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iguanasarecute · 6 years ago

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One shower stall, Two pairs of legs

[Bakugou x Reader]

summary: For the love of god, UA had a water shortage. A laborius training made all of you debilitated; the exhaustion gave all of you the thirst for being refreshed. Hitting on the limited showers connected to the lockers, well umm... someone crashed in with you. {from their third year}

warning: smut, profanity

"Fuck you bastard!" The feral classmate of yours growled at you; his PE uniform marinated with sweat, dripping blood from the scar you gave him during your training.

Your neon duffel bag slunged to your shoulders, "I'm just better than you. Admit it," you rolled your eyes as the towel on your hand roamed around your face. Your fellow classmates had their way on the locker rooms, while this goddamn pomeranian keeps barking at you for the past ten-minutes.

"Piss off (Y/N)! I'm gonna make you fucking suffer!" His husky voice thundered as the ash-blonde stomped his way in the Men's lockers, finally. You shook your head, eyeing the stubborn Ash-blonde, while you also jolted to your locker.

The familiar faces waved and offered you a sweet smile; your pink friend, Ashido, chuckled, "That's what you get for beating Bakugou's ass," she adjusted the towel wrapped around her body.

Momo gave you a sympathetic glare, "Bakugou's voice were heard here. Such harsh words!" Her soft hands patted your shoulders, "Though, he did hesitated to throw you punches. He went easy with you,"

You bit the inside of your cheeks, "Geez, should I thank him for that?" you sarcastically said, as the three of you giggled. You shifted your eyes to your classmates, exiting the room and having their way to the connected shower rooms, "They still haven't fixed the pipes, eh?"

Ashido nodded, "The Villain attack from two days ago did cause a massive destruction. Mostly affecting our water pipes," She grinned at you, "I'll be going now, I feel soooo sticky with all this sweat from beating up Sero," Momo and Ashido gave you one last glare as they walked out the room.

You grabbed the hem of your shirt and raised it; leaving you fucking naked alone in the room. Your fingers combed your sweaty hair, as you sandwiched yourself in a white towel, making your way inside the shower room.

The monotonous sound of flowing water entered your ears; searching an empty stall while you let yourself in, as the towel you're in, dropped. You turned the squeaking lever in a clockwise direction, awaiting the water flow down to you. You turned the lever again, nothing, "Ahh. Fuck!" your foot kicked the wall.

"(Y/N)?" Hagakure's voice called at the stall beside you.

You wrapped your body with the towel again, "Yeah?"

"Your shower's busted?"

You tied your hair into a bun, "Yep. I'm not so lucky today," you groaned.

Hagakure giggled, "There's an extra working shower across the gym. Give it a go. We don't have enough water supply at dorm soooo,"

The thought of a chilly shower lit up your face, "Oh god, really? Better get my ass there. Thank you!" You galloped as you poked your head outside, seeing if the coast is clear. You can't believe that you're sprinting across the gym, with only a towel covering your temples. But hey, you need a fucking shower.

You eyed the shower meters away from you as something catched your attention at the corner of your eyes. Oh fuck, oh fuck. You were ready to hit that something. Turns out, it was just a cat. Must be one of Aizawa's cats.

You shrugged as you continuously walked to the shower room. It was a single pristine stall, just for any emergency showers or whatsover, but it did, have running water. You tossed your towel at the corner as you felt the water touch every single corner of your body. You sighed in relief. This frigid shower couldn't be better.

~~~

[ time rewind ] : BAKUGOU

The Ash-blonde snarled at that nosy extra who embarassed the hell out of him. Though with that fortuitous battle with (Y/N); he did admit to himself how he was amused because of his opponent's eagerness. He smirked as he reminisce the training battle with (Y/N). Katsuki went easy with his rival; just because he kinda, sorta, has a soft spot for her. Well all he does was yell at her, or slap her with nasty words... but he isn't an expressive person, and he has his ways of showing it; for example, he adores everytime the both of them punches each other with insults.

Bakugou growled at the shower room, where all stalls was occupied, "One of you extras get the fuck out or I'll explode this shit!" He wrapped a piece of cloth at his wound.

"Calm your cock bro. Just wait in line," Kaminari yelled.

The crimson-red eyes of his twitched, "HAHHHHHH?!"

Kirishima cackled, "You yelled at (Y/N) dude! Not a manly move. The water pipes' goddess is punishing you,"

"WAIT 'TIL ALL OF YOU GET OUT! I'M GOING TO KILL—"

"Do not make obnoxious conversations!" Iida's voice shouted, probably chopping on the air right now.

Denki coughed, "Bakugou there's a shower stall at the other side of the gym. The single-stalled one. We're going to have a looooong time with this,"

"We're like fucking prisoners so thirsty for a goddamn bath," Sero sighed.

Katsuki clicked his tongue as he mumbled under his breath; making his way to the said shower stall. An abyssinian cat licking its paws, blocked his way as the crimson-red eyes of his rolled. He sprinted in the shower stall; while Bakugou raised his eyebrows. Why the fuck are the lights opened, and an irresponsible bastard just stranded the fucking water flowing.

His warm rough hands grabbed the cool door, and shot it open.

Oh shit.

~~~

Your fingers combed your saturated hair, nuzzling every drop of the rigid water. You were confident that nobody would infiltrate your shower. Since everybody in your class was already freshening up, on their own.

Until,

"WHAT THE FUCK BAKUGOU?!" Your arms spreaded accross your body, struggling to cover your breasts and your pussy. You gave him a stare, but the Ash-blonde just stood there, ogling at your exposed body, "WHAT ARE Y— GET THE FUCK OUT!"

Bakugou's cheek flustered as it turned red; avoiding your gaze, and looking at the floor, "Don't you know how to fucking lock the goddamn shitty ass door?!" He thundered.

"The water is fucking running! Don't you have fucking ears?! Or a brain atleast to conclude that somebody is inside?!" You kept your arms locked on your private parts. Your eyes were darted on his annoying brainless head, when you just realized, that he's completely naked too, except for the towel covering his lower part. You gulped, and memorized the sight of his eight-pack. You won't repudiate, he does have a fine body.

"The fuck are you staring at?" He spat. Shit he caught you, "What a perv," He playfully smirked and rolled his eyes.

"Says the person who's in struck just by staring at my goddamn body!" You growled.

His iconic devilish smirk just got wider, "You noticed?" His hands slid on the door as he locked it, advancing towards you, his Crimson-Red eyes glued to you, in libido. His tongue clicked, "So, deadass extras took all the showering stalls," the water flowing down his body as well.

Your arms, shielding your chest, now brushing on his hard abs, "What are you implying," you whispered in a monotonous way.

Bakugou's husky voice chuckled, "Wanna share?" You looked up to him, squinting your eyes to avoid the chilly water. He leaned to you, giving you a soft kiss, were diminutive water entered your mouth. The feral Ash-blond, sure is a good kisser.

His lips were warm, as it collided with yours. He aggresively osculated you, while it slowly parted, asking permission to get in you. How can you refuse? Your lips split, as a sign of acceptance. The both of your tongues' battling, devouring each other; as he licked every corner of you. Bakugou breathed, "So you do wanna fucking share," You felt the inside of you burn, as the Ash-blonde gripped on your arms, and slid it to your sides; revealing your bare breasts, and your pussy, to his.

The rigid water touched your chests, while you grabbed the soaked towel veiling his member, "Your towel's getting wet, Bakugou," your voice shaked.

He bit his lips to your obvious statement, "What are you implying," he mocked you by imitating your voice, "Rightttt, (Y/N). It's getting fucking wet," he coughed, "Would you... Would you be a goodgirl and get it off me?" Your hands touched the towel, as you complied with his command, "Goodgirl," Bakugou gripped your ass and pulled you to his hard frame, "Touch my dick and feel how hard you just fucking made me," he whispered, while your shaking hands grabbed his... long, hard, trobbing member.

"I want it in me Bakugou," your voice commanded, as the Ash-blonde chuckled at your unexpected response.

He cupped your breasts, "Let's take it slow (Y/N)," he nuzzled on your neck, marking what was his. He agressively squeezed your butt while giving you hickeys as you moaned. His hard cock was brushing over your pussy, which made you moan harder. He sucked your breasts, biting it; as he made circles on your tummy, down to your clit. His finger went in your tighthole, while you moaned his name. Another finger entered, as he chuckled, "So wet, and tight, and we just got started," he added the third finger.

"Katsuki ughhhhh— Baby that's so good," you shrieked while your arms tangled around his arms.

His husky voice giggled, "(Y/N)... be a goodgirl and suck my dick,"

"Depends if you'll cum," you smirked while you stood on your knees, ogling at his member, "Katsuki, that's uhh... huge...,"

His warm hands grabbed your hair, "...And you like it like that," he pulled your head nearer his cock, "Come on now, babygirl," you parted your lips as it came in you, pumping, as your tongue played with it, "Goodgirl, ughhh," he moaned deeply, "Shit! Shit!" He mumbled as his hot cum went in you. You catched your breath as the Ash-blonde pulled you to stand, "I have a punishment for you for giving me this bruise," he eyed his cut wrapped with a cloth, "Turn around," his husky voice commanded as you turned around.

You bit your lip. Shit anal. Bakugou adjusted his position for an enter; just then, he was pumping. The shower stall contained by your moans, "Ka—Katsuki, I'm liking this punishment," your legs felt jiggedy as his cock exited. The warm hands of his, grabbed your hips, pushing your body at the corner, "What are you—" your eyes shifted down, Katsuki setting his dick directly at your hole. His intense eyes glared as you, signaling he's coming in. You moaned at his huge member entering you, pumping, Shit. Fuck the water shortage I love it.

