Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more walleye than they bothered to count. These were sportsmen, Don reminded himself, but the fish didn’t know that. Their bait looked same enough. This lake, a hundred miles north of Nowhere, Ontario, had no roads, service, or even plumbing—nothing but water, wood, and fish. If men weren’t equal here, equality anywhere was a joke.

They floated alone in a murky bay. Jigging, their lines were taut with sparkle beetles and curly tails. Nothing was biting. They were the first on the lake, and if need be, they’d be the last to come in, even under thunderheads. Don’s wife would not approve, but this wasn’t her world. This land was untouched, primordial. When Hannibal marched on Rome, this land looked no different. This was Nature as it should be—a newborn. The wind picked up, snapping at his hood.

The boat shifted. His son squirmed in his seat. Bo was an eighth grader already, scrawny and still afraid to unhook the fish he somehow caught. Don knew how important this week was. Bo needed something special, like a good look at something majestic or maybe a long crawl through adversity. He had bailed on his first campout—which was in the backyard—but Don had higher hopes for this trip. There was no easy way out here, only the floatplane, an aluminum tube tossing around in the clouds for hours. This was the real deal. A man had died here a month ago, slipped on some rocks, and hemorrhaged. It doesn’t get more real than that.

“Dad, I saw lightning.”

Don looked. Gray clouds rolled along. The wind, barely sharp, was hollow and silent. “It’s fine,” he said. It was a thirty-minute drive. They would stay and maybe catch a lunker to bring in for the others. Those fishermen, hard and wise, wouldn’t be going in yet. They’d sit through the rain no problem, but they’d hear Don and Bo driving in, privately judging them as they’d continue to catch and string their walleye.

“I didn’t bring my rain pants,” Bo whined.

“Whose fault is that?”

“I’m not sitting in the rain just to keep catching zero fish.”

“Shut up,” Don snapped. Bo turned to the water. The wind moved between them, rattling the trees. Don didn’t like shouting, but it had its place. It was certainly better than not caring at all or giving in to Bo’s every whim. No, his patience had its limits. But, he was still more patient than his father had been with him. Don’s old man was tough, raised in a different time. He belittled him for every small failure. Coward, prissy, nancy, runt, he had called Don everything. Just imagine what he’d call Bo, gripping the boy’s neck or wrist in rage whenever he was running behind. No, Don needed work, but he was doing well.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Bo said.

“Go off the side.”

Bo stood on the thwart, rocking with the waves. He tilted and swayed for several minutes before sitting back down. “I can’t, it’s rocking too much. I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”

“I guess it’s not that pertinent,” Don said.

“Just park it somewhere.”

Park it. Don scoffed and continued to jig. He thought more of his father as the silent gray churned above them. He remembered how his dad would drag him to the truck to get feed, his cheeks red and stinging. Or how he’d hate hearing the front door burst open, knowing he had come home. He remembered his father’s funeral, bright and cold in the heart of winter, his eyes stinging from the wind.

Bo was silent, fixed on some other place. Don reeled in and started the motor.

The boat glided on the water before scraping against the flat rock of a wooded island. Bo stumbled out and rushed to the trees as waves swept along the shore. On the other side of the boat, by a heap of moss, Don saw a small stack of stones. Gray and fixed, they looked like a child’s project. Bo returned from the trees and approached the pile, leaning down to pluck off the top.

“Don’t,” Don broke out. The rocks were neat, balanced, even reverent. “They might be for the man who died,” he said.

Bo backed away. A heaviness settled there.

Don looked around. The wind tumbled through the dark green tamaracks. They were sharp, pointing up to nothing and swaying like casual fanatics. Those thunderheads, heavy and creased, were above them now. Don felt a third one with them, a stranger he recognized but didn’t know. He stared at the wet rock beneath Bo’s feet, dark with mindless malice. It was time to go.

They left the island, cutting into the tattered lake. Darker, darker dawned the sky. Don thought of the men already inside the cabin, wondering where he and Bo were. He imagined rain filling their rundown Lund, shoring them somewhere remote and overgrown.

The wind and whirling chop thrashed against them. They braced and moved against it until they came across red cliff faces. Don sped back the way they came, passing through a narrow strait. The wind was somewhere above them, the waters calm. Bo deflated into his raincoat, covering his shivering legs.

