# Cetera Magazine > Read something you didn't expect. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### Welcome URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T23:11:09.000Z *Cetera* is a multi-genre magazine that believes fiction can be one of the best forms of surprise. Every Thursday, we deliver original short stories that challenge, comfort, and hopefully astonish. Tales that explore the unexpected corners of human experience and the worlds that shift without warning. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/Cetera_cover-4-1.png) ## What we publish Our stories span multiple genres while maintaining a commitment to literary excellence. You'll find speculative fiction that bends reality, horror that creeps under your skin, sci-fi that expands your universe, fantasy that reimagines the familiar, and weird fiction that defies all categories. Each story comes complete with original artwork and detailed author's or editor's notes that pull back the curtain on the inspiration and process. ## Our “philosophy” We believe in the irreplaceable value of human creativity. Every story we publish is written and edited **entirely by human authors, without AI assistance** of any kind. Each piece is crafted with care, intention, and the understanding that the best stories trust their readers' intelligence and aren't afraid to take risks. ## What to expect from us When you subscribe to *Cetera*, you're joining a community of readers who appreciate thoughtful, surprising fiction. Our ad-free reading experience lets you focus on what matters: the stories themselves. ## Worlds Without Warning podcast [*Worlds Without Warning*](https://omny.fm/shows/thankgodformovies/playlists/worlds-without-warning?ref=ceteramagazine.com) is a weekly podcast where we present our latest stories in audio form. Our goal is to add an extra dimension to the *Cetera* experience while maintaining the same commitment to quality and surprise. The podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. ## Masthead [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-26-at-12.42.28---PM.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/author/natalia/) Natalia Emmons is the ****Managing Editor** of Cetera Magazine and one of its cofounders. She mainly writes short fiction, poetry, and extremely long text messages about the perils of run on sentences. [Stories by Natalia Emmons ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/author/natalia/) [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is the ****Chief Editor** of Cetera Magazine and one of its cofounders. He's a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Visit Jon's author website ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/10/461439309_8398302373569948_5266001374489845171_n.jpg)](https://ko-fi.com/bridgetserdock/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Bridget Serdock is an ****Illustrator and Editor** for Cetera Magazine. They're also a producer of Fantasy Writing For Barbarians. "I am nothing if not kinda heartwarming in an aggressive way." [Buy Bridget a Coffee ](https://ko-fi.com/bridgetserdock/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. ## Submissions We're always looking for fresh voices and untold stories. Writers interested in contributing can find our submission guidelines on [our submissions page](https://cetera.substack.com/p/submit-to-cetera). And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing and sharing Cetera with a friend. ### Submissions URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/submit-to-cetera/ Last updated: 2026-07-08T19:07:26.000Z We're always looking for fresh voices and untold stories. *Cetera* publishes original short fiction and poetry that surprises, challenges, and moves readers. If you write stories that explore the unexpected—tales of memory, rebellion, folklore, or worlds that change without warning—we want to hear from you. ## What kind of work do you accept? **Short Fiction:** We're looking for stories between 1,000 and 5,000 words. We do not currently accept flash fiction, which includes anything under 1,000 words. For genres, we're most interested in literary, speculative, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, weird fiction, and stories that defy categorization. We're especially interested in writing that is geared toward adults, so YA and middle-grade stories are a tough sell for us. **Poetry:** We only publish poetry in the digital issue of our magazine. For instructions on how to submit to our next issue, click [here](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/themed-poetry-call-after-the-fire-the-garden/). Due to the high volume of submissions we now receive, **we no longer accept previously published work**. That includes anything published online, even if it is on a personal blog or social media post. **Simultaneous submissions** are OK, but please let us know if the piece has been accepted elsewhere. If you need to withdraw your submission, simply reply to your submission email so we can properly flag it. **AI Policy:** We maintain a strict no-AI policy. We do not accept work that has been created, assisted, edited, or enhanced by artificial intelligence tools of any kind. This includes but is not limited to: - AI writing assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) - AI grammar and style checkers beyond basic spell-check - AI plot or poem generators - AI-generated ideas, prompts, outlines, or conceptual frameworks - Any AI tool used in the writing, editing, or revision process We believe in the irreplaceable value of human creativity and authentic voice. By submitting to *Cetera*, you certify that your work is entirely your own creation, written without AI assistance. ## How do I actually submit? Please send your submission to **ceterasubmissions \[@\] gmail.com**. But before you do, review the following guidelines to avoid an auto-rejection. - Subject line of your email should be "Fiction Submission: \[Story Title\]" for short fiction. - Submit your story as an attachment. Files must be .doc or .docx. - Please include a brief cover letter (2-3 sentences) and your author's bio. - Fiction must be double-spaced, 12-point font (Times New Roman or similar). - Include your preferred name for publication (i.e. "pen name") and contact information on the first page. - Title your file: "LastName\_StoryTitle" for fiction As mentioned above, we no longer accept previously published work. That includes anything published online, even if it is on a personal blog or social media post. Simultaneous submissions are OK, but please let us know if the piece has been accepted elsewhere. ## Anything else I should know? - We are a labor of love and cannot offer payment at this time. What we can offer is careful editorial attention, original artwork to accompany your story, and promotion to our growing community of readers. Additionally, if a reader "tips" your story, all proceeds go directly to you. - We ask for first serial rights and the right to archive your story on our platform. All other rights remain with you. - We aim to respond within 1-2 weeks depending on the volume of submissions we receive at any given time. - Accepted short stories will be published in our weekly Thursday newsletter and archived on ceteramagazine.com. Audio versions of selected stories may also be featured on our podcast, *Worlds Without Warning*. ## What if I have more questions? If you're not sure what to submit, please check out [our archive](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/page/2/) to get a better feel for what we publish. And if you have any specific questions about submissions not covered here, please email us via the address above. ### Podcast URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/podcast/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T23:10:04.000Z Our companion podcast, *Worlds Without Warning*, offers audio versions for many of our written stories. You can subscribe to the podcast on all major platforms so new stories hit your feed right away. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-06-at-9.50.05---AM.png) ### Themed Poetry Call: "After the Fire, the Garden" URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/themed-poetry-call-after-the-fire-the-garden/ Last updated: 2026-07-07T17:58:43.000Z **Deadline: August 20, 2026** Cetera Magazine’s third digital poetry issue turns toward aftermath. Toward the altered ground left behind by rupture. And the strange forms of life that begin there. "After the Fire, the Garden" is an issue about what grows after devastation. We're interested in poems that understand renewal as complicated and unsentimental and achingly alive. The fire may be literal or symbolic. Ecological disaster, family fracture, illness, exile, political violence, spiritual crisis, heartbreak, inheritance, collapse. The garden does not promise that everything has been healed. It is merely what takes root in damaged soil. ## Poetry we want to see: We want poems that avoid easy redemption. Poems that know survival is not the same as restoration. Poems attentive to the labor of tending, the unruliness of regrowth, the stubbornness of weeds, the intimacy of rot, the beauty that arrives with consequence. A garden can be cultivated, but it can also be feral. A fire can destroy, but it can also clear, expose, transform, even purify. For a good example of what kinds of poetry we typically accept, please take a look at our previous poetry issues: "[The Body Keeps the Score](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cetera-2-the-body-keeps-the-score/)" and "[The Things That Survive Us](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cetera-poetry-1-the-things-that-survive-us/)." ## Submission Guidelines: Submit 1–3 poems per submission as a single PDF. There is no minimum or maximum line count, but we ask that you consider the pacing of a digital reading experience. Previously unpublished work only. Simultaneous submissions are accepted; please notify us immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. We welcome work in translation. If submitting a translated poem, please include the original text and a brief note on the translation’s relationship to the source. We accept all formal approaches: lyric, narrative, documentary, hybrid, erasure, prose poem, visual or scored work. If your submission contains unusual formatting, include a note in your cover letter. Cover letters should be brief. Tell us your name, a brief bio, and whether any of the submitted poems are part of a larger project. Response time is 1–2 weeks after the deadline. We read every submission. Submit via email: ceterasubmissions@gmail.com. Subject line should be: **Poetry Submission – After the Fire, the Garden**. ### Cetera Press URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cetera-press/ Last updated: 2026-07-09T23:57:20.000Z Cetera Press is the book-publishing imprint of Cetera Magazine, dedicated to literary fiction, speculative work, poetry, and other work shaped by emotional consequence. Our first release, *All Our Bright Ruins* by Jon Negroni, introduces the imprint’s central concern. Of ordinary people enduring broken systems and finding small, stubborn forms of light. ## All Our Bright Ruins ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/07/AllOurBright.png) **Publication Date: November 10, 2026** > *A man feeds a stray dog beneath a bridge. A nurse keeps an emergency ward alive through a blackout. A driver waits for one more fare in a town gutted by layoffs. A girl stands under stadium lights while history performs itself around her.* > > *In* **All Our Bright Ruins** *, Jon Negroni gathers stories of labor, loneliness, faith, family, tenderness, and survival. There are no heroes in this story. But there are people. People who keep working, caring, watching, cleaning, feeding, driving, teaching, and holding on after the world has already failed them.* > > *Quiet, intimate, and deeply attentive, the collection finds brightness in the last place most would expect. In the fragile human acts that make ruin bearable.* ## Posts ### The Neptune Kids URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-neptune-kids/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T13:05:20.000Z Every March 10, Quentin and I played hooky to commemorate the finale of our favorite show, *Mr. Radical and the Neptune Kids*. The show had been cancelled for about five years, but we still maintained our own personal holiday, even though we had outgrown Mr. Radical and his band of otherworldly teenage sidekicks. We were in high school now. Our parents assumed our playing hooky on March 10 those many years ago was a one-off. We could not necessarily be seen in public—Quentin’s mom was a cashier at the FoodCorp and my dad worked at the hardware store. Both were owned by Proxima Industries. Everything in our town was owned by Proxima Industries. It was Quentin who knew where to find the defunct conductor, and thus his suggestion turned into our mission for the day. The conductor was buried deep in the forest. Its metal exterior was obscured by blankets of lichen and moss. Quentin went off the path and scaled a boulder in that orangutan way we always did. Quentin called from over the rock, “Conner! This way!” “Maybe there is another way around,” I said. All of our coordinating to maintain this ritual, to convince all appropriate parties we were where we needed to be… all of it would cease with a broken wrist. “Doesn’t look like it,” Quentin called out from the other side of the rock. I feared letting the silence between us linger to the point where Quentin himself would recognize his patience fading. I approached the rock and groped along its ridges for purchase. I heaved myself up steadily but with haste. I had a hard time making the final couple of feet. And there was Quentin just above me, hand out. “Let’s go,” he said, seemingly not aware of my struggle. I grabbed his hand and he pulled me up. We walked onto the ridges, and the ascent along them was less arduous. Perhaps Quentin’s proximity gave me courage. He asked me about Melissa, a girl in our math class. “You don’t have, like, a crush on her, do you?” “No,” I said. “You talk about her a lot.” “Oh,” I said, thinking that perhaps Quentin knew more about these things than I did. He was learning a lot from the upperclassmen these days. I asked Quentin if he liked anyone and he shrugged. We climbed another boulder before he answered, “It doesn’t matter.” We came across a clearing. From atop these hills we could see the entire forest. To the northwest was our tiny town of Cog’s Hollow, six miles away. Everywhere else was a sea of green, a glistening shimmer of swaying trees underneath the morning sun. Black birds flew in the distance. In this moment I knew that I loved Quentin. Not in a romantic way, but as a brother. I’d always thought of him as such, but it was here, standing on top of the world, that I knew this moment mattered, even as I was living it. A sort of proto-nostalgia. The quantum conductors poked into the sky, bigger than the mountains themselves. Kids in our class called them “upright cigarettes.” My dad called them “a middle finger to God,” although this was usually after he had a couple of drinks. A flock of birds orbited the structures. One of them collided with its semi-reflective exterior. It was far enough away that we only felt the *thunk*; we didn’t hear it. Animals always had a hard time with the conductors, we were told. Something about Earth’s magnetic poles. We were told a lot of things. The quantum conductors were as white as snow. The Proxima Industries logo wrapped around the entire structure. It was the color of ox blood and illuminated neon at night. It was difficult to see from my bedroom window, but the red incandescence was brutal from Quentin’s. It was almost awe-inspiring to see the quantum conductors in the sea of forest. The three structures poked into the sky and I recalled the day when the Proxima Reps came to school to talk to each individual class. This was before Proxima Industries bought the land around Cog’s Hollow using something my dad called “Eminent Domain,” which allowed the government to take land and homes away to help with some faraway war. My dad said that Proxima Industries was investigating the laws of the universe, that theoretically if America could tap into the laws of quantum mechanics, it could harness the power of a black hole for infinite energy. Now wouldn’t that be something! One of the reps said that we should never, ever get close to the conductors and Carlos Martinez, the class clown, asked him to define “close.” The rep snickered and said the conductors emitted so much heat and energy that they released a low and steady buzz, sort of like a bunch of beehives. If you could hear that, you’re too close. One time Maggie Anaheim said that she was walking her dog Bandit and they got near a conductor by accident and Bandit went so nuts that Maggie needed to take him home, walk uncompleted. Neither Quentin nor I could hear the buzz from the techno-obelisks in front of us, and I spotted a deer at the other end of the clearing, sniffing at the reeds. A part of me wished that I had lied and told Quentin that I had not seen anything, that all the animals kept a wide berth like Bandit. Quentin said, “You ever think you want to get out of here?” “Cog’s Hollow?” I asked. Quentin sat on the rock. “This place is so boring.” “Yeah?” I said, thinking of some of the more rigid kids in our class. None of the cool kids talked to me like they did with Quentin. I wondered if this was Quentin’s way of saying that he was getting tired of their attention. Quentin suddenly looked at me. “How did you know you liked Melissa?” I shrugged. “I don’t really know if I *like-like* her.” “Come on.” “I guess I like how she smells. I like how she looks.” “But why her and not another girl?” “I think she’s funny and sweet,” I said. I liked talking about her. Quentin opened his mouth and closed it again. I saw the gears in his head turning. Then he said, “Let’s get out of here and see what we came for.” He turned to go and I said, “You okay, Quentin?” “Let’s go see the ruins,” he said, his voice armored. “It’ll be like the final episode of *Captain Neptune*, when they finally go back to the wreckage of the ship that brought him to Earth.” He jumped down and vaulted with newfound energy. He was tall and spry, what our health classes would call an early growth spurt. A lot of kids in our class got early growth spurts. Already some of the juniors and seniors were being scouted to play football or field hockey in college, full rides. Dad told me that Cog’s Hollow had one of the highest concentrations of Division 1 full athletic scholarships in the country, rivaling those of the town of Reading, Pennsylvania. Mom noted how peculiar it was that Proxima Industries had other quantum conductors there, too. I was amazed at Quentin’s agility, his feline balance, the strength of his muscles. He reminded me of the Neptune Kids when they were imbued with the cosmic power from Captain Neptune himself. The story went that upon crashing to Earth, Captain Neptune split into five fragments, each one finding hosts in a ragtag group of kids. Their obvious variations of ethnicities—there was the Asian one, the black one, the British one—were on the nose. With each fragment of Captain Neptune’s power in the kids, they could do amazing things, like leap farther, lift more, hold their breath for hours. I wondered if this was what Quentin felt, in his new body, transitioning to adulthood. I doubt he even realized it. Eventually I made it to another clearing and stood by Quentin at the edge of the rock. The clearing looked as if a meteor had struck the top of the cliff. In its wake was a football-field-sized expanse of nothing but overgrown weeds and grass. The cliffside crested at all angles, insulating us from the outside. In the center of the clearing was the defunct quantum conductor, although it was miniature in scale, about the size of my house. It was almost comical compared to the large conductors we had just passed. Large reeds had taken it over, and some parts of it were scabbed with rust. Unlike the others’ eggshell-white exteriors, this conductor was as black as onyx. The ox-blood red PROXIMA INDUSTRIES was faded by sunlight. “How did you find this from where we were?” I asked, looking around and pushing some sepia-toned stalks aside. “I could see it,” Quentin said. “Just look at it. Super cool.” “But how did you see it, Quentin?” I asked. “We were down the mountain and deep in the forest, and this clearing is inset. It’s not like you could have glimpsed this through the trees.” “It looks so weird being so tiny,” Quentin said, marching forward. “Did you have a drone or something?” I asked. “Would you believe me if I told you that I dreamt it was here?” We approached the conductor and even though I knew it was defunct because I could not feel the heat nor hear the persistent buzz, I was still cautious. Quentin was braver than I, and that meant he could be more stupid. He walked right up to it, placed his hands on the exterior, looking up at the large “R.” “Why is this one black?” I asked. “Maybe they turn black when they turn off?” Quentin said. “Or maybe this one is more special.” We walked along the perimeter. The sun beat against us. I figured it was probably around fifth period now. I would be in math class with Melissa. Quentin moved his fingertips across the black shell as if he were searching for some pressure plate. With a satisfying whoop, he said, “Got it, Conner!” There was a sudden *whooshing* sound, and the smooth exterior of the conductor opened into a small square that led into blackness. Quentin stood in front of it, as if presenting his discovery. “It’s like you knew where the button was,” I said, pushing through the overgrowth, straining one ear for the low buzzing we were warned about. Quentin was silent. I said, “You did, didn’t you?” “I had a feeling.” Quentin and I looked into the abyss. I imagined it to be an unlimited expanse, full of wires and nuclear power and strange elements. No one knew what was on the inside of the quantum conductors. Jeremy Smalls said that his uncle worked on the robots that maintained the exterior of the conductors and said that the inside was a giant battery. Suzanne Gaintly, in Quentin’s history class, said her mom said that there was something large and organic in there, vials of proteins and amoebas. The thought made me shudder, to think of something monstrous trapped in the conductors. But one thing was for certain, the conductors occasionally exhaled a milky, slightly pungent mist that carried odor down the hill. You could smell it on a breezy day, or sometimes after a rain. My house was closer to the town center, so I wasn’t as bothered. Everyone who lived nearer to the edge of Cog’s Hollow, like Quentin, often needed to shut their windows and put up air fresheners. The inside of the defunct conductor was empty, a vast silo that extended as far downward as the working conductors extended upward. Quentin dropped a penny into the void. We waited ten, twenty, thirty seconds and still did not hear the impact of metal on metal. “Waste of a wish,” he said. “As if you could wish for anything,” I said. One side of Quentin’s face was illuminated by the early afternoon sun, the other blackened almost entirely by the void in the conductor. “What do you mean?” I must have irked him, because suddenly Quentin stood very erect. I doubt he realized. I said, “I’m just saying you got it made. You’re popular, you’re good at sports. You ace all your classes.” Quentin shook his head. “Don’t you think you’re thinking too small?” Before I could answer, he located a ladder and maneuvered his way down. I waited outside, listened to the breeze, watched the wheat stalks sway. A flock of birds flew across the sky. In the distance, if I looked hard enough, the Proxima Quantum Conductors were visible behind the trees, bone white against the green. Quentin called out, “Let’s go!” I looked over the lip, down into the infinite blackness. The thought of the penny still dropping made me uncomfortable. I realized as I kept Quentin waiting that this was our entire relationship. Him waiting for me. Me waiting for me. The ladder creaked under my weight but remained steady. A decade of rust and dust wafted up my nostrils. I speculated that the defunct conductor was still radioactive, like that nightmare at Chernobyl. I yelled my concern to Quentin, who by now had located a landing. “It’s not radioactive,” he said, flatly. “You don’t know that.” Quentin paused. “No. I don’t know. But I feel it.” “I’m not getting cancer because of a gut feeling, Quentin.” “Then don’t explore with me.” I did not know what I did to deserve Quentin’s attitude. Since we’d left the house, sneaking through the forest instead of going to our respective bus stops, I’d done nothing but follow him, always a pace behind. But today felt different. Had he mapped out this conductor before? When had he learned of its existence? I shamed myself into admitting I was jealous of a potential replacement, that Quentin might have found another friend to explore the wilderness outside of Cog’s Hollow. Quentin was at the landing. Behind him was a long hallway with dimly lit bulbs, evidence of dying circuits. “Does Proxima strip everything on the inside when a conductor becomes defunct? All the wires or the plasma or the…” “Biomatter?” Quentin cut in. “Maybe. But it’s weird that they maintain the shells.” “I wonder why this one was defunct in the first place.” Quentin stopped and smiled. His being was aglow with the pulsing lights in the hallway. “Maybe we’ll find out.” We came upon a chamber as large as a lake. This silo challenged my perceptions of space. Where did this conductor exist? Was it underground? A thought dawned on me that perhaps there were more quantum conductors underground, more than the ones I could see at the edge of town, from the schoolyard, from Quentin’s bedroom window. The gap gave me vertigo. I pictured large pulses of energy shooting out from a giant vat. Every twilight, the conductors released a minor electric pulse that the Proxima representatives called *Benign Tremors*. It felt like a sudden breeze and the scent of burning wires dissipated as fast as it came. Sometimes, if you were closer to the conductors, you could feel the ground shake a little bit, as if you were standing atop gelatin. When the Proxima representatives spoke at the town hall they handed out pamphlets with a whole bunch of explanations, but the last page contained a guide for what to expect with the Benign Tremors. Every once in a while, the fire alarm would go off or the fridge would get too cold, or, if you were lucky, your alarm clock would reset itself. At the bottom of the pamphlet were directions to the bunker in the church, in the unlikely event of two tremors in succession. They did not explain what happened when there were two tremors. Quentin was off again. There was another tunnel. It was hard to keep up with him. He was now almost speedwalking, unfettered by the absolute blackness beneath our feet. I tried to armor myself by faking Quentin’s confidence as my own. I walked into Quentin’s back. He was in the middle of the bridge, hand up, almost like we were playing army and about to infiltrate a camp. There was a blue light glowing at the end of the tunnel. Quentin looked over his shoulder and raised a finger to his lips. We crept slowly to the other end and came upon a cavern no larger than my living room. It glowed an ephemeral electric blue. There were six kids, all more or less our age, and they were naked. Their skin was pasty white and their hair was the color of onyx. They sat cross-legged around a glowing blue orb. I could see the reptilian spines of the ones facing away from me. None of the kids looked like anyone in our class, nor did they stir at our approach. “Are they alive?” I whispered, feeling silly to ask such a question. I was still unconvinced that they weren’t statues. “I think so. Maybe,” Quentin said. He perked up his head. “You don’t hear that?” “Hear what?” Quentin gestured around him. “It’s like there is an intercom or something. You seriously don’t hear that?” I shook my head, trying to locate hidden words. “What does it say?” Quentin smiled and looked into the orb from beyond the barrier of sitting children. His eyes were red with the onset of tears. He said, “That I’m loved, and it’s all going to be okay.” “Who is saying that to you?” Quentin wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. “You wouldn’t get it.” It was not immediate, and I doubt that Quentin fully internalized what he was trying to communicate. But I knew what he meant. Our paths would diverge. We would remain friends, and be friendly, but I doubted that we would ever be best friends again. A sad thought engulfed me: this would be our last time playing hooky. This was our final episode. Quentin looked back at the kids. “They are not from here.” “Let’s get out of here, Quentin.” He smiled. “They are the Neptune Kids.” “Come on,” I said. Quentin looked at the naked children and their strange monk-like postures. They looked so peaceful. “I don’t want to go back to Cog’s Hollow,” he said, and he was weeping again, though not from sadness. “I think I’ll stay right here.” “Quentin, let’s go. We have to get back. Our parents will find out.” “Parents are just constructs. Genetic transmitters. Their perceptions of the world are neutered in scope.” “What?” Quentin blinked. He looked at the children, eyed each of them. His shoulders slackened. Something *clicked* in him. He found whatever he was looking for. After a long pause he agreed to return to the surface, and we made our way back in silence. Occasionally, Quentin would say *I know* and *I love you, too*, and when I looked over my shoulder to confirm he was talking, he would simply shrug. After the third time he snapped at me to stop asking, and by the fourth time I ignored him completely. The sky was a light orange. “Quite the adventure,” I said, trying to distract Quentin from the silence. “It’s like that episode where Captain Neptune saves the Neptune Kids from the Mole Men of Mars. When all the kids were blinking in the new light and disoriented,” Quentin said. I laughed to hide my discomfort from Quentin’s gloom. We managed to leave the crater, and we both gave one long, hard look at the white quantum conductors lording over the forest that surrounded our unremarkable town. I said, “I think I’m going to ask Melissa to be my girlfriend.” “I think she’ll say yes.” “You never told me who you like.” Quentin said, “One of the seniors.” I listed the senior girls. Quentin shook his head. “No. Not them. Joe.” “I just said Joanne Clint.” She was one of the cheerleaders. Everyone with a beating pulse liked her. “No. Joe.” I stopped only briefly. There was only one “other” Joe that fit the description. A wallflower who smoked outside of Proxima Convenience. “Oh! Oh.” But Quentin kept walking, nonplussed by this admission. I hustled to keep pace. We left the forest just as the streetlights went on. The Proxima Quantum Conductors were visible in the distance, stark against the darkening sky, the giant “R” logo glowing like some enormous tattoo. A subtle pulse underneath our feet signified the 6:00 p.m. Benign Tremor. We came to the crossroads of Albert and Marle. “Let’s do something different next time,” I said. “Next year we’ll have our learner’s permits, and maybe we can go to an amusement park.” “Sounds great,” Quentin said. I could see in his eyes that he was already planning on returning to the defunct conductor the next chance he got. He knew better than to ask me. I knew better than to ask him. This would be his secret place, a place I had only been able to visit, just the one time. “See you tomorrow?” I asked. “You bet.” We bopped our fists together. Before turning the corner, I caught a glimpse of Quentin. He was staring back at me from the other end of the block. We waved to one another and went our separate ways. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/09/glenn.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder. To make his good day a GREAT day, subscribe to his [Substack](https://glenndungan.substack.com/). [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading Glenn Dungan’s “The Neptune Kids.” Childhood stories often give us our first vocabulary for impossible things. Before we have words for desire, estrangement, or the suspicion that the life waiting for us may fit poorly, we have aliens and we have superheroes. We have secret powers. We have kids who discover they came from somewhere else. “The Neptune Kids” takes that imaginative vocabulary quite seriously. Quentin has begun to experience himself as strange to the world around him, and the abandoned conductor offers him a fantasy made suddenly, dangerously material, as somewhere beneath Cog’s Hollow, there are beings who seem to know him already. They tell him he is loved. Conner can follow Quentin into that chamber, yet he can’t hear what Quentin hears there. That small difference contains the story’s true ache. Growing up sometimes means discovering that the person beside you has reached a place you can only visit and never fully enter. Their final walk home shows the tenderness of how these two boys will approach that knowledge together. Friendship survives the afternoon, even if something inside it has changed direction.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### The Afternoon Paper URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-afternoon-paper/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T17:41:39.000Z I sit in the kitchen and flip the pages of the Classifieds. I’m not looking for anything in particular, though, if I’m honest, I’m *always* looking to see what used Escorts are going for these days. I sold mine back to the dealer two years ago, and I’ve always wondered since if I got screwed. But I’m not *really* looking for used Escorts today. In fact, I don’t even read the ads. I just flip and sip coffee. Then *boom* — there she is with a black-and-white expression: Lindy MacIntyre. I haven’t thought of Lindy in a long time. But there’s her picture framed in black on page D23 of the paper. And while I *know* I’m looking in the Classifieds, what the hell is her picture *doing* in the Classifieds? As I sit there, considering her face, all I can think about is how old she looks. But she isn’t, can’t be, *that* old. I notice her glasses are gone, and that her hair, grey from newsprint, is clipped short. I stare at the print, her name in bold capitals: “MELINDA (LINDY) MACINTYRE.” They only use bold capitals for an announcement of some kind. Then I see what comes next: “…died on March 8 in her thirty-second year.” No mention of a partner or child. Then I say, “March 8,” but it comes out like a question. So, I read it again to be sure I’ve got the information right: “Survived by her loving parents, Theresa and Raoul, and her devoted siblings, Joshua and Lenora. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Covenant House, Lindy’s favourite charity. We hope she’s at peace in a better place.” I lean back in my chair and look up. The calendar — the one I got from my friend Lanny, one of those real estate calendars with seventies-style photos of global landscapes — tells me it is Sunday, March 13\. Also, according to the calendar, March is a spring-like ride down the Meguro River to gawk at cherry blossoms. And, Lindy died five days ago. I try the words out loud: “Lindy died five days ago on Tuesday.” My voice sounds unsure. Like I was, at that moment, back in high school. Then I think, *What did I do on Tuesday?