Let it be known that I had a Korean-food themed New Year’s Eve party in the works WAY before Kim Jong Il decided to ruin it all and make me look completely tasteless. Instead of re-theming the menu, I’ve decided to embrace the indelicacy and GO ALL OUT! As such, you are cordially invited to a…

GEOPOLITICALLY TACKY NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY!!!!!!!!!

Have you ever wondered if you’d make the same dirty jokes at a party if you knew you were being wiretapped? Do you have a burning desire to know what a “Fascist Party Favor” is? Do you ever wonder what kind of tattoo (butterfly, heart, or tramp stamp?) your favorite dictator sported on his hiney? Have you ever had the urge to play a game of “Pin the Mustache on the Dictator” or “Spin the Molotov Cocktail?”

Well then, this is the (AUTOCRATIC) PARTY FOR YOU!!!!!!!

The Date: 31^st of December
The Time: 8 o’clock in the P.M.
The Place: Your nearest bunker
The Dictatorial Details: There will be no uprisings at this party. So check your free thought and speech at the door with your coats. In fact, this whole party’s going to be censored, kind of like the rest of this sentence dissentious a material in dissentious material and that’s when she dissentious material dissentious for material by dissentious material or dissentious material to dissentious with material then dissentious material.

Potential Party Games include Fascist Family Favorites like….

• Musical Electric chairs™ – where the winner is the person who doesn’t get a chair
• Totalitarian Telephone™ – a game of censoring sentences beyond recognition
• Francisco…. Franco! ™ – a version of the popular “Marco… Polo!”
• Stoning, Firing Squad, Guillotine™ – a delightful modification of “Rock, Paper, Scissors”
• Spot the Informant ™– a variant on “Where’s Waldo?”
• Truth or Dare… on the RACK. ™
• Socialist Charades™
• Knock in the Night™ – Followed by a game of “Hide and Go Seek.”

How to Best Prepare for this Party…

1. Come dressed as your favourite dictator! Need inspiration? Here’s a list…

• “Don’t disrupt me, I’m anachronistically playing the Four Seasons on my violin… also it’s getting a little hot in here, someone turn down the thermostat” Nero (Roman Empire)
• “Broseph” Joseph “I mustache you to join the Communist Party” Stalin (Soviet Union)
• Adolf “I keep my mustache this short because I get embarrassing amounts of schnitzel stuck in it if it’s any longer” Hitler (Third Reich, Nazi Germany)
• Emperor “My skin grafting operation didn’t go as well as expected” Palpatine (The Galactic Empire)
• Benito “I actually prefer coffee, please stop asking me to tea” Mussolini (Fascist Italy)
• Napoleon “my sideways hat is almost as obnoxiously large as my ego” Bonaparte (Post-Reign of Terror France)

2. Design a unique commemorative mustache for Kim Jong Il. Help the recently departed dictator join the impressive mustachetorial ranks of his fellow autocratic rulers (see: Stalin and Hitler).

Still thinking of joining a different party? I have testimonials…

“They rang in the New Year with absolutely no tact at all.” – The New York Times

“I felt invigorated to join a Totalitarian party after playing ‘Spot the Informant.’” – The LA Times

R.S.V.P. … or else

xoxoxoxoxoxox,

Comrade Weston

On Sunday night, facing the truth that over 45 cumulative pages of final papers were calling my name, I swore off of Facebook.

Actually, “swore off” isn’t the right phrase. It implies that I have a measure of self-control, that I could distinguish myself from my legions of friends who complain, “I’m wasting time on Facebook! It’s such a time suck!” even while they… continue to waste time on Facebook, papers and projects languishing all the while. I forced myself off of Facebook, was more like it. Instead of signing a mental pact with myself or deactivating my account – which I theoretically could have just reactivated anyway – I handed my password over to my sister, had her change it, and then washed my hands of the whole thing.

Now, the obvious risks of such a move aside, I’ve been feeling surprisingly relieved. Even if my paper-writing hits a wall and I want to defer the strain (i.e., procrastinate) by taking a peep at my news feed, I can’t. My most recent status – telling my friends to text or email or come find me if they need me – is still there, gathering comments and “likes” for all I know. And I’ve been reflecting on what drives the text-based attraction of Facebook in the first place.

I was not someone who joined Facebook willingly. Even while my high school friends professedly used the website every night, I wrote my papers, wrote for fun, chatted with my family, read novels, and went to bed early. I admit it: I was antisocial, unwilling to become digitally active until the end of my freshman year at Stanford, when someone pointed out to me that if there was a venue for making more connections with people, I should use it. And then I discovered something else. For someone who considers herself an introvert, being social (or believing that I was social to some extent) became as easy as what I already enjoyed most: reading and writing. Through the interface of text, a medium which I already understood, I could appear to have a lively social life on the interwebz, all while protecting myself from the uncertainty of seeing other people face-to-face.

I need not describe the downward spiral from the time I gave in and joined, the exchanging of my private literary interests for the excitement of conducting textual interactions in a semi-public setting. Before this past Sunday, I had been increasingly struck by the fact that, on Facebook, my goals were not necessarily to “keep in touch with my friends!”, to waste my time, or even to tell the world my moment-by-moment answers to that question: “What’s on your mind?” Instead, as murky as they otherwise were, my goals all stemmed from the desire to have a social standing, to have my curiosity about other people satisfied, to have a presence in a way that promised minimal commitment and maximal affability. Most of all, the ability to construct this type of presence, frivolous and time-consuming though it may be, strongly appealed to my drive toward writing. I’ve long considered myself a writer, but I’ve also long maintained that I was a better writer before Facebook. And it’s true. When the source of this inner energy to narrate, to shape, to interact through words was channeled toward actual composition, it was unmistakably purer.

It was that feeling of undivided attention, of engrossment in the page rather than in my own construction of my life, that drove me to abstain from Facebook. As well as the sort of undivided attention I remember giving my friends and their words more of when I was 17. So I was only 17 then. But I remember sending long emails and letters and thank-you notes to my closest friends and relatives, as small as that group might have been. Instead of the cursory writing on someone’s wall or “liking” their status, I did text or email or go find someone if I needed them. As for the people who slipped through the cracks, the ones who nowadays amused me with an occasional post but otherwise never crossed my mind – all they added to my Facebook life was the feeling of being well-connected, and nothing more.

The truth is, since Sunday I’ve already felt the desire to post an amusing thought or link on a friend’s wall, or to see what that interesting acquaintance is saying next. But why not satisfy those curiosities on a personal level? Via direct writing or face-to-face? The truth is, Facebook has added distance to my sense of intimacy with friends, as well as the type of response I have to the happenings in their lives. What happens is less sharing than showcasing, casting onto others our own words or theirs, constantly aiming to alter a public consciousness through the textual proof of our presence.

I’m wondering if it all adds up to a process of narrative construction – which people have always done anyway, in life and in literature. As I use my time to grapple through concepts of narrative formation for an ever-lengthening honors thesis, it strikes me that this might be an interesting research topic indeed. But maybe that’s just the thesis speaking. Or my desire to procrastinate – again.

by Sandy Huang

He is probably an expert on truffles. He can teach you what you couldn’t learn in Catechism and Synagogue. He directs Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project. You’ve seen him on the National Geographic Channel and the History Channel.

Yeah, Patrick Hunt is kind of a big-time professor here at Stanford—even if his humility may cause him to profusely deny it.

As a member of Patrick’s SLE (Structured Liberal Education) section, I am constantly astonished by his vast knowledge of various topics. The size of his personal library just goes to show how well-read he actually is. My section notes tell me that he has quoted John Keats and Epictetus verbatim without ever having to consult a hard copy (or Google, I guess).