The going was slow through tight corners and narrow gaps. Don’s mind wandered and he thought of the island. A video played in his head of a boot slipping up, followed by a thud and swift crack of bone. Another fisherman would’ve been there, twisting his head at the sound. After a single, hanging moment, he’d call and wait for some suggestion that the man was embarrassed and sore but fine. But he’d hear nothing. Maybe a soft, rattling whimper. He’d rush over, holler, pat his face, and jolt his coat, watching a world end. It could’ve been his friend, a brother, even his son leaking through his fingers.

Don thought of what his own father would have done if he had fallen. He remembered his sister spraining her ankle, flailing and crying as Dad tenderly opened the screen door to bring her inside. He remembered him old and gray, smiling in his La-Z-Boy as Bo rolled a Hot Wheels car up and down his shinbone. Or him teaching Don to fish at the lake with red buoys an hour out of town, fingertips slowly knotting the line. He wouldn’t have screamed or shaken Don’s body. He would have knelt in the wake, quietly panicking as he wrapped his old arms around the limp body of his boy, the terror of nature driving away his harshness. He would rock him, muttering for his only son to wake up. Please, please, son. Please wake up.

Don drove the boat out of the straits into a larger basin. The wind slammed against them, peeling away his hood. He saw a slight green in the clouds to the south, and a sober terror carved into his gut. It was the sick color that stalked cornfields on childhood evenings when the sirens would blare. They bounced on the waves, floating in the air for long seconds. Bo, light and high on the prow, pitched to the left and right by the boat’s edges. Don wanted to shout at him to hold on tighter but thought of him turning to listen at the wrong moment and going over. He only watched, as though by staring he could hold his son safely in place.

The lake took an age to cross, even as fast as he went. In Don’s mind, an image flickered of a covered figure resting between the seats. How fast that boat would’ve gone, he thought, as the body was returned to the cabin. They would have placed it somewhere while waiting for the plane. Not in the kitchen. Not outside either. In the bunkhouse, on a bed, and under a blanket. It would take the plane an hour to fly in. Then it would leave as those remaining cooked and prepared a quiet dinner. When the outside air was indigo, they’d lay in bed and drift to sleep.

No, not drift. Sink. Hours of a mind floating before a sudden plummet. One by one as night would rise, a darkness deep and ancient would sweep over the arctic waters, encroaching on the cabin, docks, and boats.

In town would be a phone. Calls would be made, names would be said, gasps and wails and huff-huff-huffs. Details would be discussed. Under the sterile lights of a hospital or the yellow glow of a fishing outpost, pens would be clicked and papers signed. What happened on the rocks would become legal and accounted for in the places where streetlamps, corner stores, and highways burned endlessly and night—true night—was not welcome.

But in the dark, that void pool surrounding the lake, there would be no thought or memory but the fading gray. On and on forever as the rolling stone of time continued its slow crush. The blood on the rocks seeping down, down into elder earth, thinning and dissolving and washing away in the black water. No identity but night, patient, hungry, and final, swallowing every last day and fleeting flash of brilliance. The lights of the fishermen would dim until sleep doused the last of their thinking wicks, leaving nothing but reality: raw oblivion, an abyss beyond sight and sound save the eternal lapping of water on rock.

Rain came at last, first as pellets, then as a sheet, smothering the man and his son. Don closed his eyes, swerving the boat. He blinked and covered his face. The lake was breaking apart. Water rushed over the side, seeping ice cold on his legs and hands. The cabin would come up on the left, or maybe it was on the right. It all looked the same. He couldn’t even squint. The puddle in the boat grew.

He had waited too long. His son would have been fine if Don had only left earlier, listened to him sooner. If only he could open his eyes and see. But he saw only the rush, the quick sweep of unthinkable violence destroying everything by simply passing. The boat crumpling on the rocks. A vaulting green flood. Bo’s shadow disappearing under the rabid wake. Don stopped and listened, thinking to receive some signal of instruction from a place outside of rain. In a blossom of thought before the end, all he saw was his father, holding him and kneeling in the wake.

Three shrouded figures stood at the dock as the boat came beside it. One hunched down and whisked away his son. Another took the boat’s ropes while the last held out his hand for Don, guiding him onto the dock. They shambled across the sopping grass, coming toward the cabin. He moved through the group to Bo. Don held the boy’s jacket, making sure his shoulder was underneath, that he was really with them moving to safety. He felt Bo’s small, cold fingers wrap around his own.

