They were going to boil Dorothy’s blood. Take it out, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knew you were too thick to really understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York. There were statistics, affidavits. There was a four-color brochure from the clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, printed in three languages. As they waited for the train in the Munich station, Helen studied the pamphlet’s fonts and graphics. A frequent dupe of advertising herself–how many depilatories and night creams had she bought over the years, and at what expense?–Helen understood the significance behind the choice of peaceful, healing blue over charged, emotional red, the softening elegance of the italicized quotes from Adèle de Chavigny, a woman from Strasbourg who had not only survived having her blood boiled but had gone on to live a life of graceful transcendence. There were no concrete images of the clinic itself, no pictures of whatever this boiling machine might look like. Helen imagined huge vats like those in a brewery–wide, clear tubes with viscous, viral blood moving sluggishly in one direction, while bright, animated, healthy blood rushed eagerly back toward the patient. On the roof of the brewery, she imagined enormous chimneys expelling the sweet-sour-smelling residue of defeated disease into the air. Poof, poof, the smokestacks would go, and all the German townsfolk (yes, in her fantasy they were wearing lederhosen and small peaked caps) would look up, proud to know that, in their town, death had been conquered.

“Fairy stories,” Dorothy would have said dismissively, had Helen shared such an idea with her, as she had so often as a child, forever irritating Dorothy with her impractical mind. Helen had been careful not to lob Dorothy’s criticism back at her when she’d announced this latest and most ridiculous plan to save her life. But Dorothy’s response to her own illness had been perversely uncharacteristic from the start.

Most important, Helen realized, fingering the brochure again once they were on the train, their bags stowed away in the racks above them, the pamphlet showed no images of the sick–a choice made, Helen was sure, to deëmphasize the questionable science behind the treatment. It would be impossible to look at a photograph of someone as ill as, say, her fifty-seven-year-old mother and think that this faintly medieval idea, one that brought to mind leeches and exorcisms, could succeed where modern medicine had failed, or, in Dorothy’s case, where modern medicine had never been given the chance to go. The brochure talked about “renewal” and “refreshment,” and read more like a promotion for an overly expensive spa, of the kind that Helen had read about in fashion and travel magazines.

She let the brochure fall to her lap. Her mother was sleeping, lying on her side across the opposite three seats, her knees pulled up to her chest, her child-sized feet peeking out from beneath her maroon down coat. It had been a good idea to splurge on the whole compartment, despite Dorothy’s protests about useless expenditure (they had taken the train at Dorothy’s insistence, in order to save money) and her usual vague, disapproving intimations that Helen’s “new” life in California, the one she had been living for ten years now–ever since she’d left the conservatory at twenty-two–was somehow profligate. It did Helen no good to explain that her motley collection of jobs–as a low-level administrative staffer and occasional page-turner for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a piano teacher to private-school children, and a pianist on the High Holy Days at Temple Beth Hillel–netted barely enough to cover her expenses in the folly of an apartment she’d rented in the Hollywood Hills, which could be accessed only by an elevator tower or by a strenuous hike up a dirt-and-scrub path, and which had been featured in a famous movie from the seventies that she could never remember the name of, even when people reminded her of it over and over, exclaiming at her proximity to history as though she were living in a house once occupied by George Washington. The very fact that Helen drove a car, albeit a ten-year-old Nissan, was proof enough to Dorothy that she had embraced an ideological lack of frugality. The few times that Dorothy had allowed Helen to fly her to Los Angeles, Helen had found herself obscuring things from her mother, like the fact that she had, on a whim, reupholstered her living-room couch, although the original material was fine, and certainly not as threadbare as her mother’s valiant collection of chairs and couches, which stood in her New York apartment like the stoic survivors of some kind of rending disaster. Of course, as a child and even as a teen-ager, Helen had never noticed the fraying tablecloths or chipped china, had been comforted by the absolute predictability of her home, by the way “The Painted Bird” continued to occupy exactly the same place on the bookshelf as it had when she’d first discovered it, at age eleven, and stared, troubled and thrilled, at the grotesque and vaguely sexual cover art. A button placed in an ashtray when she was seven was sure to be there still when she was eight, nine, ten, adapted to its new habitat, and the ashtray itself adapted to its inhabitant, so that it was now “the place where the red button is” rather than anything useful for smokers. It was only as an adult, returning for visits, that she began to feel quietly dismayed by her mother’s thrift, as if it indicated something disturbing. Was Dorothy refusing the future? Was this the reason, too, that she had forsworn conventional treatment for her disease? Did she mean to die?

Helen looked around the compartment. She had been right to reserve the entire thing without telling her mother. A first-class sleeper would have been too risky; her mother might not have even boarded the train. Helen had hoped that Dorothy, upon entering the second-class accommodations and finding no other passengers there, would simply assume that they were the recipients of a bit of good luck. But, of course, Dorothy figured things out the minute Helen closed the door behind them. The only reason she consented to this act of economic irresponsibility was that she was too ill to fight back.

The flight from New York had been exhausting. As the hours across the ocean wore on, five-foot-one Dorothy had sunk farther and farther into her seat, until she resembled a child whose feet waggled impatiently above the broken-crayon-and-mini-pretzel-strewn floor. Helen had noticed the flight attendants casting worried glances at her mother whenever they passed, and she knew that they were quietly wondering if they were going to have a corpse on their hands before they reached Munich. She imagined that there was a protocol for this kind of emergency: surely they would remove the dead body from the sight of the other passengers–perhaps lay her mother on the floor of the galley at the back of the plane, cover her with some of those too thin blankets, or roll her into one of those ingenious storage places airplanes specialized in.

But what was the protocol for taking your mother to have her blood boiled?

In the low light of the train compartment, Dorothy’s face shone. She had grown so thin lately; her skin stretched tautly over her nose and her cheekbones like a sheet on a well-made bed. In the last few months, Helen had become intimate with her mother in a way that made them both uncomfortable. During her increasingly frequent visits to New York, she had bathed Dorothy, helped her to sit on the toilet, pared her thick, yellowing toenails, then stroked them with the bright-red discount-store polish that Dorothy had been faithful to all these years. This breaking down of the customary distance that had existed between mother and daughter for decades made it more and more difficult for Helen now to view her mother as a living thing rather than as a collection of body parts and functions. But perhaps that was a necessary by-product of giving care; Helen knew that if she allowed herself to look at the larger picture of her mother’s demise she would be overwhelmed by thoughts of needs, both met and not, and that she risked succumbing to a childlike terror of being left alone.

When called on to be a page-turner at the Philharmonic, Helen found that if she concentrated on one note, and then the next, instead of letting her mind take in the whole sweep of the piece, she never failed to turn the page at the right time. It was only when she lost sight of the specifics, when she let her mind range backward and forward across the music like a low-flying bird, that she made a mistake. She’d begin by thinking about the music–what choices she might make in the speed of a diminuendo or the attack on a coda–and then, inevitably, she’d get trapped in an eddy of memory about the moment, or series of moments, that had led to her decision to leave the conservatory, to walk away from the possibility, no matter how far-fetched, of being the person who was now seated at the piano so close to her that she could hear his or her breaths and grunts and soft guttural moans, as if she were standing at the open doorway to a bedroom while the pianist was making love. And then, with her mind hijacked by so many thoughts, she would be a beat too late or too early with the turn, and suffer the annoyed glance of the pianist, and carry the mistake with her for days.
When, a week earlier, Helen had told her nominal boyfriend, Nathan, about her mother’s decision to go to Germany for the treatment, he had almost rolled his eyes. Helen had been grateful for his blunt skepticism, because it allowed her to take the opposite position with a kind of self-righteousness that she would not otherwise have been able to muster. She had proclaimed, if not a belief in, at least a tolerance for this latest of her mother’s nonmedical solutions to “the cancer problem,” as Dorothy referred to it–as if it were a tangled political issue that might be written about on the editorial page of her beloved New York Times, and then hotly discussed with the butcher or the man at the shoe-repair place when she went out each day on her brisk round of errands. “She’s done her research,” Helen told Nathan, who sat at the kitchen table of her hilltop apartment–he had moved in a year earlier, after two years of dating. “They’ve had good results.”

Nathan did not respond, because he was not a foolish man. Six months had passed since Helen had discovered that he was having an affair, and their current détente was built on the understanding that he would never again be able to speak freely. A year before, Nathan would have thrown back statistics of his own; he was in immunology research at Children’s Hospital, and had a dedicated disrespect for the alternative medical arts. Over the years, he had listened with slack-jawed disbelief when Helen had explained that her friends Wendy and Terry were postponing vaccinations for little Mandy and Timmo because of studies linking the shots to developmental delays. “Do you know how many kids die each year from whooping cough?” he had exclaimed in frustration. When Wendy had proudly told him that she’d cured Timmo’s conjunctivitis by squeezing her own breast milk into his eye, Nathan had not been able to restrain himself. “Right from your tit?” he’d responded, as if Wendy had exposed Timmo to porn. Helen felt a momentary pleasure now as she watched Nathan swallow his criticism of her mother’s new gambit; he was no longer sure of himself in their relationship.

She had taken him back because he had apologized, begged, cried, and apologized again. But, in the current atmosphere of their relationship, he had no idea what concessions to his character she would continue to make, and what could cause her to send him back down that ancient elevator tower while she tossed his clothing from her balcony to the street below, white button-down shirts and briefs falling at his feet like shot birds. Could he continue to organize the papers she left scattered across the table into neat piles set at right angles to one another? Could he continue to indulge his need to keep the refrigerator clear of any food that was even approaching its use-by date? Still, although she had gained the upper hand in the relationship, her sense of victory was overshadowed by the knowledge that she no longer really had a boyfriend, only a set of misgivings and recriminations decorated as a handsome enough, smart enough, bearded, bespectacled man with delicate hands, shiny from too much washing. The loneliness that had descended on her in the aftermath of the crisis was so palpable that Helen often thought of it as a person. It stood by her side as she washed the dishes, or helped Marina Delgado, her best and most dedicated student, struggle through “The Well-Tempered Clavier” while she half listened, half watched the dust motes hanging in the air, lit by the afternoon light coming through the louvred windows of her apartment. The loneliness followed her, judged her, pointed out which of her irritating habits had finally driven Nathan to do what he had done. She was not sure why she hadn’t kicked him out in the end, except that she had begun to look forward to the outsized emotions of his entreaties, the late-night talks, the tears. She knew that the high drama was silly, but it reminded her of the kind of person she had once been–a girl who would weep when her rendition of a Beethoven adagio did not live up to the version that played in her imagination, a girl who would weep because perfection was too difficult a goal to aim for and too crushing to fall short of.

What Helen had really felt, after hearing Dorothy’s description of the blood-heating regimen, was not skepticism but pity. But she would never have said this aloud, not only because she didn’t want to give Nathan the satisfaction but because she knew that it was horrible to have such feelings toward her mother, whom she loved–if that was the right word for the mixture of frustration and gratitude and hatred and tolerance and surprising, intractable, illogical attachment she felt for Dorothy, who was as deeply and inescapably rooted inside Helen as her own fractured heart.

Dr. Halverson, Dorothy’s purported oncologist and an old suitor from her City College days, had recently pronounced the disease so far gone that the risks of conventional treatment, if Dorothy were to change her mind, would be more deleterious than the risks of doing nothing.

“You mean my risk of dying is now no better than my risk of dying?” Dorothy replied.

“Dodi,” Dr. Halverson sighed, shaking his head at her lack of sentiment, an atavistic admiration dancing around his lips.

Helen had been in the examination room when he broke the news. She could not figure out why Dorothy continued to consult Dr. Halverson, or why he agreed to see her, despite her long-term resistance to his advice. What was the point of all those unfilled prescriptions for lab tests? Why did he continue to let her waste his time? Maybe he, like Helen, was so mystified by Dorothy’s aberrant choice of the esoteric over science that he didn’t quite believe it, and was waiting for Dorothy to finally break down, reclaim her lifelong set-jawed, unforgiving gaze on life, and start the do-si-do of chemo and radiation. Dorothy, this short, mouthy woman from Bayonne who had marched for women’s rights and against Vietnam, hidden in the crowds while her homemade posters floated in the air above her as though held aloft by a ghost, had never once, in fifty-seven years, shown an interest in anything “alternative,” or even philosophical. Helen had been six when her father died. She asked how long it took a person to climb to Heaven. Dorothy took Helen’s face in her hands and said, “Not Heaven, honey. That’s just a fairy tale.” How frustrating it must have been for Dr. Halverson to watch Dorothy now, placing her faith in Dr. Hsia and his stinking herbs in Chinatown, or in Paul Romero and his needles in Park Slope, or in the water-therapy clinic in D.C. Helen admired the doctor’s delicacy. He never belittled Dorothy’s choices, and in these past months, when Dorothy had experienced her first truly frightening bouts of pain, he had visited the apartment as often as he could.

His patience stood in sharp contrast to Nathan’s disparagement. “It’s her body,” Helen had said to Nathan, in defense of the Germany plan. The word “body” sank to the ground the minute she said it, weighted, as it was, with the idea of his body and his desires, which had managed so casually to reject hers. She felt suddenly conscious of her thighs wrapped tightly (too tightly?) in denim, her small breasts bolstered ineffectually by some newfangled underwire bra she’d bought online. She had never had smooth skin–had picked and squeezed it too much as a teen-ager, despite her mother’s warnings. Was that it? Did Nathan’s other woman have small pores? Nathan shrugged, smiled, then scrolled through five other expressions, trying to find the one that would cause him the least harm. Helen was humiliated all over again. That was the problem with his transgression, she thought: he had taken so many words away from her. Besides “body,” there was “candy” (the woman’s ridiculous name), there was “desert” (one of the places they’d trysted), and whole sentences like “What are you thinking about?,” which was as dangerous as stepping in front of a speeding car.
The train made a stop at a local station. It was dark outside, and shadowy figures wearing heavy overcoats against the midwinter cold moved on and off the platform. Dorothy’s eyes opened. She stared across the compartment toward her daughter, but Helen could tell that Dorothy was not seeing, that she was suspended somewhere between her pill-induced sleep and a fuzzy semi-alertness. It made her feel weak to see her mother hovering helplessly in this state. As much as she hated to admit it, Helen counted on her mother’s decisiveness, her unwillingness to wander around in the gray areas of emotion. When Helen, having finished with middling results in too many competitions, and having taken a good hard look at where she stood among her musical peers, made the decision to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist, Dorothy had said, “That’s sensible,” as though she’d been waiting patiently for Helen to get the answer right for years. Helen suddenly felt the lie behind all those performances and recitals; she had thought her mother her ally, when in fact Dorothy had been tapping her foot the whole time, waiting for Helen to wise up.

Helen regarded her mother a moment longer. The blue of her eyes was rheumy, indistinct. Her mouth hung open in a way that Helen knew she would hate. A few strands of hair were stuck to her dry lips. Dorothy had imparted several important pieces of advice to Helen in her youth, one of which was “Don’t hold your mouth open–it makes you look stupid.” Helen was also to wear a bra even in bed, in a war against future droop, and never to hook her hair behind her ears if she didn’t want them to stick out. Dorothy’s advice was like that–warnings on how to avoid a dark, ugly inevitability. So, in reality, it wasn’t advice at all, only an acknowledgment of Helen’s ultimate inefficacy in the face of the Cards You’ve Been Dealt. Dorothy’s teeth seemed yellower than Helen remembered. But everything about her seemed yellow now, like the pages of an old library book.

“God,” Dorothy said, breathlessly, and, for a moment, Helen wondered if she was having a conversation with that Man she professed not to believe in. But Dorothy’s eyes were focussed now. She had come to. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” Helen said, looking out the window into the darkness. “We just passed a town. You should sleep some more, Mom. We have a ways to go.” She regretted this suggestion. Her mother was cunning enough to know when she was not wanted.

“Whenever I sleep, I feel like I’m rehearsing for something,” Dorothy said, attempting to sit up. Helen stood and helped Dorothy settle against the train seat. She smelled of the tuberose per-fume she’d used her whole life, that and the turning odor of the body in decline. Helen wondered when this happened–at what point the body’s smells could no longer be masked by deodorants or flowery soaps, at what point they would stop taking no for an answer.

“How do you feel?” Helen asked, sitting back down, across from her mother. She herself had barely recovered from the eight hours on the plane from New York. She felt clammy and bloated from having eaten too many meals in too short a time. She wanted to strip, have a bath, evacuate, start over again.

“I feel like shit, darling,” Dorothy said.

“Are you hungry?” Helen asked.

“No.”

“You should eat.” Helen looked into her purse. “I have a granola bar. And that turkey sandwich from the plane.”

“That will kill me. What is it, ten hours old?”

“You’ll need your strength.” Helen held out the granola bar.

“Let’s put away the platitude playbook, sweetheart,” Dorothy said. “If there’s one thing I know about lately, it’s my dear, disastrous body. And if it eats right now it will upchuck all over this lovely compartment you’ve wasted your money on.”

Helen studied the pattern of veins webbed across her mother’s cheeks. She thought about La Brea Woman. A model of the dwarfish prehistoric woman was posed in a glass case at a museum on Wilshire. She appeared clad in an animal pelt, her long black hair modestly covering her naked plaster breasts. But, then, through a trick of light and mirrors, her outfit, as well as her skin, fell away, so that you could see her knobby skeleton. Helen had visited the museum when she first moved to Los Angeles, thrilled by the city’s oddities in the way, she now knew, so many new immigrants were–as if kitsch could justify their decision to move to this patently unglamorous place.

“You make it awfully hard, Mom,” Helen said, finally.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorothy sighed, her expression genuinely penitent. “But for some reason having cancer gives everyone else the feeling they can order you around. Like you don’t know what’s good for yourself, now that you’ve been stupid enough to contract this disease.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t–”

But Helen was smiling, and Dorothy’s eyes lit up at the memory. Dorothy had despised Helen’s habit, when she was younger, of apologizing for everything and everyone around her–which was, in itself, a reaction, Helen had begun to think, to her mother’s uncomfortable insistence on truthfulness. After months of Helen’s complaining about a certain irrationally mean science teacher, Dorothy had walked right up to the woman at an open house–a woman who was half a foot taller than she–and asked her if she was experiencing menopause. Helen had spent much of her youth trying to position herself at a physical and psychological ten-foot remove from her mother.

