief after the wait outside. A teacher called you away to a corner of the class where she sat you down at a table. On the other side of the table was another teacher.

Your mother and I sat opposite the lady who had ushered us in. She looked at our application form and asked us if we had any other children.

‘I mean, if you have a boy. This is a girls’ school, as you know.’

‘No, no,’ your mother said quickly before I could speak, ‘she is our only one.’ You mother dabbed at the beads of sweat forming on her brow.

‘It’s awfully hot outside,’ the teacher said. ‘I’m sorry. It must be hard for the child. And for you.’ She smiled kindly.

‘And why would you rather that your child attended this school?’

‘We’ve heard very good things about it. Our close friend’s daughter studies here. And so did my aunt, many years ago.’

‘And, er, just one thing,’ she said, studying the form again. ‘What exactly do you do?’ She was looking at me. ‘You’ve kept the "Occupation" column vacant by mistake.’

I held her gaze. ‘I am a writer,’ I said.

‘A writer?’ She seemed to be having trouble deciding whether to be dubious or respectful.

‘Yes, yes, a writer.’

‘That will be all, thank you,’ she said, and scraped back her chair.

On the way home, we tried to find out what they had asked you.

‘Colouring. They gave me new crayons,’ you said.

‘Anything else?’

‘They showed me animals, toy animals, tiny ones. They gave me an elephant. They asked what it was.’ You nodded, pleased at the memory.

‘So what did you say?’

You looked at me, your eyes clear and untroubled, and replied in a tone that suggested that I really should have known better than to ask you that. ‘I told them it was an elephant.’

Four days later, we found out that you had got admission in both schools. We chose Southern High. It was the closest to home.

The school run was a new experience. I drove you to school every day, your mother picked you up. On some days, you barely spoke, half-asleep almost, the usual flood of words dammed up until we were in the very final stretch of the ride. And then they burst forth as I parked.

On other days, you were excited, excitable, barely able to contain yourself as you wriggled around with the safety belt clasped across your front.

‘Baba, that cow has orange horns.’

‘Um, yes,’ I said, crawling in second gear, swearing under my breath at the driver trying to cut into the lane from the right.

‘Are you angry, Baba?’

‘No, no, I’m sorry. What’s that about the cow?’ At the set of traffic lights further up the road, it had turned green. But the traffic remained resolutely at a standstill. A rickshaw (those hand-pulled ones, do you remember them?) had made a U-turn in the middle of the road, the cars behind it had all backed up and the policemen was sauntering towards the rickshaw-puller, taking his time, prolonging his awareness of the sense of power he had over all of us, knowing that unless he waved us on, none of us could move an inch.

I looked at my watch. We were getting late.

‘Why does that cow have orange horns?’ you asked. It was unusual for you to not have been distracted after a few moments (I was expecting questions about why the car wasn’t yet moving), so clearly the subject fascinated you.

I couldn’t see the cow. It must have walked off.

‘So that it can protect itself against people who might want to do it any harm.’ We were moving again.

‘If it had blue horns, would people find it easier to harm it?’

‘Jaanina, no idea, I’ll have to find out later.’ This was the last resort, I had conceded defeat.

‘Will you find out before I come home from school?’

‘Sure.’ I was fairly certain that you would forget about this by the time you were back from school.

On some days, you wanted to listen to music. Then there would be a ten-minute delay before setting off for school because you insisted that you chose what we played and then find the tape yourself from the stacks and stacks we had in the car. Mostly, you seemed to remember where each one was. On most occasions, you knew exactly what you wanted to listen to. You usually knew your own mind well. However inconvenient that was to us sometimes, I have to confess that I quite admired that. I hardly seemed to know my own mind. How did you? Were all children like that?

Soon enough, we worked out our own ritual of saying goodbye to each other. You would come skipping along from the car towards the school gate, hanging on to my index finger, half a step ahead of me. When we would get to the gates, I’d pass you your bottle of water, which you would hang around your neck like an oversized necklace. You would adjust the straps of your satchel and stand very still (a rare thing for you). I would kneel down, my face level with yours. We would look at each other, unblinking, for a moment.

Then it would go like this. I would kiss you on one cheek and say, ‘Be good’, then kiss you on the other cheek and say, ‘Have fun’; and you would kiss me back, one cheek for me to say ‘Enjoy yourself’ and then on the other for me to say, ‘Speak soon.’ It took all of four seconds.

You were still not so self-conscious as to mind being kissed by your father as your friends streamed in through the gates and often turned to look at you. Not for much longer, I always told myself when I saw someone looking. It will be over soon, without warning. And I would hug to myself these few moments at the start of the day, these moments that in their occurrence signalled their imminent passing.

You would finally set off towards class. On your way (I always remained on my knees till you had disappeared), you would stop, turn around and wave. Almost every time I waved back at you, I felt that familiar stab of irrational panic and anxiety. What if I never saw you again? What if I died on the way back? What if something terrible happened to you at school? What if the teacher was unmindful (God knows she had enough on her hands with all of you), the gatekeeper was unmindful and you wandered out? What if this was the last time I ever saw you?

Ridiculous, I know you’ll say but there you are.

We talk a lot about how our lives are never the same once we have children. It’s all true but for me, more than anything else, the most critical change was this: being a father made me feel continually vulnerable, something I had never ever felt before.

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘Fox Deceived’. Read an interview with the author, Hannah Gersen, here.

Fox Deceived

Sandra was stuck at the traffic lights where route forty hit the turnpike. She was thinking about strawberries. The ones she had bought were not good enough. They were fat and red, beautifully ripe, but they were hothouse berries and most likely tasteless. Del wouldn’t complain, and neither would the girls, but she would know she could have done better. And this knowledge would spoil Sandra’s dessert—perhaps even the entire meal. Unlike Del, she could lie awake all night worrying about things: McCain or Iran or maybe just the groundhogs in the backyard — they were tearing up her flowerbeds, she was going to have to trap them. She supposed that her husband’s learned calm, his unruffled mind, was the thing that made him a good leader. When they had arrived in western Maryland ten years ago, his first act as school superintendent had been to fire fifty-three untenured teachers — the middling ones, as he put it. He hadn’t cared who was related to whom, or which tie-clipped County Commissioner had an ear with the School Board President. There was an uproar. For his sake, Sandra had kept herself pinned to the local gossip, tuning into the AM radio shows that stoked the local chatter. This was before the Internet was much of anything, thank God. They think you’re aloof, she would warn him, you have to show them that you’re not an elitist. Instead her husband had begun a ‘Campaign Against Mediocrity’. There was a slogan, borrowed from one of his management books: ‘Good Enough is the Enemy of Excellence’. Her daughters found it hilarious, they would use the phrase when their father flubbed the household chores, holding up stained wine glasses and pointing to dust bunnies in the corners of the living room. They were smart, pretty girls, though Sandra was careful not to let them know just how smart and pretty. She didn’t want anyone calling them stuck-up.

The light changed and the car behind Sandra beeped as if she hadn’t noticed. It was her grey hair – she shouldn’t wear it in a bun – they thought there was an old lady behind the wheel. She was heading home after a long morning of grocery shopping. Today was Del’s fifty-eighth birthday and her daughters were coming home for the occasion. She was going to cook a nice dinner: grilled vegetables and sausage, warm potato salad, green beans, homemade bread. For dessert they would have strawberry shortcake, which was Del’s favourite.

The more she thought about it, the more she knew the strawberries were going to be a problem. They were the centrepiece of the dessert — no, the very reason for the dessert’s existence — and so their quality couldn’t be overlooked. But there was nowhere local to buy good strawberries. While the organics movement had swept the rest of the country, Sandra’s corner of Maryland had somehow been neglected. She was lucky there were still so many farms; it was easy for her to buy fresh produce that way. But strawberry season was over and none of the roadside stands were selling them anymore. Sandra yearned for co-ops and boutique groceries that more cosmopolitan regions boasted; they would sell the strawberries she wanted. The closest equivalent was a Whole Foods in Frederick, but that was a ninety-minute drive away, and that couldn’t really be justified. Not with gas prices being what they were. Not with global warming being what it was.

She knew of one place where she might find the strawberries she wanted — a new ‘gourmet market’ called Horizons. But the store was located in a strip mall that Sandra had vowed to boycott. This was a private vow, but a heartfelt one, and she had kept it for almost four years. It had always been an easy promise to keep: Every time she passed that vulgar building she thought of the beautiful farmhouse that had once stood in its place. The property developers had razed it in the middle of the night. That was the detail that always got to her — that they had wanted the cover of darkness. What had they been afraid of? Had they thought she would chain herself to a tree? Lie down in front of bulldozers? She and the other protestors had actually planned to do nothing. By then they were worn out. They had only wanted to watch, to say goodbye. She could still recall her despair she felt when she found the site empty — a loved one buried before she could identify the body. And in the weeks that followed she would continue to mourn, feeling a sharp pinch of grief each time she noticed that a new phase of construction had begun. They built it quickly and then there was an exultant grand opening with hundreds of red, white and blue balloons bouncing in the air. Each of the stores had stretched a plastic banner across its windows; Sandra had counted four misplaced apostrophes. This was before Horizons had taken up residence in the building — the first comers were all tacky franchises. It was painful to remember what had been there before — the simple stone farmhouse with its melancholy eaves, the row of abiding, shade-giving beeches. One look at those trees and you couldn’t help thinking of Willa Cather, who had written so beautifully about the native beeches. At one phase of their negotiations, when they had given up on saving the farmhouse, Sandra had argued for the preservation of those beeches. Surely the parking lot could be designed to accommodate them? Had she actually quoted Cather’s words? It was so hard to know what would be deemed pretentious. This was the hardest part about being an outsider: no one believed your tears. It didn’t matter how much she loved that farmhouse; she was from somewhere else, therefore she was a fetishist.

And yet, this farmhouse had warranted special attention. For one thing, it had a name: Fox Deceived. According to local legend, the property had once been a chicken farm. When a greedy fox began to terrorize the area, the farmer gave up on poultry and started to keep cows instead. The fox disappeared and the switch was deemed a victory. To mark the occasion, the farmer had named the house Fox Deceived — a reference to the Uncle Remus stories popular at the time. Like many of the farmhouses in the region, Fox Deceived had often had a public as well as private use. During the Civil War it had been a church and later, a hospital. It was rumoured that President Lincoln had once visited and had delivered a consoling speech to the soldier-invalids there, but this had never been proved.

Sandra had fallen in love with the property on her first trip to the region, when she travelled with her husband for his final interview. That last meeting had been a formality; the real test was to see if Sandra would be willing to move to such a rural area. After seeing Fox Deceived and a half-dozen farmhouses like it, Sandra decided that she could. The romance of all those old buildings seduced her; they were so magnificent and unusual, and she couldn’t help thinking that if they’d been located in more prosperous regions, they would have fetched three times the price. They had actually put a bid on Fox Deceived but when the counter-offer came they didn’t match it because by then they had honed in on another farmhouse — the one they lived in now.

Sandra was approaching the mall now and still worrying over her strawberry problem. She looked for excuses to go to Horizons. If Del were celebrating his sixtieth birthday she could say, ‘You only turn sixty once!’ Fifty-eight got her nowhere. It was true that Horizons was the kind of store she should be patronizing. That is, she wanted it to be successful. She wanted it to expand, to open new outlets in less offensive locations. Of course Horizons wouldn’t franchise itself, because it wasn’t the kind of store that did that kind of thing. But perhaps other stores like Horizons — other stores from more affluent counties, other stores that carried different ‘other’ things such as, say, organic strawberries shipped down from New York or New Hampshire or wherever it was that strawberries were in season right now — perhaps these other stores would see the success of Horizons and say, There is untapped potential in western Maryland! ‘Untapped potential’ was one of Del’s phrases. Sandra realized that she was imagining the proprietors of these progressive groceries to be social reformers like Del. In reality they were all confirmed capitalists with gunmetal hearts.

Now she was getting very close to Horizons; she could see its tongue-red roof, its souped-up sign, the font some faux-naif Helvetica. She had always wondered what the place looked like inside. She’d heard there was a cheese counter, an aisle just for olive oil, and special shelves for foreign imports — biscuits from the UK, sardines from the coast of Spain. Once, she and Del had gone to stay with a friend in the south of France. There had been other guests, one of them a man who was dying of cancer. The man had eaten strawberries every day, big bowls of them, crème fraiche getting in his moustache — they had teased him about that. As it turned out, he survived. Sandra had always thought it was the strawberries. But it was sentimental to remember this story now — it meant she was grasping. She must not go to Horizons. It had been razed it in the middle of the night. She had not been allowed to say goodbye.

Sometimes she wondered what it would have taken to save Fox Deceived. A cynical part of her believed that if just one local person had been part of the protest, there would have been at least a compromise. But all the protesters had been outsiders. Some had been as green as Sandra, but most were people who had moved here in early adulthood, lured in for the usual reasons: marriage, jobs, real estate. They had found their place in the community and were respected. And yet they were always from somewhere else. They carried this fact with them, like a talisman — its meaning changing depending on the situation. Sometimes it was a point of pride, sometimes a chip on the shoulder. Sometimes it was nothing at all — or rather, it was overshadowed by other, more important facts. Del, for instance, never really felt it. He was the boss of so many people; he was used to being set apart. And the girls; they didn’t feel it, either. They had moved on now and, when they had lived at home, there had been school, where the rules were different.

She had passed Horizons. Temptation was behind her. But now she was thinking of Del. Her husband loved dessert and he deserved something special on his birthday. He’d been the sole provider for over twenty years now; had never complained, never searched for his soul. Was he not owed a decent pint of strawberries? It made no sense for her stuck-up ethics to get in the way of his strawberry shortcake; he shouldn’t suffer because of her foolish pride. Before she could change her mind, Sandra pulled over to the side of the road and turned her car around. She would go to Horizons just this one time. It would be a kind of sacrifice.

