He arrived nine days after the fire began. He said he’d read about it in the paper, but he didn’t say which one. My father the mayor was asleep in his chair. My mother invited the stranger inside and she took his coat. I was right nearby but my mother called out loud to me. She said, wake your father. Tell him a man is here to help.

He said his name was Peter and he said he was a scientist. He said he wanted to go to the fire immediately. My mother said oh but that he’d been traveling all day and we couldn’t possibly. My father said indeed and the fire would keep as after all it had changed neither size nor scope in the nine days since its starting. The stranger said but it is a menace. My father said we suppose so. My mother said, but just to me, make up the guest room. Use the summer sheets.

He appeared in the doorway while I was tucking the quilt all around. His clothes were badly fitted, but his boots were good and he stood up straight inside them. His face was gold or reddish or that was the light from outside. The fire made a funny sort of night. He asked me which way to the bathroom and then put out his hand before I could speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m Peter.”

I boxed a pillow and nodded. I pointed to the right. I watched him put his hand down and I watched him walk away. I boxed another pillow. I smoothed the quilt. I thought I wanted something but I wasn’t sure what.

In the morning I saddled two horses. My father’s horse for Peter, and my horse for my father. Peter was comfortable in his seat and his boots made sense.

“Do you have any tools?” asked my father.

“We’ll see first if I need them,” he said. He looked my way and I looked back. My mother was on the porch and she saw it, or expected it. I stood with her as they rode away.

“Shouldn’t you go with them?” she asked.

“What for?” I asked.

She looked at me and it wasn’t mean but I saw that she knew.

“I’m not at all sure what that man’s about,” she said. “But it’s best always to fix your mistakes before strangers go and do.”

“There aren’t enough horses,” I said.

“I suppose,” she said.

“And It wasn’t a mistake,” I said.

“Your grandmother,” she began. Then she stopped. Then she went inside.

I started to walk.

The fire was in a valley, alongside a creekbed. It was a half mile long and it burned upwards. In appearance it did not move, or change, or take in any fuel. Except that wasn’t exactly so, about the fuel, and in side effect it was so that the closer I got, the louder the screams that no one else could hear. The tips of my fingers burned, too, and I started to cry. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t help it. The wind around me hurried and hurried and I knew it was not wind at all.

Peter and my father were as near as they could get. My father was gesturing at the sky and Peter was crouched, his hand resting flat on the ground. My father still thought he was a scientist, but. I could see how he was low. I could see how he was selfish. The good men always had reasons and reasons are never clean.

Back beyond a maple tree I, too, I dropped to a crouch and pressed my hand against the ground. My father continued to talk but Peter knew I was there the second my fingertips brushed the dirt. I saw the charge go through him. He stood and turned as though to hear my father better but he was looking for me. I stayed down and I breathed. The maple smelled like ice.

“Your mother refuses to know what we know,” my grandmother had said. “But it’s your right. Your ability makes it your right.”

I said a word and the screams were mute to me and I could hear Peter ask my father, how old is your daughter?

“I’m sixteen,” I said, suddenly close. They started, skittered, slipped off balance the both of them like drunken squirrels. I smiled anchored and tall on my horse. My father hung his mouth wide and Peter held his hand out as before, the bedroom. Except it was the reins he wanted. Not my hand any longer.

“It’s a seam,” said Peter.

“Sweetheart,” said my father.

“But what sort?” asked Peter.

“Sweetheart, go on home,” said my father.

“Just tell me that,” said Peter.

“It’s not a seam,” I said.

“Then?” asked Peter.

“It’s meant to help,” I said, and I said a word, and then they could both hear the screams. My father covered his ears and Peter looked back at the fire. I saw him understand it. I saw him look at me for real.

“It’s a socket,” he said.

“There’s a prettier name for it, in the original,” I said. “But yes.”

“This isn’t help,” he said.

“We’re safe,” I said. “Safer every day it lives.”

“It just eats. It can’t sustain,” he said.

“Have you ever seen one last for nine days?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t end the way the rest of them do.”

My father with his ears covered looked angry, and like he didn’t know why. Like he’d never said to me it would be better if things were different and like now that they were he didn’t understand he’d got what he wanted. Like now that things were better he was the stupidest man I’d ever met.

I said to my father, the mayor,

“You know he’s not even a scientist.”

And he said to me,

“I can’t hear you, sweetheart!”

