Many people don't believe that everything is connected. It's strange. They believe in magnets, in electromagnetic waves, in quantum action at a distance. They believe that the force of gravity makes the Earth revolve around the Sun, and yet they do not believe that the same forces can influence the smaller details of our fate. They believe that it is all up to them. That they have free will. They say that Jupiter can gently pull the Sun, yet it cannot move our infinitely smaller souls.

A paradox.

The stars are difficult to read, for sure. The horoscopes in the newspaper are wishy-washy nonsense written by lowly paid interns who do not have an inkling of physics or differential equations—you would not expect someone to be able to predict the weather without a doctorate and a powerful computer, would you? This is no different.

As a mathemastrologer, I can see the strings with which the cosmic puppeteers ordain our every move. I can follow their course, untangle their knots. This is how I have been able to read my own future for the past ten years. I knew prior to conception that I would become pregnant, and that it would be a boy. I saw my mother's death in the conjunction of Saturn and Venus, right before a car accident plucked her out of the numbers of the living.

One month ago, I read the death of my six year old son in the firmament.

As unwavering as it used to be, my faith was shaken.

In astrology, but I suppose this is true of other disciplines, you get attached to the objects of your work. You come to love the intricate play of the planets with your own fate, the way that your mood ebbs in sync with Neptune's tempests or gets lifted by the tides. I was married to the cosmos—but that day, the idyll was shattered. The cosmos had betrayed my trust. It had been difficult to accept my mother's death, to see it coming without interfering, but I had told myself that this moment comes for everyone. This, though, I could not abide. It was too cruel. Dear little Patrick, the star around which my life revolved, could not be extinguished, not now, not ever. I would rather do without the rest of the universe.

I started to believe in free will. Not out of logic, but out of necessity. There had to be a way to save him.

I poured myself in calculations, poured my life savings into computing power, sat night and day at my desk to find out precisely how and when Patrick would die. “He will drown in the pool,” the stars said. Very well—I drained the pool. But fighting fate was like trying to contain water within a sieve: if you plugged one hole, the water would simply drip from another. Still, I thought, there was a finite number of them: could I not plug allholes? I had to be strong, clever, steady, relentless, exhaustive. How was Patrick going to die, now that the pool was empty? Drown in the bathtub? I locked the bathroom. Drown in a friend's pool? Let's not go to their place, then. Drown in the lake? Let's not go to the lake. Soon enough, there remained no possibility of drowning.

The firmament still wanted Patrick's soul to rise up into its clutches, though. Fall down the stairs? I confined him to the first floor. Choke on food? I blended it into puree. The star map became more and more erratic in its dogged attempts to murder my child, threatening anything from an exploding oven (let's not cook) to plague rats (they cannot bite through five inches of padding). The signs became more and more numerous, culminating into a singularity at midnight when the dangers would number into the millions. After that, I could not tell, but I was determined to find out. I would fight off an infinite number of threats for Patrick's sake. At midnight, he would be alive and I would have asserted my free will, in defiance of the cosmos.

Six hours before midnight, someone banged at my door, insistently. I tried my best to ignore it, but I saw it was my colleague Olaf, the most brilliant mathemastrologer I knew, and a small part of my mind wanted to hear him out. I opened up a sliver.

“What is it?”

“Sonia,” he said, wringing his hands nervously, “whatever you are doing, please stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop, uh… You cannot save him. It is Written.”

“No,” I sneered. “I am his mother. Do not tell me what I can or cannot do.”

I stared him down. Blessedly, the stars foresaw no harm would come to me, which meant that he could not force his way in or do anything rash to stop me, lest he violated the celestial plan to the same degree that I was going to. I felt like a chess Grandmaster.

“Please, Sonia, please,” he pleaded, literally falling to his knees as he did so. “You have no ideawhat forces you are meddling with.”

I knew exactly what forces I was meddling with. I was meddling with the Sun (330,000 Earths), with Saturn (95 Earths), with Jupiter (318 Earths). If their combined masses couldn't stop me, that was their problem, not mine. I did what I had to do: I slammed the door in his face.

“Free will exists, Olaf,” I yelled through the wood for his edification, “and I will prove it.”

