November 2 - I dreamed you were dead

“I dreamed you were dead,” Grace said, letting out a soft sigh of relief when she rolled over and saw that Gary was still lying next to her in bed, clad in only his skin just as he had been when they went to bed the night before, his chest still rising and falling with even breath. She curled her body against his, aligning ankles to ankles, knees to knees, groin to groin, her nipples squishing into his back. Gary turned to look at his wife and reached back one hand to ruffle her hair playfully.

“What a silly thing to dream,” he chided gently. “Of course I’m not dead.”

“Of course.” Grace didn’t say it with the confidence that Gary possessed. She watched as he stood from the bed, stretching naked in the pale morning light as though the winter cold didn’t affect him, and found comfort in the normal noises of his morning routine – the hot water turned on and set to steam up the bathroom while he shaved, the sound of his toothbrush against the sink as he tapped off the excess water, the coffee maker in the kitchen giving a ding to signal that his cup had brewed. She made herself breathe normally at the familiar sounds. It was a normal day, with a normal routine, and of course Gary would make it home safe.

She was staring so intently at the steam rising from the tea kettle that she didn’t hear him come up behind her. She gave a start of surprise. Gary shook his head, half-mocking her tension, and kissed her forehead before starting for the door.

“Hey,” she called to his back. “Just promise me you’ll be careful out there today.” Gary saw the urgency in Grace’s face, so he nodded sincerely.

Gary wasn’t too troubled because he was used to these unfounded worries in his wife. Grace had worried herself sick - literally. Her anxieties had caused an ulcer two years ago, but worse than that, she suffered from a cold that had lasted for twelve years now. Psychosomatic, Dr. Lang called it.

“You mean like in Guys and Dolls?” Grace asked fearfully, when given the prognosis.

Dr. Lang pressed her lips together in what was probably meant to be an ‘I’m sorry modern science can’t help you’ expression. “Kind of like that, yes.”

Gary had long since grown used to the mountains of tissue paper in the waste bins from Grace’s constant noise blowing, to the throat lozenges on the bedside table because her throat always scratched, to the coughing at night that was a soft, sputtering into her pillow, not a keep-him-awake kind of hacking. It was the worrying that had shattered her immune system; worries about being late to events, worries about traffic accidents, worries about things breaking, worries about being a proper hostess, worries about things she couldn’t control like turbulence during an airplane flight or how much other people liked her or whether or not she would be alive when World War III consumed the planet. When Dr. Lang’s Western medicine failed to keep the coughing and sneezing at bay, Grace turned to all manner of alternatives: there was a stint with giant needles sticking from her sinuses like a porcupine at an acupuncturist, herbal remedies drunk down under the watchful eye of women who claimed to be Healers, and copious reflexology sessions, although Gary had his suspicions that these last were simply because Grace liked to have her feet rubbed.

So for all that, Gary never took his wife’s hunches too seriously. He liked to think they balanced one another out like a see-saw on a playground, his care-free to her worry, his adventure-seeking nature to her caution, his come-what-may to her plan-what-will-be. Now, he whistled as he made his way down the three flights of stairs to the sidewalk and hailed a taxi cab with two fingers between his teeth.

Grace felt jumpy all day at work. She couldn’t shake the nagging sense of the dream, and she felt a tight pain across her middle that meant the ulcer was acting up even though she had popped that morning’s purple pill. She poured cup after cup of chamomile tea, but with no result other than that her bladder was on constant alert.

“Again?” Martha asked, as she saw Grace grab the key in the shape of a cartoon woman for the fourth time. Martha was one of the lawyers at the firm where Grace was an assistant, and she always looked pulled together. She was wearing a beige paint-suit today, and her hair was caught up in a beehive. Grace looked at her image in the bathroom mirror; she had neglected to blow dry her hair that morning in her worry, and now it frizzed about her head, her curls looking like burst pieces of popcorn, and she noticed with a grimace that her blouse didn’t match the caramel brown of her skirt. She smiled over at Martha.

“Lots of tea,” she explained.

Martha shook her head. “Shouldn’t have too much of it, you know. Everything in moderation.” Martha swished from the bathroom and Grace had the feeling her idea of moderation meant counting out carrot sticks. She suddenly worried that the lunch she had brought was too much food and that the other women in the firm would scoff at her. Her ulcer gave a tug at her stomach to remind her it was there, and she placed a hand over her belly with a groan. Then sneezed. Popping a lozenge into her mouth, she made her way back to her desk.

“He won’t die, he won’t die, he won’t die,” she said under her breath.

All day, she checked Google News to see if there had been any breaking updates. Nancy, the other assistant, snapped her gum loudly. She chewed the rubbery stuff so much that Grace worried her friend would have a mouthful of cavities in the next year or so.

“You’ve been on that site all day, hon,” Nancy chided. “What’s up?”

“A dream,” Grace admitted with a guilty sigh. “That Gary was going to die today.”

“Oh hon,” Nancy began but Grace gave a shriek.

Breaking news, read the headline. Train wreck in Arkansas kills four.

Grace spit out a mouthful of tea, soaking her skirt in the hot liquid but not noticing the burn. “Nancy look!” she cried with horror, pointing. Nancy wheeled her chair over with a squeak squeak. She gave Grace a withering look.

“We don’t live in Arkansas, honey,” she reminded.

“Right.” Grace hunched her shoulders and clicked out of the website. Two minutes later, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Nancy wasn’t looking, she checked again.

“Oh!” she cried in horror. “Car pileup. On Long Island! That exit’s only about twenty minutes from the city, I think.” She wished she had a map.

Nancy’s look should have frozen Grace to her chair.