Patrick also composes operas, plays the flute fairly well, writes poetry inspired by his time teaching, and is editor-in-chief of a history-focused magazine called Electrum. And on top of all this, he works with Stanford’s athletic department in talking to interested recruits. Yep, that means he personally knows Andrew Luck and every other player on one of the top-ranked football teams in the nation (in fact, many of them have been to his house during their time on campus).

If Dos Equis ever decides that Jonathan Goldsmith is getting a bit too old, Patrick Hunt has my vote to replace him as the “The Most Interesting Man in the World-” even without the beard.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, ….random people whose names I picked out of the telephone book,[1] lend me your … sunscreen? Being a person who thrives on rain and over-cast skies, but is forced to brave college in depressingly sunny California, I am so disappointed right now at the downright “pleasant” weather in Missouri over my winter break.

Just to be clear, that was a purposefully deplorable transition into a discussion of Missouri weather… Okay, to be honest, I really couldn’t think of a witty play on “lend me your ears,” so I just pretended like I was trying to be ironic with the “sunscreen,” but I was actually pretty desperate, because I had dug myself into a hole with the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” thing.[2]

As you can probably already tell, the Weston parents made the terrible decision to let their daughter write this year’s holiday letter. I persuaded them (N.B. they did not need much convincing) that I have had by far a more eventful and exciting year than they have, and, thus, am eons more qualified to write this letter than they are. I told them to be prepared for an exciting, stimulating whirlwind of a letter. The competition over the letter-writing position was a heated one, resulting in a smack-down between my cat, Bubbles, and me. Ultimately, it came down to who was the better typist.

I have been posturing to get this coveted position for YEARS, but now that I have it, I am not entirely sure what to do with it. So I’m just going to pretend like I’ve written it, and spring a pop quiz on you to see if you’ve been paying attention to my riveting letter detailing the goings on in the Weston family’s past year.

True/False.

Not needing to ferry me around from one extra-curricular to the next, my parents have filled their spare time with a promising hobby. Yes, Bruce and Dana have taken up looting. You will have seen their mugs in the papers. FALSE: You obviously did not read my extensively detailed letter closely enough. My parents would never loot. They are much too classy for that riff-raffyness. No. Heists, a la Bonnie and Clyde. That’s where it’s at. But we have all agreed that “Bruce and Dana” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. If you have better ideas, we are taking suggestions.

While in college, I have become the proud owner of not one, not two, but THREE fuzzy blankets. TRUE: It’s all or nothing with Sarah Weston.

I am currently on the residential staff for my college dorm, holding the position of Resident Writing Tutor. This noblest of noble positions has entitled me to a room of my own – located the staggering distance of exactly one door away from the room I had last year. TRUE: I pride myself at my ability to handle drastic change.

One of my freshmen snagged my unattended computer and posted this status on Facebook: “Sarah is single, septilingual, and ready to mingle.” TRUE: To plagiarize the joke of a good friend, the one positive thing about the break-up of the former Yugoslavia is that I can now call myself impressively multilingual. I speak Serbian, Croatian, Serbo-Croatian, …

My dad has taken to staging Civil War reenactments in our back yard. FALSE: No.. just… no.

The majority of my summer, I spent with 216-year-old editions of the English Romantic poet William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I received a grant from Stanford to study them at the British Museum (London) and at Cambridge University. TRUE: The people who supervised my research fed me chocolate cake nearly every day… but only after I had finished smearing peanut butter and jelly all over the multi-million dollar manuscripts. Peanut butter is easy to clean off 200-year old texts, but we all know that chocolate doesn’t come out of anything.

I spent the 4^th of July in England. TRUE: Awkwarddddddddddd.[3]

My dad has a huge man-crush on Andrew Luck, star Stanford quarterback. He has plans for me to woo, seduce, and marry “the Luck fellow.” TRUE: I am pleased to announce my upcoming nuptials! Just in case you want to get me a wedding present, Andrew and I are registered at Whole Foods under the “Nutella” section.

I drove for 4 hours on the freeway on the way back from Chicago. Previous driving experience: driving around my neighborhood at 5mph, and hyperventilating when another car was turning a mile ahead of me. TRUE: Thanks, dad.

I am currently on crutches, and have proven myself to be a menace to society. A pregnant lady held the door open for me the other day, and I felt like a chump. TRUE: People smile at you and give you sympathetic looks when you’re on crutches. I’ve decided to keep mine around, so that I can receive preferential treatment.

Surinam Toads giving birth… perhaps the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my entire life. TRUE: Don’t look it up. Just… don’t.

While debating the merits of different desserts at dinner the other night, my mother referred to The Tiramisu as “an unstoppable force.” TRUE: My mom is one of the wisest people I know.

My parents have gotten matching tattoos. FALSE: Wait, yes they have… (Note: No, they haven’t.) (..I can’t tell what’s true and what’s false anymore…)

My dad has been conning little children out of their French fries whenever we go to a restaurant. FALSE: Unless you substitute “Me” for “my dad” and “my dad” for “little children….” In which case, that statement is *absolutely* true.

I was going to set aside a place in this letter for a “Weighty Aphorisms Section,” but I’m burned out.  Happy holidays!!!

Love, The Westons

Amid all the talk of sportsmanship and integrity and athletic ability and scholarship, it’s sometimes easy to forget that at its heart, college football stands for one thing: spectacle. Luckily, we have Bowl Season (sponsored by the Sizzler) to remind us. We’ve already seen an Alamo Bowl (sponsored by the Texas Historical Society) to remember, witnessed the Air Force come under Rocket fire in the Military Bowl (sponsored by Cyberdyne Systems), and watched Cal go on vacation during the Holiday Bowl (sponsored by Cheese Board Pizza). So what can the Fiesta Bowl (sponsored by T. Boone Pickens and John Arrillaga) possibly hold?

In a word? Spectacle. (Sponsored by Andrew Luck and Brandon Wheeden.)

I’d like to think that over the last fifteen weeks, I’ve touched on a lot of the traditions and topics that make college football such a unique experience. And this week, during the biggest desert party of the year, they’re all on display.

Okay, second biggest desert party.

Ridiculous press build up? Yeah, the game between Stanford and Oklahoma State is being billed as the offensive half of the national championship, with the LSU-Alabama rematch being left to the defense. Oh, and headline puns abound, of course.

Mascot match up? The Stanford Not-So-Much-the-Indians-Anymore versus the Oklahoma State Cowboys. Poetic western backdrop for shootout metaphors is a go.

Between “Pistol Pete” and a horse named “Bullet,” it’s a wonder no one’s died at an OSU game.

Over-the-top fight songs? OSU’s is “Ride ’Em Cowboys.” It really doesn’t get much more over-the-top than that. (Oh wait…)

And as for a venue, we have the University of Phoenix Stadium, home of the Arizona Cardinals and host to Super Bowl XLII, last year’s BCS Championship game, and Wrestlemania XXVI. The stadium, located in the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, is the home field for the University of Phoenix, thirty-time national champions in seventeen different Division I sports.^{[citation needed]}

The stage is, in every conceivable way, set. It’s time for the Cardinal and the Cowboys to do what they’ve done best all season: play some damn good football.

Thanks for a great season, Stanford—and thank you for reading. I’ll see you in Phoenix.

Finally finally, a look at some rhetoric from around the internet:

• At very least, Andrew Luck is big schmoe on campus—we know he’s humble, but this borders on meiosis
• Stanford running back Stepfan Taylor delivers rap on, off the field—gaining yards with rhythmic meter
• Stanford football instills importance of education to its players—a regular Institutio Oratoria
• Get Him to the Game—phronesis from Coby Fleener

In the course of human history, there are individuals who, from time to time, rise above the dirt and grime of ordinary humanity and transcend our mortal lives, become immortalized as shining paragons of all that is commendable about our species.  These are the titans of their age, giants nonpareil whose names are writ in the tome of history indelibly.