The fire reared suddenly and I saw that Peter was talking to it. I jumped off of my horse and I grabbed Peter’s arm. He held me back. His lips moved fast. The fire was buckling. I crouched and hit the ground with both hands. The fire was mine to begin with and it would listen to me. I felt my father’s arms confusing around me, but the ground was strong and the ground held me down. Peter’s voice sounded beautiful, just, perfect and perfect and I punctured it with my own until the screams started to laugh.

Then we were looking at each other, Peter and I, turned to one another at the same moment because neither of us could not, forever. His eyes were yellow and mine were red. His hands looked like water. My hands looked like coal. My father had let go of me and was up on his horse. The fire was larger than ever. Peter was tall in his boots.

I said a word, and I said a word, and the fire looked like grapevines under a frost, and then it shattered, and I lay on the ground knowing I would never have to be dead. Peter leaned over me, soon and weak. My father yelled, simple and triumphant. I stood up on my own but Peter was in my ear.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “And you didn’t mean it.”

I looked at his eyes, which were blue, now, and I smiled, and embraced him, and put my lips on his neck where the vibrations would best carry.

“Next time,” I said. “You won’t hear about it first.”

“No,” he said, wonderful in his panic. “No.”

“Next time,” I said, and I grasped his hand, and I turned to my father.

“Mom’s made a chicken,” I said. “And Peter will be hungry.”

Of course everything was smaller than Kathleen remembered, even the desks. In particular, the desks. But, now, what had she really expected? Had she expected the desk at which she had sat, age eight, had she expected that desk to fit her now? Had she, really? Had she really, really, really-really expected these desks to be the same size as  a BA in Biology, an MA in Criminal Justice, a contract with a shadowy government agency, a salary with sterling benefits, a life with furniture?

It was almost stupid to think that she’d ever been told to sit at a desk at all.

Kathleen hadn’t yet found a way to tell her partner, Benny, that this particular elementary school was her alma mater. Not that she was allowed to divulge that kind of personal data, although, not that it really would have ruined the operation if she had said something. She wouldn’t have bored him with the nostalgic things, of course, she wouldn’t have told him the significance of this water fountain or that rusted book return. She would have just told him, look, although this operation is covert and the best way to be invisible is to never ask any questions, the fact is that I know the fastest way to run from the playground to the caf without even studying the contents of that leather folder. The fact is that I know there’s no gas connected in any of the science rooms. The fact is that there’s an alcove off the gym where kids take music lessons. It’s a storage closet but there’s a piano in there, and probably some blunt objects. That part would have make him smile. Benny liked blunt objects because they always worked.

She kept close to the fourth-grade walls (family photos stapled to reports written on thickly ruled three-hole punch paper), her starfish-shaped alien-egg-locator-device (blinking, but quiet) in her right hand and a digital camera in her left. Her gun remained belted. It didn’t seem right and they didn’t know how The Bird (which was what they were calling it, although, talk about a failure of vocabulary) would even react to bullets. As Kathleen turned the corner towards the second grade hallway, she saw Benny crouched in the doorway of the nurse’s office, his ear pressed against the skinny wooden door. He beckoned to her and she crossed to crouch beside him.

“The Bird wouldn’t be in there,” she murmured. “He said it wants bathrooms. For the water pressure. To lay eggs.”

“I don’t think we’re calling them eggs,” said Benny. “That’s not what J.M. called them, anyway.”

“Who cares,” said Kathleen.

“You should,” said Benny. “That stuff gets in the water supply–”

“I know,” she said. “Etcetera etcetera we all go to hell.”

“Well,” said Benny. “Anyway, there are always sinks in nurse’s offices.”

Kathleen couldn’t picture a sink in the nurse’s office at all, in fact the only thing she could recall was a curtain and a voice coming through headphones to demand whether or not the apple was sitting on or off the picnic table. A vision test, maybe, or just a bad dream. Sinks, however.

“Sinks are in every classroom,” she said.

“I know, I saw the plans,” said Benny.

“No,” said Kathleen. “I mean–yes. Every classroom.”

“Quiet,” he said, not unkindly though he had every right to be annoyed. Actually he never really snapped at her, which she figured was because he was so much older than her. Probably there was someone she reminded him of, but they never talked about things like that. Kathleen put away her camera and drew the gun after all. Benny nodded and counted off with his fingers in the air. They burst in, shoes squeaking.