“Gary doesn’t drive, honey,” she assured her. Grace shook her head, the curls frizzing back and forth.

“Yes,” she agreed, hiding a cough in one fist. “But what if he had to get in a car to see a client, or if something came up, or if he found out he had to visit his mother for some reason and hired a car…?”

“Grace!” Nancy’s yell cut off any protest. “You’re worrying yourself sick. It was just a dream.”

Grace clicked out of the Google webpage.

While his wife fretted, Gary was going about his day normally. “One venti latte,” he ordered promptly at Starbucks. The server – she looked to be about fifteen and had no fewer than five piercings in various places on her face and hair that was dyed cranberry red – looked like she was in a surly mood. She confirmed this when she slapped his coffee on the counter without a lid, and the liquid gushed all over Gary’s hand as he reached for it.

“Shit!” he exclaimed, feeling the scalding liquid seep into the cuffs of his shirt. He licked up the coffee and saw already that the skin beneath was raw and red. If the server noticed his distress, she didn’t betray the fact. “Four fifty,” she said, bored.

“Keep the change,” Gary muttered, handing her his soggy five. He stepped back outside into the bracing winter air and tucked his scarf up just under his nose, squishing his iPod ear buds further into his ears. He started to step off the curve, when he heard a voice louder than Sting was singing Roxanne.

“Hey, watch out man!” shouted the delivery man riding by on his bike with two pizzas balanced on his handle bars. Gary took a quick step back, then heard the sharp honking horn. The taxi driver missed his foot by inches and gave him the middle finger as he drove past. Gary would have signaled back but he was too shaken. He hopped back up onto the curve. Maybe there was something to what Grace had said.

He started to step carefully. He didn’t walk over manhole covers – too many stories of those popping up and causing freak accidents – or take another taxi that whole day; too much potential for a car crash.

At work, he squinted at the computer screen and the account books but couldn’t seem to make sense of the numbers. His throat itched. He passed his hand back and forth across his Adam’s apple. “You all right, man?” Henry asked, leaning into his cubicle. Gary gave a nervous start and looked up.

“What? Oh yeah, I’m all right. Not feeling so hot, that’s all.”

Henry frowned. “You never get sick!” he laughed. It was a running joke between them, to see who could hoard more of their sick days in exchange for vacation ones each year. Gary always won. Now, Henry’s frown deepened. “Actually, you really don’t look good. Your face is kinda flushed. Maybe you should go home?”

Gary waved Henry away with a stab of irritation, but his head was pounding, and he rubbed his temples for fifteen minutes before remembering he was supposed to be concentrating on the numbers on his computer screen.

Suddenly, normal objects in the office looked threatening. The stapler was practically grinning at him. I’d love to bite off your finger, it said with a toothy metal grin. Gary shuddered. He worried about the microwave rays when he heated up his soup for lunch; stairways suddenly looked like deathtraps. One wrong trip and… He pictured himself with his skull cracked open at the bottom and shuddered again.

He started looking over his shoulder at every noise, loud or small, then, inevitably, had to whirl back around to grab a tissue as a sneeze caught him. His nose started dripping during the weekly office meeting.

“Gary?” the boss said sharply, crossing her arms. “Gary, if you’re feeling that poorly, maybe you ought to go home.” He coughed weekly and acquiesced.

When Grace heard his key in the door, she leapt up from the stool in the kitchen, where she had been staring fixedly at the television set for any news of explosions or tornados. So far so good, except for the news of a three-year-old who had been wounded on a school playground; Grace was ashamed at her own relief because Gary would never be mistaken for a three-year-old.

“You’re home,” she cried with relief. “I was so worried all day.” She pulled back, staring with worry into his face. “Are you all right? You look awful?”

“Can you make me some chicken soup, honey?” he asked with a hoarse cough. “I need to lie down. I think I understand now how you can worry yourself sick.”

November 1 - Casting a spell

When Mike thought on his daughter, Lily, he thought of a little three-year-old girl with wire-and-gauze fairy wings strapped to her back, running into the kitchen and yelling, “I’m casting a spell on your Mommy! Casting a spell on you!” while waving a plastic wand and hugging her mother’s legs about the knees, her head not even reaching to Margaret’s thighs. Margaret had looked down with a benevolent smile from where she was cooking a spaghetti sauce for dinner, and Mike looked over from where he was working on storyboards at the kitchen counter – this was years before he had home office space – and he had smiled too. Not just at the scene of paternal bliss, but at Lily’s imagination. Already at that age, she was constantly creating, producing.

“She’ll follow in your footsteps as a filmmaker,” all his filmmaker friends said with little knowing laughs, and Lily waltzed into the room – oh, she really waltzed: “One two three, one two three,” she counted in a high-pitched whisper under her breath, the pink ballet slippers on her feet scuffing in rhythm to the maestro in her head. The actors in the room shared wry looks. “This one’s an actress if ever there was one.” In the true sense of the word, Mike thought proudly. His daughter acted out life; she wasn’t content to let life act around her.

“Daddy,” commanded a five-year-old Lily, “You are going to be the pirate, and when I come into the kitchen, your job is to say, ‘Aargh! What have we here?’ Do you understand?” She was always giving orders like this, shaping the world to her imaginings, transforming it into the way she wanted to see it. Mike laughed as he played along.