They swung the door open and the fishermen dragged them inside, cheering and handing them towels. The barber was frying fish, and a tin of coffee sat on a low flame. The men shed their dripping jackets, patting themselves dry as rain thumped on the roof. The men told of their journeys back, along with other stories as walleye sizzled in the frying oil, and the wind outside screamed.

Don poured himself some coffee. He stood at the window, watching the storm tear the ground and branches apart. Then, he heard his son speaking from the table. The other men fell quiet, listening as Bo retold the story of border agents stopping and searching them as they came into Canada. It was a favorite in their developing canon. The men had agreed it was the van driver’s fault, fumbling over his words, but here was Bo evoking the shifty eyes of the teacher who had been sitting shotgun, which no one else noticed. Now the men were drawn in as he mimicked their scared faces in the holding area, jutted eyebrows and trembling lips. He was pretty good, working the timing like a pro. The men laughed from the gut, raspy cackles like what Don would hear from his dad.

The rain never stopped. All through the night, it rapped on the roof and pelted the windows. Don lay in his sleeping bag. He saw the past, fishermen waking up the morning after the death, unhitching a boat to return to that silent island. Perhaps they’d think of nature as a murderer or as something cold without thought or feeling. Maybe they sat in silence thinking of nothing. All he knew was that they beached the boat as he had done, gathered some stones, and made themselves a cairn. It was a small effigy. To see it would be to know it wasn’t enough. But cairns aren’t meant to be enough. They are meant to be there and that is all.

Like fingers on a keyboard, the rain on the roof drew Don again to the image of his father in the wake. It wouldn’t leave him, sticking to his mind like a dart. It was more real than the ceiling. He saw a creased shirt and runny nose, shriveled hands holding his hair. He built the image piece by piece until he found he missed his father a great deal. Maybe forgiveness is wishing there was more time between us, he thought, and a stone inside him turned into a stream. He slipped under a blanket of sleep as raindrops pattered on the window, the small, powerful things trying desperately to get in.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Aab

Minoo hasn’t been inside many hotels in her life, so she isn’t sure what to expect from the Azadi Hotel. While her parents are checking in, she assesses the cavernous lobby. Its walls are covered in gold wallpaper with a floral print that clashes badly with the blue and white carpet. There are clusters of uncomfortable-looking chairs, all of which have a view of the three huge screens that are blaring the government television station. She looks up at the vaulted ceilings and notices that the chandeliers dangling from them are covered in a thick layer of dust. The hotel was built before the Islamic Revolution; she wonders if the chandeliers have been cleaned since then.

She glances over toward the reception desk, where her father is paying for the room. Her mother is standing behind him looking a bit awkward, as if she isn’t certain what she is supposed to do in a hotel lobby or whether she should be here at all. Seeing her parents in these surroundings, Minoo feels a rush of tenderness for them. It was a stretch for them to afford this trip, the first the family has taken in several years, and she knows they are doing it for her.

The man behind the reception desk accepts the payment, then gives her father an envelope with the keys inside and points down the hallway toward the elevator.

The décor in the bedroom is tawdry, but it is clean. There is a king-sized bed along one wall, covered in a bright bedspread topped with gleaming white pillows. Behind it, Minoo spots an alcove that holds a tidy single bed where she guesses she will sleep. There is only one window in the room, and its view is of an opulent but grimy building that Minoo’s father has told her used to be a gambling casino but is now a school. At the back of the room, a sliding glass door leads out to a balcony overlooking the Caspian Sea.

The six-hour drive along winding roads in her father’s cramped Citroen had not been easy on Minoo’s stomach, and after helping her parents unpack, she goes out onto the hotel balcony to watch the sun make its descent over the horizon. From the fourth floor, the water looks blue and serene. The truth, Minoo knows, is quite another thing. It is common knowledge now that the Caspian Sea has become dangerously toxic. Oil refineries, industrial waste, radioactive waste, and untreated human waste have all been dumped into the sea for decades. Minoo has heard that the water has a foul odor and that suspicious-looking bubbles can be seen on its surface. But right now, from up here on the balcony, she finds the seascape beautiful.

