I stood by the side of the road with my hands in my pockets, looking at the long line of cars stretched out far into the distance like a depth illusion painting, backdropped sometimes by twilight and sometimes by nothing at all. The Saab was parked in front of me between a Toyota and a pickup. Cody and I took turns in starting it to keep the engine alive. And when that happened, the people who slept in their cars behind us would startle awake, thinking that something had changed. They’ll lock eyes with me, or him, and get annoyed. Because nothing had changed. It’s been a while since we’ve moved.
            Movement was about seven meters every month on this road that was currently between an empty field which edged toward the horizon and a deep forest. The kind that looked ready to swallow you whole. When I was young, I remembered being on the highway, seeing towns and houses. But nobody lived in houses anymore. Movement was slow enough for people to settle on the side of the road, but not slow enough for them to settle down for good. We were one of those people. 
         Dad had left us a tent and two air mattresses before he died last summer. When it was time to move, we rolled them up and tossed them into the trunk with our other belongings, which included some pots, clothes, a portable gas stove, food that we bought from our neighbors, if you could call them that. Important documents and money were locked in the glovebox whose key Cody kept on him at all times. If we were bandits, we would assume that the older one would have the important stuff, not the younger one. Plus, Cody was responsible. And he ran fast.
   Nobody remembered why we had started on this journey and where we were going. We can only assume it’s someplace good because our dad had told us that the place we came from wasn't inhabitable anymore. That was as much as we knew.
         When it came to supplies, we had a sale periodically, usually towards the end of the month just before we moved. Everyone opened their trunks and the road became a makeshift bazaar. It shouldn’t be enough to sustain everyone, theoretically. But the road was just so long and the number of cars seemingly infinite that if you walked long enough in either direction you would eventually find what you’re looking for.
         After a while it was night. I brought out the stove and a pot to make dinner. Cicadas hummed in the forest behind me. The girl in the tent behind us seemed to have already slept. From several tents ahead, a campfire crackled. 
         Cody was in the tent behind me. His silhouette showed that he was writing something in his journal.
         “I’m bored. Read me something,” I said.
         “You know, only boring people get bored, right?”
         “I think it’s been established that I’m not a very interesting person.”
         He sighed. Next came the sound of pages flipping. “Do you want a riddle or a poem?”
        “Both.”
         “Okay. Here’s a riddle—what’s a word that becomes shorter even if you add letters to it?”
         I stared at the bubbling stew. “I’ve no idea.”
         “Can you at least try?”
        I thought for a while longer. “I still don’t know.” 
         “Short.”
         “Oh.”
         “I think you’ll have more success with the poem.”
         “I think so too.”
         He flipped a page and cleared his throat.

​

                    She closed the door on me. 
                    I had one hand outstretched, reaching 
                    towards the doorknob when it
                    slammed into place. By the time I opened the door,
                    there was no one there. 
                    Nothing but a field of yellow grass and a few desolate trees 
                    hunched like old men in the distance. 

​

                    On the chair behind me was Autumn. 
                    He was cool and fashionable. 
                    Wore a trench coat and black boots. 
                    The sides of his hair were white.
                    He looked like he’s been sitting there for ages.
                    Tapping his foot, as though impatient. 
                    We weren’t friends.

​

                    I walked out of the room with my hands in my pockets
                    and found an old man tree and sat down beside it. 
                    Somewhere in the corner of my eye, I thought I saw 
                    a mirage of her hair. Red and fluttering in the wind 
                    like the fabric of my past dreams.

​

          “That’s cool,” I said. “What’s it called?”
         “Summer.”
         “Is that the girl in the poem?”
         “I think so,” he said. 
         “Do you always know what your own poems mean?”
         “It depends. Most of the time, yes. I don’t like poems that are too vague. I can never wrap my head around them.”
         “I see,” I said, and turned off the stove. “Dinner.”
         He closed his book and zipped open the tent. His face was skinny. High cheekbones and clean-cut eyes. His hair was short but standing as though he’d been laying down for a while. I helped him cut it after Dad died.
         He took some bread from a plastic bag, tossed the moldy bits and scooped up the stew with it. I sat down on the foldable chair and watched him. 