The flip-side to the incessant movement of Lily’s brain was that she was an overachiever, a perfectionist. It didn’t occur to Mike that this fact should worry him – he recalled being the same way as a child, exacting of himself and ignoring praise from others because with each goal achieved he was already pushing himself onto the next. He admired this trait in himself – it had helped him work two jobs as he made his way through film school, allowed his creativity to flourish, so it didn’t worry him to see the same dogmatic characteristics in his daughter. Didn’t worry him until Lily’s second grade teacher gently pulled him and Margaret aside after Parents’ Day at school, the day where the parents sat uncomfortably in their children’s child-sized chairs, stifled by the space into which there large, adult knees were squished, and nodded along to the teacher’s lessons at the chalkboard while the kids beamed from the corner. Lily was full of: “Let me show you this! And here is where I play house! And see all my gold stars for the cursive writing assignments.” Her smile was angelic.

“You’re Lily’s parents?” asked the teacher, a woman past sixty with thin spectacles and thinner gray hair. “I tell you, that girl has more talent in her little finger than most kids have in their whole bodies.”

The proud parents beamed.

“My only worry for Lily is this: that when she comes up against failure for the first time, she won’t know how to handle it.”

The beams turned upside down, twin expressions of a worried frown.

Mike didn’t understand what happened when Lily reached seventh grade. He didn’t understand why her stare when she took in the backyard – where she used to envision mountains and knights and castles – suddenly was glassy eyed. Her eyes would roam back and forth across the green enclosure and she would turn a faint shade of green, looking panicked.

“Does the yard seem smaller to you, Daddy?” she whispered one night as he tucked her in bed, and he laughed until he realized she was really afraid. “No, angel,” he told her seriously, and she nodded gratefully.

“Good,” she murmured, “For a moment there I felt suffocated.”

He continued to praise the work she brought home; that was what he always assumed to be a parent’s job. So why did this girl with the body of a pixie, a nymph, the girl who used to dance about in leotards and laugh with her head thrown back and her mouth open in unabashed glee, why did she start to wear oversized shirts that looked like a tent draped over her body, why did she walk carefully into every room, entering with one toe first like she was testing the temperature of water?

He walked past her room and caught sight of her, looking like a beached whale, pumping her arms up and down at her sides while her body formed a V-shape, her legs out in front of her, her abs straining against her t-shirt.

“What are you doing?” he asked in alarm.

“Pilates,” she said cautiously. “Counting repetitions.” She stopped counting and propped herself on one elbow and looked at him. “Daddy, does it seem easier to you sometimes to count numbers than to create?”

Mike wasn’t sure what she meant, so he said, “Sure, angel,” and walked back into his office.

The clothes were three-sizes too big to begin with, so he and Margaret didn’t notice what was happening under that tent. Still, he felt like he was to blame when the school nurse called up.

“You know your daughter has lost twenty pounds in the past six months? What kind of parents are you? Aren’t you watching at home?”

He put a cupcake on the table in front of her on her fourteenth birthday. “Happy birthday, angel,” he said with a nervous catch to his voice. Her eyes tripled in size, the lids drawing back until the whites showed like a spooked horse in Manhattan traffic. She began to blubber. Mike couldn’t remember ever seeing his daughter cry. Laugh, yes. Crying was a foreign sound coming from her throat.

“Daddy, I can’t! Please understand. I can’t!”

He thrust his face into hers roughly, angered. “Why not? You love cupcakes. What is it you can’t do?”

Her voice grew smaller, less sure than he’d ever heard it. “Daddy, I’m scared of it.”

Mike gaped. His daughter, who went hiking through the forest alone at night when she was seven, who had gone to overnight camp and insisted he and Margaret not call or write the whole time so she could have an “authentic experience” at eight, who was the ringleader in every game she and her friends had ever played, who took up stage acting at age eleven because she had a minor bout of stage fright and decided that making herself act before an audience was the best way to “nip it in the bud” (her words, at eleven), this daughter was scared of a cupcake?

Mike cried that night. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt tears trickling down his cheeks, landing with an unpleasant saltiness in his beard. He guessed he hadn’t had a beard the last time he cried.

Mike didn’t know what was in her head. He didn’t know until the psychiatrists told him that she was slicing at the flesh she imagined clung around her hips and her thighs, cutting off chunks of it until the flesh underneath bled, thinking that might make the adipose layer disappear.

“What fat?” Mike asked the psychiatrists, dumbfounded. Lily was as thin as a slat on a fence.

“She sees it, sir,” they said with hands spread in wonder. “She imagines that it’s there, even if it’s not.”

A week before the end of her eighth grade year, he received the call while he was on set; Margaret was already at the hospital when he arrived half an hour later, and they stared through the cold, glass window that separated them from the shell that had become their daughter, watching her pale lips part as she breathed in and out, the cold plastic tube that pumped vitamins into a throbbing vein.

“Can we go in, doctor,” Margaret asked, clinging on to Mike’s arm so tight he could feel welts rising under her nails, but he didn’t pry her away.

Lily’s eyes opened when they entered.

“What are you doing to yourself, angel?” Mike asked without thinking, before Margaret could nudge him with caution in the ribs. They weren’t supposed to level blame, the doctor had said.

Lily’s eyes welled with tears. “Please Mommy, please,” she whispered. “Please find some spell you can cast so my brain doesn’t think my body is an enemy anymore.”

October 31 - Someone who has passed to the other side

All Hallow’s Eve. Ginny often felt that people forgot the origins of this night, masquerading instead behind a glut of sweet candied treats and well-meaning tricks, perhaps because the truth was too frightening for them to admit. Child’s play, no harm here. People forgot that it began as a pagan ritual celebrated among the Celtic tribes of Great Britain, who knew the truth. That on October 31, magic is at its most potent, and the worlds of the dead and the living overlap. That on that night the deceased can come back to life, or the living can join the ranks of the dead. These spirit-fearing Celtic peoples devised means by which they kept their ghosts and ghouls at bay. Bonfires were lit, and masks were warn so that the living would look like just one more of the dead when they ventured from their homes, to placate them, to scare them away. To blend in with them. The young children now who dressed as superheroes and black cats, fairies and pop singers – there was no placation in that. A K-mart purchased costume did not set a spirit’s vengeance at bay.