She put the granola bar back in her purse. They were good together this way, teasing each other. When Helen had discovered the affair, she flew to New York. It was a strange impulse–to seek out her mother for emotional succor–and she was almost frightened when she arrived at the apartment, certain that her mother, never a baker of chocolate-chip cookies or a soother of feverish foreheads, would only make her feel worse. She had spent the weekend in an old Lanz nightgown that her mother had saved, standing at the open door of the refrigerator with a hand on her hip, pouting. Dorothy had been a wonder of humor, insisting that they Google “Nathan’s girl,” as she referred to her, and, together, mother and daughter had stared at a picture of the absurdly named doctor with the dumbfounded awe one feels in the presence of a masterpiece. Candi was pretty enough, with a lustrous mane of brown hair and the kind of ethnic looks that had been smoothed out by cross-fertilization or plastic surgery. She was obviously younger than Helen. But, before Helen could fall into despondency, Dorothy found fault with the set of the woman’s eyes, her thin lips, her ironed hair. She could tell that the woman had a “big tush,” despite the fact that the image on the computer screen showed her only from the neck up. Her dissection made Helen laugh and feel defended, full of gratitude.
The dim shapes of small villages appeared against the night sky like phantoms, only to disappear into nearly unarticulated darkness. An occasional bright constellation spread across the land, signalling a town of more significance. If she squinted, Helen could make out church steeples, the dark spill of homes on a hillside, and large, low factory buildings. She could have been anywhere in the world. She had never been to Germany before, and now she was seeing the country only as geographic semaphore.

“I need to pee,” Dorothy said.

Helen stood up immediately, glad to be necessary. She helped her mother out of their compartment, and, together, they awkwardly negotiated the narrow corridor. Helen held on to her mother as she opened the bathroom door, careful not to let her lose her balance as the train lurched from side to side. Dorothy was as light and fragile as papier-mâché. Helen closed the bathroom door behind them, reached past her mother, and flipped up the metal toilet lid, then steadied Dorothy as she loosened her slacks and eased them down her hips. Dorothy had always been private with her body; Helen could not remember ever having seen her naked before the disease had turned her into a reluctant exhibitionist.

“I think I can take it from here,” Dorothy said.

Helen stepped back into the corridor and shut the door. She leaned against the cold windows, trying to get the image of her mother’s thighs out of her mind, the way the folds of skin sloped gently toward her pubic area like small waves rippling onto a barren shore. Five minutes later, Dorothy came out of the bathroom, exhausted by the effort. The door swung shut behind her, and she leaned against it as she zipped and buttoned her slacks. Embarrassed, Helen tried to shield Dorothy from the view of the few strangers who lingered farther down the corridor. Her discomfort soon gave way to sadness, as she realized the degree to which the disease had stripped her mother of the identity that had got her through so much in her life, and with such grace.

“It’s like a prison camp in there,” Dorothy said. “You’d think they’d make it a little bigger just to avoid the innuendo.”

Helen moved to help her.

“I’m fine,” Dorothy said, reaching to either side of the corridor and unsteadily making her way back to their compartment.

Helen realized that her arms were still extended toward her mother, as if she could somehow conduct Dorothy to a safe landing. She lowered her hands, feeling ridiculous. Her mother had eschewed help all her life, had put herself through City College by working night shifts as a secretary. After she married Helen’s father, she’d helped him open his dental practice, running his office, sometimes masquerading as his assistant when he could afford only a part-time girl. He’d died just when his practice had grown large enough to be worth selling, and even then, despite the reasonable income from the sale, Dorothy had continued to work as the office manager for the new dentist, never for a minute giving in to any maudlin emotion about another man’s filling her dear departed husband’s white soft-soled shoes. She never thought to remarry. “Oh, I did that already,” she said simply, when Helen raised the subject, as if marriage were a step in a recipe that you would not want to repeat.

“Would you like me to read to you?” Helen asked, once they were back in their seats.

“What have you got?”

Helen dug eagerly into her bag. ” Vogue. People. Neruda.”

Dorothy smirked. “That’s cheap, sweetheart.”

“You love Neruda.”

“Are we searching for my epitaph?” Dorothy said.

“That’s unfair,” Helen said, with the requisite amount of hurt in her tone. The truth was that she had thought about what to read at her mother’s funeral and had made the private decision that it would be Neruda. Though Dorothy was not a fan of poetry and its vagaries in general, Neruda was the one poet she had gone out of her way to read. But was this why Helen had grabbed the book from the shelf on her way out the door in L.A.? Was she this fumbling, this obvious? She began to put the book away.

“Read it,” Dorothy said.

“No, it’s all right.”

“I want to hear it.”

“We’ll read something else,” she said, pulling out the Vogue and reading from the cover. ” ‘The New Stripes.’ ”

“Read the Neruda,” Dorothy said flatly.

Helen checked her mother’s face to see on which side of sarcasm she had taken up residence. Dorothy smiled enigmatically; it was the same inscrutable expression Helen remembered from her youth, from, for instance, the day she’d smoked marijuana in the apartment while her mother was at work and then tried to cover it up with some laughably ineffective incense. Dorothy had smiled then, too, saying nothing. But when Helen woke up the next morning she found a note taped to the bathroom mirror. “Smart people are not necessarily decent,” it said, and Helen felt as though her mother had reached inside her body and squeezed her heart.

She opened the book and began to read:

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

 Write, for example, “The night is starry
 and the stars are blue and shiver in the
   distance.”

 The night wind revolves in the sky and
   sings.

 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
 I loved her, and sometimes she loved me
   too.

 Through nights like this one I held her in
   my arms.
 I kissed her again and again under the
   endless sky.
She stopped.

“Mmm. Go on,” Dorothy said. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m tired,” Helen said.

Dorothy opened her eyes and studied her daughter. Helen looked down at the book. Her tears made the words into a bleary confusion of black smudges. “Oh, shit,” she said, trying to banish her sadness with ugly words, words that her mother had taught her never to use, because they were public admissions that you could not find a more exact, more intelligent way to say what you had to say. “I’m so fucked.”

“Or not. As the case may be,” Dorothy said.

Helen looked up. “Ew,” she said.

Dorothy shrugged, delighted.

“Remember when you hired that Cinderella to come to my birthday party?” Helen said, trying to change the subject. “I thought she really was Cinderella. The Cinderella. Come all the way from, you know, wherever, just for my party. You made her take off her wig at the end to show me that she was just some out-of-work actress.”

“I always thought there was something evil about those parents who carry on about the tooth fairy and then tell stories about how darling their gullible children are. I don’t believe in it.”

“You have to believe in something,” Helen said, distractedly.

Dorothy did not respond.

“What do you believe in, Mom?”

Dorothy eyed her warily. “Is this one of these before-you-go questions?”

“It’s just a question. I’d like to know.”

Dorothy turned to look out the dark window. “Well, turns out I’m tired, too,” she said, closing her eyes.
The last Philharmonic concert had been a near disaster. The Brazilian pianist on the bill had cancelled at the last minute, due to illness, and a replacement had been called in. The woman, an American, was young, maybe only two or three years older than Helen, but she had a good résumé, had recorded and performed with major symphonies–all the stuff of a strong career on an upward trajectory. The rehearsals had gone well, and the woman was full of humor with the conductor and the orchestra, and even with Helen, sweetly self-deprecating about her need to have the score in front of her, although she knew the piece by heart and had performed it before. “You’ll be my security blanket,” she said to Helen, who had been surprised by the intimacy of the remark; she was not usually addressed, except on issues that concerned the performance itself, the pianists explaining their particular taste in the timing of the page-turning, how close or far away they wanted Helen to sit. The piece was one that Helen had studied but never performed, and during rehearsal she felt her fingers moving lightly on her thighs. Studying the music a few nights earlier at the upright in her apartment, she had tried to make her way through it, and had been pleased that she could actually make whole passages nearly coherent. Nathan had come out of the bedroom to listen to her, and had applauded when she left off in the middle of a movement, feeling suddenly exposed, as though she were appearing naked before him for the first time.

“No, go on,” Nathan said.

She shook her head, her face flushing. “It’s difficult.”

“It sounded great.”

She looked at him, trying to suss out his strategy, but his face was wide open with surprise and pleasure. She stood up from the piano stool and went to him. He took her in his arms and she stood with him for a minute or two, realizing how refreshing it was to be with a man who did not think of her as a failure, the way she imagined so many of the musicians she knew must, the way she tried not to think of herself. He was nice that way, Nathan was. He sat in the living room along with the parents and grandparents of her students on recital afternoons, clapping loudly and, afterward, dissecting each student’s performance with her, rejoicing in the children’s small victories, wincing sympathetically at the memory of their bumbles. He took her seriously, even when she found it hard to do the same.

On the evening of the concert, Helen sat in her chair by the piano, wearing one of her two black concert dresses, subdued and prudish enough not to overshadow the artist; her appearance and movements needed to be so unremarkable as to be practically invisible. This suited her, this negation. It was the only way she could think about herself in relation to music now: as its shadow, its stalker. The pianist adjusted her own deep-red gown, its sleeves netted with rhinestones that would pick up the light and accentuate the hard, swift work of her arms; she adjusted her seat, tossed her loose hair behind her shoulders. Helen always enjoyed the feeling of tense excitement right before a concert began–it was one of the few times in life that you could be sure you were on the verge of pleasure. It was like facing into a giant wave and then allowing it to take you. The pianist made her opening attack with a kind of fury that made Helen’s spine shiver. With that flourish, she announced to the conductor and the orchestra that she was going to step things up. She was going to make sure that the audience, disappointed by the program insert, came away grateful for the illness of the replaced performer. She was going to own the piece so completely that no one would remember that it wasn’t rightfully hers.

Ten minutes in, however, something happened, something imperceptible to anyone but Helen and the pianist; it was like a skipped heartbeat–the woman’s neck stiffened, and she began to peer at the music where before she had largely ignored it. Helen’s breath caught high in her chest. She felt as light-headed as she had when she called Nathan’s hotel room at a conference in Austin and heard the voice of a woman in the background, followed by Nathan’s sharp “No!” And then the silence, full of his miserable inability to take back the mistake; it had been like an unwitting step off a cliff.

The pianist’s first slip came midway down a page–a second B-flat where there should have been an A. She kept going, and Helen was careful not to glance up; she wanted to make it appear that the mistake had passed unnoticed. But she could sense the pianist dissembling, could feel it in the atoms between her and the woman, which started to jump about like bubbles in a bottle of soda; she could feel the effect on her skin. The woman was trying to muscle her way back into the closed room of her focussed mind, but things just kept getting worse–a fumbled triad, and then having to make a quarter rest into an eighth in order to get back on track. And then, at the bottom of the next page, just as Helen rose into her half stand and leaned in to make her move, she caught the panicked look in the pianist’s eyes and knew that the woman was lost, that her concentration had deserted her, and that the strange alchemy by which a musician could be both inside and outside the music at the same time–both intellectually aware of the orchestra and of all that she had learned and decided about the music, and yet so wholly within the space of her own soul that the music was like speech, integrated and effortless–was coming undone.

Helen turned the page. The pianist looked at her sharply and Helen knew that she had done wrong. But what could she do? It had been time to turn the page. The music was continuing, the orchestra relentlessly pushing forward. A swift glance at the woman and Helen realized that she was not angry but desperate, and that Helen was now involved in an intimate, silent dialogue with her. The woman was asking Helen to save her. Helen gestured with her chin at the music, smiled in what she hoped was an optimistic way. Just go on, she meant to say. The woman had only to find her place in the line of notes and chords, and slip back in, like a girl stepping into the alternating jump ropes in a game of Double Dutch. She needed to yank her brain away from the accident, the missed notes, as Helen had had to yank hers away from Nathan’s damning silence on the phone from Austin, from her mother’s diagnosis, and move forward, head toward the next indicated thing, even if there were no directions. But the woman’s desperation only grew, and Helen did something that she knew was patently wrong in the etiquette of her job but was equally necessary: she rose fully off her seat, as she did when helping a faltering student through a recital, reached forward, and put her finger on the correct measure, then sat down, hoping that her move had been just swift and subtle enough not to draw the attention of the audience. But she knew that this was impossible.

Eventually, the pianist found her equilibrium, and although the rest of the movement, and the entire concerto, seemed subdued to Helen’s ear, there were no more mistakes. The audience was generous; Helen stood by her seat while the conductor and the pianist responded to the loud applause, then followed them offstage, keeping her customary distance behind them so as not to distract. When the pianist and the conductor returned to the stage for a second bow, the pianist shot her a complicated look full of gratitude and sorrow, hatred and shame, all at the same time, and Helen was sent hurtling back to the time when she herself had been unable to make her music perfect, when she had been filled with sadness and rage and hope and the aching sense of being close, but not close enough, to beauty.
Dorothy woke up, moaning.

“Mom?” Helen said, snapping out of her drowsy reverie into full-throttle fear.

Dorothy put her hands to her breastbone. “Hurts,” she said, in a high, strained voice. Helen reached across the aisle to where her mother was now doubled over, her head on her knees. Dorothy let out a muted, inhuman bark.

“Can you breathe like that, Mom? Let me sit you up.”

She moved next to her mother, and slowly pulled Dorothy’s shoulders toward the seat back. Dorothy’s face was bloodless.

“Mom?” Helen said. She was terrified, and instantly filled with a grief she’d imagined lay in store for her only later, long after this trip was over, long after her mother had died. But now it seemed that the sorrow had always been there, perhaps from the very start–from the moment she was born and first saw this person, this tiny woman who was to be her protector and guide–that it had been waiting for her ever since. She was horrified to find that her mind had made an acrobatic leap forward, that she was already turning the moment into a reminiscence she’d tell, of her last night on earth with her mother. “We were miles from anywhere,” she’d say. “We had a whole compartment to ourselves!”–as if this inexcusable luxury should at least have staved off death.

Dorothy groaned.

“Let me get your purse,” Helen said, beginning to rise from the seat. “Do you have any painkillers in there, Mom? Did Dr. Halverson give you something?”

Dorothy reached up and, with surprising strength, pulled Helen down next to her. She whispered something unintelligible.

“What? Mom?” Helen said, leaning close to her mother’s face. She could smell Dorothy’s sour breath.

“Stop moving,” Dorothy said, the words barely audible.

“There’s got to be something we can do,” Helen said.

“Why?”

Helen realized that she was holding her mother’s narrow hand in hers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had held her mother’s hand. She turned it over, and gently began to stroke her mother’s wrinkled palm in circles. “Is that good?” Helen said. “Does that help?”

“Does it?” Dorothy said softly.

Helen wondered if Dorothy was confused. Perhaps the cancer was affecting her brain. She searched her face, but could see nothing more than the mask that Dorothy had put on to barricade herself against the pain.

“It’s too much, Mom. It’s just too much,” Helen said.

“No,” Dorothy whispered, her voice barely audible above the sound of the train. “It’s just enough.”
The clinic was on the outskirts of town, and it took nearly forty-five minutes to get there by cab. The ride was more horrific than any part of the journey to that point. Even though Dorothy had agreed to take the pain medication that Dr. Halverson had given her, simply getting her up off her train seat took Helen nearly ten minutes. Helen flagged a porter through the open window, and the young man helped her, both with the bags and with the awkward attempt to move Dorothy out of the compartment, through the corridor, down the three metal steps, and onto the platform. Helen could tell that her mother was making a huge effort to hide her pain, but even with her mouth set and her eyes nearly closed her expression was stricken. Helen apologized for the jolts to her mother’s body, for the cold smack of air that greeted them on the platform, for the distance they had to cross to reach the cab stand, until she realized that what she really meant to apologize for was the fact that no amount of flinty-eyed pragmatism would help Dorothy through this moment, the fact that simply being was sometimes an unbearable mess and what was hoped for in life was so rarely reached, the shortfall so much more fumbling and base than anything one had ever imagined for oneself.

Helen held her mother as the cab bumped and buckled over the streets of Frankfurt. She thought to yell at the driver, to try to make him understand that he had to slow down because her mother was dying of cancer, but she knew that her mother’s pain was so deep and pervasive that a gentler cab ride would do nothing to ameliorate it.

The cab pulled up to the curb in front of the clinic. Helen looked out her window. The building was far from the brewery of her fantasy. A genteel-looking Beaux-Arts structure squeezed between a pizzeria and a bookshop–there was nothing to indicate that anything medical went on inside it at all, no symbol of a rod and twisted serpent, not even a wheelchair ramp. Anything could have been taking place behind those bevelled-glass doors–lawyers spinning cases, lovers making arguments of their own. Helen suddenly longed to stay in the cab, to ask the driver to carry on, take them anywhere, nowhere, as long as she could stay sitting like this, with her mother nestled safely in her arms. The driver turned and looked at the women expectantly.

“Are we there?” Dorothy’s voice was raw.

“Yes. This is it.”

“What are we waiting for?”

Helen paid the driver. He got out of the car to retrieve the bags from the trunk while Helen gingerly helped her mother onto the sidewalk.

“My God, it’s cold!” Helen said, buttoning Dorothy’s coat up to her neck, and then tugging her own around her as the cab pulled away from the curb. “You couldn’t have chosen a better season for this?” she teased. “I hear spring in Germany is lovely.” But she was stopped short by Dorothy’s expression, which seemed so tentative, as though she were facing not a four-story town house but Mt. Everest, the task looming high and impossible before her. Helen realized suddenly that Dorothy had not made her baffling medical choices because she wanted to die, any more than she chose to live among her withering possessions because she did not desire a future. She understood that her mother wanted to live, but that, standing here on this foreign street, she had momentarily lost her way. The path through this complicated piece of life, which must have seemed so clear to Dorothy just a few days ago, sitting in her apartment in New York, was now as inscrutable as a piece of music could be when first confronted–a wild and alien language of signs that seemed like the ravings of some madman, until you put your hands on the keys and played one note, then the next, then the next. Helen could see panic in Dorothy’s eyes, the same panic she’d seen on the face of the pianist, marooned in a sea of sound that suddenly made no sense.

Helen raised her hand and pointed at the door. “This is it, Mom,” she said. “This is the place. We just have to walk a few more steps and then we’ll be there.” But just as she was about to put her arm around her mother, Dorothy drew herself up, somehow guided back to herself by her daughter’s confident gesture and voice, and started forward on her own.