Of course The Bird was in there–Benny had wonderful instincts–but now it was making a noise like a siren and knocking over flasks of tongue depressors. Benny screamed at it like he screamed at everything they trapped–Benny did not have a great bedside manner–while Kathleen kept her eyes on the wings. J.M. had said about the wings that aside from being the reason he wanted to call this thing The Bird, the wings were also the creature’s most dangerous part.

She had a syringe that J.M. had given her and now Benny was yelling at her as well as at the bird and what, why, just because it was taking her just forever to get it out of her pouch, god! Why’d she drawn her gun in the first place! Now it was in the way and everything seemed to catch on everything else OH GODDAMN she hated having to approach these things with Benny’s gun swinging and swiveling and the bird’s head doing the same so she yelled too, something nonsense like, EVERYBODY IN THE POOL! And she stuck the needle in the damn glowing panhandle of a foot this bird had, and wouldn’t you know it, as soon as the sedative or whatever (J.M. hated to explain) hit the blood or whatever (did these things ever bleed) the thing stopped looking like a bird and kind of collapsed, the glowing ceasing, the bird now looking for all the world like a furry eel that had sort of grown legs.

“The wings must have retracted,” said Benny.

“I don’t think we’re calling them wings,” said Kathleen, quite unkindly, but Benny already had left the room to get the cage.

The sink that Kathleen had not been able to remember turned out to be right next to the door, easy to miss if you were eight years old and just barreling into the room as quick as you could to get a bandage and some sympathy. The faucet was on, she noticed, and then immediately she felt sick. The footed-eel-bird had already got to the water. She pulled out the tracking device which was all of a sudden going off like bonkers, of course, fantastic, the damn thing couldn’t have warned her earlier, could it, and now they’d have to shut down the school and she have to make an unpleasant phone call.

She pocketed the device, turned off the faucet, and waited for Benny to come back. When he did he had both the cage and that awful, righteous look in his eye he got after every capture. She wanted to undercut him, somehow, punch him in his stupid fleshy ego, but they did have to work together the next day, and the next, and the next next next on to the horizon, so, it was better to take a breath and focus on the acoustic tile.

“What’s with you?” he said as he gently slipped the creature through the cage door.

“The water was on,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said.

“Benny,” she said, and pulled the device back out, holding it near the sink. Blink blip-TA-blip-TA-blip-TA-blip-TA and Benny cursed. The creature sighed in its sleep and Kathleen thought she saw a smile on its hovering face.

“We have to call J.M.,” said Benny.

“I can do it,” said Kathleen, and for this Benny squeezed her shoulder with his bear paw hand. J.M. took to her better than Benny, naturally, it was the sweetpea lilt she pressed into her voice whenever they spoke. They were a coalition of manipulators and on top of this she was a girl, fantastic! And all the riches therein.

Benny left her in the nurse’s office to make the call but she didn’t stay there, choosing instead to walk back to the library. She swept aside some picture books and sat on a low bookcase, near a radiator. From the windows there she watched as Benny loaded the van, taking such good professional care to keep the cage level. He shut the doors of the van, checked his watch and his messages, then glanced back at the school, apparently wondering where she was. After another minute he walked a few yards from the van and lit a cigarette. Later he would probably lie to his tolerant wife about the cigarette’s existence. Wife-lying happened a lot. Kathleen would get around it by not marrying. She had already decided.

Kathleen knew she was young and there were other things about her life, aside from not marrying, that would need to be sorted out. Mostly though she felt these things would shake out on their own. Plus soon, she thought, she’d be hardened and tough and it would feel like an age and a lifetime since she had felt the feeling she was right now feeling all the time. The feeling like any day now she would go absolutely crazy and tell J.M. everything that Benny had told her in confidence, or maybe tell Benny everything that J.M. had told her confidence. Those exchanges alone would likely make the whole operation collapse. Or she could get a new partner and tell him (him him him him him) some choice secrets and then,–she smiled, as she piled some books under her head and kicked a few more off the shelf to make room for her legs–well, really that’s all it would take! Just a few years of slipping secrets and J.M.’s job would be hers, unless they hired anyone prettier in the meantime which was not likely to happen, because were they even hiring? Or what if she died.

The radiator blew cold air through her fingers and she called J.M. while still lying down.

