November 7 - Secretly, I know my name is Nadya

Secretly I know my name is Nadya, but no one here calls me that. Where is here, you ask? It wouldn’t really matter if I told you. It’s nowhere to you, so long as you are the kind of person who lives in a home with the things that a home normally has – a kitchen in which to eat, a bed in which to sleep, and if you are lucky, that thing called a family with whom you share these mundane things. You take them for granted because they have never been taken away. I did once, too. There was a village with a name attached to it, in a country that I don’t remember. Or, I do recall, but I pretend not to because it hurts less that way, if I close my eyes and say that this memory is only of a dream I had the other night, and there has never been any other place than where I am now. In the dream, there was green, there was a steeple silhouetted against a hill. De Silhouette, someone told me once, was a penny pincher who was so cheap that he made faceless portraits for his clients instead of the fleshed-out, identifying kind, but I don’t know if I believe this anecdote. Fancy stories are fine for children but eventually the real world catches up. So there; a pretty village in a pretty, fairy tale country and you don’t need to know its name.

The problem with the village is that there was not much more to it than that green and that steeple, and a whole mess of rotting sheep that were dying of some disease. They might have called in hoof-in-mouth or foot-in-mouth, the same term they use when someone makes a mistake and you yell back at them, “You really put your foot in your mouth that time!” There, yes that was it. Our sheep were dying of a mistake. Papa was dying of something more tangible but no less easy to capture in words. They could have called it cancer, but the only real doctor in the area lived a good twenty miles away and he came every once in a while, but when he did, Papa didn’t have enough money to pay him, so turned instead to the woman who peddled in herbs. After all, that was the way it had been done for centuries, by his father, and his father’s father, and his father’s father before that. The woman with the herbs could work miracles, they said – cure the big black lumps that formed along the skin or take the burn away from flesh charred in an accident over a stove, or take the quickening out of woman’s stomach when she didn’t want it there (but we had no name for this procedure; some things shall remain nameless).

Whether or not any particular nameless cure of hers worked on women, Papa didn’t have any choice but to trust her because he had no money for the other. Which was why when they offered money, I said yes. Who were they, you ask? I will spare you the names of the guilty. What you need to know is that, in my altruism, I said yes. Altruistically, the eldest daughter, because Mother by that point was spending most of her day vomiting up alcohol in the back room of the house, and my brothers had already gone off to the city where they could meet prettier women and sell their arms and shoulders (the men in my family had broad shoulders) while also selling their souls for a higher asking price. As long as manual labor was involved, they didn’t have to think about the other, higher price: it was a mask, a moniker adopted. People can wear different names and still be the same person.

A waitress, they said, and I had served food at home to my younger siblings for fifteen years, so a waitress, that was what I already was. A waiter. Yes, I waited, waited for life to become bigger than a village of steeples and green, and waited for love, and waited for fairy tales, so it would be proper to call me a waitress. But we shouldn’t put too fine a point on these things.

I don’t remember much of the journey. Long, tired, hungry. I may be confusing this leg of the story with all of my days since.

They took me to a house. I won’t tell you what they did to me there, because my story would make you cry. It doesn’t really matter where this place is to you, does it? This great country of yours, America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Such pretty names you can apply to such ugly things, and I wonder, these men who walk through the front door of this shabby house that could exist on any suburban street (it could be next door to your house. Is it? Are you sure?) these men who walk through this door are able to swagger because surely they know that they are Free. I close my eyes because I am the one who is Brave. Cowards, cowards, I think, but I would never call them this name to their face.

So does it matter what they call me, in this place? If no one knows that I am here, and no one where I come from remembers that I have gone, then I am probably not even in existence anymore. Things that do not exist are not named. Secretly, I know my name is Nadya, which means Hope. Here I am called Ella, which I am told means Girl. You are only ‘girl’ in so much as you turn around when someone yells out the word on the street. So I am reduced to Girl which is the opening between my legs, and the Free and the Brave forget that I came from a small village in a small country where Papa waited for the money because I was Hope.

November 6 - You're eating breakfast

She was brushing her teeth when he dropped the bomb.

“Did I tell you that my parents are coming into town tomorrow?” Just like that, casually while he adjusted his tie and adored his reflection in the mirror.

Phoebe spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. “They’re what?” she asked around the foamy mint on her tongue, so it sounded more like this: “Thah-wah?”