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together. The women’s beach was marked off from the rest of the shoreline by a tall metal fence draped in black mesh that extended into the water and was closed off at the end. This hid the women from view and prevented them from venturing out far enough to mingle with the men, who were swimming freely on either side of the enclosure. Even though the men could not see them, Minoo and her mother were required to swim in their full hijab, including pants, a roopoosh, and a headscarf. Despite the discomfort, Minoo remembers the day as exhilarating. She and her mother frolicked in the waves, made jokes about what might be visible beneath their wet hijab, and went back to their hotel room with their clothing drenched and covered in sand. She has not been in a body of water larger than a bathtub since that day.

Minoo and her parents do not intend to swim during this trip. They have come to the Caspian to get away from the noise and pollution of Tehran, to be together, and to relax. They plan to spend their days on the coast doing things they rarely have time to do: shopping together in the open markets, going to restaurants, and sightseeing in some of the small seaside towns. They will certainly stroll along the beach, perhaps gather some seashells and dip their toes in the water, but they have no intention of getting fully into the sea. It’s not just the toxicity; it’s the fact that the beaches—those designated for men as well as those marked off for women—are now patrolled by angry female lifeguards covered from head to toe in black hijabs. They do not relish the thought of being scrutinized and screeched at by such women.

Even though she hasn’t been in many bodies of water, water has always called to Minoo. The first word she learned to write as a child was aab—water. It is the word every child learning to read and write Farsi begins with, because it is made up of the first two letters of the alphabet: aleph and be. But to Minoo, learning to write this word had a special kind of significance. She remembers feeling entranced by the way the two letters on the page seemed to suggest the shape of a body of water with a tree beside it. She has always loved the sound of the word, the way it can be rolled around in the mouth and held in the throat for a long time. She loves looking at pictures of the world’s beaches on the internet and imagining herself there, standing on the shoreline. Whenever Youtube can be accessed, she watches videos of female swimmers. She is fascinated by their lithe, muscular bodies cutting gracefully through the water. At times, she almost feels she is inhabiting those bodies, inhaling and exhaling with the swimmers, gliding through the water herself.

~

On the wall in the apartment where Minoo lives with her parents in central Tehran hang two old photographs of her grandmother, Nasrin Hashemi. As a child, Minoo would stare at these photographs in awe and disbelief, trying to reconcile those images of her grandmother with the puffy-eyed, careworn woman she knows as Mamani. Whenever Mamani comes to visit, she sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes and drinking endless cups of tea. How could Nasrin, the woman in the photographs, possibly be Mamani?

The photographs are grainy enlargements that have yellowed slightly with age, but what they depict is unmistakable. One of them shows a young Nasrin, probably seventeen or eighteen, huddled together with four other women who are around same age. All of them are wearing green and white one-piece swimsuits and white swimming caps, and all of them are glistening with water droplets, obviously having just emerged from a pool. The other photograph is of Nasrin standing alone, her hands on her slender hips, wearing a tight floral one-piece swimsuit. In this photograph she has no swim cap, and her long, dark tresses spill around her shoulders. Both photographs are captioned: Iranian National Women’s Swim Team, Asian Games, 1974.

When she grew older, Minoo learned to read the captions and place the photographs in the timeline of Iran’s history. By then, of course, her mother had explained to her that Mamani had been a champion swimmer in the years before the Revolution. Women were still allowed to swim in 1974, and they were even allowed to wear bathing suits just as women did elsewhere in the world. It was not considered sinful at the time for women athletes to display their bodies in front of men. Men didn’t just watch female swimmers—they followed them, supported them, cheered them on, and coached them.

Even now, at age sixteen, this seems unfathomable to Minoo. She knows, of course, that everything was different before the Revolution, that women wore miniskirts, went to nightclubs, and danced and sang in public. In her classes at school, she learned that these behaviors were part of Iran’s “Westoxication”—its exposure to the decadence and corruption of Western countries, primarily the United States. What she has difficulty fathoming is that her grandmother had once been so physically fit, so thin and muscular, so full of energy and vigor. Throughout Minoo’s life, Mamani has always been wrapped in dark, loose-fitting clothing that hides the shape of her rotund body. In the photograph, Nasrin is proudly parading her body. If one looks closely, the contours of her breasts are visible in the picture, and there is even a suggestion of her nipples. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the brazen way Nasrin is looking at the camera, as if to challenge the photographer, who must surely have been a man. The Mamani Minoo knows often casts her eyes downward.

