as you were

the complete novelette

Nov 26, 2024

i.

When I was no bigger than a bean, my mother straddled Oregon cliffs, rubbing her belly as the Pacific bulldozed jagged rocks. Actually, that’s not right—when I was a bean, she’d disappear for hours, barreling through red lights and haunting stairways.

Dad spent those evenings cruising around, searching for her. Her favorite haunt became the Safeway parking garage on East Johnson. He’d find her standing at the tippy top of those dimly lit stairs, nibbling the webbing between her fingers, praying a good samaritan would throw her down.

It was when I became a gecko—that’s when the whole cliff-standing thing started. She’d put her feet right on the edge, half on dirt, half on air, sea-sawing back and forth, back and forth against a measly hyphen of earth.

I’m not sure how he knew where to look, but dad always found her balancing up there, her hair breeze whipped and salt stiff, rubbing the flesh above the holes becoming my ears.

He’d creep up behind her as if she were a bird trapped in a kitchen, prone to throw itself at anything sky-like. He’d seatbelt his arm over her shoulder and pull her back to solid ground. They’d listen to the inky Pacific eat the continent with its soothing waves. Then he’d kiss her iodized brow and Bataan march her to his Chevy, stroking the small of her back, telling her, “don’t worry about a thing hon, we’ll come back at first light for your Honda and, you know what? On the way back, we’ll stop by the diner for some pumpkin pancakes; how’s that sound?”

Dad never lost his cool through all this. He never blew his top or went on long rants about “responsibility.” He never asked any questions, either. On those drives back from the cliffs, he’d stay mute, smiling and reaching over now and again at stop signs to give mom one of those comforting we’ll get through this knee squeezes he picked up from the movies.

Mom never looked at him on those drives, even when he squeezed her knee; she was pure concrete, her sallow eyes boring holes through the windshield she’d fogged up with her whiskey hiccups. As soon as they’d get home, she’d waddle inside and collapse facedown on the couch, pressing gecko-me tight between the cushion cracks to spend the night with dust bunnies and pennies.

As I grew from bean to gecko and gecko to squirrel, mom’s sojourns to high places became increasingly frequent. Dad spent his nights tracking her down and his days calling therapists and doctors. He and grandma were planning to ambush mom with an intervention, to tie her up in a facility that has “group” and a roommate who’d gone through the wringer once or twice and would sit on the foot of mom’s bed and give her the pep talk but their scheme fell through when the grasshoppers invaded.

“Invaded” is the correct word—it’s impossible to refer to it as anything other than an invasion. Everyone west of the Mississippi turned in on a routine Tuesday and woke up Wednesday, finding their Kentucky blue and chokecherries swarming with black grasshoppers the size of pepper mills. By Friday, their hundred-year oaks and sunflowers were chowed into black mounds of thick sludge, so oily and heinous, the rats wouldn’t come within spitting distance.

No one had a clue where they came from. Nobody could answer “Why now?” or “Why here?” The news networks immediately trotted out a menagerie of sweaty, thick-spectacled entomologists who’d squirm in the off-white tungsten, stuttering out some barely coherent “expert” perspective intended to make sense of it all.

On day one, the invaders were thought to be rare grasshoppers once exclusive to South Africa. A few days later, a fresh gaggle of talking heads claimed, “actually… they’re not grasshoppers, not at all! New evidence suggests these are, in fact, estranged relatives of the emerald-ash borer.” A few days later, that too was malarky—“those other guys jumped the gun on the whole emerald-ash borer thing; our latest sequencing confirms the buggers are mutant versions of a rare lanternfly found in Chilean monkey puzzle trees.”

After the initial weeks of theoretical back and forth and misinformation, the Entomological Society of America demanded a stop to the pissing contest of gene sequencing and guesstimating and, instead, began marshaling its resources in the name of triage, coordinating with Big Ag, DOI, USDA, and local municipalities in a futile Hail Mary to safeguard crops and parks.

To combat misinformation, the ESA & USDA mailed out pamphlets, official pamphlets, telling the public, with absolute authorial confidence, what they knew for sure:

The grasshoppers (despite controversy, the invaders continued to be called “grasshoppers” in general news parlance) are toxic. Their venom is harmless to humans and animals but poses an apocalyptic threat to all forms of vegetation;
They are a Western phenomenon. It appears the hoppers are unique to the US and have no appetite for anything east of the Mississippi;
They are loud. (This one was obvious; no one needed a pamphlet to confirm it. On the rare occasion dad talks about the hoppers, he goes on about their god-awful, sub-natural bass frequencies that’d cut up rugs in your stomach 24/7. They were loud enough to shake the TV to the point of blurring and make the loose skin boil around your jaw. I’ve always imagined mom and dad in the dining room enjoying the last chicken breast and potato they’d see until the crops came back, talking about ultrasounds and epidurals as the good china rattled in the cabinets, their faces like poked jello);
The fuckers are hard to kill. In the early days, they were burned en masse, but this practice was halted when early burn communities reported increased cases of goiters and vertigo. It turns out that the heat denatures the protein responsible for making their venom harmless to humans; thus, the plumes of smoke became highly toxic. Burning them is banned, and they appear immune to all known pesticides, but…
The fuckers can be killed. They’re regenerative but aren’t immune to a classic stomp…if you do it right. Post-stomp, they’d look all blown to smithereens, but in an hour, little black tendrils would unfold from the smashed bits and worm their way together to form complex tapestries of organs and skins and wings; the repaired hopper would walk off and get back to the buffet like nothing happened. The ESA/USDA pamphlet advocated a “Crush & Cut” strategy where you’d crush them flat and cut the remains into at least three parts (if the hoppers were cut in half, it’s likely a complete hopper would spawn from each smushed half, doubling their numbers, but (apparently) if the body chunks were less than a third of the total biomass, there wasn’t enough cellar verve to spawn the rejuvenatory tendrils.)

I was no bigger than a squirrel when the hoppers came to town. Mom woke up covered in couch droll Wednesday morning to find the hoard masticating her precious yard into black sludge. She beelined out there and spent every day after swatting those bastards off the rhododendrons with her tennis racket.

That’s when her disappearing stopped.

There was no time to straddle cliffs or play with coat hangers; there was no time for anything other than absolute war.

Mom lost a dogwood and her tomatoes in the initial siege. The next day, she lost the zucchini, a couple of firs, and some maples—carnage she lays at dad’s feet because he was the “inconsiderate fool” who “just had” to drag her to the “useless” OB/GYN for her third-trimester check-up.

She didn’t wince or fire off a cliched shiver when they slathered her belly with the cold gel. She was lost in the ceiling, imagining the bloodbath in her yard, steeling herself for the horror of returning home to find tarpits of black goop where her father’s maples should be.

She said nothing to the doctor—nothing to the nurses or dad; she didn’t turn to see squirrel-me flickering black and white on the screen, waving hello!; she just gave a toothless, shut the hell up and leave me be smile when the doctor gave the all clear.

Her legs bounced the whole ride home, her hands yo-yoing fist..palm..fist..palm. When they pulled into the driveway, she sprint-waddled to the garage, strapped on dad’s leaf blower, and ran into the yard.

She hadn’t figured out how to turn the thing on, but as she marched to the center of the yard, the grasshoppers were in full retreat—the water to her oil, seeking refuge beyond the property line, seemingly repelled by her simple proximity. She was too preoccupied with the starter rope to notice.

Dad watched from the driveway.

She looked up as the blower rumbled to life, manhandling its tube into battle position, holding it with both hands like Montana’s little friend. There she was, in the center of her yard, blower revving, posed Moses-like in her manufactured dry ground, admiring the purity of her cottonwoods, squash, maples, and half-eaten yet still lovely hydrangeas, smiling in euphoric victory as the too-big blower made her potbellied frame look anemic and frail.