“Coming to town.” Rafael patted her butt proprietarily as he walked past her and out of the bathroom, and Phoebe gaped another moment before lowering her head to the tap and swishing water around to rinse out her mouth.

“Rafael,” she whined. “What do you mean they’re coming?” She followed him into the bedroom. He was now lacing up black patent leather shoes, standing and smoothing an imaginary crease from his pants. He admired his reflection one more time, this time in the full-length mirror next to their king size bed.

He laughed at her. “I mean they’re coming to visit. Don’t you think they’d like to see our new place?”

Phoebe shuddered.

She and Rafael had married six months ago, but she had only ever met her in-laws twice before the wedding; they only dated four weeks prior to the wedding, after all, but as Phoebe liked to gush to girlfriends over coffee, after four weeks they knew. Phoebe wasn’t oblivious to their reality; he was wealthy and provided her with security (they had met at the club where she tended bar, one night when he was out after work with similar, corporate types, showing off and buying bottles of four-hundred-and-fifty dollar vodka), and she in turn provided him with a pretty woman on his arm to take to cocktail parties and trot out for the company holiday ball. Phoebe was okay with this. Rafael didn’t expect her to be the kind of wife who kept house (she had already hired a maid) or cooked (they ordered takeout or ate at neighborhood hot spots) or produced children (she adamantly did not want to ruin her figure that way, and he seemed to harbor no paternal aspirations). What she did mind was the way his parents had instantly looked down their identical, slim, patrician noses when they first met her, weighing every ounce of her flesh (yes that included the silicone) and probably gleaning what she had eaten for breakfast that morning, and lunch and dinner the day before (which, truth be told, was more often than not cocktails mixed in with some party nuts and a Caesar salad, if the day on which they met was like most days in her life). Under those stares, Phoebe could hear every thought that flashed behind their WASP-y blue eyes of not good enough and raised on the wrong side of the tracks and money grubber and bad genes. A wife, to the Martin family, was a hostess, a helpmate, not someone who went to get her nails done at a salon and spent the biggest portion of her day shopping at Barneys.

Phoebe loathed the idea of them showing up tonight. Well she wrung her fists into her silk bathrobe, Rafael’s head poked back around the door from the hallway.

“Gosh, and honey?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had something home cooked ready to go for breakfast in the morning? My parents are big fans of the sit down breakfast, and I thought maybe they’d like to eat here instead of out like we normally do.” He winked like this was a grand idea.

Phoebe hurled a shoe at his retreating back as he took the stairs down, two at a time.

Breakfast? Her idea of making breakfast was opening the plastic bag inside a box of cereal and eating it dry by the handful; she couldn’t even be bothered with bowls and milk. She thought of dialing Rosalinda, but then remembered that the maid was out of town for her son’s wedding that week. She thought of calling a caterer, but she could just imagine Lydia Martin’s sneer at being offered someone else’s food while her daughter-in-law and (she hoped) the progenitor of her future grandchildren did no more than hand over a few crisp twenties. Panicked, Phoebe ran to the back room – it was meant to be a nursery, so the realtor had told them with barely concealed nudge nudge for their marriage bed, but Phoebe had plans to turn it into a walk-around closet and dressing space. For the moment, however, it was still nothing more than barren white walls and slick wood floors, and heaps of boxes that held the wedding gifts from Rafael’s family, waiting their turn to be unpackaged. His relatives had been horrified to learn that the couple had eloped to Vegas instead of planning a proper ceremony. Phoebe was just as happy to be wearing a short, nearly sheer blue dress with Elvis as attendant, and afterwards to drink themselves silly until five in the morning. She was pretty sure Lydia wouldn’t have approved.

Upon word of the nuptials, every long lost uncle and second cousin and niece of a niece of a sister had sent what they deemed proper wedding gifts, as though the trappings of a good 1950s housewife would take away the shame surrounding the couple. Phoebe promptly deposited all the boxes in the back room and forgot about them. Her kitchen drawers were filled with Chinese takeout menus, not pots and pans.

“I know they’re here somewhere,” she muttered, ripping open cardboard flaps and sending Styrofoam snowing down on the polished wood floor. It took four more boxes before she unearthed the cookbooks that Great Aunt Phyllis (really a childhood friend of Lydia’s, but forever referred to as great aunt) had sent.