"Gagghh! Oi, dumbass you're taking so long!" The Ash-blonde yelled impatiently outside your locker-room. Well, both of you kinda, (not kinda) enjoyed your moment, at the separated shower stall. While you and Bakugou was devouring each other; your classmates obliviously headed back to the dorms; wondering where in the goddamn world the two of you were.

You changed into your spare clothes dumped inside your locker incase of emergencies. Yet, you didn't know, this emergency, would be having fucking sex with the Katsuki Bakugou. You whimped at your sore body, while the Crimson-red eyed man leaned on the wall outside, his warm hands burried inside his sweatpants; lingering. Bakugou was staring at the abyssinian cat, as he gawked at your jelly-legs, "You took so fucking long, your highness," he sarcastically mumbled while his muscular arms grabbed your waist to support your sloppy walking, "You look like a fucking idiot with those legs,"

A deep exhale went out your lips, "Your fault,"

His devil smirk etched on his face, as you and him, walked to reach your dorms, "I'm good at fucking, right?" He clicked his tongue, "You don't need to say so. I fucking know so,"

"Geez, I bet you did that to tons of girls already," You scoffed, while your heart felt like sinking with the thought of his rough hands groping a body that's not yours.

He clicked his tongue, "Nah just you," his warm hands collided with yours, "Wouldn't fucking do that other than you,"

Well then, you just made the moths inside my tummy dance YMCA

— • —

BONUS:

"(Y/N)! Bakugou! Where have you been?!" Kirishima thundered inside the common room; as the familiar faces gawked at the two of you in worry and curiosity.

Iida started chopping at the air, "This is unnacceptable! The both of you should orient your class where you'll be going!"

Oh fuck. Oh shit. What would we say.

You were about to open your mouth for excuses, when the Ash-Blonde whose arms are around your hips, groaned, "We just took a fucking walk! Finding the owner of a goddamn stray cat!"

Nice one.

The familiar faces blinked, some of them nodded in understandment; while the others raised their eyebrows in doubt. Deku coughed, "Are you okay (Y/N)? What happened to your legs?!" their eyes darted on your jelly-legs.

You nervously laughed, "Oh! Uhh legs? What legs? Ohhh— Uhhh... Funny story actaully— I Uhhh... It was from Uhhhhhhh," you felt Niagra falls forming on your fucking forehead, as sweat dripped all over you.

Katuski clicked his tongue and rolled his Crimson-red eyes at your bovine state, "The cat went out and then she chased it. Too much running, she got kinda sore. Then dumbass fell to the ground," He gave death-glares to the extras who gave him suspicous looks, "That's it. Don't fuck around,"

Holy shit. I love this Pinocchio right here.

The Ash-blonde thinks that jabbering fabrication was utterly noxious. He doesn't like lying, stating that there's no point at it. Though, this perplexed, yet wonderful moment he had wih you; would be risky to be publicized. It was both of your moment, and was yours to keep.

Fucking water pipes started it all.

END

by: i.k.

r e b l o g !

i promised on my last that my next post (this) would be a soft one...it got delayed. i accept requests rn!

more lemons by me:

U.A.'s lingerie collection ; Self Pleasure's Mishaps ; FUCK.DATE.KILL ; Sext...with a Pro-hero? ; House Arrest

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jessischipmunk · 6 years ago

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It’s Okay to Have Those Feelings

Dean Winchester x Reader

Summary: Reader decides to take on a demon despite Dean telling her not to. When she’s caught, tied, and tortured, the demon brings out the feelings she has for Dean that she had been trying to suppress for so long.

Warnings: mentions of injury/blood

YOUR POV

The room was dark and damp. I could hear water dripping down from a leaky drain pipe. The taste of blood was stale on my tongue. The cut on my lip has dried over, but it keeps reopening every time I try to talk. All I could see were steel walls as I felt the zip ties digging into my wrists.

I should have listened to Dean. I never should have taken on this demon by myself. If I came out of this alive, I was in for an earful of a lecture.

Footsteps came down the hall. The door to my cell opened. The demon showed his face.

“Still alive, I see,” the demon stated, his voice laced with evil.

“Still an ugly sack of dicks, I see,” I snapped back.

That remark earned me a slap across the face which resulted in the cut on my lip opening again.

“You have a smart mouth on you,” he said.

“You have no idea.”

“You’ll be dead long before your precious boyfriends get here. And then I’ll kill them too.”

“They’re not my boyfriends,” I growled defensively.

“Ah, that’s right. You’re like a baby sister to them. They don’t see you as anything else. As much as you would like them to; or at least one of them,” he grinned devilishly, his eyes darkening.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped. But I did. I had been in love with one of the brothers for a couple years now. I’ve known them since I was ten and I never wanted to admit the feelings to myself because I knew what I really wanted wouldn’t happen.

“Oh, but you do. You’re in love with your precious Dean Winchester. And little brother Sam knows too. But he’s too loyal to both you and his brother that he wouldn’t dare let that slip off his tongue.”

“Shut. Up.”

The demon ignored me and continued. “Too bad. You and Dean would have been the ultimate power couple,” he commented, looking at the table of torture devices he had been using on me for the past six hours.

“Go to hell,” I snapped.

“Been there, done that. Maybe you could give it a try this time,” he said and dug a blade into my forearm. I screamed at the top of my lungs. It wasn’t long before I blacked out again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

NORMAL POV

“I told her, Sam. I fucking told her not to go without us. She never listens!” Dean shouted.

“Relax, Dean. We know where she is. We’ll get her back,” Sam comforted.

“What if we’re too late. What if-”

“We’re not. Stop thinking like that. She’s smart. We trained her, remember? She can hold her own until we get to her.”

Dean looked at his brother, worry filling his eyes. “I can’t lose her, Sammy. I just can’t. She’s the entire world to me,” he confessed.

“I know. We’ll get her back. Now let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

Dean shut the trunk. Both he and Sam got into the Impala and drove off.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

YOUR POV

I had been slipping in and out of consciousness for the past hour. I was trying to recollect myself because I heard footsteps again. I braced myself for what the demon was going to do next, but something followed the footsteps. It was a voice - no - voices. And I recognized them too.

I could hear the lock on the cell door being picked and then a “Got it.” The door creaked open. “(y/n)!”

“Dean? Sam? What. . . How did you-”

“You can thank Bobby,” Sam said. “The guy is a pro at tracking demons.”

Dean knelt in front of me as Sam cut me loose of the zip ties. Dean cupped my face and looked at me. I knew I had a few cuts and bruises on my face. I was weak and every part of my body ached and burned. It was getting hard to keep my eyes open.

“I’m going to kill that evil son of a bitch,” Dean muttered after he took one look at me. “You don’t look good at all.”

“Oh, and you look like a million bucks?” I retorted weakly. Dean had a busted lip as well and a bruise forming just under his hairline, probably from one of the demon’s goons.

“Seriously? Now is not the time for your snarky comments. We need to get you out of here.” Dean stood, and then helped me up. My legs felt like noodles. I fell forward into Dean. He caught me. I clutched his shirt, afraid to let go.

Suddenly, all three of us turned our heads toward the door. There were heavy footsteps coming and I clutched onto Dean’s shirt tighter.

Sam had his gun at the ready, Dean doing the same while holding me tightly.

“Sam, take (y/n) and get her to the car. I’ll take care of this bastard.”

“What? No, Dean. I want to stay and help! You can’t-”

“Can’t do it alone? Gee, where have I heard that before,” he scoffed.

“Dean, I-”

No, (y/n)! Dammit, for once just listen to me and go! I’ll be fine,” he said looking at me. His eyes, green with anger, bore into me.

I nodded. “Okay,” I whispered. Without thinking, I kissed his cheek. I didn’t realize what I did until after. I didn’t look at him and just turned away, thinking to myself I probably shouldn’t have done that. Sam wrapped an arm around my waist to help hold me up, and we walked out leaving Dean behind.

I could tell just by stepping out of that awful building that it was going to be a bit of a hike back to the car. I didn’t want to be too far from Dean in case he needed our help. But I knew Sam would take a lot of convincing if we were to stop and wait.

“Can we stop for a minute,” I asked.

“Sure,” Sam said. “Are you alright?”

“Do I look alright? I lost at least two pints of blood while I was in there.” I sat down on the ground.

“And yet you wanted to stay and lose more? (y/n), you’re confusing, you know that?”

“Just because I lost blood doesn’t mean I don’t want to help, Sam.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. But you know Dean is fine on his own.”

“I know,” I said looking down and picking at the grass. “But I can’t help it. I. . . I-”

“You love him. I know.” I looked up at him, slightly shocked. “Oh, come on, (y/n).” He took a seat next to me. “You don’t think I’ve noticed? It’s obvious. The way you look at him. How you enjoy his presence in the same room even when you’re both doing something completely different. How you hate that he’s so over protective, yet secretly love it at the same time. You two have a bond. Just like I did with Jessica.”

I didn’t respond.

“It’s okay to have those feelings, (y/n).”

“I know. But it’s not like it’s gonna go anywhere, so what’s the point?”

“You’d be surprised what could be.”

I just looked at him and didn’t say anything more. I didn’t feel like staying on the topic.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it alright if we stay here until we know he’s okay? I mean, I know,” I paused, catching my breath as my chest felt like it was tightening. “I know it’s not the safest place, but in case he needs us? And I’m not feeling up for walking right now. I don’t feel so great.”

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I hope he gets done soon. We need to get you taken care of. Maybe even a hospital,” he said, brushing a piece of hair from my face.