​​​​​​​

v k pandian

on one side of our house, but that was not why; I could hear the regular sigh of his breath when we watched TV together. “A minor circulatory thing,” I overheard him tell the other neighbour, but that was also not why because I could hear the steady ba-dumpof his heart when I put my ear on his swollen belly. He just did not likethe heat, I decided, like he did not like Coke but I did. The afternoon heat would drive us to the depths of the old stone church or the blasting chill of the video mart where we gazed long and hard but usually came away empty-handed. Sometimes we would ride the air-conditioned subway, end to end, with Dad trying to hide the yawns that split his jaw wide as the Don Valley.

During our last summer together, we stayed for a week at Dad’s parents’ cottage. It was possible to position your lawn-chair near the lakeshore in such a way that no other dwelling was visible. The green was rich, impenetrable. “Just like Mario World, innit, Chief,” Dad said to me. The cottage, with its splotches of red and white, looked indeed like a giant Mario mushroom. Its windows were large and high and faced the lake, and inside, its floors were the colour of golden honey.

“More like Grimms’ world,” Mom said. She stared into the dark pines.

Beside the cottage was a shingled lean-to in which someone—my uncles, perhaps—had stacked hundreds of pieces of wood about the size of children’s forearms. The wood in the lean-to seemed to wall off the Mario cottage from the rest of the world. Most afternoons, Dad would sit with his chair in the shade while I splashed in the water, chasing silvery fish with a net. Mom rattled about with dishes and dustpans and eventually emerged, toting a thick yellowed paperback.

Sometimes I would look up and see Dad’s chair empty. “Dad, Dad!” I would rush out of the lake, scanning the shady spots nearby, hollering until Mom dropped her book. Once we had to walk far in from the shore, up a pine needle path, until I saw Dad, sitting on a boulder like a natural throne, calmly surveying his realm. He nodded gravely. I hid my tears. I had to. I could not explain my relief.

Dinner was macaroni, boiled to near-pudding consistency on the wood-burning stove, unless we felt too hot, and then it would be crackers from tins, crackers until our mouths went dry. We listened to news from the wind-up radio. Mom had no patience to wind it so she’d fake a sore arm, and say to me: “Chief, give it a turn.”

My parents spoke to each other by trading words back and forth like two parrots tenderly passing a nut between powerful beaks.

“Cards for evening?”

“Cards for evening.”

“Where would we be without our cards?”

“Without our cards—nowhere, that’s where.”

“Nowhere.”

“Nowhere looks a lot like here.”

“But here we have cards.”

“Maybe nowhere has cards, too.”

“Shuffle the cards, why not.”

“Why not, it’s a routine procedure.”

“Oh, we know about routine procedures.”

“Routine procedures, ‘nuff said.”

“Give ‘em to Chief, why not.”

“Chief, shuffle.”

“There you go, they are chiefly shuffled.”

They would carry on with these bursts of verbal keep-up, like practice badminton where players aim only to keep the birdie in the air. This was the way we spoke in our family; not like those other conversations my parents had with doctors, full of long and exhausting sentences that started in one place and ended in another place, always worse.

At night we slept in the smallest bedroom of the cottage, Dad and I on spongy sleeping pads. Our sheets were worn to the limpness of complete surrender, and Dad would pick up the corners like delicate silk. Mom laid claim to an old army cot that squeaked with every movement. She trained herself to sleep half the night on one side, half the night on the other. Dad snored, which bothered Mom in the city but was encouraged here in the forest because it kept the porcupines—or worse—at bay. “Lights out!” Mom would say as she blew out the candle, leaving just the red pin-prick where the tip of the wick used to be. I would stare until it shrank to nothingness, while Dad gently touched my hair with his fingertips. I never asked him if he watched the ember disappearing, too.

Every morning I kept myself lying down until Mom or Dad woke up. I imagined I was under a Spell of Immobility until the ogre next door, the one who stockpiled arms, left to go pillaging, whatever that was. I splayed the fingers of my hand on the honey-coloured floor like I was stuck to flypaper. Birds called urgently from the trees, but no one under the Spell could wake. I could see the slack lips of Dad’s face and the moisture collecting on the lower corner of his mouth.

Then Mom would move, the squeaking of the cot sounding like the wretchedness of dreams rubbing off. Her eyes always searched first for him, then me. Catching my eye, she, too, tried to stay motionless. I tried to make Mom gasp by crossing my eyes until the muscles in my eye-sockets hurt. Or I silently curled my lip in a scowl until my gum dried out. It was our little game while we waited for Dad to wake up. I stared at his brow, or sometimes just looked out the window at the Mario-green leaves pressing themselves, like faces of curious onlookers, against the glass. His waking caused me to feel joyful, giddy, strong.

