Every day, in an unexpected place, Nina found another bead. She found one in the lint screen of the dryer. One in the soil of a cactus she repotted. One at the bottom of a bowl of tomato soup. One day, she coughed a single cough and a bead appeared on her tongue. Nina kept all the beads. She stored them in the Band-Aid tin. Sometimes she shook the tin to hear the noise it made. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, it said.
Nina and Harry weren’t happy in the new house; they bickered all the time. The only thing that brought Nina hope were the beads and the dreams, though neither of those made any real sense to her. She slept excessively. Harry came home later and later in the evenings smelling of beer, cigars, perfume. When he slept, he no longer breathed serenely. Instead, he snored, causing Nina’s dreams to take an urgent turn. There was a loud, new factory in the desert, churning out clouds of navy smoke, and she and the owner would sit in his canvas chairs wearing gas masks looking at it.
“What are they making?” she’d ask him.
“It’s not what you think,” he’d say.
Then Nina would wake up and drink from the faucet and discover another bead. Maybe pressed into the soft, pink meat of her heel. Maybe near the sink drain, in the tiny groove that kept it from drowning.
When Nina had forty beads, she spread them on the kitchen table after Harry had gone to work. She put twenty in one row, then twenty in a row below it. She pretended they were teeth. While she arranged the beads, someone came and kissed her on the nape of her neck, but this time she did not turn to see who it was. That night, Harry was the latest he had ever been.
“Where have you been?” Nina asked.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
Harry swayed at the foot of the bed. Nina felt her hands begin to shake. “I don’t like this house,” she said. “I wish we’d never bought it.”
Harry shook his head. “I knew this would happen.”
Nina’s eyes filled with tears. She lay back in bed. She heard Harry leave the room and then the house. Then she let herself cry until she was there, in the desert with the owner, reaching out for the gas mask and putting it on.
“What happened to the palm tree?” Nina asked.
“It died,” said the owner.
“And the beach ball?”
“It rolled away.”
Nina didn’t want to sit in the canvas chair. “Let’s walk to the factory,” she said. “Let’s see what they make.”
The owner said nothing, but he got up and off they went, across the red sand together. The factory was larger and louder than life and made of black glass. When they got up to it, Nina pressed her face against it but couldn’t see inside. All she could see was her own reflection, her face in its gas mask, and the owner standing behind her, his face in his.
“Look what I have,” he said. He held up something small and square and gave it a shake. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Nina froze, petrified. She watched as the owner opened the tin and brought out the beads. All forty were now on a string, and he placed them around her neck, stopping to kiss her nape, before he fastened them. Nina placed one palm on the factory’s black glass, the other at the hollow of her throat. As the necklace grew tighter, the factory grew louder. She thought to call for Harry, but she could not speak, could not breathe. She could only see the image of her masked face and that of the owner’s looking back at her. Her vision began to dim but not before she saw: a final bead—a red one—on the lens of the owner’s mask. Moving, gently. A ladybug.
The Resplendence of Disappearing
IVÁN PARRA GARCIA
TRANSLATED BY ALLANA C. NOYES
He pulled the wooden church door shut and looked up to the sky. Those black birds were still at it, flying circles around the sun in an orderly fashion, with a precision even, never losing the measured distance between themselves. It’d been more than three weeks since they showed up, and still no one knew where they came from, what they wanted, where they were going. He’d spent all day in the church’s doorway, watching them through his solar-filtered telescope.
He started off on the dirt road toward town, the afternoon sun beating down on the half-naked crown of his head as he walked ponderously, his shoulders stiff as bricks under his white shirt, collar unbuttoned. He ruminated on the lack of rain these last few months, about the news, the suffocating September heat, but mostly he thought about the birds.
As he walked along the highway, he turned back to look at the church. For the first time in his fifty years serving Christ, there was doubt in his heart. As if something more powerful than God Himself had come to stay in Texarkana.
He walked on, wishing he were at home in his rocking chair. The diabetes had left his heels cracked and covered in blisters, and his feet were aflame. Hip to toe his legs ached. The doctor had forbidden him from extended periods of standing, but he hadn’t paid him any mind.
Stopping in front of a plot of land, he looked northerly through the barbed wire where a coyote was stalking a young deer just a few meters from where he stood. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, licked his lips, and with a quick slap, obliterated a mosquito on his neck. Lifting the barbed wire, he crossed to the other