Sandra cautiously pulled into the parking lot; there was the danger that she would run into an acquaintance, with someone who knew of her protests on behalf of Fox Deceived. Sandra scanned the other cars. Nothing to worry about but she should be quick. She parked near a row of scrawny bushes — of course they were suffering here, any living thing would. For a moment she hesitated, thinking back to those Cather-like beeches, but it was too late; she had already caught sight of the produce displayed out front, piled high on to tiered wooden racks. The variety was overwhelming: Apples, blueberries, apricots, limes. Corn in its sheaves and tomatoes on the vine. Scarlet peppers and deeply purple plums. Above them, hidden in voluptuous awnings, were misting sprinklers, keeping everything fresh. The strawberries were in a corner, nesting in green cardboard containers. Their sunny, spicy fragrance brought to mind innocent summer pleasures: mint tea, picnics, badminton. She took the first pint that caught her eye and went inside to purchase them.

It was past six. Sandra was in the kitchen, fussing with the potato salad and waiting for Del to come back from the train station with their youngest daughter. The older one was in the living room, sipping at a glass of wine and reading one of her tawdry magazines. Sandra glanced at the clock on the stove — a quarter after. They should have been home twenty minutes ago; she couldn’t understand what was taking them so long.

Her strawberries were in a white bowl on the counter, washed but uncut. She would wait until after dinner to prepare dessert – she liked to have the biscuits warm from the oven. Sandra had so far resisted tasting the berries but now, out of nervousness, she popped one into her mouth. Delicious. She quickly covered the bowl with a checked tea cloth to avoid further temptation. Everything about the strawberries seemed sinful. Thinking about serving them to her family she felt almost guilty — as if she were making them complicit in her betrayal. But at the same time, she felt she was protecting them: they would never have to know what had gone into the dessert they were about to enjoy.

She decided she would wait outside; it was starting to cool off now, and there was a nice breeze. She settled on to one of the wing chairs on the side porch, breathing in sweet honeysuckle air. She’d planted the vine herself, when she first moved in, and now it grew up and around the porch’s thick, white columns. Above this porch was another one, identical but screened in, with sliding glass doors. Her daughters called it a ‘double-decker’, but it was known officially as a ‘Maryland porch’. Sandra thought it was the house’s best feature. It might even have been what convinced her to buy the place. But it was hard to say what made you pick one house over another. It was like choosing a husband. You had to go with your gut instinct.

She heard them in the driveway, pebbles crunching, two car doors slamming shut, and went to the front walk to greet them. They were both overburdened, not wanting to make two trips from the car, her daughter carrying a conspicuously large paper bag — a present for her father, Sandra guessed.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ he said. ‘We had to stop to get some ice cream.’

‘Ice cream?’ Sandra repeated. This made no sense. He knew they were having shortcake, had already complimented her on the gleaming strawberries.

‘It’s for the cake,’ her youngest daughter said, holding up the brown paper bag. It was then that Sandra noticed the emblem on its side: Benny’s Bakery.

‘Apparently it’s the best cake in Baltimore,’ Del said. His smile alluded to their daughter’s promiscuous use of the phrase ‘the best’. But Sandra couldn’t find it funny, not at that moment. She was thinking of her shortcake; how that sturdy brown bag had usurped its throne. Her dessert was now irrelevant; its ingredients would languish in her refrigerator.

Her daughter was oblivious. She was hugging Sandra now, and describing this party-crashing cake of hers. It was three layers, chocolate, and infused with something new and flamboyant. There was mint involved.

‘We should chill it,’ her daughter said, going into the kitchen. ‘The frosting is already starting to melt.’ She opened the refrigerator and then began to rearrange its contents to make room for her gift. Soon the countertop was crowded with miscellaneous condiment jars and other awkwardly sized containers. Among them was the pint of heavy cream. What on earth would she do with that now? And what of the strawberries? They would have them at breakfast, with plain yogurt; they would be thought of as healthy and wholesome. No one would notice their pedigree, their luxury.

‘Don’t forget the ice cream,’ Del said.

‘We should put that downstairs,’ Sandra said. They had a freezer in the basement, which was an indulgence — especially now that it was just the two of them.

‘I’ll take it.’ Del began to head toward the back stairs.

‘No, it’s your birthday,’ Sandra said, happy for a reason to excuse herself.

The basement stairs creaked as Sandra walked down and she remembered that she’d been thinking of having them replaced. Once she had thought she would redo the entire basement, but over the years she had become attached to its soft dirt floor and the strange, cobwebby smell of the woodpile in the corner. There was an old hearth down here, notable because it was original to the house. It didn’t work anymore, the flue had been stopped up for decades, but there was a kettle inside — a cauldron, the girls once called it — and a heavy iron poker. At the other end of the basement was a door that led straight to the backyard. Sandra liked to imagine the women who must have used that back entrance, going from sunny yard to basement shade and back again, carrying with them baskets of potatoes and squash, carrots and pumpkins. She felt a mysterious connection to these women, as if they were distant relatives. Perhaps this was what people meant when they said they believed in ghosts. Her thoughts naturally returned to Fox Deceived and it occurred to her that the demolished farmhouse must have had a basement like this one, and with it, a host of ghostly women. Then she imagined these women, wandering through Horizons, searching for their ancestral home. They were blue-lit and transparent, like movie ghosts. They would have seen her buying her strawberries, they would have bit their blue ghost lips in agitation; it was them she had truly betrayed. She was filled with new strains of remorse, and as she put the ice cream away, she reflected guiltily on her weak nature. Of course she had gone to Horizons — she couldn’t even give up her extra freezer. She wanted to stay down there in the cool, damp darkness and atone in some way, but she knew her daughters would soon call to her. And what would she say when they asked, What took you so long? That she was thinking about strawberries?

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘Crossing Cut Creek’. Read an interview with the author, Erin McMillan, here.

‘Laurie, hon,’ Grandma said. She leaned through the sliding glass door, kissing Mama on the cheek. ‘It’s not Tuesday already, is it?’

Tuesday was the day that Mama usually took us to Grandma’s to make out her grocery list. They would drink coffee and sit at the kitchen table, Mama blowing her smoke through the screen door. Me and Keller would sit on the steps outside the back door, or kick down anthills, or run through the stiff patches of grass across the spongy field behind Grandma’s house.

‘No, Ann,’ Mama said, ‘it’s Monday.’

Grandma raised her eyebrows, but Mama just shrugged her thin brown shoulders. The faded red straps of her tank top slid along her collarbone. Grandma made a humming noise, then opened the door wider.

‘Get in here,’ she said, ‘out of that hot sun.’

It was early in the day, but thick and glaring, the way that deep August days are in northern Florida. Grandma gave each of our shoulders a squeeze as we came through the door. Her kitchen was a long, wide room, with shining beige linoleum. The kitchen table sat near the sliding door, white-painted wrought iron, with a thick slab of glass across the top. The matching chairs had round lime-green vinyl cushions that Grandma made herself. They made a thick whooshing noise, and sank slowly, when you sat down on them. Grandma steered Mama towards a chair and sat across from her, reaching to cup Mama’s hands in her own.

‘Dawn, go get your mama an ashtray,’ she said to me. I opened the drawer and scrabbled around like I was looking for something, even though the ashtrays were stacked right in front.

‘Now,’ Grandma said, ‘what’s all this?’

‘Jerry left again,’ Mama said in a low voice.

‘Dawn,’ Grandma said, without looking up, ‘hurry up with that ashtray.’

I looked down at the wavering stack of ashtrays, four high. On top was the thick square amber glass one with the gold Elks Lodge logo.

‘He’s my son,’ Grandma said to Mama, ‘but I warned you when you married him.’

‘Not like I had a lot of choice,’ Mama said.

I pulled my favourite ashtray from the bottom of the stack, a thin, round wafer of cut glass with a low lip around the edge. I always liked the way Mama’s hands looked, her pale oval fingernails, as she flicked her cigarette into that ashtray. Fingering the sharp ridges of bevelled glass on the bottom, I carried it over to the table and set it in front of Mama.

‘Now you go on,’ Grandma said, ‘take Keller outside.’

‘Why do I always have to watch him?’

‘You are eleven.’ Grandma finally looked up at me. ‘And Keller is six. Go on now,’ she said, ‘and don’t cross the road.’ Then she turned back to Mama, who lit up one of her long brown cigarettes. Keller was pushing his toy car along the seams in the linoleum. I held my hand out to him. He slipped the car into his pocket, and together we went outside. Grandma slid the glass door shut behind us.

Keller jumped down the steps and sat cross-legged on the patio. Red bricks were turned onto their sides and pushed into the dirt in long criss-crossing lines to make a pattern of diamonds. The edge of the patio was jagged, the diamonds pointing out into the yard like the edge of Grandma’s lace curtains. She was particular about her patio. Daddy had laid it out for her for Mother’s Day one year. She swept the sandy soil of the yard back from the edges, and pulled the thick grass that sprung up between the bricks, now sunbleached and crumbling. Keller pulled his car from his pocket and pushed it through the gravel, plowing furrows in the chips of reddish stone.

I sat sideways on the steps, my back against the twisting bars of the iron railing. I could see Grandma’s face, the back of Mama’s head. I watched through the glass, straining my eyes all the way to the corners. Mama’s hands fluttered through the air like nervous birds. They touched Grandma’s hands, her own hair, the edge of a placemat. Grandma stood up, disappeared to the other corner of the kitchen and came back with her ice-tea pitcher. She filled two glasses and sat back down. Mama’s hands came to rest, landing one on top of the other.

‘Keller.’ I stood up and dusted off the seat of my shorts. ‘Let’s go into the woods.’

‘We can’t cross the road,’ he said, but he followed me anyway.

We crossed the asphalt and skidded on our heels down into the ditch, then up the other side to where the pines began, narrow trunks with branches too high to reach. The state planted them in straight rows, perfectly spaced, like columns in a church. Keller veered off, running and whooping.

I chose a row and walked down it, deeper and deeper, each step releasing the scent of musty pine. I stopped and looked right, left, behind and ahead of me. No matter what direction, I could look down the rows to forever and see nothing but the same, the same, the same. I sat at the base of a tree, leaned my head back, and stared up to where the green began. The long trunks of the trees around me stretched and curved, their feathery tops wavering in the wind, gathering at the centre of my vision.

I had seen Mama mad at Daddy before. He could rattle her like no one else. Usually by the time we got up in the morning he was long gone. He worked construction, mostly out of town. Half the time he stayed over in motels, came home Friday night and went right to bed. On Saturdays he lay on the couch watching football. Sundays he would pack his duffle bag and go to bed in the afternoon, to get ready for the truck that would pull into our driveway on Monday morning, headlights on, when the sky was still dark blue.

But when I woke up that Monday morning, there he was in the kitchen with Mama. They stood side by side, facing the counter, shoulders hunched. I stopped in the doorway, my hands gripping the trim. They murmured in tight voices, the way voices get lower when they’re trying not to yell. Keller was already at the table with his glass of juice and bowl of cereal. I got a bowl from the cabinet, and a spoon, and slid into my chair.

‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to go to work?’

He turned around. Mama stayed facing the counter, her hands braced against the edge. She leaned forward, her head bent.

‘Morning, sugar.’ Daddy reached over and ruffled my hair. ‘Nope. I got rid of that crummy job.’

‘You can stay home with us now,’ I said.

‘Yeah, Jerry,’ Mama said, still facing the counter, ‘now you can stay home with us.’

‘Well,’ he said.

I tried to think of something he’d like to do. ‘We could play catch,’ I said.

He rubbed his fingertips over his chin.

‘Football,’ I added, even though I couldn’t throw it right. I was much better at baseball. I looked over at Keller, and he nodded.

‘Sorry, kiddo,’ Daddy said, ‘I’ve got my eye on something. I’ve got to go check it out.’

Mama snorted and shook her head. I looked over by the door. Instead of his usual nylon duffle bag with the white webbing handles, there was a square black bag, sides bulging, sitting under the coat rack.

‘But you’ll be back on Friday,’ I said.

‘Might be gone a little longer this time,’ he said, ‘gotta check this out.’ He slid his hand through my hair as he walked to the door. ‘Take care of your brother.’ He picked up his bag, and the screen door snapped closed behind him with a hollow metallic bang.

When Mama and Daddy fought, usually she hollered, and he left. Then she would stomp around and grumble. This time, she just sat at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around her coffee mug, smoke drifting up from the cigarette in the ashtray next to her.

Keller and I ate our cereal, and Mama stared out the window. While we ate, I told Keller about the dream I had the night before. It was our breakfast ritual, and even if I didn’t remember my dream, I made one up. He didn’t know the difference. When we were done eating, I took our bowls and glasses to the sink. Keller, as usual, had spilled his orange juice, so I got the sponge from its dish next to the faucet. I was wiping his spill, when Mama’s head swung from the window and focused on me.

‘Get Keller in the car,’ she said, ‘we’re going to Grandma’s.’

Mama stubbed her cigarette out. Keller and I pulled our shoes on and ran out the back door. She followed behind with her purse, keys jangling in her fingers.

‘I get the window,’ Keller shouted as he skipped. Thick dust rose in clouds around his shoes.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I get it.’

‘You always get it.’

‘I’m oldest,’ I said, ‘the window’s mine.’

‘But I want it this time!’ Keller’s voice rose and wobbled.

‘For God’s sake,’ Mama said, ‘Dawn, give your brother the window seat.’

‘But I’m oldest,’ I said.

‘Then act like it.’ Mama wrenched open the door to the truck.

I climbed up into the cab and slid along the bench seat. Keller got in behind me and sat back with satisfaction as I leaned over him and pulled the door shut, buckled his seatbelt and flipped the chest strap behind his head.

Mama slid in next to me. ‘Dawn,’ she said, running her hand down my arm. My feet were perched on the high hump between the seats, and my knees jutted up. I wrapped my arms around them and stared out the windshield. It had a big crack that ran diagonally from one corner to another, branching off into smaller cracks along the way, like rivers on a map. I wanted to trace them with my finger, to feel the sharp edges of the wavering lines.