Then my parents would rise, paw through the contents of drawers until they discovered a pot, teabags, and matches for lighting the wood stove. How had the other one slept, they were anxious to know, and each of them gave surprisingly detailed answers. Occasionally they remembered to ask me how I had slept but, as an absurdly deep sleeper, I never had anything to report.

After their pot of “brawny brown” my parents would rustle around until they discovered oatmeal and raisins for breakfast. They cooked these in a battered aluminum pot, blackened on the outside and grey as a rainy sky inside. I did not like oatmeal, nor, I suspect, did they, but out of sheer novelty at the Mario cottage, we spooned the sticky gobs of stuckness into our mouths, chewed twice, and swallowed. It held all morning.

Afterward Mom scoured the oatmeal pot with gravel at the lakeshore. We cleared brush or rambled along the main path, which extended to the roadway where our car was parked among the tall grasses for the week, its wheel wells looking like smooth animal haunches, ready to pounce and drag us back to the world of video marts and milkshakes.

Clearing brush mystified me. Mom told me it was like combing tangles out of her hair, and every piece of forest needed this untangling so that fire would not happen so easily. What did she mean: “piece of forest”? And worse, was her hair susceptible to fire? Dad laughed, tentatively, at my questions and taught me how to tell the difference between dead sprigs and live.

“Hey, look at the big pile-a brush, Chief!” Dad meted out encouragement, until my parents, on some prearranged signal, would straighten up, have a look at what we had done, and stop for the day. I could never see the bigness or the clearness like they could; our puny efforts were overwhelmed by the forest pressing in.

We saw few people along the main path, and those neighbours we met knew Dad’s parents, not us. One morning while I hunted for frogs a woman, dressed in black, with grey hair and smudgy glasses, came up to Dad where he stood in the shade.

The woman made making the usual observations about summer weather and then asked: “You’re Frank’s son, aren’t you?”

This bothered me because I did not think of Dad as anyone’s son. He was not a child like I was, therefore, how could he be someone’s son.

“Yes.” Dad looked carefully into her face, as if he almost recognized her.

“We haven’t been introduced but Frank told me about your case,” she said. “It is unfair—completely unfair,” Her mouth tightened; I could tell she was preparing herself either to say a lot or to say something bad, or maybe both.

At the mention of “case” Dad’s eyes darted to mine. “Well.” His tone held finality in it. He looked about for Mom. “Well— ah—missus—we should be moving along. Gotta get Chief here home for lunch.”

“Blackburn,” she said, “I’m Gladys Blackburn.”

I forced myself to remember her name—like Ali Baba memorizing “sesame” as the key to the cave: “Gladys, bad is, Gladys, bad is,” I whispered all the way home.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Dad, nodding. An untruth, I could tell because he did not extend his hand. To Dad, a handshake following an introduction was practically a physical reflex but for some reason he did .babu1sunarybabu1sunary​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Our town was baptized in the flood that year and the swehttp://gp1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/802892/http_public_production/artists/images/8714084/original/crop:x0y0w1000h750/hash:1706027686/5bb257fb0114551da50e98d3_1_.jpg?1706027686lling of the river unearthed relics from long before men settled in these parts. That same year I buried my wife and infant son, both lost in birth. Months after they were gone, our train of ragged coaches met the elbow of that great river, and upon our manifest of provisions and mouths, we would continue no further and abide where we stood. Two dozen families in wheeled shelters began to fish and hunt and gather wood for burning and wood for building. The men were strong and fleet and they fashioned homesteads and fencing and a great church for the preacher to tout fable and promise. He carried his book with him and went about our nascent village to bless homes and new mothers alike. His robes and hat threadbare and humble but black and foreboding as a doctor of the plague.

Coming to me one evening, he spoke of the beyond and the blissful eternity in which I was to one day join my love. He spoke quickly and firmly and I nodded and thought of her in a gown of white with our son in her arms and they were both searching waters just miles away as if awaiting a vessel. I offered this vision to the preacher and he nodded and thought deeply.

“She waits for you there,” he said finally, “alongside her kin and beside her God in the kingdom. All you need do is remember her and you’ll see her again in the after once your toil is done, and you will know pain nevermore.”

I nodded but without agreement, such was my hurt. The god that would take from me these blessings was not one I had the desire to know, and I turned a teary gaze to the preacher and quietly said, “bless you, father.” And he said “bless you, my son.” And I didn’t feel blessed.