​

When the bazaar began, Cody and I split up to get different things. I got batteries and gas and he got food. As we were walking back to our tent, we came across a station that we hadn’t seen. It was a trailer whose windows had been shuttered. Paint peeled from its husky exterior like an abandoned soda can. There was a modest line at the door—people who looked like they knew what they were looking for while others looked only curious. We walked by it in a few steps, making note of it but not stopping to investigate.
         Later that night the girl in the tent behind us came back with an oil lamp and a miniature chessboard. She smiled at me as she slipped into the tent. I smiled back. 
         Cody was in charge of dinner today. I sat by him reading a new book I had traded with some of our old ones. We both read often, taking after our dad, who used to be a professor, but also since it was one of the only things left to do that didn’t require batteries or the internet. We received a kind of informal education that way. But out of the two of us, Cody was the one who could write.
         “Has she always been behind us?” he asked, looking at the zipped-up door of the girl’s tent. 
         I looked up from my book. “I don’t think so. She might have taken somebody’s place.”
         “They walked off?”
         “Maybe. I don’t remember seeing it though.”
         While many people camped by the side of the road, some thought that this was too inefficient a way of living and left their cars to walk. Nobody knew what became of those people because they were never seen again. Most preferred the company of a familiar group and stayed where they were. Some people who were alone at the beginning walked until they found someone. Anything’s possible.  
         “You ever think about leaving?” he asked. “We’re just two people, you know. There’s not much to carry. Maybe we’ll be able to get to the end quicker this way.”
         “We would still have to leave some stuff behind.”
         “Right. But it’s not like a few pots are so important.”
         “What if there was never anywhere to get to? And we’ll just keep walking forever meaninglessly. What would be the purpose of leaving then?”
         “That can’t be the case. Otherwise why would people keep it up?”
         “Because they see others doing it.”
         “Don’t you want to find out what’s at the end?”
        “I do.”
         He looked at me for a while and eventually turned away. We ate dinner silently. As night fell, light from the lamp drew a silhouette of the girl on the walls of her tent. Hair drooped down her shoulders like leaves.