‘Dawn, look at me.’ She put her finger on my chin and turned my head. ‘Thank you for giving Keller the window.’

I nodded, leaned over Keller and rolled the window down. She pushed the keys into the ignition and started the truck, pumping the gas pedal until the engine caught. Mama was driving Daddy’s pick-up, the one he used for hauling firewood. Daddy had said he would fix her car, but he hadn’t yet, so Mama was stuck with the old truck, no air conditioning and a broken gas gauge.

The day was hot and windless, the sky a clear, parched blue. Because it was morning, sun low in the sky, the roads were mostly shaded by the long shadows of trees. When we did drive into patches of sun, the heat was a thick blanket, sudden and suffocating. A loose stick of firewood in the bed of the truck rolled from side to side whenever we turned. Rounded stones held down a blue tarp. The edges flapped loose in the wind, and grommets tinked against the metal floor.

‘This truck was born the same year as me, Dawn Marie,’ Mama shouted over the wind from the open windows, ‘twenty-nine years ago.’

It was the only thing she said during the trip to Grandma’s house. Mama and Grandma always got along. Daddy used to tease her about it, about how she stole his mama. When she was troubled, she went to Grandma’s. I went to the woods, and walked far back into the trees.

The pine trees dripped with sap. Slow-moving amber beads ran down through shaggy bark that flaked and fell to the ground. The flat sweet-smelling scales mixed and scattered in the rusty pine needles. The only sound was a distant hum from the highway, and the soft rustling of Keller’s shoes, scuffing across the forest floor. He held the hem of his shirt with one hand, and filled it with chips of bark. Arms coated with dirt, studded with pine needles, he knelt in front of me and dropped the hem of his shirt. The scales tumbled into my lap, their rosy brown undersides sticky with sap.

He stuck a flake of bark to my chin. I peeled it off and pushed my fingertip against the gummy spot it left. I stuck the sappy chip to his T-shirt. He stuck it to the end of my nose. To his knee, to my arm, to his cheek, to my neck. I grabbed a handful from my lap and, starting just above the tops of his tube socks, I armoured him, spiralling up his body, overlapping the sticky chips like feathers on a bird’s wing. When I was done, only his clothing, face and hair, and the palms of his hands were uncovered. He was a patchwork of grey and pink and brown and rust. I picked up a handful of dirt and needles and scrubbed them through his hair.

‘Stop it,’ I said, when he started to squirm.

‘Dawn Marie.’ His mouth was open, pink and wet in his dirty face.

‘It’s for your own good.’ I ground the dirt into his scalp, harder and harder. He trembled, and I pushed him away, and started back towards the highway.

He followed behind me with a stiff-legged walk. I found him a good-sized stick, as thick as his skinny arm and about as long. I handed it to him.

‘Are you ready?’ I said.

Keller held the stick in both hands, propped against his shoulder like a baseball bat.

‘Let’s go.’

‘It’s too heavy,’ he complained.

‘I’ll carry it for now,’ I said, ‘until we get to the road. But after that, you have to do it yourself.’

We clambered up through the thick grass of the ditch and onto the gravel shoulder of the road. I gave Keller his stick, and he dragged it behind him, across the road and up Grandma’s yard. The sliding door was still shut. We stood in front of it, and our reflections wavered in the glass like ghosts, floating in front of Mama and Grandma, still sitting at the table. Keller, covered in bark, his summer crewcut dark with dirt and full of pine needles. His stick dangled from one hand, the tip resting lightly on one untied sneaker. My bony shoulders pointed out of my tank top, long thin arms dotted with dirty patches of sticky sap. My face was smudged with dirt, my mouth spread in a wide, thin line.

Grandma looked up and saw us through the glass. Her hand went up to her mouth, and Mama’s head turned. I saw her lips move as she rose out of her chair. She slid the door open, and our reflections disappeared.

‘I cannot believe you two,’ Mama said.

‘Now, Laurie,’ Grandma said, following her out the door.

‘That is it.’ Mama pushed past us then whirled around at the foot of the steps. Grandma stood behind us, her hand brushing the dirt out of Keller’s hair.

‘I’m leaving to get a few of your things,’ Mama said.

‘Leaving?’ I looked up at Grandma. She licked her thumb and rubbed it against the sticky spot on my chin. Keller dropped his stick.

‘You’re going to stay at Grandma’s for a while,’ Mama said. ‘I’ll be back by supper, with your clothes.’

Keller and I looked at each other.

‘Laurie,’ Grandma said, ‘why don’t you take them home, get ’em cleaned up. Bring them back here tonight after supper, if you still want.’

‘Fine,’ Mama said. ‘Dawn, get yourself and your brother in the truck.’

‘Grandma,’ I said.

‘I’m not asking,’ Mama said. She got in the truck. The engine rumbled to life and she looked out the window at us.

Grandma crouched down between us and put her arms around our waists. ‘Go on, honey,’ she said to me. ‘You and Keller come back tonight. We’ll have some fun.’

I boosted Keller up into the truck. He left a trail of bark shards on the seat as he climbed across to the middle. I got in after him and fastened his seat belt, then fastened my own and sat cross-legged. Mama put the truck in reverse and backed down the driveway.

‘Dawn Marie,’ she said.

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘When we get home, I need you to help your brother pack. Sleeping bags and pyjamas.’ She listed things off, flicking another finger with each item, one, two, three, four, thumb. Heat glared off the hood of the pickup as it shivered down the washboard gravel road. I nodded, swaying and bouncing. Keller’s legs dangled off the seat, knees and shoelaces jiggling.

‘Dawn,’ she said, ‘are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I propped my elbow in the open window and squinted against the sun. Thick wings of hot air beat against my cheek..

Mama gripped the steering wheel and drove straight on. Usually she dodged bad patches of road, but today she took everything head on. She didn’t even slow before the Cut Creek bridge for the bump we all knew was there, the seam where the gravel road met concrete.

Cut Creek wasn’t much of a creek. It was more a wide clear trail of water wandering through the reeds. The bridge was short and wide, with metal guard rails along the sides. Old men and women in lawn chairs lined up along the creek near the bridge, fishing poles propped in buckets at their feet. Their heads swivelled when our truck came around the curve, gravel popping under the tyres, diesel engine roaring.

The truck dipped down and jumped upwards at the seam of the bridge. All four wheels left the ground. I floated off my seat, legs still crossed. The sun drifted through the windows and filled the dusty cab. The windshield became a thick sheet of gold. Light rose over Mama’s tanned arms, Keller’s dirty hair. The air was thick with colour and swirling dust, and we were still, suspended in it.

The truck landed, and the seat belt snapped against my chest, edge zipping under my jaw. Keller flopped like a rag doll. The loud grind of tyres on gravel-scattered concrete rang through my open window as we skidded down the bridge. Mama swung the wheel, first one way, then the other. The truck twisted, shuddered and stopped.

The engine cut out. It was almost like nothing had happened, like we’d stopped to look down the length of lazy Cut Creek and ask the old people about their catch. I touched the hot, raw scrape the seat belt had burned under my jaw, and looked across the cab at Mama. Her hands were still wrapped around the steering wheel. She blinked. I hoped she could still drive. I was too young, and there was no one else.

‘You can’t leave us,’ I said.

Keller shook his head from side to side. His lips trembled, as if a wail was working its way up. There was a red spot on his forehead where he’d banged himself on the dashboard. I put my fingers on Keller’s chin, and turned his head towards me. I ran my fingers through his dusty grey brush of hair, pulled off a piece of bark still clinging to his neck.

Mama turned towards us. ‘Everyone okay?’ Her voice was thin, stretched tight. We both nodded.

She started the truck and drove home slow. The dust churned up behind us wasn’t rolling clouds like usual, just a low haze simmering a few inches off the road.

When we pulled up in front of the house, I unbuckled our seatbelts. I got out of the truck and turned to help Keller down, but Mama came around to our side, leaned in and lifted him into her arms. He wrapped his legs around her waist. She put her hand on my head as we walked up the back steps. Mama kept walking, Keller still wrapped around her waist, through the kitchen and living room. Her steps creaked up wooden stairs, then down the hallway to the bathroom.

The dirty ashtray and cold coffee still sat on the table where Mama had left them that morning. I emptied the ashtray into the trash and took her mug to the sink. The chicken for dinner was defrosting in the refrigerator, so I took it out and set it on the counter. Water murmured through the pipes overhead as Mama ran Keller’s bath.

I went back out the door and down the stairs, past the truck. The door handles winked at me in the low evening sun. I walked into the garden, scuffed my toes through the hot sandy dirt. The corn reached far over my head. I walked down the shallow trough between two rows, until I couldn’t see the house when I turned around. The stalks were thick as branches, pale bleached green, dirt piled high around the roots. I grabbed the hem of my tank top with one hand, and with the other, broke off six ears and put them in my shirt. The straps of my top cut into my shoulders, pulled by their weight. All the warmth that the corn had absorbed that day seeped through the fabric and sunk deep into my skin. I wrapped my arms around the bundle and pressed it to my stomach.

The bottom step of the back porch was one thick grey plank of wood, silvery and soft, edges curved up from years of sun and rain. I sat down, dropped the corn in the dirt between my feet, and picked up the first ear. The tough, faded outer leaves gave way with a soft ripping noise. Singed brown silk erupted from the top of the ear. I wrapped my fingers around it and snapped it off. The thin damp greeny-yellow inner leaves squeaked, layer by layer, as I pulled them away. The last leaves, fine and pale as skin, were imprinted with the shape of the firm, cool kernels beneath, and the silk that wound among them. I stacked the ears of corn on the step next to me. They glowed, pale yellow and pearly, scraped bare.

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘Conspiracy of Males’. Read an interview with Evan James Roskos here.

We hated your fat little face. We called you elephant. We called you Jupiter. We called you fat-ass. You asshole. Cocksucker. Dickhead. Shithead. Faggot. We beat you up in fifth grade, eight knees to your temple. You got detention because you were fatter than us. The principal, also the civics teacher, said we were too smart to start a fight with a big kid. How fair, how fair.

We laughed about you all the time. In sixth grade, you carried books on field trip bus rides. You took books to sleepovers. You bought science fiction and comics by the pound. You stayed home to clean G.I. Joe vehicles instead of going to our first party with girls. Well, we didn’t invite you to that party anyway. You walked down the hall with us, asking about the time and who was going. You found out the time and that you weren’t invited.

That was us laughing when you fell off your bike.

That was us that ran over your bike and left.

That was us that stole your new bike and threw the lock and chain into the tree in front of your house.

In tenth grade, we wanted to set your hair on fire. We threw things at your back while you tried to ignore us. We tricked you into saying you shaved your balls like a fag. You’re a fag! You’re a fag! No answer would have saved you from torment. We laughed in your face. We made girls defend you. Girls.

We laughed at the girls you liked. Some were two years younger than you. Ugly ones your age were uninterested. You tried to give a girl charity flowers; she politely refused.

We talked to girls online and fucked them. Some we left at the door because they were too fat. Every time, we made you wonder why us, not you. You fucked no one. You kissed no one. You called no one.

Every Saturday night you bought scratch-off lottery tickets, Yoo-Hoo and egg and cheese sandwiches. You spent Friday nights at home or at work. Aged fifteen you worked because your father worked at twelve. He saved money for a car. You spent money on books and CDs and movie tickets. We loved the movies you hated. You stood up at the end of Face/Off and declared that it sucked, and we said, ‘You suck’. We said, ‘Shut up.’ We said, ‘You didn’t have to come.’

When you were seventeen, driving home from a poetry reading (you’re a fag!), we made sure you looked to the right when you made that left. A white compact car smashed the front of your father’s truck. We made sure your father didn’t believe your story and that your mother cried about you, you baby. The pasty-white paramedic offered to help you, any time, if you were traumatized. We made sure the way he said it creeped you out. We made sure the woman who hit you blamed you and didn’t ask if you were okay.

We were there, laughing, when you told your mother there was blood in your shit. We laughed and pointed and told you there would be a tube camera with your ass in its sites. We were not lying. We were there when the barium milkshake gave you the runs and your mother was pissed that you were going to stay home from school again. We told your mother not to believe that you had an ulcer, stress-induced intestinal issues, depression. We told her not to believe that you considered dying in all its alluring forms. It was for the best.

You started to believe we wanted you maimed and disturbed but not dead. You started to believe in the whispers at school and work. You watched passing cars and gazed through the windows of other people’s houses, wondering where the conspiracy started. You made plans to get away. You were so sure we were only here and not everywhere else.

We were there, way back, watching your grandfather beat your aunt and uncles. Seeing how your mother was never touched. She would have been better off with the biting end of a belt or the flash of drunk fists. We’d love to say your grandfather was our fault. We’d love to take the credit for his glorious, perfect, bastard essence. We learned everything from him and have no qualms about how long he lived or the fact that he died of rectal cancer. An asshole rotting. Oh, the perfect universe.

Your mother was a constant source of amusement to us. Too ugly to fuck, but we said we fucked her anyway. We started stories about your sister getting around that got around. How she was on drugs. We made sure your mother blamed your sister for everything that went wrong. We were compelling liars. We urged your father to drag your sister out of the house, by her arm or hair.

Nothing was your fault. You defended no one. By default, you defended us.

We didn’t leave you behind. In college, you had lunch by yourself. We sat close enough to hear your stomach gurgle, to see you wince when your intestines cramped. We were there when you curled up to die every chance you got, stared out of your dorm room’s window, took photographs of the same two trees (in snow, in rain, in spring) like some pathetic Ansel Adams.

We broke your clocks. We broke your toaster. We broke the locks on your windows. We pushed your mouth together and ground your teeth while you slept. You woke up with a sensitive, flat smile. You entered your apartment one day and found spiders menacing you from every corner of the ceiling. We wanted you to kill them, but you cupped each one and tossed it lightly into the front bushes. Your responses became fascinating.