“No. No hospitals. Those places give me such bad anxiety. Besides, what are we going to tell them? The truth?”

“Valid point. No hospital.”

“I stopped bleeding a while ago. I’ll be fine for a little while longer.”

I laid back on the grass, too tired to stay sitting up. We stayed there in silence for about twenty minutes. There were trees all around us. Aspens, pines, even some oak trees. You could hardly see the sky through all the foliage. But you didn’t need to see the sky to know the moon was full.

We heard a howling in the distance. I sat up quickly and moved closer to Sam. A couple minutes later we heard a twig snap in front of us. Sam pulled his gun out, ready to shoot whatever might be threatening us.

“I thought I told you to get to the car?” It was Dean.

“Dean!” I stood up and ran to him completely unaware of any pain from earlier. I jumped, wrapping my arms around his neck and holding onto him. He wrapped his arms around my waist. I was not one to be clingy, and I wasn’t really. But Sam was right. I always wanted - and enjoyed - being in Dean’s presence.

I buried my face into his neck and took in his scent. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said.

“You too, baby girl,” he said. He let go of me first. My heart sank a little, but I just let it go.

“She wasn’t feeling too good, so we stopped,” Sam announced.

I sat back down on the ground, all the pain and weakness suddenly flooding back into my body.

“Did you kill it,” I asked.

“That sucker is beyond dead.”

I just nodded my head, quietly letting out a sigh of relief. I felt a chill run down my spine. And then another. Next thing I knew I was shivering continuously. It wasn’t big, but noticeable. That burning that ran through my body earlier had turned into what felt like ice in my veins. I brought my knees to my chest hoping that sitting in fetal position would help.

“(y/n), sweetheart? What’s wrong,” Dean asked kneeling in front of me. I was about to say I was fine, but he must have known. “Nah, don’t pull that crap with me, baby girl. Tell me.”

“Cold,” I said. It was all I could mutter out. Then a couple seconds later, “tired.”

Dean took off his jacket and helped me put it on. “Better?”

“A little. I just don’t feel well. Weak and dizzy.” My words were coming out slightly slurred.

“Listen to how she’s talking,” Sam said. “Those are signs of hypothermia, Dean. We need to get her home. Now.”

Dean carefully picked me up and carried me back to the car. Once he got me into the back seat, he handed Sam the keys so that he could sit with me while Sam drove.

Dean got in the back with me. Once he sat down next to me, he immediately put his arm around me, pulling me into his body and doing his best to keep me warm.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was bundled under more blankets than I cared to count. Sam had cleaned me up. Thankfully nothing was too serious. The wound on my arm needed a couple of stitches but that was about it. Other than the hypothermia, obviously.

Once Sam had tended to my wounds, Dean helped me change out of my blood stained clothes and into one of his t-shirts because it was softer than any that I owned and my favorite pair of fuzzy pajama pants.

Dean hadn’t left my side since we got back. Which I was very thankful for. His body was like a heater and a pillow all in one. Not to mention just having him there made me feel better.

I rested there with my head on his chest. He was running his fingers through my hair gently. It was soothing.

“Dean,” I said after a few moments of silence.

“Yes, darling?”

“Thank you for always being there. And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone. I should have listened to you. . .”

“Damn right you should have listened,” he said softly. “Why did you go?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought I had something to prove. But all I had to prove was just how expendable I really I am. I’m sorry.”

“You scared the living shit out of me, you know that? I don’t think I ever feared something more in my life than I did today. And I’ve literally been to hell and back. I don’t know what I would have done if I had lost you.”

“I know. I promise I won’t do it again. And to be honest, I thought I was going to get more of a lecture than that,” I said with a small giggle.

“Oh, you will. I just want to make sure you’re fully aware when I rip you a new one,” he said. He chuckled, but I could also tell he was serious about what he said. He pulled me closer, planting a kiss to my forehead.

I sighed. I knew I had to say it. “Okay, I may regret this later, but I can just blame it on the blood loss and hypothermia,” I said mostly to myself but I knew he heard me. “I love you, Dean. Like I am totally head over heels in love you. And I just wanted you to know that. Whether you feel the same way or not, I just felt like you should know that.”

He was silent for a moment. My breathing stopped for a slight second as I looked up at his face. He was smiling - grinning, actually. Like a little school boy. He looked down at me, his eyes flashing between mine and my lips. He leaned down and captured my mouth with his. It was like everything I ever imagined. His lips were warm and soft and he tasted so good.

We pulled apart and he looked down at me and said, “I love you, too.” He kissed me lips again softly. “Get some rest, sweetheart. I need you fully awake for your lecture tomorrow,” he chuckled.

I just rolled my eyes and settle into his side, my body molding with his perfectly.

I drifted off to sleep in his arms, listening to the soothing sound of his heart beating.

#supernatural #dean winchester #Sam Winchester #castiel #demons #dean winchester imagines #supernatural imagine #Jensen Ackles #jared padalecki #Misha Collins

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years ago

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Onion

Caitlin R. Kiernan (2005)

Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall. The building on St. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide, gray Hudson. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. Dirty, white-yellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement.

“Does your mama know you’re always hanging around down here?” Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney’s open door, would shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with. “I bet you she don’t,” Mr. Sweeney would say. “I bet she don’t know.” “Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask and Mr. Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better believe there’s rats. Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies. They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.” “They why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once and Mr. Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “We had whole goddamn cat armies, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.” “I don’t believe that,” Frank said. “Rats don’t get that big. Rats don’t eat cats.” “You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you too,” and then Mr. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, left Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way. And that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snowblind February afternoon, too cold and wet to go outside and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. Mr. Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him scary stories and chase him home again, and Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildew-stinking air of the hallway. The unsteady beam of his flashlight to show narrow walls that might have been blue or green a long time ago, little black-and-white, six-sided ceramic tiles on the floor, but half of them missing and he could see the rotting boards underneath. There were doors along the length of the hall, some of them boarded up, nailed shut, one door frame without any door at all and he stepped very fast past that one. Indiana Jones wouldn’t be afraid, he thought, counting his footsteps in case that might be important later on, listening to the winter wind yowling raw along the street as it swept past the building on its way to Tompkins Square Park and the East River. Twenty steps, twenty-five, thirty-three and then he was standing below the dangling bulb and for the first time Frank stopped and looked back the way he’d come. And maybe he’d counted wrong, because it seemed a lot farther than only thirty-three steps back to the dim and postage-stamp-sized splotch of day at the other end of the hall. Only ten steps more down to the basement door, heavy, gray steel door with a rusted hasp and a Yale padlock, but standing wide open like it was waiting for him and maybe Mr. Sweeney only forgot to lock it the last time he came down to check the furnace or wrap the pipes. And later, Frank wouldn’t remember much about crossing the threshold into the deeper night of the basement, the soup-thick stench and taste of dust and rot and mushrooms, picking his way through the maze of sagging shelves and wooden crates, decaying heaps of rags and newspapers, past the ancient furnace crouched in one corner like a cast-iron octopus. Angry, orange-red glow from the furnace grate like the eyes of the super’s cat-eating rats—he would remember that—and then Frank heard the dry, rustling sound coming from one corner of the basement. Years later, through high school and college and the slow purgatory of this twenties, this is where the bad dreams would always begin, the moment that he lifted the flashlight and saw the wide and jagged crack in the concrete wall. A faint draft from that corner that smelled of cinnamon and ammonia, and he knew better than to look, knew he should turn and run all the way back because it wasn’t ever really rats that he was supposed to be afraid of. The rats just a silly grown-up lie to keep him safe, smaller, kinder nightmare for his own good, and Run, boy, Mr. Sweeney whispered inside his head. Run fast while you still can, while you still don’t know. But Frank didn’t run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far way, the black thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

