Cortez

Nighttime in the desert is different from nighttime anywhere else. Darkness stretches form horizon to horizon as though it’s been pasted there. Any light beneath it is somewhat miraculous. If there weren’t other miracles in the desert, ones more influential than luminosity, people might make speculations about light in the desert. But the real miracles were loitering around an enormous box truck, looking up at the starts, or ahead at the mountains, or down at the thin layer of dust that the wind sometimes kicked up. The stars were interesting because they had been shifting for the last hour- shifting was not the right word. Showering sounded better, but it was not right either. They looked like raindrops running into each other on a pane of glass.

The mountains were interesting because they were high, alpine creations and somehow still radio waves and waves of other sorts strained over their peaks. They were formidable and unmovable and no match for the tiny antenna on the tiny radio they’d taken from the oldest girl’s mother’s kitchen.

The dust was not as interesting, but it wasn’t the dust that was being looked at. The girl with her eyes on the dust was truly looking at a narrative in her own mind, in which she climbed into the box truck and drew gratuitously large and circuitous lines all over the desert floor with its wheels, and then turned those wheels toward the mountains and together she and the truck gallivanted into the sunset, away. The narrative stopped there, because she has no use for anything that came after that. Away was the best outcome in this scenario, so away was the happy ending.

The box truck had once been more box truck than it was now. It had been decked out with parts of other cars that the girls had owned, fixed, scrapped, or just come across. Only one or two pieces had been liberated illegally for the express purpose of making the box truck look a little less like a box truck. This was Camila’s fault. The box truck currently resided on the flattest piece of desert Camila could find, surrounded by scrub, far from town. It was faded, though Camila would have liked to put another coat of paint on it. It was high off the ground, though Camila would have preferred there was only an inch of breath between it and the sand. The seats were not leather, though Camila would have preferred to burn herself sitting in them on a hot day.

The truck had a single fracture in the windshield, which was weathering it valiantly. A pair of miniature boxing gloves were strung up on the rearview mirror. The truck had license plates from California, but it had spent so much time in Colorado that no one remembered that it’s native state was not Colorado.

The radio was not broken, but the entire box truck was having issues constantly. It had a tempestuous relationship with the heat, with the sand, with its own rusting insides, and with its age, so the radio played intermittently and moodily. The radio that played was in the cargo area. It almost disappeared in the dark, because it was made of a dark red that matched the countertop it had been taken from. It played a radio station from town, one that was owned by Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend. It broadcasted rock and roll. It broadcasted Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s voice. It broadcasted songs that made Camila think that if the radio had muscles, they would all be straining at once to push these songs out.

The radio had been taken from Sofia’s mother’s kitchen, but the truck was Camila’s. Though this story belongs to every one of the Cortez sisters, it belongs more to Camila than either of the other two. Camila was not in love with the radio station, but it was her heart powering the truck, allowing the AM radio waves in. She and the box truck shared the same calculating expression. If someone were to slash one of the slightly deflated tires of the box truck, Camila would bleed.

“Here’s another one to soothe you into that lazy summer night feel,” the DJ said. “This song is made for the PM. No daylight songs now.”

Piper tilted her head toward the radio, as she always did when the DJ spoke, like an attentive animal hearing the call of its own. Piper was selectively attentive. She was the youngest of the Cortez sisters, and her name was not actually Cortez. But she did not care for her name. She cared for being left alone when she wanted to be alone, and approached and kept around when she wanted to hover. She had hair pulled strictly away from her face, and eyes downcast from the weight of her thinking brain behind them. The lantern in the bed of the box truck was behind her, which meant her freckles disappeared. She was wearing a thin blouse, which meant she was thinking hard; when so much of her thought was devoted to something specific, there was too little to inform her that she was cold. There were several beaded and tasseled bracelets around her right wrist, because she wrote and fiddled with her left hand.

In the daytime, she did not lean against the box truck and think. In the day, she learned how to drive in her father’s Dodge truck, and read and pondered the many places outside Colorado. She looked at pictures of places that bore no resemblance to the high alpine desert. This curiosity worried her mother and her father and her grandmother. It worried her a little. Only because she feared she might never see those places herself. She felt a thrill of danger in her father’s truck each time she put her hands on the wheel. She believed, superstitiously, that the truck might lead her where she was meant to go.

Because Piper believed this: she was meant to go elsewhere. Beyond Oro Vada. Outisde Colorado.