When you found a dead mouse under the laundry basket, you cried, imagining it struggling for air, just air. Twenty years old and crying. Crying because of a cruel crossing of paths – the basket dropped as the mouse ran by. Crying, believing that everything was just the pure, dumb luck of your life.

Do you remember pacing in your apartment that night, wondering how we could kill a mouse but not you? Do you remember sweating, your stomach full of static, your feet wearing a path from the front door to the TV and back? Do you remember grabbing the keys to your truck, the one you smashed that was never the same? Do you remember driving at two in the morning with the windows down, the radio off, contemplating the only escape? Do you remember the loose wheel beneath your hands, the lure of the trees?

We want to know what made you hold on.

We want to know what kept your wheels on the road despite our logical urging.

Do you remember the next morning, standing pale, standing naked in the steam of the shower, looking out the small window, admiring the gold leaves on the trees behind your apartment? Remember how the sun and cool air and hot water made things feel better, even in the clutch of autumn? Do you remember how everything seemed to lift, and how the world was beautiful and soft? Thinking that maybe you could shake us off? Thinking you could be alone, perfectly alone, and we’d stop caring about the minutiae of your suffering?

Do you remember wiping your soapy eyes and suddenly seeing a man, of course, smiling, of course, scaring you and looking at you until you shut the foggy window?

That was us. That was us. That was us. That was us.

Every two weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘Reconstruction’. Read an interview with Lana Asfour here.

There’s nothing like watching the summer sunset with a glass of jellab.

Maya squints as the sun descends to eye level but it’s gentle and it warms her cheeks, and with a spoon she chases the floating pine nuts in the sweet raisin and date concentrate. For seven minutes the balcony is under a shadow while the sun hides behind the Dream Tower to the left – only two-thirds built and already eighteen floors high. Eighteen floors of concrete and pink stone, misplaced windows and stunted balconies. The sun reappears, lower and redder, and the view is best when she focuses on the patch of sea that isn’t blocked by one of these highrises. The traffic is heavy along the Corniche, car horns compete with the generators and drills of the construction site, and the few joggers who have ventured out before dark sweat in the heat. To the right, the shabby beauty of an Ottoman house stands out against the sea with its crumbling stone walls, tall windows, spacious balconies and arched colonnades, dignified beside its newer neighbours.

Alex follows her around a corner in the eerily empty downtown area. Perfect Ottoman buildings rise in clusters in flattened sections of land. The whirr and clamour of construction surrounds them. They stop in front of a building, an office block that retains the façade of a mandate-period embassy.

‘This is it,’ Maya says.

The external structure is close to completion, apart from the top two floors and the stairs.

‘We wanted to include the memory of the civil war within the renovation,’ she explains, ‘so we cleaned the stones but didn’t repair or replace them. See how craggy they are? Those are bullet marks.’

Alex nods. Indeed, he finds that the overall effect is ghostly and provides a strange but not unattractive contrast to the sharper outlines of the neighbouring reconstructed buildings.

‘It bears its own history, but also looks forward. It’s solid enough to carry a modern penthouse.’ A sleek top floor made of glass and steel will crown the spectral edifice, complete with a light-sensitive shutter mechanism. It will be used as the firm’s office as it expands and takes on new projects.

She leads him into the building site, but moves off to discuss the next stages, the completion of the stairs and top floors, with the site manager, Walid, who is eager to show her what they’ve done since yesterday. She’s annoyed that the fourth floor still has no floor and the steel reinforcements haven’t arrived, but Walid seems to assure her it will all be done on time.

It’s the first time Alex has visited her in Beirut. She only moved here a few months ago and it’s striking how much authority she commands. The Syrian workmen look up at him for a moment. He carefully steps through the loose chippings and climbs the staircase until it stops suddenly on the fourth floor. Downtown spreads out before him through a large gap in the wall. Yellow cranes slowly rotate over half-buildings, scaffolding covers damaged sections of mosques and churches, and the excavated centre of Martyrs’ Square exposes Roman ruins. The synagogue stands surprisingly untouched, and he can just make out the site of the Phoenician wall.

Next to him, a workman hangs precariously out of a window hole to measure something, and another blowtorches a strip of metal without wearing a visor.

‘Be careful,’ Maya says as she appears on the stairs and follows Alex’s gaze to the view. ‘Many of the badly damaged façades have been entirely rebuilt. Perfect replicas. Some buildings are just fantasies: as long as it has three arches and a red roof, the Saudi engineers think it looks like an old Lebanese house. All around the city the real ones are knocked down by highrise developers. Campaigners only manage to save a few.’

Walking back, Alex is quick to dismiss the airbrushed renovations. It’s like Disneyland. And not all the firms are like Maya’s – the workers are rarely insured. They’re paid cash, good sums for them back home, but they’re hardly going to go to court if they’re injured. Anyway, he’s more interested in the scars of war on the city he discovers on long walks while she is at work: chaotic bullet hole patterns on walls and trees, bomb-collapsed roofs, paneless windows, buildings without façades revealing hanging washing and displaced families squatting in rubble, skeletal structures along the wartime green line and at east-west crossing points.

Maya teaches him some Arabic phrases to use on his excursions, and in the evenings takes him to the bars and restaurants of Monot. There’s a buzz, an excitement, and plenty of late-night discussion. Everyone’s talking about the reconstruction, everyone is reconstructing – architects, entrepreneurs, journalists, lawyers, UN, NGOs, plastic surgeons. It’s the generation that came of age with the Taif peace. Some have been here all through, but many are returning after the exile of the war years, throwing themselves into a new life with a voracious energy inspired by a hopeful city.

He asks almost everyone he meets about the civil war and each discussion helps to fill out the picture, and complicates it, with all the players and endless twists and turns. When they can explain no further, he entertains them with the story of how he got lost: an hour’s joyride with a manic taxi driver who ignored his choice of destination and offered him girls and drugs with wild gestures. Uninteresting, he was dropped suddenly in a suburb along the old airport road – Ouzai, he learns – where above the uncollected rubbish rotting in the sun, the yellow and green flags are still flying high for the first anniversary of the liberation of the south.

‘I don’t think we have a future together,’ Maya says flatly after a night out.

Alex wonders what she’s playing at. She looks serious. Sounds serious. But she can’t be. He storms out to the balcony, betting with himself she’ll follow, and has the foresight to grab the cigarettes and bottle of gin he bought at Heathrow. She doesn’t follow, but busies herself tidying the apartment, washing the dishes, probably going through her notes on the building site. So conscientious.

He throws himself down in a white plastic chair, which bends to his movements. He picks up a forgotten jellab-stained glass, fills it with gin, gropes for cigarette and lighter. He stares at the black sea and the Dream Tower.

She’ll follow, he thinks, if he waits long enough…

Maybe an hour later, she comes out, experimentally. There’s a hint of anxiety in her dark eyes. He soon drives it away: ‘Come back to London and marry me.’

‘Let’s just enjoy your visit,’ she answers, closing the balcony door against mosquitoes. ‘I live here now.’

Yes, why did she move? Okay, she was born here. And designing hospital wings, shopping malls and underground carparks for the firm in London was beginning to grind her down. But wasn’t meeting him enough?

‘How long are you going to stay here?’

‘I don’t know.’

She’s serious. There must be someone else. An enthusiastic architect, no doubt. Or a sharp banker. He fills another glass. This needs a clear mind. And some strategy.

‘Listen,’ he ventures, ‘I haven’t cheated on you. Well, only once and I regretted it.’

She leans against the railing and looks out. Not quite the response he wanted. He can see that she doesn’t care. Or there’s someone else and she’s not telling. Either way, it’s not good. She stays like that, so he rambles about his feelings, whatever they are – he’s not really sure as another hour passes and he fills a third glass.

Finally she turns to go in and for a half-second meets his eye. She’s tired, pale. There’s sadness perhaps, and bewilderment, but mainly absence. She wants to move on. He’s causing a scene, he knows it, but he makes his decision. He won’t be swept under. She’s not better than him.

If he waits long enough…

Maya wakes early, disorientated and unrested. The memory of the night before brings nausea with consciousness. Why can’t he go away? Why did he confess? She was right to have had her own fling, after all, inconsequential though it had been. But there he is, still on the balcony, with pale, contorted face: a statue of a satyr at a fête galante. She pads to the kitchen, nibbles bread, zaatar and olive oil. She needs the strength.

She thinks he doesn’t get it, this place. He takes things for granted – employment rights, zoning laws. But the country has hardly been born. These things have to be fought for and created. And here there’s more potential for change than anywhere she’s ever been. Downtown just needs more time. The stones will age, the paint will peel, people will fill the streets. It will encourage reconstruction in other areas, and social services will follow. It’s a new millennium: the south has been liberated, the younger Assad might loosen Syria’s grip, good things are possible.

She steps outside. He’s still in the plastic chair, black circles under eyes that are heavy with exaggerated reproach. She looks away. On the fifth floor of the adjacent block, a similar 1950s building, yellow shutters are pushed open. A rotund woman moves about the kitchen. A man in a suit appears, they exchange a few words, a kiss, he disappears again. A minute later, carrying a briefcase, he steps into the street, footsteps on the broken pavement, the echo of the heavy glass door slamming in the coolness of the morning. For a moment, revulsion throbs in her throat and behind her eyes. She agreed to Alex’s visit, but she won’t be stuck with him.

Behind her, he moves in the chair. “I’m going to leave,” he announces, slowly unfolding himself and standing up.

Humility at last? Before she decides, he shows her his wounded eyes.

‘Stay.’

On Saturday they rent a car and head north from Daoura roundabout, along the stretch of highway to Jounieh, where the motorcycle boys race each other. She’s seen them ride two together, bare-headed, weaving between cars at high speed. They rev their engines and raise their front wheels and scream, exhilarated, against the wind.

Alex drives nervously through the anarchy of the highway, through Jbeil and Batroun and finally to Tripoli. They enter the city on a main road lined by towering palm trees and bulky concrete blocks built at an angle from the street like quills of an arrow and dominating the suburban and commercial districts outside the centre. Unlike downtown Beirut, the heart of Tripoli’s old city wasn’t destroyed by the war. The winding alleys of the souqs smell of baking bread, spices, raw meat and fish. Rows of yellow-gold jewellery gleam in the windows of the Souq el Dahab, whose old stone walls were recently renovated by the municipality. In the Khan el Saboun, first built as an Ottoman barracks, soap is made in the traditional way and scented with almond oil, amber or flower essences. Shafts of light fall through the arches of the fourteenth-century Souq el Khayateen, illuminating the cobblestones and stacked rolls of coloured cotton, wool, silk and polyester. And in the Souq el Haraj, a Mameluk bazaar with Byzantine granite columns, a team of German restorers work on the dilapidated vaulted ceiling.

Outside the city, they find the Niemeyer International Fair, which had not quite been completed when the war started. The stark concrete forms, with metal reinforcements still protruding, sit neglected in a well-tended garden. They climb to the flat top of a trumpet-shaped structure and look out over the colonnaded pavilion, the slender arch, pyramid and dome, at the messy rows of the city highrises and beyond them to the mountains.

They have a late lunch in one of the run-down seafront restaurants of Al Mina. It’s on the first floor, above an ice-cream parlour, and has a faded, pre-war elegance. The discoloured fleur-de-lys wallpaper, mirrored stairway and heavy European tapestry chairs sit comfortably with the Mediterranean functionality of the slim tables, the oriental glass lanterns, ornate ceiling, and large open windows looking down to the sea. The waiter, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, offers them the half-empty restaurant with a graceful gesture. He gives Maya the menu in Arabic and Alex the French version as they choose a table by one of the open windows. A sea breeze lifts Alex’s fine brown hair, his face serene.

He was in the year below her at the Bartlett, but they didn’t know each other because he left the Architecture programme after the first term. They only met last year at a conference on the development of the East End. He had become a lecturer in Urban History. In his presentation he argued for modernization with local awareness and, catching her eye, pointed out that Covent Garden would have been demolished during the seventies if it hadn’t been for local campaigners. Of course, she loitered afterwards to ask questions. For the next six months they walked all over London, talked about every building and debated with his students at the college bar.

There’s an office lunch behind them, men in tired suits with gelled hair, maybe local politicians. Their voices are carried across the restaurant on the warm, damp air, deep and indistinct. A drop of lemon juice trickles down Maya’s wrist as she licks her fingers, savouring the pure flavours of grilled shrimp and Sultan Ibrahim. Alex laughs, his blue eyes teasing. She looks around the room, through the window, but finally returns the gaze, laughing at the insolence, and reaches out to pinch his soft suntanned arm.

On the last day of his visit, Maya takes the morning off and waits while he endures the interview she’s arranged for him at the American University. She walks down to Bliss Street and breakfasts on a manousheh from Faisal’s. Then a stroll through the campus, with its vista down over the grounds all the way to the sea, the tall pines and clusters of oleander along the winding paths, the sports oval at the bottom. She follows the pathways and stone stairways, circling the old green-shuttered villas, the dean’s house and newer dormitory blocks. The odours of the hibiscus and jasmine, the pine trees and warm red earth are still faint and fresh. Students sit on benches in the shade of carob trees, reading or flirting, and stray cats gather at a safe distance around those who fumble with sandwich wrappers.

Would he start over?

Inside the Urban Planning department, Dr Kamal delicately scratches his ear with a long-nailed pinky finger while examining Alex’s CV. It’s impressive. The young man across his desk waits with an unnerving stare. Kamal decides not to look up before finding the right words. At least this one isn’t Lebanese, he thinks. A foreigner is worth more – gets paid more – even if he’s from an obscure state college in the Midwest. There’s no competition. But a Lebanese who returns from abroad is harder to deal with. Like Kamal’s new colleague Rania. With her winning smile and PhD from Columbia, she’s well versed in the latest theoretical discourse. They come back, with their confidence and bad Arabic, and change all the standards. And Kamal has been here all along, lived the devastation, hidden in the mountains, returned to the broken city, packed up the children and stayed in Cyprus for months at a time because the visas for France never arrived quickly enough.