Oh how the Puritans despised this holiday, its pagan origins, its fearful connotations, thus delaying the observance of the holiday in America for years while the Irish and Scottish and British already reveled and shouted defiance at the goblins on the other shores of the Atlantic. When All Hallow’s Eve did reach tentative tendrils into America, it quickly was corrupted, the name forgotten and shortened to Halloween, the rituals subsumed into consumerism, the buying, the grinning jack o’lanterns and the office mixer parties, where the liquor was black and the cupcakes had orange frosting. What would the ancient Celts say to that? Would the witches lift their spells just because the populace had ceased to believe?

Ginny loved the lore of Halloween; her mother had always believed in witches and black magic, and when Ginny was a child, Mary O’Reilly had dusted her daughter’s head with salt on Halloween before sending her trick or treating with the neighborhood children, lest the evil spirits come out to get her. The salt made Ginny sneeze, and she hated the ritual when she was young, but as she grew up and saw the blatant commercialization, the disassociation from the origins of the night, she found herself longing for such a belief. She hated that costume parties had become an excuse for women to debase themselves. Sexy witch! said the costume racks. Sexy doctor! Sexy cat! Might as well walk around as a sexy construction cone or a sexy monkey. Were women so easily maneuverable, forgetful that they had the agency to be sexy the other three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the year without being condemned to a curse on their sexuality. Ginny was tired of the charade. She wanted an authentic costume, something that called up the true spirit – literally – of the holiday. Or un-holy day, as it were.

The day before Halloween, she still hadn’t settled on a proper costume. She was walking through the Village when she saw a strange sign outside the herb shop she passed on a regular basis, though she had only stopped in once, and that to buy hibiscus flower for a recipe. Witch on duty, the sign stated. Ginny hesitated a moment, then opened the door. A tinny bell signaled her entry.

The walls of the shop weren’t frightening or black, she noted with relief, but were instead lined in purple velvet, and the small square space smelled thickly of musky incense. The woman who looked up from behind the counter didn’t have warts on her nose, or long inky black hair; it was long, but it was a deep chestnut color. Perfectly normal.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a lyrical voice. Ginny gave a start. Normal except for her left eye, a pale blue that had not one but two coal-colored irises vying for space in the center. Ginny made herself take a step forward.

“I was hoping for an authentic costume for a costume party,” she admitted nervously. “I thought you might be able to help.”

The woman – witch – gave a laugh; there was no cackle to it, so Ginny took another step forward.

“You want to pass to the other side, is that it?” Ginny hesitated again, then nodded. The witch crooked a slender finger, summoning her beyond the boundary that normally separated a customer from an employee, and behind the counter. “Come downstairs. I have a few things that will fit you just perfectly.”

The dresses were beautiful, the incense even thicker down below. Ginny began to feel dizzy as the woman – witch? – laced up her corset. “Now here,” she instructed, before Ginny ascended the stairs once more. “You must drink down all this concoction and the outfit will be fully authentic.”

“A drink with an outfit,” Ginny laughed nervously. She sniffed warily, catching nothing more than an earthy scent, perhaps nutmeg. “What’s in it?”

“Beans, mostly,” shrugged the woman. “Drink up. You wanted authentic, didn’t you?”

Ginny left for the party the next day wearing a brocaded black dress, that cinched at the bodice before climbing to a ribbon at her bust in a criss-cross pattern. The petticoat, visible beneath the divided skirts when she moved, was the same rich purple that had adorned the walls of the herb shop. The cap was not pointy, merely a dark black snood that held her hair. The shoes were a toe-pinching black satin. Ginny caught sight of her reflection and shuddered at the effect. Before leaving the house, she sprinkled just a dash of salt onto her dark hair, the flecks glistening when she stepped outside.

The light of full moon flooded the streets, even though it was almost midnight. She heard the whisper of fallen leaves blowing along the sidewalks, across the roofs of the six-story townhouses. It sounded like the chatter of gossipy whispers, like those her mother had warned her of as a child. Leaves on the rooftop. A witch criticizing the inhabitants within.

The streets felt quiet, too quiet. Where were the young children gripping their parents’ hand with one fist, a goody bag with the other? Where were the adults clad in their skin-baring ensembles, their hemlines high, their gaiety higher? She saw a few people walking quickly, hands shoved in pockets, and picked up the pace herself.

The life within the party felt comforting after the silent sidewalks, music thumping to a deep bass beat, and Sexy This-and-Thats conferring with their male counterparts, who in turn wore plastic masks of past presidents or of ghastly beasts with fangs and tufts of fur over the eyebrows. People cackled with laughter over glasses of deep red punch, and picked at the popcorn balls that were offered on the caterer’s trays. Human revelry all around. Ginny sat on a stool near the bar and plucked idly at her dark skirt.

“Blood punch?” asked a bartender dressed as a Sexy Police Officer. Ginny acquiesced with a nod.

A man in an ape suit walked over to her, not even bothering to mimic a simian’s amble. “And what are you supposed to be tonight?” he asked.

“Someone who has passed to the other side,” Ginny said cryptically, copying the witch’s words.

“Ooh, creepy,” he said, wriggling his fingers spider-style, ten fat legs waving with menace. She cracked a polite smile.

Ginny pressed a hand against her forehead. “Excuse me,” she said, slipping from the stool. “I feel light headed, all of a sudden.”

King Kong let her go without protest.

By the next morning, she was in a coma. The doctors had no explanation for it, no trauma to the head, no injuries, no sudden mental episodes. On the twelfth day after Halloween, she passed to the other side.