“Baking for the Young Wife.” Phoebe rolled her eyes. She thumbed past the breads and the meats and the vegetables and the pictures of a blonde woman beaming proudly like Vanna White as she swept an arm across a table laden with her efforts. Phoebe snorted. She came to breakfasts.

Overnight Caramel French Toast.

It sounded complicated enough to impress Lydia, but looked simple enough to execute. The picture was actually rather mouthwateringly tantalizing. Phoebe scanned the ingredient list.

The first step was to figure out where the nearest grocery store was. If she shopped, it was at the deli on the corner for canned specialty olives, aged cheeses and biscuits, or at the liquor store for wine. She had never bought: light brown sugar, corn syrup, cooking spray, all purpose flour, vanilla extract, sugar, ground cinnamon.

“Excuse me?” she asked a man walking a dog. “Is there a grocery store nearby?” He looked at her oddly and then nodded impatiently, instructing her to walk one more block east. She thanked him.

“Excuse me,” she said to an indifferent looking woman in an apron at Gristedes. “Can you show me to the baking aisle?” The woman eyed her up and down lazily.

“Un huh,” she said, gesturing half-heartedly for Phoebe to follow. Ten minutes later she was swiping her credit card and clipping proudly back down the sidewalk with two plastic sacks in her hands. The doorman eyed her warily when he admitted her to the building.

“Baking, ma’am?” he asked wryly. His sardonic grin made the plastic sacks seem less glamorous.

“Don’t get to used to it,” she snapped, and swished to the elevator.

It took her hours, but Phoebe was meticulous about it. She even tied on an apron – another gift dug up from the cardboard boxes in the back room – to emulate the woman in the picture. Applying some jazz music to her speakers, she did this:

Combine one cup of packed brown sugar (packing was a foreign term, so she measured it out in her cosmetics bag, the smallest sack she had for packing), half a cup of corn syrup (dreadful, sticky stuff) and a quarter cup of butter. For this last, she used Benecol. That’s what Rafael needed for his high cholesterol. The recipe said to cook it over medium heat for five minutes, but her burner must have been on high, because within two, big thick bubbles were forming. With a yelp, she snatched the pan form the stove, then realized she’d forgotten to spray the baking dish to pour it into with cooking spray. Holding the skillet aloft in one arm, she awkwardly pressed the nozzle with her second hand, then poured with an exhalation of relief.

She arranged ten slices of French bread (she used the white wonder bread slices currently in the fridge) in a single layer atop this syrup (that was the cookbooks words. Not a sauce; a syrup).

Milk, flour, vanilla extract, salt, and eggs (these last already in the fridge because Rafael would come home with a carton of free-range from the specialty deli, to hard-boil for late night snacks when he was crunching numbers at one in the morning)were placed in a bowl. The recipe said to use a whisk. She wasn’t sure what this was, so used a knife to stir it all around vigorously, then poured the liquid over the bread slices. Now it was meant to refrigerate overnight. In the morning, she had only to slip it in the oven and bake for an hour.

“Phoebe,” she heard Rafael call, as she shut the refrigerator door and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Phoebe, where are you?”

“The kitchen!” she replied happily. There was a confused silence, footsteps, then three bodies entering the kitchen, Rafael followed by Lydia and George, twin pillars of white-haired disapproval behind him.

“You’re cooking?” Lydia asked archly before even saying hello. “Darling, you’ll hurt yourself.” Phoebe removed her apron with a flush.

The night was precisely as painful as she feared. They went out to dinner, and Lydia kept leaning in to whisper maliciously, “Darling, that napkin should be in your lap,” or “Oh dear. Don’t just bite into your bread! Break it into chunks.” Phoebe was ready to spit food at her by the time the waiter removed the soup bowls. Somehow, the only thing that stopped her was the idea of that French toast waiting in the fridge, biding its time before she could show Lydia what a good wife she could be, what standards she could live up to.

With an almost conspiratorial glee, a secret only she knew, Phoebe set her alarm for six in the morning. Lydia and George woke early, and she wanted the French Toast to be piping hot from its hour in the oven when they materialized from the guest room in cashmere robes and fluffy slippers.

“What are you doing?” Rafael asked in sleepy concern when she threw back the coverlet and shrugged into a robe at the early hour. He knew her habit was to sleep until noon. In fact, Phoebe couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the sun rise. It was still dark outside the broad window of the master bedroom.

She placed a finger to his lips. “Shh,” she admonished. “Just you wait.”

