Until a few weeks ago my brother had two hands. His name is Emre, which everyone mispronounces. They see it written down and say “Emir” when it’s properly pronounced EM-ray. I correct them and they apologize, looking sheepish or annoyed, and then—probably because I need people to like me—I slip in something to absolve them. I nod in a warmhearted, sympathetic way, saying, “Nobody gets it right,” or, “Ever since we were teens I’ve told him to put an acute accent over the second E but he’s intractable.” I feel better after that, for the most part, at least until the next morning, when a telemarketer from some anonymous insurance company calls and asks to speak with “Julia or Emir Torrenz” and have either of us “recently been in an accident” and are we aware we “may be entitled to substantial compensation?” I hear “Emir” and a little hurricane of rage spins through my gut. It’s as if the voice on the other end, merely by implication, has somehow orchestrated the presumed catastrophe.
I do get it though. “Emir” is a fair-minded misreading of Emre, especially in this part of the world, where it’s less common. What it comes down to, probably, is this: He is my brother and I love him.
A few weeks ago, when my phone rang, things were different. There really had been an accident. Emre’s left hand was missing.
“Hello?” I said.
No one answered immediately, which is normal. What you hear at first is a sizzle of far-off static, then a click, and then—
“Good morning, may I speak with Julia or Emir Torrenz?”
“It’s EM-ray,” I said.
“Right, okay. Is this Emre with whom I’m speaking?”
“This is Julia.”
“Julia, were you or someone in your household recently injured in an accident? According to our records you may—”
“How do you know?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How do you know about the accident?”
The voice did not skip a beat. “Before I answer that, just for verification purposes, was this a car accident or something that happened on the job?”
“On the job.” This, of course, was only technically true. We had learned technically true was not the same as legally or contractually true.
“On the job,” agreed the voice. “Yes, that’s what I have here.”
“How? How do you have it there?”
“Our records are quite thorough.”
“But we haven’t told anyone.”
“Our database is robust,” said the voice. “Information is gathered from the very widest array of institutions and organizations.”
I imagined an unholy partnership between the operating room doctors who dealt with Emre’s hand and the anonymous insurance company. Perhaps between the insurance company and the sandwich factory where Emre worked (and where our father worked before him). Between all three of them, probably.
“So,” I said, “I guess you know everything.”
“Of course not. But with all this data we do feel confident drawing inferences. Why do you think we keep calling?”
The silence that followed crackled with a barely perceptible popping noise, like tiny strings of spit snapping gently as someone parts their lips next to your ear. Probably before whispering a secret.
“It’s his hand, isn’t it?” said the voice. “His left?”
The cyclone in my gut whirled upwards, threatening to get the better of me. “Yes,” I said. “Correct.”
“And what about Cathy? Perhaps we could talk about what happened to her.”
“Fuck you,” I said and hung up.
After Mom left, Dr. Mendlow put Dad on Nortriptyline twice a day. Unaccustomed to illness, he muttered this was precisely the sort of thing Mom would bug him about, that she would have drawn up a schedule, reminders, alarms, and that was why without her, ironically, he missed so many doses. To tackle her absence he scuttled seven or eight of the blood-orange pills into these tiny, child-proof cases he found at Biway Zone. Each resembled a pastel-colored tube of lip balm, gradually accumulating in all the places he didn’t think we would look—under the owner’s manual in our Mazda’s glovebox, folded into hand towels on the highest shelf of the linen closet, or in the hidden cubby in the back of the maplewood armoire that didn’t fit through any door and so had apparently come with the house. Our father’s idea was simple. Wherever or whenever he remembered to pop a pill, he would always find one in easy reach.
I discovered first the mauve-coloured tube in the Mazda’s glovebox, which made sense. In those days we practically lived in the car. I always rode shotgun. From there, it grew into a minor hobby, finding them, these little Chapsticks-that-were-not-Chapsticks. Soon, in my mind, I had drafted an invisible map of every hiding spot. I shared this hobby with no one, least of all Emre. I possessed enough good sense not to tell a six-year-old where his father squirreled away his candy-like antidepressants.