Frank and Willa share the tiny apartment on Mott Street, roachy Chinatown hovel one floor above an apothecary so the place always stinks of ginseng and jasmine and the powdered husks of dried sea creatures. Four walls, a gas range, an ancient Frigidaire that only works when it feels like it, but together they can afford the rent, most of the time, and the month or two they’ve come up short Mrs. Wu has let them slide. His job at a copy shop and hers waiting tables and sometimes they talk about moving out of the city, packing up their raggedy-ass belongings and riding a Greyhound all the way to Florida, all the way to the Keys, and then it’ll be summer all year long. But not this sticky, sweltering new York summer, no, it would be clean ocean air and rum drinks, sun-warm sand and the lullaby roll and crash of waves at night. Frank is still in bed when Willa comes out of the closet that passes as their bathroom, naked and dripping from the shower, her hair wrapped up in a towel that used to be white and he stops staring at the tattered Cézanne print thumbtacked over the television and stares at her instead. Willa is tall and her skin so pale he thought she might be sick the first time they met, so skinny that he can see intimations of her skeleton beneath that skin like milk and pearls. Can trace the blue-green network of veins and capillaries in her throat, between her small breasts, winding like hesitant, watercolor brush strokes down her arms. He’s pretty sure that one day Willa will finally figure out she can do a hell of a lot better than him and move on, but he tries not to let that ruin whatever it is they have now. “It’s all yours,” she says, his turn even though the water won’t be hot again for at least half an hour, and Willa sits down in a chair near the foot of the bed. She leans forward and rubs vigorously at her hair trapped inside the dingy towel. “We could both play hooky,” Frank says hopefully, watching her, imagining how much better sex would be than the chugging, headache drone of Xerox machines, the endless dissatisfaction of clients. “You could come back to bed and we could lie here all day. We could just lie here and sweat and watch television.” “Jesus, Frank, how am I supposed to resist an offer like that?” “Okay, so we could screw and sweat and watch television.” She stops drying her hair and glares at him, shakes her head and frowns, but the sort of frown that says I wish I could more than it says anything else. “That new girl isn’t working out,” she says. “The fat chick from Kazakhstan?” Frank asks and he rolls over onto his back, easier to forget the fantasies of a lazy day alone with Willa if he isn’t looking at her sitting there naked. “Fucking Kazakhstan. I mean, what the hell were Ted and Daniel thinking? She can’t even speak enough English to tell someone where the toilet is, much less take an order.” “Maybe they felt sorry for her,” Frank says unhelpfully and now he’s staring up at his favorite crack on the water-stained ceiling, the one that always makes him think of a Viking orbiter photo of the Valles Marineris from one of his old astronomy books. “I’ve heard that people do that sometimes, feel sorry for people.” “Well, they’d probably lose less money if they just sent the bitch to college, the way she’s been pissing off customers.” ”Maybe you should suggest that today,” and a moment later Willa’s wet towel smacks him in the face, steamy-damp terry cloth that smells like her black hair dye and the cheap baby shampoo she uses. It covers his eyes, obscuring his view of the Martian rift valley overhead, but Frank doesn’t move the towel immediately, better to lie there a moment longer, breathing her in. “Is it supposed to rain today?” Willa asks and he mumbles through the wet towel that he doesn’t know. “They keep promising it’s going to rain and it keeps not raining.” Frank sits up and the towel slides off his face and into his lap, lies there as the dampness begins to soak through his boxers. ”I don’t know,” he says again; Willa has her back turned to him and she doesn’t reply or make any sign to show that she’s heard. She’s pulling a bright yellow T-shirt on over her head, the Curious George shirt he gave her for Christmas, has put on a pair of yellow panties, too. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the heat. The heat’s driving me crazy.” Frank glances toward the window, the sash up but the chintzy curtains hanging limp and lifeless in the stagnant July air; he’d have to get out of bed, walk all the way across the room, lean over the sill and peer up past the walls and rooftops to see if there are any clouds. “It might rain today,” he says, instead. “I don’t think it’s ever going to rain again as long as I live,” Willa says and steps into her jeans. “I think we’ve broken this goddamn planet and it’s never going to rain anywhere ever again.” Frank rubs his fingers through his stiff, dirty hair and looks back at the Cézanne still life above the television—a tabletop, the absinthe bottle and a carafe of water, an empty glass, the fruit that might be peaches. “You’ll be at the meeting tonight?” he asks and Frank keeps his eyes on the print because he doesn’t like the sullen, secretive expression Willa gets whenever they have to talk about the meetings. “Yeah,” she says, sighs, and then there’s the cloth-metal sound of her zipper. “Of course I’ll be at the meeting. Where the hell else would I be?” And then she goes back into the bedroom and shuts the door behind her, leaves Frank alone with the Cézanne and the exotic reek of the apothecary downstairs, Valles Marineris and the bright day spilling uninvited through the window above Mott Street.

Half past two and Frank sits on a plastic milk crate in the stockroom of Gotham Kwick Kopy, trying to decide whether or not to eat the peanut butter and honey sandwich he brought for lunch. The air conditioning’s on the blink again and he thinks it might actually be hotter inside the shop than out on the street; a few merciful degrees cooler in the stockroom, though, shadowy refuge stacked high with cardboard boxes of copy paper in a dozen shades of white and all the colors of the rainbow. He peels back the top of his sandwich, the doughy Millbrook bread that Willa likes, and frowns at the mess underneath. So hot out front that the peanut butter has melted, oily mess to leak straight through wax paper and the brown bag and he’s trying to remember if peanut butter and honey can spoil. Both the stockroom doors swing open and Frank looks up, blinks and squints at the sun-framed silhouette, Joe Manske letting in the heat and “Hey, don’t do that,” Frank says as Joe switches on the lights. The fluorescents buzz and flicker uncertainly, chasing away the shadows, drenching the stockroom in their bland, indifferent glare. “Dude, why are you sitting back here in the dark?” Joe asks and for a moment Frank considers throwing the sandwich at him. “Why aren’t you working on that Mac?” Frank asks right back and “It’s fixed, good as new,” Joe says, grins his big, stupid grin, and sits down on a box of laser print paper near the door. “That fucker won’t ever be good as new again.” “Well, at least it’s stopped making that sound. That’s good enough for me,” and Joe takes out a pack of Camels, offers one to Frank and Frank shakes his head no. A month now since his last cigarette, quitting because Willa’s step-mother is dying of lung cancer, quitting because cigarettes cost too goddamn much, anyhow, and “Thanks, though,” he says. “Whatever,” Joe Manske mumbles around the filter of his Camel, thumb on the strike wheel of his silver lighter and in a moment the air is filled with the pungent aroma of burning tobacco. Frank gives up on the dubious sandwich, drops it back into the brown bag and crumples the bag into a greasy ball. “I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ job,” Joe says, disgusted, smoky cloud of words about his head, and he points at the stockroom door with his cigarette. “You just missed a real peace of work, man.” “Yeah?” and Frank tosses the sandwich ball towards the big plastic garbage can sitting a few feet away, misses and it rolls behind the busted Canon 2400 color copier that’s been sitting in the same spot since he started this job a year ago. “Yeah,” Joe says. “I was trying to finish that pet store job and this dude comes in, little bitty old man looks like he just got off the boat from Poland or Armenia or some shit—“ “My grandmother was Polish,“ Frank says and Joe sighs loudly, long impatient sigh and he flicks ash onto the cement floor. “You know what I mean.” “So what’d he want anyway?” Frank asks, not because he cares but the shortest way through any conversation with Joe Manske is usually right down the middle, just be quiet and listen and sooner or later he’ll probably come to the end and shut up. “He had this old book with him. The damned thing must have been even older than him and was falling apart. I don’t think you could so much as look at it without the pages crumbling. Had it tied together with some string and he kept askin’ me all these questions, real technical shit about the machines, you know.” “Yeah? Like what?” “Dude, I don’t know. I can’t remember half of it, techie shit, like I was friggin’ Mr. Wizard or somethin’. I finally just told him we couldn’t be responsible if the copiers messed up his old book, but he still kept on askin’ these questions. Lucky for me, one of the self-service machines jammed and I told him I had to go fix it. By the time I was finished, he was gone.” “You live to serve,” Frank says, wondering if Willa would be able to tell if he had just one cigarette. “The customer is always right.” “Fuck that shit,” Joe Manske says. “I don’t get paid enough to have to listen to some senile old fart jabberin’ at me all day.” “Yes sir, helpful is your middle name.” “Fuck you.” Frank laughs and gets up, pushes the milk crate towards the wall with the toe of one shoe so no one’s going to come along later and trip over it, break their neck and have him to blame. “I better get back to work,” he says and “You do that,” Joe grumbles and puffs his Camel. Through the stockroom doors and back out into the stifling, noisy clutter of the shop, and it must be at least ten degrees warmer out here, he thinks. There’s a line at the register and the phone’s ringing, no one out front but Maggie and she glowers at him across the chaos. “I’m on it,” Frank says; she shakes her head doubtfully and turns to help a woman wearing a dark purple dress and matching beret. Frank’s reaching across the counter for the telephone receiver when he notices the business card lying near a display of Liquid Paper. Black sans serif print on an expensive, white cotton card stock and what appears to be an infinity symbol in the lower left-hand corner. FOUND: LOST WORLDS centered at the top, TERRAE NOVUM ET TERRA INDETERMINATA on the next line down in smaller letters. Then a name and an address—Dr. Solomon Monalisa, Ph.D., 43 W. 61st St., Manhattan—but no number or email, and Frank picks up the card, holds it so Maggie can see. “Where’d this come from?” he asks but she only shrugs, annoyed but still smiling her strained and weary smile for the woman in the purple beret. “Beats me. Ask Joe, if he ever comes back. Now will you please answer the phone?” He apologizes, lifts the receiver, “Gotham Kwick Kopy, Frank speaking. How may I help you?” and slips the white card into his back pocket.