* I try to remember Tuesday, what it was. And as far as I remember, it was a regular day. The usual happened. Work. Lunch at a Thai place with Dale and Mark and Kyle. Brief talk with Mom in the afternoon. Grocery shopping. But I can’t recall details, like what I ate at the Thai place or what the hell wetalked about. And it’s the details that are bugging me. I want, desperately, to remember what I did down to the details on Tuesday. My hand shakes as I raise my mug. *More coffee*, I think. I get up and go to the counter where my coffee machine sits like a distraction. I stand there, not knowing what to do, holding half a mug of coffee I suddenly can’t stand the smell of. I can’t remember what my plans for the day are, or what happened yesterday, let alone in the days before Lindy died. “Are you gonna finish that?” I look up. A girl, with big red lips and thick black glasses, looks down at me. “What? Am I gonna finish what?” “Your lunch.” She sits. “It’s just sitting there, and you’re reading, so I assume you’re done? And if that’s true, why waste food? Besides, I forgot my lunch.” Man, she talks fast. I look at my tray. I had only eaten half of a chicken salad sandwich and completely ignored the apple and granola bar. I look back at her. Well, actually, I look at those big red lips. “Go for it.” “Thanks.” She picks up the sandwich and takes a bite. Between chews, she says, “I’m Lindy. Just moved here from New York. First day.” “Brian.” I half-smile, then turn back to my book. “Hey, you’re not gonna ignore me while I sit here eating your sandwich, are you?” she says, eyes staring into me. “Uh, no. No.” I put my book down and drum my tray with my right hand. I don’t know what to say. I mean, I don’t even *know* her. Then she asks, “So, what’s your deal?” “My *deal*?” “Yah, your *deal*. You know.” “No, I don’t know.” “Oh, come on. Where do you fit in here?” She pauses and looks around. “There’s some kind of system, isn’t there? I mean, there always is. I just wanna be up on it, you know? Who to avoid, who to *really* avoid.” She pulls the wrapping off the granola bar, then smells it. “I can’t eat anything that smells like porridge,” she explains. I nod. This is weird. I don’t know anyone who speaks, well, so to the point. “I hate the smell of popcorn,” I admit. “Really?” Her eyes widen. “That’s funny, cause it’s such a *nice* smell. This may sound super cliché, but that smell’s all about going to the movies. And I love going to the movies. Even if the movie’s dumb, going is the fun part.” She bites into the granola bar but keeps talking. “It’s funny how you can associate a smell with something you like, you know? Like the movies or a person. Like, whenever I smell *anything* cherry, I think of my friend Evelyn. She loves *everything* cherry, especially lip gloss. She’ll eat the frickin’ stuff.” “Uh-huh,” I say for no reason. “Well, Brian, you mind if I take the apple? I’m gonna go exploring. Unless you’d like to take me on a tour?” She pushes her chair back and stands, one hand on her hip. Like she’s waiting. And she is. I shrug, say, “Sure,” glad she let go of the “what’s your deal” bit, glad when she hands me back my apple for a bite. That day I took Lindy for a tour around the school. I pretty much liked her right away. Though she asked a million questions, she also told dirty jokes. She wasn’t at all awkward. I remember she smelled nice. Like wood that’s been cut. I stand in the kitchen and remember that day, those big red lips, and wonder why, out of all the people in the cafeteria, she picked me. Why she didn’t pick anyone else. I remember my coffee and take a sip. It’s cold. I look at March’s cherry blossoms and wonder what I’ll do today. What I could possibly do today. I can’t do anything but lie on the couch and pretend to watch TV. The obituary lies at my feet, and I catch myself glancing over at it every other minute. Lindy’s picture seems to be from another time. And I guess it is. I mean, all this time between graduating and now, I haven’t known her. What she’s been doing, where she’s been living, if she’s been happy. I knew her so briefly, so long ago, that I can’t fairly say I knew her much at all. I turn the channel to CNN. News tidbits scroll along the bottom of the screen as Wolf Blitzer’s mouth opens and closes soundlessly. I turn my eyes to the newspaper on the floor. We walk through the corridor, arguing about who’s braver. “You’re so dumb,” Lindy spits, dragging her feet. “You won’t even *talk* to Sara.” “What are you talking about? I talk to her in math class. I just don’t get a vibe. If I got a vibe, I’d ask her out. But I’m not gonna put it out there if I don’t get a vibe. What’s dumb about that?” I take a sip of soda. Lindy snorts. “Please. Your idea of talking to her is asking her for an eraser.” She flashes her ticket for the ticket guy. “I need to check it,” he says, frowning, holding out his hand. Lindy rolls her eyes but hands her ticket over. “It’s true,” she says to me, smiling at the ticket guy as if he’d been part of our conversation and was about to agree that my attempts at small talk were subpar. Like the ticket guy cares. I hand him my ticket after he splits Lindy’s in half. “You know, you’re one to talk. How long have you gone on about Greg? And what have you done about that? *Nada*.” “Fine. We need to change our game plan,” she says, striding into the theatre. “What do you mean?” I say to her back. She goes up the steps two at a time to the very back row and plops into the aisle seat. “Can I take the aisle seat? Just in case I gotta rush out to use the can.” I manoeuvre around her knees and sit on her left side. “Nice of you to ask.” She punches my arm. “Don’t be sarcastic.” “Lindy…” I rub the spot where she’d laid her knuckles. She just laughs, takes a mouthful of popcorn, and says, “So, what was I saying? *You* need a game plan.” “What sort of game plan?” “Well, for starters, you could try having a *real* conversation with her beyond math equations. Like offer to drive her home or ask her out for a coffee. *Have a conversation*.” She pauses, chewing. I can’t help but notice her lips are greasy with butter. They look so tasty. I look away and shift in my seat. “Well, not everybody’s easy, like you are, to talk to.” Lindy takes another handful of popcorn. She doesn’t respond, and I don’t know what that means. We’re both quiet for a while as the screen posts stupid movie trivia and the odd ad for dental cleaning. I feel like I’ve said something out of the ordinary. Then she asks, “How can you stand it?” I gaze at her profile. She looks different from this angle — the bulge of her eyes, the way her glasses stick out. “Stand what?” “The smell of popcorn.” She eyes me sideways. My cheeks go hot. “Well, I guess cause it’s *your* thing. How could I not stand it?” She grins. Then the lights go down, the music starts, and we watch our umpteenth movie together. For the life of me, I can’t remember what movie we had gone to see that night: some forgettable action thriller, probably. Whatever was out at the time. I only remember feeling different about Lindy after that. I didn’t think much about Sara anymore, who’d been out of my league anyway. God. I haven’t thought of those days in forever. I’m still on the couch, flipping channels, not interested in anything. I leave it on a CSI marathon, and tune out to an old episode, a good one, where Grissom investigates a suspected killer whose touch is so hot it burns. The Lindy from the Obituary picture sits at my kitchen table. It’s the kitchen table of my current life. She smokes. I don’t remember her ever smoking. “I’m tired,” she says. “Why?” I ask. I’m in a bathrobe. It’s *the* me of my current life. There’s half a tallboy in front of me. “I just am.” She sighs, runs a hand over one cheek. “Of this. Of everything.” “What’s ‘this’?” I shrug, pick up my tallboy, take a sip. “Are you going to pretend you don’t know?” She stares hard. “Look, I don’t know what you mean by ‘this.’” I shrug again. “We used to be able to talk about anything,” she says, pulling out another cigarette. As she lights it, I see we’re no longer at my kitchen table. Now we’re in Lindy’s parents’ backyard, and it’s summer, and I feel claustrophobic. I look down at my legs and see I’m in a black tux. The Lindy from the Obituary picture is in an off-white dress. “Did you come to talk me out of it?” She’s grinning. “I don’t know why I came,” I say, and this is the truth. She covers her face with the veil. “I don’t want to ever get married.” Those red lips shine through white tulle. “So, why are you?” “I’m not.” “Then, why the hell are you in a white dress?” “Aren’t we going to the stupid formal?” she says loudly before flicking her cigarette to the ground and mashing it with the sole of her white pump, no longer embarrassed by her parents’ knowing smiles and flashbulbs. Now we’re just bored, sitting in the bleachers of our school’s auditorium, downing schnapps from a flask, watching everyone dance. “I thought you couldn’t care less if we went to this thing,” I say, wiping my mouth with my jacket sleeve. The Lindy from the Obituary picture purses her lips, shrugs. “I just want to say I went, you know?” She eyes the dance floor. “I mean, I don’t *really* care.” “Well, let’s get outta here, go do something,” I say, standing. “I don’t wanna sit here all night.” She pushes herself up. “Well, what about one dance? I mean, *we’re here*. We may as well.” I throw my head back, irritated. But there’s no protesting. I’m on the dance floor, and Lindy and I are moving together. Her arms are slung around my neck, my hands are clenched to her waist. We’re moving in a circle, and it’s warm and nice. We circle the auditorium, and I get warmer the more aware I become of her. Her head’s against my chest, and it’s like we’re hugging goodbye. She smells nice too: a mixture of vanilla and wood. We keep circling, round and round. We could keep going on like this, if we wanted… I wake and the TV blares creepy music as Warrick and Catherine examine an SUV for blood spatters. My head pounds. I force myself up and notice the bay windows are dark. I search for the converter and turn the volume down. I need water. I get up and almost slip on the newspaper. I want to kick it, but then I remember what it is. I grab it angrily and make my way to the kitchen, heading straight for the sink. I put the obituary down, grab a dirty glass, fill it with water. Then I pour it over my head. Coolness fills my pores. I lick the drips that come off my nose, walk to the fridge and open the door. The light hurts my eyes, but I manage to find a beer. I ignore the picture-perfect composition that is March in Tokyo and retreat to CSI, its blue glare. The obituary’s in my grasp. I lie back down, the tallboy in my other hand. I bring Lindy’s picture up to my eyes. She no longer looks old. She smells like vanilla and wood, has full red lips and black glasses and black hair. She’s telling me a filthy joke, and I’m laughing, and breathing all of her in. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/09/INSIDE-2.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Adrienne Weiss is the author of **Awful Gestures* (Insomniac Press, 2001) and **There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Anymore* (Nightwood Editions, 2014). Her work has appeared in **ARC Poetry*, **MockingHeart Review,* **Canadian Literature*, **Taddle Creek*, and **Room Magazine*. She lives in Toronto, Canada. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading Adrienne Weiss’s “The Afternoon Paper.” An obituary has the peculiar task of compressing an entire life into facts and figures. Obituaries include a name, an age, a date, a few surviving relatives. Brian responds to Lindy’s obituary by moving in the opposite direction. He wants details of the ordinary Tuesday on which she died, then of the years when he actually knew her. Memory begins supplying what the newspaper cannot, including the cause of death. What makes “The Afternoon Paper” so affecting is the instability of that recovery. Brian remembers smells, greasy popcorn, a stolen sandwich, the unusual cadence of Lindy’s conversations with him. Yet the woman in his dream wears the face from her obituary and speaks from years he never witnessed. His memory invents a person who never existed but also did. Brian grieves her, yes. But he also never knew her, not really. And he knows it too well. The point is that she is lost to him in many ways he can't care to wrap his head around. Brian can’t recover Lindy’s missing years, but he can recover the sensation of having known her for a moment in time. So by the final page, that sensation has become vivid enough to breathe in and move on from.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Nasturtiums URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/nasturtiums/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T02:21:59.000Z My great-aunt Reyna died when I was seven. She’d been living on the same block in San Antonio where she was born. I didn’t know her well. I knew that she grew things in her yard, that she wrote in notebooks that my grandmother didn’t read, and that the women at her funeral didn’t cry the way the women at other funerals cried. My grandmother, her sister, was the one who told me when it happened. She sat me down at the kitchen table and said that Tía Reyna had died during the night, that her heart had been weak for some years, and that we would be going to San Antonio for the services. She said this calmly and then got up and turned the stove on. I didn’t ask questions. I was seven and I didn’t know what questions to ask. The funeral was held in a church on a side street near the highway. The flowers at the altar were yellow and white and had no smell I could detect. Tía Reyna’s coffin was plain dark wood with brass handles. I stood between my grandmother and my mother and looked at the coffin for most of the service. I kept trying to remember Tía Reyna’s yard, which I had seen only once, the summer before. We drove past it on the way to the church. Some people had already started pulling things up. There were fresh dirt patches along the fence where the plants used to be. I didn’t understand, then, why anyone would pull up a garden before a funeral. After Tía Reyna died, my grandmother rarely talked about her. If her name came up, my grandmother would agree that yes, Reyna had been very dedicated to her garden, and yes, she had kept a lot of notebooks, and yes, it was a shame there had never been children. Then she would find something to do with her hands. She had a way of ending conversations by becoming busy. What I knew about Tía Reyna I assembled from fragments. She had never married, though she had been engaged once, to a man no one talked about. She had worked for forty-five years as a school secretary. She had taught herself to read in three languages. She had been, as my grandmother put it, very particular about certain things. This last phrase was used to explain a great deal. Why she lived alone. Why she did not attend family gatherings after a certain year. Why she and my grandmother had not spoken for some time before she died. I asked my grandmother once what they had argued about. She said they had disagreed about how to remember someone. She did not say who. --- A few days after the funeral, my grandmother took me to the house on Bowie Street to help sort through what remained. It was a small house, pale green, with a covered porch and a yard that had been cleared down to bare dirt. I remember standing at the front gate and feeling that the yard looked wrong, too open, like a face with something missing. Inside the house everything was orderly. The kitchen was clean. The bedroom had a narrow bed, neatly made, and a nightstand with a glass of water that was still there, half-full. The notebooks were in the back room, which Tía Reyna had used as a study. There were more than fifty of them, stacked on two shelves above a wooden desk. Each was the same: black cardboard cover, college-ruled pages, the name and a date written on the spine in blue ink. The names were all women’s names. I pulled one from the shelf. The spine said: *Jovita Idár, 1885*. Inside, in my great-aunt’s small, even handwriting, were pages of notes. Dates, places, short summaries. A list of her articles. A note: *She once stood in the doorway when the Texas Rangers came to shut down the newspaper. They had to return later.* I put the notebook back and stood there for a moment. My grandmother was in the kitchen. I could hear her opening and closing cabinets. I pulled another notebook. The spine said: *Sylvia Mendez, 1936*. Another: *Antonia Pantoja, 1922*. Another, thinner one: *María de Jesús Dosal*. At the bottom of this entry, in slightly different ink, as if added later, Tía Reyna had written: *There is no record of where she is buried. Someone knows. No one has said.* I didn’t even think to call my grandmother in to show her. It felt like something I was not supposed to be looking at. But the part I think about most happened the previous summer, when I had been six. My parents had taken me to San Antonio to visit the family, and for one afternoon, while the adults rested, my grandmother brought me to Tía Reyna’s house. This was the only time I saw the yard when it was still alive. It was August, and very hot. The yard was not large, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, but it was full in a way I couldn’t take in all at once. Things grew at different heights and in no particular order. There were tomatoes and there were tall plants with red flowers and there were low plants with thick waxy leaves that I didn’t recognize. The smell was sharp and green. It was nothing like a park or a garden I’d seen in a book. Tía Reyna was waiting for us at the gate. She was a short woman, very straight in how she stood, with white hair cut close to her head and thin hands that were stained faintly green at the fingertips. She wore a yellow housedress and canvas shoes. She shook my hand when we were introduced, seriously, as if I were an adult, too. My grandmother stayed on the porch with a glass of water and a book while Tía Reyna took me into the yard. She showed me everything. *This is yerba santa. This is epazote.* She told me the names in Spanish and sometimes in Latin and once or twice in a language I didn’t recognize. She repeated each name, as if it mattered that I remember. I remember only some of them. What I remember more clearly, though, is how she moved through the plants slowly, touching things, lifting a leaf to check the underside, pressing a stem between her fingers and holding them up for me to smell. I only pretended to smell once. Near the back fence there was a large patch of nasturtiums, orange and yellow, growing in a low dense sprawl. “You can eat these,” she said. “The flowers?” “Yes, and the leaves. Everything.” She picked a small orange flower and held it out to me. I ate it. It was peppery and strange and not unpleasant. Then she said something I didn’t understand until much later. She crouched down and looked at the nasturtiums for a moment and said, “Every one of these is for someone who didn’t get a plaque.” I asked what she meant. She looked at me, her brown eyes very steady. “Nothing,” she said. “Only that some things grow without being asked to.” She stood up and brushed her hands on her dress. “Come. I’ll show you the lemon tree.” --- I’m thirty-one now. I teach secondary school in Austin. I’ve kept a small container garden on my balcony for the past four years. Last spring I started growing nasturtiums. I wasn’t thinking about Tía Reyna when I bought the seeds. Or at least I didn’t think I was thinking about her. But when the first flowers opened, orange and very bright in the early morning, I stood there for a while before going back inside. I have all of Reyna’s notebooks now. Fifty-six of them. My grandmother gave them to me when I finished my graduate degree. She wrapped them in paper and didn’t say much when she handed them over. She said Reyna would’ve wanted someone to do something with them. I asked what she thought Reyna had wanted, and she went quiet for a moment, then said, “To have them read.” So, I’ve been reading them for two years. There are women in those notebooks I haven’t been able to find in any other source. Women who organized other women and were never recorded. Women who wrote and whose writing was lost. Women who fought and whose names were given, in the histories I can find, a single sentence or half a sentence or nothing at all. Tía Reyna had found them anyway. I don’t know how. She had no university appointment, no grant, no institutional access. She only had decades of evenings and a library card and a habit of writing letters to people who might know something about someone. She built the archive by herself, in a small green house, and no one knew it was there while it was there. Sometimes I think about what she said in the yard that afternoon. *Every one of these is for someone who didn’t get a plaque.* I thought, at six, that she was speaking loosely. Adults talk like that sometimes around children, saying something that sounds like more than it really is. But now I think she was telling me exactly what she meant. Every nasturtium in that yard had a name behind it. She’d been tending them for years, and the names were in the notebooks waiting on the shelf, and she’d been waiting for someone to come and read them. It didn’t have to be someone specific. Just someone. But standing on my balcony last spring, watching the nasturtiums open, I understood that I had already been inside it. I had eaten from it. She’d fed it to me before I knew what it was, so that when I finally did understand, I wouldn’t be afraid of it. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/please-respect-our-decision/#/portal/support) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Leave a one-time tip for this author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/please-respect-our-decision/#/portal/support) --- ## Author's Note: Thank you for reading “Nasturtiums.” This is a story loosely based on my aunt. I wrote it in response to “Forgotten Flowers,” a monthly prompt from *IHRAM Press* that they were kind enough to feature a snippet of earlier this year. I'm proud to finally share the full story this week with the readers of *Cetera Magazine*. When we think of archives, we usually imagine boxes and catalogues, as well as the institutions that house them and the authorities who must decide what belongs inside. So Reyna’s archive is unusual in that her archive sprouts from evenings at the library, letters sent to strangers, notebooks kept in a back room, and flowers tended in a scorched yard. Reyna gives the forgotten women she researches two forms of afterlife. First, she writes their names down. Second, she grows something for them. One preserves knowledge. The other requires continual care. After all, a garden survives through watering, pruning, replanting, and (eventually) someone new learning how to tend one of their own. In that way, Reyna’s true inheritance to our main character is a practice of attention. Long before her great-niece understands what she's received, she's already walked through it. Tasted it. Carried some small part of it away with her into adulthood. Perhaps this is how certain histories endure. When someone teaches another person to notice. --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Daylight URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/daylight/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T02:41:54.000Z > ***Content warning: This story contains depictions of coercive control, financial abuse, and gender discrimination.*** Arthur measured the candles on Sunday nights. He stood the week’s seven in a row on the dresser, pressed his thumbnail into each one, a notch for every evening, then locked the box away with the coal cellar key and hung the key on his watch chain. On Saturdays, he held the stubs up to the gas mantle and read them. Any candle burned past its notch went into the ledger. The ledger came out at supper. Supper was quiet, and the quiet lasted into church. On Fridays, he tipped his wage onto the table and counted it twice, slid the housekeeping across the wood, and entered the figure at the front of the book while the coins still held the warmth of his pocket. Then he turned the book to face her and set the pen on the line. Ruth signed for it, money hers to spend and never hers to keep. She had written the letter by a wax-end saved from the back of the drawer, after the house slept, with the curtain pinned to its frame so no glow would cross the yard. The nib scratched louder than she liked. Twice she stopped and listened for the boards above her, for his weight crossing the room, and heard only the house breathing. She cupped her hand close around the flame to keep it small, and a bead of wax ran over her thumb and hardened under the nail. For five days, she carried both the letter buttoned inside her coat and the wax she could not work loose, her hand returning to the place on her ribs where the paper sat. Monday came up brown. Fog had thickened in the night and hung now at the height of the lamp brackets, so the street kept clear to the knee and everything above the shopfronts blurred away. Ruth raked the range, set the kettle on its hook, and set Arthur’s breakfast down. He had the morning paper folded to the coal prices. She caught the masthead on her way out. **The London Courier. Monday, 9 February 2026.** He turned a page as she shut the door, and that was the whole of his goodbye. On the step, she wound Tom’s scarf twice over his mouth, the red one she’d knitted last winter, and pushed his slate deeper into the satchel. The lamplighter worked back along the kerb toward them, reaching his pole into each lamp and pinching out the flame. Glass by glass, the gas died back into the brown. “Why’s he putting them out?” Tom’s voice came through the wool. “You know why, Tom, you ask the same thing every day.” “It’s not light yet, though, Mum.” “Half seven is half seven. The gas company says the day’s started.” “What’s that mean?” “You’ll learn when you’re older.” “When I’m older, I could carry that pole.” “You could.” She turned him by the shoulder and faced him up the street. A woman came down Tanner’s Row with a long cane over her shoulder. At the third house, she stopped, reached the cane up, and rattled its tip against a first-floor window until a hand showed behind the glass. Then she moved on to the next window. “Why does she knock the windows?” “To wake the people inside for work. They pay her a penny a week.” “Who knocks her window?” “Nobody. She wakes herself.” He turned twice to watch her go, working it out. The coalman’s cart stood outside the Wilsons’. Sacks went down through the hole in the pavement one after another, and every drop landed somewhere under the street with a sound Ruth could price to the penny. At the fishmonger’s, the iceman swung a block off his cart in iron tongs and chalked what the business owed on the doorpost. Tom held his breath the whole length of the fish smell and let it out in a white burst, then read the marks as they walked, fours and sevens up one side of the street and down the other. The paperboy on the corner had his bundle on his hip. “Fog on the line! Northern mails delayed!” Her hand went to her ribs. She bought no paper and walked on. At the iron grate outside the chemist’s, Tom stopped and planted his boots. The pavement trembled. Warm steam pushed up his trouser legs and lifted the scarf off his chin. “That’s the Baker Street train,” he said. “How do you know?” “It shakes for ages.” He stood on it until the train had passed, then took two running steps to catch her hand. “D’you think Aunt Maud’ll send chocolates again?” “She might.” “I hope so. The soft ones were so good last year.” “She’s a long way off, love, up in Leeds. But you’ll see her soon enough. More chocolates, or something better.” Her hand tightened on his before she could stop it, and he let it stay, busy with a dray horse on the far side. The Despatch office on the High Road sent the city’s letters by air, through iron pipes laid under the streets. Inside, gas burned green-white down the length of the counter. Two dozen iron pipes rose out of the floor and curved over into wire baskets along the end wall. As Tom pressed himself to the window, a canister shot into its basket with a felt-soft thud. A girl in a grey pinafore had it up before it stopped rocking, read the address on its collar, and slotted it into the correct pipe. The wall exhaled behind her. “Make another come.” “They come when they come.” Thud. A second canister. The girl’s hands were already moving. “How does it know where to go?” “It doesn’t. The operator reads the address and picks the pipe. The air does the rest.” Tom watched her work. “You used to do that.” “Long time ago now.” “Why did you stop?” She kept her eyes on the window. “The Despatch doesn’t keep wives.” “Why not?” “That’s just how it is.” “That’s not a reason.” She looked at him then. “No,” she said. “It isn’t.” He breathed a circle of fog onto the glass and rubbed it off with his sleeve. “Is it old?” She nodded at the brass plate beside the doors. **LONDON PNEUMATIC DESPATCH. ESTABLISHED 1859.** “Over a hundred and fifty years.” “That’s before Grandad was even born.” “Before his grandad’s grandad.” She had stood six years on the other side of that counter. At fourteen, the Board school gave her a certificate with a red seal, and the Despatch took her on at Holborn. By seventeen, she could route for three districts without looking at the wall charts. *Best eye on the floor*, the superintendent told her father, in front of the men. Then Arthur Crane started sending coal. He was a foreman at the Beckton gasworks, and he had managed her mother’s account for two years before Ruth ever put a face to the name. Every Friday, a hundredweight went down the cellar hole. Her mother’s hands had gone at the mangle, the same mangle her grandmother had worked before her, and at the wedding breakfast she took Ruth’s wrist in those ruined hands and said what the street says of every man with extra coin. *He keeps a good fire.* The day before the wedding, Ruth handed in her brass check at the workers’ gate, and that was that. The rule ran the same in every trade she knew. A wife worked in her husband’s house and nowhere else, and no court, no church, no company had ever seen a reason to change it. The superintendent saw her out himself and said the floor lost its best router every June, regular as the wedding season. That was twelve years ago. Something over six hundred Sundays of notches. The candle marking had begun their first winter, the year coal ran short across London. Thrift, the street called it then. Arthur called it good management. Her mother called it being careful. By the second winter, the candle box had a lock. By the third, Ruth never touched it again. The post box’s collection key was already turning in the lock when Ruth reached the corner of the High Road. Her free hand went to her coat and undid the top button. The chemist’s boy was out with his broom. “Morning, Tom.” “Morning,” Tom said, already past him. Her hand did the button up again. The postman went by on her left, and Tom talked about trains the rest of the way, and she said yes in the right places. There was no way to ask and no way to call it back. Once it dropped, it went at the speed of trains, and three days would pass before Maud could answer, three days in his house, at his table, under his candles, waiting for a word that might not come. She had lain awake five nights running, and it ended the same way each time. Arthur had never once shouted. He would put on his church coat and take the ledger to the magistrate and read from it in his careful voice. The candle waste. The tea bought loose instead of by the chest. Five pounds unaccounted for on the eighth of last March. A wage is a number a court can write down. Twelve years of washing and cooking and mending had no number at all. The magistrate would hear a careful man wronged by a careless woman, and the law would give that man his son. After the court came the church. Separated wives sat in the back pew. If they came at all. What the ledger did not say was where the pounds went. They lay sewn into the hem of her Sunday coat, two years of Sundays, every gap he had left because it had never occurred to him that she could count. She had done the sums on the margin of a flour bag. | Rent (Leeds, furnished) | £18 | | ----------------------- | --- | | Coal (quarter sack) | £22 | | Lamp oil | £14 | | Food (me + Tom) | £18 | | | | | Out | £72 | | my wage + Maud’s | £78 | | Over | £6 | Then she had burned the bag in the range and stirred the ash. Between her wage and Maud’s, seventy-eight came in a week. Six over. Narrow, but over. She looked up. The wash-house on Friar’s Lane was already in front of her. Steam stood in the doors, and the Monday queue went down the steps, baskets on shoulders, sleeves rolled in the cold. Inside, the coppers boiled and the mangles turned. High on the wall, a bill had yellowed to the colour of the steam. **VOTES FOR WOMEN** In letters a foot tall, above a meeting date nobody could read any more. Mrs Finn wrung a sheet in the doorway, her voice carrying across the queue. “Mrs Cole’s washing for strangers in Hoxton now. Eight months since the magistrate.” Her eyes crossed Ruth’s and held half a second longer than they needed to. “He kept the boys, the house, and the piano.” A voice back in the steam said the piano had been her mother’s. At the foot of the steps, a young woman held out a letter. Mrs Finn wiped her palms on her apron and read it aloud, a son writing from lodgings, money sent, and a date he’d be home for Christmas, while the woman watched the page and could not follow a word. Ruth pulled her gloves tighter. Her knuckles were turning into her mother’s. Under her right thumbnail, the wax sat where it had set, five days ago. The school on Chandler Street rang the children in at nine. The master’s boy stood under the bell arch with the rope wrapped twice round his fist, and mothers crowded the gate, holding on until the last possible moment. Mrs Finn’s girl was going into service at Whitsun. Eleven years old, a good place out at Richmond. Her mother had said it three times already this morning. The Hobbs boy would start at the gasworks the day he turned twelve. Coal had gone up a penny a hundredweight. Across the road, against the railings of the chapel, Mrs Cole stood in last winter’s coat with her hands folded in front of her. Tom pulled his scarf down to his chin. “Why does Mrs Cole stand over there?” “She’s seeing her boys in.” “From across the road?” “From where they’ll let her.” He filed it with the fog. “Father’s showing me the candle marks on Sunday. He says a careful house can tell where every penny goes.” The wool had printed a red line across his cheek. Ruth crouched and tucked the scarf end down into his coat, and she took her time with it. “Learn your letters first.” “I know my letters.” “Learn them better.” He dug into his trouser pocket and brought out an old platform ticket, soft at the corners from a week in his pocket, and posted it into the cuff of her glove. “Keep it safe.” She pressed her lips to his forehead. “I love you, Tom.” The bell swung over their heads, and he ran with the rest. Two boys stood in the lines by the drainpipe, a tall one and a small one with matching haircuts, and the tall one turned his head toward the chapel railings and turned it back. Across the road, Mrs Cole raised her hand and held it there until the lines moved. Then the cloakroom door took the children in, and the yard emptied to its hopscotch chalk going grey in the damp. A crossing sweeper had brushed a clean lane through the horse mess at the corner. Ruth crossed by it and came to the railings an arm’s length from Mrs Cole. For a while, neither woman spoke. Both faced the empty yard. “The two by the drainpipe were mine,” Mrs Cole said. “They’ve had their hair cut.” “Tom’s third row. Red scarf.” A milk dray went past behind them, churns ringing against each other. “I went ahead to find a room,” Mrs Cole said. “Three weeks, that was all. The magistrate called it desertion. He got the house. He got the boys. And I came home to a locked door.” The master’s boy looped his rope and went inside. “I’m going to my sister,” Ruth said. She had never said it aloud before. “Leeds. Friday.” “Tom as well?” “Tom as well.” “Hold his hand from your doorstep to her door. Don’t put the bag down. Don’t go back for anything.” She looked at Ruth. “They forgot me the minute I left.” Ruth walked back up the High Road with her hand inside her coat. The post box stood on the corner. The collection plate said the next post went at eleven. She had addressed it in her sorting hand, the letters tall and plain, the way she’d written addresses on a thousand canisters at Holborn. Miss M. Hartley, 14 Bridge End, Leeds 2. Maud had written in October. Ruth knew it by heart. *Bring him. The bindery asks no questions of a woman who can stitch a spine straight, and my room holds two beds.* Two letters had gone into the range before this one—the first asked permission. The second apologised. The one in her hand said Friday. Friday, then. The half past nine from King’s Cross, a cold pie on her lap, while Arthur stood at the retorts all day with no reason to think she’d gone. One bag. She had packed it twice in her head and not yet once in the world. The certificate with the red seal at the bottom, under Tom’s jersey and his tin of tickets. They would walk to the station and spend nothing getting there. She had carried the map of this city in her head since Holborn, every shortcut and back lane between her door and the platforms, a map she had only ever used to send other people’s words across the city. On Friday, she would follow it herself. Tom would name every train they passed by the sound of it, the whole way north, and she would let him. The iron flap dragged on its hinge and bit cold through her glove. She held the letter half in the mouth of the box. *Fog on the line. The mails delayed.* She opened her fingers. A small sound, far down. Paper finding paper. Her right glove had gone loose at the thumb, and when she drew it off, the wax came with it, the bead she’d carried five days, and she flicked it into the gutter and let it go. Down the street, the fog was thinning off the river. The sun came through over the gasworks chimney, a pale coin, then a coin rubbed bright, and the light reached her where she stood. Nobody had lit it. Nobody had locked it in a box, or notched it, or written it down in a ledger. It fell on the post box and the chapel railings and the horse mess and on her, the same light on all of it. She turned her face up. The cold went out of her hands first, then her cheeks. She stood in it until she’d had enough, then put her glove back on and started home, past the wash-house steam and the dead lamps and the pipes swallowing the city’s words, with Tom’s ticket riding in her glove. By Friday night, the house would hold a locked box of light, a ledger squared to the penny, and a dinner going cold under its plate. And no one to cook the next one, and no boy asleep upstairs. On Sunday, Arthur would set out seven fresh candles, notch them, and lock the box. Let him. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/09/IMG_20220303_074148.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/daylight/#/portal/support) Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Nominated for Best Short Fiction 26/27, his work appears or is forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Expat Press, Thin Skin, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and others. Read more at [ashleymangtani.com](http://ashleymangtani.