Dad hadn’t seen her that happy in a long, long time.

They looked at each other and laughed.

Once she discovered her powers, she spent the days patrolling the property line, chalking the whole thing up to some interspecies baby on board! detente communicated by an unseen amniotic musk. She refused to leave home and got excited when her nipples leaked. She’d scoop the discharge with two fingers and anoint the tree trunks with her premature milk, never wasting a drop. When she got tired of patroling or leaking or anointing, she’d sit in the yard’s center, practicing lamaze, circumscribed by a fleet of whirring Honeywells enlisted to perfume the afternoon air with the magic stench geysering out her widened mouth, reminding the hoppers she’s not one to be trifled with.

Strangely, mom was no outlier. Across the western US, there were a couple dozen reported cases of these so-called “repellant pregnancies”—households that enjoyed immaculate, flauntingly verdant yards that would soon meet the feet of their little ones while millions of other newborns remained condemned to take their first steps on frigid concrete or crumbly pavement, ignorant to the whisper feet make in summer grass.

When it was time for me to breathe, I broke mom’s water, but she refused to leave the front lines. Dad tried the old Bataan march to the Chevy, but she dug in like a mule. He called the doctor, who begrudgingly rushed to the house with his instruments. After a long night, I came out screaming in the bath, my trebly shrieks competing with the hoppers’ low purr.

If I get drunk enough, I can still feel that cold porcelain on my skin and the tiles boomeranging back my shrieks, rubbing my soft melon in them like a dog who shit the rug.

While dad rinsed the birth slime off me and signed the paperwork that made me “Brandon,” mom got back to sitting outside like it was any other day. She’d have me out in the yard with her, patrolling the grounds and tending the veggies every day for the next four months until the hoppers got up and left. Vanished as quickly as they came.

Some “experts”—to the extent they were still considered experts—suggested they’d burrowed, fat and happy into the earth to hibernate like cicadas while others argued the hoard had migrated. There wasn’t as much public clamoring to understand why they left; all that mattered was they were gone.

To deal with the sludge, our town borrowed snowplows and bulldozers from Portland to plow it into temporary mountains erected in church parking lots and public school blacktops that loomed over us as the landfills were dug.

The blacktop of what would, one day, become my elementary school served as the foundation for one of these mountains. When the landfills were ready, the plows and dozers hauled the mountains to their resting places. But they sat there for weeks, enough time for the sun to bake sludge bits into the blacktop cracks. Years later, when I’d get knocked down at recess, and the boys piled on me, pressing my face tight against the blacktop, I’d catch a whiff of hopper sludge, an odd hybrid of turned Velvetta and Chanel No5.

That’s the extent of my first-hand knowledge of the hoppers—smelling their petrified filth. I was too young to hold any real memory of them. Sure, I’ve heard stories and seen the old news clips, but I can’t say I’ve spent much time thinking about them.

They’re only top of mind, flashing before my eyes now because mom’s calling…and mom never calls.

There was something funny about my phone’s vibrations that dredged up mom and the hoppers—the way it jiggled my thigh fat, radiating through it like a pebble breaking calm waters, told me it was her before I even looked.

ii.

I was a soft-skulled pup when they took off, but now I’m a man (or at the very least an approximation of a man)—a man with no interest in them or (quite frankly) anything happening west of the Mississippi. The second I turned eighteen, I fled Oregon for New York, and, you know, those hoppers don’t mess with us Easterners, so why bother thinking about them?

I recognized the number immediately; she could never give up that ancient landline—the one with the eggshell plastic coil cord I used to teethe on. My phone displays maybe: Oregon above her number in a drab yet sanguine font.

Mom and dad split when I was seven and I haven’t seen much of her since. It wasn’t the type of deal where she faded into the familial ether with each passing year; it was more like the sudden drawing of a curtain or an amputation. It was never clear why she embraced such severe aloofness or why such a clean amputation was warranted. It never really bothered me, though. I’ve always thought there was something kind, noble even, about her exile, some familiarity laced in her silence making it feel mutual.

I let her go to voicemail.

My desert landscape home screen returns briefly before she redials and floods the screen again with maybe: Oregon.

After they split, I moved a couple towns over with Dad, started at a fresh school, and, for the first time in my life, made some real friends. We were normal. We were happy on our own. A year into our new lives, dad re-entered the dating pool. Those were some weird, awkward years, but luckily, it didn’t take him too long to find Inez. Like father like son, I took to Inez immediately; she’s a beautiful soul encased in espresso skin with an artful port wine stain that leaks down into the cradle of her neck—a mother who never once asked me to call her “mom” and gave me two half-brothers to build furniture forts with.

Mom stayed in the house and never remarried. According to dad, she’s become a semi-agoraphobe. She leaves home once a month to stock up on food and topsoil, but other than that, she spends the whole of her existence in that yard, weeding its beds, harvesting its veggies, and knitting in its sun when she gets tired.

I let her go to voicemail and call dad.

Dad always invites her to Christmas at his place, but she rarely shows. She’ll always say absolutely! and ask (in great detail) what Inez will be cooking, and start brainstorming what sort of hors d’oeuvres and desserts and wines would pair best, but, in the end, it’s all talk. I can count on one hand the number of times she’s shown up over the past twenty-odd years.

When she does show, we’ll hug and exchange the expected how’s life? work? pleasantries while slurping egg nog; we’ll choke on cinnamon and say, “It’s been a while,” nodding in violent agreement, “Yes, yes, too long…too long,” as our eyes dart around the living room.

She gets along well with Inez and the young half-family; she’ll tousle their hair and ask them what Santa brought, but when we all gather around the table, she’ll clam up.

She’ll sit there, chewing her ham with High Victorian posture, ensuring her birdish head is trained on whomever’s holding court, offering the occasional my goodness! where applicable, mhms when warranted, and the rare laugh if required (when she does laugh, it isn’t really a laugh… it’s more of a nasal cleansing, a whatever puff of air—the mechanical purging of excess gas through a tired sphincter having nothing to do with the Christmas spirit or the warm soup feeling of proximal kin.)

Halfway through dinner, she’ll go pale and dead-eyed and perform her Irish goodbye—standing without word to nestle her plate in the sink. As the rest of us chew and gossip about politics or the neighbors, she’ll slither to her geriatric Honda and sputter back to her yard.

The phone trills.

I imagine him putting on his glasses and letting out a cartoonish sigh of exertion as he fishes the phone from his jeans.

He still has some pictures from those days displayed on shelves in his hallway. When I walk by them, they seem sharp—like they’ve sprouted teeth and sit there, waiting for me, jonesing to spring forth and bite chunks from my face.

There is one that I tolerate; on some days, I may even say I like it.

It’s the one of me, dad, and mom hanging out at Lake Wenatchee. I must be three—four at the most. We’re standing in Wenatchee’s shallows with the sun behind us, gavaging itself down the camera’s throat, turning us into fuzzy cut-outs (a fuzziness compounded by dad when he blew up the print at CVS.) There are dark mountains holding the water in an obsidian cereal bowl. I’m shirtless, wearing neon orange swimmies and robin egg trunks stamped with cartoon jellyfish. My little muffin pudge emerges lip-like over my waistband, pouting as I bend to splash in the water. Little wormy strands escape my tawny bowl cut, clinging to my forehead like eye veins—my eyes bulging with the unique raptness of toddlerhood. Dad’s rail thin and sunkissed, his too-short trunks match the loud hue of my swimmies. He has his arm around mom. His eyes are squinty, his mouth curled up in a goofy way (you could tell he was over annunciating the “ee” in “cheeeeeeeese” with his typical class clown pomp.) Mom looks young. Healthy. Different. Chubby. She’s wearing a black one-piece. Her strawberry hair is a wet, shapeless mess (it’s the only time I’ve seen it in anything other than that dusty Thatcher coif she condemns it to.) One half is dry, frizzed like peach fuzz, while the other is wet-dark, hanging in lazy cow tail dreads. On her face is the biggest shit-eater I’ve ever seen.