Piper flinched when Camila nudged her shoulder. She turned so Camila’s knee was pressed against her ear instead. She could see Camila’s raised eyebrow in her mind if not with her eyes.

Camila did not notice the flinch. No one noticed the flinching anymore. “Did you hear that?” she asked, knowing Piper had not. Piper’s hearing was as selective as her attention. “Your non-relative just said the station covers the entire desert. I don’t think he knows how large the desert actually is.”

Sofia raised both her brows, because she shared Camila’s skepticism. There was a lot of desert to cover, and the station was too small and insignificant to go much farther from Oro Vada than the box truck.

Camila sat up in the bed of the truck. Her feet dangled over the edges of the bed, the bottoms the colour of the desert. Because Sofia was in the truck with her, she got a rib full of knee. Together they jostled, together they upset one of the snake eggs that sat on top of a magazine and had never hatched. They watched it roll on the floor of the bed, as if escaping. Disaster flicked its eyes their way, briefly. Sofia reached for the egg and returned it to the magazine pile.

“It won’t hatch anyway,” Camila said.

“But we don’t want it to just break open on the bed,” Sofia said. “It’s still got that new car smell.”

It had no such smell. This was a joke as the expense of all three Cortez sisters, who had rehabilitated the car to the best of their abilities after it had been brutally neglected. Before it belonged to Camila Cortez, it belonged to Nicolas Cortez, Camila’s cousin, who vanished to San Francisco and returned with a box truck that made his parents proud and a wife that did not. The truck stuck around longer than the wife, and when Nicolas swore never to bring home another woman, or himself, he abandoned the truck on the Cortez’s land. The truck was used briefly to carry feed between ranches, and to transport relatives from carpentry jobs to paint jobs to landscaping jobs to bars. When the truck grew weary and threw a tantrum, the Cortez’s developed suddenly great skill at walking. The truck was left to stew in its bitter feelings. Then the rain came and it stewed in the rain. Then the animals and the wind came and seeds stewed in it, and animals sewed in the crops that rose out of it. Sedges climbed over the hood and roof and absorbed noisy frogs and attracted sand hill cranes. When the trout moved in, delivered by storms or monsoon rain or their own desperation, coyotes followed. The cranes hardly stood a chance. The sounds of cranes being devoured messily in the middle of the night was enough to drive the Cortez’s to action.

Camila had volunteered her services, mostly because she felt that denuding the truck of sedges and swamp timothy would be like pulling the wrapping off a gift. She worked steadily and cruelly to evict the animals. The plants took less notice of her efforts, because she was more gentle and slow evicting sedge. She found plant life more charming than bloody-muzzled coyotes. The truck was slow to trust her, but eventually even it seemed to forget the trauma. The only reminder was the snake egg that had never hatched, found under the passenger’s seat when she was chasing a leopard frog toward the door. The egg was heavy enough to contain fetal snake, but still enough that it was unlikely the fetal snake was destined to emerge. It had stayed in a rolled up sock in the glove compartment for a while, and now it sat on top of a stack of magazines where Sofia occasionally glanced at it and suggested they paint it and make an ornament of it.

The radio crooned something new and dubious. The Cortez sisters held their breaths briefly to acknowledge this, and to pay it some attention. They were all enamored with pirate radio, which they collectively saw as an embodiment of American youth and its hunger for terrible music, revolution, and jail time. Only one of these things did not appeal to them, and as Camila has once pointed out, they would none of them go to jail for listening to pirate radio. Piper knew firsthand that the broadcasts were pre-taped, and that the DJ used a false name over the radio. Revolution was good; avoiding fine while revolutionizing was best.

“Maybe he’ll get caught this summer,” Sofia said. She did not want to see any relative, or friend, or friend of a relative of Piper’s go to jail, but she was curious to see what would happen, and she had a healthy amount of concern about the Federal Communications Commission that meant she assumed that it was inevitable.

“He won’t,” Camila answered, because when a question was open to any of the Cortez sisters, it was Camila that answered first. Camila seemed often as rapt in her own imagination as Piper, but Sofia thought some of that might be a lie. She was almost always ready to respond.