But this one is English. There’s no need to give him too hard a time. He’ll want tenure. But he can start part-time for a semester or two.

‘Are you watching?’ Alex shouts as soon as she picks up the phone.

‘Of course I’m watching. We all are.’

The whole firm is gathered around the TV in the penthouse office downtown. Alex is watching in Stoke Newington. The pictures of the second plane silently penetrating the tower play over and over. Debris swirls over the city while panicked newsreaders comment. The experts are beginning to turn up, with speculations.

There’s not much talking in the office though. They’re still staring at the screen. But Maya senses that the shock contains something more, some undercurrent. It’s fear, she thinks. For the reconstruction. She slips out into the corridor. Walid is pacing at the other end with his mobile phone, still unable to get through to his brother in New York, a banking intern on one of the upper floors.

‘I’m worried,’ she whispers urgently into the phone, watching Walid’s tireless dialling. ‘It will lead to something else, somewhere.’

The air is cooler, more autumnal, and the days are getting shorter. It’s usually dark by the time Maya gets home from work, but she can still sit out on the balcony with a shawl. Alex has been calling a lot lately, after the pub.

‘When are you coming home?’ he finally asks.

He didn’t take the job Kamal offered. He couldn’t go from a tenured position to part-time, just because the campus was idyllic.

The city moves on without him. Downtown is bustling with businessmen, Gulf tourists and high-heeled ladies. Every day a new office, shop or café opens. But the Council for the South is stalling on Maya’s proposal to rebuild a cluster of villages near the border. The plans are ready but there are hold-ups. In the meantime, they hire more bureaucrats in Beirut instead of investing where it’s needed.

‘I’m not sure,’ she replies. ‘When the project is approved.’

She hears him breathing tensely and waits for a negative remark.

‘You’ll never build those villages.’

Above the highrises, along the coastline, an Israeli drone – another airspace violation.

‘Yes we will.’

The Dream Tower is finished, but she only ever sees lights on in three or four apartments. Next to it, a parking lot has been dug up and the foundations laid for a new block. Before the parking lot, there was a plot of dust and rubbish, and before that, she remembers, an old family house. A red tiled roof, stone walls and wooden shutters, very similar in structure to the house in Jerusalem, which stands framed in silver on her grandparents’ bookshelves. A date tree with cascading branches rises as high as the rooftop, and in its shade, in a wicker chair, a dark-eyed girl sits sipping lemonade.

This story by Evie Wyld – an advance extract of her novel After the Fire, a still Small Voice (Cape, 2009) – was originally published in our New Voices series in May 2008. Read an interview with Evie Wyld here.

Something Close to Heaven

It was just past nine when the fuel ran out. Already the sun was hot on Leon’s knuckles gripping the steering wheel. The spare can was empty when he’d been sure it was full. The drinking water was gone as well, and he could not remember doing that. He’d filled it at the drinking fountain at Cobar. The woman from the caravan park had come out, with her hair parted in the middle, and a T-shirt that read ‘Girls say yes to boys who say no. Stay out of Vietnam’ and he’d imagined running her head under the tap, holding open her eyes and her mouth, making her see. But then he’d shaken his head and it was back to normal.

‘Right on,’ she’d said when he told her he was headed into the desert. ‘Right on, baby.’ And he’d started the engine and driven away.

The map showed nothing, just the long black line of a road cutting through all that desert, straight as a pin. A night’s drive from where he had last stopped. Up ahead was Quilpie, but that was a full thumb’s stretch north. You were supposed to wait, so he walked in circles around the car, standing tall to try and see over the desert to where someone might wave back at him. Far in the distance was low-lying scrub, a black line on the horizon. Past that all was heat wobble. Cicada hissed in the brown grasses.

He took his sleeping roll out and laid it over the back window to block out the sun. All the doors were open as wide as they would go but the air didn’t move. It cooked itself on the dashboard and became sweet and hot. He tried passing the time by opening one of the books he’d bought with him, but Sherlock Holmes did not stick, and he let the book rest coolly on his forehead, smelling the stale moths of the bookshelf at home and trying not to get angry.

His tongue lost the feel of sandpaper, and became a small brick in his mouth. Syrup from a can of peaches wet his lips, but the sweetness got at his thirst and he chewed the peach halves, sifting them through his teeth to try and get all the juice out. When the sun was high and the inside of the car was too much, he lay underneath and wondered what bits of the engine would hold the cleanest water, recited the names of the stations, in order, of the West Central line. A couple of parrots sang out on their way to somewhere cooler. Sometimes there was a thump through the ground – a kangaroo, a footfall – but it may only have been the blood in his ears. Sleep came quick and unexpected, so that he woke suddenly with the feeling something had changed. The sun had moved and seen to his ankles and shins on its way: they were red and big like peeled plums, and hurt like bloody rope burn. With his eyes closed he waited to get used to it, to know that the pain wasn’t going away. His throat felt swollen like he’d swallowed an unripe peach.

The sun didn’t burn any more, but sent low rays and long shadows out over the ground. The road was just as long and straight and empty as it was before he fell asleep, the sand and grass and dirt were the same, deeper in colour from the lowering sun. He opened the bonnet of the car and studied the radiator. You could drink that. It was just water. He stood right over it and saw it shine back at him, put a finger down but his finger was not long enough to touch. There would be no getting it out anyway. He closed the bonnet.

As the sun set, he clambered onto the roof to sit and watch night approaching like a cloudbank. He tried to think what had bought him out here. Someone would come – there were telegraph poles for Christssake. They stretched over the red hip bone of the landscape, a measure of how big the space was. The furthest one he could see was a hairline in the distance.

Perhaps in the dark, it would be easier to spot help. He could flash his headlights on and off a few times, see if it bought anything. But once the dark had settled he felt differently. There were no stars, nothing to see past the nose of the car, and it gave him the creeps. In the far distance a gun was fired and the noise bought an old heat to his palms, and his arms twitched thinking of the kick of it. His heart beat steady and loud and he bit his lips in case he’d imagined it. In the blackness something padded softly around the car. He found his hammer in the boot and repositioned himself back on the roof, the hammer resting heavy and cold across his burnt ankles. The gun sounded again, and this time he saw a spark up ahead, a long way ahead, but still there. There was something that sounded like laughter in the big space. He felt better. The thing in the dark was most likely a dingo.

It was cold now, like some bastard was playing a joke, but he didn’t get back inside the car. It was good on the sunburn. What was there to shoot at out there? Kangaroos, he supposed, dingoes, like the one that had passed by the car. When the desert had been silent for hours, something howled far away, one voice on its own, unanswered. He closed his eyes and lay flat and waited for the cold night to pass.

At dawn, Leon slid off the roof of the car and carefully laced his boots, tying them tight over his sunburnt ankles to stop them from rubbing. He put a shirt over his head for shade. In another shirt he packed the remaining tins of peaches, resisting the urge to open one immediately to have the wetness of syrup in him. He looked at the keys in his hand for a moment, and then locked the car and began to walk in the direction of the shooting.

Once the car became a spot in the distance and then disappeared behind a swell of heat waves, there was the feeling that he was stuck on the same patch of desert, that there was a cunningly hidden conveyor belt that he walked against, keeping him in the same spot. His ankles were wet in his boots and he gritted his teeth against the steady shearing of his skin. By the time the sun was fully up, the peaches were heavy, and his lips were biscuit-dry. He took a can and held it in front of him. He held it in front of him for a long time, until the fact that he had forgotten to take the can opener had completely sunk in. He could picture it sitting on the dashboard, becoming red-hot in the sun. He held the can a little longer, and then hurled it as hard as he could along the road. It didn’t go very far, and for a few moments he gathered himself by placing a hand over his eyes and blinking grittily. He picked up the can again as he walked past it and noted that it was unscratched. He dropped the peaches out of his shirt and tied it around his waist without breaking stride.

To hide the sound of the tread of his feet, he sang the cobbled-together refrains of songs he had listened to on the radio, but he sang with such sandy croaking that he stopped, and hours passed in silence while his heart beat in his ankles and he tried to remember why he was there. Answers presented themselves, but they were like answers to different questions. The butterfly hands of his mother flapping at the old man when it would have been better to do anything than flap. That thick jungle with the breath of the fresh dead right there in the mist for him to inhale. The thing mawing in the night. He threw his arms in the air, mouthed the things in his head, which helped unsettle the flies who landed on the sun blisters on his face and stayed there comfortable as cattle.

At the point when he had started to imagine someone finding his body and peeling back the layers of cooked meat, picturing how the only wet thing about him might be his heart, floundering around in what liquid blood was left in his body, a speck appeared in the distance. A car. His breath came hot out of him and his throat burnt in anticipation of talking to someone, of drinking. What if the car was full of bastards and they didn’t stop? Surely they would stop, who wouldn’t? But if it was a car, it was a stationary one, it neither got bigger nor smaller as the minutes passed. When he got closer he could see that it was a rusted oil drum shot through with bullet holes. He stood in front of it and took it in. Someone had gone to the trouble of chalking the words ‘A Cunt’ on to the side of the barrel in a childish hand, beneath it a pair of chalk breasts, or they could have been wide-open eyes.

The drum gave out a long shadow and Leon was able to lay in it. The boots came off, sticking sickly to his torn ankles. He let the flies settle. For christssake, they looked crook. His eyes were pissed in and when they were closed, everything was red. Something touched his face, seemed to nose him, but he kept his eyes closed. Whatever it was could stuff itself. A wind blew against him and he slipped down the barrel and didn’t care except he might be late back tonight and it would be a shame to make them worry. He saw himself tied by the wrists and dragged along behind a truck, in the dirt, the last of his skin left on the ground, laughing all the way. A bird sang Matilda.

It was the thirst again that woke him. He’d been dreaming of a man passing him a glass of water and he could see it crisp and cold. He took hold of the glass and bought it to his lips, but to do that took forever and it never reached his mouth. He opened his eyes and the dark was thick, but it wasn’t the dark of night – this was the dark of inside. His bladder ached dully and he rolled onto his side and heaved slowly to standing. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, but it was better than before. His stomach felt like it’d been through a night of terrible drinking and his head wailed at him as he stood straight and leant against the wall. The wood of the house was dry and light, and it snagged on the skin of his palm. His eyes didn’t like to focus on anything, and he let the ground settle under his feet before he tried to walk. His ankles were hot and he could feel that they were bandaged tightly. A cool breeze came in through an open window, and Christ what a thirst! He moved unsteadily, the dark around him growing less intense and he found the door and then another door and then praise the lord a toilet with a tap. He turned on the tap and the water came, sweet smelling, warm but good, and he gulped fishlike under it. When he was done with that he pissed strong and happy into the loo, unable to stop a moan at the joy of it.

‘Morning Princess,’ came a voice from outside.

He was given a bucket of water by the men who were sat around the campfire in legless plastic chairs, and shown round the back of the house where he peeled his clothes off and doused himself to feel the sand melting out of his skin. There were seven of them altogether, all bearded and with the same quiet uninterested smile when Leon introduced himself. Someone gave him antiseptic cream for his ankles and someone else gave him a bacon sandwich which he couldn’t eat, but he enjoyed smelling. It was difficult to talk but no one seemed to take offence. Klyde, the one who had found him, looked old because of his wide matted beard but younger in a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He had a smell about him of raw meat and engine oil. Somebody gave him some water with sugar and salt mixed in, and he sipped it as he took in the news that he’d been asleep for two days.

‘Thought we was going to have to dig you a bed out there, mate,’ one of them said pointing into the dark with an odd tone to his voice that might have been regret. A chicken frilled in the dark. The rest of the night passed in a strange blur, sounds and colours were not how Leon remembered, and the men drank beer and commented on the hoot of an owl or the angle of a knife that someone was sharpening. He could feel his shins healing and the skin of his face was easily and dryly peeled off, and mostly it was painless.

When he next woke it was to the sound of a car and the sun was high. Pulling on his clothes he saw his brown Holden roll up to the front of the house.

‘Got your car, mate,’ said one of the men.

‘Thanks,’ he said, surprised at the generosity. The man took something out of the back seat.

‘And what is more, I found peaches all along the road!’ The man smiled happily showing him the cans, ‘looks like we eat pudding tonight.’ He walked past Leon and towards the kitchen before turning, ‘Oh – and for the future, probably a good idea to fill up on petrol once in a blue moon before heading out in to the desert.’ The man gave him a wink and disappeared inside with his peaches. Leon blushed and felt like a priss.

A few days later Klyde took Leon out to show him around the old grazier’s station, and shoot some rabbits.

‘No bugger can see us from the road,’ he explained, ‘place belongs to Colin, he was supposed to be rearing cows on it. Here we are.’ They’d come to a fallen tree, the only tree as far as Leon could tell, and Klyde had produced a sack of rotten oranges from his backpack. He started lining them up on the tree trunk.

‘Pretty unusual to get a fella on his own out here. Were you supposed to be on your way to something?’

‘Just getting a look at the country – never really seen much of it.’ He wondered if he would be asked to leave.

‘Working life, ay?’ said Klyde, agreeably, as if he himself were a keen businessman.

‘Easy to forget about it out here,’ Leon nodded to a fat pink sky. Klyde loaded and sighted his rifle, the tips of his fingers were black from engine grease. He lined up, taking his time and then he looked to Leon. ‘Mate, this is something close to heaven,’ Klyde said. And squeezed off a bullet which exploded an orange. The sweet smell of the orange came into the air. He handed the rifle to Leon.

‘It’s a pretty unusual place you’ve got here,’ Leon said in what he hoped was an even voice. The orange vibrated in the sights. It had been a long time. ‘Can’t thank you enough for helping me out.’ He shot the orange and it burst and he felt a deep well of satisfaction. When Klyde next spoke, taking his aim carefully, the log now wet from juice, his voice was tight but his words were slow. His tongue darted out of his beard, pink and quick to wet his lips.