“Gardening!” the girl said, and tilted back in her chair the way she knew would get a reaction. “It’s like knitting, isn’t it.”

“Stop that, Lara,” her mother said. “You’ll break the chair.”

“A sign of middle age,” Lara continued. “Old age. It’s what old people do when there’s nothing left in their lives.”

“I thought you were supposed to be learning about Henry VIII,” said her mother, Susan, glaring at her over a recently acquired pair of Ready Readers.

“Look at him, snipping away,” Lara said, and pointed to her father up the garden with his secateurs. “You’re just control freaks, you two. You should let it run wild!”

“Right,” Susan grunted, returning to her list.

“You could have a meadow out there,” Lara said. “Go green. A jungle!”

“It might just as well be,” Susan said. “Great fat lumps of squirrels crashing round the trees like monkeys. Come on, Lara, what about some revision.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Lara shrieked.

“Perish the thought,” Susan said. “But if you’re going to take over the kitchen table like this when you’ve got a perfectly good desk in your bedroom–”

“Listen to me,” Lara hissed. “What I’m putting myself through here, revising for exams, is entirely voluntary. It’s not necessary; it’s my choice. All the clever people are setting up Internet businesses, they’re not wasting their time on this; they wouldn’t dream of doing this. They’re going to be millionaires in five years’ time. And I’ll be in debt, twenty thousand, thirty thousand–”

Her mobile ringtone cut in, a jaunty jerky samba, and instantly she was transported from cold-eyed fury to smiles and coos of delight. “Really … really … No, she’s so not like that…. Oh, that’s so funny….” One artless peal of laughter after another loosed itself into the air.

Susan stared out the window into the green and white of May. I’m the family whipping boy, she thought. How moody it was, the weather, hormonal, melodramatic, lurching from thunder to glaring sun and back again in the space of an hour. She had been out there earlier, before breakfast, the whispering air blowing through the hairs on her skin. This sudden lush frondescence was springing up at the rate of an inch a day at least; you could stop and watch it grow like an erection. Efficient speedy impersonal sex: just what she hadn’t wanted at Lara’s age. She must stop seeing him. On the other hand, she didn’t want to. The office was another world. It was nothing to do with them.

“That was Ruby,” Lara said, as she finished her call.

“How is Ruby these days? Now she’s split up with–Sean, was it?”

“Oh, she hasn’t split up with him. She doesn’t trust him, but that doesn’t mean she’s split up with him. No, she’s made him give her the password to his Hotmail so she can check it anytime she likes.”

“Wow,” Susan said.

“Careful, Dad!” Lara said, as Barry came in from the garden and sat down beside her. “Mind my notes.”

He doesn’t know my password, Susan reminded herself, glancing at her husband.

“I’ve caught one of the little buggers,” Barry said, patting Lara’s arm in triumph. “I’ve trapped it under a dustbin lid and I’ve put bricks on top.”

“What little buggers?” Lara said.

“A squirrel.”

At least they were united in their detestation of squirrels, thought Susan. Earlier this year they had stamped across the grass and wrung their hands together over the scores of nibbled white camellia buds that had been scattered over the lawn like popcorn. Barry had started to talk longingly about rat traps. “Clean, quick, humane,” he had mused. “A metal jaw comes down on the neck and all but decapitates them.” He had an explosive temper, just as Lara did. The two of them were tinderbox touchy, gigantically flinty. She was sick of acting as the lightning rod for all their casual rage.

“Of all the things in the world to get upset about, you choose squirrels,” Lara said. “What about climate change? Why don’t you get upset about that instead? My children will fry, thanks to your selfish air travel.”

“I should cut its head off and stick it on a spike,” Barry said, ruffling his daughter’s hair. “Like Henry VIII did with traitors.”

He doesn’t know, Susan thought. He doesn’t know.

“That’s so cruel!” said Lara, looking up at her father from under her eyelashes. “You’re not really going to kill it, are you?”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing else seems to stop them.”

“The law says you have to drive any squirrel you catch far out into woodland,” Susan said.

“And kill it there?” Lara said. “Like Snow White?”

“No,” Susan said. “Then you set it free.”

“Well, I’m buggered if I’m going to spend my Saturday taking a squirrel on its holidays,” Barry said. “By the way, Susan, I thought you were going to organize some more potting compost. We’ve almost run out.”

Susan looked at the two of them, side by side at the table. Barry was fair but with a high Saxon color and narrow hot-blue eyes, which gave him an intermittently dangerous look. Lara was fair, too, but fairer than her father by far, with white-blond hair and such fine white skin that her features showed in her face like fruit, a mouth that brought cherries to mind, or, when she yawned, strawberries. Not for the first time, Susan marvelled at how her own supposedly dominant genes–brown eyes, dark hair, and the rest of it–hadn’t stood a chance against his. Her side of the family, a pack of devious troublemaking short-arses, as Barry had described them one Boxing Day on the long drive home from Cornwall, still muttered seventeen years on about the unlikelihood of her marriage to this outspoken Mancunian, with his tendency to put on weight and throw it around.

“Henry VIII was a bully,” Susan said. “He had piggy little eyes and a nasty temper. It’s all coming back to me.”

“Absolute power corrupts–” started Barry loftily.

“Absolutely,” Lara cut in.

“The thing about tyrants is, they’re vain and they like to show off,” Susan said. “Didn’t he have a wrestling match with Francis I? And they’re short. Hitler. Napoleon. Stalin wore platform shoes.”

“Henry VIII wasn’t short,” Barry said. “He was a fine figure of a man.”

He puffed out his chest and placed the backs of his hands against his bulky waist, so that his arms were akimbo.

“You are, like, so irritating,” Lara snapped. “All the people your age, the old people, they think history’s like it was in their day. But it’s much harder now.”

“Divorced, beheaded, died,” Barry chanted. “Divorced, beheaded, survived. He divorced the old one from Spain, didn’t he, and the ugly one, the Flanders mare? And he cut the heads off the ones who betrayed him.”

Even if he has sensed something might be going on, Susan thought, he won’t want to know.

“It’s not like that anymore,” Lara said, furious. “That wifey stuff’s for kids. It’s all lithurgy and transubstantiation now.”

“Liturgy.”

“Whatever.”

“Anne Boleyn kept him waiting seven years,” Susan said. “He wrote ‘Greensleeves’ for her. Then she had a baby girl, not a son and heir, so he said, ‘Off with her head.’ But he still loved her a bit, which is why he paid for the finest swordsman in France to come over and do the job.”

“It wasn’t because she had a girl,” Barry said, with a sideways look. “It was because she was an adulteress.”

Susan faltered for a second.

“Lollards,” she said.

“What about them?” Barry said.

We’ve not used mobiles at all, she thought, her mind scampering around wildly. We’ve only ever used e-mail, and he doesn’t know my password. My computer’s at the office, he has no access to my e-mails, and, even if he were to pick up my BlackBerry, he doesn’t know how to use it.

“Weren’t they something to do with transubstantiation?” she said.

“No,” he said.

He fixed her with his beady blue eyes. “He’s bluffing,” she told herself.

“In 1538, John Lambert was burnt at the stake,” Lara chanted, holding her hand in the air to silence them. “Because he held that the body of Christ wasn’t substantially present during the Eucharist. Transubstantiation.”

“Catholics still believe that,” Barry said. “That the bread turns into Christ’s body. Literally.”

“But they’re not allowed to believe in condoms,” Lara said.

“What?” Barry said, and suddenly he was blushing like a maiden. “Lara, would you make me a cup of tea, please, while I try to decide what to do with the prisoner.”

“Prisoner?” said Susan.

“The squirrel,” he reminded her.

Me, Susan thought.

“What did your last slave die of,” Lara said, getting up from her notes. As she filled the kettle, she started to sing.

“Alas, my love, you do me wrong, to cast me off discourteously….”

It seemed to Susan that Barry was staring at her.

“When I have loved you so long, delighting in your company,” sang Lara. “That’s your only song, Mum. You used to sing it to me to get me to sleep. Every night, ‘Greensleeves.’”

“Yes,” Susan said.

This was rubbing it in. If she was going to feel guilty, this would make her feel it, hearing her seventeen-year-old daughter carolling her password. Stupid choice, really: too obvious. Perhaps Barry had been tapping in all along. But she didn’t feel guilty at all. It was none of his business. She just didn’t want to get caught.

“I could nail it to the trellis,” Barry said meditatively. “Once I’ve killed it, of course.”

“Why would you do that?” Susan asked. “Nail it to the trellis?”

“As a warning to the other little buggers,” Barry said.

“It doesn’t work,” Susan said. “Capital punishment as a deterrent. They’ve proved it. It doesn’t put anybody off.”

“Hung, drawn, and quartered,” said Lara, back at the table. “What does that mean?”

“Isn’t that when they tie your legs and arms to four horses?” Barry said, taking a sip. “Then send them off in different directions?”

“Ugh!” Lara said, transfixed.

“No,” Susan said. “That was another thing they did.”

“Hanging was for commoners,” Barry said. “Beheading was for the aristocracy. They still have beheadings in Saudi.”

“Really,” Susan said.

“When they hold the head up afterward, there are a few seconds when it, you know, the head, can actually see the crowd,” Barry said. “There’s enough oxygen left in the brain for it to carry on for another ten seconds.”

“Right,” Susan said. “Come on, Lara, back to the grindstone. You’ve done hardly any work this morning.”

“You are so annoying!” Lara cried. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why do you always have to spoil everything?”

“You won’t pass if you don’t get down to it. I could test you, if you’d like.”

“Bug off!” Lara yelled. “You think you can say anything you like to me; you don’t leave me any privacy.”

Privacy, thought Susan, I’ll have some of that. Privacy. Whatever you like to call it.

“Look, Lara, we’ll leave you alone in here if you’re really going to do some work,” Barry said. “Won’t we, Susan. Come on, I want you to come and help me decide what to do with the culprit.”

“Oh,” Susan said. “All right.”

The kitchen door opened onto a small square paved area planted with pots of daisies and sage and rosemary. Against the side wall was a small self-assembly cold frame where they were hardening off adolescent geranium cuttings for planting out toward the end of the month. Nearby stood a bush of peonies with big pink faces, amorous and Elizabethan in their high-colored finery. Barry took her hand and held it to his mouth, kissed her fingertips, then took them in his mouth and tightened his teeth on them until she said, “Ouch,” and pulled away.

“It’s behind the shed, is it?” she said.

“Weighed down by bricks.”

“Have you decided what to do?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d come up with an idea.”

“Ah,” she said carefully. There was a pause. Susan examined the toe of her shoe. “That depends on whether you want to kill it,” she continued. “And, if you do, you’ll upset Lara. I ought to warn you now, she’ll call you cruel and murderer and all the names under the sun.”

“What are your favorite flowers?” he asked. “I’d like to grow them for you.”

“You should know,” she said. “You should know what my favorite flowers are by now.”

“I know I should, but I don’t.”

They walked hand in hand to the garden shed, and there behind it was a galvanized-steel dustbin lid under a dozen or so bricks.

“Well?” he said.

“Roses,” she replied. “But not just any old roses.”

“No, of course not,” he snorted.

Well, don’t think I’m going to tell you after that, she thought, but it’s those small soft damask roses I like best, with their strong sweet scent and crumpled faces in old-fashioned shades of crimson. But that’ll have to stay my secret now, too, won’t it.

“The moment of truth,” Barry said, holding down the fluted dustbin lid by its handle while he nudged the piled bricks off with his foot.

He lifted one side of the lid a couple of inches. There was no sign of movement. He lifted it another couple of inches and bent down to peer underneath. Then, like a waiter removing the domed silver cloche from a plate of roast beef, he whipped the lid into the air with a flourish. His mouth dropped open.

“It’s gone!” he said. “It’s gone!”

“So,” Susan said, breathing again, deep into her stomach.

“No, really, Susan, I caught it. It was there. It was very small, it was a young one, but it was there. It must have scrabbled its way out somehow.”

“A figment of your imagination,” insisted Susan with heartless increasing confidence.

“How could I imagine a squirrel?”

“Lara’s right,” she said. “You’re obsessed.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said helplessly.

She lifted his hand and dropped a kiss on it. Then she turned and wandered back down the garden, singing under her breath.

Alice Munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest–her 11th–collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock (Knopf; 349 pages), marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on family documents, historical records (from 19th century Scotland) and what feels like memoir to piece together, in 12 parts, a fictionalized chronicle of how her tough-minded clan got from the Ettrick Valley near Edinburgh to America. Yet it shows, as usual, how to draw gasps from other writers by defying the laws of gravitas as effortlessly as Michael Jordan defied those of gravity.

Pocket the $30,000 you would otherwise spend on an M.F.A. writing degree, and just consider her example(s):

1. Don’t think you need special effects or big-budget drama: Castle Rock takes its initial cues from everyday letters and diaries and just lets them enjoy a new life in the imagination. A girl walking to school in rural Ontario in 1942 can be riveting–if you describe the walk in the voice of her future self, in the city, many years later.
2. Don’t eschew the plain. In one typical exchange here, 38 spoken words out of 39 are just one syllable long (the exception is “cannot”). In a later story, 37 straight words last one syllable each.
3. Don’t assume you know more than your characters do, or condescend, even to children. A young girl, Munro’s alter ego, tells an affluent employer how, where she comes from, “children walked barefoot until the frost came in order to save on shoe leather” and people ate “dandelion leaves, nothing else, for supper.” Just as we’re shaking, she admits (to us only) that not all of this is strictly true–and so tells us as much about the sly, storytelling imagination of the girl as about rural circumstances that really were desperate.
4. Don’t try to make your characters consistent. Life doesn’t. A janitor abruptly decides he will become a writer, while his glamorous wife, selling fox capes in a big hotel, suddenly, while still young, develops Parkinson’s. Munro’s fiction seems uncannily true to the world because destiny plays havoc with characters’ circumstances even when they don’t do the same themselves.
5. Don’t get beyond yourself. Wandering around a church, a narrator realizes, of belief (though it could apply to much else), “You must always take care of what’s on the surface, and what is behind, so immense and disturbing, will take care of itself.”
6. Don’t give us a steady point of view. Describing her family’s long passage across the ocean, Munro swerves like a roaming camera from one heart to the next, and the happy result is that we see all her people as they seem to themselves–but also as they look to everyone else.
7. Don’t stick to what you know firsthand. A recurring theme that binds these pieces together is of people talking with the dead. This is possible, some in the book suspect, so long as you’ve drunk enough brandy.
8. Don’t look away from anything. Blessed with a farmer’s unsentimental eye, Munro offers up a clear, highly practical explanation of how you kill a trapped fox.
9. Don’t be linear or too sensible. That what-happened-after-the-story-ended appendix? Put it in the middle, as in the story “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” so that the end of the narrative can have its full kick and bite.
10. Don’t be afraid of going where you’ve never been before. There may be a tad less assurance and narrative latticework in these memory pieces than in Munro’s more familiar masterworks, as she experiments with different voices (old Scottish), different settings (the 19th century), different structures (one piece lasts 61 pages). Yet all the stories ultimately come back to her master themes, of sloughing off the world one knows and trying on a new life that’s unimaginable.
See Michael Jordan run a fast break backward.

By Pico Iyer

“Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

“Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”

“Seems like you need someone to talk to.”

Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt that she was talking to them. “I’m simply concerned about the kids,” she said.

Rafe had changed. His smile was just a careless yawn, or was his smile just stuck carelessly on? Which was the correct lyric? She didn’t know. But, for sure, he had changed. In Beersboro, one put things neutrally, like that. Such changes were couched. No one ever said that a man was now completely fucked-up. They said, “The guy has changed.” Rafe had started to make model rockets in the basement. He’d become a little different. He was something of a character. The brazen might suggest, “He’s gotten into some weird shit.” The rockets were tall, plastic, penile-shaped things to which Rafe carefully shellacked authenticating military decals. What had happened to the handsome hippie she’d married? He was prickly and remote, empty with fury. A blankness had entered his blue-green eyes. They stayed wide and bright but non-functional, like dime-store jewelry. She wondered if this was a nervous breakdown, the genuine article. But it persisted for months, and she began to suspect, instead, a brain tumor. Occasionally, he catcalled and wolf-whistled across his mute alienation, his pantomime of hate momentarily collapsed. “Hey, cutie,” he’d call to her from the stairs, after not having looked her in the eye for two months. It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle: should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.

She seldom saw him anymore when he got up in the morning and rushed off to his office. And when he came home from work he’d disappear down the basement stairs. Nightly, in the anxious conjugal dusk that was now their only life together, after the kids had gone to bed, the house would fill up with fumes. When she called down to him about this, he never answered. He seemed to have turned into some sort of space alien. Of course, later she would understand that all this meant that he was involved with another woman, but at the time, protecting her own vanity and sanity, she was working with two hypotheses only: brain tumor or space alien.

“All husbands are space aliens,” her friend Jan said on the phone.

“God help me, I had no idea.” Kit began spreading peanut butter on a pretzel and eating quickly. “He’s in such disconnect. His judgment is so bad.”

“Not on the planet he lives on. On his planet, he’s a veritable Solomon. ‘Bring the stinkin’ baby to me now!’ ”

“Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?”

“Sure! Look at Ollie North.”

“He lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven.”

“But he got some votes.”

“Yeah, and now what is he doing?”

“Now he’s promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It’s a life!” She paused. “Do you fight about it?”

“About what?” Kit asked.

“The rockets back to his homeland.”

Kit sighed again. “Yes, the toxic military-crafts business poisoning our living space. Do I fight? I don’t fight, I just, well, O.K.–I ask a few questions from time to time. I ask, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ask, ‘Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?’ I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ Then I ask, ‘Did you hear me?’ again. Then I ask, ‘Are you deaf?’ I also ask, ‘What do you think a marriage is? I’m really just curious to know,’ and also, ‘Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?’ A simple interview, really. I don’t believe in fighting. I believe in giving peace a chance. I also believe in internal bleeding.” She paused to shift the phone more comfortably against her face. “I’m also interested,” Kit said, “in those forensically undetectable dissolving plastic bullets. Have you heard of those?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong about those. I’m probably wrong. That’s where the Mysterious Car Crash may have to come in.”