Emre and I did gym together two times a week in those days. Dad drove us into town and we trained in the converted viewing gallery of the old hockey arena, where the floor was a patchwork of blue and burgundy mats and the air smelled of parched leather and marijuana. Emre excelled in the power events, pummel horse and rings, while our pothead coach Yvonne pushed me into rhythmic gymnastics, which of course I resented. True, we both scored points for form—for the sharp, military snap of our toes and fingers—but for Emre that’s where it ended. For him, there were no accoutrements, no ribbons and rubber balls, no fizzy, sequined leotards. I convinced myself this made him a superior gymnast, his tightly-sprung body a more sincere expression of our sport.
When Aunt Penny visited, she dubbed us “the swan and the bandog.” I was the swan because I was fancy and flexible and more belligerent than I looked. I had never heard of a bandog, which Aunt Penny described as “the toughest, sturdiest, most knot-tight mutt on the planet.”
Another telemarketer called the other day, complete with space station static, the big click, and then—
“Good afternoon, may I speak to Julia or Emir Torrenz?”
“EM-ray.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a common mistake,” I said. “His name. It’s pronounced EM-ray.”
“Thank you. I’ve made a note. It won’t happen again.”
“Hope not.”
“You must be Julia,” said the voice.
“Yes.”
“Julia, I have here your current address, two-six-three Collingwood, is a semi-detached home you and your brother recently inherited. Is that right?”
“From our father, yes. Our mother—”
“She left when you were little.”
“Yes.”
“You hardly remember her.”
“Not really, no.”
“Your brother, not at all. He would have been quite young.”
“True.”
“And his favorite television programme was Let Me Show You a Dinosaur. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“And you had to—”
“Some mysteries can’t be solved, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“You think if you collect enough data you can infer whatever you like. You can arrive at an absolute truth.”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Sorry. Never mind. You were about to say something.”
“Yes,” the voice said. “What I was about to say was: And you had to protect him because what it comes down to, probably, is this: He is your brother and you love him.”
“Correct.”
“Great.” The voice paused and I heard a familiar, faintly-popping silence. Beyond that I heard keyboard clatter, the exuberant chirm of a call center. “Julia, do you have homeowners insurance?”
“Yes. Grandfathered in with the house.”
“I’m sure you understand why it might be advantageous to revisit the policy.”
“Maybe.”
“I want you to know that, searching together, I’m certain we’ll locate a superior deal for you and your brother, something more secure than a grandfathered policy, which, by now, is almost certainly outmoded.”
“We’re happy the way things are.”
“Okay. Let’s park that for now. Perhaps instead we might talk about what happened to Cathy.”
“Fuck you,” I said and hung up.
One morning, Omario Joseph bet Emre fifty bucks he couldn’t walk to school with me on his shoulders. At the time, I was a foot taller than my brother and it seemed impossible he could carry me ten feet, let alone up the twisty quarter-mile between our home and St. Margaret’s. Halfway there, cutting through the fairgrounds, Emre stumbled on the dirt track. To steady him, I looped my ankles through the straps of his backpack and adjusted my weight on the huge plastic lunch box inside, a lunch box sporting the cartoon diplodocus who hosted Let Me Show You a Dinosaur. Later, Emre would admit that, had I not shifted my weight, had I not stiffened my body and gripped tightly to his own, he would never have made it. Still, Omario refused to pay. “Double-or-nothing,” he said, “I’ll bet you can’t make it all the way home on your hands.”
Had it been another time of day, Emre might have refused, but this was the twilight hour of every suburb of a suburb, every bedroom community, every place remote enough to see stars at night. In those two unsupervised hours between the end of school and the arrival of the first commuter train, we went feral. Looting liquor cabinets. Firing our parents’ hunting rifles. Entering impossible wagers.
I told Emre to make Omario pay us the fifty. We would get Trough Burger Combos at the Copper Pig and have enough left over for Dairy Queen, but Emre was intractable.
By the time we reached our end of the fairgrounds, Emre’s palms were bloody and a crowd had assembled to trail us. Omario and his friends jeered and tossed gravel, but most spewed words of encouragement, especially David, the town’s only officially registered homeless person and the sole adult present. He leapt and clapped and called out, “Do it, kiddo! Do it!”
On the final approach, every slap of the ground left a red, perfectly formed handprint. The pattern of palm blotches and splayed fingers so disturbed Gretchen Lowe, a high-schooler, that she ran home in tears.
Omario swore he would ask his mother for the money. She initially refused but, days later, when we showed her Emre’s scabby bandages, she paid us herself: a pair of crisp fifties.