In the first months, I brought deer from the forest, bleeding the carcasses and carving and salting the meat. I had but a horse called Beau and a rifle and smithing tools with which I would mend spokes and firearms but such things were less needed in the village. The coaches had now turned shelters and animals were now kept to be fed and milked and butchered. I would hang pelts of slain animals from my saddle and I stunk of blood and shit. The women would avert their eyes and hold their children as I passed in or out of the village. After a time, I spoke very little but held the dead close as if they would speak to me. In the evenings I would roll tobacco and smoke next to the fire and stare wearily at the steeple atop the church and talk to her. I wouldn’t hear her voice, but the chirp and howl of beasts beyond the village, and it was answer aplenty. God was not there with me.

The rain came on a clear day and brought with it a profound darkness. The steads were strong that they could hold up to formidable winds and bitter cold but the floodwaters took many of them. It drowned three of our cows and lifted corn and potato plants out of the earth and took them downstream. None were hurt but all had lost something in one fashion or another. The following day, our preacher offered praise to his god that we were spared this calamity and that we would continue to build in his name and reclaim what was taken. I refashioned a lean-to from the detritus of another home and remained near the treeline far from the village. I was spared no calamity and no god would give back what was taken from me.

I found a book near the water’s edge some days later. Black leather with ornately gilded lettering on the spine. Not of the preacher, but perhaps of a traveler from before we settled. I looked northward to the family of deer I had been tracking and considered leaving the book where it lie. I closed my eyes and listened for her and felt the wind rise and smelled rosewater on it. I opened my eyes and the deer had passed out of sight. I looked back to the south and breathed deeply and then lowered my rifle, hat and myself to the earth and lifted the book.

The pages within felt damp but pulled apart easily. I sat and read the beginning, which spoke to the beginning of all things and the creation of man. “Behold, it was very good,” I whispered to myself as I read. A grin formed across my face and I looked about to ensure I was alone and that no fun was being had at my expense. In turning the page, I saw there was no more. Several hundred empty pages remained, but turning them in succession, a few held handwritten passages.

And wander ye who know not your path, for it lies before you coursing and winding and true.

My brow furrowed and I peered north, seeing the family of deer ahead once more, the tawny flicker of a doe tail and a young calf. I returned to the page and read the passage again, anxiously thumbing the edge of the leather cover. I turned to the next passage some pages later.

Be not afraid of what lies behind, but find within your darkness the strength forward.

The wind lifted my hat from the ground and I placed it atop my head and stood. I breathed deeply and placed the book in my satchel and lifted my rifle again. Cold had taken me suddenly, as if a malevolent force were pursuing me to the treeline. I strode away from the waters and continued my trail of the deer family. A noticeable heft now affecting my gait.

Evening fell and I returned fruitless and tired to my lean-to outside of the village. I lit a fire and stared at the book. Firelight glinted upon the lettering of the spine and in the eyes of Beau staring into mine. “She would have me read it,” I spoke aloud to him and held the book in my hands for several breaths before opening it again. The story of genesis was the same, and the creation was the same, and beholdwas the same. But I couldn’t reckon the passages after were as I read them before.

For your path is behind, coursing and writhing, and darkness will carry you forward.

I quickly turned to the next passage, a more harried and difficult scrawl.

Ye must surrender to fathoms unknown, for in the deep lies your solace.

I felt the soft but quickened thud of my heart as I read this passage again and again and feared turning to the next. Beau continued to stare, undisturbed by the flies and mosquitos about its eyes and hind quarters. The fire crackled and spit and I turned ahead to the following page.

Thine heart, wrought of sorrow and fear, darkens in the light.

Rings of shadow formed in my periphery and my breath abated. I continued to the next passage.

Ye only need answer and ye may join the one true path.

Beau then began to jump and pull at his reigns, lifting the support of my lean-to and dropping the canopy upon the fire, snuffing it out in a searing cloud of gray. I rose to soothe the beast and looked about to see all that could be retrieved. The book lie closed atop my singed blanket and there I left it to find another place to rest for the night.

It passed in feverous dream. The river was full of copulating snakes, all of them writhing as one great living creature. The moon glistened over their scales and they rose and fell as if something were reaching from beneath to escape. There was wailing all about and black shapes darted in and out of the trees and I stood on the bank and watched the river swell and swell until the snakes licked at my naked toes.

I awoke the next morning and returned to the site of my lean-to, blackened and wet with dew. The book lie open but to no passage. Then I saw the watersnake lying beneath the canopy. I held still and the snake glided slowly back toward the river, it’s scales wet and brilliant in the morning sun. I gathered my satchel, rifle and then the book and set out with Beau northward between the water and forest.