In the chrome of the refrigerator she caught the reflection of her own face, part brunette Shelley Winters, part potato, the finely etched sharps and accidentals beneath her eyes a musical interlude amid the bloat. In every movie she had seen with Shelley Winters in it, Shelley Winters was the one who died.

Peanut butter was stuck high and dry on Kit’s gums. On the counter, a large old watermelon had begun to sag and pull apart in the middle along the curve of seeds, like a shark’s grin, and she lopped off a wedge, rubbed its cool point around the inside of her mouth. It had been a year since Rafe kissed her. She sort of cared and sort of didn’t. A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: choosing the best unhappiness. An unwise move and, good God, you could squander everything.

The summons took her by surprise. It came in the mail, addressed to her, and there it was, stapled to divorce papers. She’d been properly served. The bitch had been papered. Like a person, a marriage was unrecognizable in death, even when buried in its favorite suit. Atop the papers themselves was a letter from Rafe suggesting their spring wedding anniversary as the final divorce date. “Why not complete the symmetry?” he wrote, which didn’t even sound like him, though its heartless efficiency was suited to this, his new life as a space alien, and generally in keeping with the principles of space-alien culture.

The papers referred to Kit and Rafe by their legal names, Katherine and Raphael, as if the more formal versions of them were the ones who were divorcing–their birth certificates were divorcing!–and not they themselves. Rafe was still living in the house and had not yet told her that he’d bought a new one. “Honey,” she said, trembling, “something very interesting came in the mail today.”

Rage had its medicinal purposes, but she was not wired to sustain it, and when it tumbled away loneliness engulfed her, grief burning at the center with a cold blue heat. At the funerals of two different elderly people she hardly knew, she wept in the back row of the church like a secret lover of the deceased. She felt woozy and ill and never wanted to see Rafe–or, rather, Raphael–again, but they had promised the kids this Caribbean vacation; it was already booked, so what could they do?

This, at last, was what all those high-school drama classes had been for: acting. She had once played the queen in “A Winter’s Tale,” and once a changeling child in a play called “Love Me Right Now,” written by one of the more disturbing English teachers in her high school. In both of these performances, she had learned that time was essentially a comic thing–only constraints upon it diverted it to tragedy, or, at least, to misery. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde–if only they’d had more time! Marriage stopped being comic when it was suddenly halted, at which point it became divorce, which time never disturbed and the funniness of which was never-ending.

Still, Rafe mustered up thirty seconds of utterance in an effort to persuade her not to join him and the children on this vacation. “I don’t think you should go,” he announced.

“I’m going,” she said.

“We’ll be giving the children false hope.”

“Hope is never false. Or it’s always false. Whatever. It’s just hope,” she said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“I just don’t think you should go.”

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage: a power grab. Who would be the dog and who would be the owner of the dog?

At this point, however, she and Rafe had not yet signed the papers. And there was still the matter of her wedding ring, which was studded with little junk emeralds and which she liked a lot and hoped she could continue wearing because it didn’t look like a typical wedding ring. He had removed his ring–which did look like a typical wedding ring–a year before, because, he said, “it bothered him.” She had thought at the time that he’d meant it was rubbing. She had not been deeply alarmed; he had often shed his clothes spontaneously–when they first met, he’d been something of a nudist. It was good to date a nudist: things moved right along. But it was not good trying to stay married to one. Soon she would be going on chaste geriatric dates with other people whose clothes would, like hers, remain glued to the body.

“What if I can’t get my ring off?” she said to him now on the plane. She had gained a little weight during their twenty years of marriage, but really not all that much. She had been practically a child bride!

“Send me the sawyer’s bill,” he said. Oh, the sparkle in his eye was gone!

“What is wrong with you?” she said. Of course, she blamed his parents, who had somehow, long ago, accidentally or on purpose, raised him as a space alien, with space-alien values, space-alien thoughts, and the hollow, shifty character, concocted guilelessness, and sociopathic secrets of a space alien.

“What is wrong with you?” he snarled. This was his habit, his space-alien habit, of merely repeating what she had just said to him. It had to do, no doubt, with his central nervous system, a silicon-chipped information processor incessantly encountering new linguistic combinations, which it then had to absorb and file. Repetition bought time and assisted the storage process.

She was less worried about the girls, who were just little, than she was about Sam, her sensitive fourth grader, who now sat across the airplane aisle, moodily staring out the window at the clouds. Soon, through the machinations of the state’s extremely progressive divorce laws–a boy needs his dad!–she would no longer see him every day; he would become a boy who no longer saw his mother every day, and he would scuttle a little and float off and away like paper carried by wind. With time, he would harden: he would eye her over his glasses, in the manner of a maître d’ suspecting riffraff. He would see her coming the way a panicked party guest sees someone without a nametag. But on this, their last trip as an actual family, he did fairly well at not letting on.

They all slept in the same room, in separate beds, and saw other families squalling and squabbling, so that by comparison theirs–a family about to break apart forever–didn’t look so bad. She was not deceived by the equatorial sea breeze and so did not overbake herself in the colonial sun; with the resort managers, she shared her moral outrage at the armed guards who kept the local boys from sneaking past the fence onto this white, white beach; and she rubbed a kind of resin into her brow to freeze it and downplay the creases–to make her appear younger for her departing husband, though he never once glanced at her. Not that she looked that good: her suitcase had got lost and she was forced to wear clothes purchased from the gift shop–the words “La Caribe” emblazoned across every single thing.

On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.

There were ways of making things vanish temporarily. One could disappear oneself, in movement and repetition.

Sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. “They speak a language,” he said. “We shouldn’t ride them.”

“They look happy,” Kit said.

Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. “They look happy so you won’t kill them.”

“You think so?”

“If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.” That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase “cinnamon M&M’s” repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. “I’m a big brother now,” Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.

Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. “Would you like a man or a woman?” the receptionist asked.

“Excuse me?” Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men–or women? “There’s no such thing as ‘men,’ ” Jan used to say. “Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence.”

“A man or a woman–for the massage?” Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.

“Oh, either one,” she said, and then knew she’d get a man.

Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas–tobacco, incense, cannabis–swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Daniel Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break, but perhaps you could move on to the next one, and the next, like a worm with its several hearts. Daniel left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn’t the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.

“That was nice,” she said, as he was putting all his stones away. He had heated them in a plastic electric Crockpot filled with water, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.

“Where did you get those stones?” she asked. They were smooth and dark gray–black when wet, she saw.

“They’re river stones,” he said. “I’ve been collecting them for years up in Colorado.” He placed them in a metal fishing-tackle box.

“You live in Colorado?” she asked.

“Used to,” he said, and that was that.

On the last night of their vacation, her suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn’t even open it. Sam put out the little doorknob flag that said ” WAKE US UP FOR THE SEA TURTLES.” The flag had a pre-printed request for a 3 A. M. wakeup call so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. But though Sam had hung the flag carefully, and before the midnight deadline, no staff person woke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched during the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who were too lazy or deaf to have got up in the night.

“Look, come see!” a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented the scuba gear said. Sam, Beth, Dale, and Kit all ran over. (Rafe had stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in desiccating brown. “I’m going to have to let them go now,” the man said. “You are the last ones to see these little bebés.” He took them over to the water’s edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. And that’s when a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them, one by one, from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.

Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else’s lust. His every posture contained a strut. What bimbo had he wanted to give her ticket to? (Only later would she find out. “As a feminist, you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor would tell her. “As a feminist, I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit would reply.)

“I think I need a drink,” she said. The kids were swimming.

“Don’t expect me to buy you a drink,” he said.

Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you that?

When they finally left La Caribe, she was glad. Staying there, she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro, she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But, for now, she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who, as he aged stoically and carried on in bottomless forgetting, would come to scarcely recall–was it even past imagining?–that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.

By Lorrie Moore, New Yorker

Alec’s grandpa proves to be his best friend. But what happens when a best friend gets hurt and everything turns hopeless?

Kids at school think I’m a nerd. That’s because I don’t like basketball or football, but I do like chess and math. At home it’s just about the same, though nobody calls me names. My dad and my mom and my older brother Jake are always riding bikes or running half-marathons or rowing boats, and they’re always trying to get me to go. “Come on, Alec. Give it a try.” When I tell them no, they shake their heads, and I know what they’re thinking: nerd.

That’s why Grandpa is so important to me. He saved me.

Every summer my grandparents rent a cabin up in the Cascades. I’ve got a big family, so whenever we go, cousins and aunts and uncles are sure to be there. Hiking, fishing, swimming–day after day.

For years I was forced to go along. Everybody thought it was fun climbing up rocks and down into gulleys with mosquitoes biting you and sweat burning your eyes. They couldn’t believe I didn’t think it was fun, no matter how often I told them.

Then Grandpa put his foot down. “Alec doesn’t like going, so stop making him,” he said, staring at my dad the same way my dad sometimes stares at me.

The next morning when everybody left for Falls Creek, Grandpa and I stayed behind at the cabin. Grandpa took a chessboard down from the closet. “You know how to play?”

While they hiked, he showed me different openings and gambits and defenses. Then, when vacation ended, Grandpa and I played online. Neither of us wrote much; just what our moves were and something like, I’ve got you now. When I won my first chess tournament, I was so excited that I e-mailed him before I even told my mom and dad.

Then everything changed. Everything.

We live in Seattle, where it rains all winter long. Grandpa lives in California, where it’s warm all the time. Here’s what happened.

My Uncle Jack talked Grandpa into a bike ride up in the mountains above Menlo Park. Grandpa was slow, so Uncle Jack pushed ahead until he reached a little store in Woodside, where he stopped and waited. After 10 minutes, he headed back. He found Grandpa unconscious in a ditch. Nobody knows what happened. All anybody knows for sure is that Grandpa hit his head hard on the concrete.

My dad flew down that night. He stayed a few weeks. One afternoon, when I came back from school, Dad was home.

“Is Grandpa O.K.?” I said.

He shook his bead. “Alec, he suffered serious brain damage. He thinks and acts more like a child than a grown-up.”

“But he can get better, can’t he?” I said.

He frowned. “It would take a miracle.”

My dad had given up on Grandpa, but I hadn’t, because I’d read about people who were sick or born wrong, but somebody believed in them, and they got better. I’d be that person for Grandpa.

That summer Grandpa and Grandma rented the cabin in the Cascades same as always. Before we drove up, my mom pulled me aside. “He’s still your grandpa, and he still loves you,” she said. “But you’ll have to find a new way to be his grandson.”

Three hours later we were in the mountains.

When Grandpa had looked at me in the past, his blue eyes had a twinkle in them, as if we two were enjoying a secret joke. Which we were in a way–the joke being that we both knew that our chess games in the cozy main room of the cabin were a thousand times better than the hikes everyone else took. But now his eyes were just blue and his smile was just a smile.

“And who are you?” he asked as he shook my hand.

“I’m Alec,” I said, and I wanted to cry.

At dinner, Grandma treated Grandpa as if he were 5 years old. When he ate all his meat and none of his carrots, she wagged her finger at him. “No dessert until you eat your vegetables.” After dinner, the adults talked about Iraq. “It was real sunny today,” Grandpa put in, but they just ignored him.

The next morning everybody was up early for a hike to Cooper Lake. When Grandpa went to the closet to get his boots, I pushed the closet door shut. “No, Grandpa. You and I stay here and play chess. Remember?” Grandpa stared at me. “Remember?” I repeated.

My father’s voice came from behind me. “Grandpa can’t play chess anymore, Alec.”

“I can play chess,” Grandpa said, his voice firm and strong.

I wheeled around and faced my dad. “See?”

Once everyone had left, I set up the chessboard. Grandpa picked up the rook and stared at it. “That’s a rook,” I said. “It moves horizontally or vertically.” I picked up a bishop. “And bishops go diagonally. Don’t worry. It’ll all come back to you.”

We played. He moved the pawns O.K., but he kept messing up with the knights and the bishops. When he made a mistake, I explained the rule to him slowly. “I see,” Grandpa said, but he kept making the same mistakes again and again. Finally he stood up and went onto the porch. I followed.

“Where is everybody?” he asked.

“Out hiking.”

“Why aren’t we hiking?”

“We don’t hike, Grandpa. You and me–we play chess. Remember?”

He just sat in one of the chairs on the porch, his back to me.

Grandma was in the kitchen listening to talk shows on the radio. I could smell something cooking in the oven. I went to her. “What’s for dinner?” I said.

“Go fishing with him, Alec,” she said, switching the radio off. “There’s a pool of calm water off the river about a hundred yards down the path. There are poles in the closet. I’ll get them for you.”

“I don’t know how to fish,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter. Throw the line into the water and sit with him. It’d be good for both of you.”

“He can play chess,” I said. “He can.”

“Do you love your Grandpa, Alec?” she said.

“Yes,” I said angrily. “You know I do.”

“Go fishing with him.”

But I didn’t. And I didn’t the next day, or the day after that. I kept thinking of the stories I’d read about people working through hard times. It had never been easy for any of them, but they hadn’t quit. If I could get Grandpa to remember how to play chess, I was sure everything else would come back to him. But on Saturday, after I’d set up the board, he shook his head. “I don’t like chess.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “It’s your favorite game.”

“No, I don’t. I hate it,” he said, and his big hand flew across the board sending the pieces flying. Then he stomped outside and sat alone on the porch.

Grandma came out, saw what had happened and helped me pick up the pieces. One knight was missing. “It’s got to be here,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees to look under the sofa.

“Don’t worry about it, Alec,” Grandma said.

“I’ve got to find it,” I said. “I’ve got to.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and she went back into the kitchen.

I looked for that knight for about five minutes, fighting back tears all that time. Finally I stood and went into the kitchen. “Where are the fishing poles, Grandma?”

Grandpa and I were sitting on a riverbank boulder in the hot summer sun. Below us, fish darted about in the clear water. Grandpa opened his tackle box, stuck some salmon eggs on the end of his hook and threw the hook into the water. I did the same. Then we sat there. For 20 minutes. Nothing.

“We’re not catching any fish,” Grandpa said at last.

“No, Grandpa, we’re not.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What, Grandpa?”

Instead of answering, he stood and peeled off his shirt, then his pants. He was standing in his underwear. A second later he jumped into the little pool.

He looked up at me from the water. “Don’t you know how to swim?”

“I know how to swim,” I said.

He waved me toward him. I pulled off my shirt and my pants until I was in my underwear, standing on the boulder. Then I jumped in. I couldn’t believe how cold the water was, but in a few minutes I got used it. Grandpa pointed to some fish. “Let’s catch them,” he said. So we swam underwater and tried to grab the little fish with our hands.

We were in the water for about 30 minutes. Then, without saying a word, Grandpa got out. I followed. We sat in our underwear on the rock, the warm sun drying us. “I love the wind,” Grandpa said at last. “I do, too.”

“I love the sun and I love the clouds and I love the water.” “So do I.”

“You know what else?”

“No, Grandpa. What?”

“I love my wife and my sons and my daughters and my grandchildren. That’s what else.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. He noticed:

“Do you love everyone?”

“Yeah. I do.”

He rubbed the top of my head. “Good.” He paused. “You’re Alec, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, Grandpa, I’m Alec.”

Grandpa stood and started to dress. I hadn’t wanted to come, but now I hated to leave.

“Grandpa,” I said softly as I pulled on my pants. “Let’s make this our secret place. Let’s come here every day and go fishing and swimming but not tell anyone about it.”

“Our secret place,” he said. “No one else.”

“That’s right,” I said. “No one else.”

“Just you and me,” he said.

“Just you and me,” I answered.

He thought for a while. “O.K.,” he said at last. Then he stuck his hand out and I shook it, and the world seemed perfect. The miracle had happened just like I’d hoped. Only it hadn’t happened to Grandpa, it had happened to me. I was with him, and he was with me. That was all that had ever mattered; it was all that would ever matter.

This short story, based on similar events that actually happened to a friend’s grandfather, began as an English class paper by 16-year-old Marian Deuker.

When she got home, she showed the rest of the family the hairy creature. They didn’t know what to do so they called the police. A tired cop answered the phone. The cop said, “Hello.” She was sort of grumpy. Alizabeth’s dad said, “There’s a big, hairy creature that my daughter ran into on the way to school.” And the police lady said, “Uh-huh. Right. So let me get this straight. There’s a big, hairy creature that your daughter ran into on the way to school and the creature followed her home. Listen, Mister, every time I get calls about big creatures, I come and the creature is not there.”

“Hurry up,” yelled Alizabeth’s dad. “He’s going to break the phone.”

“All right, tell me where you live, and I’ll be right there.” Then she hung up.

It was as if the big, hairy creature had heard the whole conversation, and he ran away. Then the police officer pulled up, and she said, “Uh-huh, right.” And the father said, “No, really, he just ran into the bushes.” And the grumpy police officer drove off.

That night everyone fell asleep right away. But Alizabeth couldn’t fall asleep. She had a dream about the big, hairy creature breaking into their house. And the dream was real. The big, hairy creature really was breaking into their house right then. And he went into Alizabeth’s room and she started screaming. Then all the lights suddenly were put on, and her parents came rushing in the room.

Her Dad had a gun in his hand, and Bigfoot was threatened, so he left the house.

When Alizabeth came home from school that day, her morn asked her, “Where’s Johnny?”

“I thought you picked him early or something,” Alizabeth replied.

“No I didn’t.” So they went outside and started calling his name: “Johnny! Johnny!”

Then they heard some crying sounds. They found Johnny. He was stuck up in a tree, dangling by one leg. They couldn’t get to him.

“I thought I told you not to climb that tree,” Alizabeth’s mom said.

“I know, but I really just wanted to, just this once. I’m sorry,” Johnny cried.

“Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get you down. I’ll call the ambulance or something.”

Then suddenly out of nowhere came the hairy creature, and he leaped on the tree and saved Johnny. He brought him down to the ground gently. Alizabeth’s mother and father ran up to Johnny and hugged him, and Johnny promised he’d never do it again. Alizabeth thanked the hairy creature. The whole family thanked him, especially Johnny.

“He can be part of the family, can’t he, Dad?” Alizabeth and Johnny asked.

“Of course he can,” Dad answered.

When they got home, they fixed up a bed for the hairy creature. The bed was made out of leaves, since he loved nature and it was in the living room. They decided to name him Buddy. Then everybody went to bed. Alizabeth slept well.