The group meets in the basement of a synagogue on Eldridge Street. Once a month, eight o’clock until everyone who wants to talk has taken his or her turn, coffee and stale doughnuts before and afterwards. Metal folding chairs and a lectern down front, a microphone and crackly PA system even though the room isn’t really large enough to need one. Never more than fourteen or fifteen people, occasionally as few as six or seven, and Frank and Willa always sit at the very back, near the door. Sometimes Willa doesn’t make it all the way through a meeting and she says she hates the way they all watch her if she gets up to leave early, like she’s done something wrong, she says, like this is all her fault, somehow. So they sit by the door, which is fine with Frank; he’d rather not have everyone staring at the back of his head, anyway. He’s sipping at a styrofoam cup of the bitter, black coffee, three sugars and it’s still bitter, watching the others, all their familiar, telltale quirks and peculiarities, their equivocal glances, when Willa comes in. First the sound of her clunky motorcycle boots on the concrete steps and then she stands in the doorway a moment, that expression like it’s always the first time for her and it can never be any other way. “Hey,” Frank says quietly. “I made it,” she replies and sits down beside him. There’s a stain on the front of her Curious George T-shirt that looks like chocolate sauce. “How was your day?” he asks her, talking so she doesn’t lock up before things even get started. “Same as ever. It sucked. They didn’t fire Miss Kazakhstan.” “That’s good, dear. Would you like a martini?” and he jabs a thumb toward the free-coffee-and-stale-doughnut table. “I think I’ll pass,” Willa says humorlessly, rubs her hands together and stares at the floor between her feet. “I think my stomach hurts enough already.” “Would you rather just go home? We can miss one night. I sure as hell don’t care—“ “No,” she says, answering too fast, too emphatic, so he knows she means yes. “That would be silly. I’ll be fine when things get started.” And then Mr. Zaroba stands, stocky man with skin like tea-stained muslin, salt-and-pepper hair and beard and his bushy, gray eyebrows. Kindly blue grandfather eyes and he raises one hand to get everyone’s attention, as if they aren’t all looking at him already, as if they haven’t all been waiting for him to open his mouth and break the tense, uncertain silence. “Good evening, everyone,” he says, and Willa sits up a little straighter in her chair, expectant arch of her back as though she’s getting ready to run. “Before we begin,” Mr. Zaroba continues, “there’s something I wanted to share. I came across this last week,” and he takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolds it, and begins to read. An item from the New York Tribune, February 17th, 1901; reports by an Indian tribe in Alaska of a city in the sky that was seen sometimes, and a prospector named Willoughby who claimed to have witnessed the thing himself in 1897, claimed to have tried to photograph it on several occasions and succeeded, finally. “And now this,” Zaroba says and he pulls a second folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, presto, bottomless bag of tricks, that pocket, and this time he reads from a book, Alaska by Miner Bruce, page 107, he says. Someone else who saw the city suspended in the arctic sky, a Mr. C.W. Thornton of Seattle, and “’It required no effort of the imagination to liken it to a city,’” Mr. Zaroba reads, “’but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.’” People shift nervously in their seats, scuff their feet, and someone whispers too loudly. “I have the prospector’s photograph,” Zaroba says. “It’s only a Xerox from the book, of course. It isn’t very clear, but I thought some of you might like to see it.” And he hands one of the sheets of paper to the person sitting nearest him. “Damn, I need a cigarette,” Willa whispers and “You and me both, Frank whispers back. It takes almost five minutes for the sheet of paper to make its way to the rear of the room, passed along from hand to hand while Zaroba stands patiently at the front, his head bowed solemn as if leading a prayer. Some hold onto it as long as they dare and others hardly seem to want to touch it. A man three rows in front of them gets up and brings it back to Willa. ”I don’t see nothing but clouds,” he says, sounding disappointed. And neither does Frank, fuzzy photograph of a mirage, deceit of sunlight in the collision of warm and freezing air high above a glacier, but Willa must see more. She holds the paper tight and chews at her lower lip, traces the distorted peaks and cumulonimbus towers with the tip of an index finger. “My god,” she whispers. In a moment Zaroba comes up the aisle and takes the picture away, leaves Willa staring at her empty hands, her eyes wet like she might start crying. Frank puts an arm around her bony shoulders, but she immediately wiggles free and scoots her chair a few inches farther away. “So, who wants to get us started tonight?” Mr. Zaroba asks when he gets back to the lectern. At first no one moves or speaks or raises a hand, each looking at the others or trying hard to look nowhere at all. And then a young woman stands up, younger than Willa, filthy clothes and bruise-dark circles under her eyes, hair that hasn’t been combed or washed in ages. Her name is Janice and Frank thinks that she’s a junky, probably a heroin addict because she always wears long sleeves. “Janice? Very good, then,” and Mr. Zaroba returns to his seat in the first row. Everyone watches Janice as she walks slowly to the front of the room, or they pretend not to watch her. There’s a small hole in the seat of her dirty, threadbare jeans and Frank can see that she isn’t wearing underwear. She stands behind the lectern, coughs once, twice, and brushes her shaggy bangs out of her face. She looks anxiously at Mr. Zaroba and “It’s all right, Janice,” he says. “Take all the time you need. No one’s going to rush you.” “Bullshit,” Willa mutters, loud enough that the man sitting three rows in front of them turns and scowls. “What the hell are you staring at,” she growls and he turns back towards the lectern. “It’s okay, baby,” Frank says and takes her hand, squeezes hard enough that she can’t shake him loose this time. “We can leave anytime you want.” Janice coughs again and there’s a faint feedback whine from the mike. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and “I was only fourteen years old,” she begins. “I still lived with my foster parents in Trenton and there was this old cemetery near our house, Riverview Cemetery. Me and my sister, my foster sister, we used to go there to smoke and talk, you know, just to get away from the house.” Janice looks at the basement ceiling while she speaks, or down at the lectern, but never at the others. She pauses and wipes her nose again. “We went there all the time. Wasn’t anything out there to be afraid of, not like at home. Just dead people, and me and Nadine weren’t afraid of dead people. Dead people don’t hurt anyone, right? We could sit there under the trees in the summer and it was almost like things weren’t so bad. Nadine was a year older than me.” Willa tries to pull her hand free, digs her nails into Frank’s palm but he doesn’t let go. They both know where this is going, have both heard Janice’s story so many times that they could recite it backwards, same tired old horror story, and “It’s okay,” he says out loud, to Willa or to himself. “Mostly it was just regular headstones, but there were a few bigger crypts set way back near the water. I didn’t like being around them. I told her that, over and over, but Nadine said they were like little castles, like something out of fairy tales. “One day one of them was open, like maybe someone had busted into it, and Nadine had to see if there were still bones inside. I begged her not to, said whoever broke it open might still be hanging around somewhere and we ought to go home and come back later. But she wouldn’t listen to me. “I didn’t want to look inside. I swear to God, I didn’t.” “Liar.” Willa whispers, so low now that the man three rows in front of them doesn’t hear, but Frank does. Her nails are digging deeper into his palm, and his eyes are beginning to water from the pain. “You wanted to see,” she says. “Just like the rest of us, you wanted to see.” “I said, ‘What if someone’s still in there?’ but she wouldn’t listen. She wasn’t ever afraid of anything. She used to lay down on train tracks just to piss me off.” “What did you see in the crypt, Janice, when you and Nadine looked inside?” Mr. Zaroba asks, but no hint of impatience in his voice, not hurrying her or prompting, only helping her find a path across the words as though they were slippery rocks in a cold stream. “Can you tell us?” Janice takes a very deep breath, swallows, and “Stairs,” she says. “Stairs going down into the ground. There was a light way down at the bottom, a blue light, like a cop car light. Only it wasn’t flashing. And we could hear something moving around down there, and something else that sounded like a dog panting. I tried to get Nadine to come back to the house with me then, but she wouldn’t. She said ‘Those stairs might go anywhere, Jan. Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to know?” Another pause and “I couldn’t stop her,” Janice says. Willa mutters something Frank doesn’t understand, then, something vicious, and he lets go of her hand, rubs at the four crescent-shaped wounds her nails leave behind. Blood drawn, crimson tattoos to mark the wild and irreparable tear in her soul by marking him, and he presses his palm to his black work pants, no matter if it stains, no one will ever notice. “I waited at the top of the stairs until dark,” Janice says. “I kept on calling her. I called her until my throat hurt.” When the sun started going down, the blue light at the bottom got brighter and brighter and once or twice I thought I could see someone moving around down there, someone standing between me and the light. Finally, yelled I was going to get the goddamn cops if she didn’t come back…” and Janice trails off, hugs herself like she’s cold and gazes straight ahead, but Frank knows she doesn’t see any of them sitting there, watching her, waiting for the next word, waiting for their turns at the lectern. “You don’t have to say any more tonight,” Zaroba says. “You know we’ll all understand if you can’t.” “No,” Janice says. “I can…I really need to,” and she squeezes her eyes shut tight. Mr. Zaroba stands, takes one reassuring step towards the lectern. “We’re all right here,” he says, and “We’re listening,” Willa mumbles mockingly. “We’re listening,” Zaroba says a second later. “I didn’t go to the police. I didn’t tell anyone anything until the next day. My foster parents, they just thought she’d run away again. No one would believe me when I told them about the crypt, when I told them where Nadine had really gone. Finally, they made me show them, though, the cops did, so I took them out to Riverview.” “Why do we always have to fucking start with her?” Willa whispers. “I can’t remember a single time she didn’t go first.” Someone sneezes and “It was sealed up again,” Janice says, her small and brittle voice made big and brittle by the PA speakers. “But they opened it.” The cemetery people didn’t want them to, but they did anyway. I swore I’d kill myself if they didn’t open it and get Nadine out of there.” “Can you remember a time she didn’t go first?” Willa asks and Frank looks at her, but he doesn’t answer. “All they found inside was a coffin. The cops even pulled up part of the marble floor, but there wasn’t anything under it, just dirt.” A few more minutes, a few more details, and Janice is done. Mr. Zaroba hugs her and she goes back to her seat. “Who wants to be next?” he asks them and it’s the man who calls himself Charlie Jones, though they all know that’s not his real name. Every month he apologizes because he can’t use his real name at the meetings, too afraid someone at work might find out, and then he tells them about the time he opened a bedroom door in his house in Hartford and there was nothing on the other side but stars. When he’s done, Zaroba shakes his hand, pats him on the back, and now it’s time for the woman who got lost once on the subway, two hours to get from South Ferry to the Houston Street Station, alone in an empty train that rushed along through a darkness filled with the sound of children crying. Then a timid Colombian woman named Juanita Lazarte, the night she watched two moons cross the sky above Peekskill, the morning the sun rose in the south. And all the others, each in his or her turn, as the big wall clock behind the lectern ticks and the night fills up with the weight and absurdity of their stories, glimpses of impossible geographies, entire worlds hidden in plain view if you’re unlucky enough to see them. “If you’re damned,” Juanita Lazarte once said and quickly crossed herself. Mr. Zaroba who was once an atmospheric scientist and pilot for the Navy. He’s seen something too, of course, the summer of 1969, flying supplies in a Hercules C-130 from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station. A freak storm, whiteout conditions and instrument malfunction, and when they finally found a break in the clouds somewhere over the Transantarctic Mountains the entire crew saw the ruins of a vast city, glittering obsidian towers and shattered, crystal spires, crumbling walls carved from the mountains themselves. At least that’s what Zaroba says. He also says the Navy pressured the other men into signing papers agreeing never to talk about the flight and when he refused, he was pronounced mentally unsound by a military psychiatrist and discharged. When Willa’s turn comes, she glances at Frank, not a word but all the terrible things right there in her eyes for him to see, unspoken resignation, surrender, and then she goes down the aisle and stands behind the lectern.