Just four years after these photographs were taken, when Nasrin was still in her heyday as a swimmer, Khomeini came to power. Almost overnight, women were forbidden to swim. Minoo’s mother has told her that when she was growing up, Mamani rarely mentioned her swimming career. The pictures were not displayed in their home, and it wasn’t until she was older that Minoo’s mother learned that Mamani had been a competitive swimmer. When she discovered this, she asked Mamani if she could take swimming lessons, which were allowed in some of the female-only gyms in Tehran. Mamani just laughed at her and said, “In a hijab? That’s not swimming, my dear daughter.”

Whenever Mamani visits the apartment now, she averts her eyes when she passes by the photographs. Minoo has never heard her comment on them at all, except to mutter something like “Yaad-e-oon-roozha bekheyr. Those were the good ol’ days.” Although she won’t say so directly, Minoo knows that it pains her grandmother to remember her years as a young woman who was free, not only to swim, but to go to discotheques and dance and laugh in the company of men.

Although she never talks about her years as a swimmer, Mamani follows the news about women’s sports in Iran with great interest. A few years ago, she was outraged when she heard a story on the news about a female swimmer who swam for eight hours along the Caspian seacoast, breaking a record. She broke the record while wearing six kilos of clothing, including a full wet suit, a swimming cap, a scarf, and a cape covering her whole body. Her swim took place in a secluded part of the Caspian where there were no men present. And still, the authorities refused to register her time because her attire did not conform to Islamic norms.

More recently, Mamani was visiting their home when another heartbreaking news story came on television: a woman who was jailed for dressing like a boy and attending a men’s soccer match set herself on fire in protest of her sentence, dying from the burns a few days later. Upon hearing the story, Mamani burst into tears, cursed at the television, and ran from the room. When she came out later to have her tea, her eyes were even puffier than usual, and her hands shook as she lit her cigarette. She took a deep drag, and as she exhaled, she mumbled, “Those bastards!” through a cloud of smoke.

Mamani had an even stronger reaction when she heard a Grand Ayatollah and Islamic scholar addressing the topic of female athletes during a television interview. The moment has lodged in Minoo’s memory because it was one of the first times she realized how much anger her grandmother was carrying around. The Ayatollah was insisting that women should not participate in sports such as weightlifting because it ruined their bodies and compromised their femininity. Minoo remembers his exact words. “A woman who lifts weights is no woman,” he said. “The integrity of a woman is defined by becoming a mother and nurturing her children.”

As she watched the interview, Mamani shook her head in disgust. “Madar-ghahbe! Motherfucker!” she shouted at the television screen. Minoo, who had never heard her grandmother use such shocking language before, turned and stared at her. Mamani made no apologies. She did not turn her eyes away from the screen but instead continued shouting at it. “You filthy dog! You call yourself a scholar? You call yourself a leader? Who are you to say what a woman should do with her body? Who are you to decide what is feminine and what is not?”

Some of the news about Iranian women athletes fills Mamani with glee. Whenever she hears about a female athlete defecting to another country, as many have done in recent years, she applauds them. “Aafarin! Barak’Allah!” she will say. “Good for you!” When she heard that a female alpine skier had been chosen to carry the flag at the Winter Olympics, she waved her arms through the air joyfully and said, “Hurrah! It’s about time we joined the rest of the human race!”

Minoo’s parents invited Mamani to accompany them to the seaside for this trip, but she declined. Minoo cannot help but think that the sight of water fills her grandmother with sorrow and longing. It is less painful for her to stay at home drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

~

On the last night they are in the hotel, Minoo and her parents turn in early so they can be rested for the long trip back to Tehran. Lying in her single bed in the alcove, Minoo cannot sleep. She does not toss and turn, but instead lies perfectly still for a long time, listening to the sound of the lapping waves mingled with the sound of her parents’ gentle snoring.

She does not know what compels her to get out of bed—it is not a rational or deliberate decision. Soundlessly, she pulls back the covers, swings her legs off the bed, finds her slippers with her feet, and slips them on. Using the light of the moon to guide her, she walks over to the place where her roopoosh and headscarf are hanging, lifts them from the hook, and puts them on over her pajamas. She opens the door gently, walks down the narrow hallway to the elevator, gets in it, and pushes the button for the lobby.