“Probably it’s mind over matter,” Emre told me later at Dairy Queen, when I asked him how he did it. “Believing something’s true when it just isn’t, he said. I’m good at that, like with Mom, I think of her as still alive. But she is, I said. She’s not dead, she just left us.” Emre shoveled in a fresh scoop of snickerdoodle ice cream, cinnamon streaks dribbling down his shirt. “I don’t remember her,” he said, “not anymore. To me, she’s dead. It’s mind over matter.”
The other day, my phone rang nineteen times in a single hour. All Unknown Numbers. That was pushing it. I ignored them all.
Emre’s name was taken from our maternal grandfather, Emre Pasha, a semi-professional wrestling coach in Ankara in the nineteen seventies. He died before our parents met so all I know of him comes from the two photos our mother left behind. In the first, our grandfather poses in a gymnasium not unlike the sweaty viewing gallery of our youth. He stands arms folded, wide eyes glowering at the camera. One look—at his meaty chest, his solid legs, his bulbous shoulders—and you see where Emre inherited his impressive physique. The eyes, too. In the photograph, our grandfather’s stare is huge, glossy, inescapable. The second picture appears in a Turkish newspaper clipping that describes the train crash that killed him. Laid out before a derailed passenger car with carved wooden doors is a row of bodies. Our mother once pointed out which is our forebear, but the bodies are covered with sheets and I can never remember which is which.
When Emre lost his hand I did wonder if his sleek, coiled-up physicality might not be the only thing he inherited. I wondered if it were possible to pass on something less corporeal. A predilection for tragedy, perhaps. For violent mishap. I realize that makes the accident—and it truly was an accident—sound more dramatic than it was.
What happened was this: Emre was on break, goofing around with Sam and Wendy from payroll. They were out on the new, heart-shaped benches in the factory’s inner courtyard. It was hot that day and Emre had taken off his shirt, something we’ve learned does not play well in a Workers’ Compensation report.
I think Emre had a crush on Wendy and wanted to impress her, to demonstrate he still possessed the athletic skills that once crowned him tri-county champ of the parallel bars. He raised himself into an L-sit on the backrest of one of the benches, kipping into a handstand. Wendy was impressed, probably, until the backrest buckled.
Emre fell fingers-first into a gap between the benches and, like that day at the fairgrounds, sheared off a layer of skin. It didn’t seem serious at first, but the benches must have been poorly maintained and unclean because over the week that followed, his left thumb turned the veiny indigo-green of a distant nebula. The color spread to the rest of his fingers, into his palm and, when the antibiotics failed and fearing sepsis, Dr. Mendlow had no choice but to amputate.
Afterwards, Emre didn’t return to work. He lay in bed, silent, unmoving, doing nothing at all but staring into the sky through his open window. I haven’t seen him this upset, this inert, since we were kids. Since what happened to Cathy.
“Hello?”
“Good afternoon, may I speak with Julia or Emir Torrenz?”
“EM-ray.”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. This is Julia.”
“Hello, Julia, I’m calling today to let you know about a very special, very unique promotion. Do you like stars, Julia?”
“What?”
“We’ve recently partnered with the International Astronomical Union headquartered in Paris, France, which means, for a limited time, when you sign up for one of our affordable life insurance bundles, you’ll receive, completely free of charge, the opportunity to name a star after yourself. Or a loved one.”
“A star?”
“That will live on, should the worst unfortunately befall you, God forbid, for millions or indeed billions of years, all the while carrying your name, or the name of your loved one.”
“God forbid.”
“I thought this offer might appeal to you and your brother—”
“EM-ray.”
“Ah, yes, I see. His name. I thought, Julia, the offer might appeal to you and Emre. We have the option, you see—again, at no extra charge—of naming binary star systems. That is to say a pair of stars in orbit around a common barycenter, something the International Astronomical Union headquartered in Paris, France, highly recommends to couples.”
“We’re not a couple,” I said. “He’s my brother.”
“I meant the term only generically, as in a unit-pair. Is this something you might be interested in?”
“We like things the way they are.”
“Would it be possible, I wonder, to speak with your brother directly?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Now, I really didn’t want to bring this up but—Julia, listen. Are you aware there’s no such program as Let Me Show You a Dinosaur?”
“What?”