The river bent west and in the haze I could see great hills rising and hear headwaters crashing upon stones. I had seen no animals to this point, but tracks led north into the mist and I followed and spoke to her and smelled the air for her scent. I heard a voice behind me then and spun quickly around on the saddle to see only a veil of mist obscuring the green behind me. It spoke again and it was her voice.

Would you surrender your heart?

My eyes swelled suddenly with tears and I spoke yes, yes I would surrender it that I might have her back. There was no answer. Beau flicked its ears and snorted and then all was silent. The mist rose and the sun fell brightly on the river. Light danced along the ripples and the water turned so clear as to see the bottom. I stared into it for many moments before a figure rose from the water’s edge.

Wiping away my tears, I saw her rising in a white gown, our son lie in her arms fast asleep. She did not smile but extended her other arm to me. Her eyes were clouded and unblinking and, though her mouth did not move, she spoke to me again.

Would you come with me?

I leapt from the horse and fell to my knees in the damp soil. Sputtering and sobbing I said yes, that I would come. An invisible weight stayed my legs and I fell to my stomach and began to crawl along through the reeds to the edge of the water. I wanted so greatly this embrace, but as I reached closer my body ached and my arms fell tired and useless.

Come down with me.

“I am coming, my love,” I pleaded to her and my voice fell hoarse and I began to choke. I laid coughing and pitiful and blind through my tears. She was dying again before my eyes, escaping and leaving me to be wretched and alone. I threw my hand out to her in hopes she might pull me into the depths with her, that I might drown and end these toils. The clouded visage of my wife was unmoving but still beckoned. The ache within me turned to agony and my body convulsed and writhed there upon the earth and all went black.

I awoke to Beau nuzzling my face, seeking breath in the lifeless being on the riverbank. I started suddenly, recognizing I had lost countless moments in darkness. Regaining strength in my arms I foisted myself up to see no figure standing before me. Hurriedly casting my gaze all about, I spoke.

“I am here, my love.”

No answer followed. I spoke it many times and waited each time for response. Fresh tears brimmed in my eyes and I sat and watched the sun pass below the trees, stroking the muzzle of my horse and thinking of her in the waters below.

I thought then of the preacher and the words he gave us upon our marriage. That we were to surrender to one another and forgive and cherish all that each of us were and would ever be. That death would never separate us and that we would both share a world our own in the kingdom of Heaven. That should we be parted in death, it is only His plan and His path the other must take.

I sniffed and closed my eyes and listened to the wind and the water and the birdsong and the faint groan of branches and the whisper of dancing leaves. And though she did not speak, she was with me.

Beau grunted again, a sound deep and full of frustration. I rose and saw the satchel holding the black book, the lettering now dull in the gray of the mist. I pulled it from within and read about the beginnings of everything and leafed past the final passage. I reached back into the satchel and pulled a thin stick of charcoal and wrote within the book.

Heed not the temptation to surrender, for those lost would have you remember a love shared. For in this memoriam, a life lives eternal.

My eyes felt like galaxies—holding the swirling glow of countless memories—as I took in our childhood home. Its siding looked like remnants of driftwood after a bonfire. I swore I smelled the smoky char of pine creep into my nostrils. It’s wild how the past stays with you like that. It can feel more visceral and real than the tangible things right in front of you.

“Jesus, it feels like just yesterday.” I placed a trembling hand over my heart, struggling to steady my breath.

My brother, Perry, pulled me into a tight embrace, his strength grounding me like an anchor.

“The house hasn’t changed much,” he said, his voice steady and comforting. “But we have.” His certainty made me question, Have I really changed?

Between the two of us, Perry was as solid and stoic as a mountain range. Good thing, because I was like the wind—flighty and unpredictable. Over the years, Perry had learned to handle even my harshest hurricanes.

Being his older sister—even if only by four minutes—I always wished I’d been his protector rather than the other way around. But that demon burning deep in my belly also flashed a crooked smile, knowing that Perry would never abandon me, especially since I got sober.

I hadn’t had a drink in exactly seven hundred and thirty days, and although it remained unsaid, I knew Perry was terrified of leaving me to my own devices in fear I would relapse.