On the second day of the bazaar, I saw her lined up by the door of the soda can trailer. Cody stayed behind at camp since he had nothing that he needed. I looked at the trailer for a while and decided to get in line behind the girl. There were two people ahead of us, both quite young. After a while she noticed me and turned around. 
         “How are you?” Her voice had a natural rasp to it. It took me by surprise.
         “I’m good,” I said. “What is this?”
         “I don’t know. I just saw people lined up here so I wanted to see what it’s all about.”
         “Fair.”
         We introduced ourselves. Her name was Vivian. From her back pocket she took out a crumpled polaroid picture and showed it to me. It was a selfie of two women. One of which was her, but younger, and the other was an older Asian woman, who she explained was her mother. She was looking for her.
        “I haven’t seen her,” I said.
         “That’s okay,” she said, returning the photo to her pocket. “She found me by the side of the road one day as people were moving. This was back when movement was still regular and you could drive for extended periods without stopping. I don’t remember much of it. But apparently she saw me there by the highway and so she let me hop on her car. We’ve travelled together since.”
         I nodded. “How did she disappear?”
        “I don’t know. One morning I woke up in our tents and she just wasn’t there anymore. Her belongings were gone, but her car wasn’t. I asked the neighbors but people didn’t remember hearing anything throughout the night. It’s as though she just vanished.”
         “Sorry.”
        “It’s okay,” she said.
         We entered the trailer together, which turned out to be a bar hosting only four seats in what was once a living room. The space was narrow and we walked single file. The blinds were drawn and the place was lit by candlelight. Plastered against the walls were posters of old jazz bands and personified mushrooms. The people ahead of us had already left, so it was just the two of us in addition to the bartender—a middle aged man with whiteing hair and a kind face. Other than the fact that there was no music, I thought he did a terrific job at fashioning ambiance out of thin air. We sat down and looked at the menu. The options were extremely limited—beer, coffee, and snacks. Wine was available occasionally. I thought it was an interesting gesture. Almost a defiance of some sort against our current situation.
        “You folks new in, right?”
        “Yes,” I said.
         “Cool. I don’t have much. But let me know what you folks want and I’ll see what I can do. We’re open at the end of each month during the bazaar.”
         Vivian took out the picture of her mother again and showed it to the man, but he shook his head. We both nodded and he retreated to the kitchenette in the back, where I saw an old cabinet with travel stickers on it. 
         We spoke and hung out until the coffee and peanuts we ordered were gone and then we hung out some more. By the time we were out of the trailer, it was late in the afternoon and the sun was fading fast. We walked away from the direction the sun was setting, the cars around us pointing towards the unreached end of the road like arrows. As I paid attention to the numerous faces and tents sprawled across both sides—old, young, new, worn—it seemed to me that we were walking away from the past at a rapid pace. Maybe because we had gotten used to moving only a few meters per month, but also maybe because walking away from the sun and into the darkness contradicted natural instincts, as though tugging at the edge of something dangerous and untamed.
         “Why do you think this has happened?” she asked, weaving in-between parked cars on the road. 
         “This situation, you mean?”
         “Yeah.”
         “Nuclear fallout?”
         She considered this and looked behind us. “So you think if we walked that way for long enough we’d start seeing dead bodies?”
         “If that were really the case, if we walked far enough that way we’d probably be dead ourselves.”
        “True.”
         “But honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose the only way to find out is to ask people who had lived in the old world. But even they don’t remember much. Did your mom ever mention anything about it?”
         She shook her head. “Not really, she just said we needed to follow everyone else. The earliest memory I had was of me walking and sitting on the highway by myself. I must have been barely ten years old then. I couldn’t remember much before that.”
         “Same. I remembered seeing towns at one point. But the only thing my dad had told me was that our old home wasn’t inhabitable anymore.”
         She heard this and nodded. Something was keeping her from continuing. 
         “What?”
        “Where’s your dad now?”
         “He died.”
         “Oh.” She looked down. “I’m sorry.”
         “It’s okay.”
        “What was it?”
         “One of the travelers we met who was a doctor said it might have been tuberculosis. But antibiotics were hard to come by without walking a long way,” I said.
         “And the guy that’s with you…”
         “Cody? He’s my brother.”
         “Gotcha.”
         We walked on silently for a while. 
         “Were you close with your dad?” she asked.
         I thought about this. “I guess we were okay. I don’t know. He’s the only person I grew up with besides Cody since our mom divorced him before we were very old. But even then, there was always a veil of something between us. I’m not sure what it was. I guess I’m not too shaken up about the fact that he’s gone, which seems like a wrong thing to say, but maybe that’s just the way my heart works. When something like that happens, it doesn’t hurt. It just sheds chunks of itself and lets the air blow freely through the gaps.”
         “That sounds really sad.”
         “I’m probably making it sound worse than it actually is.”
         “Hopefully.”
         We arrived at a clearing by the road that led into the woods. As we stopped to look, I heard the sound of a branch crack, like someone stepping on it a small way ahead. I took out my flashlight and shone a light towards it. A deer. Moist nose, big eyes, and two small antlers. It stared at us, motionless, like a statue, and then I shifted my feet and somehow that startled it and it dove into the darkness.
         “Hadn’t seen one in a while,” I said.
         “Same,” she said. Then after a pause, “Have you had venison?”
        “No. Have you?”
         “Once. I was about twelve. It was a sunny day and my mom and I veered off the road for a walk. We had a map to guide us and a knife to mark our way on tree trunks. We walked for a while and eventually came across a deer lying by a bush with scratches across its body and one of its hind legs was gnawed bloody. We thought it might have been wolves. We said a short prayer and she killed the deer with the knife while I ran back to get several other people to help us drag it back to camp. One of our neighbors was a butcher and he took care of the skinning and distributed the meat. We cooked it with some canned vegetables. It was okay.”
         “At least you put it out of its misery.”
         “That’s what I keep telling myself,” she said. 
 