As the Histrionic Historiographer, I have been silent for many weeks.  But that is because I have been waiting.  Watching.  Observing.  And now, the time for apotheosis has come.

This quarter has given us one of these aforementioned titans, one of these names that will haunt the halls of Stanford University forever, enshrined with the likes of Jordan, Branner, Elway, Tresidder, Plunkett, Hoover, even young Leland Jr. himself.  This quarter, we have seen greatness.  This quarter, we have seen Luck.

Maybe you’ve heard of him.

Luck was born in 1989 to Kathy and Oliver Luck, the latter a former NFL quarterback for the Houston Oilers.  The young Luck spent much of his childhood in England and Germany playing football (that sport with the black-and-white ball and the ridiculous haircuts) before returning to Texas, where he—you know what, I’m tired of dancing around it.  Let’s cut to the point:

Andrew Luck is the best fucking architect ever.

It’s not even a competition.  I mean, there have been some great architects, don’t get me wrong.  When you look at the forward motion that Frank Gehry can create or the changes that Walter Gropius brought to the game, well, those are phenomenal advances that revolutionized the industry.  But no one—no one—architects like Andrew Luck.

Luck is the full package.  He can draft, he can model, he can analyze.  He has an extensive knowledge of complex building codes and is adept at reading local planning and zoning laws to ensure he constructs the best possible building for that specific location.  And the man can build like no one I’ve ever seen.  Houses, office buildings, stadiums, dams, Russian palaces, pyramids, synagogues—you name it, Andrew Luck knows how to design, orchestrate, and execute it in the field.

Just by numbers alone, Luck stands out.  He’s designed over eighty different buildings during his time at Stanford, and built models of another seven.  This is especially remarkable when you consider that Luck’s only been an architecture major for three years—he spent his freshman year on the Farm undeclared.  In just three years, Luck has managed to break almost every architecture record the department keeps, and consistently turns in quality buildings when the pressure and odds seem insurmountable.

But it’s more than numbers.  Luck is the only architect to ever master both Trojan and Irish architectural styles—in fact, on a recent class trip to Los Angeles, Luck was able to revitalize the aging Memorial Coliseum, replacing it with a wide open thoroughfare from end to end, a radical redesign that was greeted with huge industry fanfare.  Luck not only does the final design work on each of his buildings, but is involved with the planning from the beginning, often deviating from professors’ prompts if he sees a better way to build.

Whatever firm acquires Luck next year is in for a marquee architect, one who has the potential to make a huge impact from his very first day through the door.  Luck’s talents are unique, his intelligence unrivaled, and his ability to integrate sustainable design practices while creating a building that is not only functional but also aesthetically appealing is simply incredible.  Someone should give him a trophy.

It’s really too bad he’s just not very good at this sports thing.

Finally, a look at some rhetoric from around the internet:

• Heisman or not, Luck’s legacy at Stanford sealed among school’s greatest athletes, ambassadors—yet has never once sunk to bomphiologia
• Fiesta Bowl has makings of a classic—all these rhetorical terms come from the classics, after all
• Andrew Luck wins Johnny Unitas award—for the best quarterback in the nation, just like Toby Gerhart won the Doak Walker award for best running back in the nation in 2009
• Stanford QB Luck: I’m ‘absolutely’ prepared to try the NFL—well, damn
• Salon’s Sexiest Men of 2011—number 12 is number 13

Major: Earth Systems
Year: Coterminal Senior

Mattias Lanas is an Earth Systems major with interests in nature illustration and detail-oriented fine art. This botanical series is part of a project to document some of the common flora found at Stanford Sierra Camp, where Mattias spent this past summer working as the art instructor. He hopes to one day launch his passions for natural science and fine art into a career.

Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja miniata)
This genus is known for its hemiparasiticism: it often taps into the roots of grasses. The red parts are actually not petals, but sepals (modified leaves). The true flower is yellow and tube-like, protruding out of some of the sepal clusters.

Crimson Columbine (Aquilegia formosa)
A perennial native to the Western United States, it has a history of multiple uses by Native Americans as medicine, decoration, and food. Aquilegia comes from the Latin aquil, meaning eagle, and formosa means beautiful.

Sierra Bog Orchid (Platanthera dilatata)
As its name suggests, this orchid grows in boggy meadows and generally moist areas in the Sierras. The small white flowers on its stalk produce a fragrant, sweet perfume that can be smelled from a fair distanceaway. The plant’s range extends north all the way to Alaska, and it is especially common in the mountainous regions of the Pacific Northwest.

5.9.2011

va jugando con el tiempo
she the pretty anarcho
feminist says
of exposures
I could take one of Macchu Picchu
and then one of you
sin girando la pelicula
the sun is moving the
afternoon is gone
se fue.
a journal in verse might be
a possibility.

7.9.2011

spectating polo en
bici, I am thinking
of the 8-year-old in me that comes out,
quiet, when it’s so hard to
communicate.
thats who I am sometimes, me
alegre que decidiera no jugar 8
year-old me
couldn’t ride a bike.

9.9.2011

the tango bar was much
crazier than esperabamos
manana tenemos cita para bailar salsa con:
una pareja homosexual
nuestro verdudero y
the character rachel refers to
affectionately as
wolfman.

14.9.2011

yesterday
was a good day
we went to a monumental apology
and a biblical theme park
in between
a man with one tooth
showed us his fish.
I can still write as if I were
in love. I bought
3 alfajores (I think I forgot
the lunch I packed) one for
George one for Nick
one for me.
while he gabbed about
fishing culture, while
the slippery soft catfish
spent itself in the dry bucket, I
kept an eye on his tooth
which was long & off-center it’s
a fun mouth to imagine having,
and I thought about how I’d package it.
I will already be home when
the postcards
arrive
I have already eaten
my alfajor I have already boarded
the plane.

When I was four, my father was in a car accident that left him in a coma. My mother would later say it happened before lunch, but it took her the afternoon to figure out how to tell me. I found out after dinner he probably wouldn’t be home that night, or the next. I was four and dumb, so I made very little of it.

The next day, the doctors declared him brain dead. My mother packed me a peanut butter banana sandwich and we drove to the hospital. For the next five hours, the two of us waited for him to die.

My mother didn’t cry. She set out my favorite coloring book and sat at my father’s bedside. I couldn’t find any crayons so I folded boats and airplanes out of paper towels and the nurse on call brought me a juice box. Before we left, my mother unclasped the turquoise necklace my father had given her on their wedding day and tucked it into her pocket. I hugged my father’s sleeping body, and we slipped out the door.

On the way home, my mother told me that my father was going somewhere, and I shouldn’t be scared, or sad, because it was a place that we all ended up going to someday. It was just something everyone and everything did eventually, sometimes without even really realizing it at all.

Like the bathroom? I said.

My mother looked at me in the rearview mirror. Her gray eyes fogged like storm clouds. Yes, in a way.

I pictured my father perched on top of a giant toilet, waving down at me from the rim of the seat. I knew he was dead. I thought I understood. He had been in a car accident, he hadn’t made it.

And what was more, his exit strategy wasn’t interesting, wasn’t unique. My four-year-old brain was full of battling knights and race cars and dragons and Krakens of the sea, and my father the hero had died in the same beige sedan that drove me to and from school five days a week.