He answers.

My gut was right—after a thirty-year slumber, the hoppers are back, “…yup, the buggers are back, but we ain’t worried about ’em; it’s less mowing and leaf blowing for me, easier on the old back, haha…so what’s up, tiger?”

“Mom’s trying to call, what’s going on?”

He sighs.

A few days ago, he drove down to check in on her—to make sure she had enough non-perishables and clean water to weather the invasion.

“I ain’t exaggerating when I tell you she’s lost her damned mind,” he says. “She’s gone all eggy and shit.”

When she answered the door, she was hysterical, dirt wedged deep under her nails, crying and fumbling for his belt buckle, screaming, “DO IT AGAIN!” “GIVE ME A BABY!” over and over. Dad peeked over her shoulders to see frozen, pink cubes of what smelled like placenta—my placenta (she must have snuck it into the freezer after the night in the bathtub)—thawing next to her NutriBullet, hot boxing the house with tricennial birth musk.

“I nearly hurled in the bushes,” he says, laughing a bit before coughing in my ear. “I threw up my hands and hightailed it after that, left the box of cans and batteries and all that shit on her porch and took off…I don’t have time for her crazy anymore…anyway, we’re all set out here, tiger, no need to worry.”

Silence returns after we hang up. The freezer hums as it rustles up some fresh cubes and someone’s dog barks.

My thumb hovers over the phone like deli meat, blindly swiping through screens to find her number, then pausing, opening random apps and spam emails, hoping to distract.

I take control. I wrestle my clammy thumb above the maybe: Oregon leading to the eggshell phone that helped my teeth come in.

I click and bring the phone to my ear in a quick salute, nearly taking my eye out.

The phone trills.

I think about how I’ll greet her. She hasn’t been “mom” for twenty years. On the rare Christmas she shows up, I always prefix our ritual cheek-pecking with “Hello, Diane.”

This feels natural for both of us…I think. It’s not that adolescent thumbing-the-nose-at-the-parent-by-using-their-first-name type of deal. Certainly not. It just kinda happened; “mom,” with time, simply evaporated.

Dr. Horn agrees; apparently, something similar happened to her. After she defended her dissertation and earned her PhD, all her mail was addressed to Dr. Horn often with the “Dr.” stylized as DR. for added ompf.

Years passed, and time weaseled between the hooray of yesterday and the ho-hum of now, and her title simply slipped people’s minds. Sure, to her patients, she’s Dr. Horn, but to everyone else, she’s just “Edith” or “Mrs. Horn,” and to her kids, “mom.”

The “Dr.” is still there, of course, but it’s latent—no longer perched on tongue tips. These things have nothing to do with malice, disrepute, or punishment for something someone did or said; the title was not wrested from her out of spite— some things go extinct simply because their novelty wore off.

The connection clicks.

There’s frantic breathing and rustling— the rustling of papers or the thumping of a restless leg in nylon.

“Diane?”

I hear her sniffle.

“Diane?”

The rustling increases, then stops. There’s the crunchy plosives of hands fumbling with the landline receiver.

“Diane, it’s Brand—”

“DID YOU GET ANYONE PREGNANT?” She sounds rushed, her voice slurring and drunk-slow (despite, according to Dad, being sober for the better part of a decade.)

I’m not sure what to do with this question. Does she really not think about me, her only son? Her only child? Has she forgotten me? Forgotten how unlikely it is for me to impregnate someone?

There’s a wet plop, something hard dropped into standing liquid.

“No, Diane, you know I’m—”

“DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHOSE PREGNANT?”

She’s screaming now. I pull the phone from my ear until she falls silent. I bring it back in time to catch another plop.

“Are you o—”

“ANYONE?!”

She goes silent again, sniffling loudly and wiping snot on her wrist, mumbling under her breath.

“Diane…are—are you okay?”

“WHAT?”

I go to repeat, but she starts up a blender, and I find myself shouting:

“ARE YOU O-”

She cuts in, also shouting over the blur: “CAN YOU GET ANYONE PREGNANT?”

Dad was right; she’s gone nuts, hysterical to the point of incomprehension. But she doesn’t need to be comprehensible; I know what she’s going to ask. I know she’s convinced her pregnancy—me—was what kept them at bay thirty years ago, and because I did it once, my pores could surely muster the meiotic stench one more time; it would come back easy—like riding a bike. I know, right now, her mind’s eye is watching toddler-me patrolling her yard, her personal St. Patrick, my face meat jiggling in the deep purr of wings, as my stench forces them to behave behind property lines, emplores them to engorge elsewhere and leave her babies green.

The blender powers down, revealing guttural sobbing. She sounds like she’d suffered a gut punch; she’s on the ground at my feet, staring up, gulping air like a dumb carp. I think of Lake Wenatchee and the little trout swirling around my feet in the shallows.

My hands squeeze the phone hard; I’m expecting to hear it snap—hoping it will snap.

She stops sobbing and takes a slurp of something frothy. I hear it slither down her throat. She spews out the liquid and wretches deep before panting loudly and fumbling for the receiver.

“I need you to come home.”

Her sudden calmness is disarming. I stay quiet.

“...can you come home?”

I can’t feel my hand.

There’s the fricative fire plough hiss of her trembling hand rubbing the receiver against her hair.

“just—”

She coughs and hacks up a loogie.

“just—just for a few days, that’s all; I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t crucial, absolutely important; when have I really asked for anything? Anything at all? It would just be a few days...only a fe—”

“Okay.”

The words escape my lips, unfolding like a stranger in the room. I feel like I’ve taken a gargantuan shit; the room reeks, but there’s a relieving emptiness in my gut.

I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

I didn’t mean to say it; it was just a reflex. But now that the utterance exists in the world, my shoulders drop, my knuckles relax, I can breathe again…

I take control of my lips and say it again, “Okay, mom.”

iii.

Have you ever, while lying naked next to another body, thought about how many gallons of sweat they’ve produced? I like to steal candid glances and ring out their gym towel flesh with my mind’s eye. I spend lazy Sundays, gawking open-mouthed at their flesh, calculating how many Evian bottles their runoff would fill as if they were a guess how many carnival jar of M&M’s. On these mornings, I still feel dad’s calloused hand in mine, I hear him crooning above the calliope, “what say you, tiger? Gimme the first thing that pops into your head.”

Would it be possible to keep the sweat bottles in my closet? Would I need to rent a storage space? A warehouse? Would I be surprised by how many there are? How few? Sometimes, I’ll burrow in the crook of their neck. They’ll wake with a morning inhale, running their sausage fingers through my hair as I size up their pores—are they generous or stingy? Peppercorns or pinpricks?

Beating a stranger in the race back to consciousness is a weird thing. You wake in a room, your room, the place you spend unconscious hours, drooling and shedding skin—where the little motes loafing in the new sun are eensy orbs of yesterselves only now, you have company. You can’t be sure they’re all yours anymore; this is a problem; this makes everything gross. Among all this, something’s lying next to you, still as a miscarriage, curled up on its side, and you’re free to watch and stoke and smell and imagine…

To be fair, this one isn’t a total stranger. I know, yes, the flesh beside me is called Trevor, but right now, I can’t see his face, so he doesn’t get to be “Trevor.” He’s just some strange, freckled torso with a flat tire of flab pooling like Dali clocks around the side he’s lying on. It appears as though he’s melting into my sheets. I’m thinking of sweat again…if the average human sweats approximately 280 gallons of sweat per year, and…well, Trevor is prone to excessive sweating in the hot months, so, to be safe, let’s say Trevor gives off 300 gallons every year and Trevor is currently thirty-five years, four months, and seventeen days old and Evian bottles hold 16.9 oz of liquid…so…that would mean… we’re looking at…like…79,527 Evian bottles of Trevor sweat. How many vending machines would it take to hold him?