“I have it here in our database. Nowhere in the world has there ever been a television show with this title.”
The pause that followed sounded precisely like Rice Krispies in milk.
“He had the lunch box.”
“Are you sure? Perhaps we might discuss what happened to Cathy.”
“Fuck you,” I said and hung up.
Sometime after we started at the gym Cathy’s family moved in next door. Hers was the only fully detached house on the street and the only one with a swimming pool. The previous family—I forget their surname, Henderson, probably, or Henley or Handy—struggled for money the way all of us did. For as long as I could remember the pool next door was empty, drained to save on maintenance. From my bedroom window I had a clear view of its sloping chasm, printed with a sort of houndstooth pattern of blue-and-white diamonds, though the blues were so sun bleached they were yellow.
At first, Cathy’s parents seemed like the rest of us, two more commuters in a dozy bedroom suburb, but the speed with which they refurbished the old house hinted at uncommon wealth. Still, her parents had no choice but to yoke their lives to the weekday schedule of commuter trains, the town’s great leveler: All the adults had to come and go by the same clock.
From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.
I looked out my window one day and there she was, hovering nude on the surface, golden hair ferning around her head as if to mimic the sun. She lay there a long time, hands scalloped behind her back, skulling the water just enough to keep her afloat. She was the first human being outside my family I saw naked. It happened only once. After that first sighting, she religiously swam in a chaste, jet black one-piece.
Emre’s bet with Omario unsettled our father, who had never really been settled since Mom left. He threatened to quit his job at the sandwich factory in order to look after us. Was that what we wanted, he asked, a single dad who stayed home while we all starved to death because he was an unemployed bum? Of course not, we said. So he went next door to ask Cathy to babysit, thus ending our feral twilights.
Cathy appeared the following week in a T-shirt printed with an image of Joy Division’s debut album, the famous one with the radio-telescope visualization of CP 1919, the first pulsar ever discovered.
Discovered by a woman, Cathy told me, noticing how I gaped, mesmerized, at the sawtoothed syncopation of lines spread across her chest. Her name, Cathy informed me, was Jocelyn Bell Burnell and when she first detected the pulsar she dubbed it LGM-1. LGM stood for “Little Green Men.”
Burnell’s discovery, presented in her PhD thesis, won the Nobel Prize for physics—but only for her professors, not for Burnell herself, even though she had been the one who built and operated the radiation detector, even though she alone had correctly interpreted lines like the image on Cathy’s T-shirt. When Burnell showed it to her professors, they didn’t believe her. They told her it was a flaw in her measurements, a misinterpretation of data. The tale was so tragic Emre lost all interest in dinosaurs. He turned instead to the lore of distant stars.
In her second week with us, Cathy brought over a boy. He was tall and skinny and almost entirely mute. He reminded me of the mannequins that lingered, limbless and rain-stained, behind Mallard’s strip mall after its last shop, the kebab place, shut its doors. With Emre and I in the backyard, Cathy took the boy down to the recycled couch in our father’s workshop. Through the hazy sunken window beside the hosepipe, I watched them kiss.
More boys followed the first. Not all of them were twiggy and tight-lipped. Some were the opposite, bull-necked and loud. Some only opened their mouths to laugh, whinnying like ponies at jokes that were hardly jokes, that were barely words, just inscrutable noises. There were quite a few novice smokers, boys who loitered in the shadows of our garage, pinching cigarettes too close to the roots of their fingers so with each puff they pressed their hands fully over their mouths, as if gasping in shock. None of them spoke to us. Their demeanor was one of broad indifference. But we were not indifferent to them. Because, probably, they stole Cathy away from us.
“Hello?”
“Good eve—”
“It’s pronounced EM-ray.”
“Emre, yes, good evening. I’m calling because I want to let you—”
“This is Julia. Emre’s my brother.”
“Great. Thank you, Julia. Are you very well this evening?”
“I’m fine, yes.”
“Excellent. Glad to hear it, but you know, Julia, I’d really like to speak to your brother.”
“He’s indisposed.”
“Perhaps you and I could chat until he’s able to get to the phone.”
“Could take a while.”
“I don’t mind.
“My brother is unwell.”
“It’s his hand, yes? His left hand?”
“Correct.”
“Good. That’s what we have here. There’s nothing else the matter, is there?”
“With me or my brother?”