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/daylight/#/portal/support) --- ## Author's Note: I began with a fairly simple idea: what would the world look like if electricity had never been invented, and what would that absence mean for the people living in it, particularly women? I was interested in the practical consequences at first, including the candlelight, the gas, the pneumatic systems, the strange ways a city might organise itself around darkness and the limited hours of the day. But as I wrote, the story I found myself caring about was less the speculative world than the people shaped by it. The connection between industrial progress, women’s work, money, marriage and the still unfinished question of women’s rights became much more moving to me than the premise I had started with. Ruth’s relationship with light is really a relationship with control: who decides how much of it she is allowed, how it is paid for, and what kind of life she is permitted to build within its limits. By the end, I realised I was writing less about a world without electricity than about a woman finally stepping outside a system that has spent years holding her back. --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Goddess Class URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/goddess-class/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T02:46:41.000Z One summer day in 2048, Heinrich Oliver sat down at my lunch table and introduced himself, as if I didn’t know the name of my company’s world-famous owner. “Hi, I’m Heinrich. And you are?” “I’m Emily. Your name is Heinrich? Really?” I think I giggled, but this was from anxiety. I was scared even though I had fantasized for years about this happening. I might not have been the first woman who tried to flirt with Heinrich Oliver by making fun of his first name. If so, the other women must have discovered he did not flirt back. So what did he want? We were in the air-conditioned courtyard of the Invivion campus. The cold air wafting away into Austin’s baking scrubland didn’t matter because the units were solar-powered. So they said. Across from me Heinrich’s knees were splayed. I stared at his left cheek as he looked past me. His skin was tanned, processed-looking, like artificial leather. Finally he said, “I was named for my maternal grandfather, Heinrich Krumbach. The prominent computer scientist.” I already knew this. I also knew that his grandfather was not a well-known computer scientist to anyone outside the Oliver family. I rested my chin in my hand and smiled at him while Heinrich continued to look beyond me. “What do you do here?” he asked at last. I breathed in some refrigerated air. “I’m a data analyst in Special Projects.” His eyebrows rose in interest. “What special project are you working on?” “Right now we’re planning for the Strategic Planning symposium in October.” This appeared to bore him. Just as I thought he would get up and leave, Heinrich looked into my eyes and said gravely, “Emily, I’m getting some friends together on Saturday. Would you like to come?” My heart thudded and I thought of a deflated soccer ball. Heinrich was kicking it, joylessly, persistently. Why? “Sure, that sounds fun!” I said weakly. He peered at my name tag and said, “Emily Peterson in Special Projects. I’ll send the coordinates to your device.” He slapped the top of his thighs briskly and left. --- The party location arrived on my device seconds after Heinrich left—a warehouse west of Killeen. I thought it might be a private nightclub. The party started at six pm, which seemed early. After spending Saturday considering myself in the mirror, I settled on clothes and makeup I might wear to an upscale hotel bar. As I drove out of Austin I thought about Kevin, how I was following in his footsteps. I always thought about Kevin. I was still in love with him a year after our three-week relationship. The last time I saw Kevin he was going to a party with Heinrich Oliver, and now, miraculously, I had been invited to one of these parties. I never thought something bad had happened to Kevin. I knew he had been whisked away to some secret, glamorous place to start a new life. Driving north on I-35 I replayed my favorite scenes from our brief affair. I had intrigued him with uncanny guesses about his childhood: knowing he had a connection to a motel outside Indianapolis, sensing somehow that his father’s last name was Flynn. I just knew from the way Kevin looked and acted. He thought I was spooky, exciting, even. I was nothing like Kevin. Kevin was charming. He knew how to make other men like him. He was a computer scientist, not an analyst. To find Kevin I needed to appeal to Heinrich. Average-looking women can attract even the most important people, I told myself. Attraction is the great equalizer. I put my faith in these ideas because I wanted to believe I had a chance in this world, something to make me the equal—worthy—of Kevin. I never considered what would happen if Heinrich actually wanted me. How could I have Kevin then? When I pulled into the cracked cement parking area I was thinking about how I looked in my eleven-year-old Mazda Inago. I was relieved but puzzled that many of the cars were not nicer than mine. Inside the warehouse men and women were sitting at tables in assigned seats. This and the fluorescent lights made me think of a low-budget wedding reception. No one was particularly attractive, least of all the women, and I saw that I was overdressed. I found my place card, sat down, and checked the time: 6:03. I pick up on social cues; it’s how I’ve managed to stay employed at Invivion. So after glancing around I put my device away. Staring at screens was a no-no, some inner voice told me. Then I wondered: Why hadn’t I known how to dress? At that moment a woman I recognized as the Vice President for Corporate Excellence rose from the long table at the end of the room. “Good evening, friends. Thanks for joining us tonight in Bell County. You’re wondering why you’re here. You’re here tonight because you have a special talent. A gift we want to nurture. Nurture and harness to improve the world.” Had they noticed my social sensitivity? My heart began to thud again when Heinrich appeared from behind a stack of shrink-wrapped pallets. He took the microphone from the woman, then stood still, scanning the room. Not as a performer does to connect with an audience, but as a seafarer looks over a vast ocean. When our eyes met, his gaze slid over me without recognition. At last he smiled and said, “I want you to imagine a future where integrated AI doesn’t just know who won the internet today, or who had the snarkiest online comebacks.” We all knew to laugh politely at this. When the tittering subsided, he said, “We’re doing something infinitely more important. Using your gift for interpersonal dynamics, you are going to be the progenitors of the future internet. The creators of something so transformative that our children will not recognize the world we live in now. You, friends, are going to train the *Algorithm*.” For the first time in my career, someone was acknowledging my value. I was flooded with gratitude and hope. Who had selected me? What if it was Kevin? --- There were a hundred and twenty of us in the warehouse. When I found out we were going immediately to Little Cayman Island, I worried about my apartment and my cat, Diego Rivera. Women wearing stylish wrap dresses streamed in, ten of them, one per table. Ours was named Solange. She had shimmery brown skin, frizzy orange hair, and orange-brown eyes. When Solange came near me I told her that I wanted to go to Little Cayman but I could not leave Diego Rivera. Solange smiled and said, “Yes, we know Diego. What a big fat cutie. He’s going to a resort, just like you. Movers are putting your things in storage. It’s climate controlled; our guys are professionals. They do corporate moves all the time. It will be fine. I promise.” There were two charter buses waiting outside in the dusk. Solange made me sit with my group, the Jades. The other groups were also named after semiprecious stones. Was this stupid? I told myself to reserve judgment. The buses drove down empty country roads through the last of the twilight. Then we came to an airstrip, which are common enough in rural Texas. What was unusual was the size of the plane waiting there. I felt giddy, unreal. I hadn’t had to plan any of this, it was just happening, my new life. Maybe a new life was all I wanted. Maybe I wanted nothing from Heinrich Oliver. I leaned across the aisle to Solange. “What about my parents? I need to tell them where I’m going.” “We told them. Everything is taken care of.” “But my parents aren’t going to be satisfied with that.” Now Solange looked at me with a hint of authority, though her voice was warm and smooth. “This comes up all the time with corporate moves. Your parents are not worried. I promise.” I looked around, afraid. But the cabin door was closed, and the engine had begun its subsonic thrumming. Solange gave me her sunniest smile, and then we were accelerating. --- When I awoke the next morning a light breeze was probing the thin curtains. Memories of the night before, golf carts swimming through sultry black air, came back, indistinct. I got up and parted the muslin panels. The searing light wiped away my mental haze like a refreshed web page. Before me lay a shallow sea, turquoise, surreal. I turned to the nightstand for my device. It was 7:53 am. No cell service. I looked around the room. Like the view outside, it was beautiful, not quite real. There was a tap on the door and Solange entered. “You look great this morning, Emily. Refreshed. There’s breakfast on the veranda. Your clothes are in the closet, okay?” She turned and left. I was wearing the gauzy nightgown I’d found on the bed the night before. Now I opened the closet. There were three wrap dresses, just like Solange’s. As much as I envied Solange’s beauty and poise, I could tell she was a servant of some kind. She controlled me but her social status was below mine. I pulled a dress off its hanger, looking for clues. It was made of a nubby, rust-colored linen and raw silk blend that surely cost hundreds of dollars per yard. This was not a servant’s livery, I told myself as I tied the sash around my waist. Because I was not a servant. I made my way down a boardwalk toward the sound of voices on a veranda. Below the veranda was a tropical garden of astonishing richness and color. I felt an urge to run down the steps and stand among the strange, lush plants, to bathe in their green light. Instead I went to the buffet. What food! The food of the wealthy and slender. I had seen images of these foods all my life. I ate a slice of radish adorned with brown paste and bright seeds. It tasted like virtue and rarity. *Food exists to train self-control,* it said. *Status comes from self-denial.* If I did not want to be a servant I needed to remember this. “Sit down, everyone.” Solange’s voice was playful but unopposable, like a nursery-school teacher. She pointed to a studiously whimsical flower arrangement that marked the Jades’ table. When we were seated, a thin woman with white hair and a long, sleeveless white wrap dress appeared. Everyone stopped eating as she glided to the center of the veranda. “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Richilde Hess. Your guide. Welcome to Little Cayman.” Richilde smiled and met our eyes gracefully, promising to get to know us. Or perhaps her smile was to show that she already knew, at a glance, our special qualities. I had seen this kind of person before. She was a grande dame. And I was heartened that Heinrich Oliver knew the value of a woman like Richilde. It gave me another way to matter to him. Richilde seated herself on a chaise longue, brought one knee under her chin, and grinned like an impish yogi. She was perfect, serene. I was seized with the desire to please this woman, to meet her high standards. To be a goddess like her. She stretched out a gaunt arm and said, “First we detox. No electricity. While you are detoxing you will get to know your teammates. Your facilitators will show you to your workspaces.” “Follow me, Jades!” Solange’s voice rang out. She led us along another wooden walkway. As we clomped along, the garden gave way to mangrove thicket. Ahead were palm-thatched bungalows, each with a sign. We passed Agate, Tourmaline, and Carnelian before we came to Jade. Solange sat us down inside a bungalow decorated with woven grass mats that I knew cost a fortune and said, “Now we are going to talk about… Power!” She said “Power!” the way my mom would have announced, “Ice cream!” Turning to me she said, “Emily, why do people have power?” I shrugged. “They inherit it? They have a lot of money? They’re intimidating?” I looked around and added, “They employ a lot of people?” Solange nodded. “Adam, what are some other reasons people have power?” “Leadership? Charisma? Intelligence?” “Darcy, can you add to that?” Solange asked cheerfully. Darcy answered, “What about knowledge? Knowledge is power, right?” Adam interrupted. “You can’t define power without talking about power structures. There are two kinds, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal power is wielded by people who are equals. Vertical is a hierarchy.” “People Power!” A woman laughed and waved a fist. When no one smiled she looked at her lap. “Those are all good answers,” Solange said. “I’m going to leave now so you can get acquainted.” When she was gone no one spoke for several seconds. Then Adam said, “What the fuck is this place?” “We need to know if they’re watching us,” a woman said. “If they are, they lied about there being no electricity,” someone answered. Darcy asked, “What would happen if we went exploring?” Adam opened the door and everyone followed him outside. Solange had vanished. I looked over the side of the walkway and saw tangled mangrove roots. No one could walk down there even with waders and a machete. We had a binary choice: continue down the walkway to where the sea must lie, or back to the veranda. Adam chose the sea. We heard the voices of other teams as we passed more bungalows. Then the walkway turned into a pier jutting into the sea. It was mid-morning, sticky and hot, late August. I wished I had brought a hat. Did I own a hat anymore? Then I saw a boat with an outboard motor lashed to the pier. Adam said, “Should we grab it?” I looked out to sea; there were no other islands, no boat traffic. We would probably die or get picked up by the resort’s staff if we tried to escape this way. When no one said anything Adam shrugged. Without discussion, we turned back. We were a herd. Somehow our bodies had synchronized yet we acted as though communication was impossible, not worth the effort. Halfway to the veranda we noticed another walkway. We veered onto it without speaking. The garden became less tended, but gradually, as if the gardeners would not admit they did not control all things. Without warning a tower appeared behind a clump of trees. Coming toward us was a figure dressed in white. Someone gasped. We all knew we had transgressed. --- She walked to meet us with an amused smile. “You’re the explorers, then, Jades. Good for you. Let’s go back to the veranda, shall we? It’s nearly lunch time.” Richilde eased to the head of our pack. Turning to me she said, “And what do you make of the place? I’ve been watching you troop around.” “It’s beautiful. So refined.” I couldn’t find better words. My eyes implored her to feel the depth of my appreciation, my sophistication. Richilde frowned, then fell behind to speak to someone else. Embarrassment flared inside me. When we got back to the veranda I ate slices of flower-encrusted zucchini until I calmed down. After lunch Solange surprised me by telling me I did not need to go back to my group. I could spend the rest of the day by myself. In fact, I could spend the rest of the week relaxing. The other Jades were told to go back to the bungalow. I had done something wrong. I went to my room and pulled the covers over me. I stared up at the ceiling, feeling, for the first time, how trapped I was. *Kevin.* The thought of him returned like a welcome burden, like ballast. I was not on this island to impress people like Richilde, I was here to find Kevin. I got out of bed and returned to the veranda with all the dignity I could summon. And yet once on the veranda I was afraid to leave it. I was sure if I went exploring I would lose the little freedom I had. I passed the next six days in a state of dreamy, floating unease, waiting for the thing that would happen at the end of the week. I ate my exquisite, tiny meals and watched my body slowly shrink, become dense. Strange to say, as anxious as I was, I was delighted to be surrounded by rare, desirable things. I had wanted to know luxury my whole life; it would take more than a few days to see its emptiness. In that strange interlude I often watched Richilde idling on the veranda. I was curious why she spent time there. In her place I would have guarded my mystique in my tower, showing myself only when I had an audience, devotees. Richilde ignored me, though now I know she was watching me, too. Once I saw her serene mask slip to reveal fear and anger. Our eyes met and I experienced a rush of satisfaction. I saw the Jades on the veranda at mealtimes. They were not bonding. They were driving each other mad, feeding dread that would surely derail them when we reached the test. The other nine groups had connected; their laughter was giddy. They were afraid but they had each other. On the morning of the seventh day, Solange entered my room while I was still asleep. “Good morning, Emily. Ready to go to the Compound?” Her sing-song was that of a nurse who had come to prep me for surgery. I played along, refused to be disoriented. “Yep!” “Good. Get dressed and meet me outside.” We were the only ones on the veranda. For the first time since I arrived, the sky was overcast. I heard the first heavy raindrops percuss the large-leaved plants, then the dim rumbling sound of the plane. It flew above me, loud and low, before merging with the clouds. Solange handed me an umbrella. For once she was not smiling; I glimpsed the scared and bitter person who lived inside the nurse, the preschool teacher. I followed her through the rain, up the path to Richilde’s tower. I looked up as we passed; it was much larger than I thought, with dozens of windows. I saw a young woman at a window high above, regarding me thoughtfully. She did not wave. There was a golf cart below the tower. The walkway swelled to form a place for it to turn around, like a snake that had swallowed an animal. Solange sat in the driver’s seat and motioned me to sit beside her. She was angry about something. I wished I knew how to tell her I was on her side, whatever side that was. The rain drummed on the plastic roof of the golf cart. Through the downpour the island was gray, featureless scrub. It took a long time to reach a building that looked like my workplace in Austin—sharp angles, metal and glass. Solange pulled into a covered entrance, and, stepping out, I reached for my luggage before I remembered I had none. “Good luck,” Solange said. “Thanks, Solange. Thanks for looking after me.” She nodded curtly and drove away. --- When I stepped through the sliding glass doors I let out a little gasp. Kevin was standing there. Before I could speak he said, “I knew you’d make it. Want to get something to eat?” He gave me a quick shoulder hug and tears threatened behind my eyelids. He led me down a glassed-in walkway to a cafeteria where the smells were heavy and unapologetic. A plump man smiled and pointed to the day’s offerings. Conch curry. Shrimp gumbo. Lobster roll. I took one of each and Kevin laughed. “You must be starving after Richilde.” We sat across from each other at a table overlooking a sculpture garden. The rain was lifting; shafts of sunlight striped the dark grass yellow-green. When I thought my voice would not break I said, “You’ve been here since… you left.” “Yeah. I went to the Killeen facility, then Richilde, then here. Same as you.” “Were you also the only one who made it through?” Kevin paused mid-bite. “There are different places people go. We both ended up here.” I searched his face. His auburn curls had receded slightly. His delicate pink skin had turned yellow and waxy in the hot climate. I remembered worrying that Texas would do that to him; instead it was this place. He was a man now, the boy was all scrubbed off. What kind of man? He looked at me steadily and said, “The Algorithm is amazing. You’re going to love being part of such a cool project.” When he cleared his throat I thought he was going to bring up *us*. But he said nothing. I felt dizzy. The Kevin of now and the Kevin of memory had not reintegrated. I didn’t know him anymore, and I didn’t believe he’d ever really known me. I wished I could be alone for a while. Finally Kevin said, “I owe you a lot, Emily. You’re pretty cool.” I said, “Yeah, that was something, wasn’t it?” Kevin blinked or possibly winced. Maybe he was trying to reintegrate the different versions of me, too. I said, “So, where are the other places people end up?” “Most of them go to Nashville. We have an Algorithmic starter community there.” I thought about this. “The ones who bonded, right? What happened to my group? The Jades?” Kevin laughed. “Yeah, you had the weirdo group. I don’t know what happened to them.” --- When we finished eating Kevin took me to the labs. There was no special equipment, just lots of screens, tables, and conference rooms. Heinrich himself was there, along with seven or eight young men. Heinrich said, “Welcome, Emily.” He did not shake my hand or introduce me to the men who orbited him like an electron cloud. Kevin was at home here, joking, competing. He looked young again. Soon Heinrich slipped away and Kevin called to me. “Come see the Algorithmic Village.” The others made room for me in front of a screen. I watched people interacting—cashiers and customers, people talking in parks, people at work. After each conversation, text appeared under each person. Things like: *Credit Earned +3 Status, -2 Power*. This was delightful, freeing, acknowledgement of a reality I had always tracked. There was recent footage, too, from the bungalows and the veranda. It was easy to search. The readings from the Jades were nothing but zeros. “People who refuse to participate are going to starve when the Algorithm takes over,” one of the boys said. After a while the boys drifted away, and Kevin with them. When I was alone I found the video of Richilde and me on the veranda. Though we never acknowledged one another, the Algorithm knew we were competing. I watched intently at the spot where Richilde’s face had dropped its mask to show fear. At that moment my posture was proud, brave, exultant, for that was when I had sensed she was not a goddess. Her animal mind had submitted to mine, but my thinking brain had only registered that she was a fraud. And with that my status and power credits reached a tidy sum. As the afternoon lengthened I grew bored watching other people compete. I left the monitors and stretched out on a sofa overlooking the sea. I watched the sun slip into the water. --- I awoke at a touch on my shoulder. Heinrich was standing over me. I sat up quickly and brushed hair out of my face. “Emily. Will you join me in my office?” I looked around. The boys were gone. My stomach rumbled and I saw it was night outside. I stood and straightened my wrap dress. I did not expect the equestrian theme of Heinrich’s office: photographs of sleek horses, green fields, serious people wearing funny pants. Heinrich leaned on the edge of his desk and motioned me to take a seat. His face was almost bashful. “Look, Emily, with your high readings for status sensitivity, you meet the criteria for oocyte donation. The modern harvesting technique is relatively painless, and quite safe. In addition, you would become eligible for a job transfer.” “You want my eggs? Why?” Heinrich’s buttocks shifted on the desk. “We would use them to create gametes.” “I don’t like this,” I blurted. He sighed, then retreated behind his desk where he paced back and forth. “You know, I could’ve had someone else have this conversation with you. I’m here because I know what I’m asking of you.” I wondered if he wanted me to acknowledge that he was doing something that made him uncomfortable, to praise him. I said, “Oh. Whose sperm would fertilize the eggs?” He looked up, surprised. “Mine, of course. You wouldn’t need to gestate them. We have special people to do that.” “Do I have a choice?” Perhaps an old reflex made him say, “Yes, yes you do. If you don’t want to participate you can return to your old job. You’d need to sign a nondisclosure agreement, of course.” I could hear the lie. “Is that what happened to my group, the Jades? The ones who wouldn’t participate?” Heinrich’s face contracted, and when he said, “That’s none of your business,” I understood. There was no NDA, no going back to my old life. The Jades had disappeared; it was better for both of us if I did not know what that meant. I breathed in. “What is the job transfer?” He brightened. “Richilde needs an assistant. Someone to keep the resort beautiful and elegant. She’s getting old. You will replace her someday.” --- Kevin drove me back to the resort in the golf cart that night. The headlights picked out the gray ribbon of the walkway. I thought: *The walkway is a circuit board. We can only flow where it conducts us.* Around me in the blackness I heard strange birds calling out, commenting on our intrusion. I could not see Kevin in the dark, only feel his bulk beside me in the vinyl-upholstered seat. Uncomfortable with his silence, I spoke at random. “Where do you live?” “Oh. We have our own digs in the Compound.” “Are they as nice as the resort?” He considered this. “The resort is about showing off. The Compound is more about showing who’s boss.” “One is status and the other is power?” Kevin laughed. “I forgot you were so smart.” “Do you know what Heinrich is going to do to me?” It took Kevin a while to respond. “Yeah.” I breathed in. “Am I going to see you again?” Kevin took his right hand off the steering wheel and felt around for mine. “No, Emily. Heinrich doesn’t want his children’s biological mothers interacting with men. It would damage them psychologically, knowing their mothers were like that. Don’t worry, he won’t pester you, it’s not like a harem or something. We respect you; we actually call you the goddesses. Because you’re untouchable. We have our own fun in our compound.” He squeezed my hand and let go. “With girls?” “Yeah, with girls. They fly in special girls.” I felt cold. I was a special girl too, but not the kind that cavorted with special boys like Kevin. “Why does Heinrich want you guys around?” Kevin sighed. “He has a tendency to be gloomy, and we cheer him up. Add energy.” Something in his tone made me ask, “Does he like the girls they fly in? Or boys?” “You would ask that, wouldn’t you? I think he’s more into the boys. Do *not* tell anyone I said that.” “He’s into boys like you?” “Um, yeah.” I was overcome by the bleakness in Kevin’s voice. Kevin had already turned dry and yellow in this environment. What would happen to him when his beauty was exhausted? I decided to tell him one of my secrets. “When you disappeared it reminded me of a painting. *The Assumption of Mary*. I called your leaving the *Assumption of Kevin*.” Kevin snorted. “I know what the Assumption is. Now you know I didn’t go to heaven.” Then he said something unexpected. “I changed my last name. I’m not Kevin Benitez anymore. I’m Kevin Flynn.” “Why?” “Because our mothers both had that name and I only knew this because you got me talking about myself. Because you are the only person who ever figured me out.” I wanted to tell him I wasn’t sure that was true. The only thing I knew about Kevin was that I loved him. Was that enough to know someone? Was it enough for him to love me in return? *Please, please let that be enough.* “I will change my last name to Flynn, too.” “Like a secret marriage or something?” Kevin’s old trustfulness tore at me. “Yes,” I said softly. He sat up straight behind the wheel and said, “Miss Flynn, will you marry me?” I smiled in the darkness. “I do. By the powers invested in me, I now pronounce us husband and wife.” Kevin leaned over and kissed my cheek. I tried to kiss his cheek but ended up kissing his neck. We had reached Richilde’s tower. Candles and lamps shone from many windows, like a leaking lighthouse. Kevin turned off the engine and bounced his knee up and down. “I’m not allowed in the women’s quarters. I guess someone else will take over now.” He gave me another shoulder hug as I got out. He turned the cart around and I watched him drive away. “I love you, Mr. Flynn,” I said to no one. I stood still as the two beams of light, never meeting, grew dimmer and dimmer. > **This story is one of a series that serve as a prelude to Carmen Clarke's novels. The first novel is called Eusebio's Tale and is available** [**on Amazon**](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1C7WD4V?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&ref=ceteramagazine.com)**.** --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/09/unnamed.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Carmen Clarke is an infectious disease epidemiologist living in Maryland. Clarke began to write speculative fiction several years ago, no doubt as a way to understand what was happening to our shared reality after exhausting themselves responding to the pandemic. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading Carmen Clarke’s “Goddess Class.” There is a seductive idea buried inside our language about power. That understanding a system gives us some measure of freedom from it. Learn the codes of wealth, beauty, class, corporate life, and social influence, and perhaps you can finally move through the world on your own terms. In that way, Emily has been learning those codes all her life. She reads status with extraordinary precision. Yet this talent becomes another resource for powerful people to identify, measure, and eventually own. The cruel joke of “Goddess Class” is that seeing the hierarchy clearly can make someone exceptionally useful to it. Clarke pushes that idea into especially uncomfortable territory with the word “goddess.” Emily is elevated through language at the moment her choices become increasingly constrained. Prestige becomes one of the technologies of control. A beautiful name for the place someone else has chosen for you. Perhaps that is why status can exert such a powerful hold on us. It teaches us to experience our assigned place as an achievement unto itself.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Fade to Bette URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/fade-to-bette/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T02:51:01.000Z “So, the purpose of the new software is to reintroduce the customer experience to a more profit-forward—” Oh God, it’s happening again. Stay here, Bette. Don’t lose it. My hands are gone. The tingling climbs my arms—nothing there. My face. I can’t feel my face! I’m not here. “Where’d Bette go?” “Funny, she was sitting right here. Gone.” _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Carcinization URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/carcinization/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:21:08.000Z Carcinization 0:00 /2016.1960997732426 1× > ***Content warning: This story contains depictions of ableist treatment, chronic illness and disability, and sexual content*** Malachai, did you know that 10,000 years in the future, everything turns into crabs? The people are crabs, the dogs they walk, crabs. I’m watching one being walked now just outside my window, its leash looping around each of its eight stubby crab legs. The buildings have become crabs too, concave carapaces, expanding out widthwise like how the skyscrapers of Manhattan once towered upwards. Do you remember that lecture we had halfway through second semester biology? The one where the professor drew a crab on the blackboard in shaky chalk strokes as he explained the process of convergent evolution. How nature had attempted over and over again to evolve everything into a crab. How it might again try to evolve everything into a crab. The Great Carcinization, he called it. That was the only time all semester you stayed awake for a whole lecture. I don’t know how I feel about everything eventually turning into crabs. I never particularly liked crabs, but I don’t hate them either. When we ordered sushi from Aunt Mai’s, I never got the California roll or the spicy kani roll. The first time I tried crab was that summer we went to that seafood place in Chelsea Market. I forget what it was called. We sat on the wooden barstools at the long counter, peered into the giant tanks behind, brimming with Dungeness crabs and Maine lobsters, their legs clicking against the glass. The woman behind the counter brought out a whole Alaskan King Crab, its body shining like a ruby. You showed me how to crack open the claws, the back, the tail to reveal the pale meat. Chelsea Market is underwater now. Buried somewhere underneath layers of silt and sediment. The Carcinoids found parts of the seafood market we went to. A fractured portion of the black granite countertop, its edges worn smooth, and the remnants of one of those large glass tanks. There was one lobster still in it, fused with the bottom of the glass, fossilized underneath the weight of the ocean. Forever captured in time. They brought everything they found back to the museum archive and laid the nets out, still dripping seawater. Hemania helps me pluck the smaller artifacts out of the nets and organize them into piles. I’ve never seen Hemania look so excited. Her claws move so fast, half a plate slips through them and shatters against the floor. One pile is entirely forks bent out of shape, another a bouquet of tarnished spoons. Hemania asks me to identify each one. She can’t accept that they are all used for the same thing. The Carcinoids have one utensil, the urp, and one eating dish, the urth, and both are much simpler in appearance. The noise attracts the other archivists, and they crane their heads over their desks. They are not interested in the artifacts. They are staring at me. I keep my head down, eyes focused on the strands of net in my hands. That’s when I see it, a speck of gold interlaced with a strand of seaweed. A small heart-shaped pendant. Thousands of years ago, my initials were carved into it. I know it was mine, but it looks so alien on the museum floor it might as well have come from Mars. I forgot I lost it that day at Chelsea. With all that had happened since. It probably got snagged on something when I got up to use the bathroom. I knocked over my plate, and it shattered on the floor (I thought it was too early to be a sign, but was it?). You laughed at me, always clumsy. It’s bad luck, you said, to break a plate on a Friday. Or something like that. (A few days after we went to Chelsea, that summer so long ago, a fortune teller stopped me while I was wandering Pier 35\. I wanted to ask her if she could divine the location of my lost necklace, but she grabbed my hands and whispered something about how deja vu isn’t a brain glitch, but our consciousness slipping forward in time. Quantum mechanics, leaps, something, something. I didn’t believe her then, but now I’m not so sure. This felt like what she was describing but the opposite. My consciousness slipping back in time while my body remains physically here. Time traveler’s jamais vu. When I turned to leave, the fortune teller tried to sell me a string of jade beads for $50\. She claimed they would grant me twenty years’ worth of good fortune if I wore them every day. Maybe I should’ve bought them. Where are you, Malachai?) --- My days here are filled with a wide expanse of silence. The Carcinoid language is in a frequency not audible to the human ear. When I take the subway (it is now truly a sub-way—part submarine, part train, connecting the terrestrial portion of the city to the subterranean portion) to work in the mornings, I see them standing together in clusters. They look like they are whispering. Probably about me. Their lips move, but no sound comes out. --- I watch Franke-with-an-E enter the employee mess hall for weeks while I eat in deafening silence. He is the archive’s cataloger. He normally sits by himself at a desk in the corner, takes my artifact identification reports orally, and hammers away on what looks like a Morse code typewriter. A single large button configured for crab claws, pressed at various frequencies and intervals. He usually sits by himself in the mess hall as well. Near the window. He pretends he is in an aquarium, looks out at the fish swimming by. A striped bass, a bluefish, a glimpse of squid. He eats a forkful of seaweed salad, his eyes wander across the cafeteria hall and meet mine. I don’t know what comes over me that day. It’s not like me, you know it’s not like me. I pick up my tray and slide onto the bench across from him. This is a precarious endeavor because the benches have a series of curved contours, five feet wide, as long as a human-sized crab shell. My drink spills across the table, leaving a translucent, shiny patch. I am swallowed into the divot across from him, so only half my face peeks over the table. But I have accomplished my objective. Now, not speaking to me has become the more awkward alternative. “My name is Yara.” I break the silence, extending my hand out to him before quickly retracting it. Shaking hands is not a common greeting in the Carcinoid world. The Carcinoids don’t have hands to shake. “My name is Franke. With an E,” he says, then, noting my confused expression, “Not to be confused with Franc-with-a-C.” His pronunciation is precise, but his voice is airy in a way human voices are not. Unlike the other Carcinoids, who are mostly shades of crimson, Franke-with-an-E’s shell is a deep blue color, like an Atlantic blue crab. When he moves his claws, there is a shock of cyan blue on the posterior aspects of his limbs. “Why are so many of you named Franke/Franc?” I say, laughing. Franke-with-an-E doesn’t laugh. “Our names are not Franke/Franc. My name is made of sounds you cannot pronounce. Those were just the names we picked in Human Language class.” I never thought about it before, but the Carcinoids must study English in school like we study Latin or ancient Greek. Dead languages they never expected to hear spoken in real life. Franke-with-an-E lowers his voice, eyes drifting away toward something just over my shoulder. “I hope our names are not offensive to you.” I must have stared at him blankly, because he continued, “We liked how it sounded, the name of your god.” (Later, Hemania told me about Franck Cillion. The billionaire who lived two hundred years after our time, who built an impenetrable bunker underneath the Chrysler building. A fortune teller told him that human civilization would fall within his lifetime, so he gathered his favorite media. The complete Criterion collection, a copy of Moby Dick in every human language. He was a huge Frank Sinatra fan and had his entire library of songs on deluxe vinyls, CDs, cassette tapes. Every form of every Frank Sinatra song. The bunker was so secure that it remained undisturbed for the next 9800 years. Until the Carcinoids penetrated its airtight seal. It became the greatest archaeological find in Carcinoid history. It was how they began to connect the dots of human history. Understandably, they misunderstood a few things.) But in that moment, I nod at Franke-with-an-E, my head empty. “No, I’m not offended.” --- Malachai, did you ever think about what would be left of us, thousands of years after we are gone? If I had to pick a remnant of humanity to survive the apocalypse, it wouldn’t have been a piano. I spilled a glass of orange juice on my mom’s hand-me-down Yamaha when I was eight years old, and it hasn’t sounded the same since. The citric acid still seeps into the notes all these years later. Waterlogged A minors and sour G majors. Hemania takes me to see the piano in secret in the middle of the night. She doesn’t tell me what it is at first. It’s a surprise. She blindfolds me on the way there so I can’t tell the others where it’s at. At first, I protest, but she says, “They will take it apart.” Her blue eyes are watery, as if the thought alone drives her to tears. “They will split open its shiny black shell, rip out the white teeth one by one…” “Okay,” I say. And let her blindfold me. The museum is built out of Franck Cillion’s old bunker. It has a large space in the middle which houses this month’s main exhibits: a pile of polyester sweaters and a wad of plastic grocery store bags that have yet to decompose. But most of it is snaky passageways and little nooks containing treasures once priced in the millions of dollars, now languishing worthless in forgotten corners. I get dizzy as Hemania twists my shoulders through the paths. Then abruptly we stop, and the blindfold falls away. It’s a Steinway. The blue light streaming through a small window makes a kaleidoscope of waves across its shiny exterior. “Show me how it works.” Hemania steps backward. “I can’t.” The air I inhale feels sharp in my lungs. “I can’t play it anymore.” “Why not?” “There are some things most humans can do that I can’t,” I say, holding out my hands, palms toward the ceiling. “Most humans can move each of their five fingers independently. That’s what allows you to press the keys individually. And press multiple at once.” I try to spread my fingers apart, but they barely move. The collagen has calcified, encasing each joint like a spiderweb wound around a piece of prey. “It’s a condition that runs in my family. My aunt got it when she was about my age. So did my grandmother. It causes the flexible cartilage of the small joints in your hands and feet to become hard and calcified like bone.” Hemania tilts her head slightly. “I just assumed all humans were like you.” It feels like there is a bird caught beneath my rib cage, its wings fluttering. I don’t know if I want to know the answer, but I have to ask. “Has another human ever traveled through here?” Hemania pauses before answering. Her blue eyes are strangely human, but they are endlessly deep, and I cannot read them. “No, you’re the first one. There are no records of any others in our histories or the histories of those who came before.” --- I don’t know where you are, Malachai. If you crash-land two thousand years ahead of me, or somewhere so deep in the past, any trace of you is lost to history. I found the time machine plans crumpled in the back of your desk drawer. These were the coordinates you used. But I noticed an error in your calculations on page 37\. You didn’t integrate the Lagrangian properly over the correct variable. I fixed it. I was always slightly better at math than you. Slightly. Franke-with-an-E tells me that moving through time is an illusion. Like how a tendril of seaweed appears green or the sea appears blue. Neither are those colors in their essence. If you pulled them apart, unlinked their DNA piece by piece, analyzed each gene fragment, you wouldn’t find it hidden in there. The color is just how we perceive light hitting an object. A thing that has mass in this universe. Time is the same. It is just our way of processing the laws of the universe. In that way, we aren’t actually that far apart. It makes sense, but it doesn’t if you think about it too hard. That we exist simultaneously at every point in time. It’s like you haven’t moved; you are in the same place you always were. It is everything around you that has changed. One moment, you are standing in your apartment, staring out at a New York City alleyway, oozing black trash bags and cooing pigeons and rats the size of your head. The next, you are underwater, the air crushed from your lungs, darkness closing in all around you. Then suddenly, giant red claws embrace you. They are warm and gentle, and they are lifting you. And everything has turned into crabs. Anyway, I’ll wait here for you. --- I want to believe you landed somewhere far upstream from here. Where the humans that have evolved into crabs have evolved into something else. Maybe everything has reverted to primordial soup, a hot slurry of single-celled archaea and amino acids. You’re the only one left, sitting in a silent world. Then one day you uncover these letters like the Carcinoids found Franck Cillion’s bunker, and you will remember me and know that I came looking for you. Until then, this journal can serve as documentation of the Carcinoid people. Of their ways, their culture. --- The Carcinoids celebrate the new year on the first full moon of the winter season. When a thin layer of frost has crept over the edges of the ocean. It never gets cold enough for the subterranean city to completely freeze over, but it’s enough to stop the subway from running. The museum is closed, so Hemania hosts a New Year’s dinner for all the archivists at her home in the ’burbs. Franke meets me in the lobby of my apartment complex. It turns out he lives two buildings over from me, in a top-floor unit overlooking the water. We wait for the land train at the station, our breaths escaping as puffs of mist. We glance at each other awkwardly. Somewhere along the way, he has shed Franke-with-an-E and become Franke. The traditional Carcinoid New Year’s dinner is a four-course meal. First, a seafood stew is served. A small pot is delivered to each Carcinoid sitting around the table. It is green in color, a mix of clams, mussels, and oysters. My hands slide into the divots made for crab claws, and I take a sip at the same time as everyone else. Next, a song is sung as a blessing for the new year. At first, it is too high a frequency for me to hear. Then it descends. A low rumble, then a hum, the sound comes into focus like a Polaroid photo. A ghostly outline, then shadows, then recognizable shapes. Finally, I can join in. The sound vibrates in my chest. The second course is a roast of some kind. It will be another thirty minutes until it is ready, so everyone leaves the table to gather in small cliques around the hearth. Franke snakes his way through the crowd to get us some drinks. Everything has gone silent again. The only one who doesn’t have a group (besides me) is Hemania. It is her party, but she is alone. She is looking out the window at something I can’t see. I slip in beside her. She turns to me and looks like she wants to say something. “If you are able to repair the time machine,” she whispers, so that I can barely hear her, “I want you to take me with you. To the Anthropocene.” “The human era… it’s really different from this one,” I say, picking up one of the urps lying on the dining table. “See this here. How it curves around your claws so you can hold it. How it stays in place without you having to grip it with fingers? Humans are obsessed with fingers. It’s one of our key attributes. Everything requires them. You wouldn’t even be able to eat most human meals properly.” You also wouldn’t be able to walk through a vertical human door comfortably or fit in a car or a train. Humans would stare at you in the streets. They would point and laugh at you. You couldn’t go anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to eat at a dinner party like this. And neither would I, for that matter. (When was the last time I went out to dinner? It was with you, probably. Three months ago, at Antonio’s, I believe?) *Antonio’s is always booked out on Saturday nights. The tables are packed in so closely it feels like all the oxygen in the room is being used up. If I stick my elbow out too far, I’ll bump into a Supreme sweatshirt or a Chanel bag that costs more than my rent.