I stopped crying after a few weeks. It was hard to know what I was crying for, anyway—missing him was missing runny strawberry ice cream days in the summer, missing having someone to vault me up to catch snowflakes on my tongue on Christmas morning. Isolated events. Piecing the rest of him together was difficult, and so hard to separate from my mother, who was now suddenly her own person. It wasn’t long before my memories of him frayed at the edges, became weightless, lost in the shuffle of everything else. And before I knew it, my father was a brief appearance—a guest speaker in my childhood schooling. He’d come and gone painlessly, and here I was on the other side.

It was basic arithmetic. My father was a subtraction, one less, and that was the end of it. Death, his death, it wasn’t fair. Just final.

*

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday evening and my suitemates are in the third hour of a marathon round of video games. I’m sitting on my bed waiting for the phone to ring.

My phone’s had poor reception all night, which gives me hope. There’s a chance Sarah has called, and I didn’t pick up, which breeds hope that she’ll have found me less desperate. The downside is, there’s a chance Sarah has called and I didn’t pick up.

“Okay, okay—I’m winning this time, twentieth time’s the charm,” Christian says with finality. From his other side, Blake passes me a beer. It’s room temperature, and flat. “Dude, she’s not going to call.”

I scowl. “She might.”

Gavin laughs. “Ten bucks says she won’t.”

I don’t take the bet. I’ll lose. “Fuck you.” On cue, my phone rings. I scramble for it, upsetting my beer onto the couch. It seeps into the cushions and the seat of Christian’s pants, but everyone is too absorbed in the game to notice.

But it’s not Sarah. It’s my cousin Juliet, whose number I have only by the sheer coercion of family obligation. I let the phone ring a few times, then answer cautiously. “Hello?”

“Tom!” Her voice is chipper and grating. “Long time, no talk.”

I get off the couch and cross the room, eliciting loud protests from the guys when I walk in front of the TV. Juliet squeaks. “What’s going on?”

“Hang on for a second,” I snap, shutting the door behind me as a muffled roar rises from the group.

Now that I’m in the hall, I don’t actually know where I’m going. So I walk into the bathroom.  It’s a mistake. Half the urinals are already housing the remains of several condoms, floating on the brackish yellow surface like pale dead codfish. It smells like piss and vomit. I head for the sinks, turning the tap on and off as Juliet clears her throat. “You good?” She sounds irritated.

“Yeah, sure, what’s up? I’m kind of busy, I’m waiting for another call…” I’m being an ass, but the remnant probability of Sarah, and sex, is enough to trump Juliet, who I’ve spoken to maybe twice since we were nine. She’s simple. She likes Dawson’s Creek. Poor thing never stood a chance, landed with a dipshit name like Juliet.

“Tom, your mom passed away.”

The faucet is leaky. I wriggle the taps on both sides, hot and cold, but the water continues to run in frantic little dribbles down the drain.

“Tom, did you hear me? Your mom… she’s dead.” Juliet repeats it slowly, carefully, enunciating her vowels.

“I heard you. Yeah.” It makes sense. She hasn’t emailed in a few days. A couple weeks, maybe.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Juliet says. She keeps saying my name, like some kind of rote incantation. “We were… Dad and I were visiting, you know, since it’s near the holidays and we figured she should be with family…” She stops abruptly and clears her throat.  “Not—not that I mean you had to have been there, ‘cause like, you’re in college and that’s important and stuff…”

I look at myself in the mirror, expecting to see something different than I normally do. Death—the death of a parent—it’s supposed to change you. Be shocking, numbing, life-changing. But in the mirror, it’s just me. Same reflection as always. I need a haircut.

“… She had a seizure this morning and just didn’t wake up.  I know this is really hard to hear.”

“It’s okay, Juliet,” I say. “She was sick. It was… coming.”

“I guess,” she concedes, not bothering to conceal her relief at not having to console me. “Yeah. You’re right.” She pauses. “Still, sorry,” she adds as an afterthought.

Thanking her for her condolences feels silly, so I say nothing. My hands aren’t wet, but I dry them anyway. I scrub the mirror with my paper towel. Still, nothing’s changed.

Juliet’s voice crackles through once more. “So… what are you going to do now? With the cabin, I mean.”

“The cabin.” Our old summer home, where my mother moved six years ago after she stopped being able to walk on her own. It was bad timing; I was feeling temperamental and maladjusted, so I decided to go to boarding school in Massachusetts. To compensate, my mother hired a full time nurse to help her around the house.

“Are you going to sell it? Because we, the family I mean, could really get a lot for it.” Juliet clears her throat for emphasis. “You know?”

I stayed away most summers, finding excuses in flashy internships and pre-college programs. When I did go back, it was hard to make it seem like home. And every time I did, my mother was weaker. I’d boil her tea, help her bathe, bring her the morning paper. She started weeping for no reason, getting anxious over small things. Last Christmas morning she was afraid of me: she’d forgotten who I was. But most days she would just stare out the window, folding little doves out of napkins and pushing them over the sill.

“Or you could keep it, I guess,” Juliet says, taking my silence for disapproval. “It’d be cool. You know. Tom’s Cabin. Ha, ha.”

“What?”

“You know—like the famous book, or movie, whatever… about the slave…”

“You mean Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“Right, yeah, that. Whatever.”

There’s a pause. I hear Juliet suck in her breath. “So are you going to sell it?”

I hang up.

Same grimy floor, same desecrated urinals. There’s loud music churning in the hallways, screams and drunken karaoke from the floor below. I head back to my room. The door opens with an arthritic creak that I don’t remember being there the last time I used it. Christian, Gavin, and Dan are eating tortilla chips, apparently on a well-deserved break from the battlefield.

Christian fishes his game controller out of the salsa and mutes the game, which is back on the welcome screen. “Well? Are you getting laid?”

I hesitate. Blake has taken the controller from Christian and is scraping salsa off the buttons with a tortilla chip; Gavin is picking his nose. I think, they’re not mature enough for this. “It wasn’t Sarah.”

“Ten bucks!” Gavin crows, reaching up for a high five that no one reciprocates.

I don’t have to tell them. I do anyway. “My mom… she’s not doing too well.” They look at me, unsure. Gavin’s hand sinks downwards. “What I mean is she’s dead. So, I’m probably going home.”

There’s a sharp silence. Then,

“Fuck, man.”

“Dude, you okay?”

“I’m so sorry, man.  That’s really… awful.”

Christian claps me on the shoulder, awkwardly, delicately, like I might shatter.

I sit back down. The room is much quieter now; the chip bowl is empty but no one’s calling for a refill. Gavin hands me another beer without meeting my eye. This time, it’s freezing.

*

I decide to take the rest of the semester off and book a flight home. In a duffel, I pack three boxers, two shirts, a toothbrush, a razor, my phone. Enough for a weekend trip; it’s how long I’ve convinced myself I’ll stay.

It’s a two-hour train ride to the shore, then forty minutes on a bus to reach the cabin, which sits at the edge of a national woodland preserve. Prime real estate that was a stretch to rent as a summer home and a near fortune to purchase. But my mother had wanted to die here. She at least saw that far.

Through the tinted windows of the train, everything looks sharp and bleak. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve come back, but with the seasons moving fast this year, it looks like no time has passed at all. Outside, the grass has already turned its flaming November golden, tousled like the hair of a child by the thick, rattling wind.

The bus leaves me at the edge of the preserve, and I walk the final quarter mile to my mother’s home. The cabin sits on a little cliff, tucked behind a grove of old pine. It’s a beautiful spot, really. You can see the sea, the forest, the speckled white beaches shedding coats of sand into the foaming surf. I pause for a moment to look at the ocean. Its surface is shimmering, motionless, thin and taut like the skin of a drum. Above it, the air smells like salt and sand and seals. Home. Kind of.