In the morning, Johnny and Alizabeth went to school. Alizabeth didn’t have many friends at school. Nobody really liked her, and when she told them about the hairy creature, nobody believed her. They all started to laugh at her.

At recess, Buddy came. She told him to go away, since it was not a place for him to be. But he didn’t listen. He just went over to the other kids and started playing with them. They thought he was cool.

The teacher looked nervous. Alizabeth told her that Buddy was safe. “He saved my brother when he was stuck up in a tree. He’s very gentle,” she explained. Alizabeth’s teacher looked like she believed her. Then everyone started to be much nicer to her than they usually were. Alizabeth felt special. When she came home from school, she told Morn and Dad about the great day she had. She said thank you to her new friend, Buddy.

Editor’s note: Jessie was 9 when she wrote this. She is now 10 and lives in Florida.

By Jessie Greenberg, Child Life, Nov/Dec2006

I was lying on the rug in my room, watching the rainbow that my mirror makes on the floor at the same time every day. I was wishing that it weren’t Thursday, and that Mom wasn’t at the hairdresser, and that I could be at Beth’s working on my history assignment. I was also wishing that someday Peter would call me Jessie, not Chessie.

“Chessie, why didn’t you answer me? Hey–what are you doing lying on the floor? What are you looking for? Do you want to see what I found?”

Peter appeared in the doorway of my bedroom. He was mostly freckles and missing front teeth, disguised as a brown-haired, seven-year-old boy.

They should have named him Question Martin Rogers instead of Peter Martin Rogers. I have never heard anyone who could ask so many questions at once.

“Why aren’t you outside playing with your trucks?” For a change, I asked Peter a question.

“Because I wanted to show you this.”

He held up what appeared to be a very dirty penny. He had tried to scrape some of the dirt off with his finger. I took it from him and looked at it quickly.

“That’s just a penny, Peter. Why don’t you put it on the kitchen counter so Morn and Dad can see it? Go back outside to play until Morn gets home.” I handed the penny back to Peter, then turned back to my rainbow. I was so lost in my daydream that I almost forgot about my brother.

“… some funny writing and a picture of a lady on it.”

“What? What did you say?”

“My penny has some funny writing and a picture of a lady on it.”

“That lady is Abraham Lincoln and that writing is Latin. Now go outside and play.”

“No, it is a lady sitting down,” Peter insisted. “Here, look at it again.”

He was right. There was a lady sitting on a bench or something, holding a wand. The kid was pretty observant for a seven-year-old. It was hard not to be interested in Peter’s discovery.

“Where did you find this, Peter?”

“Over by the stone wall. Do you want me to show you, Chessie?”

We went out back to the stone wall, where Peter had been playing. He had used the garden trowel to dig up small mounds of dirt near the wall.

“Don’t forget to put the trowel away,” I said absently. “Now where did you find this coin?”

Peter pointed a dirty finger toward a space between the rocks at the bottom of the wall. I tried to put my hand in the space, but it wouldn’t fit. The best I could do was wiggle my fingers around in the emptiness.

“You try it, Peter,” I said. “Your hands are smaller than mine. Feel around in there and see what you can find. Be careful not to scratch yourself on the rocks.”

A look of intense concentration came over Peter’s face. He frowned; he shut his eyes; his tongue came out and followed every move his hand made. After a couple of minutes (which seemed like hours), he began to smile. He pulled out his hand. In it was a small pouch. The pouch was badly decayed, but it looked as if it were made of leather.

Peter had a look of surprised victory on his face now. It was almost as though he hadn’t been sure there was something hidden in the wall, and he had been afraid to be disappointed. He tried to shake the pouch. At the first movement, the seams split, and several coins fell out onto the ground. We both reached for them at the same time. Each of us picked up a coin. Since I was thirteen (almost fourteen) and therefore much wiser, I decided to impress Peter with the importance of his discovery.

“What you have here, Peter, are some very old coins. They were probably hidden in the wall a long time ago by one of the owners of our house. You have heard Mom and Dad say that our house is one of the oldest houses in Westfield. This could be an important discovery. We will have to show Dad what we found. He will give us advice.”

“What I found,” Peter corrected. “You were only a helper.”

“OK, what you found. Let’s go in and wash all the coins. I’ll carry them. You take your trucks and the trowel.”

“I’ll carry the coins and come back later for the trowel and the trucks,” Peter retorted.

His seven-year-old logic sounded so right that I let him have the coins. I picked up the trowel and the trucks instead.

He was standing at the sink, waiting for me. “You can wash and dry them, Chessie. You are better at that than I am.”

Carefully, he placed the coins in my hands. In the excitement, we hadn’t stopped to see how many there were. I put them on the counter. There were nineteen of them–twenty, counting the one Peter had found in the dirt. Not a fortune, but probably someone’s nest egg.

“This was probably a nest egg, Peter,” I said aloud.

“Did a bird put that there? I didn’t think birds had money. Do they, Chessie? If I were a bird, I’d build my nest in a tree, not way back in some dirty stone wall.”

How did he always manage to ask crazy questions?

“A nest egg is when people put some money in a safe place for an emergency. They hide it so they can get it quickly if they need it. Like the money you hide in your toy box.”

Peter’s discovery caused a lot of excitement in our house that night. Both Mom and Dad said the coins were antique, but they didn’t know anything about them. Dad was going to the library after work on Friday to borrow books about old coins and the history of Westfield. Mom was going to the college to do some research about the former owners of our house. Peter was a celebrity; he fell asleep with a glowing smile on his face. I hated to admit it, but I was pretty proud of him, too.

I hurried home from school on Friday. I didn’t want to miss finding out what Mom and Dad had learned about the coins. Peter kept following me around when I got home, so I was glad when Dad drove up the driveway.

Dad had a big smile on his face. He tried to hide it, but we all knew he had good news. Peter tackled him on the front lawn, demanding to know all about the treasure.

“Those coins are the type used around here in the early 1800s,” Dad began. “They have some value, but they are not made of gold. There are coin collectors who will buy them. You would have to advertise in a coin collectors’ magazine. So that’s one option.”

There was a lot of conversation at the dinner table that night. Mom and Dad did most of the talking; it was hard to tell whether Peter was paying attention.

Finally Mom said, “Well, Peter, what do you think? Have you decided what to do with your treasure?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I am going to keep one of the coins.”

“But what about the other nineteen?” I asked.

“I am going to give them to the museum in Westfield so other people can look at them,” Peter said firmly.

“Why, Peter!” Mom exclaimed. “How wonderful! Did Jessie give you that idea?”

I was flattered, but, to tell the truth, it had never entered my head.

“No, I thought of it myself,” he said. “We are going to take a field trip to the museum in the spring. We talked about museums in school.”

Mom and Dad said they would take Peter to the museum the next day to make arrangements for his contribution. He was very excited. I tried to fight back the tiny feeling of jealousy that was creeping into my head.

That night when I was getting ready for bed,. I noticed something wrapped in a tissue on my pillow. “Love, Peter” was scrawled on the note beside it. Inside the tissue was one of Peter’s coins. I didn’t understand what was going on. I went across the hall and stood at his door.

“Peter,” I whispered. “Peter, are you still awake?”

“Yes. Did you find it?”

“‘Yes, I did. But why did you give me one of your coins? You are going to give them to the museum.”

“I know, Chessie. but you were the helper. And besides, I thought you might want to start a hen’s nest.”

“You mean a nest egg, you silly! Thank you very much, Peter.” I tiptoed over and gave him a big hug and a kiss. “This is the nicest present I’ve ever gotten. I’m going to put it in a safe place.”

“You can put it in my toy box, Chessie. That’s where I put mine.”

I couldn’t answer him because I was afraid he would know I was crying. I just gave him another hug before I tiptoed out of the room.

At the door, I stopped. “Good night, Peter. See you in the morning.”

“Good night, Jessie,” came the sleepy reply.

By Carol S. Meldrom, Children’s Digest, Nov/Dec2006

I would like to use this college application essay to explain two blemishes on my record: an F in my creative writing class and a suspension for nearly killing my teacher It is my hope that if you know the whole story, you will still consider admitting me to your institution.

You can see on my transcript that I usually get good grades. Science and math are my best subjects, and I hold my own in the others. One thing I am not, however, is a poet. Tell me “bear” rhymes with “butter,” and I’d believe you. My friend Meredith knew that when she talked me into taking a poetry writing class. I’m not trying to point fingers or pass the blame, you understand, just letting you know how it happened.

I’d been complaining because I had all these hard classes like physics, calculus, government, and French.

“My schedule is brutal,” I’d told her. “And I still need one more elective.”

“So take poetry with me,” she said. Meredith likes poetry. Even as a little kid she was always making up rhymes about birds and whatnot.

“Reading it or writing it?”

“Writing it. The teacher is David Kerr.”

“The shop teacher? What does he know about writing poetry?”

She shrugged. “Exactly It’ll be an easy A, I’m sure of it.”

“Do we have to rhyme?” I asked. “Because seriously, you could tell me ‘orange” rhymed with ‘salamander,” and I’d believe you.”

“Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme anymore, Steve,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Not about poetry, no. When did it stop rhyming?”

“Like five hundred years ago,” she said. “Milton said rhyming was barbaric.”

“And this Milton guy …?”

“Was a very famous poet,” she said. Meredith knows all about poetry.

MR. KERR WAS a short, stout guy with longish hair and a beard. He seemed like a laid-back teacher who would be an easy grader. In a warm, airless classroom, he looked at us like a bicycler in the Swiss Alps. I knew how he felt. I didn’t see any poets in that room except for Meredith. The rest were a bunch of kids trying to get an easy A.

“By the next class,” he said, “I want you to each write a poem.”

About fifteen hands went up, including mine.

“No,” he said. “This poem doesn’t have to rhyme.”

Fourteen hands dropped. Mine did not.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Do we have to rhyme later?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said this poem doesn’t have to rhyme,” I reminded him. “So I thought if we had to rhyme later, I’d like to know, because seriously, if you told me ‘banana’ rhymed with ‘rabbit,’ I’d believe–”

“I would rather have unrhymed poetry than badly rhymed poetry,” he said. “I will leave it at that.”

“Whew,” I said. “Because really, if you told me ‘moonlight’ rhymed with–”

“Yes, I get it,” he said. “You don’t know how to rhyme.”

Meredith now eagerly raised her hand.

“Yes,” he said.

“Milton thought rhyme was barbaric,” she said.

“Milton himself could rhyme like nobody’s business,” said Mr. Kerr. “His complaint about rhyme was that it was a crutch of inferior poets. Also, it must be remembered, Milton came to this decision about rhyme when he set out to write a poem that was over 10,000 lines long.”

“So it was, like, a cop-out?”

“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Now, as you begin to write your first poems …” He went to the board and wrote:

Breakups with boyfriends/ girlfriends

Dead pets/grandparents

Being a shop teacher, Mr. Kerr had big, rough hands that looked like overcooked meat. However, his penmanship–or chalkmanship–was beautiful.

“Are these things we can write about?” someone asked.

“No,” he said. “These are what you cannot write about.” He added more items to the list:

High-school memories

Father/mother doesn’t understand you

“Why not?” someone asked.

“Because sentimentality is perilous to the novice poet. Wallace Stevens called sentimentality in poetry ‘a failure of feeling,’ because it fails to register the feeling of the poet with the reader. Take as an example …”

Several hands went up, but Mr. Kerr ignored them as he related a long and confusing lecture about the dangers of sentimentality. I gave up keeping notes and started writing out my first poem.

“Are you scared of writing your first poem?” Meredith asked after class.

“Heck no. I’m already finished,” I told her. “It was easy.”

I read my poem aloud at the beginning of the next class. Mr. Kerr asked for volunteers, and there were no other offers.

So I stood up and read in a kind of booming, dramatic voice I thought appropriate to a poetry reading. The poem itself was about a fishing trip I had taken with my father. That is, it starts off being about fishing but kind of turns into a poem about me and my dad drifting on the lake, my dad in front, steering, and the lake is like a symbol for life. I hate to sound arrogant, but to be honest, there were sniffles as I finished.

Mr. Kerr was silent for a long time, and I took it to be a kind of respectful awe.

“O.K.,” he said, “everyone add ‘fishing trips’ to your list.”

Pens and pencils set to scratching as kids added fishing trips to the list of banned topics.

“I think you will find,” he said to me, “that you cannot steer a boat from the front.”

“It was symbolic,” I said, slumping back into my chair.

The class went on reading poems aloud. We had to add several things to our list, though: basketball games, childhood friendships, and anything to do with flags or eagles.

Mr. Kerr did not hate all of them. He didn’t hate Meredith’s, for instance. Hers had something to do with yellow leaves on black streets.

“Sycophant,” I said to her as we left the room. “Teacher’s pet.”

“Oh, get over it,” she said.

So weather is the way to go, I thought, and wrote a long poem about a massive snowball fight with my brothers and friends a few years ago. The battle had raged for two days while the schools were closed because of bad weather. After the fishing poem, I knew better than to turn my new poem into a testimonial to my brothers, so I used the whole thing as an allegory for the futility and stupidity of war.

That was how “snowball fights” and “anything political” made the list of banned topics in Mr. Kerr’s class. He did like Meredith’s poem about collecting stones at the beach with her sister, so I was confused.

“How is beachcombing with your sister so different from fishing with my dad or snowball fights with my brothers?” I asked Meredith.

“I don’t think it’s what you write about really,” she said. “It’s how you do it.”

“Well, how am I supposed to do it?”

“It’s not something I can explain over lunch like an algebra problem” she said. I’d helped her more than once in algebra over lunch. “It’s something people spend their whole lives trying to learn.”

“At least I tried to help you,” I said.

“Well, maybe I can show you what he means,” she said.

She pulled a book out of her bag and passed it to me. It was a thin book with a drawing of a ship on the cover. It was from the college library. Meredith went there all the time. “Strophes of Lake Michigan,” I read aloud. “Poems by David Kerr.” So he did know something about poetry. He’d published a book.

“What’s a strophe?” I asked, imagining it was some kind of lake octopus.

“I had to look it up,” she said. “It’s a kind of poem. Ancient Greeks would read them out loud in a chorus.”

“So is it any good?” I asked, thumbing through the book.

“It’s good,” she said. “It’s all about being in the Coast Guard. Rescuing people from boating accidents. Stuff like that.”

I opened it and started reading one poem aloud. At first, I was kind of mocking him, reading the poem very earnestly, but after a few lines I began to feel the poem.

The poem swayed gently, and I felt nearly like I was at sea myself, heading out on calm waters, appreciating the cold loneliness of the lake, until I got to the second bit.

A storm came up–the crew was frightened but busy, keeping the boat steady, heading into the wind. The words of the poem howled and clashed and sprayed in my face.

It ended terribly, with a new but eerie calm, and the Coast Guard unable to save the victims of the storm on a fishing boat. The words of the poem became as bright as the sun in my eyes as the Coast Guard fished icy bodies from the lake.

“You read beautifully” said Meredith, wiping her eye with the back of her hand. I wanted to wipe my own eyes, but not in front of Meredith.

“O.K., he’s a great poet,” I said. “He’s still a jerk, though.”

I wrote my third poem about this time in sixth grade when I missed the school bus and Meredith missed the bus on purpose so she could walk home with me. So really, it was about friends being there for you. Remembering Mr. Kerr’s own poems, I made sure to put in lots of crunchy-sounding words like leaves under our feet.

I did not read this one aloud but just handed it in to Mr. Kerr.

During my next class with him, Mr. Kerr handed it right back to me, with a note across the bottom in his lovely handwriting: “This is unacceptable.”

I’d forgotten that childhood friendships were already on the list.

Meredith laughed aloud when I showed it to her, and then she apologized. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but it’s corny. Besides, it was only like sixteen blocks. And what’s with all the chattering chipmunks and chocolate trucks rushing by?”

“I was trying to get the sounds of crunching leaves under our feet.”

“Well,” she said. “You need to work on your sound effects.”

I revised the poem, leaving Meredith out and cranking up the sound effects of me walking through the autumn leaves. I read it aloud in class but mucked it up pretty good, having accidentally turned the whole thing into a tongue twister.

Mr. Kerr asked me to stay after class.

“I know you are required to write six poems for this class,” he said, “but I’d like to strike a deal with you. You don’t have to write any more poems, and I will give you a C for the class”

“Only a C?” I asked. “I’m working harder for this class than any of my other classes, and I’m getting A’s in all of them.”

“A B then,” he said. “And in exchange, I ask you–beg you–please, spare me any more of your poems.”

“Spare you …?”

“I would never discourage anyone from pursuing poetry,” he said. “If you are serious about poetry–which I doubt–please continue. Just don’t read any of them in this class or ask me to read them. I can’t take any more.”

“I really don’t think I’m that bad,” I said. “I try to write what I really feel.”

“Oscar Wilde said that all bad poetry is sincere,” he said. “What he meant is that just because the feelings that go into a poem are real doesn’t make the poem a good one. Yours are a perfect example. You seem like a nice guy. I’m glad you love your family and friends. I must ask that you not tell me in sincere poems with clumsy rhythm and no discernible meter.”

He was talking music now, which was not my best subject. I couldn’t tell a bassoon from a sonata.

“But I want to stay on the honor roll. I have to think about college.”

“I’ll give you a B+ then,” he said. “A B for a nearly heroic effort, and a plus for a truly heroic surrender. What do you say?”

“Can I think about it?”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “Please think about it, but keep this conversation between us, O.K.? I don’t want other students asking for the same deal.”

I wanted to talk to Meredith about Mr. Kerr’s deal, but I’d sort of agreed not to talk to anyone. So I talked around the issue without getting directly to the point.

“Do you think that if someone believes in himself he can do anything?” I asked her the next day over lunch, thinking of a poster that had hung in our sixth-grade classroom.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “It’s a nice thing to tell kids, but look at sports. Every kid thinks he’ll be the next Babe Ruth, but only like one in a million will ever play in the big leagues.”

“That’s baseball. You need physical gifts to be an athlete, but anyone can be a poet, don’t you think?”

She looked a little cross and started to say something but stopped.

“Steve, you don’t even want to be a poet, remember? It’s just a class.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “That dumb class is going to ruin my straight-A average.”