* *A waiter has brought out our main course after a 40-minute wait, but the plates in front of us are untouched.* *“Do you need help?” you ask.* *“No,” I say, a little too loudly. The fork slips from between my deadened fingers and clatters to the ground. The woman at the table next to us glances in our direction. She is wearing a sequined cocktail dress, her eyeliner drawn to a fine point. She smells of tangerines and cigarettes.* *A waiter materializes out of thin air to place another next to my plate. I pick up the fork, but the same thing happens. Clang! And again. In the restaurant kitchen, there is a pile of forks in the prep sink. Each one is unused, spotless, save for a few strands of lint and wool carpet fiber strangled around the teeth.* *“Yara.” Your voice is strained, the sound a little too curt. “Maybe we should take the food to go.”* *You gesture at my untouched lasagna, the cheese congealing on my plate in globs.* *“I don’t want to take it to go.” I grit my teeth. “I want to eat here.” Clang. We’ve caught the attention of the entire restaurant. They stare. Their gazes are red-hot pokers. The waiter materializes again. His face is scrunched into a grimace. He doesn’t know what to say.* *You turn to him. “Can we get two to-go boxes?”* *“Malachai,” I feel my cheeks grow hot. “I said—”* *I move to grab your hand, but my arm flails to the side. My still-full wine glass topples over and shatters. The red soaks through the Chantilly lace tablecloth, through my gray sweater, spreading, consuming. As if it were fire.* --- Malachai, I know you will probably never read this. I miss the taste of mangoes, of all things. And bread. I wonder if I will ever see another human, who is not also a crab, ever again. They look like crabs but more parts of them are human than you would think. What parts are crab and what parts are human? Or are the crab parts the human parts now? Perhaps it is me who is no longer human. Parts of me have already begun to change. --- Carcinoid lovemaking is a lot like human lovemaking, and at the same time, they are nothing alike at all. They do it standing up sometimes, but more often lying down. First, the female Carcinoid must shed her hard shell, her exoskeleton. Must become vulnerable and soft. At first, we do not touch each other for what feels like an infinite amount of time. Franke and I sit across from each other on the cool stone floor of his apartment. “Can you feel this?” I say. I run my hand against the back of his shell. It is smooth and cool like glazed pottery. It’s the first time I have touched one of their shells. “We have nerve receptors in our shells. They are part of us. We can feel pain, and pressure, crude and light touch,” he reaches out to touch me, but stops. “You can tell me to stop if it’s hurting you.” “How do I know that what Carcinoids call pain is the same as the pain that I feel?” He frowns. “How do you know that the way someone feels anything is the same as what you feel?” He takes my hands in his claws. They have rough nodules inside, like little teeth. They are sharp if brushed from the wrong angle. Afterward, I am lying in his bed and there’s a soft ringing in my ears, crisscrossed scrapes on the insides of my arms. My thighs are rubbed red and raw, but they don’t hurt. When I shower, the hot water doesn’t sting. At the end, you’ll know you should feel dirtier than you do. You should feel like you broke an ancient law, violated something sacred. But you don’t, because you don’t know who’s less human, the Carcinoids or you. --- That night, I dream of you. It’s a dream I’ve had over and over again these last few months. It always takes place somewhere different. One time, I’m at the grocery store. Another time, I’m at a college party. We are talking to a few of your friends, Kathy from upper division differential equations, and John, who lives two floors down, when it happens. One of my teeth is loose. I reach inside my mouth, and it comes out, root and all. This seems to unleash something and another one comes loose. Then another. Sometimes they break apart and come out as shards. I have to pick them out of my gums, piece by piece, like broken glass. It feels so real. How am I supposed to eat toffee, or apples, or doughy New York bagels ever again? Then I wake up with my hands shoved inside my mouth, fumbling for my teeth. Making sure they are still there. In this dream, I’m in our apartment on that last night. You came home drunk, breath smelling like something aged, something expensive from an upscale Manhattan bar. I hadn’t left the apartment in almost two weeks. I have become well acquainted with the red wine stain hidden underneath the dresser, the dust bunnies in the crevices of the windowsill. They have lived there for years, have stayed the same. But everything has changed. “You could always go out, you know.” You know I can’t. “I don’t like how they look at me.” “You could be brave. Jaqueline is brave; she was diagnosed with cancer. She goes out.” “People don’t stare at Jaqueline.” She doesn’t drop things. “I don’t know what you want me to be.” I know what I am. I am like the wine stain. A bitter aftertaste. “Even if I time-traveled to the future and found a cure for you. Even if I went through all that trouble, would anything really change?” I don’t know if anything would. Then I reach into my mouth, and an incisor comes out. Then a molar. I hold them in my palms, speckles of bone and blood. You don’t react. The dream begins to fade. One last time, I feel the ghost of a finger tracing the edge of my lips, the soft touch of a palm. The warmth of human skin. My nostrils are filled with the scent of our apartment. For a moment, I almost believe it is the summer day we went swimming at Long Island beach and hung our swimsuits up to dry on the fire escape. My lips still taste of ocean salt like you were just there. Like I was just there. But as I lie in bed, head spinning, body settling back to Earth, I can feel it evaporating. The tastes, the smells, all of it. No matter what I do, it’s slipping through my fingers. Inevitable. Like how the last rays of the sunset are swallowed by the sea. *I thought you would come back for me.* --- I can’t remember if it’s the first or the fifth time I stay over when he says it. When I’m slipping out of bed, ready to leave. “A male Carcinoid will take many mates. Many times. Over the course of years. But a female Carcinoid will take a mate only once during a short window of her life. Then never again.” At first, I say nothing. I don’t know what to say to something like that. It’s different from our usual arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes after dinner. Or who left the takeout box out on the counter instead of putting it in the fridge. “But I am not a Carcinoid.” It comes out like a sigh. “You left a few pages of your journal on my typewriter.” He takes me apart with his eyes. “You love someone else.” I pull on a jacket, slide my feet into rainboots. “He left you. You know that.” His words are like daggers. But I don’t turn around. --- One night, when I lie in bed unable to sleep, my mind becomes untethered from this upstream place in time. It wanders down the strands, combs through the knots that have accumulated. Until I am sitting on the loveseat in our apartment. The one that sits adjacent to the only window that doesn’t look out over the alley, but out at the street. People are walking past. It is summer, and the sidewalks are dotted with baseball hats and sunburned cheeks. That’s when I see it. Two figures walking hand in hand. Everything seems to slow as I watch them. The man is shaped like you. Same dark hair, same gray T-shirt you always used to wear. I can almost see the coffee stain on the hem. It wouldn’t come out no matter how many times I dragged it to the laundromat. His arm is around a woman in a wide-brimmed sunhat. Before I can get a better look, they are swallowed by the crowd. *You never left our time. Did you?* It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. All of you are long dead, bodies reduced to dust. No less than dust. Atomized. Now part of other things. Maybe a string of seaweed, or algae, floating peacefully on an ancient lake somewhere. Somewhere fossilized under a thousand layers of silt and stone, there is an empty apartment down a shitty Lower East Side street. It holds a single strand of my permineralized hair tangled in the fibers of an antique rug, my smell still lingering in its vacant corners. *You left me in my darkness.* *I found the way out on my own.* --- A few days pass, and I can’t keep taking time off work. I take the subway to the museum later than usual, so it’s strangely empty. Peaceful. Some silences are more pleasant than others. When I get to the museum, something guides my feet through the network of winding passageways. Past the bottlenecks and sharp turns. I know where they are going. I find Hemania there. She is kneeling on the ground in front of the piano, her crab legs folded underneath her. Her eyes are closed. At first, I think she is sleeping, but she nods when I walk in. “How’s Franke-with-an-E?” she asks. “Oh, we broke up,” I say awkwardly. “We kept fighting over who was going to do the dishes.” “I’m sorry,” she says. “No, it was kind of nice in a way. To have an argument about something dumb like that. We just weren’t compatible. That was it.” I shuffle my feet on the stone floor. It is my turn to hesitate. “Do you want to hear one in real life?” I say. “There are professionals who play piano in my time. They hold performances in giant concert halls. There are other instruments too; sometimes they all play together. Sometimes, the sounds are so beautiful, it’s almost as if you can taste them.” Hemania looks up. “But what you said about the human world, I don’t know if that will work. If I could do any of the things I want to do there. If they would accept me…” “Well, if I can figure out a way to live in the Carcinoid world,” I say, “I’m sure we can figure out something back in the human world. For both of us.” Maybe I can fix the time machine. I think I know how. Maybe I’ll see you again. Then I can tell you myself: Guess what, Malachai? One day, you’re going to turn into a giant crab and so will I. There will be no such thing as forks or pianos, and none of this will matter because nothing will ever be the same again. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/24-1.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Danielle Wilfand resides in Denver, Colorado where she is a first-year internal medicine resident at the University of Colorado. She enjoys writing about and examining her experience of living with chronic illness through different lenses. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading Danielle Wilfand’s “Carcinization.” Given enough time, everything becomes a crab. All right, fine, that's not really true, but it *is* the wonderfully strange joke at the center of this story. And importantly, Wilfand takes that evolutionary oddity and turns it into something so blissfully intimate, using a future populated by Carcinoids to ask what happens when the world changes around a body faster than the body can adapt. Yara is an appealing character in how she's constantly measuring herself against vanished standards. Forks, pianos, crowded restaurants, human hands, and so on. All these ordinary objects acquire enormous emotional weight because they once belonged to a world designed around an outdated idea of how a person should move through it. In the Carcinoid future, those assumptions disappear. Suddenly Yara’s body is simply one body among many, and the inconvenience belongs as much to the environment as to her. This is where the story earns its real tenderness. Hemania can't play the piano because she has claws. Franke experiences touch through a shell. Each encounter swiftly widens Yara’s understanding of what a body can be, while her memories of Malachai reveal how thoroughly shame can become entangled with intimacy. In that way, the title is both a biological term and a philosophy. Everything changes shape. Bodies do. Cities do. Relationships. Even things we consider essential to being human turn out to be temporary. And what truly remains is Yara’s capacity to adjust and keep moving. By the time she imagines returning home with Hemania, the future has stopped looking like the place where humanity disappeared. It's now a life that keeps inventing new ways to fit itself together.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Pete URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/pete/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:25:14.000Z Pete 0:00 /1131.6043083900227 1× > ***Content warning: This story contains strong language and depictions of cancer, death, and explicit sexual content.*** It was a glioblastoma, they said. And it was so fast that she never got to learn the details. With some cancers, you could really dine out on the pain. Make a meal of the despair. But glio was quick. A magic trick. A disappearing act. And now there was no point in knowing anything. He was dead. Everyone told her how sorry they were. Like it was somehow their fault. Like they hadn’t tried hard enough. Like they hadn’t believed in him, and one day he’d just vanished. Like a kid’s peekaboo. Her Aunt Maimsy, the weird one who always wore felt, told her to watch out for the *quiet*. “No one’s ever really prepared for being alone by *themselves*,” Maimsy said. “What do *you* think about when you’re alone, Aunt Maimsy?” Emma asked. Maimsy licked her lips, and laughed like an old crow. Cigarettes and felt made bad friends. After all the casseroles and sympathy cards and awkward hugs. After all the black dresses, and fancy hats. And the funeral “party” that felt more like a country club get-together. After picking out his last suit (it had to be a *good* suit) and the flower arrangements and the tombstone (selected like it was a used car). It, all of it, was only and totally and completely quiet. Terrible. Like that Beatles song, the one where they sang about how “She was on her own.” Except John and Paul harmonized the shit out of that song. “The lyric is actually ‘We’re on our way home,’” Tabitha, her sister, said. “That’s why they *both* sing it.” Of course it was. She broke down and cried into her sister’s wool sweater. Wool and tears made bad friends. She would hear his voice at strange times and in strange places. While taking a piss. And the cat would come in. It sounded like Pete was going out to get some bread. “Wait, wait!” she’d shout. And she’d try to pull up her underwear as she ran to the front door. Which was, of course, locked. There was no one. Only the cat staring at her wet thighs. “Fucking cat,” she’d say. Then, she’d have to walk back down the hall to wash her hands. A postcard from Bermuda turned up. That’s where they went on their honeymoon. It just said: “Miss you babe.” The stamp was weird. She immediately threw it out. Creepy, ghost, shit. One night, late, she had a whole conversation with him. Lucid dreaming, perhaps. They talked about all the people they knew in college. How silly and serious they were. “Remember how you used to always wear corduroy!” she said. “God, you’d think I was the professor,” he said. He could still make her laugh. It had been a while. But she never told anyone about *this* hangout. She didn’t want them to think that she was crazy. She’d smell him early in the morning. After she’d ground the beans. It was faint. *Norwegian Moss* was his chosen fragrance. It was unmistakably there. To recapture his woodsy essence, she’d smell random things: pillows, t-shirts, old socks. *Norwegian Moss* was an old, discontinued brand of *Speed Stick*. Very 70s. Inherited from his father. It made him smell like a wet creek. It’s weird what marketers thought masculinity should smell like. Now, she hung out in obsessive Japanese forums to find the last tubes of it on Earth. After the fifth such smelling incident, she tossed most of his old clothes. She didn’t like how the cat judged her when she smelled his sweats. But she kept the one T-shirt with the NASA logo—just to be safe. Bless her heart, Maimsy, tossing back her third Legion Hall G&T, told her that he would eventually fade from her life. “You’ll see him less and less,” she said, “And at first you’ll feel rotten, but this is a *good* thing. Maybe not *good* as in goodness, but good as in less bad.” At that moment, Emma tried hard to not judge Aunt Maimsy and her Church of the Perpetually Lit Parliament and the Glass of the Beefeater. Its consecration of the ritual of the Scratch Lotto and its canonization of the Princess Diana. Pete would always be part of her life. But then one day, she woke up, and she didn’t smell him. She got dressed, drank her coffee, went about her day and didn’t think of him once. She couldn’t remember his voice. Or his stupid farts. Or his dumb laugh. The first time she realized that it had happened, she punished herself with a box of cookies and a home reno show where yuppies flipped houses after a hurricane. But then the memory wipe happened more and more. He *did* fade. Now, he only visited her on special occasions. He had become a shadow. It was a *less bad* thing. --- She’d found a new life. She took up yoga. She pretended to like hip hop. She got a dog—who mostly got along with the cat. It wasn’t perfect. But, she found a measure of peace. Then, one night, after work, at her corner bodega, she bought bread, eggs and yogurt. Why not? She embraced the convenience. And she liked how the bearded cashier always wished her “a *nice* night.” He wore a pewter Santa Muerte necklace. What was *his* life journey before he got to this spot and gave her change for a container of Oikos? She turned around. And there he was. Pete. She almost ran into him. But he still looked cool. “Hi Emma, it’s good to see you,” he said. She dropped the yogurt. But she saved the eggs. “How in the sweet George Harrison fuck?” she blurted. He wasn’t a shadow. He was real. He was younger. Like when they first met. In his bad boy phase. There was of course the leather coat and the motorcycle. Yeah, Pete was once *that* dude. Then he became a lawyer. But she didn’t care. She held Bad Boy Pete and she kissed him. Like he would disappear. Then she stopped. “You taste different,” she said. And he held her *strange*. Like it was a mirror version of his old hug. Where were her arms supposed to go? And his smell was wrong. It wasn’t just the cheap French cigarettes. Her husband hadn’t smoked in years. This man’s sweat was sweet. Like he’d lived on the *Big Rock Candy Mountain*. What made her think of that song? Still. Still. She fucked his brains out. It’d been a while. Afterwards, she stared at the ceiling. She just wanted to hold that feeling in. But, mostly, she wanted a snack. Cookies? *God, they thought they’d be young forever.*They didn’t know any better. They got old. Bad Boy was a young lover. He didn’t know what she liked. He tried too hard. He was too enthusiastic. Still, he made sure that she reached orgasm. Like a gentleman caller. But when he put his hand on her breasts, she just laughed. “What? Did I do something wrong?” he asked. It was like he was sizing up a grapefruit. He didn’t know. The leather and gasoline were only a facade. He was a sweet, idiot boy. He also wasn’t great at the intimacy part. “I thought you liked…” he said. “No,” she snorted, “you’re what? Twenty-two and… uh, dumb?” “I’m trying…” he said. She laughed louder. “No, no, you’re just… Is this like your first time…” she said. She tried to be serious. She put on her serious face, like in college. But she still found him hilarious. “With an older woman?” she said. He took a deep breath. “You left me like six months ago,” he said. “*Excuse me*,” she said. “You left me six months ago, and I haven’t been able to get you out of my head,” he said. *She lived in his head*, she thought. She bit her lip. “Wow,” she finally said. What else was there to say? She felt embarrassed for him. “What’s your name?” she said. “I’m Pete,” he said. It wasn’t funny anymore. “Pete’s dead,” she said. This person smelled sweet. Like gasoline and jawbreakers. Pete, her husband, smelled like a Norwegian smokehouse. “What if I told you that I’m from… another version,” he said. “Like a Marvel movie,” she said. “More like Star Trek,” he said. “OK, crazy pants,” she said as she got off the bed and put her sweats on. “Where I come from, you left, and I missed you and you died in a plane crash,” he said. “Sorry, *what*?” she said. She needed to take a piss. “There was a flock of geese…” he said. He stood next to her bedroom door. He didn’t get the hint. “OK, well, Buh Bye,” she said. “Time to go.” She had to underline that one. He gathered up his leather coat and distressed jeans and vintage Metallica shirt. “I didn’t mean to…” he trailed off. She nodded to the exit. He left. “Boys,” she said. She was alone again. With a *New York* magazine. And it was quiet. “Huh,” she finally said to herself. She put on an old record. New Order. And made some granola. Who needs to know the details? She added in the yogurt. And the berries. It was a magic trick after all. She’d had fun. She missed fun. --- Then, life went on. Work. Pets. Bills to pay. It didn’t get any more real than that. Bad Boy Pete sent her flowers. With cards. It was sweet. But she’d moved on. She was an adult. He’d call her number, till she changed it. That was annoying. She picked up some pills at the pharmacy. She had a migraine and needed relief. He stood there by the checkout buying postcards. He was older and wore a grey suit. “I thought you might like this,” Partner Pete said. He handed her a postcard from the Seychelles. They’d once taken an anniversary trip to the islands. The suit looked good on him. He was very confident. Somehow he talked her up to a room at the Four Seasons. He was a *partner* (as he frequently reminded her). They ordered sushi. Rather, he ordered the sushi. She’d never ordered room service before. It felt decadent. He smelled of Ralph Lauren and Cuban cigars. She didn’t love it, but she didn’t hate it either. There’s something to be said for male grooming. He owned an expensive phone with an ivory keepsake. He spoke Japanese. She liked those parts. He was in a hurry. The sex was brusque. A little impersonal. And very efficient. Then, as she stretched out, he rolled calls in bed. “Miss you babe,” he said. She made a duck face. “Cool,” she said. When he started to snore, she snuck out. In the elevator, she compared the two Petes. Partner Pete was a 7.2 on the Pete scale. Weeks passed. Pets. More bills. Good coffee. And reading Spanish novels in the park. Suddenly, the Petes started showing up everywhere. There was Surfer Pete with the bracelets. Like those he wore after he’d spent that year in Honduras. Apparently his version of Em died in a mudslide. He was very needy. He wept in her bathroom. She jerked him off and sent him packing. He was kind of useless. 3.0. There was Fast-Talking Pete. She gave him a blowjob in his Dodge Durango just to get him to shut up. It mostly worked. After they smoked a joint. Which was not great. She burned her fingers on the matches. But she liked staring at the flames. She also forgot how weed turned her into a goon. He happily filled the space. “I got to, um, get…” She left. 4.2. There was the submissive one who surprised her in the subway. He could barely make eye contact. “You died in a…” he said. She’d lost all interest in small talk. And glared. “I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” he said. She nodded in the direction of her apartment. They got home, stripped off all their clothes, and before they got down to business, he sheepishly looked at his toes. “Ummm, I have something to ask,” he said. “Like how specific?” she said. “Like how we used to do it…” he said. She didn’t want to hear about another car crash, chainsaw mishap or volatile chemical explosion. “Like how?” she said. “Please don’t judge,” he said. “It better not be foot stuff,” she said. It wasn’t that she hated foot stuff. She just hadn’t trimmed her toenails. “That’s, uh, in the right ballpark,” he said. She nicknamed him *The Goof*. He crawled around on his knees picking her pubic hairs up with his teeth, while she slowly shaved her legs and furiously rubbed her clit. “The floor is not clean yet, *Pete*!” she screamed and grabbed his hair with something approaching tenderness. “Yes Mistress, Please may I…” he squirmed. “I have given you enough chances!” she howled. *The Goof* looked beatific. This Pete was a programmer in Scottsdale. Too bad. She could never live in Arizona. It didn’t agree with her skin. 8.4. Then there was the Pete with the snore. Who showed up with a sleep apnea machine that he refused to plug in. Who does that? 3.7. And the Warrant Officer who was posted to Guam. He had Southern manners. And Southern charm. He was almost her favorite. Till his night terrors. Unrated. And the religious one who showed up with six kids and the minivan. “Help! Help! They won’t listen to me!” he screamed. She didn’t even let this Pete into her apartment. She had enough drama with a cat and a dog. 2.2. And then Old Pete, who she had to care for after his hip surgery. He’d lost a lot of weight and she carried him to the couch. He was very frail. They were both out of breath. They held each other. She liked how he looked at her. Quiet. 9.3. There were more deadlines and more birthdays. Movie nights with friends. She volunteered at an animal shelter. Sometimes a Pete would send her texts: “Miss you babe.” Which she casually deleted. Other nicknames for her from the Petes included: Cinder, Crabapple, Tick Tock, Apricot (lots of stone fruit apparently), Sunny Side and Buster (after the candy, not the silent film star). *The Goof* called her *Mistress of the Blade*, which she found especially endearing. Bad Boy Pete sometimes stood on the street corner below her apartment. Smoking his terrible Gallic cigarettes. His Triumph motorcycle getting wet in the rain. Later, she hid from Partner Pete in a coffee shop. Never again. She’d rather hang out with her cat, and fall asleep with a good book. --- The dog woke her up. She pushed him out of the bed, rubbed her eyes and cracked open her bedroom window. It had rained in the night. The air smelled fresh. And there was a terrible noise outside. The street was filled with hundreds of Petes. Thousands of them. Some wore raincoats. Yellow slickers with drops on the collar. Many held flowers. Some burned matches. A boombox or two. They all shouted, “We miss you!” A bike-courier Pete knocked over a newsstand. And papers went flying. And she laughed. And laughed. It was how you filled the silence. It was a big choking laugh. And she shouted back, “You aren’t him!” “We are!” They all shouted back. “He’s dead!” she cried. They all shouted back, “You’re dead!” And she was furious. She threw a bowl of yogurt at them. “Go home!” she screamed. The Petes dodged the projectile. And looked at each other. Confused. “Go home,” she said again. This really confused them. Then, Bad Boy Pete shouted, “Pick me!” She was at a loss for words. “Did you hear what I just said…” “Pick me!” Corduroy Pete shouted. “No way, jagoff, she’s gonna pick me!” Disco Pete shouted. And then they all shouted, “Pick Me!!!” She leashed her dog. Picked up the cat. And left through the fire escape. Behind her, the last thing she heard was an army of Petes banging on her front door. She ran down the street. And went to her sister’s. --- Emma gave Tabitha a hug. “It was fun while it lasted,” she said. Then, Emma cried. “I don’t want to know the details,” Tabitha said. Emma dried her eyes. “Are you hungry?” her sister asked. Tabitha made Emma breakfast. She squeezed a fresh grapefruit and her sister inhaled the smell. There was a pot of coffee. Bacon and eggs. A fried tomato like their mom used to make. Tabitha poured the coffee, just as the toast popped up. “Tastes good,” Emma said. Later, on her phone, Emma signed herself up for a kickball team. She’d decided she should meet new people. Another weekend was coming up. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/20240523_183129.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Jeremy Morris has been published in **The Deadlands*, **Neon Demon*, and **SciFanSat*. He's also won a Sloan Writing Fellowship, the Jubilee Prize, and the McGill Short Play Prize. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Author's Note: I lost a friend to glioblastoma. And it happened so suddenly that I only learned about it after the fact. It was the pandemic. And people could just disappear then. But it was like they were alive and weren't. I tried to channel some of that feeling into the story. But what came out was very different from who they were as a person. But they were also a writer, and I think they would have appreciated when a character demands to be born. --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and access to our members-only newsletter, *The Editor's Notebook*. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### We All Must Attend the Deathbed of the Lich URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/we-all-must-attend-the-deathbed-of-the-lich/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:33:45.000Z We All Must Attend the Deathbed of the Lich 0:00 /1593.3315873015872 1× > ***Content warning: This story contains depictions of violence, death, and authoritarian repression.*** We all must attend the deathbed of the Lich, so naturally the line stretches far beyond the palace walls. And naturally, too, we whisper about this unnatural *why*. Isn't the whole point of becoming a lich the keen avoidance of this very moment? What lich has a deathbed? What lich so much ashas the linen? Rumors stir. The phylactery, that golden soul jar lit behind the thickest charmed glass and guards' sharpest lances in the Grand Hall of the palace—the phylactery is the only way to stop the Lich's ancient heart. The issue must be there. A knot of farmers in line by the apothecary posit a chip in the glass, some magical reagent in the spell depleting faster than it can be replenished as the summers blaze hot and wet and relentless. A chip, then a stray bit of damp or dust—Josten the cheesemonger, his daughter's married into the family of the smithy that made the phylactery all those ages ago, and he's said no metal can keep out the damp or dust forever, see. And, he reckons, a soul's not too dissimilar from a good jam. No seal and it'll start to fur and sprout. Josten, though, we all know he's more full of shit than not. Ariella, his daughter, she's posted up all the way down by the old cemetery and she's vouching for her eons-great-grandmother-in-law's handiwork with enough ice in her stare to add another seal. Besides, she's saying, why does anyone care about the *why* at all? The Lich will soon be dead and good ridd— We hush her, the whole line of us. It's not as if he's dead *now*, is he? Have some respect or pretend to. It's the Lich—*the* Lich, the center around which the kingdom's orbited since our people shifted away from the old tongue. The Lich grasped our little realm in his bony palm and lifted it into the light. The epics bind his exploits in verse, neat and unassailable. Ariella can talk however she wants, but we know her embroidery rarely strays from the Lich's poetic footsteps. Recall, Old Tayron says from his perch on the lip of the fountain, how the Lich met with the ambassador of the Northern Alliance when they threatened invasion. He twisted the man's ascot through his fingerbones and yanked him into Hell. Straight through the earth! No portal! And the Northern Alliance have barely sniffed at us since! Yes, yes, we all know the stories, a handful for each of the neighboring realms across the ages. The Lich rode alongside his generals against the forces of the Borys Emperor, robe snapping in the windrush and his heel bones digging into the meat of the steed's ribs, one hand tangled around the reins and the other lobbing fireglobes. The old kind, laced with shattered glass. The Borys cavalry's pincer collapsed in a bloody, screaming smog, and the Lich rattled the dried ropes of his vocal cords with a triumphant shriek. And—oh, Itak, you put it best—when he challenged their Imperial Guard hand-to-hand? What was it like to tackle him? Smashing into a wall of diamond, that's right. The Lich has always provided— Except when he hasn't, sure, but this *is* his deathbed, and we shan't speak ill of the dying. We whose respect is gilded at best can abide by that much, surely. The wait is long, though, and only growing longer as those of us outside the capital come streaming in to join the line, and the line is only moving in one direction: out. Past the dockworkers' pub, sounds like, and the day's turning into a real scorcher. The brickwork in the main square will cook us like an oven at this rate, and it's not even midday. Tollius and Yevenia might not last long enough to be cooked alive, the way they're shouting. A couple of us reshuffle that section of the line to put people between them, but those two are barely shorter than the Lich himself, and besides, Yevenia's armed with her baker's paddle and has already knocked Tollius**'**s hat off. Yeah, the weird one with the orange feather. Which isn't important but— No, it *would* be nice if a mule's business managed to stink it up past wearability, but if the damn thing's survived this long— The shouting, the threats, right. We know their fights by heart, the cadence of them, the eddies where they slip to and linger, and with a step back they form the outline of their son. Erlo. Squire in the Lich's guard, prestigious for his station. Delivered back to their doorstep four months later, just before his nameday, in an infant's coffin. There wasn't enough of him left to warrant the full size, and there wasn't enough by way of answers. Tollius**'**s crushing grief softened at the knowledge Erlo passed in service to the kingdom. Yevenia blamed the Lich. She does not want to be in this line. Those of us closer to the palace gates can hear her, distance and echo smearing the individual words into their base emotions. Or, just the one. Rage. It's all-encompassing, swallows everything else. We can't look at her, or the direction from which her voice rises, or at each other. Word travels up the line once she quiets—an armored guard, a lance tip angled to catch the sun, the glint of it digging into the eye. We all must attend the deathbed of the Lich, and there's no use causing a fuss. She's fortunate, really. The baronies in the eastern reaches would have snatched her in the middle of the night and dropped her into exile long before this point. So who can say that he doesn't provide? An hour passes. They kick up again, but we hear Tollius first, somehow. Fear turns the world wobbly in this kingdom—some deep magic in the stone and sea—and his every word rings bright across the line, end to end. Plea upon plea, begging. A litany of *stop* collapsing into pure animal noise. Those of us who can watch don't. They did warn her, and the Lich's justice isn't really our business. It's meted out like the weather—if you see dark clouds, hurry on inside. The rain's coming either way. You don't have to get wet. --- The Lich was once a man; all liches are. And there was a before to his rule, as all things must. What we've discerned on those matters is loose, simple, brought to light by logic rather than anything we could hold in our hands or find under glass at the university library. The break from the old tongue turned surviving records into art pieces, pretty and useless. There was never enough coin in the royal coffers to fund a classics department, and the scholars learned to stop asking. So we stare up at the statue of the Lich in the central plaza and wonder. The marble received a fresh coat of paint last season and the navy-gray of his bones melts the surrounding air into a shimmer. His teeth gleam, gold and grinning. We've all grown up with tales of how, after dark, you may catch the empty eye sockets humming with a faint pulsing red. Sometimes, though we'd never openly admit it to each other, we still check. Some of us are checking now, squinting up with craned necks, blocking the sun as best we can with a flattened hand. We're not sure what it would prove if we did see it. The Lich uses magic!