*    *    *

When we arrived at our tents, she unzipped the door, crawled inside, and zipped it back up. I was left standing there, looking at the shape of the thing. By then the sun had set, so I couldn’t make out her figure until she turned on her lamp.
         Cody sat by our tent with his journal open in his lap. He noticed me coming. “Took you long enough.”
         “I know.”
        He looked over at Vivian’s tent and then at me, flashing his eyebrows. 
        “Bro, cut it out.”
         “What’s her name?”
         “Vivian.”
         “Is she nice?”
         “Sure.”
         He nodded and looked back down. “That’s good. Just be careful though. What you see right now? It’s all a facade. The facade of civility. The fact that we’re holding any semblance of a community together means that we’re still in the earlier stages of disintegration. It’s better to be prepared. Not to rely on others.”
         “You speak like you’re the older one.”
         “Age is truly just a number now. Nobody cares if you drink or do drugs. There aren’t laws anymore.”
         “I suppose,” I said. “Speaking of which, you know the old trailer out back that way? Turns out that’s a bar. Only open during the bazaar.”
         “Guess some things about people never change.”
         “Guess not.”
         We started the stove and ate dinner and I used water we bought from one of the stations to rinse out the pots. Then we read outside wrapped in blankets under our headlights. The wind blew softly. But after the sun went down it began to feel chilly. Cody flipped the last page and closed the book. He sat on the chair and looked at the cover for a long time. Then he zipped open the tent and tossed it in there and picked up his journal. 
         “You got another poem for me?” I asked. 
         “Sure.” He flipped the pages.

​

                    Some people no longer have homes,
                        because they have no one to love. 
                    They tried to love, maybe, but they couldn’t call 
                        any of those people their home because
                    they were barely strangers.

​

                    Some people are always home because they live on airplanes.
                       They see their wives once a month.
                    Sleep becomes the rattling of their head against 
                       a too-cold window, shut like an eyelid
                     next to inches of aluminum, the stomachs of clouds.

​

                    Some people feel the furthest away from home upon landing.
                       Conveyor belts serving duffle hugs. 
                    They stand by the curb, watching people run into each other and kiss.
                       They light a cigarette and hail a taxi, telling the driver to take them
                    to the apartment of their longings.

​

          “Interesting,” I said, and thought about how, despite having read and heard about it, neither of us had ever been on a plane before.
         “I’m not happy with ‘the apartment of their longings.’ It sounds generic.”
         “Read through that part again.”
         He did.
         “I think it’s fine. It’s kind of a play on ‘belonging.’”
         He stared at the page. “Huh, interesting. Didn’t catch that.” Then he looked at me. “So you can write.”
         I shrugged. “Commenting isn’t the same.”
         “Isn’t that basically what they get you to do in school?”
         “How do you know? You’ve never been to school.”
        “I’ve been to kindergarten.”
         “Impressive.”
         He punched my arm. I dodged it unsuccessfully. After a while he went back to journaling. Sometimes I was curious about what he wrote in there other than poems and jokes, whether there were personal entries. Maybe stories. But he never mentioned anything like that, so I never asked. We maintained a boundary of privacy in this way, one that solidified when it was just the two of us.
         “Do you feel at home?” he asked.
         “I guess I’m not sure what that means.”
         “It means whatever you want it to mean.” 
         I paused. “Probably not, then.”
         “Is it the road?”
         “Not just that. It’s the shifting people, the moving, the instability. It’s hard to feel at home when you’re living a life like this,” I said. “What about you?”
         “I don’t think it bothers me very much. I enjoy the clarity of this kind of life. It makes you think about how people in earlier centuries spent their days. Maybe that’s why there are less philosophers in this century, or at least before we started moving, because people were too busy working jobs that didn’t mean anything to them.”
         “But you can only assume. It’s not like you’ve lived that kind of life before.”
         He nodded. “That’s why this to me is a temporary state. I want to get out of here. To get to the end and find out what it’s like.”
         “And then what?”
         “Then I’ll write a book about it and people in the future sitting on their automated chairs will marvel at how we ever lived.”
         “Big dreams.”
         “Gotta have them. Or else life becomes bland, like a steak with no seasoning.”
         “Terrible.”
         “Give me a day. I’ll work on it.” 