It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. Trevor and I used to be quite serious. In fact, I once caught myself thinking he may very well be “the one.” We were going strong for six months until we found ourselves drunk, sitting in a Denny’s at 2 am, sipping milkshakes and swapping yarns about the worst things we’ve ever done.

He sat, swirling sloppy figure eights in the brown slush, telling me how once, when he was seventeen, he was driving home from a concert, buzzed and belting along to cranked music, and hit an old stray. He made a ba-dump! sound and whipped his head forward to illustrate the collision.

He got real sweaty, swirling the shake with increased intensity, telling me how his belly filled with a hot fuzz when he saw the mutt spinning ass over teakettle in the rearview—how it streaked the pavement a twinkling red before coming to rest in a teddy bear heap.

He didn’t know what to do. He’d just gotten his license. Will dad take the car away? Without question. He couldn’t risk it, so he kept driving; it was the only thing that made sense.

He paused briefly and stopped swirling the barber pole straw. He seemed far away, the image of that furry lump screaming bright across his eyes—he swallowed and waved it off, saying it’s “no big deal”—as soon as he got a place of his own, he went down to the pound and found the oldest, neediest pup and brought him home. It became a ritual of sorts. Chloe, his greying German Shepard at the time, was just the latest embodiment of this particular neurosis. She was a sweetie pie, always smiling and whinnying when I came over, bringing me her favorite tennis ball and looking up at me as the kitchen light sparkled in her rheumy eyes.

The morning after the Denny’s confessional, he texted, “Should I come straight to yours?” I’d forgotten he was supposed to drive me to Newark to catch my Christmas flight. I held the phone, thinking of the dog he hit, wanting nothing more to do with him or his revolving door of geriatric pups, so I ghosted him, called an Uber, and flew to Oregon.

The strange thing is that, usually, when it comes to flying, I’m a nervous wreck. It takes me three months of affirmations and qigong to work up the nerve to even book the damn tickets, but on that post-Denny’s flight, I was calm, surprisingly so. At no point did I experience my usual jitters or clammy appendages. Hell, for the first time in my life, I had the stomach to pull up the shutter and watch the clouds out the window. For some reason, I attributed this irregular ease and sudden aviary machismo to Trevor, and ever since, it’s mutually understood that we only hook up when I need him to be my lucky rabbit’s foot—to settle the cauldron of pre-flight nerves. It also helps that he knows where to get Trazodone on short notice.

It’s been a while since we’d slept together. I’m staring at his back, trying to recognize it. I don’t remember it looking like this. His freckles are bigger and less circular, more drawn out and angular, dark like tar pits. The once hairless terrain is now littered with meringue kisses of pubic quality hairs, stray strands of black fronds sticking out like hummingbird moth proboscises, curling into cute Fibonacci approximates.

I ghost my fingertips along his spine. Whenever I cross a vertebra, I hear him say ba-dump! and see the light sparkle in Chloe’s rheumy eyes.

If I tore into him, I suspect I’d find an eclipse of furry moths smiling up at the tasty light.

The pre-flight jitters hit me when I hung up with mom, rushing into the space opened by my reflexive “okay.”

I texted Trevor, “✈️🍆🍑???”

He got back right away, “when?”

“tonight?”

“Should I come straight to yours?”

I booked the 10 am out of Newark, threw some clothes in my luggage, and waited. I wasn’t even horny; the thought of his saliva on my cock skeeved me out, but this is the price to avoid tragedy; no one wants to carry a rabbit’s foot.

I get through security fast and take a seat facing the gate, waiting for the pilots to arrive. I like to get a good look at them to make sure they’re not drunkards or suicidal. Ideally, I hope to overhear them talking about their kids so I know they’ve got skin in the game.

As I wait, I have an impromptu phone session with Dr. Horn; she’s always good about fitting me in last minute. She believes that because I haven’t been back to my childhood home since dad and I moved out—that I haven’t seen the place as a complex adult, I should expect the ordeal to be “triggering.”

I disagree. I see where she’s coming from, but I don’t remember anything from those years. I don’t remember much about the house at all, really—certainly nothing that would trigger me. Sure, some disjointed vignettes bubble top of mind once in a blue moon, but they’re always hazy—hazy, boring, banal shit.

I contrast this with the vivid memories I have from my post-divorce childhood. I know I’m capable of creating, storing, and revisiting lucid childhood images—in fact, I’ve been told my memory is exceptional and that I have an eye for detail. Therefore, the lack of clear memories—exciting or mundane—must mean my childhood in mom’s house, the home Dr. Horn suspects will trigger an unconscious avalanche, was vanilla, uneventful, lame, and thus, not worth the brain space necessary to conjure it in living color.

Dr. Horn says this is exactly what a repressed person would say.

I am not a repressed person.

“Repressed people” are those who strut around feeling no pain, believing their shit don’t stink; the type of Uber-human who is always at the height of their powers but when presented with the simplest of things—the rainbow blotches in an oil spill, Lucky Charms, the smell of ripe cantaloupe, yellow snow—the horrors they’ve kept at bay come rushing back. Their bodies go from blissful remission to end-stage in a blink. They lose their footing and enlist drugs, alcohol, sleep, sex, excess, to throw shovelfuls of psycho-dirt back on their wounds so they can get back to their un-smelly shit and “every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” crap.

That ain’t me.

Dr. Horn knows I abhor this label, but still, she urges me, “not just as your therapist, but as your friend,” to consider the possibility (however remote) that I may (like the vast majority of us) have repressed a few memories from those early days.

She tells me about an old patient of hers, a lifeguard who, back in his heyday, did a prodigious amount of LSD. According to Dr. Horn, the thing about LSD is that it’s known to be quite pesky—it likes to hide in the body, playing house between vertebrae, lying in wait for the right movement—a neck crack with peculiar angle and force or a new yoga contortion and poof!—the acid emerges for an old times’ sakes swim in the blood. This happened to her lifeguard patient. It was midday, and he was on duty, perched in his wooden tower. There was a crick in his neck, so like he had done thousands of times before, he cracked his neck, but this time, on a micro-level, he did something right and started tripping balls. A kid drowned as he sat there floating in his own universe—“…bottom line is, you never know when you’ll lose control…you never know what you’ve picked up along the way…all I’m saying is, be prepared.”

She wants me to use the flight time to “reflect” and journal—to visualize that old home so I can better understand the unconscious forces that made me slingshot myself into my current clusterfuck.

“…and please, don’t take the trazodone.”

I forgot she knows about the Trevor/trazodone ritual.

“Trevor didn’t have any, so don’t worry about that,” I say, despite having washed the pills down in the Uber. She starts talking about something else but they’re calling my boarding group. I thank her and hang up while she’s mid-sentence.

The scanner at the gate beeps, and the bubbly gate agent scrunches her smiling eyes, “Thank you, Brandon!” I nod, fumbling my phone back in my pocket as the trazodone settles in. The wheels of my luggage Choo Choo along the crumpled jet bridge floor. I’m thinking about the dog Trevor left in the street—how it must have cried and whimpered and prayed (to the extent that dogs can pray.) I blame him for its death despite knowing I would’ve done the same—kept driving, kept moving forward. I feel like I’m relapsing somehow, imagining myself standing over the furry lump cooked and faded by the moth-laden halogen—thirty years too late to do shit about it other than throw up my hands and say, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

iv.

A flight attendant pokes my shoulder.

I come to.

I shake off the traz haze, flashing a sheepish I’m sorry smile as I scramble my stuff together. I trudge through the airport without much incident, relishing the prick of fresh air as I hail a cab.