“Inexplicable by modern science,” the doctors said, shaking their heads.

On a street in the Village, a woman with long chestnut hair and two irises in her left eye continued to peddle her wares.

October 30 - What will happen can't be stopped

Julia had silver hair by the time she found the letter. Hand-written, as love notes were in those days, still smelling faintly of cologne though that may have been imagination, but yellowed now at the edges, like curdled milk, curled upwards like fingers with rigor mortis. The words were still legible though, a simple sentence, written with the strength of conviction of one newly in love:

I’d sooner cut off my right arm in this lifetime than live without you

It read. Julia gave an involuntary gasp. She could picture still the day he had given it to her, handing across a book in their European history class, the note tucked within the pages like a lost missive from the medieval past. She had giggled and hid it in her school bag, and placed it in her desk drawer that night, making sure to keep it flat, without creases. Now here it was in her hands having been forgotten for – what? – forty-five years, and all of the care she had taken once had dissolved into this yellowed, cracked piece of parchment.

How could they have known, when they began? What innocents they were, she thought with something close to fear in her belly, as though she could jet back through time and warn that younger incarnation of herself of all that would ensue. There would be beautiful times; she could warn herself of that, and warn that within that beauty there were thorns for which you had to watch, take care where they pricked lest you find yourself firmly in the briar patch. She remembered moonlight on the window while he kissed her upturned lips for the first time. She remembered dinners with their fingers entwined atop the tablecloth of the fanciest restaurant in town, the waiter coughing with embarrassment to solicit their order because they had just been sitting there staring into one another’s eyes for half an hour already. Oh, they said with guilt. We’re not ready to order. We haven’t even looked yet. The menus didn’t merit looking.

She remembered how passion carried them through full days – twenty-four hours, forty-eight – without leaving their dorm room beds, freshman year forgotten somewhere between the smell of sex and the curled hair between his thighs, that twirled into little ringlets that she would wrap around her finger, a coil that would spring back. She could perform this task absently for hours, while he dozed beside her. Coil, recoil, coil, recoil. They lost themselves in the scent of one another, forgot that they were supposed to be earning degrees, beginning adult life.

They very quickly forgot other people existed on the campus. Did she even remember, now, years later, the faces of her other classmates? The yearbooks still arrived in the mailbox once a year, carrying news of her graduating class, but the names it boasted were strangers. The quadrangle, for her, was one giant ghost town the moment she left his side in bed, devoid of any sentient being except him and her. She felt his hand in hers as they strolled the flagstones; those might have been flickers of people walking past her, or sitting in the front row of her advanced French class. But then, they might have been curtains drifting in a breeze, flickers of the wind, for how little she saw them. They would collapse into one another’s arm after an hour apart in class. I missed you, they cried, wiping back tears, thumbing the mucus from the corners of eyes. I missed you so much. You’re never leaving my side again.

Oh how they laughed together when they were alone.

But what will happen can’t be stopped. Something went sour when the winter wind hit campus. Days spend indoors not for desire or pleasure, but because the snow was piled high and there was nowhere to go. I feel suffocated, she said against the sheet. He peeled it down from her nose. Because you’ve covered your face, my love, he explained, but she shook her head. That wasn’t quite right.

Three years it went on, freshman, into sophomore, into junior. Senior year, winter again. The fights had grown in intensity and spite, words snarled out as spittle flew back and forth.

Suffocated, suffocated, Julia had shrieked at him, and this time she was standing up, not under the covers in bed, and she squinted outside the window because she thought she saw other people out there, but could no longer really be sure. She reached out to steady herself, her hand on his arm, the feel of real flesh.

“Don’t you leave this room, he warned with a hiss. She made is if for the door. Don’t you leave this room or I’ll, I’ll… He snatched up the Swiss army knife that lay on his desk, next to a book by Sartre, another by Kant. Don’t you leave this room. This time there was no need to finish the threat because the knife was poised against the vein in his wrist; it bulged in protest, a frothy sea of blood below roiling in a tempest. Julia cried and shrieked, clung onto him, kissed the tears from his eyes and tasted the salt like it was honey, and begged him to understand.

Don’t you leave this room, he threatened.

She called him on his bluff.

She thought. She didn’t remember where she went that night. She wandered a campus that she didn’t recognize, wondering how she possibly had found her way to class all these four years, if now she couldn’t seem to orient herself from dorm to Main Street, to library, to cafeteria and back again. She saw a giant tree in the center of the quadrangle that had never registered in her vision. There were people walking about. People! She walked for hours, until she exhaustedly tripped into her own bedroom. The phone flashed with a message.

Hospital. Badly wounded. Provided your number as emergency contact.

These were the words she remembered. The doctor was an intern – a student, still, really – and pulled her arm roughly so they could confer in the corner. The arm had been so badly butchered into that there was no saving it. Within days, gangrene had set in, and it was amputate or let it spread. They sliced off the right arm while he slept under anesthesia. She watched them wheel him, comatose, form the operating room, a wad of bandaging covering the stump that had once been an arm that held her, caressed her, hugged her, pinched into her flesh. She wanted to kiss his forehead, but three white-coated nurses were in between her and that brow. She turned and left the hospital, because she shouldn’t be there when he woke up.

I’d sooner cut off my right arm in this lifetime than live without you

He meant it, she thought with a sigh, refolding the yellowed paper in the box in her attic, closing the lid. Some things weren’t meant to be unearthed from the past. She had a husband downstairs, with whom she’d spent forty-one years, now. True love, she decided, was never made to last that long.