Frank wakes up from a dream of rain and thunder and Willa’s sitting cross-legged at the foot of their bed, nothing on but her pajama bottoms, watching television with the sound off and smoking a cigarette. “Where the hell’d you get that?” he asks, blinks sleepily and points at the cigarette. “I bought a pack on my break today,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the screen. She takes a long drag and the smoke leaks slowly from her nostrils. “I thought we had an agreement.” ”I’m sorry,” but she doesn’t sound sorry at all, and Frank sits up and blinks at the TV screen, rubs his eyes, and now he can see it’s Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story. ”You can turn the sound up, if you want to,” he says. “It won’t bother me.” ”No, that’s okay. I know it by heart anyway.” And then neither of them says anything else for a few minutes, sit watching the televisions, and when Willa has smoked the cigarette down to the filter she stubs it out in a saucer. ”I don’t think I want to go to the meetings anymore,” she says. “I think they’re only making it worse for me.” Frank waits a moment before he replies, waiting to be sure that she’s finished, and then, “That’s your decision, Willa. If that’s what you want.” ”Of course it’s my decision.” ”You know what I meant.” ”I can’t keep reciting it over and over like the rest of you. There’s no fucking point. I could talk about it from now till doomsday and it still wouldn’t make sense and I’d still be afraid. Nothing Zaroba and that bunch of freaks has to say is going to change that, Frank.” Willa picks up the pack of Camels off the bed, lights another cigarette with a disposable lighter that looks pink by the flickering, grainy light from the TV screen. ”I’m sorry,” Frank says. ”Does it help you?” she asks and now there’s an angry-sharp edge in her voice, Willa’s switchblade mood swings, sullen to pissed in the space between heartbeats. “Has it ever helped you at all?” Frank doesn’t want to fight with her tonight, wants to close his eyes and slip back down to sleep, back to his raincool dreams. Too hot for an argument, and “I don’t know,” he says, and that’s almost not a lie. ”Yeah, well, whatever,” Willa mumbles and takes another drag off her cigarette. ”We’ll talk about it in the morning if you want,” Frank says and he lies back down, turns to face the open window and the noise of Mott Street at two A.M., the blinking orange neon from a noodle shop across the street. ”I’m not going to change my mind, if that’s what you mean,” Willa says. ”You can turn the sound up,” Frank tells her again and concentrates on the soothing rhythm of the noodle shop sign, orange pulse like campfire light, much, much better than counting imaginary sheep. In a moment he’s almost asleep again, scant inches from sleep and “Did you ever see Return to Oz?” Willa asks him. ”What?” ”Return to Oz, the one where Fairuza Balk plays Dorothy and Laurie Piper plays Auntie Em.” ”No,” Frank replies. “I never did,” and he rolls over onto his back and stares at the ceiling instead of the neon sign. In the dark and the gray light from the television, his favorite crack looks even more like the Valles Marineris. ”It wasn’t anything like The Wizard of Oz. I was just a little kid, but I remember it. It scared the hell out of me.” ”Your mother let you see scary movies when you were a little kid?” Willa ignores the question, her eyes still fixed on The Philadelphia Story if they’re fixed anywhere, and she exhales a cloud of smoke that swirls and drifts about above the bed. ”When the film begins, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry think Dorothy’s sick,” she says. “They think she’s crazy, because she talks about Oz all the time, because she won’t believe it was only a nightmare. They finally send her off to a sanitarium for electric shock treatment—“ ”Jesus,” Frank says, not entirely sure that Willa isn’t making all this up. “That’s horrible.” ”Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it? It’s what really happens to little girls who see places that aren’t supposed to be there. People aren’t ever so glad you didn’t die in a twister that they want to listen to crazy shit about talking scarecrows and emerald cities.” And Frank doesn’t answer because he knows he isn’t supposed to, knows that she would rather he didn’t even try, so he sweats and stares at his surrogate, plaster Mars instead, at the shadow play from the television screen; she doesn’t say anything else, and in a little while more, he’s asleep.

In this dream there is still thunder, no rain from the other sky but the crack and rumble of thunder so loud that the air shimmers and could splinter like ice. The tall red grass almost as high as his waist, rippling gently in the wind, and Frank wishes that Willa wouldn’t get so close to the fleshy, white trees. She thinks they might have fruit, peaches and she’s never eaten a white peach before, she said. Giants fighting in the sky and Willa picking up windfall fruit from the rocky ground beneath the trees; Frank looks over his shoulder, back towards the fissure in the basement wall, back the way they came, but it’s vanished. I should be sacred, he thinks. No, I should be scared. And now Willa is coming back towards him through the crimson waves of grass, her skirt for a linen basket to hold all the pale fruit she’s gathered. She’s smiling and he tries to remember the last time he saw her smile, really smile, not just a smirk or sneer. She smiles and steps through the murmuring grass that seems to part to let her pass, her bare arms and legs safe from the blades grown sharp as straight razors. ”They are peaches,” she beams. But the fruit is the color of school-room chalk, it’s skin smooth and slick and glistening with tiny, pinhead beads of nectar seeping out through minute pores. “Take one,” she says, but his stomach lurches and rolls at the thought, loath to even touch one of the things and then she sighs and dumps them all into the grass at his feet. ”I used to know a story about peaches,” Willa says. “It was a Japanese story, I think. Or maybe it was Chinese.” ”I’m pretty sure those aren’t peaches,” Frank says, and he takes a step backwards, away from the pile of sweating, albino fruit. ”I heard the pits are poisonous,” she says. “Arsenic, or maybe it’s cyanide.” A brilliant flash of chartreuse lightning then and the sky sizzles and smells like charred meat. Willa bends and retrieves a piece of the fruit, takes a bite before he can stop her; the sound of her teeth sinking through its skin, tearing through the colorless pulp inside, is louder than the thunder, and milky juice rolls down her chin and stains her Curious George T-shirt. Something wriggles from between her lips, falls to the grass, and when Willa opens her jaws wide to take another bite Frank can see that her mouth is filled with wriggling things. ”They have to be careful you don’t swallow your tongue,” she says, mumbling around the white peach. “If you swallow your tongue you’ll choke to death.” Frank snatches the fruit away from her, grabs it quick before she puts any more of it in her belly, and she frowns and wipes the juice staining her hands off onto her skirt. The half-eaten thing feels warm and he tosses it away. ”Jesus, that was fucking silly, Frank. The harm’s already done, you know that. The harm was done the day you looked through that hole in the wall.” And then the sky booms its symphony of gangrene and sepsis and lightning stabs down with electric claws, thunder then lightning but that’s only the wrong way round if he pretends Willa isn’t right, if he pretends that he’s seven again and this time he doesn’t take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. This time he does what his mother says and doesn’t go sneaking off the minute she turns her back. Frank stands alone beneath the restless trees, his aching, dizzy head too full of all the time that can’t be redeemed, now or then or ever, and he watches as Willa walks alone across the red fields towards the endless deserts of scrap iron and bone, towards the bloated, scarlet-purple sun. The black things have noticed her, and creep along close behind, stalking silent on ebony, mantis legs. This time he wakes up before they catch her.

The long weekend, then, hotter and drier, the sky more white than blue and the air on Mott Street and everywhere else that Frank has any reason to go has grown so ripe, so redolent, that sometimes he pulls the collars of his T-shirts up over his mouth and nose, breathes through the cotton like a surgeon or a wild west bandit, but the smell always gets through anyway. On the news there are people dying of heat stroke and dehydration, people dying in the streets and ERs, but fresh-faced weathermen still promise that it will rain very soon. He’s stopped believing them and maybe that means Willa’s right and it never will rain again. Frank hasn’t shown the white card—FOUND: LOST WORLDS—to Willa, keeps it hidden in his wallet, only taking it out when he’s alone and no one will see, no one to ask where or what or who. He’s read it over and over again, has each line committed to memory, and Monday morning he almost calls Mr. Zaroba about it. The half hour between Willa leaving for the café and the time that he has to leave for the copy shop if he isn’t going to be late, and he holds the telephone receiver and stares at Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card lying there on the table in front of him. The sound of his heart, the dial-tone drone, and the traffic down on Mott Street, the spice-and-dried-fish odor of the apothecary leaking up through the floorboards, and a fat drop of sweat slides down his forehead and spreads itself painfully across his left eyeball. By the time he’s finished rubbing at his eye, calling Zaroba no longer seems like such a good idea after all, and Frank puts the white card back into his wallet, slips it in safe between his driver’s license and a dog-eared, expired MetroCard. Instead he calls in sick, gets Maggie and she doesn’t believe for one moment that there’s anything wrong with him. ”I fucking swear, I can’t even get up off the toilet long enough to make a phone call. I’m calling you from the head,” only half an effort at sounding sincere because they both know this is only going through the motions. ”As we speak—“ he starts, but Maggie cuts him off. ”That’s enough, Frank. But I’m telling you, man if you wanna keep this job, you better get your slacker ass down here tomorrow morning.” ��Right,” Frank says. “I hear you,” and she hangs up first And then Frank stares at the open window, the sun beating down like the Voice of God out there, and it takes him almost five minutes to remember where to find the next number he has to call.