I don’t remember getting into the cab. I know time has passed; we’re not at the airport anymore. I don’t remember saying a word to the driver, either. How does he know where to go? Why does my asshole hurt?

There are black mounds of goop along the highway, with few trees in sight. Was it always this sparse? Treeless? I can see the mountains, though; I’ve missed the mountains.

I think about Dr. Horn’s lifeguard presiding over mass drowning. I hear parents screaming—see them shielding the sun from their eyes with fat hand visors, helpless, curious, watching him sit full lotus in his tower, floating ass out of chair— untethered, unbothered, unknowing. There’s a hoard of angry dads in floral shirts and boating shorts scaling the tower, ready to tear his face off, ready to—

The driver says something I don’t understand. I chuckle and agree and turn towards the window so he’ll leave me alone.

The sun is setting. I’m checking the streetlights for dead pups, flickering in and out of sleep as old haunts and greasy spoons blur into a whipped fuzz behind the finger-smeared glass.

My mouth is cotton; my eyes dusted with kiwi fuzz. I can’t stop blinking; they want to close. My hands are balled into fists, my nails digging crescents into palm meat. Maybe Dr. Horn was right…maybe the levy is bound to break. Maybe I’m weak like the rest of them and should prepare to be infantilized when her house—our house—assails my eyes.

The purring intensifies as we near the coast. The driver turns up the radio. There are trees now—trees with black patches of hoppers lounging in their canopies. I knew they were big, but not like this. How come no one told me they were so big? So big and so ugly?

I close my eyes tight, focusing on the shrapnel ratatat of pebbles in the tire wells.

The cab begins to slow. I swallow hard as I feel us rounding the bend.

“This it?” asks the driver.

I open my eyes.

We’re stopped at the lip of her driveway. I spot-check my body like a crash victim. FEET?! THEY STILL HERE?? Yes…yes…okay, they’re here…CAN I MOVE THEM?! I fan out my toes, wriggling them against my shoe’s rigid toe-vamp—phew! WHAT ABOUT THE LEGS THOUGH? Hmmm, let’s see…I scissor them side to side and bounce them around. Check! Okay, okay… what’s next? Butt? BUTT?! CAN I FEEL THE SEAT ON MY CHEEKS? I wriggle like a duck in water…good, good… it’s all there; I’m all here. Dr. Horn had me expecting a catastrophic implosion if I so much as glanced at this house—this evil house, but here I am, unimploded, with all my limbs, breathing normally, staring at a very normal, very vanilla house, feeling nothing in particular. Nothing at all, really. Nothing—

“Sir?” the driver says in a loud staccato to indicate I’m beginning to irk him. “This it?”

I nod, pay him, and open the door. He walks back to the trunk as I stand, trying to remember how a car door works, distracted by my face fat wriggling Nixon-like in the hopper purrs, struck by how the vibrations burrow into my chest—how they make it hard to breathe, but somehow, in a good way.

The lawn and branches are crawling with hoppers, but not as many as I hoped—as I hoped? Was I hoping for destruction? I remember the bespectacled bug nerds floating in the airport TVs saying the hoard was still emerging, finding their appetite; this was only the beginning.

The driver hands me my luggage. I nod and telescope its handle.

The taxi peels out down the lane, leaving a great dissatisfaction in my gut. I’m satisfied Dr. Horn was wrong but disappointed I wasn’t struck down—upset I wasn’t beaten into submission by memory lane, broken, forced to curl fetus-like and suck my thumb right there on the cab’s fart-battered vinyl, howling loud—louder than the purring hoppers so mom would hear and rush to the cab and shoulder me upstairs to bathe in the very tub where she shat me into life.

But it’s not like that.

It’s one foot in front of the other. It’s hopper wings crunching underfoot—just the good ol’ here we go… as I make my way to her door.

v.

DAY 1

Has the door always been plum? So aggressively plum? I don’t remember—I don’t remember this door, let alone it being plum, or mauve, or whatever breed of purple this is.

For an old home, everything seems new—the pavers in the front walk are rich-hued and even; the porch is beautiful concrete, unblemished, and baby butt smooth; the awning shows no signs of rot, its shingles snuggled up, pristine as freshly de-braced teeth.

At the plum door’s foot is a semicircle welcome mat—thick bristling fibers woven in industrial rubber, depicting an ovoid sun spewing the new day across a husky horizon.

The door is bookended by tall, fluted urns made of porous stone. The left urn is full of a black, hot-looking sludge. I put my hands out like a trash fire hobo, hoping some Precambrian warmth will burrow between my palm folds. I stoop down to the urn’s rim and sniff; the rank wasabi tingle presses the playground against my cheek.

I straighten and snuffle, wiping snot on my sleeve.

The right urn has two hoppers—slim, tarmac-black brutes the size of my forearm —devouring what appears to be a little boxwood.

I press my forehead to the door’s frosted pane, hoping sight and proximity will shake something loose. I see the carpeted staircase leading upstairs and the floral patterned runner slithering toward the kitchen; if I squint, I can make out the blender dad raved about.

I knock on the glass, softer than I wanted. I step back, the tips of my shoes out of the fibrous sun’s reach. I stand, swaying heel-toe-heel-toe, looking around. It’s quiet; the boxwood hoppers are gone, and I’m alone.

I knock again, louder, longer. I stand close to the door, straining my ears for footsteps or a be right there! but nothing comes.

I take my phone out and call her.

...voicemail.

I knock again, sustaining my stream of raps for well over thirty seconds. The air starts to smell funny.

Nothing.

I redial.

...voicemail.

I slide my phone into my pocket, leave my luggage on the porch, and walk toward the back fence. The gate is wide open, and a plume of smoke rises into the sky.

“Diane?” I pass through the gate, round the corner, and there she is—in the center of the yard, standing over a burning mound of hoppers in her ratty white bathrobe.

“What the fu—WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!” I yell, pulling my shirt over my nose and mouth, powerwalking in search of the garden hose.

She doesn’t respond. She turns her back, zombie marching, tennis racket in hand, towards the bushel of hoppers clinging to her hydrangeas. The air is thick with Velvetta and No5 as I drag the heavy rubber towards the heat.

She has the bottom of her robe folded up pouch-like. I unspool the hose, watching her swat hoppers off the hydrangeas, collecting them in her cotton marsupium.

She’s walking back towards the pyre to deposit her load; I’m finally within spraying distance and pull the trigger.

The water rushes forth, sizzling the flames into clouds of hissing steam. I vampire my forearm over my face for added protection, keeping my eyes closed. The hose is a vein pumping chilly blood; it feels turgid—turgid and alive in my hand. I relish its pleasing cool until a sudden bovine force tackles me to the ground, casting it from my hand.

She’s on me, slapping my face and chest, shouting, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” She gets me square in the ear, “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO HELP!” There’s a high-pitched ringing; my lobe feels hot, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!” I manage to sit upright and grab her wrists. “WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING?!” She’s ensnared but flailing like mad. “WHY AREN’T YOU HELPING?!” Her screams retreat into incoherent mutters as I stand. She collapses into my chest, bawling and snotting all over my shirt. I let go of her wrists. My arms, surprised with their sudden emptiness, hang in space, awkward and Vetruvian.

I am dizzy. I rest my chin on her head to stabilize. She smells sour and unwashed. I hold my breath. My right hand takes the initiative, administering some sterile hey there! pats to the small of her back, the type of pat you’d provide a reptile or a strange child at the public pool.

I survey the yard for the first time. The fire is out; the black mound of twitching bug matter remains smoldering. A few paces from the fire is a tent, its door unzipped, and a wrinkled canvas chair placed by its breeze-flapping maw.