“Your brother.”
“I couldn’t say.”
There was a familiar silence, pocked here and there with a noise like a slow and methodical crush of plastic.
“I can only imagine how it’s affected him. And yourself.”
“The doctor said it would be good for him to rest. He doesn’t speak much.”
“Of course, and don’t you think he deserves proper compensation? I’m sure you’re aware he’ll need support, in the short term at least, and if his mood has taken a dive as a result of—has he taken anything for that?”
“For his hand?”
“His mood.”
“Maybe.”
“Nortriptyline?”
“How do you know that?”
“You have a link to this medication. Don’t you, Julia?”
“What?”
“Your father, what happened to Cathy, and now your brother is—”
“Fuck you.”
It was autumn before Cathy brought over a girl. As a lanky, mostly speechless person who ignored us, she was a female doppelgänger of the first boy and, for a time, Cathy oscillated—girl, boy, girl, boy—until the boys dwindled and Cathy settled on Gretchen Lowe.
Gretchen never came through the front door, but rather insinuated herself through a gap in the backyard fence. Entering via the kitchen, she strode with confidence, as if in the midst of a garden party, delivering cupcakes or coleslaw. As if she lived with us. Briefly, at least in the afternoon for a few warm weeks that October, she did, more or less.
I asked Cathy if there was a difference between kissing boys and kissing girls. A mouth is a mouth, Cathy told me. They’re all different. They’re all the same.
Sometimes, Cathy and Gretchen didn’t kiss. Through the sunken window beside the hosepipe I watched Gretchen’s head in Cathy’s lap, Cathy roping her friend’s hair into plaits, twisting them, unweaving them, twisting them again. Sometimes, Gretchen napped, lulled to sleep, probably, by the rhythm of Cathy’s fingers. Sometimes, her eyes popped open and, through the haze of the sunken window, I swore she saw me lurking. I’m not sure. The sunken window was always foggy, spiderwebbed, unclean.
After she settled on Gretchen, I asked Cathy whether she believed the universe provided us with a single true love and, no matter who this true love might be, didn’t she think we have a cosmic duty to love that person with all our hearts forever and ever? It was typical kid’s stuff, a breezy jumble of hypotheticals and absolutes.
“Maybe,” Cathy said. Her voice was a vicious monotone. “But how the hell would we know?”
The day after my question, Gretchen didn’t come. Through the onion-skin translucence of the sunken window, Cathy stared at the wall-mounted television in my father’s workshop. I knew a piss-colored tube of pills was stashed behind it, tangled between the wiring and the bracket. I thought she looked lonely, but then I saw a head in her lap, not Gretchen’s, but Emre’s. His hair, a dense, Turkic mop, was impossible to braid. Cathy merely twirled one of his many cowlicks.
On the television, probably, was Let Me Show You a Dinosaur, not that Emre was watching. His eyes were closed. I waited for them to pop open like Gretchen’s, but Emre kept them shut. He was no longer seduced by allosaurs and pterodactyls.
Someone pounded on our door. I thought it might be Gretchen, taking a more direct approach. But it wasn’t. It was Cathy’s parents. Shoulder to shoulder on the creaky wood of our veranda, identical in height, they seized Cathy in unison, robotically, the conjoined works of a single machine, thudding their daughter down the steps, frogmarching her home. She went quietly. Not a word of protest. I had never noticed before, but the symmetry of their bodies was horrifying.
“Hello?”
“Good evening, is this Julia Torrenz?”
“If you want my brother, I’m afraid—”
“Emre?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“It’s here in your file, next of kin.”
“You said it correctly. First time.”
“I’m calling for you today, Julia. I wonder if you’ve given thought to your retirement?”
“It’s a long way off.”
“It might seem that way, yes, but the sooner you plan, the more prepared you’ll be when the time comes. Perhaps you have a moment to answer a very short questionnaire we’ve prepared?”
“How short?”
“Won’t take more than a minute, I promise.”
“Go on. You deserve something for getting his name right.”
The pause that followed crackled like a campfire, not a roaring blaze, but more an end-of-the-night smolder when everyone is tired, half-drunk, ready to crawl into their pup tents, a fire as it dies on the far side of a forest, perceived only as a mute orange smudge through a field of black spruce and white cedar.
“Julia, do you think about your future?”
“As much as anyone.”