Sidney McAvoy stopped coming to the meetings at the synagogue on Eldridge Street almost a year ago, not long after Frank’s first time. Small, hawk-nosed man with nervous, ferrety eyes, and he’s always reminded Frank a little of Dustin Hoffman in Papillon. Some sort of tension or wound between Sidney and Mr. Zaroba that Frank never fully understood, but he saw it from the start, the way their eyes never met and Sidney never took his turn at the lectern, sat silent, brooding, chewing at the stem of a cheap, unlit pipe. And then an argument after one of the meetings, the same night that Zaroba told Janice that she shouldn’t ever go back to the cemetery in Trenton, that she should never try to find the staircase and the blue light again. Both men speaking in urgent, angry whispers, Zaroba looking up occasionally to smile a sheepish, embarrassed, apologetic smile. Everyone pretending not to see or hear, talking among themselves, occupied with their stale doughnuts and tiny packets of non-dairy creamer, and then Sidney McAvoy left and never came back. Frank would’ve forgotten all about him, almost had forgotten, and then one night he and Willa were coming home late from a bar where they drink sometimes, whenever they’re feeling irresponsible enough to spend money on booze. Cheap vodka or cheaper beer, a few hours wasted just trying to feel like everyone else, the way they imagined other, normal people might feel, and they ran into Sidney McAvoy a few blocks from their apartment. He was wearing a ratty green raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, and chewing on one of his pipes, carrying a large box wrapped in white butcher’s paper, tied up tight and neat with twine. ”Shit,” Willa whispered. “Make like you don’t see him,” but Sidney had already noticed them and he was busy clumsily trying to hide the big package behind his back. ”I know you two,” he declared, talking loudly, a suspicious, accusatory glint to his quavering voice. “You’re both with Zaroba, aren’t you? You still go to his meetings.” That last word a sneer and he pointed a short, grubby finger at the center of Frank’s chest. ”That’s really none of your goddamn business, is it?” Willa growled and Frank stepped quickly between them; she mumbled and spit curses behind his back and Sindey McAvoy glared up at Frank with his beady-dark eyes. A whole lifetime’s worth of bitterness and distrust trapped inside those eyes, eyes that have seen far too much or far too little, and “How have you been, Mr. McAvoy,” Frank said, straining to sound friendly, and he managed the sickly ghost of a smile. Sidney grunted and almost dropped his carefully-wrapped package. ”If you care about that girl there,” he said, speaking around the stem of the pipe clenched between his yellowed teeth, “you’ll keep her away from Zaroba. And you’ll both stop telling him things, if you know what’s good for you. There are more useful answers in a road atlas than you’re ever going to get out of that old phony.” ”What makes you say that?” Frank asked. “What were you guys fighting about?” but Sidney was already scuttling away down Canal Street, his white package hugged close to his chest. He turned a corner without looking back and was gone. ”Fucking nut job,” Willa mumbled. “What the hell’s his problem anyway?” ”Maybe the less we know about him the better,” Frank said and he put an arm around Willa’s small waist, holding her close to him, trying hard not to think about what could have been in the box but unable to think of anything else. And two weeks later, dim and snowy last day before Thanksgiving, Frank found Sidney McAvoy’s number in the phone book and called him.

A wet comb through his hair, cleaner shirt and socks, and Frank goes out into the sizzling day; across Columbus Park to the Canal Street Station and he takes the M to Grand Street, rides the B line all the way to the subway stop beneath the Museum of Natural History. Rumbling long through the honeycombed earth, the diesel and dust and garbage scented darkness and him swaddled inside steel and unsteady fluorescent light. Time to think that he’d rather not have, unwelcome luxury of second thoughts, and when the train finally reaches the museum he’s almost ready to turn right around and head back downtown. Almost, but Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card is in his wallet to keep him moving, get him off the train and up the concrete steps to the museum entrance. Ten dollars he can’t spare to get inside, but Sidney McAvoy will never agree to meet him anywhere outside, too paranoid for a walk in Central Park or a quiet booth in a deli or a coffee shop somewhere. ”People are always listening,” he says, whenever Frank has suggested or asked that they meet somewhere without an entrance fee. “You never know what they might overhear.” So sometimes it’s the long marble bench in front of the Apatosaurus, or the abyssal, blue-black gloom of the Hall of Fishes, seats beneath a planetarium constellation sky, whichever spot happens to strike Sidney’s fancy that particular day. His fancy or his cabalistic fantasies, if there’s any difference, and today Frank finds him in the Hall of Asiatic Mammals, short and rumpled man in a threadbare tweed jacket and red tennis shoes standing alone before the Indian leopard diorama, gazing intently in at the pocket of counterfeit jungle and the taxidermied cats. Frank waits behind him for a minute or two, waiting to be noticed, and when Sidney looks up and speaks, he speaks to Frank’s reflection. ”I’m very busy today,” he says, brusque, impatient. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.” And no, Frank says, it won’t take long at all, I promise, but Sidney’s doubtful expression to show just how much he believes that. He sighs and looks back to the stuffed leopards, papier-mâché trees and wax leaves, a painted flock of peafowl rising to hang forever beneath a painted forest canopy. Snapshot moment of another world and the walls of the dimly-lit hall lined with a dozen or more such scenes. ”You want to know about Monalisa,” Sidney says. “That’s why you came here, because you think I can tell you who he is.” ”Yeah,” and Frank reaches into this pocket for his wallet. “He came into the place where I work last week and left this.” He takes out the card and Sidney turns around only long enough to get it from him. ”So, you talked to him?” ”No, I didn’t. I was eating my lunch in the stockroom. I didn’t actually see him for myself.” Sidney stares at the card, seems to read it carefully three or four times and then he hands it back to Frank, goes back to staring at the leopards. ”Why didn’t you show this to Zaroba?” he asks sarcastically, taunting, but Frank answers him anyway, not in the mood today for Sidney’s grudges and intrigues. ”Because I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. You know he’s more interested in the mysteries than ever finding answers.” And Frank pauses, silent for a moment and Sidney’s silent, too, both men watching the big cats now—glass eyes, freeze-frame talons, and taut, spectacled haunches—as though the leopards might suddenly spring towards them, all this stillness just a clever ruse for the tourists and the kiddies; maybe dead leopards know the nervous, wary faces of men who have seen things that they never should have seen. ”He knows the truth would swallow him whole,” Sidney says. The leopards don’t pounce and he adds, “He knows he’s a coward.” ”So who is Dr. Monalisa?” ”A bit of something the truth already swallowed and spat back up,” and Sidney chuckles sourly to himself and produces one of his pipes from a jacket pocket. “He’s a navigator, a pilot, a cartographer…” Frank notices that one of the two leopards has captured a stuffed peacock, holds it fast between velvet, razored paws, and he can’t remember if it was that way only a moment before. ”He draws maps,” Sidney says. “He catalogs doors and windows and culverts.” ”That’s bullshit,” Frank whispers, his voice low now so the old woman staring in at the giant panda exhibit won’t hear him. “You’re trying to tell me he can find places?” ”He isn’t a sane man, Frank,” Sidney says and now he holds up his left hand and presses his palm firmly against the glass, as if he’s testing the invisible barrier, gauging its integrity. “He has answers, but he has prices, too. You think this is Hell, you see how it feels to be in debt to Dr. Solomon Monalisa.” ”It isn’t me. It’s Willa. I think she’s starting to lose it.” ”We all lost ‘it’ a long time ago, Frank.” ”I’m afraid she’s going to do something. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.” And Sidney turns his back on the leopards then, takes the pipe from his mouth, and glares up at Frank. But some of the anger, some of the bitterness, has gone from his eyes, and “He might keep her alive,” he says, “but you wouldn’t want her back when he was done. If she’d even come back. No, Frank. You two stay away from Monalisa. Look for your own answers. You don’t think you found that card by accident, do you? You don’t really think there are such things as coincidences? That’s not even his real address—“ ”She can’t sleep anymore,” Frank says, but now Sidney McAvoy isn’t listening, glances back over his shoulder at the Indian rain forest, incandescent daylight, illusory distances, and “I have to go now,” he says. “I’m very busy today.” ”I think she’s fucking dying, man,” Frank says as Sidney straightens his tie and puts the pipe back into his pocket; the old woman looks up from the panda in its unreal bamboo thicket and frowns at them both. ”I’m very busy today, Frank. Call me next week. I think I can meet you at the Guggenheim next week.” And he walks quickly away towards the Roosevelt Rotunda, past the Siberian tiger and the Sumatran rhinoceros, leaving Frank alone with the frowning woman. When Sidney has vanished into the shadows behind a small herd of Indian elephants, Frank turns back to the leopards and the smudgy hand print Sidney McAvoy has left on their glass.