Our sibling bond was iron-clad. After we lost our parents in the fire (my mother didn’t properly butt out her 2:00 am cigarette and well, the rest is history), all Perry and I had was each other. But let’s call a spade a spade; we were also as fucked up and as co-dependent as it gets. Who mutually decides to visit the catalyst of your alcohol addiction on the anniversary of your sobriety?

The house’s dilapidated front door creaked as Perry gently pushed it open. The rusted metal hinges were holding it up by a thread.

“After you.” Perry gestured me in, squinting from the sunlight. He was a gentleman, even in such obscurity.

As he held the door open, the shallow scar on his right cheek taunted me like some kind of schoolyard bully. His wound often pulled me in like that. Some days, I was sure I would dive right into it and drown. Other days, I prayed to God and the Devil himself to just let me fucking drown, already.

That mark became permanently etched on Perry’s face on the day I quit drinking, exactly seven hundred and thirty days ago. That was the day Perry screamed bloody murder at me from the passenger seat, “Jackie! Stop the fucking car!” But my bloodstream was far too poisoned with Bacardi Limon to listen. All I remember next was my vehicle being wrapped around a tree. I could have died that day, but what truly disturbed me in the middle of the night was the fact that I almost killed Perry.

A lot can happen in seven hundred and thirty days. But I assure you, forgiving yourself isn’t one of them.

“Well? You coming in?” Perry was still holding the door ajar.

I shook it off and gave my brother a knowing glance. I swear, even though we were fraternal, we had twin telepathy. I exhaled and walked in.

“Watch your step,” I warned, my forehead tense.

I imagined the rickety floorboards collapsing, crashing us into what had once been our dad’s “man cave”. That’s where he was passed out, the night of the fire.

“Kids, stay here. Do not move,” our mother demanded after getting us out of the house safely. I remember the black soot on her face and the spiderweb veins in her eyes. She shook us firmly by the forearms. “I’m getting your father.”

Perry and I held each other, shaking. The heat from the inferno felt like standing in a volcano. We never saw our parents again.

Two decades later, there we were—Perry and I—-making our way through the wreckage of our home. It was midday, yet the inside of the house screamed a tone of pale blue midnight. My shoulders were up to my ears, as though we were walking through a haunted house attraction.

I coughed into my forearm. The ocean of dust was thick like butter. As I cleared my lungs, Perry called out from behind me.

“Jacks, look at this! The fireplace,” Perry's voice was filled with awe.

“Unbelievable. It’s still here,” I whispered, a lump forming in my throat.

It was as though a Fairy Godmother breezed by and brought the decaying living room to life with her magical paintbrush. Kind of like in “Titanic”, when they showed the sunken ship underwater, versus in its prestige as it sailed across the Atlantic.

We made our way over to the fireplace and sat cross-legged on the floor.

“This was our favorite spot, remember?” I avoided his gaze, overwhelmed by the flood of memories.

“Yeah,” Perry murmured, his eyes softening with nostalgia.

For a moment, the taste of crispy, fire roasted marshmallows superseded the saturated stench of mildew.

“Remember our s’mores nights?” I asked.

“Duh. What about all our fireplace movie nights?” Perry proceeded to do his best, nasally, childhood impersonation of me, “But mom! I want to watch Beauty and the Beast!! Perry always gets to pick the movie!!”

I punched him in the arm, “First of all, I never sounded like that. And second. So what? I knew what I wanted.”

The corners of Perry’s mouth lifted. He had such a sincere sparkle about him, as though a storm cloud of confetti followed him overhead wherever he went, “You really did, kiddo.”

My chest went heavy. How could Perry love me after everything I had done? After all the relationships I’d ruined? All the jobs I’d lost? All of hisrelationships I’d ruined? How could he still choose me, when so often I had chosen a forty of Jack Daniels over him?

How could Perry still love me after I almost fucking killed him?

Perry’s gaze widened, “Hey! Remember when Mom would bring out those hot drinks she always made?” He paused, almost as if he was searching for the right term. “Apple… something? Apple ssshhh…”

I snapped my fingers, “Apple-Schnapple!”

“Yes!”

“I mean, looking back it was basically just hot apple cider, but damn it was good.” And it really was.

Our laughs echoed throughout the abandoned asylum we once called home.

Perry leaned back, holding himself up with his hands. “I loved our fireplace hangs. Especially our movie nights down here. But nothing beats our movies up in the projector room.”

I tilted my head, “We never had a projector room.”

Perry playfully “shoo’d” me away.

“No. Perry. I would remember us having a projector room. Our movie nights together were our favorite thing. You even just said it yourself.”

