“I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop this nonsense.”
Perhaps this is as far as you will get. Return to 4 if you must continue this game with him. Go to 8 once you realize there is no possibility of winning.
8
Neither of you speaks to the other for the rest of the day.
Hasn’t he noticed how your long black hair has gone rough? You forget and repeat tasks so often that you find yourself with four new ChapSticks but can no longer locate your phone. What would it take for him to admit that everything is wrong?
Is anything, indeed, wrong, or is this how things have always been? The direction they would always take? When you sleep that night, or try to, you wonder when you will break, or if you’ve already broken.
In the morning, there is coffee, toast. If you could have tried harder, go to 2. Go to 3 if you just want peace.
The Family Dinner
MICHELE ZIMMERMAN
The forest—autumn crisp, deep purple. The stone hut—overwarm, cluttered. Inside, identical twin sisters cook meat stew over a stove.
Each sister has a gap between her two front teeth. Each has a permanent blemish between her eyebrows. Each has a scar on her left shoulder—dips in the skin that came naturally at birth. They are separated in age by two and a half minutes. But that’s nothing, they are one and the same.
Together they stir the blood and remnants of the girl in the pot over the wood-burning stove.
Each sister has seven piercings on each earlobe. Each has a ring for every finger on her right hand. Each keeps wrists and neck bare.
Their mother is ash in a jar on a shelf above their bed. Wrapped around their mother is where the opal pendant should hang.
One sister pinches red and brown seasonings from glass vials; the other stirs the pot with a long, splintered spoon. Together they breathe in the rich scent, rear their heads back, and spit.
Each sister has one blackened big toenail. Each has an extra bone in her left heel. Each sister hated her daddy.
His ashes were thrown to the wind some years ago.
When the pot boils, the sisters place heavy stoneware plates and cups upon the table. Garlands of raccoon paws encircle the plates. The candelabras are lit. They serve each other dinner. They pour dark liquid into the other’s cup and drink deeply in unison.
Each sister has a bulging disc near her lower spine that pains her in damp weather. Each sister has legs like broomsticks, long and shapeless. Each sister fears loneliness, strangers, and deep water.
From across the table one sister notices a lump underneath the fabric of her sister’s shirt. Large, oval, resting in the center of her collarbone. Their ash-mother’s pendant.
She points toward this stolen difference.
The sister wearing the pendant stops chewing. She smiles through her mouthful of little-girl stew. She has something her sister does not. She has.
The sister who has not, lunges across the table.
Cups turn over, liquid splashes out. Plates are shoved and food is lost. Candelabras are extinguished, paws are disturbed. She holds a fork to her sister’s neck. She pulls the pendant out from under her sister’s clothes. She slaps her sister hard cross the face when her sister starts to laugh.
Identical twin sisters pull each other to the floor.
They tumble and twist. They anticipate each other’s movements, dodge each other’s fists and forks. The sister who has, laughs until she can no longer breathe. The sister who has not, hisses like a cat. She weeps black tears.
At the end of it all, the sister who has stands up. She pulls the sister who has not, up by the arm, and walks her to their bed. She takes the pendant off and wraps the chain of it slowly around the jar of their mother. She smiles at her twin and kisses her on the lips. She dries her sister’s tears.
Together they return to the table to finish the remnants of their meal.
Afterlives
BENNETT SIMS
They visited Sicily that weekend. Boeing crashes were in the news, so throughout the flight over the Mediterranean their talk was of turbulence, burial at sea. Driving into Palermo, he paused at a memorial beside the highway, an obelisk monument to the 1992 Capaci bombing, when the Mafia had packed thirteen drums of Semtex and TNT beneath the road and remotely detonated them under a judge’s motorcade. Local seismographs, she read aloud from her phone, had registered the explosion as an earthquake. Later, at lunch, talk turned to respect for the dead: soldiers recovering fallen bodies from battlefields; mountaineers carting down frozen climbers’ corpses. He cited Antigone’s fidelity to Polyneices, sprinkling earth over his cadaver to short-circuit its state-mandated fate as carrion, food for dogs and vultures. Would you do that for me? she asked. He thought about it. He had never been sentimental about funerary rituals. It made no difference to the dead, was his feeling. After he died, the career of his corpse—whether it was buried, burned, exposed to scavengers; whether left at sea, or on a mountainside, or on the side of a Sicilian highway—would be a matter of no consequence to him. He certainly wouldn’t want her to get herself killed recovering it. But when he considered what he would realistically do in the same situation—for instance if they were stranded in an apocalyptic wasteland, he imagined, and one afternoon she was late coming home, and at sunset he noticed a weird scrum of wild dogs in the distance, and raising his binoculars he saw that what they were all fighting over was her corpse—his eyes surprised him by watering, not in the daydream but in reality, there at the restaurant. He described the dog scenario to her. Yes, he said, if I found a pack of wild dogs devouring your dead body, I think it would enrage me. I would kick them off you and try to bury you.