—not a revelation. But perhaps if we could spot it, then we'd know in our own bones exactly what it was for. And knowing, as they say, is half the battle when— No, Sir Guard, no, we were just talking nonsense. Admiring the statue, is all. No, Olcher's red in the face from the sun, not—what did you call it? Revolutionary fervor? No, no, that's— Well, this is our own fault. The deathbed of the Lich is no time to pick apart old childhood myths. Not that kind, at least. Separately, we consider not the Lich as a man, but a boy, a song whistling through the fresh gaps in his teeth as he ran across the grazing fields, heeding the dinner bell. In the schoolhouse, feet swinging under a chair he hadn't yet grown into, or whatever it was they had back then. A father's calm instruction by the barn, a mother's patient fingers beside his as they traced the old runes. At some point came the deathbed of a childhood, the kind that's poorly attended and dourly colored. Perhaps there are many such deathbeds**.** And perhaps that's why such a man would kneel at the deathbed necrotic, a cursed knife to his throat. Sever the soul, flay the skin, burn the bones blue as night. So we agree something terrible must have happened, but terrible things always do. Still, there is only one lich. --- We wait. Some of us sit on the cobblestones, an overturned bucket, a chair fetched from the closest shop or home. Shadows grow long, melting together once the horizon begins to bleed. The line hasn't progressed, but we don't dare take our leave, even with the promise to return early the next morning. Murmurs start up about doing just that, flattened to nothing when the guards bring Olcher back—pale, trembling, missing his left little finger. We give him a stiff nod and a seat in the shadow of a palace tower. He wants to go home. We hand him a chunk of cured goat passed up the line from the butcher on the corner, like it's an answer. Just as we start to search out ways to pad the night, a new figure approaches the head of the line. Not a guard or a local—the leatherwork is odd, not the style of Pedric or Sorena or even Old Dharrow, and no one in the kingdom has hung a scabbard at the hip in a century. The copper scarf, tied around her head in the manner of the western isles, hides her profile, the loose tail hanging just above her shoulder. Her tanned hand grips the pommel of the sword, knuckles blanched from the squeeze. We hold our breath as she stares up at the farthest spire of the palace, and when she turns to the guards before the front gate, the setting sun catches in the opaline surface of her false eye. I hear, she says, that my father is dying. --- Her name is Feriana, and there is much that none of us, including her, knows. The Lich had a wife once. We suspect he's had several wives over the ages, spread far enough apart so that the kingdom's citizens only ever know one at a time. Little is written about them in official histories or recovered ephemera from us common folk, though we have a handful of names. Jethima, of the Golden Expansion. Winifrine, of the Borys War. Nelizher, of the Wheat Famine. More than a millennium under the cloak of the Lich, and this is all that has lasted. Lasted, not survived. Survival would imply a death date, a single adjective to pin under their entries in the Record of Nobles, any detail at all. Feriana does not know her mother. We hadn't known the Lich had taken a wife until he announced that she was dead. We hadn't known of Feriana until she appeared in the center plaza, all of seventeen years old, and announced she was leaving for good. Perhaps she was adopted, an orphan carted home after the skirmishes with the mountain nomads; or magicked into existence, vermilion smoke spewing through the sockets of his skull and leaving an infant behind; or created the common way, though we're rather certain the effort would be fruitless. Looking at her now, she appears to have the same high cheekbones and delicate brow the Lich displays openly, but again—we don't know much. How long has it been since she left? Twenty years? We crane our heads to watch as she crosses to the gate and starts up the imposing marble steps. The door to the palace is ten times the height of any of us, ebony inlaid with gold, and when it shuts, the noise rolls through us like thunder. Have we been waiting this entire time for *her*? The lead guard slams the butt of his lance on the stonework three times. We *all*, he shouts, must attend the deathbed of the Lich. --- Come morning, Feriana leaves, disappearing without a word to the hills beyond the city, and our procession inside is finally allowed to begin. For all the pomp, the individual moment is surprisingly simple. We kneel at the Lich's bedside, where his arm has been propped up on a velvet stool, and bow our headsbeneath the chandelier of his fingerbones. The tips tap against our crowns, cold in a way that reaches down our throats and straight to our knees where they ache against the floor. We rise. That's it. The Lich says nothing, doesn't so much as twitch for any of us. And we start to wonder what took Feriana so long last night; and behind the walls of our homes and shops, out in the fields and barns and forests, pictures emerge. We're all two or three relations away from someone who works for the palace, or at the very least a sneaky, nosy sort who we will, for today, refrain from calling a bastard for their trouble. The accounts settle themselves into two camps, and we'd usually cut a line down the middle between them and call that the truth. Here, though, they diverge so greatly that the compromise would have Feriana standing stock-still before the Lich all those hours before taking her leave, and that's more absurd than the dreck Shyber spun up at the pub. Then again, maybe she did. Maybe all she could do was stare at her father, the once-man. She looked to us to be the age where standing that long would strain the knees past their bounds, and her departure wasn't a hobbled one. We're not used to not knowing—or not having a consensus, more like. We try to grab at the details straddling the two tales, few as they are. They're anchors to hold onto in the gulf. So they go something like this: Feriana, hand still on the pommel of her sword, steps inside the Lich's receiving chamber, the one in the southeast tower of the Grand Hall. Not his usual choice of setting, and not its usual furnishings. The desk and plush seating have been replaced by the deathbed, a side table, and a high-ranking guard. | Some say —Her lip curls when she catches the empty eye sockets of her father, and the guard reflexively tightens the grip on his lance. That clink of armor gives way to a duller rattle—she knows the way his bones approximate laughter. Her feet shift like she's about to approach the deathbed but decide against it. Her mouth, too, molds the shape of words it does not say, wide and open, showing off the fleshy parts her father hasn't had for a millennium. Her knuckles pull stark white across the pommel until it seems about to rocket out of her grip, sweat-slick, and then she's fumbling in her satchel for a bundle of rags. A glint of flaking gold leaf peeks through a hole. | | Others say —She does not make eye contact with the guard, nor with her father, staring instead at the sheets where his kneebones have formed sharp peaks. Her face twitches, conflicted, as if it's trying not to collapse into something soft and raw. And her knees don't collapse, but they do fold, bringing her to the bedside, her eyes falling on the chiseled line down his sternum. A scar from a duel many ages old, a story she's heard from the epics and his own tongueless mouth countless times. With shaking hands, she pulls the leather satchel from her back and removes a bundle of embroidered linen; it falls open. | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | The phylactery. The real one, kept on her person for the last twenty-odd years. The double behind all that charmed glass has fooled us all. | Some say —I know you think I did this to you, she says, but I've been a little preoccupied. The rags around the jar fall, little winks of gold trailing after. Aside from the gilding's bald spots, it appears untouched. Her father's rattling laughter starts up again and she mutters to herself, inaudible, staring down at her hands and scowling and flushing a splotchy red with anger. When she snaps, the words all trip over themselves: I didn't do anything to it, I knew the blasted thing failing would drag me back if I did, I know how your hex works—she pauses to catch her breath—and why would I want that, so here I am, have at me! | | Others say —I kept it far away, she says. I tried to keep it safe, I was—her voice falters. She tries again, and it catches on a knot in her throat as she thumbs at the angry oily crack running down the phylactery's side. A hum rises from her father's skull, hollow. It was a night of drink, she says after a long thread of silence, and the song the rest of the caravan was singing brought my younger years rushing back to the surface. My anger burned like dry kindling. I threw the bag with it against a tree where we'd made camp, and the song stopped, and I wanted, at last, to tell my comrades everything. Where I came from, why I wail in the night, how I lost my eye. But I didn't. I didn't. | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | She waits for him to say something. She doesn't know if he can, in this state. What he does manage, though, is turning his head away, toward the ceiling, and beckoning her closer with the crook of his finger. | Some say —Nothing? she scoffs. She eyes the guard, then raises the phylactery high above her head. She's not a tall woman, but the strength in her arms radiates through the room, and the guard instinctively lowers his lance. Straight at her throat. Waiting. She smirks. Then she brings it down. A flash of teeth, of sharpened steel, of iron chips flying, snapped like pottery from the strain of all that magic. The lance tip hovers at her throat and her father rattle-cackles and she glances past the guard to the debris at her feet. Broken metal rings around a small pile of white sand with a crystalline sparkle, the same found on the beaches of the western isles. Her fists clench. The guard notices, too, and drops his stance, the transgression forgotten—or, not forgotten, but revised. That can't be all a phylactery is, she says, or are you not a lich? Which is it? Tell me, tell me, you owe me that much! But he doesn't tell her. He only laughs, until he can't even manage that anymore. | | Others say —I'm sorry, she says. She shuffles closer to the head of the bed. I'm so sorry. I was angry, but I didn't want this, not really, I swear it. Her father runs his hand across the folds of her headscarf like it was the long gold braid she wore her last day in the kingdom. He points to the phylactery, then to the table beside them; the wood creaks under its weight when she sets it down as instructed. The crack has split farther, leaking in earnest. A fat bead of white with a rainbow sheen dribbles down the side and splats on the tablecloth with a sizzle. It wouldn't be long now, her father seems to say, his hand closing over hers. Bone on flesh. The guard ducks his head, as much privacy as he can afford them without shirking his duty. She doesn't beg for forgiveness more than she already has, and she will not beg for his contrition, but she does not rise from her kneel at the bed. She does not let her gaze stray from the contours of her father's skull even as the phylactery scalds the table, drip after drip. | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | The Lich died as the morning lightened in anticipation of sunrise. The Lich, or whatever he was, depending. He was dead when we were marched into the palace, and he was dead when we knelt below his impeccably posed arm, and he'll still be dead, of course, when his retinue decides to formally draw up the edict. These matters are complicated, Old Tayron keeps repeating, as if he knows better than any of us. The successive days pile on, though, and the work never stops. There's still the bulk of the kingdom that needs running, the boots and hands in the earth, but we all tilt an ear palace-ward, listening for who knows what. A gong from the bells in the spire, a chord from the royal horns—what is the rite of succession when no one in living memory has borne witness to it? We dare not speculate; the guards still stand on corners, eyes glazed with boredom. We've not been especially well-behaved lately, so perhaps their ennui's all for show. Still, we play our part—there's the post, look busy. But the season turns and they start to doze off against the lanternposts. The season turns again, bitter cold, and a few have tucked little books inside the ties of their faulds, and when we poke forth questions while they're reading, they actually answer. Only one possible successor, they say. The law is, apparently, clear as midsummer's day: the throne may only be filled by the Lich's blood. Nothing anyone can do until her return. The Lich is dead. Feriana is never coming back. The Lich, officially, still lives. --- We all attended the deathbed of the Lich. In the night we pull from our barns and sheds and closets all manner of tools with sharp edges and heavy swings. Dust falls from the flat end of Yevenia's baking paddle as it towers over the heads weaving through the city. The guards at the palace gate are asleep, and they do not wake as the torchlight licks at their faces. We all must bury the coffin of the Lich. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/author-photo-2.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Haden Cross is the author of **The Uncontinented Stars*, which was a finalist for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. Their short fiction has been featured in The Deadlands and Shadowrun: Augment. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading “We All Must Attend the Deathbed of the Lich” by Haden Cross. One of the pleasures of this story is how quickly its grand fantasy premise becomes a civic inconvenience. An immortal ruler is dying, and everyone has to get in line. From there, Cross builds a whole political order out of gossip: cheesemongers and bakers trade theories, old men repeat official legends, guards overhear the wrong conversations, and centuries of history survive mostly as stories people have learned when to tell and when to swallow. That collective “we” is the story’s great device. It gives the kingdom a voice without granting any one citizen the comfort of individual authority. Everyone knows something. Everyone has heard something else. Together they construct the Lich from rumor, propaganda, family history, fear, and the practical knowledge of what happens when somebody speaks too loudly. Even Feriana’s private encounter with her father reaches us in competing versions. By then, uncertainty has become a political condition. The title’s “must” gains significance each time it returns. At first it sounds ceremonial, then coercive, and finally communal in an entirely different sense. The people have spent generations defining themselves by the Lich’s permanence. His death leaves them with the stranger problem of imagining a life after him. Cross saves the story’s harshest turn for that realization. Power survives partly because people learn its rituals so thoroughly that obedience begins to resemble ordinary life. Once the ritual falters, the same collective voice that whispered its way through the story discovers that it can speak as a body. And, eventually, act like one.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Please Respect Our Decision URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/please-respect-our-decision/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:37:52.000Z There were twenty minutes to go before closing when he came in. The taproom had been empty since ten. Janet sat behind the bar with her phone flat beside the register and a clean glass in her hand. She'd wiped the glass twice and had begun a third time since there was nothing else to do, plus the game on her phone had become stupid. She looked up when the door opened. “What are you doing here?” He stood inside with one hand still on the door. He wore the good jacket he used for parties. The collar had folded inward on one side and there was a dark place on the shoulder where someone had hugged him or spilled something. His face looked hot and his eyes did not. “It’s not last call yet, is it?” _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### And Yet, So Far Away URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/and-yet-so-far-away/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:47:48.000Z > ***Content warning: this story contains strong language and ideations of self harm.*** **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 0907** *Rooster— do you read?* I hear ya, Nest. Loud and clear. *Describe your location.* So far it pretty much matches the pictures from the rover. There’s what looks like shelving and containers against the walls on either side of us. If I had to guess, I’d say this was a warehouse, or whatever their equivalent is. *Elaborate, Rooster.* Yeah, uh, everything is kind of a dull purple-blue. Material looks sort of like a cross between metal and stone. *Can you make out any of the contents of the containers?* Most of them appear to be sealed. A few are open, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what’s inside. Sure don’t look like anything I’ve seen back home. *Have you encountered any forms of life, intelligent or otherwise?* (laughter) If I’d seen a fuckin’ alien, don’t you think I woulda said something by now? *Rooster.* Negative, Nest. Aside from us, the site appears deserted. *Very good, Rooster. Update me if anything changes. Nest out.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 0944** Nest, this is Rooster. *I read you, Rooster.* It looks like we’ve reached the next section of the site. Color of the shelving and storage has changed from purple to a sort of light green. *Copy. Was the change in color gradual or immediate?* I guess immediate. There was the first section, a gap of about two feet, and then the green part started. *Does there appear to be any difference in container size or shape from the previous section?* Uh, maybe. I honestly wasn’t paying super close attention. *But you haven’t observed any major differences?* Negative, Nest. Apart from color, this section appears to be roughly the same as the last. *Understood. Nest out.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1121** COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO! *Rooster! Repeat?!* (laughter) Just makin’ sure you were awake. *Please limit use of this channel to mission-critical communication only.* Fuck you, Nest. … *Fuck you, Rooster.* (laughter) **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1200** *Rooster, is there a reason you’ve been moving so slowly?* Unclear what you mean, Nest. We’ve been maintaining pace this entire time. *Tracker says you’ve gone a little over three miles.* Bullshit. You sure the tracker’s still working? I mean, we’re in another dimension or whatever. I’m surprised the signal can reach us in the first place. *Affirmative. Tracker’s still registering movement; it’s just very slow.* Well, I promise you, we’ve been keeping a steady pace. *Have you made any turns?* Negative, Nest. It’s been a straight shot all the way. *Copy. Carry on, Rooster.* Still think it’s the tracker. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1205** Hey Nest, how long is this supposed to be, anyway? *The site?* Yeah. I mean— affirmative. *Based on preliminary scanning, they’re estimating it’s about 14 miles from your entry point to the end.* Huh, okay, that’s not so bad. Thanks, Nest. Rooster out. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1314** Nest. Just letting you know that we’re gonna stop for a few minutes to eat. *Acknowledged, Rooster.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1327** Uh, Nest, come in. *I hear you, Rooster.* I forgot to tell you**:** I think we’ve made it to the next section. *The next section?* Yeah. The shelving has been replaced by these enormous… boxes, I guess. They’re maybe nine feet tall with some sort of symbol in the center**;** kind of like a sideways hourglass with some other stuff in the middle. *When did you start seeing these?!* I dunno, maybe two miles back? *‘Maybe two miles’… goddammit, Rooster, am I supposed to put that down?! We’re making a map; it’s gotta be precise!* Look, I’m fucking sorry, alright?! We’ll get the exact location on the way back! *Fine. Make sure you tell me immediately if you see any other changes.* Yeah, yeah. Rooster out. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1333** *Rooster, this is Nest. You haven’t gone two miles.* What? *You said the third section of the warehouse began two miles back from your current location. But you’ve only traveled 1.3 miles since noon.* Bullshit. *People are bad at estimating distances. You probably—* No, man, I promise you— I don’t know exactly how far we’ve gone, but I know it’s more than fucking 1.3 miles. I turn around, and I can’t even see the start of section three anymore. *Okay, but—* Look, just think about it. You really think three healthy guys need an hour and a half to walk a mile? I could go faster than that hoppin’ on one foot! *Don’t know what to tell you, man.* I’m not blaming you, dude. But like, get one of the engineers to look at the tracker. Something’s wrong with it. *Will do. Nest out.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1355** *Nest here. Engineers are reporting no issues.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1412** Nest— how far does the tracker say we’ve gone? *5.3 miles.* Okay— and what time is it? *1412*.** You don’t think that’s strange? That it’s taken us five hours to go five and a half miles? *I mean, yeah, it is. I don’t mean to be a skrat, but are you sure you guys aren’t just moving slowly?* I promise you, that isn’t it. *Okay. Yeah man, I don’t know.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1428** Nest— requesting permission to turn back. Call me a bitch if you want, but I just got a really bad feeling about all this. *Negative, Rooster. Command wants this finished today.* Copy. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1441** Nest, I’m once again requesting permission to turn back. I know what Command said, but something about all this isn’t adding up. Remember when we did those ten-mile rucks back in basic? I could handle those just fine, but right now my feet are aching like a motherfucker. Something’s seriously wrong here, man. *I hear ya, Rooster. I’ll go check with Command.* Thanks, buddy. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1449** *Rooster— you’ve been given permission to turn around.* Thank fuck. Much appreciated, Nest. Rooster out. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1613** Nest? We’ve— we’ve reached the fourth section. *What? I thought you were going to turn back.* We did. *That doesn’t make any sense.* I KNOW THAT, MOTHERFUCKER, THAT’S WHY I’M TELLING YOU! *Hey! Calm down, man, tell me what’s going on!* We— we— fuck, we, uh, turned around, uh, as soon as you told us. We’re walking back for— I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes— before we reach this new section. The containers look like the ones in sections one and two, except they’re like, black and red. *Okay. And I’m sorry to keep asking you this, but are you sure you didn’t accidentally take a turn somewhere?* Man, you don’t understand— this whole place is one big hallway. There are two directions— forward and backward. There’s nowhere to take a turn. *Okay.* Hey— what does it say on the tracker? How far are we from the portal? *Uh, 5.1 miles.* Okay. Okay, okay. Thank God. At least we’re heading in the right direction. Thanks, Nest. And uh, hey— sorry for blowing up at you earlier. *All good, man. I know you’re stressed. And hey— we’re gonna figure this out, okay? I got your back.* Thanks, buddy. I know you do. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 1831** Uh, Nest. I’m sorry, but I forgot to tell you— we’ve been walking through another section. There are these sort of… pod things that are hanging off the walls. Should’ve told you earlier— really sorry, man. *I don’t think that really matters right now.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 2004** *Rooster— just wanted to check— have you guys been walking this entire time?* I mean, we stopped for ten minutes so Mallard could take a shit, but other than that, yeah. *Okay.* What’s it say on the tracker? … What is it?! *4 miles exactly.* Christ. **\[REDACTED\]: September 25th, 2050: 2201** *Rooster, this is Commander Davies. Nest tells me you’ve been experiencing some complications.* (chuckle) Yeah, that’s one way to put it… I mean, yes sir. *Mission Control is looking into your situation. In the meantime, we’re going to be relieving Nest for the night, but we’ll have someone on comms in case of an emergency.* An— okay. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 0412** Nest— you back yet? **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 0759** *Rooster, this is Nest. Do you read?* Aw— yes! Yes, I hear you, Nest! (laughs) Took your damn time. Good to have you back, buddy. *How are you guys holding up?* Pretty shit. None of us got much sleep. Then again, we didn’t get jumped by any UILs, so I guess there’s that. *Look around. Have your surroundings changed at all?* Uh, nope. Everything’s the same. Why? Did they think that might happen? *Honestly, I don’t think they have any idea what might happen.* Yeah, sounds about right. So no plan on how to get us out of here? *‘Fraid not.* Back to walking it is, then. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1154** Hey Nest— me and the boys are gonna try something out. We’re gonna send Canary back about a hundred yards. Can you keep an eye on his tracker, and let us know how far it says he’s gone? *That’s a bad idea, Rooster. You guys need to stay together.* Nah man, no one’s got any ideas so we’re gonna throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks. Besides, it’s a hundred yards. He’ll be right there. *Understood.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1157** Alright, he’s stopped. What’s it say? *Hasn’t moved.* At all? *Nope.* Fuck! Okay, thanks Nest. I’ll call him back. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1202** Nest?! Nest, come in now, please! *Rooster?! I read you, what’s going on?!* Something’s wrong with Canary, like he’s trying to come back over, but he’s not moving. I mean he’s literally sprinting, but it’s like he’s stuck in place. *Can you—* Oh my god, he’s shouting at me but I can’t hear him. He’s right there but I can’t hear him, what the fuck is going on?! *Rooster! Calm down, man. Let’s work this out.* …We gotta go get him. *NO!* What do you mean, ‘no’, we can’t fucking leave him! *Rooster, if you go down there— I don’t think you’re coming back.* … Fuck. … okay. okay. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1209** Canary’s stopped moving. I keep looking back; he’s just— staring at us. Like an abandoned puppy. He’s so close, man, he’s right there. What are we doing? *We’re gonna get you out, and then we’re gonna go back and get him out. Stay strong, brother. A week from now we’re all gonna be laughing about this over a beer.* I don’t think he’s ever gonna forgive us. And I don’t blame him. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1440** Nest? Any word from Command? *Not yet. Sorry.* Okay. *I’ll let you know the minute anything changes.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 1815** Nest? Come in. *I hear you, Rooster.* How far does the tracker say we’ve gone? *1.8 miles.* That checks out. We’ve been walking for hours, but I can still see Canary. He’s further away, but not by much. *How’s he doing?* Hard to tell. He was walking, but kinda draggin’ his feet. Right now, he’s sitting down. I’m, uh, I’m trying not to look at him too much. **\[REDACTED\]: September 26th, 2050: 2155** *Rooster? You read me?* What’s up, Nest? *Just wanted to let you know it’s almost 2200\. I’m about to head home for the night. It’s gonna be the same as yesterday, they’re leaving someone stationed for emergencies.* Okay. Thanks for everything, buddy. Guess I’ll see you tomorrow. *How are you and, um— how are you guys holding up?* Well, I mean, you know Mallard; doesn’t say much. As for me… I ain’t even ashamed to say it; I’m scared. I’m more scared than I’ve been in my entire life. Don’t really notice when I’m walking, cause I’m just so focused, I guess, but times like this, it really hits me. Am I gonna die in here? *I don’t know, buddy. But I promise you I’m gonna do everything I possibly can to make sure that doesn’t happen.* I know you will, brother. And I really appreciate it. **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 0800** *Rooster, this is Nest. Do you read?* (groan) Aw, you motherfucker. *Good morning to you too.* Nah, I, uh, sorry— fuck… it’s just… you woke me up. *You were able to fall asleep?* I’m just as surprised as you. *Well that’s good. How are you guys feeling?* Exhausted, got a headache, and my mouth tastes like three-day-old roadkill. Never thought I’d miss a toothbrush so badly. Think a few of the blisters on my feet popped too. Mallard looks ready to bash my head in, so I’m guessin’ he feels about the same. *What about Canary?* Well, it’s not like I can ask him. … Sorry, guess that wasn’t funny. He’s just sitting up against the wall. Think he’s awake but I’m not sure. *Okay. Let me know if you need anything.* Will do. **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 1108** NEST! NEST! NEST! COME IN MAN, NOW! PLEASE! FUCK! NEST! NEST! *Rooster! What’s going on?!* IT’S CANARY! HE FUCKING SHOT HIMSELF! *WHAT?!* HE’S FUCKING DEAD! OH MY GOD, HE’S FUCKING DEAD! *Rooster— Rooster, settle down man; tell me what happened!* I don’t know, man. I-I-I just look over, and he’s lying down; there’s— blood just pouring out of his head! Oh my god— oh my god— (retching) *Rooster— talk to me, brother. Breathe deep.* *…* Okay… Okay. I’m— I’m here man. Fuck… *You didn’t hear anything?* No. *Are you sure he’s dead?* There was so much blood. You don’t— yeah. Yeah, he’s dead. *Jesus. Okay. Well, you can’t— I mean, there’s nothing you can do for him. Right now, just— keep moving. You’ve-you’ve just got to keep moving.* I know. *Jesus fuck.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 1123** *Rooster?* **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 1425** Nest… Nest… come in… please… (sobbing, gasping) *Rooster! Are you okay?!* How far… have I gone? *What?!* *Um, .3 miles.* Are you kidding me? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?! *What have—* (Sobbing) I have been sprinting… for hours. Why can’t I go? I don’t want to be here anymore! What is going on? What is going on?! … TELL ME!! Those NASA fuckheads, what have they been doing for the past three days?! Do they know anything about the hellhole they just sent me into?! *I— they think the creators might’ve, like… dilated space somehow— so they could fit a dozen miles of storage into one mile of space.* Fuck, man… … I can’t do this anymore. **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 1836** *Rooster?* … *Rooster, do you read?* WHAT?! *I just— wanted to ask if you were okay.* NO MOTHERFUCKER, I WAS ASLEEP!! *Okay, I’m sorry, I—* Just fuck off! **\[REDACTED\]: September 27th, 2050: 2302** Nest? Are you there? Nest? …Fuck, he must’ve been dismissed. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 0344** Nest? You there, buddy? Guess not. Fuck, I wish there was some way to tell the time. Everything’s the same down here, all the time. I’m losing my fucking mind. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 0758** *Rooster? Do you read?* Oh shit! Nest, buddy, what’s up?! *You sound better!* (laughter) Sure as shit don’t feel better. This is Hell. I’m still in Hell. … Nest? *I know you are, Rooster. I’m so sorry. I wish I could be doing more to help.* Hey hey hey— chill, dude. It’s all good, I’m just being a bitch. Listen, you’re doing plenty, okay? Seriously, you’re the only thing keeping me sane right now. *Still… just— just make it out of there, okay?* I will, buddy. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1054** Yo, Nest. Do you believe in God? *Uh, yeah, I guess so. Do you?* I thought I did. Went to church on Sunday and everything. You know, it’s funny, they say there are no atheists in foxholes, but I’ve tried to pray, and it just feels so… pointless. Nobody’s listening down here. ‘Cept you, I guess. I dunno. Maybe there is a God; He’s just not in here. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1214** Nest. Just wanted to let you know, Mallard’s stopped walking. Says it hurts too bad**,** to go on without him. I know we ain’t supposed to leave a man behind, but uh, I don’t think the rules apply anymore. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1400** *Rooster— Central wants an update.* Update? On what? I’m losing my mind walking down a never-ending hallway, same as the last 72 hours! I’m the one who needs an update! What’s their plan to get me out of here?! … I’m going to die here, aren’t I? … Yeah. That’s what I thought. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1629** NEST! NEST! I SEE IT! IT’S— IT’S— YES! I SEE IT! FUCK YEAH! *Rooster! What?! What is it?!* THE TRANSPOSER! THE FUCKING TRANSPOSER, I CAN SEE IT! *The transpo— our transposer? Are you sure?* Y-yes, yes, I’m absolutely positive! It’s a fucking pinprick— I can barely make it out— but that’s it; I’m sure! *Holy shit.* I’m gonna make it. (Crying) Oh my god, I’m actually gonna make it out of here. *I’m so happy for you man, you don’t even understand.* … Okay. Okay, no more talking. Gotta focus my energy on getting there. *Affirmative, Rooster. Let’s get you home.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1702** Yo Nest. What’ve I missed since I’ve been gone? *Huh?* Like, what’s been going on in the world? *Man, for the last three days I’ve been in either the control room or the barracks. I don’t know any more than you do right now.* Huh, fuck. Fair enough. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1715** Dude. Dude, oh man, Misty is gonna be so pissed at me. *That’s your girl?* Yeah. Yeah, she’ll be furious. Gonna rip me up for making her worry. *I think she’s just gonna be relieved to have you back safe.* Yeah, for like, ten minutes. Then she’ll start yellin’. … Yo, after this we all gotta meet up for dinner somewhere. What’s your favorite food? *Uh, artificial steak.* Really? Not the real stuff? *Never had it.* Well shit, after this we’re gonna go to a real steakhouse, and I’m gonna get you the biggest, juiciest fuckin’ T-bone they got on the menu. *Can’t wait, buddy. Can’t wait.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1724** Hoo boy. Once I get back to base, first thing Imma do is take these fuckin’ boots off. *Say again, Rooster?* Just said I’m really looking forward to getting these boots off. *Oh yeah. They gotta be pretty uncomfortable at this point, huh?* Like you wouldn’t believe. **\[REDACTED\]: September 28th, 2050: 1935** Yo, Nest. How far away am I? Or at least, how far does it say on the tracker? … Nest? *One poin— (static)* Say again? *1.6 miles.* Okay. Okay. *Yeah.* **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 0652** Good morning. Rise and shine. Another day in paradise. Every day I wake up and see the exact same thing I saw when I last closed my eyes. Think that might be what I hate most about this place. Everything is the goddamn same. Gets to be so you wonder if anything else is real, if anything exists outside of this endless fucking hallway. Are you real, Nest? **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 0808** Yo, Nest. Do you think they’ll put me in the history books? ‘Rooster was a trailblazing pioneer who boldly forged a path through uncharted territory. Tragically, his stupid fucking dumb ass died in the process.’ … Nah, they’ll just redact everything and pretend none of this ever happened. **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 1124** Feel like I’m walking through the desert. I mean, I guess a warehouse is pretty far from a desert, but it’s the same kind of vibe. The lone wanderer, journeying through an endless expanse. Makes me wonder if the transposer is just a mirage. But I don’t think so. It’s the heat that causes them, right? And it’s not hot in here. Plus, mirages disappear, and I’ve been looking at this for hours. And even if it is, it’s not like there’s anywhere else I can go. So Imma keep walking. Following my North Star. **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 1215** Uh, Nest. Just wanted to keep you updated. I’ve, uh, officially exhausted my water supply. **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 1330** (Tuneless whistling) **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 1841** Nest, I’ve been… I’ve been walking for… for such a long time. My feet are bleeding through my boots. I can see them turning red and my feet squish with every step. I must’ve walked through a dozen different sections by now. It’s incredible stuff, man, beyond… you wouldn’t even believe me if I told you and it just doesn’t even register in my mind anymore. It’s funny, I was… um, I was so excited to come here, and now— I just want to go home. I wanna go home. I miss Misty and Lucky. I miss beer and foosball and *Maxwell Fury*. I miss the Sun. I miss the Sun… so much, man. Maybe I’m being dramatic. I’ve only been down here, what, six days? But sometimes it feels like nothing on the outside is real. Like nothing exists outside of these walls, like I’m going to be walking for all eternity. Misty was worried. I told her there was nothing to worry about. I laughed at her, man. I’m so sorry, baby. God my feet hurt so bad. **\[REDACTED\]: September 29th, 2050: 2022** Nest. Just wanted to let you know that, uh… I’m checkin’ out. I know how this story ends, and I ain’t puttin’ myself through that. I hope you don’t feel guilty, brother, cause you got nothin’ to feel guilty about. Hell, you’ve done more for me than anyone these past few days. Just bein’ there to listen— kept me sane. Made me feel like I still existed, you know, that I still mattered to someone out there. Even now— well, no one wants to die alone. Love ya, brother. Rooster out. … (Gunshot) **PCF-3/Site 88: 12 April 2077: 1205** EXO C, this is Scoutman 5\. Transposition successful. *Full Contact, Scoutman.* Scoutman 2 and I are beginning basic preliminary tasking. So far site appears unremarkable and consistent with neighboring structures. *Very good. Maintain tasking, Scoutman.* **PCF-3/Site 88: 12 April 2077: 1337** EXO, we appear to be approaching a UAO blocking our— wait. Is that a—? *Scoutman? Describe the object.* It’s not a UAO, EXO. The object in our path appears to be a transposer. *A transposer?* Yes EXO, a second gen. Unpowered, but otherwise in perfect condition. *So we aren’t the first to make contact. Very interesting.* How should we proceed, EXO? *Continue tasking. But keep an eye for any other terrestrial artifacts.* Understood, EXO. **PCF-3/Site 88: 12 April 2077: 1621** EXO! EXO! Come in! We’ve— we’ve found something. *Another sign of contact?* …In manner of speaking, EXO. We’ve identified what appears to be… a body. *A body?!