Art by Gabriele Crow

Text by Lucie MacAulay

A Frog Among Princes

I was never interested in kissing, and I had considered it a personal failure. Everyone seemed to want to kiss. Everyone seemed driven by a desire for physical intimacy. I desired something else, though I could not articulate it. All I could articulate was that I would not be fulfilled by a kiss. Depending on how you say it, people can take that different ways. They rarely took it the way I meant it, and the follow-up questions were predictable and easy to answer.

The ball was held late summer. I was born, unfortunately, during a heat wave, and therefore every subsequent birthday had to be celebrated during or on the edge of another heat wave. It was hard to evoke jubilation in a crowd of people that were melting. I immediately hated the day when I felt the uncomfortable trickle of sweat down my spine. Gogu was the only one to enjoy the heat.

I had mastered the art of entering my birthday party as inconspicuously as any guest. I wove through a crowd of Fiskers and Porches and Mustangs first. I was sure my parents didn’t know anyone who drove a Honda civic. The cars huddled together clannishly, like their owners. I could make out faces in the lantern-light. The garden was strewn with lanterns, and structures for the vine flowers to climb. Everything was wreathed with golden light and smelled like a flower shop had thrown up. Gogu had once told me that there was a way to assure roses would grow steadily and unhesitatingly in someone’s garden, and that was if they grew atop a body. It sounded very fairy tale to me at the time.

“How many people do you think have lived on this land?” Gogu had said to me. “Why do you think it’s so unlikely that one of them also died here? Beside, your garden is big enough for a morgue-full of people to have died and been buried.”

Just another way in which the upper class were privileged, though if someone had had the thought of planting roses in a warzone, I suppose those roses would outdo ours easily.

I let someone touch me on the elbow. This was normally forbidden, but this was not a normal night. I had to resign myself to others’ touch. Gogu was probably snickering from a potted plant somewhere, his ego inflating exponentially. But Gogu didn’t count as other; I didn’t think he had such a right to be as smug as he was that he was an exception to the rule.

“Lily!” Someone shouted. I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but someone saluted with three fingers, the gesture of the varsity swim team. I saluted and carried on.

He was here, and not too far away. I had to remind myself that I had submitted to this party more for Evan than because it appeased something nascent and empty in my parents. He looked very much like one of the Porsches in the front, which is to say shiny and untouchable and like he had nothing to do with me.

Gogu appeared on a day with rain. He appeared on a day with brilliant orange sun. I had just walked through my mother’s plot of garden, where nothing thrived beneath her un-green thumb, to the gardener’s herb garden. I preferred it to my mother’s flowers. The smells were richer, the plants more practical, and I did not have to hear about their difficulties or how much or little they needed to be watered.

I’d seen a frog leaping across the path and had decided to hurry it along, incase it was trying to make it across the entire garden, or in case someone else came along the same path and was not looking down for stray animals. The frog looked as unappealing as it could, in shades of green and brown that reminded me of the soggy bottom of a lake.

I shooed him away from the path and went inside. When I came to the door and found him sitting outside of it, I dropped a piece of cheese in front of him. I felt cruel only fifteen minutes later- I was fairly certain frogs could do nothing with cheese. The frog hadn’t left. There was an expression on his bumpy face that made me think of a child kicking their feet on a swing as they waited. I recall that after a full minute I had decided upon a name for part of his expression. He was decidedly smirking.

He jumped forward a little, close enough for me to hold, though I didn’t. “Thank you,” he said to me. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, like it had to make awkward adjustments to the rest of his frog face to get words out.

“For what?” I said.

He shrugged a little, I’m sure. It was a movement like a cat shrug. Smooth and starting from the shoulders. But he finished with a shake of his rear. “Helping me off the path.”

“I didn’t really do anything. You hopped,” I said.

Gogu shrugged again. “The thought was there. Close calls do count, to me.”

Gogu stayed with me for weeks before he told me his age, before he told me his name and before he told me that he’d hidden under our abundant roses for a long time since hopping to the garden, and he had been speculating about who lay dead beneath them. I asked how long he had been under that rosebush, and how long he’d been wondering. Gogu had monumental patience, of the kind I would never have.

He knows that now. Just like I know what his face looks like when he’s just been smirking and is trying not to get caught at it.