The house suddenly became pin-drop silent as Perry leaned in. "Memories are quite something, aren’t they?" The slight shift in his tone made my skin crawl. Perry was always wistful, but this felt different, almost… clinical, "We often remember things in ways that are… easier for us to digest.”

I was fidgety. “Gees Perry. You sound like Dr. Lasko.”

He seemed to enjoy my little joke.

Dr. Lasko had been my therapist since the accident, and I would go out on a limb and say that he would not have approved of this self-inflicted exposure therapy I was subjecting myself to by visiting the house.

Perry seemingly snapped out of his little therapist moment and went right back to being his sparkly confetti self. As I watched his amicable face scan the mantle above the fireplace, I felt a sickening uneasiness. Imagine you had actually fucking killed him.

“Man, I can still picture all our family photos up there,” Perry’s childlike wonder destroyed me.

My face went flush. I could feel the water rising in my eyes like the tides. How pathetic and infuriating was it that after everything I’d done, I was still somehow the victim.

“Hey.” He took my hand.

“Oh Perry,”  I threw myself into him. “I’m so sorry.”

My brother held me with his usual care that I didn’t deserve.

“Jacks, it’s ok. I’m still here. We’re both still here.”

As my chin rested on my brother’s shoulder, I looked ahead of me at the remains of the house. Something felt off, and it wasn’t just the overall unsettling environment. My brow furrowed. “Wasn’t the doorway to the kitchen on the other side of the living room?”

I felt Perry shrug, “I don’t think so.”

I was staring into the out of place doorway like I was trying to pull a recollection towards me. And that’s when I saw them in the kitchen: the translucent memory of mom and dad. Mom was getting our Apple-Schnapples ready. She was pacing, unlike Dad, who was sitting motionless at the table. His face was planted on its mahogany surface. His glass of Apple-Schnapple was empty, and so was the bottle of Jim Beam beside it.

Mom floated into the living room, our warm beverages in hand and a cigarette in her mouth, “Kids, your father’s not feeling well. Let’s have our Apple-Schnapples in here.”

Oh my God. The bruise on her face.

Perry jarred me back to reality with the gut punch of what he had to say next, “You’re remembering the truth about mom and dad, aren’t you?”

I pushed myself off and away from him. “How did you…”

My brother looked down, delicately tracing the floor with his finger, “We always put them on a pedestal after they died.”

I felt a shiver run down my spine, “What are you talking about?”

As Perry continued to speak, his words grew even more detached. "Do you remember that first drink Dad ever gave you?”

My eyes darted around the room as my jugular pulsed in my neck. As much as I tried to escape what Perry had just said, I did remember.

I could hear my dad’s slurring words of encouragement, “Come on, Jackie. Just one drink. It’ll be our special time, just you and me.”

The bitterness of that first sip of beer made me squirm, but sharing a “special time” with my dad—and the desperate yearning that maybe he did love me, afterall—was the overwhelm of the full moon swallowing me whole. I was only a child, and much like how my mom turned a blind eye to my father’s drinking, she did the exact same when it came to her daughter.

I’d used the death of my parents as the excuse for my alcoholism for so long, because admitting that they helped create the monster I would eventually become was like a knife to the heart. And knowing I had been too weak to conquer the addiction from my own volition just made the weapon twist in my chest.

The room was spinning. My face was blistering hot like the night of the fire.Or was that the warm heat from the fireplace when we were kids? The childhood fireplace memories ran through my mind, frame by frame, until…..they eventually vaporized to nothing. I crouched over, thinking I might vomit.

“We never had a fireplace.” Perry was nodding, very matter-of-factly.

My fingernails dug into my thighs when I looked at the fireplace and: it was gone. Only a blank wall of faded, forest green wallpaper remained. Our house was once on fire, yes, but that was it. There was never a happy childhood fireplace. Ever.

My hands were cold and clammy. I fell back onto the wall behind me. “Perry. Where are we?”

He stood up and glided towards the staircase. One hand on the banister, his footsteps creaked, one by one, as he made his way to the second floor.

My mouth was bone dry, “Perry!”

He stopped and turned towards me, “Come to the projector room. We love watching movies together, don’t we? There’s a movie I’d like to show you.”

As my brother disappeared from sight, I did what any classic horror movie trope would tell you to do: I went upstairs.

I found Perry standing at the end of the ominous hallway. Large, empty picture frames lined the oxblood walls leading up to him. Through the doorway where Perry stood, particles in the air danced in the projector’s cone-shaped light. That telltale winding of a film reel was the only sound in the deafening quiet of this house that I no longer recognized.