The perimeter of the yard is littered with what, at first glance, appears to be garbage, but as I look closer, it is, in fact, clothing and toys—my clothing and toys—little bibs, action figures, bumble balls, onseies, shoes, hugging the property line, exploited for their stench—my stench.

She’s starting to quiet down. She has her arms around my neck now; I feel her shaking. I stop my reptile pats and start rubbing little circles on the small of her back and hissing comforting “shhh” s.

The yard is in better shape than I expected. Sure, it’s pocked with dead chunks and mounds of hopper tar, but, on the whole, the place remains immaculate, verdant, and dense—certainly better than some of the places I saw driving down here.

She’s mumbling something now; her face is smushed against my chest, and it’s too muffly to suss out, but I feel it shaking my ribs.

The hoppers have made quick work of her yews and mock oranges, but there are surprisingly few of them. How many exactly? Two, four….six…eight, ten….twel—

“Is it like you remember?” She says softly, her voice calm, chest-muffled.

I knew she would ask; of course, she would ask. I’ve prepared a breakglass answer, but I’m thinking now. No—I don’t remember it, not really. It feels new, foreign. I remember the action figures, teddy bears, and Rubik’s Cubes she’s scattered on the ground but not the yard itself—this may as well be a stranger’s yard or a new park the city put in, but this isn’t what she wants to hear. It’s not one of the valid replies so I opt for the breakglass:

“yes,” I say, “of course I do, it’s just as it—”

“They can’t smell it anymore,” she interrupts, “…they aren’t listening…they don’t smell me…” She shakes her head, burrowing in my chest; her earrings are cold through my shirt, making my nipples hard. “I’ve tried everything—everything! I don’t…” she sniffles, “they won’t stop! they won’t—”

She coughs and itches her neck, her voice more conversational now, “…but they’ll listen to you, they’ll smell you, they always did, they will, they must—that’s why you’re here, yes? To help? To make them understand? Oh, please…they won’t stop. They won’t—”

“It’s okay,” I say, quickening my hand circles on her back, “Yes, I’m here to h—”

She’s suddenly energetic. She pulls away from my chest and anchors her chin on my breastplate, looking up at me—towards me, not at me—past me perhaps, her wide, tear-curtained eyes trained on my forehead. It’s quiet. I stare into her. Since when have her eyes been green? Have they always been? Why aren’t mine gr—

“WALK!” She yells; her sudden loudness pops my flight-clogged ears. She grabs my hand tight and sprints to the property line. We reach the edge, and she picks up a tennis racket. Her mouth is wide open; she’s spewing long and deep breaths. Her eyes meet mine for the first time, shooting a get fucking serious look through the purring air. For my own good, I get serious and start breathing like her. She turns away with a shiver of pleasure, ready to go over the top to No Man’s Land, when she sees my diaphragm poke through my shirt and disappear with a generous exhale.

We patrol the property line, walking along all of my shit she’s dredged up from the bowls of god knows where, enlisting it to stand troop-like on the parapets of property, warding invaders off with whatever stench their fibers cling to.

I step on a deflated Socker Bopper with the “B” faded into oblivion. I keep my breaths deep and long as I smile down at scores of Gerber-stained pastel onesies, diaper bags with colorful floral patterns, moth-munched maternity sweats, teeny tiny sneakers, velcro shoes festooned with Rugrats characters, and—are those?—I think so…the blue jellyfish trunks I wore to Wenatchee.

Mom’s standing above them right now. She swats a hopper from a dogwood branch; it falls on a jellyfish. She lifts her booted foot and puts her full weight into a solid stomp, twisting and scraping the guts deep into the trunks. She haunches hyena-like over the smithereens, pulling a ka-bar from her robe, and starts hacking the mess into small heaps incapable of new life. Where the fuck did she get a ka-bar?

She wipes the black-soured blade on the trunks and stands, sheathing her knife. I think she’s saying something, but I’m lost in the jellyfish, trying to remember the last time I wore those, saw those—which of the jellies was my favorite? The pink one? I think it was the pink one with yellow polka dots…or was it the orange one? She’s breathing loud, hyperventilating, snapping her finger at me. I come to. She’s ahead of me, waving her hand impatiently. I follow—walk and breathe, walk and breathe...tell the fuckers you’re here...walk and breathe, walk and breathe...

We circle the property until it’s cleansed of hoppers. She’s out of breath and plops down in her wrinkled camping chair, putting her head back and resting her eyes. I take the opportunity to gather all the pyro-paraphernalia and sneak it inside.

Out of habit, I slip my shoes off on the deck before entering the living room. The air is immediately hot; my vision goes fuzzy, and my gut gurgles. There’s a horrid stench in the place, metal and blood and musk. I look around. In the kitchen is her NutriBullet, full to the brim with frothy pink mush, thawing cubes of pink flesh waiting their turn in uncovered Tupperware. I drop the gas can and rush outside, throw myself over the deck’s railings, and puke onto the lawn.

I’m wiping my lips post-hurl; she’s running up with a shovel, “What the fuck is that in there?” She doesn’t answer. “Diane, what the hell is that?” She’s scooping the puke onto the shovel. “WHAT THE FUCK, DIANE?” She races to the eastern front, gets on her haunches, and uses the ka-bar to spread my insides judiciously on the front lines.

My throat burns, and I hear dad’s voice, “I don’t have time for her crazy.” I cough, nodding in agreement as if he were here, lurching towards a deck chair. I plop down, my head tilted toward the blank sky, tonguing chunks of airport pastries in my teeth.

I hear her little boots coming up the steps. I turn; she’s smiling like I’ve given her a gift, just what she asked for. She’s approaching, arms outstretched as she does on those rare Christmases to exchange cheek peeks. I’m dizzy and powerless; I let it happen, let her limp lips press against my cheeks. As she pulls away, I notice something on her neck, a Rudolphian orb, oily, blinking in the sun. I feel my anger again, “Diane…seriously? What the hell is that?” I poke at it; it’s firm and rubbery. She pulls away and sits across from me. “Why are you doing this? Even—even I know you can’t be burning these damn things…how long—how long have you been doing this?” She says nothing, just sits, her dirty hands folded neatly in her lap. “Diane, your neck…” I’m pointing at her, yelling now, “For Christ’s sake, have you seen your goddamn neck?” She stares, mute and smiling. “What are you doing to yourself? To the neighbors?” Still nothing. “Diane?!” She’s just sitting there, twitching her neck bird-like—content and victorious, drinking in her hopper-free yard.

I couldn’t stomach her crazy for another second. I threw up my hands and stormed out, mumbling as I ordered an Uber to take me to a bar, any bar.

I called dad on the way, asking if there was room at his place, staying here—with her—is impossible. He begged me to stay the night—…one night, c’mon…just to make sure she doesn’t burn the place down, saying the gesture wouldn’t be for her, it’s a favor for him (…understand? I’m asking, man to man…please?)

I stayed at the bar until it closed. I’m just now getting dropped off at her place.

My luggage is still on the front porch. I gather it and carry it through the yard to the back door. There’s a light on in the tent. I see her knitting silhouette through the nylon; the purring comes up through the soles of my feet as I slip out of my shoes.

I hope the upstairs doesn’t reek. I hold my breath, sprinting through the living room, the kitchen, and up the stairs. On the landing, I take tentative, probing breaths. Not bad. I breathe normally. Okay, not bad, not bad…stinky, yes, but certainly not puking off the deck bad. I set my luggage down in my old room, swaying as I try to remember.

I plug my phone in. There’s a missed call from dad and a slew of horny texts from Trevor (“how was the flight? Do I still got it?? 😏”, “when’s the flight back? Maybe we can do a FaceTime assist 👀”).