 

We started moving again soon. Cody and I woke up and drove the Saab forward about ten meters, and then everything stopped again. We walked back and uprooted the tent and moved it to the new location. The ground was slightly more uneven there. It took us a while to find a good place. Behind us, Vivian’s tent remained in place. I hadn’t seen her that morning. I walked to her tent and gently rapped on the front, but there was no answer. She was probably out.
         “You think we should move her stuff?” I called out to Cody. 
         Cody looked up. He was reorganizing our belongings in front of our tent. “No, I don’t think we should.”
         I nodded and stood in place for a while. Then I walked back to our new spot and joined Cody in setting up. The people behind her eventually got impatient and skipped her spot, and so we acquired new neighbors. They were a Dutch couple with outdoor gear armed to the teeth, looking well-suited for this kind of life. 
         I sat on the ground in front of our tent and waited, and in the afternoon she returned. I helped her move her tent to the new location, grabbing opposite corners and pulling the poles out from the soil. The tent collapsed itself like an overconfident boy who had fallen down and scraped his knee, and who was now crying. We carried the flattened tent and reapplied the poles. The boy was okay again. I asked her what she had been up to and she said she was going around showing the polaroid photo to other people again. I didn’t ask what the result was. She went back inside and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. 

 

About a week later she came over to have dinner with us. The sun had dipped below the horizon, leaving a dulled orange tint hovering just above the mountains in the distance. Vivian brought her lamp and a few packets of water flavor. Grape and orange. We drank that together and talked for a while about our day, and at one point she ended up retelling her deer story. Cody latched onto something different.
         “You have a map?” he asked.
         “Yes. I do.”
         “Can I see it?”
         She went to her tent and came back with it. Cody unfolded it to its full length and studied it. He only needed glasses to look like an old man reading newspapers.
         “Okay, hear me out.” He drew a dot to indicate the segment of the road we were on and pointed to a nearby trail that led to a bridge. “We could follow this trail here. It should take us to the shore in about a week. People tend to cluster along coastal regions, so maybe we’d find out more about what had happened there. And if there’s nothing there, we’d still get back in time for the next move.”
         “But it’s risky,” I said.
         “What about it?”
         “Wolves and bears and cannibalistic humans?”
         “Oh, come on. Grow a pair.”
         Silence.
         He sighed. “You can’t seriously expect us to be like this forever. Our whole lives just stuck on this one road with everybody else. Like everybody else. I mean, what have we really got to lose?”
         “Our lives?” I said. 
         He looked at me for a while and then turned away, his fingers drumming on his knee. “What have you seen that’s seriously troubling when you were walking here?” he asked Vivian.
         “On the road? Not much. But I haven’t gone into the forest as far as you’ve indicated on the map here. My mom and I only took walks without straying too far from the road. We didn’t want to get lost.”
         “I still think it’s worth a shot,” he said. Pause. “You guys can think about it.”
         The three of us took a walk on the road while light lingered and Cody went back to watch the tents after it was completely gone. Vivian and I sat on the ground outside her tent in silence. The wind blew circles of dead leaves around us, sweeping them onto the road and under the cars. Everywhere was dark except people’s tents, which from a distance looked like isolated paper lanterns shaped like domes.
         “Do you want to come inside?” she asked suddenly.
         I looked at her. “Sure.”
         I unzipped the front of her tent and went inside. She carried the lamp and set it between us. Our faces looked orange. Her sleeping bag and blankets were wrinkled and pushed towards the corners with the storage containers. There was only one mat on the ground, so I sat with half my ass on solid dirt while she did the same. A caterpillar crawled across the top of the tent on the outside. I could just about make out its shape. 
         “I wish I had a smaller lamp,” she said. “Not exactly convenient to have that in here.”