I know when I open the door, Addy will be there. I’ve been waiting for myself to be nervous about this fact, but it hasn’t yet hit me. It’s been years since I’ve really let myself think about her.

She was twenty, four years my elder, when we hired her sister as my mother’s full-time nurse. When her sister decided to get her M.D., Addy, who’d gotten her own nursing degree by then, took over. During the day, she cooked, cleaned, changed my mother’s bedpans, wheeled her from room to room. She was efficient and cheery, which was enough for my mother. What’s more, she expected only minimal contributions—boiling water, loading the dishwasher, reading the paper to my mother—from me. I skittered around my mother’s illness while Addy cleaned up after the both of us.

We became friends, at first only out of convenience. The age difference was a little crippling; the matter of her employment made things worse. But we somehow managed to push it aside. Looking back on those years, I can barely comprehend how Addy pulled it off—how she made me laugh, how she made me forget I was an angsty kid with a sick mom and a crappy attitude. She was, in a way, a blessing.

She also had fantastic tits.

There’s a key we always keep under the mat. For emergency purposes. It’s a stupid place to keep it—the first place anyone trying to break in would look—but it’s there all the same. It’s cold and grimy on one side from the hard earth, clean and neat on the other, which faced the nylon doormat. I open the door hesitatingly, like a stranger. Addy’s at the sink. She watches me shut the latch behind me; she heard me coming.

I take a breath. “Addy.”

She smiles, sadly, as she must. “Tom.”

*

That night, we make soup. Or rather, Addy makes soup while I stand uncomfortably behind the stove and tell her stop, you really don’t uh have to you know, cook for me, because. She’s wearing jeans and a green blouse just tight enough to reveal the slight outline of her bra beneath the cotton. I am incredibly—uncomfortably—aware that I am still attracted to her.

She ladles out a bowl for me, nervously. It’s an old recipe of my mom’s—a fish stew she made for me a lot when I was little. You could say it was a comfort food—something I’d always have after a rainy day at soccer practice, on snow days when we’d snooze in front of the television. It’s been years, but the minute I see it, I know it hasn’t come out right. The smell’s off, the color’s too light. I don’t tell her this. I hardly care.

“I know it’s not as good as your mom’s, but… I figured you might be missing it. I remember you loved this stuff.” She smiles, a careful quarter of a smile that casts a fleeting shadow on her jaw. She’s unsure. Not embarrassed; she won’t be, even if it’s inedible. Addy doesn’t really do embarrassed.

I laugh, a little more dryly than I might have intended. “Thanks, but I think I’ve been over it for a while. She hasn’t made it since I was twelve.”

Addy shrugs and dips a spoon into the pot. “All the better for me, then. Maybe you won’t notice the difference.” She sips at the spoon, cautiously, puckering her bottom lip, and gives me a reassuring smile. “God, I always tried to cook like your mom, but I could never pull it off.  Anyway, like I said… I just wanted this place to feel like home for you again.”

We eat in silence. The soup isn’t my mother’s, really, but it’s not bad—in fact, it’s pretty good. Just different. I watch Addy, sneaking glances as she studies her bowl. I haven’t seen her in almost three years, the summer before I left for college. She hasn’t changed; even her hair is the same dark auburn, parted on the left, always worn down. I remember wanting to sleep with her, badly. That feeling isn’t gone, but it’s lighter now, a little more inconsequential. We’ve barely spoken since I walked in the door three hours ago. I didn’t let her hug me, and I don’t think she was expecting me to.

“Tom—how are you doing?” She asks it abruptly; I can tell she’s been waiting for the right moment. This still isn’t it. She glances at me cautiously, then tries to make amends. “I—it’s a dumb question. Obviously, shitty.” She hesitates. “Your mom was fine, I mean, she’d been doing really well… there was this one week last month where she was lucid almost the entire time. She talked about you a lot. And you know, she was always so happy when you called, or when you emailed.”

I frown, scrape my spoon over the little gritty puddles at the bottom of my bowl. “I should’ve more. Emailed, I mean.” My mother had written me at least twice a week, every week I was away from home. Every time she was lucid she would want to call or write. They were long, heartfelt emails about the cabin, the beautiful sea, how she wished I were here with her to enjoy life. I wrote three line responses, always the same thing with mildly different wording: hi, I am good/healthy/fine/happy, glad things are fine back home, miss you write again soon, love tom. College, books, girls—they seemed out of place in that conversation. Not because they were trivial, though they were. Just distant. My mother had always been a completely separate sphere of my life, and it seemed perverse to violate those boundaries, even for the sake of typed intimacy.

“No—I mean, she knew you were busy.” Addy looks prepared to mop up a torrent of gushing tears, and I feel suddenly bare. It’s a tight, ugly sensation in my chest that I immediately despise.

“I’m fine, Addy, really. You don’t need to do this.”

“Talk to you?”

“No. You don’t have to give me unnecessary compassion. It is what it is. I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m okay.”

She looks at me, waiting for me to recant my words. A flicker of something—relief, maybe—passes over her face when I don’t. Her eyes meander over to my mouth.

“Oh—Tom, you’ve got some soup on your—” She reaches over, almost instinctively, and dabs my chin with her napkin. And it’s this—the physical contact, the maternal gesture—that makes something in me snap. I flinch away from her, pushing off from the table so sharply that I send my silverware clattering to the floor. Flecks of soup spatter the rug, seeping like brilliant crimson blood into the little fibers wound tight beneath my feet.

I look at Addy and feel a powerful, insatiable need for her. To lay my head on her chest, let her run her fingers through my hair. I want to fuck her, but even more so, I want to watch her pleasure herself, run her hands down her stomach, between her legs—her perfect body, unblemished by disease or death or sorrow.

I shut my eyes and take a breath. Addy’s staring at me like a cornered cat, eyes wide and cautious. I stand, and a shudder runs through my body like a sip of something unexpectedly frozen. “Sorry,” I say. I walk out of the kitchen, down the hall, into my old bedroom.

*

My mother is undressing herself in front of the mirror. I watch her from the doorway, timidly, as she unbuttons her blouse. I am seven years old.

Her face is slate; nothing moves but her eyes, quick and flashing like the scales of a fish. She examines her breasts as they appear over the descending collar of her shirt, touches the outline of her bra. Her collarbone is prominent, highlighted in the light. I have pictured my mother naked, innocently—simply as a comparison to my own nakedness in the tub or between changes of clothing. Girls and boys are different. But I do not expect the wrinkles, the pale white skin beneath the brilliant blue of her blouse.

I came looking for her when I woke up and found her bed empty. But this creature I have discovered is not my mother: everything I see before me is foreign, pale pink and soft like a molting creature from the sea. I am petrified and enraptured all at once. Do not move, my feet say. I cannot move myself.

She finishes unbuttoning, but does not remove, her blouse. Next, she slips quietly out of her loose tan slacks and sits, legs tucked beneath her, on the floor. She looks small: in this position, she is nearly my height. And though she thinks she is alone, her arms still twitch forward subconsciously to shield her body.

She continues to examine herself, shyly. Her hands touch each part of her body at least once, a soft, lingering brush of the fingertips, as if making contact with tabooed artifacts. Her eyes rage, and I am afraid she will cry, as she has not dared to do since the funeral.

For a moment, she pauses, hands pasted to her stomach. I feel myself unfreeze a little; I picture her getting dressed, coming to find me spying at the door. But as I watch, she unfreezes as well. With her eyes trained onto the ground—as if she is scared to look—she extends her right hand in front of her, as if reaching out to someone in the mirror I cannot see. She stares at her fingers, at this mysterious person on the other side of the glass, watching, waiting.