“You’re brilliant at math and science,” said Meredith. “You don’t have to be perfect at everything.”

“I guess,” I said. To be honest, though, I didn’t really care that much if I had one B+ on my report card. It wasn’t about the grade. I just didn’t want Mr. Kerr to give up on me.

I spent some time that evening surfing the Web, reading about the art of poetry. It’s not just about rhyme. There’s assonance and consonance (Mr. Kerr did those a lot in his poems) and metaphor and metonymy and apostrophe. I’m usually pretty good at learning new things, but pretty soon my head was spinning. I read some famous poems, too, until my head reeled with flowers and birds and urns and statues and roads less traveled.

The last poem I read was the only thing I could think about as I drifted off to sleep, and I woke with a grand idea. I’d take the road less traveled. While other students tried to write those unsentimental verses that pleased Mr. Kerr, I would go out of my way to write the opposite. I would write poems so sweet he’d get diabetes. I would have chiming rhyming, clumsy consonance, awkward assonance, and metaphors as clumsy as hippopotamuses doing the Macarena. I would show him what it meant to be clubbed over the head with bad poetry.

I got to class early and saw Mr. Kerr eagerly waiting.

“Have you decided on our deal?” he asked.

“I decided to stick with it,” I said. “So I wrote a 200-line poem about opening Christmas presents with my late grandmother. I hope you don’t mind if it rhymes. I’m not good with rhymes, but once I got the hang of it, I was O.K. Lots of things rhyme with ‘tree,’ it turns out. I can’t wait to read it.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said.

“I would,” I said. “I will.”

“Is your grandmother even dead?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” I said. “Also, she’s Jewish and lives in Wisconsin and never sends me anything but cards and money on my birthday. For the purposes of the poem, though, she knits me a sweater despite her arthritis.”

“She knits you a sweater for Christmas despite her arthritis,” he said miserably.

“It must have been dreadful,” I said. “But she couldn’t afford to buy me a present, so it seems she did it despite the pain.”

“It’s cheaper to buy a sweater these days than to buy the yarn and make one,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The whole thing is a symbol for the spirit of giving.”

“You’re just being obdurate,” he said.

“Why, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. And I didn’t either.

Students were coming into the room, so he waved at me to sit down.

I nearly felt bad doing it, but I read every tortured rhyme with feeling and received a round of applause when I was done … mostly because I had taken the entire period to do it.

“It’s going to be hard to top that last one,” said Meredith a week later as I took my latest poem from my notebook. “That last one was pretty awful.”

“It’s a eulogy for the squirrel my dad ran over with the car,” I said.

“Elegy,” she said. “A speech for a dead person is a eulogy. A poem for a dead person is an elegy.”

“Well, the squirrel doesn’t exactly die anyway,” I said. “We nurse him back to health and release him in the wild, but a year later he rescues my little sister from drowning.”

“You don’t have a little sister.”

“He gets his forest friends to help,” I told her. “The beaver gnaws off a branch, and a couple of otters bring it to her, and she holds on to the branch while they bring her to the shore.”

“Does it rhyme?”

“Terribly. You’ll never guess what I rhyme with ‘otter.’”

“I’m frightened,” she said.

“You should be.”

Mr. Kerr asked me to stay after class again. I was still a bit flush from the hearty applause for the eulogy or elegy or whatever. Mr. Kerr must have been affected, too, because he was nearly in tears.

“It’s wrong to take something away from someone that he loves,” he said. “And here you are ruining the two things I love most: poetry and teaching. I dread coming to class, you know. I snap at my wife. I’m rude to the cat. I can’t eat. My life has become empty and meaningless.”

“I’ve just got to write one more poem, right?”

He shuddered.

“Please,” he said. “You win. I’ll give you an A. I’ll write letters of recommendation. I’ll give you money.” He took out his wallet.

“I have an idea for this last poem that I’m really excited about,” I said. “I’d tell you about it, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.” I left the room whistling merrily, at least until I was out of earshot. The song I whistled was a bit out of tune, and I’m not sure if he noticed what it was. It was the theme song to “Popeye the Sailor Man.”

It took me a lot longer to write than I expected, and by the time I read it, I wasn’t even sure if it was a deliberately bad poem or one of my ordinary bad poems.

“This is called ‘Elegy for a Sailor,’” I announced and began reading.

Mr. Kerr had never placed himself on the list of banned topics, and I seized the opportunity. The poem was about a sailor crashing through the waves of the Great Lakes, plucking up shipwreck victims from the sea. I tried to reproduce Mr. Kerr’s own poetic style, with the rocking of the boat and the wind and everything. At the end of the poem, the sailor falls off the boat, sinks to the bottom, and is eaten by inky black strophes.

Mr. Kerr turned about eighteen shades of red, blue, and purple before I was finished.

He opened his mouth and held up one finger but couldn’t speak. I don’t think he could breathe: Finally he choked out the words: “No more elegies!” And collapsed to the floor.

“What’s a strophe?” somebody asked. “Is that like a squid?”

It was only a minor heart attack–Mr. Kerr would be back in the classroom after the summer break–but it was a very big deal. There were a lot of meetings with my parents and the school principal and the police. There was even a story in the newspaper about it, which said I “described the death of my teacher in graphic detail,” which wasn’t true. I kept explaining that the poem was a piece of creative writing, and it wasn’t a threat or anything. I reminded them that the poem didn’t even say that the sailor was Mr. Kerr.

When it was over, I got a five-day suspension and an F in the class. I also had to write a letter of apology to Mr. Kerr. Meredith thought I got off easy. I felt like the sailor who’d been through a terrible storm and now had to sort out a shipwreck with the sun in his face.

I decided to hand-deliver the letter to the hospital. Meredith came with me. We found Mr. Kerr sitting up in bed reading a novel. He smiled when he saw Meredith but glared at me.

“I wrote a letter of apology,” I said, handing it to him.

“It doesn’t rhyme, does it?”

“No, sir,” I said. “It’s just a regular letter.”

“Good, good,” he said. He didn’t read it though. He left it on the side table on a stack of books.

“Is there anything else?” He looked longingly at his novel.

“Um … I just wanted to say sorry for everything. I never meant it to get so out of control.”

“Never mind,” he said. “What’s done is done.” He opened his book.

We took a hint and started for the door, but he spoke.

“Wait,” he said. “Tell me, how do you know about sailing and strophes?”

“Meredith found your book at the college library, so I read it.”

“You didn’t just dig it out to make fun of me?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “I thought it was really good.”

“It happens,” he said, “that I asked my wife to bring me a copy of that book to show one of the nurses. … I have a gazillion copies, you know. The press went out of business. Here”

He pulled a copy of Strophes of Lake Michigan from the stack and signed it with a flourish, then gave it to me.

“Your own copy,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Really, I appreciate it. I think I like poetry. I just can’t write it.”

“You know, that last one … It was a bit better,” he said thoughtfully. “My initial shock and embarrassment may have clouded my judgment. Your description of strophes as sea creatures … that was very nearly poetic.”

He mulled it over.

“Yes, it was almost not completely terrible. I still hope you will abandon your efforts to write poetry, of course, but I can’t say that you don’t have a glimmer of hope.”

So, in closing, that is what happened, and I hope you will look at these events in light of my otherwise straight-A record and consider the excellent references from several of my teachers, including Mr. Kerr himself.

Furthermore, if it makes a difference, I promise to spend my time in college focusing on mathematics and science and will avoid taking any creative writing classes. But only if that’s what you want. Otherwise, I might take a poetry class or two. I mean, if I can put a guy in the hospital with one poem, imagine what I could do if I applied myself.

By Kurtis Scaletta, Cicada, Nov/Dec2006

My name is Charles-Henri Sanson, known to many throughout this city as the Keystone of the Revolution, and known to the rabble as Sans Farine–without flour–a pun based on my use of emptied bran sacks to hold the severed heads. I was named for Charles Sanson, former adventurer and soldier of the King and, until 1668, executioner of Cherbourg and Caudebec-en-Caux. My father claimed he was descended from Sanson de Longval and that our family coat of arms derived from either the First or Second Crusade. Its escutcheon represents another pun: a cracked bell and the motto San son: without sound.

You want to know–all France wants to know–what takes place in the executioner’s mind: the figure who before the Revolution wielded the double-bladed axe and double-handed sword, and who branded, burned, and broke on the wheel all who came before him. The figure who now slides heads through what they call the Republican Window on the guillotine. Does he eat? Does he sleep? Do his smiles freeze the blood? Is he kind to those he kills? Does he touch his wife on days he works? Does he reach for you with blood-rimmed fingernails? Did he spring full-blown from a black pit to send batch after batch through the guillotine?

Becoming shrill, my wife calls it, whenever I get too agitated in my own defense.

“What struck people’s minds above all else,” Livy, the great Roman, wrote in his History on Brutus’ sacrifice of his own sons for the good of the Republic, “is that his function as consul imposed on the father the task of punishing his sons, and that his unbendingness compelled him personally to order the execution, the very sight of which was not spared him.” In Guerin’s rendering of the scene, the hero turns away but does not blanch. Standing before it in the old Royal Academy with Anne-Marie, I told her that perhaps that way we attain the sublime: by our fierce devotion to the required. She was not able to agree.

I am a good Catholic. The people’s judges hand out their sentences, and mine is the task of insuring that their words become incarnate. I am the instrument, and it is justice that strikes. I feel the same remorse as anyone required to be present at an execution.

Before the Revolution, justice was apportioned and discharged in the name of the King, who ruled by divine right as one of God’s implements. And the punishment of malefactors was God’s will and earned, therefore, for his sovereign minister, God’s grace and esteem. But for most, that grace and esteem did not extend as far as the sovereign’s hand servant. Before the Revolution, daughters of executioners were forbidden to marry outside the profession. When their girls came of age, such families had to display on their doors a yellow affidavit clarifying the family’s trade and acknowledging the taint in their bloodline. Letters of commission and payments were not passed into their hands but dropped before them. They were required to live at the southern ends of towns, and their houses had to be painted red.

Before the Revolution, a woman with whom I dined at an inn demanded I be made to appear in court to apologize for having shared with her a dinner table. She petitioned that executioners be made to wear a particular badge or color upon their coats or singlets, so that all would know their profession. Before the Revolution, our children were allowed no playmates but one another.

For lunch today there was egg soup with lemon juice and broth, cockscomb, a marrow bone, chicken fried in breadcrumbs, jelly, apricots, bread, and fennel comfits. Clearing the table, Anne-Marie reminisced about a holiday we took when the children were small. When she speaks to me, she holds the family before us like a pleasing little stove. Before, she was able to treat this terrible time as a brigand unable to trespass upon the better world she bore within.

With children, everything and nothing registers. My earliest memory is of the house outside Paris, and the height of the manure pile, and the muck dropped by the household geese. I remember flies whenever one went outside. I remember my mother’s calm voice, and associate it with needlework. She was fond of saying that I had no ideas of grandeur and that she would wish that to continue. My grandmother always chided me for losing even a crumb of my bread, since, as she put it, I couldn’t make for myself even that. My father was a quiet man who resolved that his little boy should become a person capable of self-sufficiency, when it came to understanding the world, and so he allowed me to negotiate my own passage through that household. I was perceived to be headstrong but inhibited. I was sent away at an early age and then pitched from school to school, since the moment my classmates uncovered my family’s profession, life became unbearable again. I wrote my mother a series of supplications outlining my misery and pleading for a response. In a cheerless chapel in a school in Rouen–my fourth in as many years–I received my father’s letter informing me of her death.

He remarried; the house was repopulated with half brothers and half sisters; I stayed away at my schools. I matured into a beanstalk whose expressions excited pity on the street. My teachers knew me as dutiful, alert, frugal, and friendless: a nonentity with ambitions. I was often cold and known for my petitions to sit nearer the room’s hearth. I volunteered for small errands so that in solitude I might gather the strength to face the rest of the day. I wrote to myself in my notebooks that I felt my bleak present within me, and ached to my bones with wondering if loneliness would always be the measure of my days.

Anne-Marie was a market gardener’s daughter in Montmartre, her father’s establishment a luncheon stop on my infrequent visits home from school. She was his eldest. She was born the same day as myself, and when we first conversed, I imagined that we had loved each other from that date, unawares.

Her first act in my presence was to scratch at a rash on her foot until chided by her father, entering the room with the roast. She visited the water closet and, back at the table, returned my gaze as if examining a distant coastline. She was still chewing a bit of carrot. From that first meeting I have perched perpetually, in a kind of dreamy distress, on the very edge of relieving my longings. Her lovely large mouth and deep-set eyes, with their veiled expression, and her child’s posture have been my harbor and receding horizon. Her seat, that first luncheon, was in the sun, and her skin was so fine I could see the circulation of her blood. When she blushed, I could feel the warmth.

I contrived to visit more often. She confided her various sadnesses, her mother having led a life regulated by an intricate and dispiriting routine, much of which was centered around the needs of her younger sister. Her father’s health and general cheerlessness prevented him from finding solace in anything. But even in that company, she found the resources to engage, with animation, in any society offered her, as if the seas that swamped other shipping beat upon her little boat in vain.

With her I tended toward passionate recollection of my own imagined virtues. Without her my private life had been a record of uninterrupted emptiness and misery. Her first letter to me upon my return to school concluded, “I seem to have written you a newspaper instead of a note, as was my intention. My conduct is most mysterious. Well. Until later–”

She saw in me a perceptive enough boy, self-educated in a variety of disciplines, from astronomy to law, from medicine to agronomy. I was tall. I was charitable, and kind to the poor. I played the cello, and seemed someone with whom a good home could be constructed. Her family was poor enough that an executioner’s son was still a possibility, but respected enough that she was as good a match as my family would find. For her, marriage to someone like me meant renouncing vanities she had never possessed, and for which she had no desire.

Soon after our marriage I related to her the story of my first execution, a story designed to elicit her pity. I had been sixteen. When home from school, I had been my father’s assistant from the age of eleven. He had retired and I had been left alone on the scaffold with a few of his assistants, now mine. A man named Mongeot was to be bludgeoned and then broken on the wheel for having murdered his mistress’s husband. His mistress was to be held under guard and made to witness what transpired. A snowstorm had enveloped the scaffold, then a kind of sleet, and I stood in the wind clutching my collar against the wet while my mulatto did the bludgeoning. The man’s mistress shrieked and clawed at her guards’ faces, and tore at her hair. It took Mongeot two hours to die. I’d worn the wrong boots, and my feet were soaked through and freezing. I could not see for my weeping and misheld the lever when we were in the act of breaking his legs. My grandmother, bundled in robes and representing the family, lost patience and shouted at me. The crowd hissed and showered me with contempt.

Anne-Marie pitied me for such stories but, after an expression of sympathy, maintained a wary silence. Our newlyweds’ happiness was then colored by a kind of quiet. There were other stories I didn’t share with her. After Mongeot, a man named Damiens, who had tried to stab the King, was sentenced to be drawn and quartered. No one had been quartered in France since Ravaillac, more than a century before. I went to my father, but he said he had no advice to give. I offered to resign my commission, but my grandmother summoned my uncle, executioner of Reims, to steady me. Our assistants were to handle the preliminaries and on the appointed day drank until they could barely stand. They tottered between the instruments while the crowd jeered at their fumblings and shouted abuse. The hand that had held the knife was severed, and boiling oil and lead were poured into the wound. The man’s screams were such that we could not hear one another’s instructions. Then the horses only dislocated his limbs without separating them from the trunk. The executioner’s sword lodged in one of his shoulder joints. I had to run and find an axe.

Some three months after the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly took up the issue of renovating the penal code, and in the middle of those proceedings, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, deputy from Paris and professor of anatomy on the Faculty of Medicine, set forth his argument in favor of a fixed punishment for the same crimes, regardless of the convicted’s rank and estate. He reminded the Assembly of the infamies of the unenlightened past and proposed a less barbaric method of capital punishment: automatic decapitation by a mechanism yet to be developed. A Jesuit, he’d left the order, choosing a ministry of the body over that of the soul. He wanted the machinery of execution to be fearful but the death to be easy. There was enthusiasm for his proposal among the revolutionaries: a capital punishment that was mercifully quick and democratic was seen as another step in the regeneration of society. It was pointed out that while the executioner’s sword might require two or three strokes, with a machine the condemned man would not be kept waiting. Lally-Tollendal’s name was resurrected. Some years before, I’d proven unable to dispatch him, and my father had had to take over the blade.

After some delay the measure was adopted in the new penal code, and the next challenge became how to cut off all those heads. I was invited to submit a memorandum sharing my views in which I pointed out that with any multiple execution, the sword is not fit to perform after the first, and needed to be reground and sharpened, which meant an impractical number of swords, depending on the number condemned. I also pointed out that for an execution by sword to arrive at the result prescribed by the law, the executioner must be consistently skillful and the condemned at least momentarily steadfast, and that in the event of multiple executions, there would be the issue of blood in such quantities that it would affect even the most intrepid of those to be executed, so that it would be indispensable to find some means by which the condemned could be secured for the blow and the public order protected.

Dr. Guillotin had begun to lose interest in his idea, but Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, engaged a German piano maker to build the prototype. There was some difficulty finding men to do the job. They had to be exempted from signing the usual working papers, so that their identities could remain a secret.

The result is what my assistants call the Great Machine. At the heart of its design are two uprights, five meters high and fifty centimeters apart, which flank a blade weighing seven kilos. Bolted to the top of the blade is a thirty-kilogram iron bar to accelerate its descent. The assembly falls from top to bottom in three quarters of a second. The cutting edge is slanted so that the blow, as it penetrates into the parts it divides, acts as a saw of lightning efficiency. The blow lands at the head of a narrow table-like arrangement for the condemned. From a distance the whole thing has the austerity of a diagram. The grooves are rubbed down with soap before each use. Disassembled, it’s stored in a shed known as the Widow’s House.

My sons and I supervised its first test at the Bicêtre Hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Before us and the assembled dignitaries, Dr. Louis beheaded a bundle of straw, a live sheep, and several corpses. The last corpse was not beheaded after three tries, so it was decided to extend the height of the uprights and add weight to the blade. At that very first demonstration, I was heard to wonder aloud whether the machine’s very efficiency would prove to be a source of regret.