“Great. Admirable. I would argue that anyone—and by that I mean everyone—ought to think of it deeply. In sharp relief. Do you see what I mean?”
“Sounds like you want to sell me life insurance.”
“That’s certainly something we can discuss, but right now let’s talk about the shorter term. Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?”
“Here.”
“No change?”
“We’re happy. We’re fine.”
“Ten years from now?”
“Same.”
“How about goals and ambitions for the medium term? Should the need arise, our Registered Retirement packages allow you to dip—”
“We like things the way they are.”
The voice paused so briefly there was no time for static. It was a traditional fermata, a brief, unsullied silence.
“Julia, why don’t you tell them the truth?”
“Them?”
“You said it yourself. You likened the sunken window beside the hosepipe to the skin of an onion. Foggy. Indistinct.”
“That’s how it was. It still is.”
“So you don’t know what you saw. Not really.”
“I know what I know.”
“Why don’t you tell them the truth about what happened to his hand?”
“He was goofing around. The backrest broke. The sepsis would’ve killed him. That part’s all true.”
“Which implies you haven’t been entirely honest about the rest. Have you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Who else knew where your father hid his pills?”
“Fuck you,” I said. And hung up.
Two days after her parents dragged her off, they found Cathy in the swimming pool. She was naked again, but face down. I didn’t see her that time. On weekdays her parents left town on the earliest train. They had already found her, fished her out, called the ambulance, all before the rest of the street was awake.
A day earlier, Cathy showed up at the regular time, but not to babysit, only to inform us she couldn’t anymore and to apologize, stiltedly, for “inappropriate behavior.” And so—if only briefly, until our father found a replacement—our feral twilights returned.
We never again saw Cathy’s parents. They vigorously pursued an autopsy and the coroner found Nortriptyline in her system, enough to constitute an overdose. Enough to cause dizziness, disorientation, blurred vision. Enough to cause muscle spasms and seizures and hallucinations of little green men.
My father was the only person anyone knew on Nortriptyline and, for a long time, things were difficult. There were awful rumors. His colleagues at the sandwich factory said monstrous things. He came home with a bloody nose. Twice. With bruises. With a broken pinky finger.
Now that he’s gone I see how the shadow of Cathy’s death darkened his life. I see why, after we finished school, he tried and failed to sell the house. Why, at the end, he was so bitter, so domineering. Why he snapped or snarled at anyone in earshot, “What in fuck’s name was it all for?”
The police questioned me at school, a pair of female officers. I imagine they were steered toward interrogating children because they resembled actors typecast as grandmothers. The contrast of their kindly, doughy faces with badges and guns and matching uniforms was chilling. I mistrusted them instantly. I revealed nothing of my father’s hiding spots. No, I said, Cathy must have found them, either by accident or because she deliberately searched the house. Yes, they were secured in a single bottle, hidden in my father’s bedroom, safely locked away. Yes, I saw him take them regularly.
In the end, despite efforts by her parents to vilify my father, Cathy’s death was deemed a suicide. Not that it mattered. He was vilified nevertheless and, ultimately, it was his medication in Cathy’s system that killed her. Regardless of how it got there.
Now it’s just Emre and me, sitting together in the bedroom he slept in all his life. He is no longer the cartwheeling child I remember. He’s depressed, probably, taking after our father. He hasn’t stirred in a long, long time. He just lies there, cradling the empty space where his hand used to be, his huger-than-ever eyes pondering out the window.
On clear nights, when a star winks at us, I imagine it’s a twin system, two bodies fastened by invisible gravities, spiraling. I imagine Emre’s huger-than-ever eyes interpreting its flicker as an alien language. I imagine him, probably, communing with little green men. Sometimes, I lie beside him and we gaze up together. Sometimes, I can almost hear them.
I’ve switched off my phone, of course. We like things the way they are.
Robert Paul Weston's fiction has appeared on the New Yorker Radio Hour and in journals around the world, including the New Orleans Review, the Raleigh Review, Litro Magazine, Postscripts, Kiss Machine, On Spec, Eastlit, and others. His stories have been nominated for the Journey Prize in Canada and the Fountain Award for Speculative Literature in the United States. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln, where he is Faculty Fiction Editor of the Lincoln Review. He is also an award-winning author of novels for children and young adults.
Photo by: Tom Spentys