In the van she and Benny didn’t speak right away, then he asked her if she was hungry and she said no, and oh, not to worry about J.M., he didn’t sound mad at all. Benny didn’t believe her, but instead of saying that, he said he was hungry, and she said, well, they had to make the drop before they got anything to eat, and Benny said of course in a particular way that meant she’d offended him, of course.

“He’s looking for a way to let me go, you know,” said Benny.

“He knows this wasn’t your fault,” said Kathleen.

Benny turned up the radio, which is why they didn’t hear the bird as it cried out awake, and why they didn’t hear it maneuvering the lock, and why, at the moment their van veered off the highway and slammed into three trees, the whole thing was coming as a complete surprise to both of them.

I heard his footsteps all the way down the stairs. He took them two at a time and then stopped in front of my apartment door, sweeping his hand through his pocket, searching for his key. I was still in the shower, and I was accidentally holding my breath. When I exhaled, the sound of air blocked the click of the open, the slam of the close. Something to remember. He paused to look through my mail. I took my time.

“Hey,” he called through the bathroom door.

“What?” I said.

He couldn’t tell if I meant, what, I can’t hear you, or, what, what is it? So he just continued down the hallway to the kitchen, oh. He wanted to make me dinner. The cutting board slammed on the counter, the soup pot rang out. I brushed my teeth to the rhythm of him, chopping onions. Together we sounded like wild applause.

I didn’t get dressed because I didn’t need to do things like that in my own home. In flip-flops and a stupid bathrobe, I walked to the kitchen and tapped my fingers on the doorframe.

“What?” I said.

“Hey,” he said, and he kissed me with the knife still in his hand.

“You didn’t call,” I said.

“Do you have plans?” he said.

“Just because you have a key doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call,” I said. “How was your day?”

He shrugged, and I thought, oh, you have got to be kidding me! as he turned to the stove and hunched a bit, squinting to match dials to burners. The gas went tick-tick-tick and I flinched. He noticed. I smiled. The fire sprung up and he turned full to face me, I mean, I could tell he was really looking this time, and he put down the knife.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“What are you making?” I said.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, but differently.

“Yeah,” I said.

We waited.

“I got a superpower, you idiot,” I said.

I probably should have held back longer because of how this was going to change everything, but probably he would have figured it out anyway, at least by the end of dinner, and even though this soup thing was a little presumptuous, I was hungry. Also my ears were really starting to hurt because of how hard it was to concentrate while he was just standing there not knowing. I had to keep concentrating. Already I had figured out that much.

“Turn off the gas,” I said, and I showed him my wrists, which were red where they’d been tied behind me. Fast, before I could protest, he had me cradled in his arms with his head down weeping into my neck. He was going, why me, why me, why me, why me, why me why did I do this to you, and I wanted to be like, jesus christ, first of all please keep it down and second of all you didn’t, it was that fuckwad with the black hat and black car and the three henchmen of different body weights. Except, it made me feel a little better now that he was taking the blame. I guess if you knew how little he opens up about the reality of things, you would agree that sometimes the most awful things are necessary if only because otherwise we’d just get fat staring at the prettiest lies.

He cupped his hands over my ears. His hands were wonderful, large and thick and never cold. Superhero circulation is just one of those things.

“Does that make it better?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, sure. Your skin is basically lead, right? But you can’t go round with your hands over my ears all the time.”

He was quiet for a moment and so rather than make him formulate the question himself I reached into the pocket of my bathrobe and pulled out the note they had earlier pinned to my t-shirt. The intent had obviously been for him to find me, tied and crying and newly sonic, but I’d sawed myself free with a steak knife from the dishwasher. He read the note in a glance–I always forgot about the speed reading–then crumpled it with the angriest exhale. I unraveled myself from his arms.

“I’m coming with you,” I said, in the defiant voice of all who had come before me.

“It’s too dangerous,” of course he said.

“You have to take me seriously, now,” I said.

“What?” he said. “I mean, I do. But–”

I walked past him to the kitchen and concentrated as I turned on the gas. The onions went in first, and then the carrots, then the potatoes and the celery and the beans and the broth, and I stirred. Everything roared and roared if I let it, and I let it. He stood behind me with his hands on my hips and he told me things I didn’t quite catch.