So on the twenty-second of March in the year 1792, the Abbé Chappe bestowed his invention, the telegraph, upon the Assembly. A month later, Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Louis’s machine was inaugurated. The culprit was strapped facedown on the plank, which was then tilted to the horizontal and run on grooves forward until his neck slid onto the lunette, a semicircular block. The block was not struck by the falling blade but grazed at high speed, so that the head was planed off. In an eye blink it leapt seventeen or eighteen inches from the trunk. For some, the head was gone before the eye could trace the blow. It became clear that the minimum size for the basket must be that of an infant’s bathtub. The executioner’s role in the proceedings consisted of giving a little tug on a lever. The crowd saw the blade but not the hand that moved it. Much time was consumed afterward with the mess. Four buckets of water alone were used on the grooves and block.

I used to have a constitution able to endure labor that might have hamstrung a team of oxen. Now my complaints include dizziness, inflammation of the eyes, colic and digestive troubles, and rheumatic pains.

What talk I have with Anne-Marie occurs in the early mornings before the workday begins. I’ll pass her on her way out of our little courtyard, hanging laundry to dry, if it’s warm enough, or plucking salad herbs. Across from us a shop sells brushes of every manner and use. Its proprietor is a drunk and in all weather slumps beside its door in an old wreck of an iron chair. We can hear the knife-grinder’s bell as he makes his rounds.

For the last three months, I’ve approached her heartbroken with the misfortune I helped author, because in August, at the execution of three men accused of forging promissory notes, our youngest boy, Gabriel, fell when exhibiting one of the heads, fracturing his skull and dying before my eyes. He was twenty-one. There’d always been in our family puzzled concern about him, since he’d kept hidden his aspirations and inner life. What we knew was that he was great for peeling oranges when they were in season. In response to interrogatives he stroked his upper lip with his forefinger and seemed to wait for the intelligent part of the question to emerge. He’d wanted to try his hand at another profession, and Anne-Marie had wanted the same for him. But I’d reminded her of his cousin’s experience of having apprenticed himself to a locksmith only to find that no one would patronize their shop. The subject had been dropped. Then Gabriel had offered to join the National Guard. His older brother had asked if he thought himself too refined for the family business. His uncles hadn’t been even that kind. I had done my best to comfort him but had also requested that he remain a realist about his future.

That morning the clouds had poured forth rain, the sky churning as if with empyrean seas. Up on the scaffold, our hair was whipped by the wind. It had rained, and the wood was slick and the cobblestones below greasy with mud. There’d been the usual silence while the executioner and his assistants had walked about the platform. Each had a special task, one assistant handling the strapping to the plank, one seeing to the remaining condemned, one adjusting the heads in the lunette while wearing an ankle-length and waxed apron. Each assistant is given a chance at one point or another to display one of the heads.

Gabriel I usually allowed to see to the remaining condemned. He moved about his responsibilities like a child resignedly attending a new school. The third head pitched from its lost shoulders. It was his turn to reach his arm down into the basket. I could not see from Where I stood whether his expression as he held it up by the hair was one of fascinated horror or queasy forbearance or distracted indifference. The rain and the three men’s blood made the front of the scaffold as slick as soap. There was no rail.

Perseus hoisted Medusa’s head. Judith, Holofernes’. David, Goliath’s. The head warns of the consequences Of violating the sovereign peace. Held by the hair and presented at the scaffold, it represents the government’s discharge of its promise to maintain order. An executioner’s reputation depends to a large extent upon his efficiency and élan with that display. Doing his best to manifest the head to as much of the crowd as he could, and failing to look where he put his feet, our Gabriel slipped and split his head open on the cobblestones. The head he’d been holding scattered the crowd. We carried him back to our house in the cart that had brought the condemned.

It’s said that, losing his wife and crazed with grief, Robespierre’s father abandoned his four children, the eldest being only seven, and traveled in turn through England and the German states, eventually dying in Munich. And that young Robespierre, at seven, had become the implacable and unhappy figure he remains today. All through the early morning hours of that terrible night, Anne-Marie lay like one of the Furies on her bed and would not be consoled. I was not allowed into the room.

A week passed before she addressed me. Her misery was a well from which her spirit refused to surface. I saw only stiffness and mistrust when I got too near. All of her gestures seemed devitalized, as if viewed in weak candlelight. If not for her capacity for work, she would have seemed imprisoned in a perpetual exhaustion.

It was a busy time for the executioner. She tracked without comment my unimpaired predilection for order, my consistency of demeanor, and my undiminished capacities of concentration.

We both remembered a time, after the imprisonment of the King, when I’d been of a sudden possessed by an ungovernable rage with all of those in power who had brought our nation to her present catastrophe, and had resolved to leave Paris. Gabriel in particular had loved the idea. But my passion had subsided, and I’d understood just a bit of what such a decision would involve. Was everyone to abandon his post every time the country took a turn for the worse? Was it left to each servant of the State to decide which laws he would carry out and which he would not? Did anyone but the highest ministers have sufficient information on which to base their opinions?

Yesterday there was a hard frost, and we woke to discover the waste plug burst and the corridor floor covered in filth. Some of it had already frozen, and we scraped and chipped at it in the early-morning darkness. The smell from what hadn’t frozen drove us back. It was unclear to me, working beside my wife, which in me was stronger: hatred of my profession or hatred of myself. I asked her opinion and she didn’t answer. Later, when making her toilet, she remarked that she found my self-contempt understandable, given the minuteness of my self-examinations.

Even with my family, she told me later, serving my supper before leaving the room, I craved the advantage of invisibility. My supper turned out to be beef and cabbage and runner beans.

I eat alone. I sit alone. Without her I have no intimate friend, no affectionate relations. For three months she’s remained close-buttoned and oblique, her expressions lawyers’ expressions. Some nights I sleep, when Heaven has pity on me.

The night before the waste plug burst, she woke to my weeping. She remained on her back and addressed the ceiling. She told it she’d overheard a boy on the Rue de Rennes tell his wet nurse that he’d gone to see a guillotining, and oh, how the poor executioner had suffered. Her tone prevented any response.

She knows that the exclusion of our profession from society is not founded on prejudice alone. The law requires executions, but compels no one to become an executioner.

So now I carry an emptiness with me like the grief of a homesick child. I understood my wife’s misery and, under the compulsion of duty, added to it. Each night I take a little brandy, hot lemonade, and toast. My belly is in constant ferment. I’m a pioneer in a Great New Age in which I don’t believe. My profession has grown over us like a malevolent wood.

Another frost this morning. In our windowbox, frozen daisies.

The executioner has the uncontested title to all clothing and jewelry found on the men and women put to death. He pays no taxes. The condemned are subcontracted to him by the nation. The trade in cadavers with the medical profession brings in some additional revenue. But in terms of expenses, there’s all household costs and salaries and repairs to the carriages and feed for the horses and any number of other constant vexations. And, of course, the expectation that the machine will be maintained and housed. My father, on execution days, wore a brocaded red singlet with the gallows embroidered across his chest in black and gold thread. In bright sun onlookers could make out a heavily worked panel of darker red satin along his spine. His culottes were of the finest silk. What do I own? A coat of black cloth, a satin waistcoat from an old-clothes shop, a pair of black breeches, a pair of serge breeches, two clothes brushes, four shirts, four cravats, four handkerchiefs, two pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, and a hat.

This morning in the courtyard, Anne-Marie was doing no work at all. The sun was out but it was very cold. Clouds issued from the mouth of our sleeping neighbor in his iron chair. She sat with her back to the plaster, wrapping and rewrapping a shawl. I tucked it behind her and she thanked me. We sat for half an hour. Sometimes when addressed she seemed as if she were alone. I told her that I had stopped for wine on the way home the previous evening and had overindulged. She responded that it was probably a part of my unconquerable rejection of anything that might cause me to think. And what was it I should be thinking about? I wanted to know. The world and your place in it, she said. And what was my place in it? I asked, and touched her cheek. And she stood, composing her carriage. Around me now she carries herself like the Holy Sacrament. She returned to the house. We’ve had two weeks of her working alone, the Austere Isolate, while the rest of us come and go, playing off one another like members of a mournful choral trio.

Perhaps, I told her at dinner, my curse from God was that I lacked that stone tabernacle within the soul in which I could treasure absolute truths. We were having soup, skate, and artichokes. She answered, after some thought, that I was killing her, but that I was also teaching her how to die.

We kept to ourselves the rest of the evening. At one point we had to consult over the household’s ledger books.

Ask any soldier what his profession entails. He’ll answer that he kills men. No one flees his company for that reason. No one refuses to eat with him. And whom does he kill? Innocent people, people who are only serving their country.

Together, Anne-Marie and I have negotiated, like wood chips in a waterfall, the Revolution itself, with its shocks and transformations: the trial and condemnation of the King; his execution; and all the deprivations of the war with the Allied powers. We covered our heads and hurried past each disaster, sometimes speaking of it afterward, sometimes not. The poor King’s troubles began when he was dragged into the unhappy affair with America. Advantage was taken of his youth. In financing his support of America’s revolution, he fell victim to that belief of monarchs that expenditure should not be governed by revenue but revenue instead should be governed by expenditure. And then nature provided its additional burden: the summer of 1788 and its unprecedented drought. We saw starvation in our own neighborhood. And everyone was busy holding forth on the subject of just which radical changes needed to be made, each to his own attentive audience.

So events took their course, thanks to that crowd of minor clerks and lawyers and unknown writers who went about rabble-rousing in clubs and cafés. From such crumbling mortar was the Edifice of Freedom built. De Launay was decapitated after the Bastille’s fall by a pocketknife used to saw through his neck. Foulon, accused of plotting the famine, had the mouth of his severed head stuffed with grass. It was proclaimed that the great skittle row of privilege and Royalism had been struck to maximum effect, revealing a new and cleared space for civic responsibility. The Treasury was refilling, the corn mills turning, the traitors in full flight, the priests trampled, the aristocracy extinct, the patriots triumphant. The King did nothing, apparently believing the more extreme sentiments to be a fever that had to run its course.

Anne-Marie took up needlework, and then abandoned it as unsatisfying.

The National Assembly had announced only the abolition of royalty. Everyone saw clearly what needed to be razed or pillaged, but no one agreed what needed to be erected in its place. There was not a man near the wheels of power who was equal to the task at hand, with ever-greater tasks impending. The more radical, sensing conspiracies, wanted more surveillance, more wide-ranging arrests, more extremity. They proclaimed the maintenance of civic virtue impossible without bloodshed. They learned the hard way that government was impossible if the bloodshed was not monopolized and managed.

First the King’s Swiss Guards were slaughtered defending him at the Hôtel de Ville. Some were thrown alive into a bonfire, others from windows onto a forest of pikes. My assistant Legros, passing the Tuileries, saw furniture together with corpses being pitched from the upper stories into the courtyard. He met us on our way home, and Anne-Marie and I had to wait at each city gate so he could shout “Vive la Nation!” like a good sans-culotte and thereby disarm the murderousness of those roaming the streets. Four times we were stopped and made to swear an oath to the new regime. At the entrance to our courtyard we found half a corpse, which I dragged out of the archway by the feet.

Then in September it was deemed necessary to weed out Royalist sympathizers after the Prussians had had some success against our armies, and People’s Tribunals, set up in each of the prisons, began handing prisoners over to crowds gathered outside with butchers’ implements and bludgeons. In four days 1,300–half of all the prisoners in Paris–were massacred, including Mme de Lamballe, whose body was dragged behind a wagon by two cords tied to her feet and whose head was carried on a pike to where the royal family was imprisoned, so that it might be made to bow to the Queen. One of the killers was said to have used a carpenter’s saw. Each neighborhood seemed to have its own mob of National Guards and sansculottes, a few mounted, bearing on their horses fishwives and bacchantes, filthy and bloody and drunken. At the Quai d’Orsay hung a whole row of men mangled and lanterned, their feet continually brushed and set in motion by passersby. Garden terraces in the morning sunlight were a-shine with smashed bottles. It was said that Mme de Lamballe’s head was found wedged upside down on a bar in a cabaret and surrounded by glasses, as if it were serving as a carafe. She’d been famous for her fragile nerves and her penchant for fainting at the slightest unpleasantness.

As was the King. We followed his trial through the newspapers and broadsheets. Talking with Henri-François, our eldest, was like conversing with a rock garden, so Anne-Marie was left with me. During meals we were circumspect because Legros shared our table, but at night in bed some of our old intimacy returned. She argued the King’s side: perhaps the mildest monarch to ever fill the throne had been precipitated from it because of his refusal to adopt the harshness of his predecessors. Throughout the proceedings, from the galleries, the Jacobins, men and women, ate ices and bawled for the death penalty. Legendre proposed to divide the accused monarch into as many pieces as there were Departments, so as to mail a bit of him to each. My wife was at a loss, reading such news: from where did such ferocity originate? I had no answer for her, just as the King had no ally in the Assembly willing to risk his own life on his sovereign’s behalf. Having refused to become the patron of any one side, our helpless monarch had become the object of hatred for all.

Robespierre finally doomed him with the argument that if the King were to be absolved, what would become of the Revolution? If he was innocent, then the defenders of Liberty were malefactors and the Royalists were the true inheritors of France. To those who said that the State had no right to execute the King, he countered that the Revolution had been “illegal” from the outset. Did the deputies want a Revolution without a revolution?

We were awake the entire night before the execution. The day before, I’d been authorized to oversee the digging of a trench ten feet deep, along with the procurement of three fifty-pound sacks of quicklime. The machine was moved to the Place de la Révolution, near the pedestal from which the bronze equestrian statue of the King’s father had been hacked down.

I had asked the Prosecutor to be relieved of my responsibilities in the King’s case. That request had been denied. I had then asked for more detailed instructions: Would the King require a special carriage? Would I accompany him alone or with my assistants? I was informed that there would be a special, closed carriage, and that I was to await the King on the scaffold. The latter instruction I understood to suggest that I myself was suspected of Royalist tendencies.

I asked Legros to wake me at five, the same hour that the King’s valet, Cléry, would be waking him. I was awake before he could knock. “Please don’t do this,” Anne-Marie whispered from her side of the bed. Her fist pounded lightly on my rib. But she knew the danger in which we already found ourselves, and only held the pillow over her face while I began to dress.

Cléry reported to me later that the King’s children had been rocking in agony as he’d prepared to depart under guard. For the previous hour they had consoled themselves with the time they had left, the little Dauphin with his head between his father’s knees.

Would the population rise in revolt against such an act? Had the Allies planted agents in order to effect a rescue? These questions and more terrified the deputies, who ordered each of the city’s gates barricaded and manned, and provided an escort of 1,200 Guards for the King’s coach. The streets along the route to the scaffold were lined with Army regulars. The windows were shuttered upon pain of death.

The crowd during the carriage’s parade was mostly quiet. The King, when he arrived, seemed to derive much consolation from the company of his confessor. A heavy snowfall muffled the accoutrements of the carriage.

He mounted the steps. He asked that his hands be kept free. I looked to Santerre, commander of the Guard, who denied the request. The King’s collar was unfastened, his shirt opened, and his hair cut away from his neck. In the icy air he looked at me and then out at the citizenry, where the vast majority, because of weakness, became implicated in a crime that they would forever attribute to others.

I was assisted by my eldest son and Legros. That morning I had received absolution from a nonjuring priest–the new term for one who has not yet forsworn his allegiance to the Church. I had checked and rechecked the sliding supports on the uprights, and re-sharpened the blade. The King tried to address the people over the drumroll but was stopped by Santerre, who told him they’d brought him here to die, not to harangue the populace. Henri-François strapped him to the plank. Legros slid him forward. He died in the Catholic faith in which he had been raised. In accordance with the custom, the executor of justice then found the head in the basket and displayed it to the people. He lifted it by the hair, raising it above shoulder height. He circled the scaffold twice. The head sprinkled the wood below as it was swung around. There was an extended silence and then a few scattered cries of “Long Live the Republic.”

The executor did not accompany the wicker basket to the cemetery. He was told that it fell from the cart near the trench, and that the crowd had then tom it to pieces. He ordered more expiatory Masses said on his own behalf. He made certain that the King’s blade was never used again.

And he also made certain that his wife never discovered his trade in packets of the King’s hair: his eldest son’s idea. Though for months afterward she saw the broadsheets of his hand holding the King’s severed head over the caption May impure blood water our fields.

Thereafter there seemed to be no space anywhere in our country for moderation. All dangers and all proposals conceived to counter them partook of the dire, the drastic, and the headlong. The nation was in peril, and what constitutional safeguards remained had to make way for emergency measures. Danton claimed that if a sufficiently severe Revolutionary Tribunal had been constituted that September, there would have been no massacres. The government’s discipline had to be terrible or the people themselves would again spread terror. A Tribunal impaneled to punish with death all assaults on the indivisibility of the Republic could operate, as he put it, with an irreducible minimum of evil.

Anne-Marie by then was a wraith, disappearing from rooms, a cough the only evidence of her presence in the house. One night she didn’t come to table at all. Legros had to fetch our dinner from the kitchen. Henri-François informed me that she’d had an altercation with another woman at the bakery about her place in the bread line. He was no help with details. I waited while together we watched the shoveling motion of his spoon. Finally I asked if she’d been hurt, and he shrugged and said, “Well, she got the bread.”

I found her in our root cellar, sorting through potatoes. Many had already sprouted. The skin under her eyes was blue.

“Are you well?” I asked.

“I’m unable to eat,” she told me. “I’m sure it will pass.”

“Are you injured?” I asked.

“I’m sound in body and mind,” she answered. As if to prove her point, she showed me a potato. We could hear someone above us who’d returned to the kitchen for a second helping from the pot.

We said nothing for some few minutes, sharing the close darkness. The damp smell of the dirt was pleasant. I sorted potatoes with her.

“It’s not assumed that the wife of the Executor of State Judgments will be found brawling in the street,” I joked, gently.

“You thought you married a lady,” she said.

“I only meant that this was not a time for public demonstrations,” I told her.

“They know you by now,” she said. “You’re as suited to take a hand in political faction as you are to arrive on the moon.”