‘This is where a man can just fuckin’ be his natural self.’ He shot and missed. He breathed in deep through his teeth and as he exhaled he shook his head, putting the gun down at his side. ‘There’s some of us, yourself included, I’m sure, have seen and borne witness to a number of terrible things. And as you’ll know, those things haunt a man.’ Klyde handed the gun across. Leon found his arms suddenly lacked the strength to lift it.

‘And at home everyone wants to act like we haven’t seen those things, or done those things. But we have, an’ that’s not a fair thing. It’s not.’ Klyde was watching the oranges and so Leon looked, too. ‘I got a friend stepped on a mine out there. We all heard the click. He stood still, an’ we all got round him with our ideas and shit. Tried holding it down with a bayonet, tried it from every angle, thought about tying a rope round his middle to pull him off, but we couldn’t have gone quicker than the blast, we knew that. Thought up ways all afternoon, meanwhile he’s stood there, sweating at twenty-one years old. So in the end he says to pile up his leg with rocks so the mine’ll only take off up to his calf, or maybe he’s lucky just his foot. An’ anyway he’s standing there crying and shouting, telling us all to get the fuck away and piss off and we all take cover and you can just hear him there on his own crying and swearing. Then the boy does it, and after the bang, after all the dirt comes down over us and there’s that smell, we scramble up to him and he’s white in the face and his whole leg’s off and the other foot, too. And he died. An’ I told everyone there, went round telling them if any bastard ever talked about it again I’d fucking shoot them in the face, no trouble.’ He turned and looked Leon in the eye. ‘No bugger’s looked after us.’

Leon lifted the gun and took aim again, but now his heart bounced his arms. ‘See,’ Klyde went on, ‘but here, we’re all in the same boat. I can tell you are, or else you wouldn’t come rambling through the desert alone and half smoked. This is the place a bloke can let loose.’ Klyde inhaled and sucked air through his teeth again. From the corner of his eye, Leon was aware of Klyde stretching out his arms at the sky. He pulled the trigger just to have taken his turn but the bullet still found its mark. Leon looked at the place the orange had been, surprised.

Klyde carried on loudly. ‘This place is man town. There’s no women, no children. It’s just us,’ he gestured to the blasted oranges like they were a field of daffodils, ‘and we can do what we want.’ Leon handed the gun back and saw that Klyde’s eyes were shining and wet.

No one asked him to stay, but no one seemed to expect him to go either, and it was comfortable. He slept deep black sleeps and nothing woke him but the morning. The days were spent hunting and talking and fixing things, even if it was just a hole in a bucket or a blocked pipe, there was some satisfaction in it that he hadn’t known before. Out the front of the house was a jungle of metal and scrap. You would pick up a piece, sit in the dirt with a drink and make things – a chair out of old fence and chicken wire, a bin out of insulated pipe. Sometimes useless things, a family of logs, each one with a different expression, wearing funnels and rusted colanders for hats, nails for eyes, scraps of oil-stained cloth for clothes. Leon cut a person out of a tin can, yellow with sharp fingernails, a ring pull for an empty head.

There was one called Colin, someone was called Grub and there was definitely someone called Jarred, but still, he was only ever able to recognize Klyde for certain. All of them wore wide beards and long hair and everyone swapped clothes. They all had a way of licking their lips with their hot little pink tongues that made it look like they were smelling the air. Every so often, a few of them would make off to the nearest shop. It was a day’s trip away, and the idea of going seemed dreadful. The idea of those naked beardless faces, of the chatter and the sidelong looks. Because the shop was a gas servo the food they came back with was of a type. A lot of chips, chocolate bars and beer. Sacks of cigarettes, coffee and a loaf of bread each to eat fresh. One evening someone turned up with a clutch of rabbits which were gutted and skinned, and roasted on a stick over the fire. Amongst the scrap and cigarette butts of the yard was the sound of low talking, the crack of beers being opened and the smell of burning rabbit hair.

There was an old mirror in the toilet, with most of the reflection taken out of it. The toilet itself wasn’t often used by anyone – you had to get water to pour it down, and it was a waste. Someone had chalked the word ‘Ladies’ on the door. Most of that sort of thing took place out behind the scrub and wattle, and it was a better set- up altogether than going in that dark and stinking room. But he went in there anyway because he remembered the mirror. He knew the beard was there, could feel it peeling its way through the skin of his face, but it was still a shock. It was long rather than wide because he hadn’t shaped it like the rest of the men. It hadn’t grown so long that it got in his way yet, but it was still long, and parts of it were white. He hadn’t expected it and he sat on the loo seat for a moment to take in the time that had passed. His eyes were lost underneath his eyebrows which had gone feral, his shoulders were like cow skin and lean, just the sinew showing. His lips were blood-bitten and dark and, just like the rest of the men when he licked his lips, his tongue was surprisingly pink and very quick.

Out in a dry field close to midnight Leon felt the pull of home like a bite on a reel. He was drunk, had spent the afternoon drinking and shooting cans with Colin/Jarred, had even joined in at lazily trying to pick off a chook. The chook was having none of it, and had simply walked off around the back of the house and sat smugly in front of the diesel barrel.

The plan had hatched when night had fallen and the last of the potato chips had been snaffled between them. The idea of rabbits again made Klyde fart dirtily in disgust. Red meat was what was called for. They piled into the back of a ute and hooned off into the desert, Klyde now and again switching off the headlights, setting them adrift in the cold black air. Leon imagined he was near the sea and that the bellows and grindings of the truck and its passengers were the sounds of water attacking the land, and the high yells of the men were seagulls and plovers.

When they came to a stop they had come up alongside a fence. The headlights were switched on and Leon could make out the dense square of a cow, her eyes round and green and glowing.

A quiet came over the truck, like small boys looking through a window at a girl changing, they hushed each other, nudged and crowded around Klyde, who held the gun.

Another cow, smaller, presumably the cow’s calf came to stare at the headlights. They wouldn’t shoot a cow with its calf. Those were hunting rules. Give the young a chance. Leon carried on thinking this, as Klyde hopped off the ute, levelling his gun at the cow, thinking this is a joke, he’s pissing about, watching because he was certain it would stop, watching Klyde walk towards the animal, aiming as he went, watching the light of the cow eye glow, the flickering of her worried ears, her raised eyebrows, the safety clicked off.

The cow’s child gave a soft low moo and before the moo had ended, a shot rang out and the small cow leapt all feet off the ground, its tail straight out, and hurtled off into the darkness, calling raggedly. The mother cow let out a honk, like the noise you would make if someone struck you in the chest with a cannon ball, and she fell over sideways, her four legs splayed out as she dropped, her head still looking up and towards her murderers. The ground shook with another shot and then another and the cow didn’t look up anymore, but her great belly sank into itself, and her hind legs twitched.

Other cows lowed in the dark, feet trampled away from the noise, and above it all Leon could hear the husky cry of that small cow that had stood by her.

The butchering only took ten minutes. Leon stayed in the back of the truck as Colin/Jarred cut out enough for a steak each, and the cow still bled heavily and the hands of her butcherer were black in the night, and steaming. The sound of the sea rose again in the voices of the men and they whooped and some drew patterns on their faces with blood and danced a caroboree around the carcass.

Leon thought about the sound of shop bells, the girls and their lips. The hack and cough of cars in the high street. The closeness of water, the heavy rain in the streets. The light of night-time and the distant sound of music.

He kept his eyes closed on the drive back to the station, listening to the dark, and when they arrived back at the house, and when the meat was thrown on the fire, and when it clenched up and shrunk, toughening in the flames and the smell was of hot grass-fed fat, he kept still so that his thoughts wouldn’t touch the edges of his body. In the morning before he was sober, and before anyone was awake, he swung his sleeping roll into the back of his old brown car and drove thirty-three hours to Sydney, only stopping to refuel.

Every two weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The first in our series – ‘Sign of the Gun’. Read an interview with P.D. Mallamo here.

1.
He buys a thrice-wrecked Maule in Alaska after his second season in the business, a brown-and-white STOL tail-dragger that doesn’t look like much but gets off the ground in 200 feet. He sells his truck and most of his things, stuffs the rest into the airplane and leaves Georgia forever.

2.
With a new set of topos he scouts north-west New Mexico for a week before he sees his spot, an abandoned airstrip with a wobbly hangar on the lip of a deep canyon just off the Navajo reservation. He wonders at its purpose all those years ago, the runway so short and close to the canyon’s edge it may have been for helicopters instead of fixed-wing. Now sage grows through the pavement and tumbleweed piles against the west side of the shed. The desert is full of old strips. For his purpose this is the best.

The maps indicate springs nearby. A self-published guidebook written by a hippy explorer forty years earlier says they are good springs. In a thousand square miles he’s seen nobody and figures he is alone.

3.
His back story, if he needs one, involves aerial mapping for the United Nations Cultural Agency. Uncharted Anasazi settlements detectable only from the air are scattered widely across the long red waste.

In truth he is a grower of high-grade marijuana for certain young lawyers in New York City who prefer organic, sun-grown bud, preferably from a desert with a whiff of Castaneda. He’ll call his crop Verse of Eden and should anyone care to read the fine print on the packaging he’ll describe it as That Which the Lord in His Infinite Wisdom Hath Brought Forth for the Joy and Benefit of Mankind. Like the prophets of old the desert makes his plant purer and stronger, altogether unlike that grown in the feeble artifice of civilization.

4.
You are going to be lonely for a while, he says to himself at six p.m. on a Thursday and orbits the field three times before dropping in like he’s crashing, just beyond the edge of the canyon he’ll fall back into when he takes off again. He stops abruptly before a dilapidated hangar, cuts the engine, opens the door. Footsteps absurdly loud in the deep silence, he walks through the ruined old building, returns to the plane for a pair of leather gloves and commences rearranging.

The plane barely fits, with all the falling-down junk inside. He jockeys it in with a hand winch and goddamnit. He figures the shed has weathered many big winds so he’s not too concerned with structural integrity, but just in case shores up two pillars with four-bys and wire he finds on the ground. He plugs the engine where it needs plugging and covers from prop to wings with a waterproof tarp cinched tight at the bottom but cut for the doors. He lowers a light dirt bike, fuel and oil, provisions and grower supplies from the packed-tight fuselage and passenger side, jacks up the rear of the craft to make it level, removes the passenger seat, lays his bed out, then, further back, checks the germination of his seed in the damp folds of the bluetowels.

5.
Evening. In the cockpit he listens to an AM station from Virginia, a right-wing screamer deifying American power in Iraq, but it is obvious that conditions at the front are not good. The USA is ruled by fools, he thinks, big red-faced Anglo-Saxon fools who know even less than me. All that blood and money. Por nada. And they call me a criminal.

The violet horizon swarms with silent bats, twittering nightbirds. Rain will come in a month or two, he figures, and release the deep scents of desert sage, chamisa, juniper. He stands with his face to a sun well-dropped below the glowing rim of the world and imagines what day is left in San Francisco, the day ahead in Singapore; sees slender, coal-haired Chinese women in summer dresses stroll leafy boulevards.

6.
He is up before dawn, takes three protein bars from a big bag of protein bars, an apple, a package of buffalo jerky and a gallon of water with a water-soluble vitamin pack, stuffs everything in his saddlebags, and heads off on the bike. He’s marked six spots on the maps and three more in the old hippy guide which he almost didn’t buy years earlier from a sidewalk bin outside a new-and-used bookseller owned by two lesbians named Sam and Amos in Nashville up near Vanderbilt University.

He seeks a sweetwater spring near a plot of land he can fertilize with composted guano and chicken litter and irrigate with a small pump and several hundred feet of black plastic tubing. The sun and shade must be right, and it is also a good thing if the plot is protected from at least two sides or near some trees that might provide a bit of camouflage.

7.
By nightfall he’s found three sandy seeps, all good water with animal tracks, plus one hotspring he can bathe in and, if necessary, drink. None is closer than three miles from the airplane. He can plant one site each day. He arranges his translucent growtubes, sacks of fertilizer, solar panels and pumps on the back of his bike, which he loads up like a Shanghai poultryman. He pulls his .41 from beneath its hiding place in the cockpit, an odd calibre that suits him. He spins the cylinder, buttons it up and stores the canvas holster and a box of ammunition next to the protein bars in the saddlebag.

8.
He figures to sink a single line of tubes against low cliffs in two spots, and parallel with a raggedy treeline in another. The first cliff is etched with figures from that lost tribe whose dwellings he ostensibly seeks. This is good medicine, he knows, a provident omen in the great bare desert, these stretched spectral creatures presiding over his illicit labours. Who knows what they did here? Whatever it was, no doubt it wasn’t illegal. He samples soil here and there, then digs a heap of fine sandy loam from the side of the wash and carefully mixes in the right proportions of guano. By his calculations 160 feet of cliffline provide optimum light and cover, so he marks his spots, somewhat above the floodline and, donning latex gloves to prevent leaving fingerprints, lays out tubes and stretches his thin black waterlines, which he buries three inches under the sand.

He digs the seep at scrapings animals have made and lines it with rocks to create a lasting depression. This slowly fills with cloudy water, then runs off in a channel he has likewise formed from stone. When the water clears he samples a cup, literally betting his ass against giardia, and finds it candy-sweet. Bingo, he thinks. I have hit the mother lode. He sets his pump, solar panel and timer.

9.
For three days he carefully plants and waters each tiny sprout, five to a laterally expandable tube of clear plastic that will increase in diameter as the seedlings grow. The soil and nutrients are rich enough to sustain all of them; in the event that one or more do not survive or must be culled, there’s always a backup which will grow bigger and faster, though not yield quite as much as the multiples. The tubes will protect the plants until they’re mature and by then he figures to have the desert and its challenges well read.