When she enters the lobby and sees a man behind the desk, she has a moment of panic, thinking she might be stopped and interrogated. She doesn’t believe it is against the hotel’s rules for a guest—even a young, unaccompanied woman—to leave the hotel room and go for a walk, but just in case, she quickly plans what she will say: she has a headache and needs to get some air. Men do not question women who say they are in any kind of pain, as this could be an indirect reference to their menstrual cycles. The man behind the desk looks up and sees her, but he makes no attempt to stop her.

Outside, the moon, which is almost full, shimmers on the surface of the sea. The air is brisk for May, and there is a gentle breeze. Minoo’s roopoosh and headscarf flap around her as she walks, but the sensation is pleasant. The moon’s reflection draws her forward, and she aims directly for it, then realizes that the light is everywhere at once, dancing all across the water. She sees no toxic bubbles and smells no foul odors.

Guided by the moon’s light, she moves down the shoreline until she comes to the men’s section of the beach, which is not enclosed by a fence. The hotel is some distance away, and there is no one else in sight. As soon as she realizes she is alone, she does not hesitate: she strips off her headscarf, her slippers, her roopoosh, and her pajamas, and deposits them on the shore. Then she walks, stark naked, into the water.

The water encircles her, caressing first her ankles, then her knees, then her inner thighs, her breasts, and her shoulders. Finally, she submerges her full head under the sea until she feels her hair floating on the surface. She has never learned to swim, but her arms know what to do. She moves them with the rhythm of the waves, buoying her body and propelling it forward. Every part of her body comes alive.

Unafraid, she plunges deep below the surface again and again, like a fish. Each time she rises for a breath, she whispers, “Aab, aab.”