Preheating the oven was an alien concept; it sounded time consuming. She figured if she skipped that step and simply cooked the French Toast at a hundred degrees hotter, it would still come out fine. Slipping the pan into the four-hundred-fifty degree oven, she set the timer n the microwave for an hour.

“You’re up?”

Phoebe gave a yelp and turned to find an already dressed and scrubbed Lydia staring at her. Had she really thought her mother-in-law would emerge in a bathrobe? Phoebe felt tousled and unkempt in comparison.

“I was making… breakfast,” she concluded lamely. Lydia sniffed and sat at the window bay, the sun just now peeking in through the window panes.

“Tea?”

“Oh, um, I haven’t made any. In fact, I’m not sure we have any. I think…” The pitch of her voice was rising in alarm when, thank God, Rafael appeared around the corner, already showered himself! She looked at him accusingly but the stare glanced off of him.

“I’m doing a Starbucks run, Mom,” he said, kissing Lydia’s forehead. “One chai tea for you coming right up.” Lydia pursed her lips and looked archly at Phoebe.

“Jesus,” she swore, stomping back to the master bedroom. She took a long shower.

She was blow drying her hair when she caught the whiff of burning. Assuming it was an idle strand caught in the nozzle, she continued her drying and brushing when she heard a shriek. Quickly, Phoebe shut off the hair dryer and tilted her head to listen. The burning scent was thicker, acridly crowding into her nostrils. There was another yelp, then a:

“Phoebe!”

“Oh shit.”

She dashed to the kitchen, where thick smoke crowded around the marble countertop, the Whirlpool refrigerator, the custom-made cabinets. Coughing, Phoebe rushed to her stove and waved one hand frantically in front of her eyes as she turned off the stove with the other.

“Pot holders, pot holders!” she cried, looking around furiously, completely forgetting where she had left them. Of course there was Lydia, standing with one hand on her hips and offering the damned pot holders casually with the other. Her smirk clearly said, I told you so. Phoebe snatched the pot holders from her and extracted the burnt French Toast.

Burnt indeed. Blackened. Phoebe stared down at the charred mass of her creation with dismay.

“Well,” she heard Rafael laugh. She looked up at him pleadingly, waiting for him to rescue her from Lydia’s words, George’s scoff, the mocking that hung thicker than the smoke in the air. “Well, it looks like we’ll be going out for breakfast after all.” George gave a soft chuckle and Lydia was already moving towards her mink coat.

“No!” Phoebe’s shout froze them all where they stood. “Enough is enough. I’ve had it with you all thinking I’m not good enough and we’re going to stay right here because I’ve prepared this French Toast and I spent all afternoon yesterday getting ready this moment and now that it’s out of the oven you’re going to EAT IT.”

There was a stunned silence. She pointed imperiously at the kitchen table.

Rafael was the first to move. He grabbed one of the four plates she had left stacked on the countertop and walked to her side. “Right,” he said firmly. “Mom, Dad?” Lydia and George lined up behind him with twin expressions of horror. Smirking, Phoebe dished out one burnt toast slice onto each plate, then primly handed each party a knife and a fork. There was an awkward shuffling of feet, the screech of chairs being pulled back along the tiled floor, the awkward crunch as the knives forced their way into the black bread.

Rafael placed a bite into his mouth. His eyes betrayed him for a moment, going first wide with shock, then tight with effort, and then he swallowed. “Phoebe!” he crowed. “It’s delicious. A budding home chef we have here. Mom, Dad? You see how hard Phoebe has worked to make you happy?” Phoebe could have kissed him.

Lydia swallowed like it was a live bug going down. George still seemed to be chuckling around his bite. “I’d say she made a valiant effort,” her father-in-law said, slicing into his piece a second time, and eyeing her with a new note in his eye. Could it be… respect? Waving away the errant tendrils of smoke that still clung to the air, he took a second bite. He looked over at her and winked.

November 5 - Divine intervention

You are my pleasure, you are my pain. Was it divine intervention that brought me to you, or the devil’s curse? I came home that night, drunk off of wine. Everything feels better after three glasses of wine. I was operating by rote, robotic, not conscious, when I locked the door with my left hand, applied the dead bolt with my right, while the left was already reaching up to perform the second motion of switching on both light switches: the top for the living room, the bottom for the kitchen. This is what I called them anyway, since it was really a studio and all the rooms were one room, but I had bought furniture that imposed these human, inconsequential divides upon the space.