10.
In eight weeks the plants are high and thriving, bursting from their tubes. There are no bugs, the rodents can’t reach that high, no sign of deer, hot sun, perfect water. He has only run off the trail twice with minor injuries. He’s finished five difficult books and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series, a sheaf of crossword puzzles, hung a hammock from a strut and a beam, three times cleaned the plane snout to heel, target-shot through ten boxes of 210 grain .41 magnum loads, cooked many a tasty little quail he trapped at the springs, done thousands of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, tanned himself golden, found a midnight jazz station from Chicago.

Things are going well.

He decides it’s time for a trip to town.

11.
There is a little rut that follows the edge of the canyon south-west for six miles until it dips sharply left into an arroyo barely wide enough for a Jeep and winds its way steeply to a narrow log bridge at the bottom of the gorge and then up the other side. Once every two or three years a flash flood washes out the bridge and the tribe takes another two or three years to replace it, so the period during which it is serviceable is utterly unpredictable. From the canyon the road shoots east a few degrees off perpendicular on the other side and eventually connects with a maintained gravel road, which connects with a less maintained paved road, which eventually connects with a blue highway that bisects a few lonesome little pueblos. All are occasionally crossed here and there, usually at right angles, by other roads to nowhere.

He’s lucky: the bridge is up. Water runs clear and cold beneath it. He stops and wades around a little, chases a school of silver minnows through brief shallows, watches an eagle meander a hundred feet above, tipping its broad wings this way and that in a spirally rising thermal. He takes a spartan lunch in the cool shadow of riverside trees, then dries his feet and ascends the other side.

12.
In Gusano, New Mexico, just off the rez there is a gas station attached to a tiny grocery store. This is on the blue road. On the others he sees nothing, not a hogan. Only the road, a busted-down fence and beer cans attest to the presence somewhere of somebody. The proprietor is a little brown man he takes to be Mexican or Latin American, but he doesn’t respond to Spanish or English. On the wall he sees a flag he can’t identify and points to it. Sri Lanka, says the man, and smiles proudly. In small rooms behind the counter he hears children, and in a moment the man’s beaming wife walks out, swathed in a sari of luminous red cloth. An old woman, similarly clad but in iridescent blue, follows after her and brings him a cup of green tea with mint leaves in a white bone china cup with saucer. He thanks her and sits on a fruit crate in the middle of the floor and sips the tea as an overhead fan creaks and rocks. Cool air from an AC unit in the bedroom swirls around his feet and when he finishes the tea and attempts to stand the old woman reappears and, still smiling, pours him another cup and hands him a cookie in a napkin. An hour and a half later he’s purchased far more than he requires and, with their assistance and two thick black plastic trash sacks, lashes it all somehow to the bike. He fills his tank with premium gas. The store contains no alcohol, an anomaly for any establishment this close to a rez, and he figures they’re Muslims just scraping by. How they got way out here he can’t imagine and can’t ask. He gives the children twenty dollars each, shakes the man’s hand, waves to the waving women and turns back the way he came.

13.
He is speeding on the gravel road and almost runs first into a woman standing in the middle of it out of sight at the top of a rise, then, when he swerves, into her car which is burning on the shoulder somewhat further on. An old pickup without a tailgate is stopped sixty yards past the conflagration and he can see two heads backlit in the westerly sun craning around to look at the woman and himself.

They did something to it, she says as he slows and circles around to where she stands. I stopped at a station a hundred miles back and used the ladies room and that’s when they did it. Now I guess they can do what they want. My cell doesn’t work out here and I don’t have a gun.

She had gotten out with only her purse and hat and stands with one hand on her head and the other on her hip as the car burns to the ground. You’d better move back, he says. The tank will blow.

It’s already blown, she says. There was my suitcase and three boxes in there. She drops her purse, throws her hands up and steps back two or three paces, then rests her hands on the top of her head and watches it burn. He looks up the road to the truck. One of the men has climbed into the bed, then clambers up on the roof of the cab where he shields his eyes with his hands and looks east and west along the stretch of road. He sees the man lean and hears him say, Go to the other, then the driver’s door opens and the driver steps out and pulls a long gun from behind the seat. When he sees him check the chamber he reaches slowly to the saddlebag where he keeps the .41, tells the woman, Run, and crouches behind the bike as the man strides quickly toward them and shoots. He figures from the blast it’s a 12-gauge; a swarm of pellets tears into the chips, sodas, cookies, eggs, milk, sausage and orange juice that hang from the sack on the bike.

The man shoots again and he hears the woman cry out, sees her fall and pick herself up. He peers through the cooling vanes of his motor and waits until the shooter is twenty yards away before raising the magnum over the seat and touching off two deafening rounds. One strikes the man squarely in the belly and the shotgun flies from his hands. He rises to brace himself against the cycle, cocks the hammer and, with hand on hip like an old-time target shooter, takes aim at the other, now quickly descending the roof of the truck. With one shot he knocks him backward in the bed, then hears the liquid wallop of the blossoming hollowpoint. The woman stops and turns. He walks to the first man, who is crawling, and kicks him on to his back and despite his outstretched hands shoots him twice through the face. Bloody vapour explodes from the man’s shattered head and levitates briefly in the slanting sunlight. The woman falls to her knees as he walks to the second who is sitting in the bed of the pickup holding his stomach and screaming, No, buddy, no and shoots him like the first. The blasts echo and die across the shining red desert as she buries her face in her hands and prays, Jesus Lord in Heaven, Dear Lord Jesus, see this, see this.

14.
He thinks hard to not automatically eject the spent brass on the ground and reload. He walks back to the bike where he sets the revolver on the seat and works his way noiselessly to the woman who is sitting on the dirt with her arms around her knees facing away. Blood seeps from a dozen small holes in her back and her white blouse is red through and through. If he’s going to kill her he’ll either have to reload or do it with his blade, but even as he pulls it from a sheath on his calf he knows he can’t. Her long tawny hair has fallen from the keep on her head and the wind is blowing it around her neck. She shakes visibly and does not raise her eyes to look at him when he steps into her field of vision.

He walks back to the bike and considers his options. There are only two, the first of which he has eliminated.

So he stands her up and steadies her, then turns her around and lifts her blouse. A few pellets are visible just under the skin. He pushes one out and holds it in his palm. Number four, he thinks. Duck load.

Can you walk, he asks? Sure I can, she says, but what for, why don’t you just kill me right here? He half carries her over to the bike, hands her the .41 and says, If it makes you feel better, you can keep this with you.

15.
Except for a few packages of Fig Newtons, a three-week-old Sunday New York Times the Sri Lankans fished from their gas-pump trash can after a German tourist threw it away, some toothpaste and floss, two loaves of bread, mouthwash, new socks, four cans of spam, tomatoes, a sack of potatoes, salsa and a glass bottle of Italian mineral water that are all in another trash bag on the lee side of the bike and hence unpunctured, he throws everything he bought at the little store on to the car fire, then walks out to the pickup. There is, as he hoped, a chain in the bed. He drives to the dead man on the ground, removes his wallet, checks for exit wounds, pulls and hoists him like simple meat into the bed; he takes the other’s wallet and checks him for wounds, too. He tracks both later rounds through either the glass of the cab or wall of the truck bed and, satisfied that they are far out on the desert, backs up to the smouldering wreck. He hooks the chain to the hitch, then wraps it around the front of the red-hot frame and jerks the wreck across thirty yards of desert, down a ravine where both truck and wreck drop completely from sight. He walks back to the road, gathers the odd identifying litter this-and-that, and takes it all to the truck where he throws it into the cab. He remembers the shotgun out on the ground where the first man dropped it and tosses it into the cab with the rest. He backs the truck over the wreck as far as he can and waits a few minutes until it catches fire, too.

16.
She’s leaning against the bike and hands him his gun. It’s empty, she says, what good is it? She’s pale as the dead and just holding on. He makes her drink a little water, then shifts the saddlebags and surviving trash sack and sets her on the seat. Both of them reek of blood. Hang on tight and tell me before you puke, he says. He starts off slowly, but they are losing light and still have to negotiate the canyon. By the time they labour up the other side she’s vomited twice and the sky is falling upward from cobalt to indigo to luminous obsidian. When they reach the Maule he can see the ghost of the Milky Way.

17.
This is my airplane, he says. She stands in shaky wonderment at what the single headlight reveals. He finds his medical kit and a small gas lantern, sits her down on an empty five-gallon fuel can, gingerly removes her blood-soaked blouse, bra and another garment he can’t identify, and goes to work on her back. Two hours later she is lead-free, disinfected, bandaged, wearing one of his T-shirts, well drugged with two Percocets from a bottle he took from his addict brother years before, and unconscious in the cool belly of the Maule. He digs a pit, burns their now-dry bloody clothing with the help of a cup of gas, throws a few big rocks on the ashes and fills it in. A fresh desert breeze rocks the hammock and he’s sure he won’t sleep, then sleeps to the chanting of coyotes running from a dawn still half a hemisphere away.

18.
At half past ten an F-16 flying contour 300 feet above the earth smashes the air directly over them and she tumbles screaming from the Maule.

White people! he hollers, then tries to orient himself in time and space after a dream about women with tiny heads driving cars. When the roaring stops she stands and wobbles and says to nobody in particular, I would rather be dead than violated.

He laughs and says, My daddy’s a fool preacher. Momma weighs much as a horse and can’t stop eating. I’m never going to see them again.

I’m a Mormon, she says next, as if he is wondering. That was the article of clothing you removed beneath my blouse. Where did you put it?

I burned the clothes. Mine too.

Now what do I do? she asks.

Keep the shirt, I guess.

She sits on the fuel can and he says, I’ll show you what to eat. I lost the good stuff with your two stupid assholes out there.

My God, she says, shaking her head and holding it in her two hands. My God. Where am I?

He shrugs.

What do you do out here? she asks, looking around.

I’m an archaeologist.

She laughs immediately and slowly stands. And I’m Hillary Clinton. Nice to meet you, Indiana. She laughs again. Where’s the farm? My husband’s a sheriff. And I’m not stupid.

19.
She staggers back to the airplane and fishes around inside for her purse. Where’s my cellphone?

I took it.

Why?

You’re kidding.

She weaves back to her can and sits down. What are you going to do with me?

Jesus Christ, he says. You’re welcome.

20.
He makes her drink a cup of water mixed with pack of powdered vitamins, then leads her around the hangar where he’s dug a slit latrine. I’ll check in five minutes, he says. She walks back on her own and he leads her to the plane, helps her up and straightens the bed. Go to sleep, he says. Do you want another pill? She shakes her head and he leaves her alone.

21.
At dusk he rouses her. He gets a towel and clean clothes he’s saved in a box against the parachute, takes his medical kit and sets her on the bike. They wind along a narrow trail for twenty-five minutes, then turn and drop through boulders big as a house. He stops at the side of a sandy wash, takes her hand and leads her, still groggy, to the base of a high sandstone incline where a steaming pool hisses in the shadows. I scooped this out myself, he says. The bottom’s gravelly and over there it’s about three feet deep. It’s hot and there’s sulphur in it. I want you to lay in it for half an hour. Take your clothes off and wash them out. Here’s clean ones. Drink a little of the sulphur water. It’s good for you. He lifts her shirt and peels off each small round Band-Aid. Here’s a flashlight, he says. I’ll be back in an hour or two.

22.
In the dark he picks his way to the pool and calls. I’m here, she says, and flicks the flashlight on and off. He finds her sitting on a rock with the towel around her head staring at the galaxy turning gigantically above them, brilliant and indifferent as if it were itself the mind of God. He sits beside her and the light of a billion lost suns pours through their eyes and over their heads and shoulders and into the clear steaming waters of the hot spring. Can you hear the stars? she asks in the darkness. Can you hear them?

Since I was little.

Nothing we do is miraculous, she says. Look at this!

23.
I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it, he says in the dark as he dries from his bath. Keep that in mind. This is a bad business I’m in. That’s why I’m by myself way out here. Then I run into your two fools. Some goddamned luck. Now you. I couldn’t dream this up.

Mormons don’t believe in adultery, she replies. We regulate sex. We regulate it all over the place.

Where did that come from? he asks.

Sex and killing are the same to us. Sometimes sex is worse.

He laughs and says, You might reconsider after what you’ve seen.

***

What about the kids? she asks. The ones who smoke your dope. Do you ever think about them?

There aren’t any. It costs five hundred bucks a jot.

Then who buys it?

Legal professionals in Manhattan.

That’s a good one, she says. You must have quite a reputation.

A small circle. It’s good dope. Free-range, he laughs. You’re a Mormon and sheriff’s wife, so when it comes to understanding something like this you’re as close to an idiot as it gets.

She laughs too and says, Maybe that’s just as well.

Nothing but this, in case you’re wondering – no crank, no chiva, no pills – nothing but weed.

I feel better already, she says, and he laughs again.

24.
You can’t always judge your life by what’s worse, he says. Sometimes there’s no frame of reference at all. For instance you can’t say, No matter what my life is like, I should be grateful because I could have no legs like him over there. I should just shut up and be grateful, especially for my legs. I don’t think like that. My family was bad. My luck was bad. Now my business is bad. That’s the way it is. I didn’t choose it. You can turn it this way and that in your head, you can symbolize it all you want, but it’s still what it is.

25.
She asks if he’s ever read the Book of Mormon. No, he says, but on the other hand why bother? He’s read enough archaeology to know it’s bullshit top to bottom, there weren’t any Jews in Guatemala. She says that some things you know by other means. He replies that lots of people in other religions know things by such other means too, but so what, do we worship the elephant god like them? She says there’s a powerful thing, the Witness of the Spirit, and once you experience it you are never the same. He replies that those two men out there had a witness, too. She says she is very tired and can she please go to sleep now.

26.
He takes the flashlight from her and says, Let me see your back. He opens his medicine kit and takes out a small tube of Neosporin, then lifts her new shirt, which is showing a little blood here and there. He daubs the ointment on each small hole and Band-Aids the wounds that are seeping. He sees no sign of infection.