I can still taste puke in my mouth. I rustle my toiletries from the luggage and march to the bathroom, pausing at the door. Is this the bathroom? My bathroom? I enter, locking the door behind me, greeted by a haggard-looking self in the mirror—unshaven, purple rings around the eyes, forehead that keeps laying claim to more of my hairline...the room is spinning. I see the bathtub in the mirror behind me. I run the cold water in the sink and take out my toothbrush—there’s something about the tub drawing my eyes to it—here come those drunk birth howls, belching out the tooth-white tub, shaking my skull; there’s a tickle in my crotch. Do I still got it?? Yes—yes, Trevor...it appears you do.

I switch the tap to hot, full blast, giving up on brushing my teeth. I watch myself as I strip to nothing—Jesus, how long have I had these cabernet tits? When’d they get so pendulous? I stand, observing every skin fold and skin tag, freckle and blemish— waiting for the faucet’s fog to eclipse me. I walk to the bath, pausing at its lip, staring into it. I hear mom’s panting punctuated by my virgin howls. I’ve got one foot in the tub now. The cold plays my femur like a tuning fork; my skin cells pucker for warmth, seizing my muscles.

I’m still dizzy—dizzy and erect. I have both feet in the tub now. I put my face close to the green tiles with their little fern banners, lazily fingering the worn grout with the soft flesh of my fingertips. The room is full of sink steam; the little droplets cling to my skin, making me feel sticky and birth-slimmed. I want to scream—scream to start again, to emerge with new skin, but decide against it.

I lower myself into the cold porcelain crucible; my breath flees when my ass meets the cold. I’m quiet, my mouth frozen in a wide O, my brow scrunched—just as I was before the crying began. The first thing we do when we’re here is scream—if we don’t, we die. Why scream? Why can’t we laugh, or smile, or kiss…

There’s a piss-yellow ducky in the corner; I’m surprised she hasn’t drafted the poor thing to the front lines. Maybe it doesn’t stink enough like me? Lucky bastard. I pick it up and look at every angle, trying to remember if it’s mine. There are black specs of mold under the crook of its little tail.

I put the duck back and stretch out, slowly lowering my head until it thumps against the tile and the cold shoots through my crown. I stare up at the light, lost in the sink’s hiss, and the hopper purrs, so vibrant and powerful they make the bath vibrate my balls, jostling them against my warm thigh meat, feeding my erection.

I’m thinking of Trevor—Trevor and that dog bleeding out under the streetlight, how it must have looked up at the light, a light like this, thinking—hoping it was the sun or salvation or god, anything other than abandonment.

I don’t want it to, but my hand is wrapping around my cock. I am helpless, and my hand is cold. My eyes close, turning the ceiling light eyelid red, and my hand moves slowly, up, down, up, down—my body remembers waking next to Trevor—remembers how he felt thrusting into me, how his hair fell in his face as he stirred his milkshake, how he—just now, not yet ten strokes in, my cum thumps the porcelain.

vi.

DAY 2

I’m naked in my bed. It’s morning, and the smoke trickling through the window coughs me awake.

I scramble to close the window. I look out. The yard is crawling with hoppers, hundreds of them. Mom’s dumping a load from her robe pouch into the fire, sprinting back to the front lines to refill.

I’m cursing to myself, my head throbs as I negotiate my sweatpants. I rush down the stairs, remembering to hold my breath through the kitchen, but her NutriBullet’s gone.

I slip my shoes on and rush to the hose. There are too many of them; they shift when I walk, vibrating earthquake-like underfoot. I start and stop, stumble again and again, left with no choice but to walk slowly with my hands out like a slackliner.

I drag the hose to the flames. Mom’s by the rhododendrons with her NutriBullet, throwing pink goop in the soil, smearing it around with her boot, bending down to stomp and cut.

As the water hits the blaze, I vampire my forearm again, shivering as I catch a whiff of unwashed pits. I close my eyes, wishing I were asleep as the steam lays siege. Mom’s yelling something. I open my eyes, prepared to see her charging at me, but she’s standing where she was, and the hoppers are retreating. I look behind me. The path I took from deck to hose to flame is pristine—clear grass radiates out from me as the rowdy hoard backscatters to enemy territory.

The fire is an oozing black puddle of twitching legs and Swiss-cheesed wings. Mom’s finished crushing and cutting the last of the stragglers. She wipes the knife on her robe and sheaths it. She’s in the shade of a dogwood, hands on her hips, beaming towards me, her face twisted up with that Wenatchee shit eater. I smile, too. For a brief instant, it’s a real toothy one, but the moment my teeth rub shoulders with the air, something in me retreats, something says you don’t get to do that, mutating my face into a closed-mouth smirk, my gaze shifts away from her, returning to the hose.

DAY 3

We’ve come to an understanding—she won’t start any fires as long as I stay outside and make regular rounds (at least three per hour). At first, she demanded I stay with her in the tent. We went back and forth on this but agreed to a compromise: I’ll sleep in the house, but I won’t shower, and any scatological releases made throughout the day must be done outside and used to fortify the front lines.

Me—the guy who can’t take a shit if someone’s in his apartment—agreeing to crap outside and smear it on the property line to ward off giant hoppers, writing the whole thing off as desperate times, desperate measures hoopla attests to the fact that I, like dad, have thrown up my hands (metaphorically at least)—if it gets me through the day and closer to that eastbound plane, it’s good. Sign me up. Simple as that.

All we do is walk, breathe, crush, cut, and fortify the lines with blended placenta and excrement. I feel special looking at the neighbors—at the barren sludge pits that were once their stupid yards—that were once green expanses home to bar-b-qs and bonfires but now stand devoid of life save for the random spared tree or bush. By comparison, mom’s yard—our yard—is a desert mirage, a uteral Eden where I’ve returned to power.

DAY 4

This morning, my neck started itching really bad. Mom tolerated me running inside for a few minutes to consult the mirror. I’d forgotten to clean the other night’s jizz off the tub floor—it’s still there, dried into a limescale crust.

Distracted by my neck, I decided to leave it. The skin around my Adam’s apple was puffy and red. Swallowing had become an ordeal. I poked at it. It was firm and bulging out like a bald head.

Mom started yelling.

I heard her tennis racket thwacking branches.

I moved to the window. The hoppers were racing in like picnic ants, clinging to everything in sight. She was in high gear, swatting and looking around. I could tell she was jonesing for the gas can and a match.

Fuck.

I hightailed it down there and got to my rounds.

In thirty minutes, we had the yard clear and the stragglers slaughtered, but the rhododendrons and half the buckbrush were gone.

Mom pitched a fit. Crying and slapping like that first day. She threatened to light fires, “to burn it all down,” if I refused to sleep in the tent with her.

So here I am—praying for sleep in this shitty tent, mom sound asleep to my left. A craggy rock digs into my lumbar, and the hopper purrs excite the soil with their snoring crescendos, leaping dirt into my face.

The sleeping bag is too thin and short; I have no choice but to curl into a tight fetus. She had me patrolling for hours, and I was stupid enough to go barefoot (turns out, like sand, it’s easier to walk on the hoppers barefoot.) I got swept up in the adrenaline of my neck and the invasion and forgot to sunscreen my feet. Now, they’re hot and throbbing with leftover sun, roasting me inside out.

I don’t know how late it is, but it’s pitch black. I think I’ve been dozing in and out of micro-naps, but it’s hard to tell—my burning feet keep waking me. I weasel my hand down towards them, half-asleep, shimmying close to appease them. As soon as my nails scrape the chapped flesh, I close my eyes and feel the relief of water, hear the lapping of tides and my little feet sloshing through Wenatchee’s shallows. I see the boats hanging on the horizon, dwarfed into little bobbing motes by the mountains. My periphery glows orange, and my feet burn.