Half of Perry’s face—the one with the scar—was perfectly illuminated, as though he was wearing the mask from “The Phantom of the Opera”. “I think you’re ready to see how this movie ends, Jackie. This is the most progress you’ve made since we’ve been coming here.”

I gripped my thumbs in the palms of my hands, “Perry, you’re freaking the fuck out of me!”

I thought my knees might buckle as my brother’s face glitched, like a flash of static snow on a television set. As his face settled back to normal to a deadpan gaze, he disappeared in the innocuous room. I followed, running on nothing but fumes.

Clutching the doorway, my mouth fell agape. Perry was gone. I darted to the middle of the room.

As I frantically searched for my brother, I shielded my eyes with the back of my hand from the projector’s light. And that’s when, from behind me, I heard five words that made my blood run cold, “Jackie! Stop the fucking car!”

I was convulsing yet paralyzed. Moving as slowly as cold molasses, I rotated on the spot towards my worst nightmare, shown on 35 mm. On the projector screen was Perry and me in my car, exactly seven hundred and thirty days ago, the day I almost kill—

Oh my God.

My head pounded as fragmented memories surged. The reality of what happened began to crystallize, unrelenting.

My joints ached and my stomach churned. Clamping a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream, I stumbled down the hallway as it began caving in on itself. The picture frames were sucked into the walls. The floorboards cracked into distorted peaks and valleys. Wooden beams swung down from the ceiling like pendulums. I tried to spit out the chalky grit of disintegrating drywall that made the hallway look like a winter squall.

Panting heavily, I stopped dead in my tracks at the stained glass window. My body trembled with an all-too-familiar dread. Each time I faced this, I wondered if this fall would be the one that would finally end it all.

Maybe it’d be better if it did.

Holding my breath, I threw myself through the glass, my hands clawing the air for dear life. Free falling two stories feels like an eternity when you’re watching the memory of your childhood home fall apart before your very eyes. But when the weight of my body finally made contact with the earth I—

I gasped. The cold air of the hospital room shocked my lungs. I sat up, ripping the suction cups from my face and body. My gown was clinging to me, soaked in sweat. Medical equipment beeped all around me like a metronome.

Dr. Lasko, my therapist since the accident, sat across the stark white room, sighing as he rubbed his forehead. He, too, was connected to a plethora of suction cups and wires. He looked a little worn out in the fluorescent overhead lighting. Ever since I was hospitalized and later incarcerated, Dr. Lasko had been helping me delve into my memories, namely the ones that were too excruciating for me to face. And as such, Dr. Lasko had been appearing in the simulations as my brother Perry, the love of my life who died in the car crash, seven hundred and thirty days prior.

Disoriented, I blinked rapidly, the vividness of the memory contrasting sharply with the sterile, geometric ceiling tiles above me.

“I don’t ever want to do that again!” I was venomous.

“Jackie,” Dr. Lasko started.

“Don’t start,” I pulled up four fingers for air quotes, “‘Jackie, don’t give up. This was the closest you’ve ever come to facing the truth.”

As the initial burst of adrenal and cortisol left my body, I fell back on my pillow. I was depleted. Quiet rivers flowed down my cheeks.

Removing his own suction cups, Dr. Lasko approached my bedside and took a seat. He treaded lightly. “Jackie, I understand how challenging this is for you, but you did an incredible job today. If we continue making progress like this, there's a real possibility you'll gain your freedom sooner.”

I looked at the well-meaning doctor, but all I could see was Perry. Multicolored confetti fell softly around him like that first November snow. His face was the sun. His eyes reflected the whole world back to me.

Perry.

With a weak grip, I took Dr. Lasko’s hand. My vocal cords were like sandpaper. “I’ll leave this place one day, doc.” A single tear dripped from my chin onto my collarbone. “But I’m not sure if I’ll ever be free.”

Dr. Lasko didn’t say a word, but I felt him squeeze my hand, just a little bit tighter.

I licked the cracks on my lips as my eyes closed shut, imagining the oaky comfort of bourbon on my tongue. I felt myself drift, and good thing, because I needed the rest. Dr. Lasko and I would be delving into my memories again the following day.

No matter how masochistic it felt, I vowed to keep showing up for the simulations. Even if I never forgave myself for what I did, at least in my memories, I got to see Perry.

Twitter

babu1sunary​​​​​​​