* Well, ‘skeleton’ is more accurate. *Human?* Affirmative, EXO. Based on their uniform, it appears they were a Greater American soldier. *The Americans. Of course. Do you have any idea how they died?* There’s a hole on the top of the skull, and a firearm and spent casing on the floor next to the body. Seems pretty clear this was self-inflicted. *Jesus.* Yeah. Poor bastard; I wonder what made them do it? The exit was so close… --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/20251208-holiday-party-05.jpeg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Kevin Cronin is a Washington DC-based writer focused primarily on short stories and screenplays. His favorite genres to read and write are comedy, sci-fi, horror, or any combination of those three. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading "And Yet, So Far Away" by Kevin Cronin. We at Cetera believe some of the brightest science fiction can expand the universe by shrinking its focus. In that way, Cronin's story unfolds almost entirely through radio transmissions, allowing voices to carry the full weight of setting, character, and suspense. Each exchange deepens the emotional geography while the alien ground grows stranger with every mile. Yet the most remarkable distance emerges between two people determined to keep each other company across an impossible divide. Companionship, to put it bluntly, is often an act of endurance. Rooster and Nest begin with the easy shorthand of colleagues who've shared enough days to tease each other without explanation. Their conversations gradually become something richer, though. Humor gives way to confession, routine becomes ritual, and every response across the radio serves as a soft affirmation that someone is still listening. Until they can't. Even as the warehouse stretches space beyond ordinary comprehension, friendship continues to measure the world in the promise of a beer waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Berm People URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/berm-people/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:50:43.000Z Before he decided to kill half of everyone in The Retreat, William worked repairing its roof. He and his teammate, Carl, had once completed a job during sustained winds of 75 mph with gusts of 88\. Wind-blown sheet metal sliced through William’s protective tunic and into his back, leaving him with a proud battle scar. For their courage and commitment, they got a certificate printed on actual paper and signed by the Residential Director of Critical Services. They also got one vending machine token each. William immediately used his to buy frozen sugar water. Two years later, William went to clear out Carl’s sleeping cubicle and found his token. Carl had held onto it all that time, waiting for… what? From then on William kept it in his pocket, and when he felt his anger ebbing, he would grip it tightly, driving its reeded edges into the palm of his hand. --- The morning things went wrong, William woke looking at the low ceiling above his sleeping cubicle. On the other side of that ceiling, the winds shook and battered the roof, as always, but not as badly as when he went to sleep. He rolled out of bed and got dressed, stooping slightly to avoid bumping his head. He lived in the extreme low end of The Retreat, the eastern edge, where the wedge shape of the structure first met the wind. He slept with bits of cloth shoved into his ears, which helped somewhat. He found coffee and a Danish in the nearby break room. The stale pastry tasted like a thick slab of cardboard. Still, he felt grateful. Some days there was only coffee. He sat with Martha, and as always, they talked about her kids. William enjoyed hearing about their interests—or in the case of Michael, obsessions. The boy loved baseball, and dreamed of someday playing on a full-sized field, in the open air. Carl joined them, and the conversation shifted to work, and rations, and then old movies. “Time to go,” said Carl, touching William’s arm. He had already checked their work orders for the day. “Be careful,” said Martha. “You be careful,” said William. A joke that wasn’t really. Martha worked in daycare, tending to the children of residents. One bad review from a picky mother could get her and her own children ejected from The Retreat. Carl and William traversed a maze of narrow, twisty service corridors to get to their equipment room. They donned their protective clothing, made from heavy fiberglass canvas, and checked each other over. “What do you call this?” asked Carl, poking him in the side. William had misaligned the snaps on the left side of his tunic. The extra flap of fabric would have significantly increased his wind drag. “Sorry.” Carl frowned. They put on their audio rigs, did a radio check, and called into dispatch to confirm their hatch numbers. Including respirators and cowls, each man had added a good 40 pounds of protective equipment. And that didn’t include their work tools. Carl paused to say a quick prayer for safety during the day’s labors. William bowed his head, not in reverence but to prevent his friend from seeing that his lips remained tightly shut. They re-entered the service corridor, this time splitting up. William found his hatch and clipped a heavy guide strap to his belt, climbed, then made sure the strap lay correctly in the small slit in the hatch before closing it behind him. On the roof, he glanced around, taking in the miles-long width of flat metal, tilted up slightly in the west, the leeward direction. The roofing was a patchwork of overlapping squares, each about five feet across, made from repurposed steel, aluminum, wrought iron, copper, and occasionally titanium. Some still bore the faded markings of product names or corporate logos, truncated at the edges, though these had mostly been sandblasted out by the wind. The wind defined The Retreat, with its long wedge shape, as well as the lives of everyone in it. William could remember some things about his life before coming here—playing in parks, living in a house, eating ice cream… When it started, the east wind was just one more inconvenient effect of climate change. Optimists even speculated about new wind farms in places that previously didn’t have enough to justify construction. But as the winds continued to rise, so did the struggles of daily living. Trees shed their branches at alarming rates; traffic lights bobbed and swayed at every intersection. The seas grew restless, never without whitecaps, and later the lakes. Outdoor football became untenable, as dust and dirt blinded fans and made every pass incomplete. Flags on flagpoles crackled and snapped, and eventually developed horizontal rips that crept upwind, until only colored streamers remained. When the winds tore the roofs off houses, people with basements moved into them. Those without paid to have bulldozers dig up their yards, building berms against what had become a constant assault of howling blasts always out of the east. William couldn’t see them from where he stood, but beyond the leeward edge of The Retreat those berms still stood. People lived between them, though he couldn’t say how. Staff who lost their jobs and were ejected from The Retreat would wander off into the berms, never to be seen again. William checked the wind speed displayed on the screen inside his cowl: about 68 mph sustained. Not even Category One. Plumes of brown soil coiled in the sky like swirls in cinnamon bread. “Hey,” Carl said through the radio. “You ready?” He had emerged from his own hatch about 30 yards away. The two men walked leeward, trailing the straps, which unspooled automatically as they went. Sand, soil, and bits of gravel pelted William’s back. The return trip would require much more effort. They found the loose panel. Over time, the wind worked its way under everything. If left like this, the panel would eventually lift and tear away, and the deadly gales would roar under the next panel downwind from it, and the next, setting off a chain reaction. Such a cascade had happened once before. The incident response team had managed to stop the damage, but repairs had dragged on for months. Rumor said that three residents had been sucked out and tossed onto the roof, then who knows where. But such things could not be confirmed, or even talked about openly. Carl got on the radio to tell dispatch that the damage to the panel was more severe than expected. He angled his body camera toward it. “Can you send someone out with a heavy welding rig?” “No. Too many work sites this morning. Handle it with what you have.” The two men looked at each other, and began setting down and securing their tools. They would have to bend the thick metal back into place, then reattach it with a combination of rivets and spot welds. The work required them to shift positions constantly. As the morning dragged on, the wind picked up. William’s faceplate made an irregular ticking sound as pebbles struck it. Inside the heavy clothing, sweat formed on his back and chest. The air carried more dirt now. He had to bend low, putting his face nearer the work. His legs and back burned with fatigue. At last they had the panel secure. William stood and turned into the wind. He took a bit of slack from his guide strap and secured it to a clip in the front of his tunic, without releasing the back clip. He turned to look at Carl, and was surprised to see him still bent over their work site. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “My strap,” said Carl. William then saw that, between the dust and the many changes in position needed to complete the job, they had accidentally secured the panel on top of Carl’s guide strap. He didn’t have enough slack even to stand. “Shit,” said William. “We’ll have to tear off the panel.” “We can’t,” said Carl. “The wind is picking up.” William checked the wind speed—83 mph sustained and climbing fast. “What do we do?” asked William. “We’ll have to cut it,” said Carl. “I’ll strap onto you, and we’ll walk back together.” They strapped together first, in case of a sudden gust. William had to get back down on his hands and knees next to Carl. Nervous sweat mixed with sweat from exertion. They cut the strap and stood carefully. 94 mph. Almost Category Two. The walk back was blind—walking windward, William could see nothing but dirt and grit hurtling toward him. Each footstep had to be carefully planned—flat as the roof was, there were still things that could trip him. Carl walked behind, his hands on William’s shoulders. Finally the panels underfoot began to look familiar—they were almost back to the hatch William had emerged from earlier. He called dispatch to explain that they would need to both enter the hatch at the same time. “No,” replied the voice over the radio. “Tell him he has to return to his own hatch.” “I’m here,” said Carl. “What’s the problem?” “You’re to return through the hatch you exited.” “Why?” There was a pause. “With two in a hatch, you won’t get a proper seal on the outer door. Without a proper seal, the inner door won’t open.” William turned to Carl, and mouthed the word *bullshit.* Carl thought for a moment, while the wind bludgeoned. “We can enter one at a time. Once William is all the way inside, I’ll follow.” “No,” said dispatch. “Go back to your own hatch.” “What the hell?” said William. “Do you need me to repeat?” asked dispatch. Carl held his finger to the spot on his faceplate in front of his lips. “No. We copy.” He tapped his helmet to cut the connection to dispatch. William did likewise, and switched to a private channel. “Come in with me,” said William. “Screw them.” “No,” said Carl. “You go in. I’ll make it.” “Just come in! What are they going to do?” But Carl shook his head. “It’s not worth it. I’ll get down on my hands and knees to reduce drag. I’ll see you inside.” Carl lowered himself, gently pulling William down with him, then unhooked. William, calcified in fear and anger, caught the wind and went sprawling on his side. He had to struggle onto his hands and knees before groping to his hatch. Before he entered, he caught a last glimpse of Carl, crawling away in the torrent of filthy air. --- In recognition of his loss, they allowed William to take whatever he wanted from Carl’s sleeping cubicle and gave him the rest of the day off. He took only the two-year-old vending machine token. He spent the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, while the wind made a sound like a hundred running feet on the roof. For much of this time, his mind swung back and forth. It was their fault, for insisting that Carl return through his own hatch. It was his fault, for the carelessness that necessitated cutting Carl’s strap. Their fault, his fault… his brain wouldn’t settle, not when the bulk of the day lay ahead of him. But as afternoon slid into evening, and evening into night, and painful rumination into fragmented sleep, he landed more and more on the side of their fault. Not because of any evidence or analysis—when all is said, a blistering anger is just an easier burden than leaden guilt. Over the next few weeks, he went through the motions of his job. He fixed panels, he maintained equipment. He got a new partner, younger than himself, who annoyed him. One day as they worked near the site of his last job with Carl, he found himself fantasizing about throwing the young man up into the wind and watching him spin at the end of his strap like an unbalanced kite. He began to avoid Martha. At breakfast he would deliberately sit alone, drinking his coffee. The stale pastries disgusted him, and on the rare occasion there were breakfast burritos, he would only glance at the long-past expiration date and put them back in the freezer. *What is going to happen?* he asked himself, alone in his bunk. He thought of himself, his personal future, but also the future of this awful place and everyone in it. Was it his destiny to live and die in the background of the residents’ lives, like Carl? He thought of extras in old movies, present in crowd scenes but making no impact on the story. Was that him? Or did he have a part to play in what might unfold? That last question became the seed out of which his new idea grew. He began to carry a small notepad and, in between jobs, to mark down the location of certain types of equipment. Specifically, switches and routers, critical pieces of the control network that activated mechanical devices throughout The Retreat. He didn’t know that much about networks, but he hoped he knew enough to find what he was looking for. His plan coalesced around one simple fact: each hatch to the roof had a servo attached to it, so that if need be it could be opened remotely by dispatch. The feature was only supposed to be used in the event of a propane leak within The Retreat, only during low wind conditions, and only in the area immediately surrounding the leak. Opening all The Retreat’s hatches simultaneously during high winds would allow the rushing air to peel back the roof like the skin of a rotten fruit. The whole structure would be reduced to flying debris in minutes. But… what if only the hatches above the residents’ areas popped open? The residents lived downwind, on the leeward side of The Retreat, where the ceilings stood higher and provided more of a baffle to the wind’s rattling, screaming, and shaking. Their roofs would peel away and, if this happened during a high wind, they might all be sucked out (or at least many of them). The damage wouldn’t travel upwind, so the low-ceiling areas where the staff lived would be safe. The staff could then seal off the damage—they had the skills and the tools. With the residents gone, they could finally breathe and live. This was William’s new idea. If he could find a hub that controlled all the hatches, he could sabotage it. He didn’t yet have the details. He imagined a box, like a fuse box, full of switches. Maybe not that easy, but he would figure it out. He had time. He continued searching for equipment and writing in his notepad. Martha began to worry him. He would catch her watching him at breakfast, and it made him uneasy. Others might underestimate this short, plain woman, but William knew those dark eyes missed nothing. Could she guess what he planned? It seemed paranoid, and yet her work with children required her to be watchful, attuned to changes in behavior… maybe she could sense a scheming mind. Her gaze made William feel exposed and vulnerable. One afternoon, as he walked a corridor following the winding path of a fiber optic cable, he almost ran into her. “What are you doing?” demanded Martha. “Nothing!” he blurted. But his nervousness betrayed him. Martha looked at his notepad, and he moved it behind his back. “Whatever it is, you have to stop,” she said. He said nothing. “He wouldn’t want this. Carl gave his life for you.” “Carl didn’t give his life. They took it. For nothing!” Martha glanced around. “Lower your voice.” “We’re slaves here. Understand?” “We’re alive.” “Better we weren’t.” Her eyes registered shock and confusion. “Is that what you want?” “No! Just them.” He gestured to the leeward side of the building. Martha glanced around nervously. “God will deliver us. That’s not your job.” “God abandoned us. We ruined Eden so he left us to choke on our own filth. We need to look out for ourselves!” Martha’s face had been a mix of sympathy and sternness, but the former drained quickly away. “Whatever you’re planning, you’re putting us all in danger. They’ll find out, and punish all of us.” When William didn’t answer, or even meet her gaze, she raised her own voice. “My children! Think of them, you selfish bastard!” In her sudden fierceness she was not so plain. A lioness, defending her cubs. William pushed past her, turned a corner into another corridor, and another and another. --- In bed again, this time waiting. He expected security officers to burst into his sleeping cubicle, thick with body armor and bristling with tasers. Martha had told them. They would drag him to the leeward doors and toss him out. He would fight the other unfortunates for a spot among the berms, for food and filthy water, and die with dirt in his lungs. William regretted so much. Not concealing his feelings, letting Martha read him like a child. His stupid plan—maybe there was no hub, or it existed as software in some office only accessible to residents. Letting Carl go off without a guide strap. He had been a fool. The officers were coming. Every sound outside the door was them, marching his way. Even the silence was them, sneaking up like ninjas in a movie. They would come through the ceiling, the wall, the floor. But they didn’t. William didn’t know if he should go to work the next day. He would step onto the roof, and they would not let him back in. Why should he do their job for them? Make them drag him out, thrashing. Let everyone know that one man had tried… But he went to work the next day. And they did not leave him on the roof. The day was terrible, but in the usual way. Martha had not told them. But she still could. He had to find the hub soon, if it existed. And if not… He gripped the vending machine token. --- For weeks he followed fiber optics lines that terminated, disappointingly, in security cameras, thermostats, and propane leak monitors. Through miles of corridors with walls of drywall, sheet rock, plywood, and cloth-covered panels, his determination held. Then one day, the wind stopped. It took everyone long moments to realize they no longer heard a sound that had grown as familiar as their own breathing. And when they did realize, they weren’t sure what to do. They only knew they wanted to look. They crowded around the leeward doors, taking turns peeking out through the tiny windows. “Can you see?” those in the back demanded to know of those in the front. But of course, there was nothing to see, just the stillness of air. Outside, a few of the berm-dwellers stood looking around confusedly. Some even waved at those inside. “This is just a temporary cessation,” said the loudspeakers. “The wind will resume.” True, there had been lulls before, some lasting an hour or more, though not in a long time. Staff went back to work. A day passed. Then two. Those inside kept looking. The berm people built fires in the open and roasted rats. The sky cleared for a bit. The pent-up need to be out in the open swelled, overwhelming, like fierce hunger or lust. To raise your face and feel the sun… Staff sent a delegation to the residents, asking for permission to go outside. “You’re always free to leave,” said the resident leaders. “But getting back is on you. If it starts again, don’t expect a rescue.” Staff began to walk outside. First a trickle, then a flood. Then, a few residents. Children chased each other. Security officers drove the berm people back, to prevent mingling. William left The Retreat without protective gear for the first time in years, and the air didn’t batter or assault him. He looked up at the sky, where the ripped clouds revealed unfamiliar blue. “William.” Hearing his name, he turned and saw Martha standing there. She pointed to where her son, Michael, played ball with other boys. “See!” she said. He nodded. The absence of the wind left him feeling strangely untethered, at a loss in some ill-defined way. Even the joyous shouts of children next to him seemed distant. He sifted through many emotions, including an impulse to go back inside and continue his search for the hub. But here was the sky—the gentle, lost, brilliant sky. More residents stepped outside, tentative at first, but in increasing numbers. The security officers relaxed somewhat. The berm people posed no threat. They stood in their filthy clothes and stared at the people who had emerged from The Retreat, as though they looked upon beautiful, exotic animals. William walked among the berms to see how they lived. The berm people lived on trash. Some of it he recognized as cast off from The Retreat. Other bits and pieces had come from elsewhere, probably the blown-down homes that had once stood on this ground. He imagined all the household items that must be lying below just a few inches of grime—bent knives, battered pots, rusty shovels, filthy blankets… They made what use they could of these things. The berm children stared at him. He smiled, but they did not smile back. *What do they eat?* he wondered. The Retreat must dump some food, scraps too foul or stale even for staff. But that wouldn’t be enough. Looking into the crude nests of trash they had gathered between berms, he saw improvised cages full of black, crawling creatures. Beetles. He saw a rail-thin girl scratch a hole in the ground, and from it she pulled a grub, placed it in her mouth, and began to chew slowly and carefully, all the while staring at William and showing no emotion. *They move like cattle*, thought William. *Slowly and without words.* He wondered if their brains were affected by their meager diet—if their stick bodies lacked the energy to power human thought. The girl’s hands were filthy, but more than that—they were stained the color of dirt, as though they had never been clean. William looked away. Inside The Retreat he had thought himself at the bottom of the pyramid, barely tolerated by those at the apex, like a useful animal. He knew of the berm people but had spared them no thought. They were outside the hierarchy, and therefore unconsidered. He took from his pocket two small, ancient candies wrapped in brightly colored cellophane. He held them out for the girl. She reached out to take them, but hesitated. “It’s all right,” he said, but she didn’t seem to understand. He wondered if living in the wind had made her deaf. Eventually she took the candies and slipped them into a pocket of her dress. Just then William felt a breath of wind on his neck. It had started again. Everyone from The Retreat began to move back toward the doors. All except William. He lingered, looking at the squalor between the berms, trying to commit the details to his memory. Why though? What was the point? He couldn’t imagine anything he could do to help. He turned toward The Retreat, took a few steps, then stopped again. The wind was at his back. He faced The Retreat, but the wind came from behind him. He turned and looked at the sky behind him to see a cloud of dirt bearing down. From the west. But the wind had always come from the east. He looked at the people lining up to re-enter The Retreat and saw Martha and her son. He ran to her. “Don’t go in,” he said. “What?” “Don’t go in. Martha, don’t!” The man behind her barked, “Back of the line!” Martha looked at William with confusion, then distrust. “Come along, Michael.” “Listen to me! I’m not trying to… to hurt anyone.” William glanced at the man behind her in line. “It’s not safe.” “If you want to stay out, stay out,” said Martha. She pushed past him, and the line moved on. William stepped away from the line, away from The Retreat. The wind had picked up to a nice steady breeze, reminding William of kites, sailboats, soap bubbles, and balloons. But still from the west. He watched the last people re-enter The Retreat, returning to what they believed to be safety. William had spent years repairing The Retreat’s roof, and he knew its secret. It had been built to withstand the east-blowing wind. Every strut and every seam had been placed, shaped, and engineered to withstand force from one direction. *Maybe I’m being foolish,* he thought. *Everyone else has gone inside. Maybe the residents know something I don’t. Maybe this west wind is nothing to worry about.* But he didn’t think so. He walked to the nearest berm and sat with his back to it, facing The Retreat. In the little time it took to do that, the wind gained more strength. The girl to whom he had given candy sat next to him. She also watched The Retreat. Was she mimicking him? William studied her profile and found he could not determine her age. She had the thinness of an adolescent but also a profound weariness in her face and movements. An elderly child. The wind grew stronger. Blown soil and rocks blasted entrance doors that had never before faced the wind, that had always rested on the leeward side of the building, which had now become the windward face. Maintenance crews rushed out to protect the glass rectangles set into the doors and walls, covering them with plywood and nailing them in place. As they did so, the panels along the front edge of the roof began to rattle as the wind caught them. *If I hadn’t lost Martha’s trust, could I have convinced her to stay outside?* he asked himself. And *is that any better?* He looked at the berms. East-west, west-east, they offered the same protection either way. He also looked at the girl, the one who had dug a grub with her splintered, black fingernails. Once again, he felt like a fool. For not appreciating life, even a bad one. For not throwing a baseball with Martha’s son. For letting Carl go off on his own. He had directed his rage against the residents, and to some extent himself. But didn’t Carl share the blame? Crawling off across the roof like that… William imagined his friend praying, telling himself that God would protect him. He should feel angry at Carl for this stupidity, but he couldn’t bring himself to. The wind shrieked from the west, a sound both wearily familiar and disturbingly new. Dirt blew into William’s face—he tried to shield his eyes, to no effect. Then he felt a hand grab his own and place something in it. The girl had given him something, but he had to discern the shape from touch alone, blinded as he was now. Plastic and smooth… a pair of goggles, the type people once used for swimming. He put them on, and saw that the girl had her own pair, along with a cover for her nose and mouth. He had been wrong about the berm people. They did not lack human intelligence; what they lacked was spoken language. They had discarded that particular tool, because, as he now understood, it was useless in their environment. The blasting wind carried words away. Behind the tinted plastic, the girl’s eyes directed his back to The Retreat. Its roof was lifting now, tentatively. William remembered all the hours he had spent welding, nailing, and riveting to prevent this moment. All that effort. He watched a huge area of the roof surge upward then fall back. Once, twice… it then exploded upward. The wind found the people inside. They must have screamed, shrieked, and cried but no sound came back to the berm. Papers, blankets, pillows, everything got caught in the updraft as the wind, greedy for destruction, dipped into the exposed innards of The Retreat and back out with its loot. The rip in the roof spread out from the initial breach, just as William had once imagined, though the reality of it now sickened him. He knew it would not restrain itself to one side or another, staff or resident. He had aspired to destroy the privileged half of The Retreat. But from the vantage point of the berm people, it was all privilege. Something carried on the wind struck the back of his head. He put his hand to his ear, and it came back wet with blood. The girl pulled on his sleeve—she wanted to take him to the safe spaces between the berms. Instead, he reached into his pocket, took out the vending machine token, and gave it to her. Her face registered mute confusion, then she scuttled off on both feet and hands, like a human crab. *At least,* he thought, *I got to see who will inherit the Earth.* The remaining roof exploded upward to the left, right, and forward. William saw the roofing material rise in the air, followed by more of those possessions and comforts that had defined human life, wealth, and status, but were now merely airborne flotsam. And finally, the humans themselves were lifted by the updraft, joining the midair dance, heading toward the brown dirt that once again swirled across the sky. Kicking legs found no purchase and flailing hands found nothing to grasp. William watched them ascend and waited his turn. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/maurice-1.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Maurice Martin has written science fiction and fantasy for the stage in plays such as “R.U.X.,” “Vampires on Disability,” and “A Hillside in Hell.” He's also written non-fiction for many publications including **The Washington Post* and **Wired* magazine. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Every civilization tells itself a story about where its edges lie. Maurice Martin's "Berm People" follows just one man as those edges shift beneath his feet. The wind carves the landscape, determines the shape of buildings, assigns value to labor, settles people into otherwise mundane holdings. Martin writes with remarkable confidence inside that premise, allowing the even darker world to reveal itself through routines instead of exposition. Each repaired roof panel, each narrow corridor, each breakfast shared before work carries the gravity of an entire society that has doomed itself to self-mythology. The story also understands the peculiar intimacy between grief and certainty. William engages with loss the way he engages with Carl’s vending-machine token. Just close enough to leave a mark. His mourning narrows his vision until the world resolves itself into categories that feel fixed and complete. Then the landscape opens, and with it the possibility that another way of seeing has always existed just beyond the walls. The finest speculative fiction grants unfamiliar worlds the density of remembered places. "Berm People" accomplishes that rare feat while inviting us to reconsider the stories every society tells about who belongs at its center and how quickly those positions can exchange places when history changes direction.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### The Bones URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-bones/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:52:51.000Z Her husband walked off one night and didn’t come back. She saw him leave, but didn’t think much of it. He’d always walked at night, even since the doctors told him he shouldn’t go out alone. Maybe she should have remembered that, remembered to wait up for him, but she supposed she’d been having some lapses of her own. Anyway, he didn’t like it when she loomed. So she went to sleep at eight, like always. When she woke up the next morning, 3AM on the dot, she called the police. They asked if she had kids, siblings, anyone that could come over and wait with her. She told them she didn’t. They asked if she wanted an officer to wait with her and she said no thank you. The time would pass faster if she knit, and she didn’t like people to stare at her while she knit. Her husband knew that. So he never did. She never called him on his walks and he never stared at her when she knit. The police asked if he had any favorite spots and she said that he liked to walk along the heath and sometimes the woods on the other side—but she didn’t think he would do that after dark. They asked her if he had ever wandered off before and she said he hadn’t. Sometimes he asked her things he should know, like where they kept the sugar, or who she was, but nothing like this. Really, he was mostly okay, most of the time. She was sure he was fine. They took her number and left, promised they would call. When they were gone she tried to make a fire in the brick grate, but she couldn’t squeeze her hand tight enough to turn the gas key. So instead, she put a blanket on her knees and another over her shoulders and moved her chair to the middle of the room, away from the windows. She thought she had been knitting something, something for her husband, a red hat for his walks, but she couldn’t find it. So she started something else without knowing what it would become. It was early winter and she thought it was snowing for the first time, but she couldn’t be sure. It crossed her mind that it would be nice for them to have tea during the first snow of the year. Tea and a fire, that would be nice. So she started to boil water and then went to light the fire, but she couldn’t squeeze her hand tight enough to turn the gas key. She went back to the kitchen and poured the water, two bags in each cup—they both liked it strong. Then she took the cups into the living room. When she got there, she saw that his chair was empty and remembered that he had gone for his walk. So she sat down to work on the hat she was making for him, but the knitted pile of cloth didn’t look like a hat, more like the start of a sweater or a scarf, so she kept knitting like she was working on a sweater or a scarf. She had only knitted a few rows when she remembered that her husband had been gone all night, and now all day. She called the police to ask if they had found anything. They said they hadn’t. They were still looking. They would put together a search party, but the snow was coming down too hard right now for people to come out. She asked what that meant and the man just repeated that they hadn’t found him. She said okay and picked up her cup to drink some tea, but the cup was empty except for two dry tea bags. She woke up in her chair later that night and wondered why it was in the middle of the room. She moved it back to the wall then tried to light a fire but couldn’t squeeze her hand hard enough to turn the gas key. The phone rang and she picked it up and they told her that they still hadn’t found him and she asked who. There was a silence on the other line. Then the voice asked if they could send someone to her house. But the way they said it scared her, so she hung up, but of course they sent someone anyway. Again, they asked if she knew where he would have gone and she told them the same thing that she had said last time, but they said they had looked there and hadn’t found him. Again, they asked if she had anyone that could come over. This time, she lied and told them she had a nurse—no, a housekeeper, she didn’t need a nurse—who came over every afternoon. They said that was good, but she didn’t like the way they looked at her. She asked if they could leave and they said yes and they would call when they had an update. She got into bed and swept her arm over the space next to her. His pillow felt cold in the dark and she realized that she was starting to remember. She wanted to get up and call the police back and ask why they hadn’t found him. To scream and yell like she knew she should’ve done, like she would’ve done if she was younger, but now it felt like that was outside of her. He liked to go to the heath, she thought she should tell them that. The heath and the woods on the other side, but he wouldn’t have gone there at nighttime. And that he sometimes forgot things. That he had gotten lost before. The next day she woke up and the bedroom was glowing from the light reflecting off the snow outside. She stared at the bathroom door and waited for it to open and for her husband to come back and get in bed with the crossword so they could do it together. They liked knitting and walking by themselves, but they liked doing the crossword together. Then she remembered. She waited all day for them to call. She wished that she did have a housekeeper, even a nurse, to come over. She saw one of her neighbors come across the street and knock on the door, but she didn’t answer because she didn’t like them and they didn’t get to be nice now just because they felt bad. Another neighbor came later and she ignored them too, not because she hated them, but because she was scared to open the door. To go outside. Then the police called and they said they hadn’t found anything and she said okay and sat in the chair and then moved it back into the middle of the room. Then she waited until she couldn’t remember what she was waiting for. Then she got up to make them dinner. --- In the spring they called her and asked what she wanted to do with the body. “What body?” There was a pause on the other line. “Is this Emily?” “Yes.” “Didn’t someone—I’m so sorry, I have to—” She dropped the phone and stared at the counter. The surface was spotless, except for one empty cup of tea with two dry tea bags inside. She heard the little voice, the far-away mouse voice, coming from the phone. Then it stopped and the phone rang again. She picked it up and listened. It was the ice, they said. They found it when the ice thawed. She shook her head yes, her eyes on the teacup. They asked if there was anyone there. She said of course. Her family was there. She listened for a while longer, then hung up. A moment later the phone rang again. “What do you want to do with the body?” She didn’t have much money. Or she didn’t know if she had much money. She had been waiting for him to come back and tell her. He had always handled the money. He was good at that sort of thing. “We have a number, of a place, if you don’t have the—” “Yes.” “What’s your address?” “My address?” “They’ll need to contact you. To make plans.” A few seconds later the doorbell rang and a boy was standing on her step with the box. A medium-sized box, a gray box. He was tall, with pimples, and he held the box at a strange angle away from his chest, so it shook in his hands. “Barnaby and Lemon?” he said. “No.” He frowned and looked at the clipboard on top of the box. “This is the address.” “They must have given you the wrong address.” “You’re not Barnaby and Lemon? Are you Emily?” “Yes.” “I think this is your box, but maybe I took it to the wrong address. Can I leave it here? While I go back and check? Can I leave it?” She shook her head yes. Then he got in his black van and drove down the street, through the rows of brown houses and shrubs that all looked the same. She stared down at the box perched on her stoop. It was a gray box, a medium-sized box, and on top was a piece of paper. Someone had printed her husband’s name on the paper by accident. Which must be an accident, because her husband had disappeared some time ago and hadn’t been at the house to order