         “Also kind of hazardous to have something that runs on oil next to flammable material.”
         We were silent. She looked around in the containers and came up with the miniature chess set. “Do you want to play?”
         “I’ve never played before.”
         “Me neither. But at least I know the rules.”
         We set up the board and she explained to me how each piece moved. We began playing. I struggled with knights.
         She moved her pawn. I moved my pawn. She took mine. 
         “Do you think your mom is—you know.”
         “I’d like to think she’s alive.” Pause. “But we haven’t got much except to hope. No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. We’re all jumping into the abyss blindfolded. No parachute.”
         She nodded. I moved my bishop.
         “I mean, I’ve thought about the possibility of her having suddenly decided that she didn’t want me anymore,” she said.
         "Why would she do that? She’s your mother.”
         “Not really. She just picked me up by the side of the road. You can’t seriously blame her in these conditions.”
         She castled. I moved my queen.
         “But I don’t think she’s that kind of a person.”
         She looked at me. “Thanks.”
         We were quiet for a while and focused on the game. Half of my pieces were captured. She checked me. I stared long and hard at the board and made my next move. She checked me again. It wasn’t long before I was done. 
         “Are you sure you haven’t played before?”
         She smiled. “I lied.”
         We stared at each other. I felt my palms sweating. “What now?”
         “Come here.”
         “What?”
         And then she leaned forward and kissed me. She touched my hands and put them to her waist and unzipped her windbreaker on top of me. Up close, her eyes were almost quartz grey.
         “Do you mind?” she whispered.
         I shook my head. She kept her eyes on me as she turned off the lamp. An outline of her face lingered in my mind, like an afterimage in the dark.

 

At the end of the month when the bazaar reopened, the three of us all went to the bar. The man behind the counter recognized us and asked how we were doing. We ordered cashews and shared a coffee and a beer between the three of us. When I touched my hand to the can, I was surprised that it was cold. 
         “Hooked the mini fridge up to the trailer battery,” the bartender said. “Not a permanent solution, but, we’ll cross the bridge when we get there.”
         I thanked him and the four of us chatted for a while. The bartender, unsurprisingly, was also a bartender in his old life. Told us he worked at a tavern in a small town somewhere in the south, a few hours away from a major city, but that he didn’t remember what the town was called. 
         “I still remember certain details about the tavern. Like the texture of the bar, the deer head mounted on the wall, the slot machine in the corner. What else? The faces of regulars, maybe,” he said. “But I don’t remember other minute details surrounding life in general. Especially leading up to the point where everybody started on the road. It’s like that part of my memory just ceased to exist. I blinked, and then I was sitting in my trailer, honking my horn at the unmoving line of cars in front of me.”
         “Could it be some kind of alien invasion?” Vivian asked. 
         “Long shot,” Cody said. 
         “Who knows? Maybe they look just like us and blend right in. Maybe you’re an alien.”
         “I think I would’ve known by now if that were the case,” I said.
         She shrugged. “Fair.”
         The bartender seemed amused by our comments. “To be honest, even though I don’t remember certain details about life back when things were normal and that, as I continue to get older, I’ll probably remember even less of it, I don’t think things were too different. I mean, maybe people had nine to five jobs that they worked five days a week, and now they don't have that anymore. But strip all of that back, and what are you left with? This. Pretty much. Eating, sleeping, hanging about. Existing. Watching the sun rise and set each day, trying to make do. I think the fact that you guys are still laughing and joking about things in these conditions is already pretty good. You should enjoy that.”
         We looked at one another, each trying to see what the others would say. But in the end no one said anything. 
         “But again, you guys are young,” the bartender said, leaning on his elbows. “It’s good to want to do things and not be content with what you have. I just can’t exactly picture how that’s going to look now.”