I remember—it’s vacation; I’ve spent the days and nights romping in creeks and chasing fireflies. Yesterday, mom forgot to put sunscreen on my feet, and now they’re throbbing—alive with heat, beginning to peel. Bits of spent skin wave in the water like algae. I’m standing still. If I’m still enough, the little trout will emerge from the stones and gather around my feet—swarming by the dozen to nibble my dead skin.

If I cast my fist into the water, they scatter like flies off a turd, disappearing into the rocks with their bellies full of me. I am still. Frozen. As the circles of my previous thrust peter out, the congregation renews its hunger for foot pulp; their white, googly eyes peek out between the stones.

All of a sudden, cold hands shove themselves under my armpits, and I’m airborne. I squeal-giggle and kick my sea monkey legs as dad puts me in a chair beside mom. She’s wearing her black one-piece and the biggest, floppiest sunhat I’ve ever seen. She’s putting a fork full of macaroni salad through her sun-chapped lips, chewing it, and smiling.

I open wide, going ahhhhh, suddenly ravenous. She prepares a forkful, “One for mommy.” She takes a bite, chews, and prepares another, “One for your sister.” She bites, chews, prepares a forkful, “And last but not least…one for Brando!” I giggle as she traces circuitous shapes in the air, repeating cho cho and chugga chugga. I want to itch my feet, but I wait for the train to dock and bite down, feeling the cold of the fork between my teeth, and I pull back, away from her, hearing the silver sing in my brain as the fork scrapes teeth and the noodles land on my tongue.

I start chewing.

She’s given me a bite with an olive, and it makes me pucker. She laughs, and the mayonnaise on her cheek sparkles in the sun as she rubs her pudgy belly.

“Sister?” I say, chewing open-mouthed.

“That’s right,” dad says from behind, his voice semi-carbonated from a beer swig, “lil’ tiger’s gonna be a big brother!”

Mom snores and turns on her side, wresting me from the lake. Sister? I taste olives and remember the red maple—sister?! I sense it out there, through the nylon, bleeding its musk into the ground, stinking like mom’s kitchen. My nails are hungry shovels turning the earth below its sanguine branches. I stop itching. My brain is a pink piglet, curled up, fattened, and warmed from the pellets of connected dots, drifting into gluttonous remembrance while my body is left in the cold, gawking and malnourished.

Is this Dr. Horn’s levy breaking? Is this what she meant? This isn’t a flood. I’m not swept away in grief, or anger, or jealousy, or anything—memories have come, yes, but they’re a blurry trickle—hushed voices from the other room, the red maple, an uncomfortable suit, the shoebox coffin, flowers (so many flowers), everyone in black and sniffling, and mom—mom, coming into my room in the dead of night, curling herself on my floor, curled fetal like I am now, facing me.

How could I have forgotten?

Sometimes, she’d lay there, awake, just staring at me—the whites of her eyes tinted blue by alarm clock light. Other times, she’d be asleep, snoring as she is now. Sometimes, I’d hear muffled sobs. For three years, this was her nightly ritual. She’d never start out on the floor—she’d kiss me goodnight, and I’d doze off, but hours later, she’d come sneaking in. If I stirred, she’d run her fingers through my hair and shush me as she coiled in a bedside heap on the carpet. Come morning, she’d be gone. I’d get dressed and head downstairs to find her in her robe making eggs, smiling and cooing, “Morning, sleepyhead!” We never spoke about it. At first, I thought these were just dreams because when I’d confront her about it, she’d brush it off, saying nothing. If I pressed her too hard, she’d get flustered:

“Hey mom, why do you sl—”

“why what?…why…WHAT?”

If dad witnessed my inquiries, he’d stand behind her, pressing his pointer against his lips in a silent shhh, shaking his head side to side, wordlessly imploring me to give it up.

“You’re seeing things…just dreams,” she’d say, stirring her eggs, staring out the kitchen window at the red maple, “you and that busy head of yours…”

DAY 5

Come first light, we were outnumbered. Mom crab-walked through the hoard, smushing and cutting as I did my rounds, but only half seemed to heed my stench. They’d razed the whole neighborhood. Hunger had set in, turning them ignorant and disrespectful. I broke out the leaf blower and lawn mower to slaughter en masse. This bought an hour of temporary calm, but they just kept coming—they’re all awake now, flooding out from the dirt.

We did what we could, but the yews are gone, the hydrangeas are sludge, the maples, the lawn, the firs, the dogwoods, are hanging by threads. Mom’s has become monkish and unkempt—her white robe’s nearly black, and errant strands of greying strawberry hair escape the Thatcher coif to hang in her eyes.

She’s gone for the gas can multiple times. I poured it out and threw it into the neighbor’s yard. She clenched her fists, but she didn’t have the strength to yell or attack.

By noon, we made an unspoken yet mutual decision to retreat, to focus our efforts on the veggies, the blue blossoms, and the red maple (which, thankfully, the hoppers don’t appear interested in as they’ve left its branches and a shoebox swatch of soil at its trunk unmolested.)

It’s been hours.

The sun is going, and we’re tired.

We’re confined to the dry ground at the foot of the red maple, standing in the brown-black dirt, watching the hoard digest the yard. I remember how in the summer twilight mom and dad stood in front of this frail thing, dad with his arm on mom’s shoulder; I heard her sniffle as I dug up worms from the grass.

Mom’s tapping the racket against her sneaker; her shoulder rubs against mine. She smells acrid and there’s a new growth on her nape. She takes my hand in hers; she is sweaty and goop-slimed. I want to turn to her, but I can’t—my neck lump makes it impossible.

She mumbles something to herself and goes quiet.

“Her name would’ve been—,” she chokes, “…was…” she says quietly, pausing to clear her throat, “...was...” she’s yelling now, getting it out above the purrs, “her name was Emily.” Her nails dig into my hand when she says it, her free hand gesturing to the maple.

We’re silent again, letting the purrs ravage us—letting them shake us from our skins—we’re a bored girl’s Etch A Sketch doodles; she’s shaking us silly—shaking for the pure white, the do-over—shaking to make the new real again.

“Emily,” I repeat, just for myself, my voice tremulous. I stare at the maple as I say it. The sun’s caught behind the leaves, making them blurry and blood-like, showing me her veins.

“Emily,” I say again, putting my arm around mom.

We stand in Emily’s reprieve; the awning rain-soaked passersby stand under, shoulder to shoulder in absolute silence, together, for a brief moment, appreciating the absence of what they’ve fled before fleeing into the ether.

A big hopper takes an exploratory step into Emily’s ground. He’s left the bustle of the hoard, frozen in the clearing, coming to terms with the fact he wasn’t snuffed out. He is confident and moves slowly to the base of the maple. He flaps his wings, making a gunshot sound. Mom’s hand tightens in mine. Whatever decorum these things respected withers in front of us as more hoppers peel away, marching in the maverick’s wake, scaling the ornate maple, their purrs trembling it like a wet pup, shaking the veiny leaves to the dirt.

Mom stoops to gather the fallen leaves. She kisses one and slides it in her robe. She passes the other to me. She looks at me as I pinch the papery thing and slide it into my shirt pocket, her eyes empty and blue-hued like she’s been caught sleeping on my floor. I nod. She nods. I tighten my grip on her hand and start walking across the backs of the feasting hoppers. After a few steps, she stops. I see her looking for the red maple, trying to find it under the monochrome black. She’s breathing heavily, running her free hand through her hair and smoothing out her wrinkled robe. We keep moving until we’re at the garage. I pull up the door. She stands, staring at the red leaf as I pull the dusty tarp off her Honda, hoping the thing still runs. I open the passenger door and help her in. I walk around and get behind the wheel. The purrs make the car shake. She’s staring out the windshield as it fogs with our useless breaths. I turn the key and she sputters to life. I reach over and give mom a squeeze on the knee. She says nothing, but I think the corner of her lip twitched. I smile and drive east.