any packages, so this package couldn’t have been for him. It must have been for Barnaby and Lemon. Maybe Barnaby and Lemon knew her husband. She didn’t want to take someone else’s package, but she didn’t trust the neighborhood anymore. She didn’t even like to go outside. And now she saw her neighbor opening the door across the street, opening the door of a house that looked just like hers. So she bent down to pick up the box and was surprised to find it was lighter than it looked, and she carried it inside as the neighbor called out and she closed the door behind her. And when she closed the door she saw his empty chair and saw the name on the box and then she dropped the box and it sounded like someone had knocked over a chess set and she stepped back and put her hand over her mouth. She knew this wasn’t right. And she knew she forgot things. But she didn’t think this was wrong because of something she had forgotten. She thought this was wrong because it was wrong. Because she had lived a quiet life. They had lived a quiet life. And of course bad things had happened to her, happened to everyone, happened to them, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t lived a quiet life. It just wasn’t right that something so strange would happen to her, to them, now. Still, it had happened. So she stepped back toward the box, lifted the lid off the box, and looked. Then she put the box in the closet. But that wasn’t right. So she put it in his chair, but that was far too wrong, so she put it on the mantle. People sometimes kept urns on the mantle. She waited a few hours but the phone didn’t ring and the boy didn’t come back. She thought she might call them, but she wasn’t sure who to call. So she sat in her chair. It was cold. She went to light a fire, but she couldn’t, because she didn’t want to accidentally burn the box—even though she knew someone should burn the box—so instead she pulled her chair to the middle of the room. And when she woke up in the middle of the night, she wasn’t confused why the chair was in the middle of the room, because she saw the box and remembered. The boy didn’t come back the next day either. The phone didn’t ring. She remembered that the boy should be back and that the phone should ring because of the box, the box that sat on the mantle. After a while, she liked to look at the box. A few days more and she had to dust it off. She still found empty tea cups and full tea cups and lots of half-knit yarn, but she didn’t mind as much. The box reminded her that she forgot, and forgetting wasn’t so scary if you knew it was happening. It was only scary when it surprised you. She tried to talk to the box, the way that people talked to gravestones, but that felt too silly. Instead, she would do the crossword next to the box, because she remembered what was inside, even when she forgot everything else. In fact, now that the box was there, she stopped thinking her husband would come in the room any minute. She stopped waiting for him to come out of the bathroom in the morning. No longer did she sit, staring at the door, waiting for him to come in with groceries. At first, it was good to remember. Not nice, not happy, but good. It had been hard to set down a plate and have nobody come eat it. To open the front door and find stacks of uncollected newspapers. The moment of remembering was bad every time. But it wasn’t long before she found that never forgetting was even worse. It wasn’t long before she started to distrust the box. --- Her suspicion started when she was knitting in the middle of the room, and she could feel someone watching her. She put down her needles and looked around the room, but no one was there. She stood up and checked the windows, but no one was outside. She closed the blinds anyway, turning on the lamp in the dark room, but the feeling didn’t go away. She sat down in her chair and tried to knit, but she couldn’t. She put down her needles and looked at the box. She didn’t know why she looked at the box. It couldn’t be the box. Her husband knew she didn’t like to be watched while she knit. The feeling didn’t go away. She moved the chair to one corner, then another corner, but there was always an itching at the back of her neck. She thought of the boy with pimples, who had made one mistake, then never came back, which was another mistake. And what’s a third mistake to someone who had already made two mistakes? She laid her hands on the blanket on top of her legs and tried to keep them from shaking. She slowly looked up at the box, the medium-sized box, the gray box, and she thought how her husband never stared at her when she knit. Not once. She spent less time in the living room. Instead, she lay in bed. She knit in bed, and ate in bed, and slept looking toward the wall, hoping to forget the box. To forget and know, even for a second, that her husband would be there when she rolled back to his side of the mattress. But she couldn’t forget the box and she couldn’t forget that her husband was dead and she started to feel its eyes, even in the bedroom, even when it was far away. She felt the box’s eyes even though her husband had never stared at her while she knit and never would, because he knew she didn’t like it and he wouldn’t do something she didn’t like. Not unless he had a good reason. He wouldn’t hurt her unless he had a good reason. She left her bedroom and went to the living room. It was dark with the blinds closed, so she lit some candles. Then she took the box down from the mantle and put it in the middle of the room. She took off the lid and looked inside, but even with the candles, she couldn’t really see, not well. But she knew him. She would know him. She was sure. She went to the bookshelf and took out their old encyclopedias, turning the pages slowly in the candlelight until she found what she wanted. Then she set the book open on the table nearby and one by one, took the bones from the box. They were cold at first, but they warmed quickly in her hands. She closed her eyes when she picked up each one, sliding her palms over the surface, feeling where they were smooth, where they were chipped, where they felt heavy and where they felt hollow. Sometimes she would touch one to her cheek, her collarbone, to feel. To see if she felt. But she didn’t feel anything. Sometimes she forgot what she was doing. She would come to with one of the ivory branches in her hand and feel something like shock, but it never lasted long enough to get to her heart, her nerves. It always died in her fingers. Then she would consult the book, find the right place on the floor, and go back to the box. It was hard work, but she made strong cups of tea, two at a time, to get her through. She would pause and look at his cups of tea, going cold next to the encyclopedia as she drank her own. She felt blank. Calm. After a while, she realized that she didn’t feel the eyes on the back of her neck anymore. It was still dark when she finished. The candles had burned to nubs, but they made enough dim light to see. The flames left wavering black spots on the polished white where the divots and chips sank deep, and they looked like black ash embers dancing off a fire. The more she stared, the more the wobbling light made the long pale branches look like they moved, but she knew that was an illusion. They were still. They were still and they were blank and worse of all they told her nothing. She had been so sure that if she could see him, she would know. And now she could see him, laid out just like the picture in the encyclopedia, and she had no idea. She didn’t have a meter stick or a measuring tape. She didn’t know if he had been missing any teeth. She knew he had broken an arm, a leg, but she didn’t know how to see that on the bone. So she pushed the table out of the way, the candles with it, opening a space next to him on the floor. It was cold in the room, even in the spring, and when she lay down on her stomach next to him, the dusty wood felt dry and crisp on her skin. She turned her head and lay her cheek against the floor and imagined she was in bed. That she had woken up before him and he hadn’t gone to get the crossword yet. She imagined the way he frowned in his sleep, how it made him look like a little boy. She turned one foot toward him and touched his toes, as cold as they always were in the morning, and she almost laughed. They were as cold as they always were in the morning. She closed her eyes. She would know when she opened them. If she looked out at the same spot of his neck, if he was just the right amount taller than her, then it must be him. She was sure she would know. But when she opened her eyes, she didn’t. She didn’t know because it was too hard, and she always looked at his eyes, not his neck, so of course she didn’t know if it was the right height. She felt her chest swell and collapse, swell and collapse. Her heartbeat hammered away in her palms against the floor. She felt something in her eye. But her mind was empty, comfortable and calm against the cold wood of the floor. After a while, she started to lift her foot, her right foot, over him. She followed with her left leg, settling her knees between the outstretched V of his hips and sockets, then placed her hands on either side of his ribs. She turned her head away, looking at a burning candle nub above the little pond of wax. It was the last candle left. She didn’t know how long she stayed there until the flame fluttered and died. When it did, she started to lower herself down. She laid her chest onto his chest, not minding the way it poked, the way it hurt. They made little sounds, screeching against the wood as she settled, but went quiet when she lay still. Then she lifted her left leg and moved it onto his, then her right, matching the splayed angles of his own. Her arms were last, and she lined them up on top of his until she could feel the tips of his fingers lightly touching hers. They felt cold at first, pressed through her dress into her body, but as before, the cold went away quickly. The pain went away quickly too. She kept her head raised slightly above the neck, the jaw, looking to the side, looking away. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, she laid her head down against the joints of his neck. She closed her eyes. Breathed deep. When she opened them, she could see that a few feet away, underneath the couch, was the red hat she had started to knit him for his walks. She turned her head up toward his, to tell him, to tell him not to forget his new hat when he went for a walk that night. Then she remembered, because she had forgotten. Lying there in his arms, his body, she had forgotten how he had changed. His legs, his chest, his neck, they had all felt the same. The only thing that was different was his arms, because he hadn’t curled them around her, hadn’t clutched her to him and held her tight. They hadn’t moved at all. But oh, oh, how she wished that they would. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/07/INSIDE--1-.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) John Cohle is a writer from central Illinois. He completed his undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. He has worked in restaurants, warehouses, and until recently, consumer financial protection. He is now gainfully unemployed and taking the opportunity to wander the world with his wife. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading "The Bones" by John Cohle. Its subject reaches far beyond memory loss. At its heart lies a meditation on recognition. We spend our lives believing love resides in recollection: a shared history, familiar routines, accumulated knowledge. Emily’s world proposes another possibility. As memory loosens its hold, affection migrates elsewhere, settling into ritual. Into posture and even touch. A crossword waits on the table. Tea steeps two bags at a time. A chair slides toward the center of the room. Knitting continues without destination. Each repeated gesture gathers the weight of a vow. The story understands that habit serves as memory’s oldest muscle, preserving devotion long after chronology has dissolved. Love survives every transformation except indifference. Memory frays. The body changes. Time remakes every life it touches. Yet the human heart continues its search for the familiar shape of another soul. Few stories capture that search with such grace and devastating clarity.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Bleach URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/bleach/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:55:49.000Z The name of my roommate is Ana. She’s twenty-six, working as a cleaner at a restaurant chain. She wakes up early in the morning, drinks black coffee, puts on the same pair of brown boots, and leaves the house to return late at night. Ana has a collection of umbrellas, and she doesn’t talk much. I wish I knew more, but I don’t. I would occasionally have a beer in the kitchen and ask her how her family was doing, but she would only shrug. Everything around her smells of bleach. Ana celebrates her birthday three months into our coexistence, and I give her a bottle of perfume as a gift. She doesn’t take the hint. The walls, the floors exude bleach. My throat is tingling. One night I wake up to the sound of long nails tapping on the floorboards. Ana’s in the living room, in the light of a single yellow lamp, kneeling on the floor with a rag in her hand. I’m forced to hold my breath. “Ana.” I turn on the big light. It takes her a few moments to turn her face to me, to look me in the eye. I squint to see something: a shade of drunkenness, intoxication, or sorrow she suppresses by cleaning. There’s nothing. Eyes, hair, skin. “I woke you up,” she whispers. “Sorry.” “What are you doing?” “I couldn’t fall asleep. I thought I’d clean.” “You can’t clean wood with bleach. You’re destroying the floors.” “Oh. I didn’t know.” “How could you not know? You’re a cleaner.” “There’s no wood in the restaurant’s kitchen. I’ll rinse the detergent off. Don’t worry.” “It’s bleach, not detergent.” “I know, I know.” One morning I use my ten minutes of solitude after she leaves and go through the cabinets in the bathroom and the kitchen, but I find no bottles of bleach. The garbage can is full of things—wrappers and containers and glass jars—but there’s no sign of bleach. The door to Ana’s bedroom beckons me, but I ignore the noise in my head and leave the house as well. It’s all bizarre. I’ve never bought or used bleach. I only use dish detergent and citric acid for cleaning. It’s my birthday; I come home late. There’s a piece of lemon cake on the dining table Ana’s left for me. It’s the third Saturday of the month, and she’s visiting her family again. She never talks about her family. I never see her booking train tickets, ordering a taxi. I’m drunk and brave, of course, so I unlock her bedroom door and come inside. It looks normal. I see no feathers or scales or fangs: the things they show on TV to scare us. I check every piece of furniture, every garment, every book. I’m anxious, incredulous. The only unsettling thing is her pillow. It emanates such a strong, toxic smell that I wonder if she poured an entire bottle of bleach on it, making it forever permeated. She’ll pay for the ruined bedding. How will she pay to get rid of this scent? What will she do? The house’s now the realm of bleach. Even the lemon cake leaves a bleach aftertaste in my mouth. My throat is itchy. “Do you want to have some beer with me?” I ask her when she returns home. “Sure.” “Where does all the bleach come from?” “What?” “It’s smelled of bleach all the time since you’ve come to live here, but I haven’t found a single bottle.” It’s all it takes—a confrontation. Ana stutters. She’s never stuttered before. The sound of her voice is mechanical, resembling a thin nail touching a corroded wire. She coughs. She’s never coughed before. She lags. She freezes. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just here. I’m a cleaner, after all.” She doesn’t scream when I chop off her index finger with a butcher knife. There are no hinges or wires inside her, no sachets full of fake blood. There’s a bone, a joint, a muscle. Ana doesn’t cry. But it must hurt. Why doesn’t she cry? Her finger looks like a picture from a biology textbook. It’s an aberrantly neat structure. It’s not the messy, bleeding finger of a human being. Because her blood is translucent. And it’s not blood at all. It’s bleach. “Were you crying?” I whisper. “Your pillow, Ana. Were you crying?” She nods; she’s weak. The bleach keeps dripping onto the floor. Ana doesn’t do anything about her inhuman blood leaving her body. Will she regenerate it like a reptile regenerates its tail? I don’t know much about the abilities of *those*. They show them on TV, but you don’t think you’ll ever come across one of this species, let alone let one settle in your house. Ana. What’s her real name? Does she have one? I have to run, but I don’t, as if I’m waiting for her to regain consciousness and grab the knife and stab my face and sprinkle her blood into my eyes and dissect my skull and switch our brains. I can go on and on. I’ve seen one thousand horror movies in my life; every day I watch the news. She bleeds. She bleaches. Is she capable of dying? I want to cry. It’s stupid. “You should’ve told me you weren’t human. I wouldn’t have made you go.” “I am a human,” Ana says, and drops onto the floor. Her face is blue, yet she keeps breathing. I turn to the window. It’s been hours. It’s dark outside. I see my reflection. Eyes, hair, skin. *I* am human, not her. I have *always* been one. Two years ago they drew my blood to see if I was low on iron and vitamin B. I observed my own red blood rising from the hole they’d made in my vein. The blood was only a little thin, just a little too thin. “It was a dream,” Ana whispers with a weak smile. I poke my arm with the butcher knife. There’s no blood. There’s bleach. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/07/g6Fa_Py1_400x400-1.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Nora Ray’s fiction and poetry has appeared in **Flash Fiction Magazine*, **MoonPark Review*, **Maudlin House*, **Twin Bird Review*, **Ergot*, etc. She’s a poetry and fiction reader at **Cosmic Daffodil*. She speaks English, Russian, and Spanish. You can find her on Twitter: @noraraywrites [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading "Bleach" by Nora Ray. You know, the oldest horror stories tend to ask what monsters "look" like. I think the best modern ones ask a more unsettling question, which is... what if we’ve already learned to recognize them incorrectly? This story begins with something almost laughably ordinary—a roommate whose obsession with cleanliness becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. The repeated smell of bleach transforms from a household nuisance into a psychological irritant, until the narrator’s certainty that something is wrong curdles into suspicion, trespass, and ultimately violence. What makes the story remarkable is that it never lets the supernatural eclipse the human. Every revelation forces us to reconsider not only who Ana is, but who the narrator has quietly become in the process of needing an explanation. The final moments perform a rare kind of reversal. Rather than assuring us that monsters exist, they suggest that our hunger to separate ourselves from the unfamiliar may be the greater horror. By the time the last drop of bleach falls, certainty itself has become suspect. In that way, it's a haunting meditation on prejudice and identity. On the frightening possibility that the boundaries we trust most are the ones we’ve imagined ourselves.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### And a Bottle of Rum URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/and-a-bottle-of-rum/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:57:32.000Z Looking back on it now, this may have been a major mistake, but when my craft sent me the first emergency alert, I dismissed it without reading it. I also dismissed the next three. It could have been five. Alright, it was seven. I was doing the daily crossword. What was I supposed to do, stop? My ship is old, and it’s constantly sending me ping after ping after ping. Oh, the structural supports are slowly degrading. Please pay attention, the filtration system’s functionality is down an additional 5%. In need of your assistance, the exo-outside is growing increasingly fragile. Whatever. Who needs a structural system, anyway? It’s become routine to just press dismiss and go on with my life. Eventually, though, the pings become so overwhelming that I can’t even come up with a nine-letter word for ‘lacking a vital organ’ that starts with an H. I ask the ship’s computer what’s going on and it sends back every kind of emergency alert it has, flooding my senses. *Jeez, alright, you don’t have to shout at me!* Craft failure is imminent. A brief overview reveals that I am in a real pickle. I didn’t get much mechanic training before I defected from the Army. I was supposed to be trained on everything, at least a little, but I bounced pretty early. There are a lot of weird gaps in my knowledge. How to “fix” a “ship” is one of them. I do at least know that there is only one scenario in which I am completely boned: damage to the ship’s central core. Today is my very unlucky day! The central pump has stalled out. I internally wince when I take stock of the pump’s functionality. The circulation system was already faulty when I commandeered the craft. If one were to be ungenerous, this could be considered my fault. I was the one who illegally escaped from the military in a stolen vessel and missed mechanics training. They call me a traitor. I prefer to think of myself as the only pirate who’s ever stolen themselves. Yo ho, and et cetera. This craft failure could easily put an end to my piratical career, as well as my life. Even though there’s no direct damage to the cockpit, the ship’s computer is failing fast. If I hack the motor systems I can force an additional thirty units of manual movement. I hurriedly plunge into the computer’s mainframe, no doubt destroying countless memory banks–not like it matters, all of the data will go dead with the ship–and plug directly into the motor system. Who even let it get this bad? Not me, surely. My jerky driving job is not pretty, but it gets me from A to B. Still, I do feel some distant shame. If my piloting officer could see me now... alas. Thank goodness that this ship came equipped with a separate mini-craft. It’s close enough that I can make the physical hop and abandon ship. Leaving the support systems to brave the frightening outside world makes me want to poop my proverbial pants. Pretty much only total ship failure would compel me to face the cold expanse. I am always so aware of the delicacy of my slender limbs, how little it would take for the harsh outside to crush and destroy my fragile insides. I am dwarfed and vulnerable and afraid. I know, deep within me, that I am not meant to be here. This is not a place for me. The urge to get to safety as soon as possible leaves me nearly insensate; it’s counterproductive, that the overwhelming fear of staying outside interferes with my ability to get inside. I wish that the Army had driven the fear out of me, the way it had with the rest of my unit. If they had, I wouldn’t have run. I was the single failure of the super-soldier bunch; you’d think they’d have written off the problem child by now. I don’t know why they keep chasing me. They spent too much money and time to allow their investment to go to waste, I suppose. I make the transfer successfully, though it’s certainly a mess. The mini-craft sends out panicked alerts as I breach, engaging its self-defense systems to shake me off as I worm my way into its airlock. Other crafts might pick up on the SOS signals it’s sending out, so my first order of business once I’ve made it to the cockpit is to shut this thing the hell up. I mash buttons until the distress signal quiets. Jeez Louise. I carefully take stock once I’m settled in. I’ve never driven this model of craft before. The ship’s systems are, overall, very similar to my previous ship’s, but a lot less complex. The computer is actually laughably simple. That would be enough to convince me that I need to find another full-sized ship STAT, but to add insult to injury, I am so cramped in the cockpit I can barely move. I am not staying in this thing any longer than I need to. This particular mini-craft was associated with the ship when I first stole it, and I found no reason to abandon the little thing. Plus, mini-crafts are built to be extremely cute. What was I supposed to do? Kick it to the curb? Using my new craft’s sensors, I hesitantly peer at my old ship, nudging it with the nose of my craft. Yup, dead in the water. Like I said, it was as old as heck when I got it. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been completely marooned and left for dead. It’s too bad. I was fond of that ship, which was probably why I stayed in it for, frankly, too long. I should have traded up for a new model once the pump system really started fritzing. The mini-craft doesn’t have clearance to leave my previous ship’s associated sector per se, but I’m smarter than the autopilot was. It’s no trouble to escape. I keep to the edges of the sectors I navigate through, skirting around other crafts. It’s not just because they’re so much bigger than me and my weapons systems are not... great, but also because if someone looked too long they might wonder where my main craft was, and if a lone mini-craft had permission to be here. Given that I don’t, it’s in my best interest to escape attention. This entire mini-craft class has really stupendous stealth systems, and the exo-outside is a slick all-black sheen. That nearly makes up for its small size and unbuffed offense. Sure, I might be tiny and stupid, but at least I look cool. It’s always difficult to find a new craft to commandeer, but especially so when you’re magnitudes smaller than everyone around you. This sector is busy, and it takes all of my significant piloting skills to avoid being bashed simply by accident. I can’t take another ship by force, not with my limited weapons. I’ll need to find one that I can sneak onto. Behind a popular refill station, I find a full-sized craft that looks like it’s been abandoned. It’s sitting in stand-by mode up against the wall. I don’t know if the pilot is asleep or compromised, but their loss is my gain. It makes easy prey, and easy prey is my favorite kind. In piracy, it pays to be a coward. It also pays to be an opportunist, as well as to have a make-do attitude. I am a fairly successful pirate. I’ve made it this far, haven’t I? I transfer into the full-size craft, blinding myself with terror for the second time today. Two transfers in a row not only puts me at significant risk, but also severely exhausts me. Physically, I’m completely spent, but mentally, I’m so hyped up from fear that I could practically vibrate myself to the moon. My body is begging me to lie down and never get up; my mind is screaming to start running and never stop. I am straight up not having a good time. The autopilot for the mini-craft kicks back in once I leave. It wanders off to return itself to its sector. It makes me a little bit sad to think about it hovering around its associated full-size, its computers not advanced enough to realize that its friend wouldn’t be coming back online. It can’t manage fuel access on its own, so hopefully someone will hear its eventual distress call and come adopt it. Chances aren’t great for a mini-craft on its own in the great big universe. I don’t want it to run out of fuel. It’s really a sweet little craft. As I plug into the new ship’s systems, I understand why it’s sitting behind a refill station unattended. This thing is extremely compromised. It took in too much bad fuel, and that affected the original pilot. I can feel them, their consciousness linked to the ship’s mainframe. Right now, they’re dormant, probably a reaction to the faulty intake. This is, actually, a pretty ideal situation. Not for the original pilot, but certainly for me. How often is it that you get to force-board a craft with absolutely zero defensive maneuvering on the opposing pilot’s part? Even the mini-craft’s auto-pilot tried to fight me a little bit. On proverbial tip-toe, I inch my way onto the main deck. The pilot doesn’t stir, and I remove them easy-peasy. I settle into the seat and immediately build a firewall around the pilot’s consciousness, then write a program to keep them trapped inside. Golly, it’s not murder. They’re still technically alive. They’re just never going to escape as long as I’m in the pilot’s chair, and I don’t plan on abandoning ship. Still, there could be scenarios in which they would be given back control! None I can think of now, but it’s possible! The first thing that I do, once that crucial task is completed, is purge the intake system. There’s still some of that bad fuel left in the tank, and it splatters as it’s ejected violently from my ship’s premises. I’ve never seen the appeal of bad fuel, though some members of my unit used to consume it for fun. It slows down all of your systems and severely compromises your ship’s computer. Plus, once it hits, there’s nothing to do but wait for your filtering system to work it out and purge it through the output systems. They thought it was a challenge, but I’ve never liked making things harder for myself. I stumble my way through engaging my new motor systems. This new craft is nearly as jerky as my previous craft was when it was actively dying. My optic channels are wobbly and my balance systems are way off base, which makes it impossible to comport myself with my usual effortless grace. I swear, I’m an excellent pilot. All my instructors said so. Most pilots wouldn’t even be able to turn on a craft this compromised, let alone drive it. I should probably try to wait this out wherever this craft’s docking station is, rather than behind a random fuel station. Accessing a craft’s entire memory bank at once is a great way to go catatonic, so I open the slightest channel to gain basic information and try to figure out where I dock. I look for my class and designation first. I’m big, I realize. Really big. Full-sizes vary, but even taking into consideration natural differentiation, I’m nearly twice the size of my previous full-size craft. Twenty-five times the size of the mini-craft! I’m gigantic! I wiggle with glee as I access my weapons systems. Beyond my size, I am packing some serious heat. The previous pilot got basically every weapon add-on available. The memory bank finally pulls up my designation: mercenary craft. That makes sense, then. I’m an ambulatory killing machine. Unfortunately, my other systems have been treated very harshly. My filtering system is the worst off, poisoned from bad fuel. Though this ship is relatively young, it’s in nearly as bad a shape as my last ship: a barely functioning filtration system, damage to the ship’s computer, and, of course, central pump problems. Just my luck. I stay where I am–sort of upright, generally–as I sort through the foggy data that’s trickling across my psychic processors. I’m in an off-world craft, built on Mars. Neat! I’ve never piloted a ship built off-Earth before. Mars has well-established ship nurseries so it makes sense that I’m capably built. I wonder if my size is because of the lighter gravity from my home planet. Post-Mars, it seems as though I’ve been working as a free mercenary for a while. I cackle when I discover my craft’s current job. I serve as protection for a pirate crew! We’re in this sector to sell our stolen goods before we jet off again. How absolutely ironic in the best way! Though we are piratical peers, I’m not interested in sticking around and playing nice with this crew. I work as a lone wolf. I’m going to dock until I filter out this bad fuel, and then I’m going to leave before anyone on the crew realizes I’m not the original pilot. Stealing vessels and putting their original pilots in psychic prison is frowned upon, and it would most likely evoke enemy action if I was discovered. I do wish I could let the mechanic take a look and tell me more about what’s wrong with my systems, maybe fix me up a little bit, but there’s no way I can take that chance. If they do any sort of psychic scan on me they’ll be able to see that the consciousness in the cockpit is not the original. Hell, even my physical form is detectable through the exo-outside on some scanners. I can’t risk it, despite how creaky and sick my functioning feels. I’ll have to work it out on my own. My systems alert me that I need to purge fuel right-now-immediately. I purge fuel again. There isn’t actually much left in the tank, but involuntary fuel tank purges tend to operate on a better-safe-than-sorry model, which I approve of. I set a sub-routine to search through the computer’s storage to find my class and call sign. My internal navigational systems do not come online in any sort of helpful manner, but I do have an external geo-locator device on board that remembers where my traveling station had parked. The ship’s systems and I agree that we both desperately want to dock and go into standby mode for eight hours, minimum, so I’m going to do my darndest to bear up under adverse circumstances. The good thing about being so gigantic and heavily armed is that, even with my motor systems screwing up royally, no other craft opens offensive maneuvers when I swerve or cut them off. I even rear-end another ship and the pilot apologizes to *me* for being in *my way*! The bad thing about being so gigantic and heavily armed is that you attract a lot of attention, especially when you’re blatantly driving under the influence of *something*. A couple of military police give me the hairy eyeball before the fuel station is even out of sight. Just the sight of their exo-outsides makes me want to turn tail and run. The Army logo is big and gold and threatening. If I get caught, now, I’m really screwed. Back to the military for me; back to the labs and experimentation and engineers who will poke and pry and test and torture in order to produce the optimal weapon. What a happy reunion that will be! Luckily, they continue on their way without engaging. I breathe an internal sigh of relief. The soldiers around here are not super invested in their jobs, a benefit of sticking to the backwaters. I slowly drag my stupid craft across the finish line, reaching the entry to my crew’s spaceship. It’s interstellar mobile, capable of moving between planets in a way our personal crafts would be unable to. The door scans one of my optic channels, which luckily has not changed along with the new change in management, and it opens, welcoming me home. Our spaceship has a long corridor with different fuel, docking, or mechanic stations branching off. My craft has a vague motor-memory of which docking station is mine. It’s the farthest down on the left. I confidently engage my motors forward and immediately bounce into one wall of the corridor, which sends me careening into the other side. I crash to the ground. My craft is big enough that this makes a substantial thumping noise. Another ship emerges from one of the docking stations. I take one look at its exo-outside, and barely hold in a frightened whimper. All white armor and a red cross emblem. *Mechanic.* “Jake, come on, man. It’s 0900\. You were gone all night, and you came back drunk?” “Drunk” must be its term for taking in bad fuel. Fear screws with my response time as it approaches; fight and flight have left the building, and only freeze remains. The mechanic heaves me up and brings me inside its station despite my prodigious size; it’s pretty big, too, though it doesn’t appear to have any weapons systems. I am unable to resist, paralyzed. I’m towed into the mechanic’s station. White, white, all white: bright white lights and bright white scanners and shining silver implements reflecting back the endless white. It’s too much like the labs where they made me, the belly of the beast I only barely escaped. The mechanic gives me basic diagnostic tests to determine functionality. It shines a light into my optical sensors to test pupil dilation, then presses a device to my central core to assess my pump and listen to my respirators. It has me stick out my comms wiggler to look down my comms tube and then clucks at me for being low on lubrication fluid. Like that’s my fault. Hello? Take it up with the original pilot, thanks. “Did you black out?” I attempt to access the comms system for the first time. It is extremely complex and difficult to manage even without bad fuel poisoning your ship–it’s never been my forte. My comms wiggler feels heavy and clumsy, and I don’t think it’s just the bad fuel. “Miaow,” I say. “Excuse me?” Gosh darn it, that’s a response for a mini-craft! I expel some mucus from my comms tube and try again: “Nuh-uh.” I don’t know what “black out” means; we hadn’t covered it in training yet, but it doesn’t sound good. I send a thumbs up reaction, trying to indicate that everything’s chill. That doesn’t seem to assuage the mechanic, so I send a second. I’d send a third, but you can only do two at a time, given that these crafts only have two thumbs. Thumbs are one of the best features of a full-sized craft. If I had designed them, I would have given them at least six, but nobody cares what I think. “Do you remember what happened last night? Jake?” “Nerp.” It looks frustrated. It’s not too old for a ship, exo-outside light brown and still smooth. Full-sized crafts’ exo-outsides have this weird thing where they get wrinkly and fragile as they age. My previous craft had wrinkles galore. “If you keep showing up to work drunk, I’m going to have to tell the captain. No doctor-patient confidentiality on a pirate vessel.” If the mechanic tells the captain, they might want to do a more thorough examination. They might put me in scanners. They might find me out. I’m not getting scanned today. No way, José. This calls for drastic action. I use my considerable bulk to push the mechanic back. It’s not expecting a full frontal ram, stumbling and trying to catch itself on the rack that holds its devices. The flimsy rack can’t hold up to a full-sized’s weight, the devices scattering across the floor and the mechanic crashing its hull into the wall. Still, the push clears a way to the door. I run the best I can, which is not very well at all. I fall as I escape back into the corridor. I don’t bother to stand up again, just put all of my processing into my motor systems and drag myself forward on my hands and knees. “You asshole!” Its cry echoes around the corridor as I escape. “You wait until the captain hears about this!” I crawl into my personal docking station and close the door behind me, fumble with the lock until it engages. Internal alarms are blaring for the second time today. I can’t wrest control of my respirators, air pumps drawing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide at a frighteningly heightened rate. The central pump is going haywire. The ship’s computer is firing like nuts. Excess lubrication gathers in my optic sensors. I feel like I’m going to purge fuel again. Of course, the previous pilot takes this opportunity to wake up. Just what I need right now! I can feel it pounding against the firewall. It’s sending me all these pings: “no, stop” and “please, let me out” and “get out of my head.” Drama queen. I start the process of wrestling my craft back into obedience. The first thing I do is put the original pilot on mute. That won’t stop it from being able to send pings, but at least it’ll stop me from receiving them. *So* annoying! I used to take my previous ship’s pilot off mute sometimes to check on it, but it was always screaming. I don’t need that kind of drama in my life. I think I’ll just leave this one on mute permanently. *Heartless*. That was the answer to the crossword clue. “Lacking a vital organ.” I just forgot that “heart” is another word for the central pump. Riding high on my victory, I take manual control of my respiratory system, slowing the intake and outtake. This calms the central pump–the heart, as I now realize, because I am a genius at crosswords–and brings the circulatory system back to baseline. With those two systems settled, the ship’s computer stops going haywire. I desperately need to rest. My physical form, inside the cockpit of this craft, is exhausted from switching ships twice today. I was designed to sit inside a ship, for Pete’s sake, not skitter around outside of it. Independent movement is a last resort, and it drains my emergency battery. I need the electrical impulses from the ship’s computer to keep my own circuits functioning. Once I put this ship into standby, I can go into sleep mode and recover. We’re almost there. I shed my add-ons, including my weapons systems. I log them as I remove them: laser pistol, a heavy slug repeater revolver, brass knuckles, boot knives, a couple of shurikens, a mechano-parasite psychic disruptor (oops, that’ll get mysteriously lost immediately!), a shield generator, a semi-automatic laser assault rifle, a pump-action shotgun, and a garrotte wire. I have to give the previous pilot credit, they really were ready for anything. Beneath the weapons systems are layers of armor. The previous pilot seemed to favor the all-black look, and though I don’t think that my optic channels are a bright orange like the mini-craft’s, I still think I look pretty cool. I strip everything off in preparation for standby mode and stuff anything that has purged fuel on it into the auto-washer. Finally, I get a ping that my sub-systems have accessed my class and call sign. Took them long enough. Call sign: *Jakob Dobrzinski.