It’s slight at first. I don’t even notice until she inhales sharply. A mild quake in her fingertips, juddering up through her wrists. She snaps her hand back into a fist as if burned, clutching her hand to her bare chest. The folds of her blouse cave in around her like a shielding cloak.

With a gasp of defeat, my mother buries her face in her hands, not crying, not even making a sound—just shielding her eyes. Almost immediately, I feel my own discomfort, seeing my mother sick, seeing my mother vulnerable without her permission. I think of my mother laughing, of my mother holding hands with my father. Mother brave, Mother strong, Mother whole. The scared woman in the room, huddled before the mirror, violates any notion of have yet formed of parenthood. And I realize for the first time what it’s like to feel a little older.

The heat burns back into my legs; I scuffle out of the doorway and slip away before she can notice I’ve even snuck in at all.

*

I decide not to hold a service. My mother’s only living family other than me is Juliet and her drunk father, and it hardly seems worth it to bring them out here just to haggle over a selling price for the cabin.

Addy and I bury her in a cemetery that overlooks the sea, just as she wanted. I see my mother’s face once before it disappears beneath the coffin lid, gray and set like a photograph. I cry for the first time since her death, but they feel like an involuntary front. I am disembodied, watching some disheveled doppelganger of myself weep in an ugly suit I fished out of a closet at the last minute. I wonder when the tears will end, how they even began. As an incentive for sorrow, I try to think back to some happy memory of my mother and me, but all there I get is a whining tightness in my chest that squeezes once, twice, and leaves me just as I was. By the end, all I’ve managed to come up with is relief that it’s finally over for the both of us.

As her coffin descends into the earth, I feel there’s something else too, a weighty soreness at the back of my head that I suspect is the beginning of grief. But I don’t know grief. And because I can’t quite place it, the emotion doesn’t bother to linger.

On the way home from the cemetery, I ask Addy to stay for a few days, to help me sort out my mother’s affairs, what’s left of them. I offer to pay her, but she scowls in disgust and I don’t push the matter.

“Let’s just start with her bedroom,” I suggest the minute we’re back. I feel hollow and I don’t like it. If I come across a picture of my mother and cry, I might get to feel a little more human again.

Addy stares at me. “Are you sure you’re ready? We just buried your mom like, half an hour ago.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” I say, nodding vigorously. I feel cartoonish. “Let’s just start, get this over with.”

We begin with the bedrooms. When she moved here permanently, my mother quietly claimed the guest bedroom that overlooked the far side of a little ocean cliff. The master bedroom, where my parents used to sleep when we spent summers here, hasn’t been lived in for nearly two decades. Now it’s a storage space, jammed to the corners with boxes and rolled up rugs and odd ugly furniture that didn’t belong.

“Jesus,” Addy whistles. “What are you going to do with all of this?”

I laugh bitterly. “What else? Get rid of it. I mean, what would I do with it? I don’t want it.”

“Okay,” she says carefully. She picks her way through the room as if wading through a reef and pulls a large box off the shelf. “But this stuff… it was your parents’ life. You should at least take a look at the family stuff before you sell it all.” She peels the yellowed tape off the flaps and peers inside. “I mean, god. Look at this stuff—this is old. It’s valuable.” She sets the first box down on the floor and reaches for the one next to it.

“Addy,” I say helplessly, “It’s all useless stuff, don’t…” But it’s too late. Out comes a set of beautiful long-stemmed candles, a set of first edition books that look like they could be from the 1800s, some willow-patterned china, a beautiful set of silver spoons that I recognize from my grandparents’ old home, and my mother’s turquoise necklace. Addy immediately takes the necklace out of its casing and runs her fingers over the turquoise, eyes sparkling. “Wow, Tom. Was this your mom’s? It’s so beautiful. I don’t know why she didn’t wear it more often.”

I scuff my heels crankily against a small box at my feet. “My dad gave it to her,” I mumble. “She stopped wearing it after he died.”

Addy’s face crumples. “Oh, that’s so sad. It must have hurt so much, seeing it just sitting there in its box…”

“Yeah, I bet,” I cut in. I crouch down to open the box I’ve been kicking as noisily as I possibly can, peeling the tape off in a loud, slow screech. I just want her to stop talking. I don’t know why my mother stopped wearing the necklace. For all I know, she didn’t even like it. Maybe she only wore it to please my father, and then after he croaked, it was goodbye to marital obligation.

“Oh, wow, Tom—this box.” Addy hops over the wall of cardboard between us and reaches into the box I’ve opened. In my surly tantrum I haven’t even bothered to look inside; it’s filled with notebooks and yearbooks and photos of my parents from when they were young. There’s even one of me as an infant. I look like a slimy, pink little alien shaking its fists at the camera.

Addy grabs my baby picture and bursts out laughing. “My god. This is great. I want this one—I’ll keep it and tell people this was my boss taking a shit.” I can’t help but smile too as I try to pry the photo out of her fingers. Addy rolls away from me, holding it out of reach, and grins back at me victoriously. Her eyes are a late autumn green. My heart pounds a little. I want to pull her face closer and kiss her, but I don’t, I won’t, not over a box full of dead mommy and dead daddy. I drag my eyes away from her, down to my nails, which I start to pick at guiltily.

“Whatever, screw you,” I say, forcing a laugh. “What else is in here?”

With my photo safely stashed in her bag, Addy dives back into the box and pulls out a photo of my mother and father. They look to be about in their early twenties, maybe a few years before they got married. With his arms around my mother’s waist, my father looks confident and happy; he hasn’t shaved in days.

Addy reaches back to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, like my mother is doing in the photo. Other than that, they look nothing alike. Addy’s hair is a straight caramel brown, my mother’s still rich and yellow, whipping around her head as she laughs. She seems mildly embarrassed by the photograph: her other hand is waving the camera away. My mother used to always laugh like that—like she was surprised at her own joy. It only made her laugh harder.

When Addy laughs, she is always sure.

“God, they look so young,” Addy murmurs, running her fingers along the frame of the photograph. “Your mom’s gorgeous, Tom. You should keep this.” She slips the photo out of its frame. Someone, probably my father, has scrawled on the back: “Pearl Beach Aug 83.” They were twenty-five. Addy’s age. I don’t recognize my parents like this, and the thought of keeping the photo seems disruptive to memory. I take it anyway, just to make Addy smile.

We spend the next three days straight moving boxes, clearing a path to the older stuff in the back. Piles appear in the living room, organized by year and utility. Most of what we find is typical: old plates and silverware, photos and textbooks, cassettes and a radio, boxes and boxes of eighties clothing. But we also come across a box of funny hats and waste an afternoon in front of the bathroom mirror, only making things worse when Addy drags over what looks like the costume set from Grease.

Being with Addy makes things bearable. The heaviness and confusion of everything seems so much more distant when I talk to her. Because in spite of everything, she’s still a tourist here. She cared for my mother, but her affection was necessarily muted by hierarchy. For Addy, this death and this house are all just a part of passing through this shit town. Being with her makes it easier to take everything less seriously. The lighter perspective is foreign, almost abrasively so, and it’s refreshing.

If I’m brave enough to consider my mother—consider her absence—all I come up with is shallow, frustrated confusion. My mind has emptied all but two of its beakers, and someone keeps siphoning water out of the Addy beaker and dribbling it into my mother’s. A careful, steady dilution: my feelings, whatever they are, towards my mother diminish as those for Addy—platonic, romantic, whatever—grow more and more concentrated by the minute.

It’s easy to settle back into the old familiar of our friendship. It’s not sex, or any kind of intimacy. But it’s a relief to not feel like I need it.

*

The night we finally finish, Addy and I get drunk. We unload a box of fluffy pillows with artsy fruit patterns on them and sprawl out on the porch with an assortment of alcoholic beverages we unearthed from the corners of the cabin: red wine, a few beers, and, unfathomably, an ancient bottle of rum.