October 29 - I'm at a loss

Every year, Dean began to panic at the advent of the holiday season. He was a wealthy man – a self-made man; his father had sold goods for a baking company door to door in a suburb outside of Philadelphia and his mother was a third grade teacher. Dean himself had moved to New York and become an investment banker at one of the larger firms, and didn’t have any qualms about the fact that he enjoyed his yearly bonus and sending his parents off on cruises through the Aegean Sea - he was a wealthy man and he took pride in his wealth, and as a result, he tended to attract women who expected much of his wealth and little of the rest of him. So as the holidays drew nigh every year, he found himself breaking into cold sweats in the middle of the night as he lay on his four-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, or suddenly losing his appetite while dining with work buddies at Tao or club-hopping in the Meatpacking district, because he was caught by that familiar dread that accompanied not knowing what to get this year’s girlfriend that would possibly satiate her appetites.

“Diamonds,” advised the women he worked with, still a small percentage next to their male counterparts, and always eager to share the secrets of their sex. “Buy her diamonds and she’ll be smitten.”

“Chicks dig fur,” noted one of the buddies he worked out with as they sweated side by side on the treadmill at Equinox. Dean would comply, but the gifts felt cold, and the calculating looks that entered the women’s eyes as they peeled back store-wrapped paper made him even more certain they saw a wad of green money when they rubbed his cock at night, not the man attached to it.

This year, he had a different panic in his throat when he thought of what to buy his girlfriend for Christmas. Bethany was different than the women who had come before. They had met a literary event held at the Museum of the City of New York, and she was obviously there for the brains behind the evening, not the glitterati. Bethany was beautiful – stunning, even – but seemed oblivious to it. She didn’t dress well – it was not that she dressed poorly; she simply had no taste for labels or trends, shrugging into sweaters and jeans like they were her uniform. Dean felt double the intimidation of shopping for this woman. They had only been seeing one another for two months, and he wanted to impress, but felt that anything monetary he came up with would fall flat.

“Money can’t buy happiness and all that?” his best friend, Jason, said, elbowing him in the ribs with mirth. “Yeah right, man.”

“Diamonds,” counseled the women he worked with, as always, but he shook his head. Bethany was simpler than that. He had only ever seen her wear one piece of jewelry, and it was an antique locket that her grandmother had bequeathed to her in her will. He felt that Bethany would find diamonds gaudy, in poor taste, a waste of money.

“Chicks dig fur,” said Jason as he pushed his treadmill up to eight miles per hour with a grunt. That would be worse than the diamonds; Bethany wouldn’t even dig being referred to as a chick, much less wearing something that had once been alive; she ate strictly vegetarian. Jason shook his head and wiped away the sweat beads the dripped into his eyes. He felt like he needed to come up with something more personal, but couldn’t quite figure out how. He told himself he’d concentrate once things quieted down at work.

Only work got busier in the days leading up to the holiday. He already only saw Bethany once a week, which seemed fine to him since he couldn’t really think about her when he was squinting at his computer screen long past midnight. When they did squeeze in dinner or a movie, she seemed resentful, restless. She’s waiting for her present, he thought with a worried frown. It was the same look all the other women had begun to wear when the calendar ticked into December, the calculating stare that measured every penny of his worth, could miraculously see every stock and bond to his name.

So he did what he knew how to do and he opened his wallet.

When Bethany arrived home the next day, he had hired a small, four-piece orchestra to serenade her just outside her apartment, with lines from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The next morning, he waited for a phone call of thanks, but it didn’t come. He opened his wallet again, placed a phone call.

The next day, twenty bouquets of roses arrived at her doorstep; he figured she could flood the place with them. Still no word of thanks.

“Diamonds,” said the women he worked with, with a roll of their eyes.

On the third day, he sent diamond earrings. He waited all day for the phone call, the text message, but nothing came. He worked past midnight, even though it was Friday, and extinguished the life of his computer with a sigh once he was finally done working, rubbing his eyes and stumbling out for a nightcap before falling into his bed.

The next morning, Saturday, he ventured to her apartment early. She was already up, toweling damp hair when she opened the door, a cup of home-brewed coffee in one hand. Dean idly wondered who still made their own coffee instead of going to Starbucks.

“Did you like the orchestra I hired?” he pressed like an eager boy.

She took a sip of coffee. “They played well.”

“The flowers I sent?” He looked over her shoulder and noticed all twenty bouquets had been pushed into one corner; they really didn’t fit well in her small studio, he realized. Bethany had confessed she could afford a much larger place in one of the new condos that had gone up, uptown, or over in Hell’s Kitchen, or down near Wall Street, but that her studio was exactly as much living space as she needed or wanted, so why have more. He should have thought of the inconvenience when he ordered from the florist, he thought guiltily. Bethany didn’t even respond, her eyes flickering to the corner and back again.

“Did you like the earrings I bought?” he pushed. She was not, he noted, wearing them, still had that infernal locket about her slim throat. Her eyes narrowed.

“They were all beautiful gifts, Dean,” she said.

“But…” he asked, hearing the unspoken word.

She looked at him with a flat, unimpressed stare. “Things don’t buy my love, Dean. I’m sure they would be exactly the right gifts for some other woman, but they don’t do anything for me.”

Dean threw up his hands. “I’m at a loss, then!” he cried to the water-damaged patch of her ceiling. “What could I possibly buy you for Christmas that’s good enough?”

Bethany tapped one finger against her lower lip, as she always did when thinking.

“Come,” she said finally, setting her coffee mug down on the one patch of counter space and taking his hand. She led him from the building.

