When we were seven, Marshall and I would play astronauts and Martians. He was always the astronaut, and I was always the monster. By virtue of being 23 minutes older, and somehow much bigger, he always got to be the good guy, but he never let himself be the winner. He was always going down in a hail of laserfire or jumping on an imaginary bomb to save a bunch of imaginary lives.
I wonder whose life he imaged he was saving in the end.
I was the evil, ugly Martian, doomed to die, if I had been playing with anyone else. Not Marshall. Even though I always won, his incessant martyrdom always made me feel weaker. Already significantly shorter and skinnier, and much less athletic, he found a way to make me feel even more helpless by always being the one to sacrifice himself.…
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How much pain can the human heart endure was more than a rhetorical question for Jill at this point – it was more like how much pain could she endure, or continue to endure, because every day she had to endure it, and endure more of it than the day before, or so it seemed. The times when Anne was lucid were becoming less frequent, but Jill lived for those times, when Anne looked up from the bed with those sparkling brown eyes and remembered who she was. How are you, dear?, she would ask, more concerned for Jill than for herself. Are you getting enough to eat? You look thin as a bird, for Chrissakes. I should cook you something.
Jill always smiled at this, one of the few times she smiled anymore, but it quickly became not so funny.…
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Under the blankets she shivers like she’s out in the snowstorm, not curled safe in our bed with the lights out. I close the door behind me, but I don’t move to warm her. She’s piled those blankets so high tonight, so high and so heavy. The heat’s turned way up in here. Outside, the snow falls for real, thick sheets of it tumbling from clouds that block the moonlight. A few stars shine through, though. Just enough light to see her by.
“Allie?” The pillow turns her voice to a bare murmur, like the voice she uses when I’m there beside her, our hands and hair twined together, one blanket sheltering us both. Like the voice I spoke with when I started school, mumbling at my shoes, before her kindness opened me up.…
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My father was an old man. Seventy-seven years he had lived on this planet. One day he complained to me of a headache. It seemed mild at first, but toward nightfall he was massaging his temples, his face wreathed in discomfort. By the next day it had morphed into a meaty migraine, and he told me he heard rustlings in his ears. Clinkings and tinklings. In the evening my poor old pops spoke of whisperings. He said they came from inside his head, and that the voice was a young girl’s.
On the third day, my father was unable to get out of bed. Every time he tried to stand, he fell to the floor, head-first – as if something in there was too heavy, was pulling him down.…
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A warm wind blowing in from the west made the exposed hairs of my legs and forearms sway and move. High in the sky the sun’s heat caused me to stir and slowly wake. My eyes opened and carefully focused on some blades of grass as I followed a small ladybug until she flew away. I was awake now, and fully aware of where I was. I was on top of my favorite hillside, overlooking a stream that ran to a lake a few miles north. What I was not aware of, was who was with me.
I was laying on my side, my left arm being used as a pillow for a girl I didn’t know, my right arm wrapped around her slender figure. Her hair blew softly with the wind and tickled my nose, bringing with it a beautiful smell I had never experienced.…
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