We talk for a while, mostly about nothing. Addy puts her head on my shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”

I stare at the lights from the next city over flickering across the ocean water. “I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. All that shit, in those boxes. I can’t tell what year I’m in anymore.”

Addy laughs thickly. She’s a messy drunk. “You need to get out of this house.”

“Uh huh. And go where? The post office? Or the movie theater in, in, fuck, it’s like three towns away.” I feel wonderfully foggy. It’s amazing, not having to think about what I’m saying.

“No, no, let’s go… out there.” She points to the darkness before us, stretching into the glinting woods.

“There?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Okay.” I get up and follow her, stumbling down the porch steps. She waits for me at the bottom, grinning. Then, almost gracefully, she peels off her jeans and her top and sprints down the path.

“Hey!” I call after her. My voice echoes off the trees, and I run after her, tripping over myself until I’ve caught her around the waist.

We strip off the rest of our clothes and streak into the woods, howling like animals. The dirt is sharp with pine needles and rocks beneath my feet, but soon we’re running fast enough that it hardly matters.

We are insane, inhuman. The shame I should feel dies in some fiery hole in my chest, replaced by the thrill of abandoning civilization, of letting loose every ugly dark confused emotion I’ve had in the past week. Fuck death, fuck misery. Fuck everything.

We reach a ledge, barely catching ourselves in time. The surf rages below us, spraying the rocks with brilliant, heady white foam. We heave in gulps of air, collecting salt on our tongues. I grab Addy’s hand and drag us to the very edge. My toes grip the rock; it’s sharp, a true edge that cuts into my joints. I can see all my knuckles going white.

“Do it,” I say.

“What—”

“Do it, jump!”

“No!”

“Together, on three, we’re jumping, one.”

“You’re crazy—”

“Two.”

“Tom.”

“Three!”

“Fuck!”

“Fuck!”

We scream together as we launch over the edge. “FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKK!”

The water slams us unforgivingly, smacking our flailing limbs. I go under, far deeper than I’d been sober enough to expect. When I break the surface, a wave smashes against the side of my head and I gulp in mouthfuls of freezing, powerfully briny water. To my left, Addy resurfaces, shrieking and laughing. “Oh my god, oh my god!”

We throw our heads back and wail into the night, screaming until we’re hoarse—because it’s freezing, because we’ve each swallowed a pint of filthy ocean water, because my mother’s dead and we’re fucking alive and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

I catch my breath, abruptly sobered, and swim clumsily in Addy’s direction. She waits for me, treading water evenly beneath the inky waves. My arms snake around her—she’s naked, we both are—I’ve barely understood this properly. We’re human again, sentient, but it’s too late and too useless to be self-conscious.

I stare unabashedly at her, the curve of her waist, the space between her legs. Her body is every bit as beautiful as I could have imagined.

Addy wriggles out of my grasp, splashing me. She curls her legs back into her body and dives forward. I catch her by the shoulders and she wraps her arms around my neck, laughing and spraying my face with water. I pull her in closer and kiss her hard. She melts into me, pressing herself up against my chest, legs kicking fast in the churning water. I run my fingers up between her breasts, skimming her collarbone, feeling the faint beating of her heart chiming dissonantly against the sound of the surf.

My hands are inept in the water. Somehow I muster up the courage to trail my fingers down her back. Heat churns through my blood and I tread water more confidently, making the two of us more easily buoyant. Addy sighs into my mouth, and I’m braver, brave enough to run my hands forward, over her hip, down a little trail to rest on her thigh. But as if on a trigger, she gasps and pulls away sharply, sending a rush of salty water into my eyes and mouth.

“Oh god, no.” She shakes her head, swimming away from me in fast, pumping strokes. “No, no. Bad idea.”

“Addy, wait,” I say helplessly. I don’t follow her, but she’s stopped only a few feet away.

“Tom, we can’t.” She’s catching her breath and her sentences are clipped and rushed. “We’re drunk, and we’re out in the middle of the ocean… your mom just died, you just left school, you’re not thinking clearly…” She trails off.

I stare at her dumbly. Her hair, stained black by the water, fans around us, a shimmering vacuum. We’re both breathing hard. We’d forgotten to fight the current and drifted closer to shore. I can see the edge of the cliff we jumped off of, a triangular point cutting into the sky above us.

I want to say, I’m fine. I want to say, you’re making a mistake. But instead, I just keep looking at her, and she gazes back at me with pitying eyes.

Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, Tom.” And that’s it.

She swims away from me in a contained breaststroke, her bottom bobbing in and out of the water. I want to scream after her, tell her she’s a bitch, tell her I’m furious about being left buck-naked in the ocean with my last set of clean clothes strewn god knows where in the forest. It’s my own damn fault. I feel stupid, sick, guilty, like a kid caught crapping in the pool at grandma’s birthday party. The humiliation is crippling. It’s all I can do to keep treading water in the thrashing waves, keep myself afloat against the current. Give myself a moment to catch my breath.

*

After my father died, I spent nearly every night of the next year in my mother’s bed. I lay awake beside her, listening to her snore lightly under the covers. I wondered if she noticed the difference, now that it was her son next to her and not her husband. A lighter weight, less contact. There was simply less of me; it made it easy, to forget.

Sometimes she would have nightmares, ones that would make her seize and writhe. It terrified me to see fear in my mother. I would shake her until she woke, tell her she’d been dreaming again. Each time she would emerge as if breaching the surface of a pool, breathing in thick gulps of air. She would stare at me as if for the first time. I was foreign to her in those moments; I would wonder if she dreamt of my father, of his death, of hers or mine.

But then, as if I had been the frightened one, she would spend the next half hour stroking my hair and singing me back to what I convinced her was sleep. Most of the time she’d simply doze off, fingers still entwined in the soft hairs at the nape of my neck. I would lie there for hours, bathing in the static of her touch, staring into the darkness of our broken home.

*

I wake up the next morning with cottonmouth and the ghost of a hangover. The night before comes crashing down on me and I curse under the covers. I figure I’ll have to face her sooner than later, and drag myself into the hallway with the resignation that I’ll act as normal as possible and hope she catches on quick.

Addy is reading Rebecca on the couch with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.

“Good book?” I say.

She starts, banging her heel against the table. “Oh—uh, yeah, yeah it is.” She smiles cautiously. “Your mom gave it to me. It was her favorite.”

“I know,” I say, annoyed that she assumes I don’t. My mother’s favorite book. It belongs on her nightstand, where it’s been ever since I can remember—or with me. Not with Addy, never with Addy.

Addy gives me a reproachful glance, then looks me over and raises an eyebrow. I’ve forgotten to put on pants.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Addy. Part of me is still angry, but I’m not sure at what anymore. I try and place the feeling. It’s not the sex, or lack thereof, that much I know. But beyond that, all I have is a displaced anger rocketing around inside my head. Addy has barely looked up from my mother’s book. Until now I haven’t realized how much I expected her to apologize, at least be as wretched and uncomfortable as me. The casual interaction I’d pictured before now seems silly and naïve; her indifference rakes at me. I snatch at a few of the boxes in the living room, going for a particularly heavy one that I half hope will fall and make a lot of noise.

“I was thinking I’d make French toast when you woke up,” she says cheerily. “I forget, do you hate French toast? You hate something. Belgian waffles?”

I shove my hand in the box and rattle it around. It’s the expensive heirloom box with the books and the spoons and the candles. But it’s not really clunking in the way I want.

“I’m hungry, though. What do you think? I can just make pancakes. Everyone likes pancakes, right?” Addy shuts her book at looks up at me. “What are you doing?”