Most of the guests looked like they had just fallen into the part of a yacht, and like the only problems they’d ever had were the kind that someone encountered on a yacht. There were men watch tans on their shapely wrists, and women with hair shined like the carapaces of iridescent, dark beetles. They looked at me when I appeared, took in my dress that was so white it was nearly blue, and nothing like the sort of dress I would have chosen for myself. Someone plucked a rose for me; I smelled it in front of them, which seemed the thing to do. They looked charmed as I played two narratives in my head, one was the rose in front of me, smelling sweet and summery, the other was a body in front of me, smelling acrid and dissolved. I smiled through it and moved on.

There were guests that I would never have invited, had I been consulted on the guest list at all. Neither of us liked to look at one another so we glared at one another from different spaces in the garden. We were all adept at being where our enemies were not. Unfortunately, because Evan was also where I was not, one of my enemies was stationed next to him. She looked unmovable and testy, as I imagined Cerberus looked stationed outside the gates of hell.

It somehow did not matter that Evan was on the other side of so much hairspray and hatred. He spoke to me anyway. “Lily. There you are. I was going to come looking for you.” He looked particularly devastating then, in that way that people can in a ring of lantern light and handmade Italian silk shirts.

“Well, you don’t have to now. Here I am.” This seemed self-evident, but people in my generation seemed t say self-evident things all the time. Evan looked satisfied with it. The stony quality of Cerberus’ face had increased by degrees. There were other, smaller and less relevant Cerberuses around her that also seemed to sense a disturbance in their night. They looked furious, and like they were furiously trying not to be. “Unfortunately. I mean, it’s not been that great, so far.”

“It could be better,” Evan said, diplomatically. “If you like dancing. Or if you want to go for a walk. I’ll have you back before the clock strikes midnight.”

I could feel my mouth grimacing and I tried to turn it into a smile. Evan’s expression said he’d seen the transformation, so I made as hasty a recovery as I ever have. “I like walks. I’m great at walking. You can watch. Come on.”

There was a stumbling moment in which he came to stand beside me and I pointed him the right direction and we walked and gathered gazes and focused on not returning them. He stared at my shoulders in the dress. I stared at the roses in the dark.

Gogu had a low opinion or balls and parties, and that this one was thrown in honour of my birthday did not change that. He had, for a few years, been disgusted by the fair offered, and how little control I had over it. It was an opportunity for my parents to flaunt their own popularity, he’d insisted, and subsequently insisted that I need not actually attend, because who would notice until it was time to blow out the candles on the cake? He’d been furious on my behalf when my mother had presented me with a dress that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. He was confused when I told him I would go, and shrugged when I tried to explain that obligation was a perfectly legitimate reason to attend an event, even if I lost hours of my life to it and aged prematurely before the end of the night.

“You’ll hardly eat because you’ll be nervous and tired,” Gogu predicted. “You’ll be bored by all the conversation, because you’ll have heard it or you won’t have because you already didn’t want to, and you won’t dance.”

“I won’t be bored by Evan’s conversation,” I said. I’d spoken to Evan enough times to know this to be the truth. “He’s the only one I’m really going to talk to.”

“Unless you faint, because you’ll hardly eat, because you’ll be nervous and tired.” Gogu’s tongue leapt and caught a gnat out of the thick summer air. He looked dissatisfied with its flavour, or my argument or both. “You’ll get bored of his conversation and you won’t dance.”

“It’s my own party. I have to go. Cerberus will be there.”

Gogu didn’t smile, but frogs can look incredibly self-satisfied. He looked as wickedly pleased as any sort of viper I had ever seen. “She doesn’t have to be.”

I shook my head at him. “Don’t say that. I don’t care if she comes, as long as she keeps away from me. I just want to choose what I wear and not have to make a grand entrance. And not to talk to everyone.”

Gogu snatched another insect from the air, this one of the stinging variety. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering near my cheek until it was between Gogu’s amphibian lips instead. He caught me staring. “Well, you already know that’s not going to happen, Lily. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Nothing. I wasn’t asking you to tell me anything.”

Gogu considered me as he swallowed the angry insect. It might have been rattling in his throat but if it did, he didn’t show it. “I know. Just thought I’d say it anyway.”

Walking with Evan was almost exactly as I’d imagined. I smelled roses and felt heat jump between our shoulders. He was polite, only touching me to steer me, and keeping a polite distance between us. Our hands brushed. The wind shivered. The music was faint and then loud and then faint again. When I did see Cerberus’ face, it was violent as war.

We were living out a scene that would make anyone’s heart swell, and their hand flutter above their chest.