She took him downtown. They had brunch at a corner café with small brown tables and paned glass windows, and the menu written in chalk on a placard by the bar. They walked along the cobblestone streets of the Village that stopped running in a grid and started making funny angles. Who knew 10^th Street could intersect with 4^th? They stared into book store windows and admired the architecture in the neighborhood, as they walked around with her arm laced through his, bundled in coats and scarves. At first, Dean couldn’t help looking at his watch incessantly; there was still work to catch up on, but she playfully grabbed his wrist, hid the dial from view. His Blackberry buzzed every few minutes. She snatched it from his hand and put it on silent, hiding it in her purse. She took him to a small park, where the trees were festooned with white lights – not a display to rival the garish Rockefeller Center tree, but somehow holier, more refined, simple but elegant. They drank hot chocolate purchased from an outdoor vendor, cupping cold fingers around the plastic cups on the sidewalk and watching their breath mist in the air.

Dean waited all day, but never once did she pull him in a store to show him what gift she desired, as he had expected. When they reached her doorstep once more, he asked with exasperation, “Well? I thought you were going to show me the gift you wanted for Christmas.” There had been no trip inside a lingerie parlor, no fittings in a dressing room while he yawned with boredom, no hint-hint pointing at a jewelry store window.

Bethany smiled and kissed his cheek. “Yes, Dean,” she said. “I just did.” And shut the door behind her.

October 26 - What goes without saying

I had ordered my usual Americano, asking for it black because I secretly brought along a vial of my own milk – I hated places that thought they could approximate exactly how much of the substance a customer would want, splashed liberally in the bottom of your paper cup – a vial that I extracted once I was seated, surreptitiously poured in a dollop, then replaced in my purse. It was difficult to pretend to read the headlines of the newspaper today; nothing seemed able to hold my attention. I was embarrassed, because today was the first day my server acknowledged what a creature of habit I was.

“The usual?” the guy behind the counter asked when I walked into the coffee shop, before I even opened my mouth. I recognized him, too, of course, since he was there three out of four days that I wandered in, with his oversized glasses and his short-cropped hair and a slim, artistic, slightly fée build. Guilty as charged, I thought with a grimace. I had become so predictable it was unnecessary to voice it.

I nodded mutely.

The espresso machine made a pleasant hum as my shot of espresso was prepared, then he poured hot water on top, and placed the double-cupped beverage on the counter. “Careful,” he warned, as always, “it’s scalding hot.”

“Thanks,” I said, leaving two extra quarters in the tip jar to back up my words, but I slinked quickly away from the counter.

So now I felt agitated as I sat at my usual table – the second from the left – in my usual coffee shop. I liked this place because it had a European air about it, white plastered walls with wooden lattice, and bottles of wine lined up in smart rows on the shelf that ran in a circle around the room, just above head-height, looking like so many butlers at the ready: “Yes sir, very good sir, pop my cork, sir,” I imagined them saying. Normally, I felt comfortable here, could slip into anonymity, but it galled that the server had ferreted out my routine ways.

Sighing, I feigned a read-through of the paper, as usual. The woman next to me – a striking black woman in a coral-colored business suit – was definitely reading hers carefully, each page creased neatly between thumb and forefinger and then flattened on the table before her. Then, she would bend her head low over the article, her neck waving back forth like a person watching a tennis match as she scanned each line. As for me, I really only glanced at the paper so that I would know enough to cover my bases in social situations. When I went out to drinks with my co-workers, I needed to be able at least to sound smart on burning Buddhist temples and which presidential candidate had put his (or her, now) foot in his (or her) mouth at a stump speech yesterday. But really, I was not so much paying attention to my own business as I was trying to eavesdrop.

I was far more interested in the conversation of the two women next to me; it always seems to happen that way in coffee shops. Perhaps it is the proximity of the small wooden tables, one to the next, perhaps the intimacy suggested even among strangers by the fact that we have all clearly escaped our private domains, our kitchen counters, and chosen instead to sip our coffee – in whichever of the myriad ways it can be ordered – surrounded by other people. Coffee shops practically begged one to eavesdrop.

These two particular women were French, or at least, spoke French with flawless, lilting accents. They both, I noticed sourly, were wearing tights even though the temperature had dropped alarmingly in the past few days, as if French fashion were impervious to something as trivial as the weather. One ordered a large hot chocolate in a clipped accent, which annoyed me further. I couldn’t imagine her being so controlling of her environment as to bring along her own vial of milk stashed in her purse. “Yes, a large,” she agreed, bored, when the server asked what size she wanted. She didn’t care; it wasn’t going straight to those Gallic thighs no matter what size it was.

“A double espresso,” the other said politely. How French, I thought with an eye roll, then was mad at myself for being so bitter. They seemed perfectly amiable; their conversation was in high, chirping tones, and they smiled back and forth at one another across the table. I could admit to myself that I was annoyed because I didn’t comprehend more of their conversation despite six years of high school and college French. All I understood was a, “Oui, c’est cool!” here and a “D’accord, d’accord!” of agreement there, but beyond that, their subject matter alluded me.

I went back to pretending I understood the mortgage catastrophe in the business section.

I looked up in relief at the sound of the door opening, combined with a blast of cold air and with Valerie’s entrance. Valerie had a way of breezing into a place, quite literally. She shook off her umbrella with an expression that said not so much that it had been raining on her, but raining for her, for her delight to dance about in the droplets, and to grant the rain the privilege of falling upon the sleeves of her jacket. She smiled at the server, but didn’t even look guilty that she wasn’t placing an order, just here to keep me company. I folded the newspaper gratefully and placed it on the table, rising to hug her hello.

“I’m glad you made it,” I said truthfully. She was fifteen minutes late for our rendezvous.

“Of course I made it, silly,” she said with a grin. “Sorry I’m late. I hope you weren’t bored in my absence.”