When I come home, you are already passed out on the bed, and I want to ignore you with every tendon and axon and neuron in my body. But just as I flip on the lights, you let out a cough that is more of a wheeze, and it makes my heart catch and I find myself looking down on you tenderly instead of batting you upside the head. So instead I kneel to unlace your shoes – which you have forgotten to take off – unlace them and set them neatly in the corner, like two sentries standing guard for the night. I have brought you pizza in a box, two slices of cheese, which are just out of the oven, bubbling under the cardboard, only because you have requested it.

“I’m hungry,” you said over the phone. Followed by a confused, “Wait, where are you?” You got home before me and it took you several sentences to realize I wasn’t there.

“I’m having a glass of wine at the French café. I’ll be home soon,” I promise.

“I’m hungry,” you repeat.

‘I’ll being you pizza,” I promise. “I’m a block from the pizza place.”

In fact, I am not. I am a good ten minute walk from the pizza place, but I will do anything to increase your happiness. I have forgotten my umbrella, so I walk through the slanting rain that dusts down on my hair, and fetch you two slices of cheese, and shield the box with my body on the walk home so the slices do not become soggy; my body can bear the brunt.

I feel as though I should be black and blue all over, and am surprised to find, when I look in the mirror, that my flesh it still flesh-colored, that my eyes are still green, that my hair is still a matted, blondish-brown (although darker for the rain). I always hated that term, as a child. Blondish-brown. The in between-ness of it, the neither blonde nor brown, the you are a mutt, a mongrel, a hyphen. No one notices hyphens.

Nothing holds my attention like it used to. This is how you’ve ruined me, I think with a pout, as I look over at you sleepy soundly and I try to find something I can do in the studio that won’t wake you. But nothing holds my attention like it used to. Not the newspaper, which I can barely skim. Not the book I am reading, whose words might as well be written in a foreign language, for all the sense that they make. Even computer solitaire feels stale while you slumber on my bed, your snoring louder than my brain. In this moment, I think: I hate you I hate you I hate you and I know that it is the truth. You cough again and my heart catches for the second time in a span of two hours, and I rush over with a glass of water that you don’t notice because you are asleep.

The bigger fool am I.

I feel like my face is leaking. Oh no; those are my tears. Good, my skin is not yet melting off like wax. I play with a candle flame for a while.

I slice off a chunk of cheddar cheese not because I am hungry but because my teeth want to gnaw. The serrated knife finds the tip of my thumb, so discreetly that for a moment I’m not sure what I felt had been real.

“Did it get me?” I ask. The bead of red blood tells me yes, the knife got me. I have band-aids in the bathroom, but the wound isn’t deep and I’m not concerned, so for the moment, I just suck up the red in between bites of cheddar cheese. It will be my dose of nutritional iron for the day, I decide. Only once I wipe my hands of the last crumbs do I go fishing underneath the bathroom sink.

By the time I remove the band-aid an hour later (sticky and dissolved because I have done dishes in the interim) the sides of the wound have knit together like two chapped lips puckered for a kiss.

How fast flesh wounds heal, I muse. Would I could say the same for those of the soul. I hate fighting with you, but we have fought, and so tonight while you sleep soundly I simmer inside like a soup set over a low burner on the stove and then forgotten. By the time you remember it, hours later, the edges of the pan are brown, crusted. I’m surprised to note that my fingertip wound has knitted up cleanly, that it does not have this brown, crumbly puss burping out from it.

My mother always said: never go to bed angry.

My father always said: everything will feel better in the morning. I want to wake you up and ask you which you would prefer, but you look so angelic when you sleep that I go back to deliberating with my reflection in the mirror. “Mom’s advice, or Dad’s?” I ask. My reflection purses her lips. I wonder if I look as drunk as my mirrored self, then laugh with relief. Nobody looks that drunk.

I go to bed not because I am tired but because I have absolutely nothing else to do.

By morning your arm is around me; it is your tacit way of saying you have forgiven me, and therefore I have forgiven you, and I do not protest as I curl into your body with a contented sigh.

“So we’re okay then?” you ask sleepily, happily, and I purr out agreement. There is contentment in the early morning sunlight that falls on the sheets.

“Do you believe in divine intervention?” I ask suddenly, raising my head from your chest.

“What?” you say absently, not understand why I have asked this. But then, neither do I.

“Nothing,” I say, settling back into the crook of your arm.

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.