I knew Gogu was watching, though he wouldn’t reveal himself. He was only a shadow amongst other shadows.

“You look beautiful,” Evan said to me.

In the end, Gogu made my dress tolerable. Sometimes he disappeared and reappeared with trinkets. Shiny things he plucked off the street, as though he were a magpie rather than a frog. It was impressive that he managed to carry them from without to within the house and past my mother and the maid, who would have both tried to throw him in a French soup. I sometimes fantasized that they would see him, and each have a conniption. But those fantasies all ended poorly for Gogu.

This time it was not earrings or a necklace or a sewage-crusted ring he’d found all the way at the end of the drive that he brought back for me. It was one of the roses from the garden, which was perfect for securing to the front of my dress. It looked less unreal than it should have.

“If you’re going to act like a useless damsel, you should dress like it,” Gogu said, squatting on top of my chest of drawers as I fiddled with the petals. He watched me put on the shoes my mother had brought for me from some factory that did not pay their employees well enough.  “And this way, no one will smell you if you sweat.”

“Kind of you,” I said. “Don’t look.”

Gogu shut his eyes, though sometimes it was hard to tell. I also didn’t know if it made much of a difference, asking a frog to close his eyes. I kicked off the shoes, reached under the skirt of my dress, pulled off my jeans, and put the shoes on again. The cold fabric of the petticoat felt strange and sensual against my bare legs. Gogu’s eyes were open when I looked up again.

“Polka dots?” He looked at my skirt as though he could see my underpants through them.

I hissed, “Gogu!”

“I can’t see them now, calm down.”

It didn’t make a difference, really.

“The dress covers them up fine,” he said. “You just look uncomfortable in it. Too bad you can’t wear your jeans and boots. Not that I’m saying you should. I haven’t worn boots in a long time, so what do I know?”

This was one of the things I found interesting about Gogu. He had never told me exactly, but I was sure he hadn’t always been a frog.

Later, Gogu snickered at the lineup of cars in front of the house, like an automotive pageant. My own car wasn’t with them. It was up on blocks again, because it was always up on blocks, because giving up on the side of the road was how I knew it loved me.

“I like your Camaro better,” he said to me.

After I’d blown out the candles on my cake, and after Evan and I had both had a slice, some of which he’d tried to feed to me and I declined, he asked me for another walk. There was more intent in the shadows of his face now.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve done enough walking tonight.”

“It is pretty tiring to be walking around the whole time. Want to go sit somewhere?”

“I think I want to sit on my own for a while,” I said.

Evan looked at me as though he was beginning to realize something, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about this realization. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased to have figured out some sort of puzzle, or wishing he hadn’t known he was up against a puzzle at all. Eventually he said, “Maybe we could go out sometimes. After school or something?”

Because I could hardly believe it was my own voice saying it, I listened very closely when it said, “I just don’t think we should. Thanks for keeping me company.”

I left the ball and went inside, and maybe only Evan noticed, or maybe Cerberus did as well, or maybe my mother did and I was already in trouble. I didn’t watch to find out. There was a feeling in my throat that meant I was going to emote terribly, and it made me as uncomfortable as anything else that night.

In the garage, just in sight of the Fiskers and Porsches, my Camaro watched me dustily as I leaned against it, dirtying my skirt. The top half of my dress was a little sweaty. The only thing that really still looked lively and perfect was the rose on my bodice.

Gogu ate the last of the gnats as I joined him. He hunched down on the hood patiently. His eyes reflected the porch light, and then the rose, and then my face.

Gogu smiled, pleased as a viper.

Art by Ludovic Jacqz

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Nuclavees in America

I don’t believe in divinely-distributed responsibility. If something is my business, it’s because I’ve made it my business. Like my father’s business, before I killed him, was lousy first aid advice, consultation, and occasionally, practice. I had to wonder if he’d ever read the first aid books he had under the record-player in the den, because I had. I almost wished I hadn’t, sometimes, when I watched him search for the radial artery on a patient and wind up pressing his two fingers into the carotid. He could stitch up a cut just fine, and he knew all about disinfectant, but he’d been sewing up his own shirts and saddles for years, and he’d been drinking alcohol long enough to know that even though he was treating his insides with one kind, he could treat his outsides with another kind. He would offer the former to his patients before he doused their cuts or stab wounds or what have you with the latter.