27.
In the morning he opens his eyes to find her standing next to the hammock. She’s resting a two-by-four on her right shoulder but grips it with only one hand. She appears to have been standing there for a while. I changed my mind, she says. God loves you. I owe you my life. I won’t betray you. I give you my word.

28.
He takes her back to the hotspring on his way to the farm. Before they leave he hands her the cellphone. She tries it here and there on the way and finally connects with one of her children at home and talks for five minutes.

Turn if off, he says when she’s done. There’s no charge for your battery out here.

29.
So what the hell are you doing all by yourself?

I’m an audiologist, she says. In the summer I go from settlement to settlement and test the Indian kids. I forgot my gun and it was too far to go back. I’ve never had a problem until now. I’ve been doing this for years.

30.
I learned to fly in the army, he says. When I got back they sent me to Fort Hood. There was a little college and flight school right next to it. The army pays for everything and I think, Why not? I got a commercial licence and when my time was up I learned crop dusting. Then I damn near died with the sprays, allergic or something, I don’t know. I couldn’t get medical because I’d signed a waiver – don’t come crying if this bad shit makes you sick. I could barely stand. A naturopath cleaned me up and turned me on to weed for pain. I said hell, this is good, make your own. I save money for bail and skipping if worse comes to worse, but I never been caught. Tried the swamps down south, but so does everybody and crowding leads to fights. I love the desert. It’s open and quiet except for the fucking air force, but that’s every other month most likely. I bought the Maule in Alaska after two big crops. The guy wrecked it and fixed it and wrecked it and fixed it. I helped him fix it the third wreck, so I know it top to bottom. He gave me a good deal and anyway with that history nobody else would touch it, for jinx if nothing else. We got rapport, my girl and me. She’s finally got a man who cares.

31.
I had electroconvulsive therapy when I was in college, she says. BYU. A room-mate from California took me up to a hospital in Salt Lake and they did it outpatient. I’ve never told anyone, not even my husband. My parents never found out. I got so depressed I tried to kill myself. Why was I living? She shrugged and held out her palms. Just so I could do what everybody else does, have kids and die? What’s the point? But I made it through college and went on a church mission to Portugal. It seemed to disappear over there. Then I came back and got married and had kids, of course. I hope this doesn’t push me over.

You and a dope dealer at the spa, he says. Vacation.

How long will I be here?

Till the crop comes in, he says. Twelve days.

32.
Her name is September; she has a sheriff husband, two kids and lives in Spanish Fork, Utah.

I’ve not heard that as a name before, he says. September. I like it.

She pulls an Oprah magazine from her big battered purse and sits down to read. Hoary Oprah herself is on the cover, airbrushed again to look like a June bride. She never gets any older, he laughs. If anything it’s going the other way. He looks over her shoulder as she turns the pages and says, The next new shoe women can’t walk in either. Explain that to me.

Women dress for women, she says. Men are too stupid to notice one way or the other. After you’re married, the important men are all homosexual anyway. My brother, for instance.

I like fashion, he says, least as much as I’ve seen. After I sold my first good load in New York I found out I was a city boy. I stayed for a month and did everything, even the shops on Park Avenue. I had some money. I blew it all. One of these days I’ll go with a woman who knows her way around.

33.
This is the library, he says, taking a small box of books from the airplane. At least part of it. You want my recommendations? Sure, she says. He holds up The Rainbow Stories by Vollman, Our Kind by Harris, The Cold Six Thousand by Elroy, The Bushwacked Piano by McGuane, and Che Guevara (My hero, he says) by Jon Lee Anderson.

He hands her The Rainbow Stories. Here, he says, take it. Put it in your purse. He winks. Might even lift a print or two. He finds a pen and signs the title page: To September from Joshua. Remember me.

***

There’s a dictionary in here, too, he says. Primogeniture. Sacerdotalism. He smiles at her. Do you know them?

I do not. You’ve got me there.

What does the old man read?

Elk magazines and police reports. The scriptures.

What do you talk about?

She pauses for a moment. Kids. Work. I’d have to think about that.

34.
Besides the gay brother and three straight brothers, she has a sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws galore. Essentially he has nobody.

Don’t you get lonely? she asks.

You learn how to be by yourself, he says. I don’t want to do this forever, but it’s all right for now. I got my teeth fixed and whitened a couple years ago. I thought it would make a big difference with my confidence. But you watch your parents, don’t you, and do what they did until you think your way out of it. My parents hate themselves. We learn those things. Did you have good parents?

Not perfect but always there. They tried. Most parents in my church are like that. It’s what we believe.

You tried to kill yourself.

I grew up.

Jesus Christ Himself could come around now and it wouldn’t make any difference at all, he says. My brother and sisters? Good God, woman you can’t imagine, you can’t in a million years imagine what their lives are like. Maybe Jesus isn’t just for Mormons, but we’re coming up on your system way too late for anyone in my tribe.

35.
Daddy preached the old-timey stuff, he says while he cleans the .41. Old Testament. He could work momma and the others up like singing hounds or clapping so hard you wonder they don’t break their hands. He beat everybody. He beat the fucking dog. The only thing he didn’t do was strychnine and rattlesnakes. Too bad. He should have.

He holds up the gleaming revolver. Flame and shadow play along the barrel as he hefts and twists it in the firelight. Misters Smith and Wesson here have solved many a problem, he says. For me and others. The big guns make one hell of a mess, go right through or disintegrate inside so there’s no round to trace. You understand that, I bet.

Did you kill your parents?

What a question, he says.

Well, did you?

What for? They’re killing themselves. I wouldn’t dirty my hands. He holsters the gun, snaps the dust flap over the grip and says, Man carry his rags and bundles around Salt Lake, you don’t know him from Adam, only you got to keep the kids away. But I do, I know where he’s from. I been there, too. I know what the old man did to him and the rest. If not for a naturopath in Georgia I’d be on the street myself.

***

No one knows but me and my parents, she says. I’m sorry. Another true confession. Why do we tell these things to strangers? My little brother killed himself. Everybody thinks it was an accident. My parents knew he was gay and tried to fix him – blessings, therapy, special summer camp. Everything. He got the message. In my culture that’s too much for some of them. They leave the church or kill themselves. My parents carry a heavy weight. He was smarter than anybody. Funny, too. He could see right to the middle of things. I don’t know how, but he could. Everything except himself.

That’s all of us.

He didn’t have to do it, she says. Across the fire he sees her eyes fill with tears. He could have moved. Gotten out of Utah. He’d still be alive. New York City maybe.

That’s right, he says. He’d of been right at home. It’s a different place. A lot like the desert. He stares into the flames. That’s a damn shame, he says. A damn shame. I’d have taken him there myself.

36.
He shows her how poor boys take care of bright, new teeth. I might not be able to see a dentist for a long time, he says. Here’s the program: Get some good toothpaste with fluoride and whitener. First you brush. Spit but don’t rinse. Then you floss. Then you put the toothpaste on a little prophy brush and run it between every tooth down to the gumline. Spit but don’t rinse. That’s the thing. Leave the toothpaste on your teeth all night so the fluoride and whitener work. I don’t have any cavities and I haven’t seen a dentist for years. I never know when I can see the doctor, either. I don’t smoke and I take vitamins. My brother and sisters, they don’t give a damn. Do whatever they want. Sick or hurt all the time, don’t give a shit one way or the other. I’ll have me some funerals to pay for soon. There’s no one else to do it. Life is no great secret, you know. Some choose to go on, some don’t. A few are in between, like priests and addicts. They don’t know if they’re dead or alive.

***

She fishes around inside her big purse and comes up with a thin slip of plastic and paper. Okay beautiful, she says, let’s give this a try. Wash your face with soap, rinse, leave the skin wet. He does so, and she applies the strip over his nose. When it dries she peels it off and shows him the dirt it’s drawn from his pores. It’s for women, she says, but your secret’s safe with me.

He examines the strip closely. The naturopath candled my ears once, he says. He pulled out everything from earwax to dead gnats. I was impressed. I wish they had something like that for the brain.

***

You want something to eat? he asks.

She looks up and smiles at him. I trust you, she says. I’d trust you with my children.

37.
Rain all night. Sharp scents and heady fragrances saturate the desert, sage fusions of soil and plant that are singular every time. She rides with him on his rounds, arms tightly around his waist unselfconsciously, face against his back. She inspects the farms close up: Now I know what to look for, she laughs. That’s quite an operation. She calls a reservation school on her cell, speaks for a moment, disconnects and says, Indian Way: They don’t care if I show up or not. He’s brought the revolver, a package of earplugs, some cans. They shoot through two boxes and she can hit, holding the heavy pistol with two hands in combat stance. I’m a lawman’s wife, she says. What do you expect? Now’s your chance, he laughs and jerks up his hands. On the dirt, dirtbag! she yells, but points the pistol over his head. Then the joke is over, and when she reloads she examines the weapon closely. You executed those men, she says. Was that for me or you? That was for them, he replies. Those old boys had already gambled – once for your backside, once for your front, once to see who cuts your throat. They had become devils. It’s why I shot off their faces. That way the devil’s gone for good.

***

Later he remembers the wallets and they go through them slowly, she quietly pointing out this and that. One is attached to a chain, and both are thick with papers: driver’s licences from Wyoming and Colorado – two hard men with dire histories and uncertain futures; forty-one dollars, cards for six different roofing companies, a couple photos of spread-eagled women, children they take to be nieces or nephews, a ribbed, strawberry-flavoured condom, fake confederate money, a single-edged razor blade still in its little cardboard sheath, a handcuff key, calling card, debit card, a five-yuan note from the People’s Republic of China. One has a little certificate from the Universal Life Church indicating that the bearer so designated is officially a clergyman. This makes them look at each other and laugh. When he builds a pit fire against the damp evening chill he burns everything but the money, which, while she sleeps, he stuffs into her purse along with several hundreds of his own.

38.
What do you need? he asks. I’m going to town. What town? she asks. He tells her about the Sri Lankans and their fine green tea, then tucks her list in his pocket. She takes Our Kind to the hammock and settles in.

He finds where he found her on the gravel road and circles around to the burned-down vehicles. Storms have washed clean the ground, and half-buried the wrecks in silt at the bottom of the sandy draw. They look like they’ve been there half a century. Coyotes have carried away the charred carcasses; nothing remains. At least those men were good for something, he thinks, if only food for the little dogs.

He marvels that all the destruction he had wrought is melting into the fine ochre sand like so much mother’s milk; that all of it, blood, flesh and splintered bone, now nourish the insects and plants that constitute the sweet matrix of life. Even the wrecks, once blackened and raw, now rust and settle in their graves as no more than tranquil memorials to his small undetectable holocaust.

39.
The Sri Lankans greet him like a brother or a son and this time insist he eat with them, an aromatic supper of eggplant curry and lentils. He asks to use the bathroom, locks himself in and weeps silently. He washes his face and hands, and when he emerges the wife, with poignant expression, touches his eyes. He says Dust Dust, then motions with his hands to indicate the rolling tyres of his bike.

When they finish the women rub his hands and feet with oil, then hug him and say soft words he cannot understand. They will take no money for his shopping, but he folds 300 dollars in a child’s shirt pocket, kisses them all, even the man, and spins slowly back to the canyon.

40.
The first man I killed raped my sister, he says. The Mormon Woman and Sheriff’s Wife sits in a folding canvas chair the Sri Lankans have given him. She shakes her head, laughs, covers her face with her hands.

I know, he says, like a goddamned comic book, unbelievable – but at the lower end of things in Georgia that’s how it is for everybody, not just us. But wait, wait – he holds a hand up – here’s the rest of it: Killing him didn’t do any good! She actually married the man’s brother, a wife-beater, and one day she stabbed him in the liver. He bled to death and she did five years.

***

Do you smoke it? she asked.

Sometimes. Not very often. I can’t fly and smoke it. I fly mostly at night so I have to stay sharp.

So what do you do?

Whisky, he says, and smiles. Only once in a while. I guess it’s in the blood.

***

Now they walk the crumbling runway. She kicks rocks to the side, he chops weeds and trees. She calls her husband and lies innocently, laughing and chatting like she’s just around the corner. How beautiful she is, he thinks, how much younger than the day I found her. She is so different from the coarse, unhappy women he has known. She hangs up, turns the phone off, slides it into a pocket. A breeze swirls her hair. She gathers it in her hands, twists and pins it with a splinter she’s carved smooth to the top of her head. They walk to the very edge of the canyon. He would stroke the pale skin of her neck and throat, but knows he must not. You can hear silence for a hundred miles, she says, turning her hazel eyes upon him. Sunlight pulses above the great shadowy depths, and a whisper rises from below, verdant and cool. A hawk appears from nowhere and floats silently just beyond the rim of the gorge. I can’t hear the river, she says. I can smell it but I can’t hear a thing.

41.
After harvesting more or less non-stop for two days he finishes loading the rough cut at two a.m., and together they push the plane out into the warm, starry night. He will leave her off at the small airport in Durango and fill his tanks. He has stowed the dirt bike, leftover fuel and provisions high up in a rickety loft at the rear of the hangar. You never know, he says, though of course they do. He would burn the hangar if the sky was overcast and close.

He shovels in the latrine and builds a small pit fire just inside the hangar. They burn garbage and anything else not part of the structure or the natural world. After a pilot’s walk-around with the flashlight, he says, Let’s go. We’re heavy. We’ll drop like hell into the canyon, but don’t you worry. Baby’s gonna pull us right on out the other side.

He does another walk-around and two run-ups just to make sure, then flicks on the lights and points her to the chasm. Ready? She nods her head, and he shoves the throttle full forward. Laughing and yelling they charge down the runway and plunge into the inky abyss.

42.
As they fall she closes her eyes and sees the metropolis, a broad crowded sidewalk on an avenue of trees. A man and woman pushing a baby stroller pass her in the multitude. She sees him turn, sees him raise himself on his toes to find her, sees him smile, sees him lift high his steady right hand and, before vanishing forever, make the sign of the gun.