On a rainy Friday night I’m again in the dolphin-run laundromat on 123rd, watching the races on cable access while my unmentionables take a spin. Might not be the height of a happening eve but it ain’t at all a bad place to wash your clothes. Benny and EveEllen opened the place just as that dolphin craze hit its peak in the mid-nineties. I know you know how most of their kind couldn’t see a world past Lisa Frank, but these two had real brains behind those bottle noses. As such it’s a damn well-run joint, free of the filth who would put pleather in the dryers and throw your still-dripping clothes into rusty old chairs when you’ve just slipped around the corner for an egg cream.

It is in fact the kind of place you go to feel at home when you don’t necessarily got a home to feel at all.

It’s only regulars in the ranks tonight. The babysitter from upstairs is separating colors, the old man from across the way is in the window staring at the bus-stop girls, and the bartender from the daylight Irish pub is folding socks into neat balls. I’m sitting on one of the worn plank gangways over Benny and EveEllen’s main tank, my feet dangling in the cool water while I take hits from a amber-brown bottle wrapped up in a paper bag. EveEllen swims up to me and nudges my ankles with her nose.

“Steep, you girl, you know we don’t allow that stuff in here,” she says, quiet, so as not to embarrass. The box on the wall translates.

“I know it,” I say.

“Well, you best not let Benny see,” she says. “He’ll just want a sip.”

“I never have seen a drunk dolphin,” I say. “Might be worth it.”

That makes her laugh.

“I don’t know why you do the kind of work you do,” she says. “When you ought to be doing something better.”

“It’s too late for me,” I say. “It always is for some people. You know I seen more than that machine can translate.”

“Please,” she says. “Surely you must know how Benny and I worry.”

“Well, quit it,” I say. “Where is that old sack, anyway?”

“Nosing the books,” she says.

“Cooking them is more like,” I say. “You know you’re too good for him.”

“Not all of us got the same choices as a pretty girl of your aperitif,” she says.

Sometimes the box gets things wrong.

“Haven’t you got other customers to torment?” I ask.

“Hmph,” she says. “And your ankles best be clean.” Then she swims away.

I drink to not taking the compliment, then pull my feet out of the water and roll down the cuffs of my jeans. Barefoot and a bit tippled, I pad across the plank and down the concrete stairs to my washing machine. I count five four three with my hand in the air and shout BUZZZZZZZ along with the machine. The man in the window looks my way and waves me down like I’m the pervert, but no one else looks up. I think Steep, old girl, you need yourself a boyfriend to take you out of this place. I think, hell Steep, pretty lady, you need yourself a husband to pull you out of this town. I think gee dee, Steep, you cow, you need a cop and a handbasket send you straight down the river to the farm. Or just maybe you need a desk job.

As I sort through my damp laundry, liberating things un-dryable, the ‘mat door goes flying open like it was from a gust of wind. I pause with underpants in one hand and more underpants in the other. In the doorway stands a beautiful woman of six or more feet. She has a bag of laundry slung over her shoulder and a half-cocked smile on her face, and she says:

“Is this where a girl can get a clean?”

We all sorta stare at her for a second, thinking, what a dumbass. Then the babysitter starts to laugh and laugh and the old man in the window turns away and the bartender makes a racist joke for absolutely no reason at all. Benny swims up using the center tank and tells us all to hush up, then asks the woman what’ll she have.

“Just a wash and dry,” she says. “Nothing special.”

“We got just the thing,” says Benny. He leads the newcomer down to a washing machine a few units down from mine. As she goes by, the light reflects off the water in such a way that I see what I see. A time machine, ten years back: my hands go frostbite, my breath goes vacuum. This stranger ain’t a stranger at all, not to me.

Man, can’t a girl catch a break!

I turn towards the row of dryers and throw my garments in there, one by one, plotting my most brilliant strategy. It has to be brilliant because she too happens to be brilliant, maybe moreso than me but my advantage is that I have recognized her and she has not recognized me. Unless of course that is her own brilliant strategy and–here I pause to hiccup–and if so then I have been outsmarted again. I slam the dryer closed, drop in four quarters, and hit Lo, for the environment. Then as a safeguard I flip the hood of my sweatshirt up. In these fleece confines I count my weapons.

By now Benny has left her and the stranger is bent over her mesh bag, pulling out dirty t-shirts and jeans crumpled like paper flowers. My feet are still bare and I move quietly, aurally masked by the fluorescents buzzing and the lazy lap of the water. I am behind her as she closes the lid of the machine. I am behind her as she deposits four quarters and presses Permanent P. I am behind her as I make my move: flat kicking her left knee and shoving her towards the machine with the full force of my weight. I grab her left hand with mine, wrenching it behind her, then twist my right arm around her neck and press into it the sorry edge of a small and rusted pocketknife.