There was nothing he could have done for himself, in the end. I remember that much about him. I could see his liver, his kidneys, his blackening heart and grey lungs, all through his skin, just before I cut out his spine. He’d once told me where to stab someone in the spine to cause a mobility-ending injury. It turns out, that if you dig hard enough into any part of the spine, that really does it, for mobility. “I made it easier,” I told him, while he twitched on the end of the kitchen knife. I pushed his hands away when he tried to grab me, but there wasn’t much power left in them. His skin was already collapsing around his organs, like a sped-up video of a deflating balloon.

There are quicker and cleaner ways to do it, I’ve learned. The papers covered and proposed several methods at first, to make it easier, and simpler, but only some of them have caught on. A kitchen knife was risky- close range. If my father were smart, he would have figured out that joints and angles didn’t mean so much in that state. I might have been behind him, but if he’d really tried, he could have reached behind himself and grabbed me. He would have looked truly monstrous. I don’t know what that would have done to Sonny. Golden-smiled Sonny, the only one of us to never have been called to the office for physical altercations, the only one to want to be a civil engineer and go to school after high school, already looked faint when I pulled the knife out of dad. Connor was just behind him, because it didn’t matter that we hadn’t wanted to drag Sonny through this dirt. He would be dragged through, and there was no way to clean him, so he might as well get comfortable with it. The couple months we’d spent trying to make sure the end of the world didn’t reach him seemed especially pointless then.

There was news that something similar had been seen before. Nuclavees was the name. It was all over the news. Every channel had an Irish or English or Scottish folk explaining the transparent skin, the monstrous deconstruction of the organs, and then positing a mythological explanation for the appearance of nuclavees all over the country. Across the pond, they were having a field day. Our epidemic was something they could peak. Have a look on the television, dear. They’ve got Nuclavees. I was looking into schools for Sonny when the news stopped being news and started being shadows in the back garden. Then we abandoned the notion of school altogether. Academia looks great on applications and resumes. It’s the lube of the future, my father once said. Creates opportunities for you to slide yourself in somewhere. What can lube do for a dying country, though?

Sonny was scared enough to give up right away. There was no waving a white flag, just cowering on the floor, behind the door, in the closet. Hands over ears. Eyes squeezed shut. And when courage pricked up its head, he watched through the window as I stood on the porch with the shotgun and Connor packed the Mustang. Every neighbour had either fled or had ceded to the Nuclavees. Wherever they’d fled to, hoping to hide, they’d still probably cede to the Nuclavees. In America, everyone cares about trends. And giving up seemed to be the largest trend since slavery. Whole families were becoming infected. They twitched and seized on the floor, turning prismatic, and rose up with skin like ghost flowers. They prowled. They stalked. They still bled and tore the stitches my father had given them.

Illness takes everyone, I’d told Sonny. It’s nothing worse than a deadly strain of influenza. You just have to deal with a few extra steps after the dying. It must have been our father’s eyes in the Nuclavee’s face that turned my brother’s brain into the twisted filament shape it was in now. The eyes were, for the most part, where eyes should be. The face around it had changed. It wasn’t what you expected to see around eyes like that. But eyes were just eyes, after all, I told myself. I’d read the first aid books: optic nerve, vitreous humor, schlera. Even looking straight into them, I knew those eyes weren’t my father. Everything in that face wanted to kill us.

We’ve taken the Mustang and the first aid kit and every tool in the house that could be made into a weapon. If we can’t take back our town, or our country, we can carve a path to another place. One where the eyes aren’t a problem. One where no one has a problem pulling the trigger or forcing the knife in. One where people knew to bandage their wounds so they didn’t pull and bleed and attract the attention of something that was human. There’s got to be a place like that somewhere in the world, and if there isn’t, then I’ll make one. And if a Nuclavee kills me first, then I reckon it isn’t a problem. How will I be able to care.

Connor drinks while I drive, and for now he’s treating his insides with the right kind of alcohol, because I don’t think he’s been driven to treat his insides with the other kind, yet. I might not be the best at patching people up, but I’m better than my father was. I can keep the blood where it’s meant to be, and that’s enough for now. And if it’s too late, if I’m looking at eyes that are only relatively where they should be, in a face that shows me much more of a person’s insides than it should, then it’s enough that I know that what’s supposed to be there, on the inside, isn’t. And I know how to treat that too.

Art by Arash Radkia

Text by Lucie MacAulay