I gave a guilty shrug. “Actually, I was listening to the conversation of the two women next to me,” I confessed in a whisper.

Valerie gave a quick glance, an unconcerned shrug. “That goes without saying,” she said casually.

“What’s that?”

“Everyone eavesdrops in coffee shops.”

It wasn’t only me then!

“What? What’s so funny?” Valerie asked. I erased the smile from my lips, leaning in to begin our weekly catch-up chat. The man with the spectacles who held his report out a good foot and a half from his nose; the couple in the corner with their fingers wrapped around their coffee mugs, both staring off into space; the businessman who had just come in and booted up his laptop. I wondered at that moment which ones were eavesdropping on us.

October 25 - Small scrapes and bruises

Sabrina danced for a living. She wished she could say it was ballet that she danced, up a-tip toe on pink slippers that squished her toes to half their size while she wore a sparkling tutu and a jeweled tiara on her hand. Or wished she could say it was tap; not even up on a stage, but rather, her heels a drum beat on the hard platform of the subway station. She wouldn’t mind that kind of living, a cap out on the floor in front of her for errant pennies, the only heat coming from the lack of air, there, below ground, not from hot male eyes. She wished, even, she could say she was a modern dancer, gyrating to strange choreographed steps while lights flashed and the theatre director tried something outré and bizarre because every year the troupe needed to delight an ever-more demanding well-heeled crowd.

Sabrina danced against a pole, but she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself at Lincoln Center, the Boston Ballet, even an outdoor summer stage in Central Park. She tried to pretend the pole was a tango partner. It would have been easier to pretend if the men didn’t have wandering hands, hands that pinched fiercely, leaving behind welts of purple, hands that scratched, the nails unkempt. Those were the bachelors. The men with wives had neat, trimmed fingernails. In the dressing room, she examined her wounds.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” Monica said, waving one hand through the air dismissively while she reapplied lipstick with the other, a screaming, burnt orange color like a fire roaring wild in California. Sabrina nodded, and pulled up her bra, hiding the welt that ran from nipple to armpit. A bachelor, that one.

The words brought her back. She was a child, on the playground, nursery school. She was laughing, and someone was throwing a ball her way. She caught it, tossed back, caught in the back and forth rhythm, synchronicity, something in it for everyone. Catch, release. The ball came back, but this time the throw was off and she made a dive across the cement of the playground. Her fingertips brushed lightly against the ball like an artist’s brush on canvas, a lover’s caress on a tit, but she couldn’t get her palms around it. It skittered off into the bushes and she in turn landed, knee first, against the hard pavement.

It didn’t even hurt. But she looked down and she saw the blood cascading over her knee, and the blood scared her.

“Waaah,” she remembered wailing, that sound that only a child’s throat can produce.

She tugged on the sleeve of the teacher put in charge of recess, known derogatorily as the “lunch lady” among the children.

She pointed at her knee when the lunch lady turned to regard her coldly with a measured, “Ye-es?”

“I fell.”

The teacher’s eye took in the bleeding knee and the otherwise safe and sound child.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” she said dismissively. “Go down the hall to the nurse’s station. She’ll have a band-aid.”

Sabrina’s little eyes welled up with tears. Diligently, she did as told, but the knee burned as she limped down the hall, the blood pooled along the cut, even though it was only a few layers of skin deep, pebbling it with dots of red like little bloody islands surrounded by the otherwise healthy flesh. Bits of cement and dirt made coral reefs around which the blood had to swim. It wasn’t the pain that made her cry; it was the sight of all that frightening red. No one band-aid could staunch that flow.

She was whimpering when she reached the nurse, who leapt from behind her desk, rubbed at the wound with a soft, sure hand until only pink, raw flesh showed, dutifully produced three, overlapping band-aids that hid the shameful blotches.

Sabrina wished for a band-aid now, but rifling through the makeup kits of the other girls in the dressing room, she found all manner of rouges, lipsticks, blushes, mascaras, condoms, lubricants, and nailpolishes, but no band-aids. None of them would admit to their hurts.

Sabrina limped back to the stage.

She was alone in a private room. He wore a suit. The corporate type, well-groomed, neat hair, trimmed beard only now showing the five o’clock shadow, now that it was half past nine. His fingernails were neatly clipped, his smile charming, his eyes dead.

“Why don’t you bend over for me,” he purred.

She complied, and his hand found one cheek. She slapped it away.

“You’re allowed to look,” she reminded, “not touch.”

The hand kept coming back, more insistent. She told him there were cameras. She told him she could shout for security without raising her voice, realizing her words contradicted one another, and he sensed her unease and the smile grew feral. His hand reached out and she panicked. Her high heel found him directly in the groin; the soft squishing sound of the impact coincided with a satisfying popping of his eyes.

He clutched at himself, his mouth opening and closing like a hooked fish, until he produced one word: “Bitch,” he wheezed in a voice as high as a tot’s on the playground.

Sabrina smiled at him. “You’ll hardly have a wound to show for it,” she consoled sweetly. “Small scrapes and bruises, maybe. No more.” She swayed from the private booth. She knew she’d be fired of course; the cameras were there; that much hadn’t been a lie. They didn’t handle her too roughly when they deposited her out on the sidewalk, though her makeup kit was thrown to her feet. She watched the contents spill onto the pavement, roll a ways. A lipstick found its way into a gutter. Let a rat have it, she decided, picturing a subway rat wearing red paint and proud of how beautiful it looked compared to its ratty friends.

She didn’t have anywhere to go tonight, so she started walking. She had come through worse than this before, and she’d pick her way up again. “A small scrape,” she decided out loud, and ignored the way her heart rate sped up in fear. The night was cold, and she shivered.