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care. Quietly reveled in it, in fact, since the rusticity, or whatever, sure seemed part and parcel with the thing seizing their lives, lifting their proverbial boats like the wind lifted those bald eagles they watched amazed from the tilted front stoop, soaring over the stubbly cornfields across the road. Her short stories were getting published left and right. So many there was talk she’d need an agent for her first book. Tim’s numbers-theory articles were landing in journals unchaperoned grad students weren’t supposed to be in. Grants and scholarships out the wazoo. Both of them. They kept startling their profs, who, though they taught at really a very good school, didn’t expect to have TAs gunning for their own jobs. And it scared them at first. Not the success, which seemed, in its way, right and proper, if not full-on promised. The farmhouse. With its scabby-red-paint iron roofs. Its turbid-water-vomiting backyard pump. Its creaky, perilously winding staircases. Yet the house had gotten it done. Cockeyed their lives sufficiently to let the success pour in. Country life. The left-field surprise of it. Even if they did still shop at SuperFresh. Even if the old rustbelt city was right there, other side of the “mountain.” Because had anyone told two-years-ago her she’d be planting zucchini. Going to class makeup-less, freckles flying. In threadbare OshKosh overalls from Goodwill. That Tim would grow that scraggly beard, so strange on so gentle and—okay—feminine a soul. And she did know it was obnoxious, maybe, the place’s becoming hangout du jour for both their departments, stealing social thunder from certain untenured faculty, one of them, Rachel O_____, her thesis director, fresh from a program so huge you trembled just hearing its name. Every weekend, by their second spring there, people crowding the yard. Girls (women) lounging in dilapidated lawn chairs under the big elm, under the soulfully glowing Japanese lanterns she’d hung. Boys (boys) strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, arguing Scorsese vs. Kubrick, Chomsky vs. Foucault. People’s dogs romping in the sunflower patch. Everyone drinking. Everyone. All the time. Crashing overnight, as necessary, on the grungy old futon in what it amused them—as it had perhaps amused those getting hammered in it a century before—to call the parlor. Odd interdepartmental hookups. Clouds of patchouli and pheromones drifting over the unmowed, unfenced backyard on summer nights. Scenes seeming, with enough wine, weirdly meaningful, Whitmanesque, every glistening bicep, every un-bra-restrained nipple an expression of the universe’s urge, urge, urge. Cheap shiraz and ice cream made her the teensiest bit chubby and now even girls were hitting on her. Women. Not that she and Farmer Tim weren’t off the proverbial menu. But still. Halcyon. All of it. Until, at least, their third summer there. When their guests, or whatever, suddenly started sitting around staring at those wretched, wretched devices. Caveman-typing with their thumbs. Deploying idiot hieroglyphs to express whichever of three corporate-sanctioned emotions. Morphing themselves, out of some perverse-unto-satanic impulse, into screenbound advertising campaigns for themselves to be consumed by the same people in whose physical company they sat. She could not get her head around it. Couldn’t believe the whole world was poised, at the very moment it was blooming for her, to vanish up its own digital ass. How did she compete with vacation porn, fancy-drinks porn, home-decor porn? Porn porn? How did you write for people craving a nonstop dopamine drip of GIFs and memes? The violence with which her soul, or whatever, rejected it helped explain, maybe, why she let an inebriated Rachel O_____ lap at her mouth and feel her up one August night in the shabby Formica kitchen, a half-dozen highly entertained guests in witness. Compelled, finally, to pay attention to something other than their goddamn iPhones. A reassertion, call it, of the primacy of the real. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end. Rachel O_____ abruptly quit speaking to her—about anything, anyway, other than the thesis. It wounded her out of all proportion. Probably because she’d never had so pedigreed a friend and an Olympus dweller’s rejection augured nothing good where her own heights-scaling ambitions were concerned. Tim, for his part, pitched no mortified-partner fit. Did, however, seize an opportunity to tearfully confess he was hot for an infuriatingly beautiful undergrad boy—a senior, but still, for Christ’s sake—who sang Jeff Buckley songs like some sort of fucking angel and had over a thousand Facebook “friends.” She wanted to tell him this was not who he was, only it was tough arguing with anything as moronically honest as a hard-on. Circa that fall semester’s start, it occurred to her she hadn’t seen an acceptance in months. That her new stories were insipid. That the raves Rachel O_____ kept scrawling on them were disingenuous or mean or both. That her father was right about her “career choice.” Glancing out the farmhouse’s bedroom window one November morning she discovered a different sort of party happening: buzzards feasting on a car-struck deer gone down in the veggie garden, one standing priestly atop the exposed ribcage, wings outstretched. All those soaring eagles were doing was corralling terrified rodents. After she and Tim split up and vacated the farmhouse—a mere rental, for all their fondness—she took a medical-tech-writing job in Chicago. Which moved her, after a few years, to Atlanta. Which moved her, a few years after that, to D.C. She kept waiting to meet the person—dude, chick, whatever—she’d fall for the same way she’d fallen for Tim. In some state park it would happen. At some gallery. At a work friend’s kid’s graduation party. Kept waiting, too, for the not-just-want-but-need to write to come back. Thought she felt, every so often, her old muse tugging her wrist, then found, sitting down with the legal pad, it was just the ghost of Jackie Collins. Such a long road back it would be. To writing. With ever more years passing. Outrageous, time’s breathless gallop. She often thought of Tim. Teaching pure mathematics, whatever that was, at UC Riverside. Still bearded, she saw online. Married to some younger man. She thought, too—usually while staring out her condo’s dining-room window at a sunset mirrored in the twin high-rise’s glassy façade—about the farmhouse. Permitted herself, finally, to hunt for it in Google Maps. Discovered, dropping down to street view, a McMansion enclave on the ancient beanfield where it had stood. That adorable, scary little house. She’d been harboring, she realized, some vague plan to go see it again. To stop the Volvo on the road out front, mount the tilted stoop. Summon, if possible, the courage to knock. That same night she dreamed what she thought, startled awake, was a memory. Was it? Of the time a Jesus Christ-grade racket woke her in the dead of night. Emanating from atop the ceiling atop Tim’s and her bed. Something murdering something. Farmer Tim unrousable. Post-party fumy. For some reason the power was out. She bumbled downstairs, hand on plaster wall so she didn’t slip and break her neck on that insane staircase. Knocked over God knows how many empty beer bottles in the kitchen, groping around the counter for the flashlight. Which, happed upon, actually worked. Sort of. She headed back upstairs, stepping over places she knew jutting nailheads to be. Opened, on the second-floor landing, the creaky door to the attic staircase. “Tim!” she hollered. Got only a rumble of thunder for an answer. That and more slapping, thwacking, screeching racket from up above. She started climbing, free hand on the steep, dusty stairs in front of her. Air getting warmer and closer and warmer. Holy hell, she was brave back then. Heat lightning throbbed in a dormer window. Her head cleared the tops of the floorboards and she twisted in place, naked feet braced on two different steps. Aimed the fast-dimming flashlight beam into the attic’s nether regions. Stood transfixed by the pair of bright red eyes glaring back at her from deep inside all that dark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Excerpt from Salt Bones