“Don’t think you’ll ever be clean, Olivia K.,” I say.

“Easy, Imogene,” she says. “Let’s take it easy.”

She’s strong and she knows I can’t hold her, even with her left leg curled in pain as it is. I feel her tense for the push and I let go, holding the knife out and ducking her punch easily. Now as we face off the regulars are starting to take notice. The babysitter starts grabbing for her stuff–she’s got too many arrests to be here much longer. The pervert, too, but he likes a good scrap, especially between girls, and so he stays for the entertainment. The bartender yells for Benny, but he’s already there trying to talk us down.

“Now you know we can’t have this kind of trouble, Steep,” he’s saying. “Not with the marine crackdowns how they are.”

“No trouble, Benny,” I say.

“She’s drunk!” calls EveEllen from the back.

“I amn’t,” I say.

“Steep, huh?” says Olivia.

“That’s what they call me,” I say.

“That what they call you or that’s who you say you are?” she asks.

We are circling in a pentagon sort of way, taking the angles to make sure we don’t slip into the center tank. She’s got nothing in her hands and nothing to grab, unless she plans to strangle me with a pullover. Which come to think of it she just might.

“What’re you doing here, Olivia?” I say.

“Came to find you, Imogene,” she says.

“Funny,” I say. “Think you might have had more luck going back to that trench where you left me in the first place.”

“I knew you’d get out,” she says.

“May you be so lucky,” I say, and then I lunge, aiming for the bad knee and holding tight as the two of us roll. I slice the steam-air and narrowly miss her face, cutting instead a bit of her shoulder. She cries out and uses the strength she had apparently been holding back for kindness’ sake. Together we topple into the tank and underwater her blood looks like gasoline puddles. I lose the knife somewhere and just kick blindly, squeezing my eyes shut against the water-sting.

Overhead there is a dull explosion.

I break the surface with a gasp and pull myself out, sodden and sticking to the floor. Olivia treads water and stares wide-eyed at the front tank, where EveEllen’s got her auto-gun out and is pointing it back and forth like she can’t figure which of us deserves it more. There’s already a bullet in the ceiling. Benny’s screaming and the box has quit translating, he’s speaking so badly.

I stalk over to the bartender’s dryer, rip it open mid-cycle, and pull out a hot towel. He doesn’t object.

“Throw her out,” I say to Benny.

“This is my laundromat,” he says. “I throw out who I like.”

“Fine,” I say.

I walk over to the edge where Olivia is tiring and I hold out my hand. She eyes it and waits for confirmation. Only I just stare because it’s not my problem if she does or doesn’t. When she does I almost fall in again, but we get our balance and she sprawls out on the floor. I drop the used towel over her and head to my dryer. When it goes buzz, I just dump everything in a bag. Nothing’s getting folded tonight.

EveEllen’s still fretting at the main tank and I go to calm her. I tell her about Olivia and what she’s done. EveEllen says everyone makes bad choices, surely I am no stranger to that. I tell her I know and that’s why Olivia isn’t dead now on her floor, that and I love EveEllen too much to make her deal with my kind any further. I tell her I’ll leave and never come back but I hope she knows this is where I want to be. I tell her she knows what I do for a living and Olivia’s the one that made me this way. EveEllen says no one can make you any way. I say well maybe then I wasn’t made this way. Maybe I was left one way and then left to make my way, another way.

I say does she want me gone. Well, you never heard a dolphin cry before. I put my chin at the edge of her tank and she says it’s all right if I touch her head.

When I come back down the stairs, Olivia is waiting for me. Her wet laundry is bagged, dripping behind her.

“You know I got more than a damn knife right now,” I say.

“I know you know how to choose,” she says.

“I never would have had to,” I say.

“You always would have wanted to learn,” she says.

“That’s predictive predetermination,” I say.

“No, that’s just you,” she says. “Since we were babies down the street of each other.”

She holds the door open for me. The pervert in the window says,

“Don’t go punching each other in the face!”

And laughs forever.

It just quit raining and the city’s been cooled; my legs, too, and the jeans are caked to my skin. The air smells like asphalt and vinegar and I have this sudden urge to hold Olivia’s hand. Instead I stuff my left fist in my pocket, tighten my right hand’s grip on the laundry bag.