Hours and hours later, past sunset to the other side of the wasted day, the night that seems even hotter than the scorching afternoon, and Frank is dreaming that the crack in the basement wall on St. Mark’s place is much too narrow for him to squeeze through. Maybe the way it really happened after all, and then he hears a small, anguished sound from somewhere close behind him, something hurting or lost, and when he turns to see, Frank opens his eyes and there’s only the tangerine glow of the noodle shop sign outside the apartment window. He blinks once, twice, but this stubborn world doesn’t go away, doesn’t break apart into random kaleidoscopic shards to become some other place entirely. So he sits up, head full of the familiar disappointment, this incontestable solidity, and it takes him a moment to realize that Willa isn’t in bed. Faint outline of her body left in the wrinkled sheets and the bathroom light is burning, the door open, so she’s probably just taking a piss. ”You okay in there?” he asks, but no reply. The soft drip, drip, drip of the kitchenette faucet, tick of the wind-up alarm clock on the table next to Willa’s side of the bed, street noise, but no answer. “Did you fall in or something?” he shouts. “Did you drown?” And still no response, but his senses waking up, picking out more than the ordinary, every-night sounds, a trilling whine pitched so high he feels it more than hears it, and now he notices the way that the air in the apartment smells. Go back to sleep, he thinks, but both legs already over the edge of the bed, both feet already on the dusty floor. When you wake up again it’ll be over. The trill worming its way beneath his skin, soaking in, pricking gently at the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, and all the silver fillings in his teeth have begun to hum along sympathetically. Where he’s standing, Frank can see into the bathroom, just barely, a narrow slice of linoleum, slice of porcelain toilet tank, a mildew and polyurethane fold of shower curtain. And he thinks that the air has started to shimmer, an almost imperceptible warping of the light escaping from the open door, but that might only be his imagination. He takes one small step towards the foot of the bed and there’s Willa, standing naked before the tiny mirror above the bathroom sink. The jut of her shoulder blades and hip bones, the anorexic swell of her rib cage, all the minute details of her painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh and curving light. ”Hey. Is something wrong? Are you sick?” and she turns her head slowly to look at him, or maybe only looking towards him because there’s nothing much like recognition on her face. Her wide, unblinking eyes, blind woman’s stare, and “Can’t you hear me, Willa?” he asks as she turns slowly back to the mirror. Her lips move, shaping rough, inaudible words. The trilling grows infinitesimally louder, climbs another half-octave, and there’s a warm, wet trickle across Frank’s lips and he realizes that his nose is bleeding. Behind Willa the bathroom wall, the shower, the low ceiling—everything—ripples and dissolves and there’s a sudden, staccato pop as the bulb above the sink blows. And after an instant of perfect darkness, perfect nothing, dull and yellow-green shafts of light from somewhere far, far above, flickering light from an alien sun shining down through the waters of an alien sea; dim, translucent shapes dart and flash through those depths, bodies more insubstantial than jellyfish, more sinuous than eels, and Willa rises to meet them, arms outstretched, her hair drifting about her face like a halo of seaweed and algae. In the ocean-filtered light, Willa’s pale skin seems sleek and smooth as dolphin-flesh. Air rushes from her lips, her nostrils, and flows eagerly away in a glassy swirl of bubbles. The trilling has filled Frank’s head so full, and his aching skull, his brain, seem only an instant from merciful explosion, fragile, eggshell bone collapsed by the terrible, lonely sound and the weight of all that water stacked above him. He staggers, takes a step backwards, and now Willa’s face is turned up to meet the sunlight streaming down, and she’s more beautiful than anyone or anything he’s ever seen or dreamt. Down on Mott Street, the screech of tires, the angry blat of a car horn and someone begins shouting very loudly in Chinese. And now the bathroom is only a bathroom again, and Willa lies in a limp, strangling heap on the floor, her wet hair and skin glistening in the light from the bulb above the sink. The water rolls off her back, her thighs, spreads across the floor in a widening puddle, and Frank realizes that the trilling has finally stopped, only the memory of it left in his ringing ears and bleeding nose. When the dizziness has passed, he goes to her, sits down on the wet floor and holds her while she coughs and pukes up gouts of salt water and snotty strands of something the color of verdigris. Her skin so cold it hurts to touch, cold coming off her like a fever, and something small and chitinous slips from her hair and scuttles behind the toilet on long, jointed legs. ”Did you see?” she asks him, desperate, rheumy words gurgling out with all the water that she’s swallowed. “Did you, Frank? Did you see it?” ”Yes,” he tells her, just like every time before. “Yes, baby. I did. I saw it all,” and Willa smiles, closes her eyes, and in a little while she’s asleep. He carries her, dripping, back to their bed and holds her until the sun rises and she’s warm again.

The next day neither of them goes to work, and some small, niggling part of Frank manages to worry about what will happen to them if he loses the shit job at Gotham Kwick Kopy, if Willa gets fired from the café, obstinate shred of himself still capable of caring about such things. How the rent will be paid, how they’ll eat, everything that hasn’t really seemed to matter in more years than he wants to count. Half the morning in bed and his nosebleed keeps coming back, a roll of toilet paper and then one of their towels stained all the shades of dried and drying blood; Willa wearing her winter coat despite the heat, and she keeps trying to get him to go to a doctor, but no, he says. That might lead to questions, and besides, it’ll stop sooner or later. It’s always stopped before. By twelve o’clock, Willa’s traded the coat for her pink cardigan, feels good enough that she makes them peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, black coffee and stale potato chips, and after he eats Frank begins to feel better, too. But going to the park is Willa’s idea, because the apartment still smells faintly of silt and dead fish, muddy, low-tide stink that’ll take hours more to disappear completely. He knows the odor makes her nervous, so he agrees, even though he’d rather spend the afternoon sleeping off his headache. Maybe a cold shower, another cup of Willa’s bitter-strong coffee, and if he’s lucky he could doze for hours without dreaming They take the subway up to Fifth, follow the eastern edge of the park north, past the zoo and East Green all the way to Pilgrim Hill and the Conservatory Pond. It’s not so very hot that there aren’t a few model sailing ships on the pond, just enough breeze to keep their miniature Bermuda sails standing tall and taut as shark fins. Frank and Willa sit in the shade near the Alice in Wonderland statue, her favorite spot in all of Central Park, rocky place near the tea party, granite and rustling leaves, the clean laughter of children climbing about on the huge, bronze mushrooms. A little girl with frizzy black hair and red and white peppermint-striped tights is petting the kitten in Alice’s lap, stroking its metal fur and meowling loudly, and “I can’t ever remember her name,” Willa says. ”What?” Frank asks. “Whose name?” not sure if she means the little girl or the kitten or something else entirely. ”Alice’s kitten. I know it had a name, but I never can remember it.” Frank watches the little girl for a moment, and “Dinah,” he says. “I think the kitten’s name was Dinah.” ”Oh, yeah, Dinah. That’s it,” and he knows that she’s just thinking out loud, whatever comes to mind so that she won’t have to talk about last night, so the conversation won’t accidentally find its own way back to those few drowning moments of chartreuse light and eel shadows. Trying so hard to pretend and he almost decides they’re both better off if he plays along and doesn’t show her Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s white calling card. ”That’s a good name for a cat,” she says. “If we ever get a kitten, I think I’ll name it Dinah.” ”Mrs. Wu doesn’t like cats.” ”Well, we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in that dump. Next time, we’ll get an apartment that allows cats.” Frank takes the card out and lays his wallet on the grass, but Willa hasn’t even noticed, too busy watching the children clambering about on Alice, too busy dreaming about kittens. The card is creased and smudged from a week riding around in his back pocket and all the handling it’s suffered, the edges beginning to fray, and he gives it to her without any explanation. ”What’s this?” she asks and he tells her to read it first, just read it, so she does. Reads it two or three times and then Willa returns the card, goes back to watching the children. But her expression has changed, the labored, make-believe smile gone now and she just looks like herself again, plain old Willa, the distance in her eyes, the hard angles at the corners of her mouth that aren’t quite a frown. ”Sidney says he’s for real,” half the truth, at best, and Frank glances down at the card, reading it again for the hundredth or two-hundredth time ”Sidney McAvoy’s a fucking lunatic.” ”He says this guy has maps—“ ”Christ, Frank. What do you want me to say? You want me to give you permission to go talk to some crackpot? You don’t need my permission.” ”I was hoping you’d come with me,” he says so softly that he’s almost whispering, and he puts the card back into his wallet where neither of them will have to look at it, stuffs the wallet back into his jeans pocket. ”Well, I won’t. I go to your goddamn meetings. I already have to listen to that asshole Zaroba. That’s enough for me, thank you very much. That’s more than enough.” The little girl petting Dinah slips, loses her footing and almost slides backwards off the edge of the sculpture, but her mother catches her and sets her safely on the ground. ””I see what it’s doing to you,” Frank says. “I have to watch. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?” She doesn’t answer him, opens her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes, only one left and she crumbles the empty package and tosses it over her shoulder into the bushes. ”What if this guy really can help you? What if he can make it stop?” Willa is digging noisily around in her purse, trying to find her lighter or a book of matches, and she turns and stares at Frank, the cigarette hanging unlit from her lips. Her eyes shining bright as broken gemstones, shattered crystal eyes, furious, resentful, and he knows that she could hate him, that she could leave him here and never look back. She takes the cigarette from her mouth, licks her upper lip, and for a long moment Willa holds the tip of her tongue trapped tight between her teeth. ”What the hell makes you think I want it to stop?” And silence as what she’s said sinks in and he begins to understand that he’s never understood her at all. “It’s killing you,” he says, finally, the only thing he can think to say, and Willa’s eyes seem to flash and grow brighter, more broken, more eager to slice. ”No, Frank, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. Knowing that it’s out there, that I’ll see it again, and someday maybe it won’t make me come back here.” And then she gets up and walks quickly away towards the pond, brisk, determined steps to put more distance between them. She stops long enough to bum a light from an old black man with a dachshund, then ducks around one corner of the boathouse and he can’t see her anymore. Frank doesn’t follow, sits watching the tiny sailboats and yachts gliding gracefully across the moss-dark surface of the water, their silent choreography of wakes and ripples. He decides maybe it’s better not to worry about Willa for now, plenty of time for that later and he wonders what he’ll say to Monalisa when he finds him.

We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own. CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS (c. 1690)

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