Cover of Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan

The Salton Sea,
Southern California

An excerpt from Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan
(Mulholland/Little Brown, July 2025)

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Thick, noxious air burns her throat as she flees through the fields, mud clotting to her soles like leeches, one untied shoe after the other over the rutted vegetables.

She shouldn’t run toward the water—it isn’t safe. But the murk would offer cover.

She doesn’t risk a glance behind her or fumble at the yellow onions bulging from the ground. At first, it’s the familiar stench of sulfur bubbling from deep in the earth, mangled with the smell of rotting fish, thousands of carcasses gurgled onto the brackish marsh just ahead.

Then something intoxicatingly sweet fills her nostrils. She’s not near the sugar plant on the other side of town, but those sugar beets smell like overripe dirt anyway. This is more walking into the donut shop at sunrise and ordering a maple bar and sweet tea. She shakes her head, sure her blood sugar’s collapsing from starvation and dehydration and she’s about to nose- dive into the fields when the sweetness sours just as suddenly as it came—and she’s overtaken by the dank stench of sweat and shit.

Her heartbeat throbs in her ears, eclipsing the sound of a truck engine’s roar—another predator in the night, tearing through the furrows and ruining the crops, chasing her.

Would anyone hear her if she screamed?

She can’t waste the breath she needs for running.

In the distance, golden lights twinkle a mythical city arisen in the nowhere between the closest towns, neglected or desolate, and the still-living, breathing town where her people are.

But the lights aren’t magical, and they’re far, much too far. She’d never outrun the truck to get to the geothermal plant where someone at the gate might hear her. Let her in. But would they believe her if she told them who was after her?

A few hundred feet ahead stands a dock. Rickety and slanted, but still possible cover. She could jump into the frothy, stinking water, hold her breath, and hide beneath the battered, salt- crusted planks. Her pursuers might assume she’s darted toward the wildlife preserve, climbed the chain link. Or drowned.

The fug of gasoline and exhaust commingles with the acrid sea, fertilizer, her own sweat and spit, and her blood pumping, pumping furiously. Her lungs scream. Don’t let me die out here—

The sky lights a purple path upward—the Milky Way beckoning as if someone’s holding a flashlight behind a pinpricked cosmic bedsheet. It cascades across the expansive blackness that blurs into the jagged peaks of the Chocolate Mountains beyond this stretch of desert that’s claimed countless lives.

The clomping of hooves and a blaze of headlights pierce her back. Her dark hair flaps crow’s wings against her sweat-drenched hoodie as her high-tops slip against the mud.

There’s nowhere to hide, no tree cover, nothing but shrubs and dirt, and the green fingers of onion bulbs wavering the hands of the dead, reaching for her, grabbing, pulling her downward.

She falls to her knees, blackening her hands with soil.

But the creature canters steadily toward her.

She scrambles up, the Salton Sea in sight, a soupy bog in the darkness.

Her feet crunch fish bones and the minuscule shells of dead crustaceans; millions of them crackle beneath her while she flies toward the pier stretching into the abandoned lake, all that “accidental” water sloshing for miles across the dusty bowl of valle, before the headlights overtake her, and the horse-headed woman cackles, her midnight-black mane scraggling down her bare back.

For a moment, she’s glowing yellow, gleaming with beads of sweat. Saintly.

Jennifer Givhan, author of Salt Bones

Then the gunshots resound.

One. Two. The deafening booms reverberate through the mountains. Aerial drills. Only this is no drill. Following the shots—metal clanks its sick click, click. Boom, click, click. Boom.

If anyone were out here but the night animals, the stars, they’ve shut their eyes.

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Jennifer Givhan is an award-winning Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert. To learn more about her upcoming fourth novel, Salt Bones, from which this excerpt is taken, read our interview with Givhan in conversation with Mary McMyne in the “High-Beams.”