“So are you banned for life?” she asks.

“They wouldn’t,” I say. “I’m like a daughter to them.”

“They’re dolphins,” she says.

“I don’t have what you want,” I say, to keep it simple.

“You got forgiveness,” she says. “For your old childhood friend.”

“You still owe me three lemons and a half pound of sugar,” I say. “Not to mention dignity and pride. Not to mention the trench.”

“I know things that will ease the trench from you,” she says.

“You don’t,” I say. I thumb south. “That’s my way. It better not be yours less you want to know how good I’ve become at everything you taught me.”

“You make you,” she says.

“We make me,” I say. “And you, too.”

She heaves a breath, cocks that smile. Her ears are bigger than I ever would have drawn them for the police, were I that kind of girl. This is the first night she will try me, and because I am now experienced I know there will be others. Maybe mornings, too, maybe afternoons. She’ll be a reasonable, calm, and worthless shadow, and I’ll feel good by the pursuit. We’ll start to dream of each other and it’ll all go wrong the next time, and the dolphins won’t forgive me, and the knife won’t be dull, and neither of us will know how to swim either.

I drop the laundry and punch her in the face. Her nose breaks. The threat to society laughs in the window and pounds on the glass. Olivia howls and I pick up my laundry again. I walk south, which is my direction, and she never follows.

The first awful thing she ever said to him! He might not remember but she really does. Well he might remember but he’s gone now. That’s the way to put it, isn’t it. A thick coat of something clear and binding. He’s gone now, he’s dead. Or he’s gone now, he’s moved. Or he’s gone now, he lives down the street and we haven’t spoken since his first child was born. Any single one would be enough, a combination would be unfathomable. It’s been some time now.

So it was on a trip they took together. They didn’t take many but they did take this one, a utilitarian grab for romance at a lakeside cabin in Maine. It was fall so the rates were low and the storms were always, with breaks for dawn and dusk. The rain clawed at their car the night they arrived and the wind made it hard to get to the front door without toppling. She clung to his arm similar to the way he’d always wanted someone to need him. It was a good beginning.

Inside there were walls creaking and things falling off of hooks. The electricity was completely knocked out and he and she lay together on a davenport covered with a dropcloth, thinking it was a blanket and not knowing until the morning their mistake. Wind flew through the poorly-insulated cracks around the doorframes and sung low anthems to their wakeful night.

“I hope you like the cabin,” he said. “When you can see it, I mean.”

What a brave and kind boy he was, it’s a true shame he’s gone. What a good boy and a proud one too, full of announcements, declarations, sayings and so-ons. She mouths the vowels in his name, pulls them here and there in caverns of her tongue, a ridiculous prayer. She’d say more like a curse but he’s a myth more than that. Curses you can have whenever you want.

They slept in the morning, once the storm had passed. Andrew (fuck shit goddamn) got up first and saw the way Patricia (…) was splayed, her mouth open and her body turned upward like a dog showing its belly. He laughed and she batted at him, sleepily, lovingly, sent him away to the porch. He liked the idea.

There were rocks down below and a ladder, he guessed, to get to the ground. It was a long way down but it seemed that the ladder would reach, so he lifted it over the edge of the railing and made like a fulcrum. Here he took care, moving the ladder by inches and pauses.

“What are you doing?” said Patricia. She was standing in the doorway with one hand a balled-up fist in her eye.

“I’m getting down to the ground,” said Andrew. He had the ladder still secure in his hands, a chemical alloy tilting on a physical angle.

“With that? she said.

“That’s what it’s here for,” he said.

Obviously this was not true. The ladder belonged to the caretaker. The caretaker was re-shingling the roof. The ladder was for the roof, and for the caretaker. But today the ladder agreed with Andrew, and so met the ground with a crunch (gravel). Andrew gave the nearest rung a good slap, to demonstrate the security of his method.

“I wish you’d just think before you jump right into things,” said Patricia.

Then she just went back into the cabin.

Andrew climbed down the ladder anyway. He sat on a flat rock with his legs hanging over, long square toes skimming the frothy surface. Dead things stirred up by the storm floated by like a grotesque buffet. When he re-entered the cabin he used the front door, and she poured him a coffee and kissed his neck. Then he forgot because he loved her, or he remembered for the same reasons, and it’s not as though you can control these things from a distance. It was just a trip to the lake and it happened a long time ago.