 

The next day it rained, and people who had cars sat in them and waited until it cleared. The leftover moisture on the grass made it slippery to step on. Autumn passed. Leaves shriveled by the side of the road and it started to get cold. People brought out their parkas and coats and built fires more regularly. Vivian continued showing her picture to new people each day and at the end of every month, the three of us hung out at the bar with the white-haired man. Then, winter came, and in these conditions Vivian finally decided to leave after she had made her rounds with everybody in the vicinity. 
         She picked a clear day to set out, although it had snowed lightly the night before. I helped her roll up her sleeping bag, disassemble her tent, organize miscellaneous things into containers which she put into her backpack and her duffle bag. And when it was time for her to leave we stood facing each other at the place her tent used to be, a square of dirt untouched by branches and leaves. I wasn’t sure how I looked, but she didn’t look sad at all. She looked calm. Serene, almost. I asked her why she insisted on going and she couldn’t give me a clear answer.
         “It’s not like you owe her, you know? She chose to take care of you and she chose to leave. Probably. At least it wasn’t you who made her,” I said.
         “I know. But it’s not even about that. I just need to go. It doesn’t feel right to stay here.”
         “Why not?”
         She thought about this for a long time. “I don’t know if you’d understand.”
         I felt like saying something but the words died in my throat. So we just stood there in silence, facing each other. Eventually she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and slung her bag over her shoulder.
         “Maybe I’ll see you again some day,” she said, smiling.
         “Maybe.”
         She walked me back to my tent and then continued ahead. Her figure shrinking in my field of vision until, eventually, it vanished into the distance. Cody was in the chair on his journal, as usual. 
         “Do I have to pick up your broken pieces now?” he asked.
         I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not that bad.”
         He nodded. “Good. Because when I’m balling my eyes out after my sweetheart leaves me, you better be there for me.”
         I laughed. “Sure.”
         We were silent for a while.
         “Hey,” I said.
         “What?”
        “Give me a poem.” 
         He smiled and flipped through the pages. 
         “Make it a good one,” I said.
        “Just shut up and listen.”

​

                    Ish is a modifier.
                    These days people add it to the end of a word
                    so that it turns into an approximation.
                    Like Selfish, for example. 

​

                    When you cut open someone’s heart with
                    God’s eyes, you’ll find a house ornamented 
                    with the feeling of diving headfirst into a pool,
                    of riding on a train and watching someone step 
                    onto the platform of their lives and wondering 
                    whether you’ve missed your stop.

​

                    This house is covered in dust
                    sprinkled by Time on a parched evening as
                    he was getting ready to head home. 
                    It’s his job to give people things, not to take them away. 
                    But sometimes we still hate him with a passion. 

​

                    We seem to have forgotten about the house. 
                    About the man living in the house who
                    holds the key to the creaky cupboard in which
                    we exist.

​

                    Without him, we don’t exist. 
                       We are tiny rocks on a never-ending shoreline.
                       No one can find us. 
                       We are out of control.
                    But we never had control. We had initiative.
                    The name of the man living in that house is Self. 
                    But we call him Selfish these days. 

                    

                    Here’s the broom.
                    Time to start sweeping.

​

          “Not bad,” I said.
         He shrugged. “I’ll take it.”
         Wind blew, cold and piercing. I put on a sweater and zipped it up to my neck. Somewhere in the distance in the wide open fields, the grass now dried and frozen, I thought I saw something move. An animal, maybe. It was too far to tell. Thinking about this reminded me of the clearing where Vivian and I ran into that deer, its eyes round and curious like smooth pebbles, leaping headfirst into the dark.