I pull the box off its pile and begin to sort through its contents. The books. The candles. The willow-patterned china. My mother’s necklace, in its velvet case. The spoons are missing.

“Addy, where are the spoons?”

Something flickers across her face. “What?”

“The spoons, Addy. The silver spoons that were in this box yesterday.” I dig through the box more vigorously, now just for the hell of it; I know they’re not going to appear. And I’m starting to have a sneaking idea of where I’ll find them. “I put them in here myself, next to these books, and my mom’s necklace, and these candles. Where are they?”

“I don’t—I don’t know, Tom—”

“You took them.” I say it simply. She doesn’t meet my eye. “So.” My voice gets louder, angrier, and I let it. I storm over to where she sits, still holding my mother’s copy of Rebecca. “Where the fuck—” I grab the book out of her hands and hurl it across the room. It lands with a wet smack in the sink, catapulting a dirty spatula onto the dining table. “Are they?”

I storm into the kitchen and start to tear drawers open. I’m hardly looking where my hands go, and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Whatever I touch I fling aside. Things break and it feels incredibly empowering. I go to the door and fling Addy’s coats aside, kicking them away from me with my feet. I am insane, running around the room throwing things in the air screaming about spoons. Addy has followed me, and stands behind me with a sad little pitying look in her eyes.

And I know. I go to the couch, grab her bag, tear it open. The spoons, still in their worn wooden case, are inside. I wrench them out and fling her bag into the fireplace, where it lands in a smothering puff of ash.

I turn on her. The anger has built on itself productively within me, multiplying, dividing, running its spawn to my hands. I undo the clasp of the box and the spoons spill onto the floor. “Why did you take them?” I ask her, evenly. My voice wavers. I want so badly to scream again.

“Tom, calm down,” she says.

I laugh crazily. “Calm down. Calm down—you stole from me. To, what, make some extra cash? What were you going to do, run out of here and never come back? Make a fortune off some ancient dessert spoons that my grandma ate pudding with?”

She doesn’t look afraid of me. I hadn’t expected her to. She says, “Come on, Tom.”

I shake my head. “No. Why did you take them?”

She just looks at me, her green eyes glinting. They don’t look so charming now, pained and pitying like this; they look false, bland.

I pick up the case and hurl it against the wall next to me; it splinters and cracks down the middle. Addy winces. “Are you that pathetic—you’re stealing from a dead woman now?” I snarl. The words echo painfully in the room. It’s the first time I’ve said it to her face—dead, dead, deaddeaddead.

“Tom,” she says evenly. “Don’t overreact, okay? It’s not like you would’ve done anything with them, or…” She hesitates before continuing.  “She’s gone, Tom, and none of that stuff in attic—none of it—seemed like anything you cared about.”

I stare at her, trying to decipher what she means.  She’d always idolized my mother in a strange way; she was both a caretaker and a daughter, both sides of the relationship my mother had failed to forget with me.  It’s as if she was peeling me open and picking out the parts of me that still tie me to my mother, as if they never belonged at all.

“Besides,” she says, more coldly this time. “This isn’t just about the spoons, and you know it.”

She catches me so off guard I almost forget to be angry. “What?”

“I didn’t sleep with you. I’m sorry. You were hurting, and I left you vulnerable, but—”

“Christ, Addy, you can be so self-centered! This has nothing to do with that!”

She gives me a look. “Come on, Tom,” she says again, coaxingly. I feel like an insolent child, being scolded gently for asking for an unreasonable amount of ice cream after dinner.

I look at the spoons, languishing between us. They’re tiny and fragile, hardly even appropriate for stirring sugar into tea. The stem of one is already chipped and bent. Pretty, worthless things.

I grab the broken case and clench it hard in my hands. Little flecks of wood embed themselves in my skin like little teeth; I squeeze harder, force them into my blood. I want to hurl the case at Addy, smash her skull in, watch her scream—anything to wipe that look off her face. I’m in control. She doesn’t get to pity me—fuck her, the spoons.

I hurl the case, banking it left. Its trajectory is headed far from her, but Addy squeals and ducks all the same. The case smashes against a decorative urn over the mantel and it shatters across the floor, pinging against the hardwood like the plucked keys of an untuned piano. Dust settles across the floor, eerily ashen; the urn was empty, but I can’t help but feel as though I’ve actually tarnished the remains of the deceased. Addy eyes are fixed, unblinking, on the fragments of ceramic scattered at her feet. For the first time, she looks afraid.

And I can’t help it. I laugh. I laugh at Addy and her fear, at the ruined kitchen and the things I’ve strewn across the floor, broken against the wall. I laugh at my own cowardice, at my mother’s death and how little it really changed things at all, at how I can’t even accept my own morality and how it clashes with bravery and sorrow. I stumble over to the box of precious things, still gasping with laughter, and pull out my mother’s necklace.

Now Addy looks completely petrified. As I approach her, she takes a few lurching steps backwards, as if afraid I’ll attack. I give her a twisted smile and hold out the necklace, free from its case. “Take it.”

“What?” Her voice is small. I’ve never seen her unsure before—meek, cowering. But I no longer feel empowered. Just tired. And I realize I don’t care.

“Look, I broke your prize.” I laugh again, haltingly this time. “Go ahead. Take this. Wear it, sell it, I couldn’t care less.”

She continues to stare at me, worried I’m baiting her.

“Honestly. Take it.” I shake the necklace, and the turquoise clinks plaintively at her.

“I, I couldn’t,” she says uncertainly. But her hand is already inching unconsciously towards mine. I see her fingers flex with yearning.

I shake my head in frustration. “Yes, you can. I’m entirely sure that you can.” I toss the necklace onto the table. It hits the wood with a clack and slides to the opposite site, dangling innocently over the edge. The stones waver back and forth, as if it’s considering whether or not to take a plunge. “Just take it,” I say wearily. “And leave. Please.” I put my hands up. I concede. “I really, really don’t care.”

She does the easy thing. Slips the necklace into her pocket, takes her things, walks out the door. She leaves the spoons, broken and sullied amidst the fractured remains of the urn.

She shuts the door quietly. And I know she won’t think of me again.

*

I wake up in my mother’s bed at five in the morning. It’s freezing, and the room is wonderfully warm, but I pull on a coat and head outside. The ocean is like glass in the early light, almost fiery in the way it shines. From the porch, I exhale, watching my breath fog, then dissipate over the lawn.

I walk to my mother’s bedroom window. From the outside, the room still looks well lived in—as if my mother will come take her place at the window any moment. At my feet, there’s still a small pile of seven paper doves, cracked and yellow from the dew. They never made it past the crabgrass, beaks tipped down into the dirt in a display of defeat.

As the wind picks up, three of the doves tumble forward, haphazardly, onto the toes of my boots. Their little wings beat against my laces, crinkling from the force. I pick them up. The first two are larger and more impressive than the third, their wings more carefully constructed, their tails and beaks folded meticulously to perfect points. They looks a couple weeks older—more grayed, more chapped from the wind and rain—than their partner, which more resembles the confused first product of a child.

These two I release first. The wind whips them up and they part from each other almost immediately. The doves careen upwards, bucking back and forth in the currents, billowing over the steely water. It’s only a few seconds before I lose sight of them, drawn into the thick creamy white of the rising sun.

From between my fingers, the third dove rattles thinly in the wind, as if desperate to join them. I press it flat and slip it into my coat pocket, exchanging it for the cabin key. Addy still has hers, but she won’t be back. This one was my mother’s. I walk back around the house, slowly, careful to tread on the same path I took before, until I reach the front door. The key is still warm from my palms as I slip it under the mat, leaving everything just as it was before.