But she underestimated me. I attended Commune sessions when I saw fit, ready to speak if the occasion warranted it. The Law of the Suspect was promulgated that September to speed the work of terrorizing foes of the Revolution. Suspects of any sort could now be denounced and detained by local Committees constituted on the spot and unfettered by the sorts of legal concerns that had no doubt already allowed too many culprits in league with our enemies to escape. And that category of suspects now extended to all foreigners residing in France; to those who speculated in any way with foreign currencies; to those who spoke too coldly of their enthusiasm for the Revolution; and finally to those who, while having done nothing in particular against the Cause, hadn’t seemed to do much for it either. A prisoner might be accused at nine, find himself in court at ten, receive sentence at two, and lose his life at four. Anyone’s neighbor might be an Allied agent already at work to engineer famine or defeat. The Law of the Suspect was a reminder to the populace that a nation at war might have to exterminate liberty in order to save it. Prisons like the Conciergerie tripled their detainees. In some rooms, the sewage fumes were so strong that torches, brought into them, went out.

And by such measures idlers and thugs had now become the People. Histrionic patriotism was the only requisite for public speaking, so especially those compromised by shameful pasts rushed to demonstrate their worthiness by addressing their Popular Societies, agitating in all comers, disrupting the courts and trials, searching homes themselves, denouncing and condemning and turning France into one boundless parade ground of calumny. The solution for all national troubles was understood to be an unflagging austerity of purpose in the form of an ever more passionate embrace of ruthlessness. There were mass cannonadings in Lyon. Carrier, the revolutionary representative at Nantes, sealed hundreds into the holds of barges and sank them in the Loire in what he called “vertical deportations.” Saint-Just announced that the Republic consisted of the extermination of everything that opposed it. The Marquis de Bry offered to organize a force he called The Tyrannicides: freedom fighters dispatched to foreign capitals to assassinate heads of state, or anyone else the Committee might stipulate.

“The People make their demands,” Henri-Francois remarked one night at dinner, apropos of our ever increasing workload. His hair fell across his forehead like a scrubbing mat. He always seemed against his mother to be nursing a grim new resentment.

“Their inner lives have been made bestial,” Anne-Marie said to him, after having been silent the entire meal.

“That’s not entirely what she means,” I told Legros, who observed her as though she were a mouse in the grain supply.

“That’s exactly what she means,” he answered, with some affability, and then went on with his meal.

I drove my assistants day and night, but we could not master our burden. Lethal misadventures and irregularities compounded daily as batch after batch moved out of the tumbrels and into the baskets. One Tuesday we dispatched twenty-two condemned in twenty-nine minutes. Pastry merchants divided their attention between the scaffold and their customers. Friends asked friends in the crowd if they were staying and were told, not today, that they had things to do. So much blood ran down the front of the platform supports that boots there sank into the supersaturated earth as if into a mire. One woman, eighth in line among the condemned, told me that the lunette’s wet wood on the front of her neck was unpleasant. When the blade dropped, her body jerked in the straps, as if abruptly trying to find a more comfortable position.

In our home, with Legros and Henri-Francois sent away, we received the Sacrament from our non-juring priest.

“They’re putting the Queen on trial,” Anne-Marie told me one morning, once the priest had left. She said that he had confirmed the rumor. In one stroke she seemed to have resuscitated all of her old intensities. She crossed and recrossed the room. She wrung her hands in a series of nervous contractions. She was beside herself, certain that the Queen would be condemned.

“Not necessarily,” I told her, trying to get my bearings.

“You have to resign. You have to withdraw. You have to refuse to have any part in this,” she said.

“There’s nothing to refuse yet,” I told her.

“You have to refuse,” she cried.

I told her I would attend as much of the trial as I could. And on those days I attended, she demanded a full recounting. I spared her very little. The Queen was, in those chambers, the Austrian she-wolf, the arch-tigress, the cannibal who wanted to roast alive all the poor Parisians. It was claimed she’d bitten open the cartridges for the Swiss Guards in their defense of the royal family to help speed their slaughter of the on-charging patriots. She sat alone in the dock, a childlike figure further diminished by her incarceration. Her eyesight had begun to weaken and her hair to turn white. She looked twenty years beyond her age. She’d been made to reply to accusations as to the incestuous nature of her relations with the Dauphin. The poor boy had been made to parrot unspeakable things, and his testimony was read back to her.

Everything about the Dauphin injured Anne-Marie. She knew a wife of the assistant jailer and learned the boy had just passed his eighth birthday alone. Apparently he was chronically ill and had been ministered to by his mother with unceasing tenderness until he’d been made a ward of the Republic and dragged to a cell immediately beneath hers, from which she could hear him shrieking in his terror and loneliness. He was left to himself for weeks at a time. The shoemaker appointed to be his personal jailer looked in only every so often. Even he found the boy’s cries hard to take. But he also made him wear the red bonnet and sing the Carmagnole and the Marseillaise and to blaspheme God from his windows.

My wife lay awake nights, mute and suffering and considering various aspects of his plight, until she burst out with wailing, jolting me from my half-drowse. When I embraced her she demanded a promise that I wouldn’t be a part of this. She needed to be sure that I wouldn’t be a part of this. I wouldn’t be a part of this, I assured her, and reapplied my embrace.

Only weeks after the inauguration of the machine, the medical community found itself grappling with the controversy concerning the survival of feeling and consciousness in the separated head. Did the head hear the voices of the crowd? Did it feel itself dying in the basket? Could it see the light of day above it?

The question became a more urgent one following Charlotte Corday’s execution for the assassination of Marat, when Legros, apparently communing with his inner brute, saw fit to slap the severed head while he was displaying it. And the face, hanging by the hair, showed the most unequivocal signs of anger and indignation in response. There was an uproar from those in front of the scaffold, who could see it, and afterward many medical eminences were interviewed on the phenomenon for the newspapers.

Eventually I was asked to assist a Dr. Séguret, professor of anatomy, who’d been commissioned to study the problem. He set up an atelier on the same square as the machine, and my assistants delivered to it a total of forty heads. We exposed two, a man’s and a woman’s, to the sun’s rays in his back courtyard. Their eyelids immediately closed of their own accord, in a way that was startling, and their faces convulsed in agony. One head’s tongue, pricked with a lancet, withdrew, the face contorting. Another’s eyes turned in the direction of our voices. One head, that of a juring priest named Gardien, dumped into the same sack with the head of one of his enemies, had bitten it with such ferocity that it took both of us to separate them.

Other faces were inert. Séguret pinched them on the cheeks, inserted brushes soaked in ammonia into their nostrils, and held lighted candles to their staring eyes without generating movement or contractions of any sort.

His report was suppressed, and he refused to have any more to do with such experiments, or with me.

“What at have you decided?” Anne-Marie took to asking each day, as the Queen’s trial dragged on. Besides all of the other charges, there were the letters abroad, many of which had been intercepted. All military defeats were being blamed on her treachery. Her son’s illness was blamed on her sexual demands. As proof of the latter, his hernia was displayed.

In bed with my weeping Anne-Marie, I tell her I see no way out: the letters demonstrate conspiracy, and in all other cases, the accusers invent the proofs they lack. We need be resigned to God’s will; to prepare ourselves for it and to summon the strength to endure the terrible stroke.

“Your terrible stroke,” she responds. “You must not do this. You understand that.”

But she knows, I tell her, that God alone can alter the course of events at this point. It’s His mercy for which we must ask, even as we submit to His decrees.

“I’m not appealing to you to save her,” she answers. “You know what I’m requesting.”

A few nights later, lying beside me in the darkness, she palms my cheeks and moves her face so close that her lips graze mine. “Listen to me,” she says. “Don’t dismiss me like this.” She moves our bodies to their newlyweds’ position. But then she says nothing else.

Henri-François brings us the news as we’re sitting down to some pigeon, red currants, apricots, and wine: the Tribunal, according to the declaration of the jury, and complying with the indictment of the Public Prosecutor, has condemned Marie Antoinette, called Lorraine d’Autriche, widow of Louis Capet, to the pain of death, the judgment to be carried out in the Place de la Révolution, and printed and exhibited throughout the Republic.

On the appointed day, my wife is missing when I awake. Our drunken neighbor across the courtyard claims not to have seen her. She’s nowhere to be found when I return. The Queen flinches upon seeing the open cart in which she’ll ride. She explains she’d been hoping for the enclosed carriage that carried her husband. She apologizes for treading on my foot as she climbs the steps.

My wife does not return that evening, or the next. Henri-François notes a missing trunk but mentions nothing else, contemptuous of my agony. Legros takes over the cooking. In the wee hours, I occupy my fireside chair, swigging wine. In the fire the future unfolds like a game board dotted with opponents’ pieces. I envision new laws abolishing the accused’s right to any defense; the frightened seeking to outpace one another with the zeal and homicidal efficiency of their patriotism; prisoners condemned in groups, identities muddled in the confusion, with sons dying in the names of fathers, and families decimated by misspellings and clerical errors. At the scaffold, a nightmarish constancy, with only the actors changing. Chemists. Street singers. Fifteen-year-old servants. An abbé who’d founded and run the orphanage for the city’s chimney sweeps, most as young as five or six. Carmelite nuns. Peasant women from the Vivarais, unintelligible in their patois and bewildered at their arrest. One boy in a forgeman’s cap. One in a hat of otter skin. One already bloodied and bare-headed. One with little guillotines on his suspenders. One who’d drawn in ink on his neck Cut on the dotted line. The executions proceeding at such a pace that the heads tip from the filled baskets and roll from the scaffold’s lip. Never enough for carts, straps, bran, hay, nails, soap for the grooves, or tips for the gravediggers. Baskets changed every two weeks, the bottoms rotted through, the sides chewed by teeth. The machine frequently moved as a menace to sanitation. An old man, taking in the great pile of clothing discarded by his predecessors, and extending me his compliments, and noting that I must have the most extensive wardrobe, of anyone in France.

A man climbs the stairs. He’s strapped to the plank. The plank slides forward. The half-moon is brought over his neck. There’s a frightful second. His open eyes see the basketful below.

And when the blade comes down, a fiery mist explodes about his eyes. It’s radiant with reflected light. The light converts to pain. The pain saturates all that follows. The head suffers for three days and nights, its spark finally extinguished beside its body in the lime pit.

Sulla said he stood before all of Rome and dared to declare: “I am ready to answer for all of the blood I have poured out on behalf of the republic. I will render an exact account to anyone who comes to plead for a father, son, or brother.” And he said that all Rome was silent at his offer.

What a creature is Sanson! Impassive, standing with his slightly timorous look beside his sinister friend, the black heart of the Revolution. He chops off whatever is brought to him. Does he fear being alone? He eats. He gazes at others. Their heads elude him, as his eludes theirs. Will he in his dotage have visitors, each wanting to touch the blade, peer inside the baskets, lie upon the plank? Will he become the town eccentric who plays the cello badly but remains a good neighbor, puttering with his tulips and relating anecdotes to the curious?

Through years of vigils and crises and alarms that kept men from sleeping, he was never seen unshaven. Insignificance, silence, and dissimulation were his most powerful tools. His machine was a celebration of geometry formally applied, and geometry is the language of reason.

Who presented Pompey’s head to Caesar in Egypt? Who presented Cicero’s to Antony? History records only whose head was presented to whom. Who did the chopping? Those impossible beings. That species unto themselves.

From his chair Sanson tends the fire and coddles the past. The past for him is his wife. On their first walks, their conversation was like the exhilaration of learning itself. When he spoke with her, she lowered her eyes. When he stopped, she lingered until he continued. He blurted during one of their partings that without her he’d be his broken cello, all tunes lost. She smiled when he was in particular need of indulgence. And when her mouth touched him, she smelled like a linen sheet in the sunshine.”

In a day or so he knows he’ll receive a letter, its hand uneven as though composed on a knee or post: a letter in which she advises him not to be anxious on her behalf, and to follow her steadfastness, which he should have no trouble imagining. A letter in which she tells him she has no counsel to give, and that he should follow those he needs to follow. In which she informs him that she wants nothing in the way of a settlement. In which she confides to him that the time will come when he’ll be able to judge the effort she has made to write this. In which she closes by noting that she has no more paper, and that the misfortune that she’s awaited has arrived, and that she claps him to her heart.

And even then he’ll understand the implication that he could still renounce this life and find her where she suffers. But instead he’ll sit in his house, with the face of an absconding debtor. His father told him that if he offered to carry the basket, he shouldn’t complain of the weight. His grandmother told him that the tears of strangers were only water. He himself was given a miracle and threw it away. Let his society perish, then, through the ferocity of its factions. Let his city return to its original state of forest. Let his neighbors relapse into the primitive, from which they could one day start again. Let it all go on without him. He was already that head without its body, jolted with the consciousness of its own death. He was already a tiny, bat-winged machine, fluttering over a wave of corpses. He was already that empty narrow space between the raised blade and its destination: that opportunity, gone in a tenth of a second, which would never return again.

By Jim Shepard, Harper’s Magazine

• Sexy marketing executive Gabrielle Flannery is determined to excel at her firm in Atlanta. But there’s one person standing in her way: Dell Kingston, her hot, smooth-talking coworker who claims all the clients. When a highly coveted camping-equipment account is up for grabs, Gabrielle’s boss can’t decide whether to give it to Dell or Gabrielle, so he comes up with an unconventional solution. Dell and Gabrielle must camp out in a state park to compete in a series of survival contests — and whoever wins the most contests gets the account. By the second day, Gabrielle is kicking Dell’s butt, but she wonders if her overly flirtatious colleague is letting her win so he can put the moves on her. When she’s in her tent that night. Dell comes by for a surprise visit, and Gabrielle has to decide if she wants to keep things professional or put in some erotic overtime.

My Sleeping Bag — or Yours?
Exhausted from the day’s competitions, Gabrielle Hopped down on a couple of sleeping bags spread out on the bottom of her tent. Even though she was pleased that she’d won the navigational and tent-pitching tests, she had to admit she was surprised that an avid camper like Dell was doing so poorly.

If he was purposely letting her win, Gabrielle figured, he could only be throwing the competition for one reason — to make it easier to seduce her. From the very start of the challenge, he had been trying to butter her up, and while she was unbelievably attracted to him, she didn’t want to get involved with a coworker. Maybe Dell hoped that if she didn’t think he was a threat, she’d finally let her guard down.

Suddenly, Gabrielle heard a scratching noise and realized that someone was outside her tent.

“Gabby?” Dell whispered.

Gabrielle unzipped her tent flap and poked her head out. “Dell? What do you want?”

“I cut my chin, and I need a bandage. Can I come in?”

Gabrielle hesitated. If she let him in, she might do something she’d regret. But he was hurt. “Uh, okay. I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

Gabrielle’s heart beat faster when Dell slid inside the tent. In the darkness, she could only see his silhouette, but his nearness alone was unnerving.

“This tent is big enough for two,” he laughed as he glanced around.

Gabrielle didn’t respond. She turned on a flashlight and rested it near her sleeping bag, then took out the antibiotic ointment and adhesive bandages from the tent’s first-aid kit.

“Lift your chin,” she ordered.

Dell did as he was told, and Gabrielle smoothed ointment on the cut with her fingers, distracted by his bottomless brown eyes and ruggedly handsome features. Just touching him sent her mind spiraling in a carnal direction. He smelled of the minty body wash from the showers, and she imagined Dell standing under the showerhead with sudsy water rolling off his fit body. Unbidden, her midsection instinctively tightened with desire.

“It’s a little swollen,” she whispered,

“Are we still talking about my cut?” he asked.

She was afraid that the longer he stayed, the more tempted she’d be to do something she shouldn’t. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Good night.”

“But you said you wanted to talk,” Dell protested.

I Gabrielle wondered how she could bring herself to tell him to back off. Before she could even begin, Dell reached up and brushed her hair behind her ear. Her mind went blank as longing coiled within her. He captured her mouth in an all-consuming kiss. A steamy fantasy unrolled before her: the two of them…in the woods…in a dark tent… alone. Except it was reality.

The Ultimate Seduction
Feeling dangerously close to losing control, Gabrielle suddenly pulled her mouth away from Dell’s. “I know what you’re up to,” she said breathlessly.

Dell turned her flashlight off. He kissed his way down her graceful neck. “What am I up to?”

“Come on, Dell,” she said. “You failed the navigation test.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And today in the contest, you couldn’t get your tent up.”

He laughed as he eased off her tee shirt. “Believe me, my tent is definitely up now.”

Gabrielle pulled away from him.

“Dell, you’re failing the challenges on purpose, aren’t you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“So you can get me to do this!”

He was still for a bit, his face barely visible in the night. “I’ll stop any time you tell me to,” he whispered. She didn’t know what he was up to, but as much its she wanted to resist, she couldn’t bring herself to stop him. He lowered his mouth to hers for a long, languid kiss.

A Hot Night in the Tent
Dell slowly explored Gabrielle’s mouth with his tongue. He undid her bra, drawing her nipples into his mouth, sending unbearable pleasure rushing through her body. He slid lower, licking a trail down her stomach as he unbuttoned and slid off her pants.

Once he got to her thin, cotton panties, he flicked his tongue over her most private parts. She melted into the ground beneath her and fisted her hands in his shirt to keep from crying out. He rolled her panties down her legs and buried his head between her thighs. Gabrielle bucked, unprepared for the erotic jolt that coursed through her system. She didn’t want it to end, but soon a fierce orgasm claimed her body in waves of delicious spasms.

After Gabrielle went over the edge, she forced herself to sit up. She needed to taste Dell’s body in the same way he’d tasted hers. She look of this shirt and jeans, then slid off his boxers. She licked and nibbled his nipples, working her way down to the prize that stood stiff and ready for her attention. She took him into her mouth, taking her cues from his moans. “Gabrielle,” he exclaimed. “I need you now.”

Dell reached for his jeans pocket, found a condom, and slipped it on. With a groan, he buried himself deep inside her. Gabrielle rocked her hips against his, all the while murmuring, “Harder, Dell. Harder.”

A surge of adrenaline like he’d never experienced pulsed through his body as he met her challenge. She dug her nails into his back and let him know every move, every slight shift that felt good…better…best.

“Oh yes, yes!” Gabrielle tensed, then collapsed in a full-body shudder. Dell gasped, falling into her, feeling as if he were being turned inside out.

Later, Gabrielle listened to Dell’s heartbeat as he slept. She wouldn’t mind sharing her tent with him again. But before she got distracted, she vowed to do one thing: land that client.

By Stephanie Bond