* Designation: *Mercenary.* Class: *Human*. There’s a reflective surface hanging on one of the walls of the docking station. I walk in front of it, looking at myself, turning around, taking it all in. Although I am not as large as I was with my add-ons and armor equipped, my pure frame is still substantial. My base exo-outside is a dull beige-pink, which is... fine? Not as cool as the mini-craft’s solid black, and I had grown very fond of my previous full-size’s dark brown color, but it will do the job. Like the previous full-size, the thin, threadlike strands that grow from the exo-outside are not full coverage. They had been on the mini-craft, but most pet designation mini-crafts have those filaments across their entire body. There’s still significantly more strand coverage here than there was on my previous full-size craft’s, especially around the comms system output. Both excretory systems also have more of those strands surrounding them, and it looks like there’s a different configuration on the front liquid-based system than on my previous craft. My previous one didn’t dangle. It pisses me off how they change these things from model to model. Still: four limbs, one head, two optic channels, one olfactory channel, one comms channel, and two auditory channels. All systems are present and mostly functioning. Everything is about where it should be and nothing is missing. Not bad for a curbside find! There’s that dependence on bad fuel, but once I get somewhere safe, I can detox myself and re-write my programming to get rid of the addiction. I settle into my docking station and close my eyes. A few hours in standby mode and then I’ll figure out what to do next. I rest my ship’s hand on its central core, feeling it rise and fall with the intake and outtake of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The circulatory pump is beating away, strong and healthy, carrying the oxygen and immunity system drones along the blood ducts. This time, I tell myself, I’m going to be better about going to the mechanic. I’m not going to ignore duct buildup, like I did with my previous craft, “the Ethel”. Or filtration issues, like I did with the one before that, “the Henry”. Or accidentally pilot my way into a military base, get shot in the cockpit, and barely escape with my own life, like I did with “the Soon-Lee”. That was the past. It’s going to be different this time. I might be a parasitic brain robot, but I can learn from my mistakes. Anyway, it’s not like “the Jakob” is brand-new, off the lot, straight out of the womb. He’s a used model. After I get the addiction thing figured out I can probably ride him for a while before I have to steal a new vessel again. I try to remember my training. I can get another... what, four years out of him? That’s about how long humans live, right? I’m a great pilot. I bet I could stretch it to five. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/07/Profile_photo.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Mayrav Feynman lives and writes in Boston, MA. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you so much for reading Mayrav Feynman’s “And a Bottle of Rum.” One of the main things that drew us to the story is how it begins in the register of comic misadventure. We read of a failing craft, a negligent pilot, a sequence of bad decisions narrated with cheerful confidence. Its deeper pleasure, however, lies in the instability of that narration. The story keeps revising the reader’s understanding of its own terms—ship, pilot, mechanic, fuel—until what first appeared to be a familiar piece of spacefaring fiction reveals itself as something much more disquieting. Feynman’s conceit is sustained by an exacting control of language. The body is rendered as machinery in many respects. Where consciousness meets occupancy and survival becomes a matter of maintenance and replacement. Because the narrator experiences these ideas as ordinary, the story’s violence hits harder, likely because of how it's disguised as inconvenience, even charm. The humor remains buoyant, but it acquires a darker attitude as the implications gather. Until it finally resolves into its startling treatise about possession. About the stories we tell ourselves in order to feel less queasy about our own affairs with possession and trespass.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### 105.9° URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/105-9/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:11:36.000Z > ***Content warning: this story contains strong language and drug use.*** The fever rested on Jimmy’s brow like a crown, heavy and cloying and bright. Chills wracked him and ache dawned on his muscles like gentle epiphany, as if surfacing from somewhere deeper within him. I am the Shivering King, he thought serenely. These blankets are my royal blankets. “Gonna light you up real good,” Heavy Eddie had promised, ever the pitchman even from a hospital bed. “Nothing fuckin’ like it.” He was correct. Jimmy writhed back and forth beneath his sheets, unable to settle into a single position. The inside of his head felt viscous and red-gold. His thoughts moved in thrumming waves, his mind a boat anchored at sea. But his throat was dry. Gradually he rose from his bed, shaking off his many layers of covers, and conducted himself almost stealthily toward the kitchen, stepping lightly so as not to make the floorboards creak. It was midday and he lived alone, but still he felt he should respect the apartment’s silence, refrain from making his presence too obvious. In sobriety’s foresight he’d left a glass of water out for himself, and as he drank he observed his kitchen with wide new eyes. It brought him back for some reason to that hospital room, the alien brightness of it. Eddie’s face shining, cherubic, suffused with feverish pink. Jimmy had overheard the doctors talking; they were worried he might die. Obviously they had no idea who it was they had on their hands. Eddie was a practiced trafficker, with the immune system to prove it. He’d bounce back so fast their heads would spin, and the hospital would never know his real name or find his real address to collect on the bill. That was how they met, actually. Jimmy was fixing up IDs for quick cash, a couple years back. He was pretty good at it, good enough that Eddie had wanted to keep in touch. That was how he got his start. Weird, he thought, that he’d forgotten about it until just now. Dizziness crept up on him and pounced, a nauseating rush. He clasped the edge of the kitchen counter with both hands, recognizing the precipice of a bad trip. Rather than attempt the journey back to bed he deposited himself on the couch, which he’d also stocked in advance with extra pillows and blankets. It was no less comfortable than his bed: the Shivering King now ruling in exile. Music, music might be good. He fished his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants and found the jazz album that girl Lizzie had told him to listen to. Since he was going to tell her he’d liked it he figured he might as well hear it too. It was moody and slow, and as the melodies wound their way around him they changed the flavor of his thoughts, of the way the light sat in the room. He took a calm slow breath and settled into the blankets, closing his eyes. Good to focus, to drink this in like he meant to, while he could. Once he got better he’d have immunity and then he would never be able to hit this same high, from this strain, ever again. For some reason, the buzz of his phone sent dread washing through his gut even before he checked it – and sure enough, when he did check he found catastrophe delivered quietly in his notifications. It was one of his buyers, texting to back out. Some bullshit about a delayed paycheck, profuse apologies for the late notice, please reach out again next time he had a hookup, et cetera, et cetera. And with that about six hundred dollars evaporated. Jimmy touched the top of his phone to his forehead. He blew air out from his cheeks. He didn’t bother texting back, just started scrolling through his contacts to look for a replacement. It was now or never, since he couldn’t exactly stash his supply and hold onto it for later. He’d already made two sales and had another lined up for tomorrow, but of course he couldn’t charge Heavy Eddie’s prices. His customers knew potency decreased with each body the fever passed through. Eddie sat pretty because he knew someone who worked in a lab, but Jimmy needed to make at least one more deal out of his before he lost contagiousness or he’d be in the red. So who could he hit up? There was Pete Skiller, the line cook at Adelaide’s. He’d definitely go for this, but probably couldn’t afford it on short notice. Maddie Maddox, who was never low on cash but was out of town all week at some tech conference. And Carter Hills – good old Smarter Carter. He was clean now, working an office job apparently, but back in his day…. Maybe he wasn’t too far out of last hurrah territory yet, maybe if he knew what Jimmy had right now – but no, he wasn’t going to be that asshole, at least not today. He also thought about texting Lizzie, the idea borne into his head by the music still playing from his phone, but he’d only seen her a couple of times so far and didn’t know if she used like that, and if not he didn’t want to be that asshole either. Maybe if he came up empty everywhere else first. Resentment toward his flighty buyer bubbled idly as he scrolled through names. Today was supposed to be his day to just enjoy the ride, not to work. The novel and entrancing patterns of his thoughts resisted being turned toward this effort, like he was trying to drag his brain through thick muck. He felt moments slipping irretrievably away, wasting the limited time that he had with this. He came to a name that made his thumb stop and hover, saved in his phone as Mike DON’T TEXT. He would buy, though. He would definitely buy. Goddamn it. Jimmy typed out a message before he could talk himself out of it. hey, got rosepetal fever secondhand right now if you’d want to get in on it. i could do 500\. Line break line break line break. missed you last month at mom’s funeral by the way you piece of shit. He took off the “piece of shit,” then after a moment’s begrudging consideration the whole last line, before he hit send. He still meant it, but – well, he was also still trying to make a sale. He pulled the blankets over his head, sealing himself in muggy darkness, and the faint buzz of the text back came within moments. He told Mike to meet him here as soon as he could, the sooner to get it over with, and didn’t think he’d be waiting too long. Mike seemed eager. But to his surprise Mike didn’t show up after an hour, or even after two, and eventually Jimmy drifted off to sleep. When he woke up he felt like he was floating inside his own body, drifting up against the ceiling of his skin like a balloon caught in a corner. It was not an entirely unpleasant feeling but it took him almost twenty minutes to come out of it. It was starting to get dark outside. He checked his phone to make sure Mike hadn’t canceled, though he still wasn’t worried much about that. He’d never known Mike to miss out on a score. Jimmy had far greater expectations for him to show up here today than he had for the funeral. Realization hit him like a drowsy slow-motion punch. Could that be what was taking so long? Was Mike *nervous* to see him? Did he *feel bad*? Well… good, he deserved to feel bad. But it would be nice if he would show up and get this done so Jimmy didn’t have to spend any more time thinking about him and souring his trip more than he already had. He was shuffling back from the bathroom, quivering with the bracing shock of being out from under the covers, when the knock at the door finally came. Mike stood with his hands in his coat pockets, rocking on his heels the way he always did when he had to stand still. But if there was any self-consciousness or nervousness in him now Jimmy couldn’t see it. He was older than Jimmy but didn’t look it, never had; his features were disarmingly youthful and there was a childlike looseness in the way he carried himself. “Damn,” he said, eyes lighting up with interest, “you look like you got hit by a truck.” “Telling you, this Rosepetal shit’s no joke.” Immediately Jimmy seethed at himself for slipping so obligingly into everything’s-normal rapport. He coughed for a moment and then cast about for a truer tone, hoping to achieve some sort of brisk firmness. “So, you coming in or can we just do it right here?” “Whatever’s easier.” “Let’s do it here. I’m tired, you know?” “Sure, works for me.” Mike retrieved an assortment of folded bills from different pockets and amassed them one by one into his fist. Despite his headache Jimmy watched carefully so that he wouldn’t have to be seen counting them by hand. “I was thinking actually,” Mike said, pausing when the bundle of bills was complete, “and I don’t know, you’re tired I guess, but I’d been thinking maybe I could maybe hang for a bit. If you’re not doing anything.” Jimmy had seen this coming and was prepared to turn it aside – not cruelly, not warmly either, but perfectly dispassionately: “I think it actually hits a lot better when you’re alone.” “Oh, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.” “You’ll see what I mean, trust me.” Jimmy tucked the cash into his pocket and took a moment to glance both ways down the hall. Seeing no snooping neighbors, he brought a shivering hand up to his face and ran his tongue several times across his palm, as if licking a row of envelopes. He pursed his lips, working fresh saliva into his mouth, then repeated the process until his hand was thoroughly coated, a cooling sheet of moisture across his palm. Mike was doing the standard routine buyers always did, looking tastefully down at his shoes while he waited. Then, without lifting his gaze, he mumbled, “Hey by the way, I just wanted to say, just that I – well, I know I should’ve, you know, I mean I uh….” For just an instant Jimmy had the uncomfortable sensation that he was about to be confronted with a legitimate miracle to which he had no idea how to react, but what came next was nothing more than a throat-clear and then a short “Well.” And Mike nodded to himself, as if he’d accomplished what he set out to. Jimmy realized, almost dryly, that he found himself relieved and disappointed at the same time. He reached out and pressed his spit-slick palm to his brother’s. “Enjoy.” “Well, I appreciate it man,” Mike said over their clasped hands. “Thanks for thinking of me.” Though he must have known exactly what had transpired for Jimmy to set this up so last-minute. Jimmy stood for a moment and watched as Mike walked away; he wasn’t sure why. Then he closed the door and journeyed back through his apartment to the warmth of his bed where, with just a bit of time and effort, he succeeded in restoring his thoughts to more pleasant trajectories. --- ## Editor's Note: Certainly an original premise to envision "fever" as a commercial object. But then also memory and the strange intimacies people make of their own damage. The story’s conceit is at once elegant and unsettling. Illness can be pursued as a high, passed hand to hand, valued by its potency, and diminished by every body it crosses. Yet the author, Martin, is less interested in the mechanics of this world than in the emotional economy it reveals. Jimmy, alone in his apartment and suspended between delirium and calculation, treats his sickness as both private transport and perishable inventory. He wants to surrender to the sensation, to become the Shivering King of his own diminished room, but the fever keeps dragging him back to the practical indignities of money and buyers and loss and all else. His altered state is comic, even faintly pathetic, but it is also clarifying. Beneath the hustle lies a grief he has not quite admitted to himself, and a family wound he would rather convert into a transaction than acknowledge directly. By the time Jimmy’s brother arrives, the story has quietly transformed its speculative premise into something more ordinary and more painful. A sale becomes a visitation. A handshake becomes an inheritance of resentment. Of need and the horrific "almost-apology." Martin’s achievement is to make the fever feel imagined and the ache beneath it unmistakably real.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/07/INSIDE.png) Conner Martin is a writer, copy editor, and sometimes Dungeon Master based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When not writing, he can often be found hiking, seeing live music, or gaming. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### A Little Something URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/a-little-something/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:15:12.000Z A Little Something 0:00 /1352.695351473923 1× On the sixth careful reading of the tape measure, whose end lay at the bottom of the dark borehole I was peering into, it read eighteen feet and four inches to the surface. The reading was exactly the same as the previous five I had taken in the last hour, but perhaps another verification couldn’t hurt. But it did. As I wound up the tape, my fingers were so numb that icy morning that I didn’t feel the sharp edge of the metal tape slicing through my thumb. And knowing that my fate would be measured out by Mr. Fletcher’s tape cut somewhere the metal hadn’t reached. When Mr. Fletcher, the building inspector, had visited the previous Monday, his tape couldn’t muster over seventeen and eleven and a half. To be fair to him, he jiggled and wiggled the tape, but whatever was obstructing it didn’t budge, and the reading held. And the blueprints stipulated eighteen feet, and that was that. So that inspection did not pass. The concrete pour had to be rescheduled; a crane had to be rented again to pull the rebar cages out of the pier, and the drilling contractor had to be called again to have the holes re-drilled. A half-inch clod of dirt pushed, perhaps by an errant gopher, into one borehole among twenty-four, had set me back by a few thousand dollars. At the very foundational stage of our American Dream building, we were thwarted. What fault could he find this time? I sucked on my bleeding thumb. --- My wife had chosen to wait in the car with the heater on, preferring to avoid any interaction with Mr. Fletcher. “What the hell!” she screamed when I returned to the car, still sucking my bleeding thumb. “I thought you made sure this time that all pier hole depths matched the blueprints.” “Yes, I did!” I whined. “Exceeded, not just matched. But the inspector found a small root poking into one hole, at a depth of five feet from the ground. It must have grown over the weekend. He said we did not have the required three-inch clearance between the rebars and the sides of the hole all around. One root! One wisp of a root!” Leaving my distraught wife to continue her passionate, expletive-laden analytical reasoning on the passenger side, including commentaries on the othering of immigrants and inter-ethnic jealousies, I started driving toward the nearby Home Depot, hoping to find pruning shears with extra long handles. She suddenly turned to me and yelled, “You never notice anything!” “Wait a minute!” I remonstrated, “How the hell was I supposed to know about tree roots?” “That’s not what I am talking about,” she said, slapping her forehead in exasperation. “Did you see how long he was waiting next to his car, pretending to write notes? Perhaps he was open to negotiations.” “Huh?” “You know, maybe he was expecting what we used to call *a little something* back home in India?” I was quiet for a while. “But this is America! Such things don’t happen here.” She didn’t reply. She worked in the government herself. I was used to hearing her frustrated litanies across the dinner table about big corporations, in cahoots with the folks in Sacramento, having their ways to subvert the system she worked hard to uphold. “I don’t know,” I said. “But Mr. Fletcher does not seem to be that kind of person.” Was she right? Perhaps I could have offered to take him out for lunch to discuss the matter further, and he would have tipped his hat and stepped out of the way as I pursued my American Dream. But the real question was whether *I* was that kind of person? --- Even though I grew up in India, where corruption is a celebrated cultural artifact and the shadow economy is as real as any illumined economy, I had deep difficulties with these practices. While it was true that recalcitrant building inspectors would merely have been a minor nuisance in India, one that would dissolve as quickly as you could open your wallet, I was not sure I had it in me what it took to avail myself of that easy lifestyle. Through constant, well-intentioned education and example-setting, my father had enticed me into a moral cage. Had I not moved to America for graduate school, I could envision myself, constrained by this cage, incapable of flowing with the ways of that world. The cage was my father’s gift to me. My father worked in the government, too. Perhaps the only government servant of his stature with modest means. He tried to stay honest in a place that paid better for the opposite. If he had not reached the place in life where he deserved to be, he had often explained; it was because he had refused every shortcut presented to him on his journey. For a government servant, that was a remarkable claim. I had subconsciously bought into his paradigm and sought its mold, wherein I poured my still-gelling soul. But I was a kid then and did not have to face moral quandaries. It was not as if I had anything in my pockets to tempt me into unsavory *quid pro quos*. --- Strangely enough, the quandaries appeared just shortly before I left India for good. It was my last semester in college, and I was expecting to be in America in a few months. India, it seemed, was unwilling to let me leave without a few tests, catching me right at its threshold before I could put the whole unpleasant bribing business behind me for good. All my American graduate school applications were in. It was only January, too early to get anxious about the outcome. The one distraction in those meaningless winter days was feeling my bile rise as I watched a wretched postman walk along the hallways of the dorms where I lived. Just a small, dark, *beedi*\-smoking, emaciated old man, dressed in unwashed khakis, shuffling listlessly as he walked from door to door. He held my fate in his hands. He was the gatekeeper to my dreams and aspirations. He could crumple and destroy them with his wizened knuckles, if he so chose. The common wisdom was that if the postman’s palms were not adequately greased with Little Somethings, he would choose to deliver the valuable epistles that determined one’s future and fortunes into the tinder pile for his wife’s kitchen stove. And I was loath to leave my moral cage. Other scholarship aspirants would regularly ask warmly about his family, make sympathetic noises when he related his tales of woe, and on occasion, stuff a little bill or two into his hands. However, when he dilly-dallied outside my door after a delivery, scratching his nether parts, I feigned ignorance and stared at the numerous crude mends in his ancient sandals, silently savoring my bile. --- I looked up from *The Guardian* crossword when I heard a muffled cough. It was the postman again. He handed me an envelope, one that had obviously traversed the oceans. My breath stopped. When I regained my senses, I realized he had left without his usual antics. I inhaled deeply. The paper smelled nice, like only a piece of American paper could. It was whiter than any Indian paper could dare to be white. The printing was impeccable; it had the name of a reputed American university in the corner, and my name on the front. Neat little black letters that had just found their place on a clean, new, white envelope. They were typed using an electric typewriter, a device whose existence I had only discovered through such correspondence. That day being in January, I knew this could not be a rejection letter. --- The significance of being the first student from the graduating class (across the whole university) to get a scholarship to an American graduate school cannot be overstated. Even before I got comfortable with the pleasure of feeling the smoothness and thickness of American letter paper in my fingers, a crowd of fifty, a hundred, or more, had gathered around my room to celebrate. The letter was flitting from one ogling pair of eyes to another. In that commotion about the letter, the kids had forgotten me completely. That gave me a chance to escape from the dorm to address another issue that was eating me from inside, the exhilarating circumstances notwithstanding. I ran out to the front gate of my dorm, trying to see if I could intercept the postman before he left. Unfortunately, he was just a khaki blob in the distance, wobbling on his pedals, too separated from me to receive my gratitude. Guilt rose and drowned what little euphoria had found its way into my heart. Oh, why had I distrusted this poor honest soul? A while ago, when my friends had berated me for not doing the “right thing” by the postman, I had an excuse. “To be trusting and then be deceived is more tolerable than being deceived by mistrust in every thought,” I had said. Perhaps I was deceiving myself; it was just me being a tightwad, fearing opening the doors of my cage? I was expecting more letters, with better scholarships. Expectations like that could nudge those creaky doors. --- The next day, at a calculated time, I was waiting for him at a spot a little distance from my dorm. I had an image to maintain, even though nobody cared about or even knew what my image was. I couldn’t be seen conducting an unlawful transaction with a public servant, no? So, no cash! But inside my jacket, I had a small bottle of good whiskey. Someone had given it to me for my birthday, and I didn’t drink. Various theories from my sophomore year economics class raced through my mind. The bottle was a gift, and it had no utility for me and therefore, perhaps, no real value. If it did not carry a value, what would be the impropriety in transacting with it? The answer was not clear to me, but the act of shame seemed necessary, and I wanted to execute it quickly. Fortunately, his bicycle appeared on schedule. I sidled into his path. I tried to improvise some words, but not finding them forced me to scramble to my meager plan. I pushed the little bottle awkwardly into his hands and said, “A little something for you.” With those words expectorated, I felt much relief. It was good to give a gift to myself. There was no joy in his eyes, only a puzzled exasperation. “How much would this bottle cost?” he asked. I didn’t know; I hazarded a high number. “You could have given me that sum, sir. I can’t feed this to my kids,” he said, returning the bottle to me. I didn’t have any cash in my hand that day. Only a bottle of dubious value. “Another time,” I mumbled. And that time never came. And I continued to receive all my mail, unintercepted. --- The trials didn’t end there. My passport application was stuck, with the travel date a few months away. I visited various government offices in Calcutta, and tried to sweet-talk hardened bureaucrats into condescending to share even a snippet of information, but it was all in vain. This was new territory for me; when my brother left for America the previous year, he hadn’t gone through this ordeal. He had just paid what we call a “*tout*,” an unofficial broker who hangs outside government offices, a nice packet of money and he brought the passport home a few weeks later with no fuss. It took a while, but I found the choke point in one particular office housed in a crumbling building, which allegedly in its eighteenth-century heyday used to function as a residence for the local *nawab’s* concubines. A government clerk (*babu*), seated at one of the many desks scattered in the remains of an ostentatious ballroom, glared at me from behind a stack of file folders. He pointed vaguely at a folder at the bottom of a pile and told me that one could be mine. He slowly waved his hands and explained its intended trajectory: “See, it has to arrive at the top of this pile. If the paperwork is in order, it can then move to this other pile here. Then that one. Then it goes to the desk of that other clerk over there. As you can see, he has four stacks of his own. When all three of us approve this file, we send it to the Police Headquarters in Lal Bazar for address verification, and when that gets done, they send it to the main passport office in Brabourne Street.” I stared back at him, dumbfounded. “Files don’t move on their own, you know,” he spat out, annoyed. He went back to reading the newspaper. Something caught his eye and his eyebrows went up. He called out to the clerk at the next desk and said, “Hey, it says here our strike is scheduled to start next week. What’s the Union saying?” I ran out in distress. I found a stack of bricks in the shade of a big banyan tree outside the office where a few handcart pullers were taking siestas and sat down on it, not knowing what my next move could be. My father was traveling on government business, so he was not available. What would he advise? The babu from the third desk came out for a break. He settled himself comfortably under the same tree and started rolling a cigarette. For a while, he watched me with disdain as he lazily blew smoke rings. That was the point when I broke down. A couple of teardrops teetered at the bottom of my eyes for a second, and then a whole stream ran down my cheeks. Those tears from the eyes of a twenty-one-year-old must have melted even such a hardened heart. “What’s the matter?” he asked. I told him I was from an impecunious family, couldn’t afford to present “gifts” to the hard-working people who rightfully deserved them, and might have to forsake my last opportunity to study abroad and improve our circumstance. Even in my grief, I could imagine the desperation of a man having to sit in that dingy office all day long with no escape while he signed off passport applications for a pittance just so that his rich brethren could fly off to golden lands. So I tried to work some pitiful elements into my story. It worked. To a large extent. I could see him struggling with his principles, too. “Listen,” he said, finally. “Can you buy us a round of tea and cigarettes? I’ll see what we can do.” I walked with him to the tea and smoke shack. I counted my bills, setting aside what I needed for the bus fare home. We ran some numbers. The kid noted in his ledger that the next four days’ refreshment expenses for the babus were prepaid. There, I admit it! I did it. Not a bad deal for the price of two modest meals. On the bus home, I am not sure what felt worse. The bribing or cheating the babus of their bribes with a fabricated sob story. --- A few weeks later, as I was turning the corner into my dorm hallway, I saw a uniformed policeman leaning against my door, lazy curls of smoke rising from his dark lips. Address verification = bribe. I fled to the library. My friends later told me the low-level police constable had patiently waited for a couple of hours at my door, even after they had vouched for my address. He was probably expecting to make at least a hundred bucks that day, which would be a week’s worth of his official wages. And I had denied him that opportunity. Nice! --- My father handed me a letter saying my passport was ready to be picked up. “Amazing, isn’t it?” I said. “I managed to get an Indian passport, and I didn’t pay a single rupee in bribes. All done by the book!” It wasn’t necessary to update him regarding the tea and cigarette expenses. My father’s face seemed to quiz me, ostensibly searching for extra-planetary origins for my stupidity. “By the book? What about the *hawaldar* who knocked on my door last month? He said he couldn’t find you at your dorm address, so he wandered in here instead. Going by the neighborhood we live in, he reckoned he shouldn’t leave without at least Rs. 1000 in his pockets. Things just don’t work out by themselves, you know!” “But, but …” I said, “what about not taking shortcuts in life and all that?” “It’s better that you get yourself to a place where you don’t have to ponder those questions. Go get your passport.” --- Fortunately, Mr. Fletcher was transferred to rental inspections. I could race along the rest of the way to The Dream. The new inspector, who stayed with the project through its completion, treated even getting out of his car as a chore. One could guess how seriously he would execute the task of walking the steep hillside lot and peering into two-dozen boreholes on a winter morning. Months rolled by. A gleaming new house stood on the side of the hill. --- A man does not build an edifice without leaving some debris behind. It behooves him to look back and clear it out, especially when a suitable opportunity presents itself. There was this issue of long forgotten moral cages and delicate options. At the very end of our building project, I was doing a dump run. This last one was a light one, just a lot of paint cans, perhaps fifty of them. I had with me Luis, one of the regular laborers who I used to pick up from the parking lot of The Home Depot. He used to be a professor of Animal Husbandry in El Salvador in the past, but he had fled government corruption and other such things and was trying to make a living as a day laborer in California. In those days, he was digging ditches or mixing grout and thin-set mortar for me for twelve dollars an hour. I drove into the city’s hazardous materials processing facility, where they would accept unused paint for free. At the receiving station, I showed my ID to prove city residency and opened the trunk of the van. The clerk, who looked like a character from Duck Dynasty, stared at me with a crooked smile. “Sir,” he said, “do you realize I could summon an officer of the law and have you cited for this?” “Huh? *What*? These are just half-empty paint cans!” “Sir, do you know that under California law, you may not carry over eight cans of paint in your personal, non-commercial vehicle?” “Really? No.” “It would be illegal and inappropriate for me to accept this consignment of hazardous materials, sir.” “I am so sorry. I did not know. What should I do?” “Please exit the premises that way, and if you choose to use this facility in the future, please arrive with eight cans or fewer.” “Okay, I will do that. I appreciate your help!” As I turned the bend and was about to exit the yard, I saw a second bearded clerk in an orange vest waving at me, asking me to stop. He spoke sweetly, addressing me as “dude,” and said I looked sincere and so they would like to help me out. He said there was another “commercial process” through which they could accept a larger consignment of paint, which as a residential and not commercial customer, I couldn’t avail myself of. But as a one-time exception, they could be flexible, but there would be a processing fee of $120\. That looked like a deal, considering the alternative was that I would have to make seven more trips to this place. I thought I should tell my wife about these guys. She was not the only one in the government who interpreted regulations in a way that it helped the people. --- I was back at the unloading station, sitting in my driver’s seat. The trunk was open. The first clerk shoved a clipboard through the window. I expected to see some forms. Instead, it only had blank sheets of printer paper. I pulled out a credit card from my wallet, wondering where the commercial paperwork was. I turned to him in confusion; his beard was quivering from side to side ever so subtly. What an idiot I was! I should have understood, having grown up in India and all. Fortunately, Luis was there to guide me. He pushed my Visa aside and told me, “Cash only, *patron*.” To be trusting and then be deceived, indeed! Like before, I had no cash in my hand. Luis whisked out the wages I had paid him earlier that afternoon and neatly slid the ‘Little Something’ between the sheets of blank paper, deep inside the car and outside the prying line of vision of security cameras. He knew the drill. The clipboard went back to the clerk. The trunk was cleared, and we were waved out. --- My thoughts went back to the day my wife had suggested that Mr. Fletcher might have been expecting a little something, and I had wondered whether I was that kind of man. The question felt misplaced now. I had never really been outside the system—I was a shielded subsystem within it, for which I was allowed to get creative with pretty names. “You have been a great help, Luis. I will pay you double for your work today,” I said. “Just for today. okay?” If I paid him double and he used his money to suborn a civic official, it wasn’t such a stain on my soul, was it? “What a country!” Luis shrugged. I nodded. My father should be satisfied. --- ## Editor's Note: Fundamentally, this story is about moral rot. The narrator spends the entire story telling himself he's different from the corrupt systems he's navigated, only to arrive at the ending and discover he's been inside them all along. "My father should be satisfied" stands out in particular for its irony. The father who modeled integrity is invoked to bless a rationalization. The narrator has become exactly what he feared, and he's made peace with it by outsourcing the dirty work to Luis. For these reasons and more, we consider this story to be a truly accomplished piece of literary fiction for its thematic coherence, structural patience, and a voice that the reader wants to spend their hard-earned time with.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/06/vmugcropped.jpg) Vaidhy Mahalingam came to the USA from India for graduate school, completed his PhD in Naval Architecture, and had a 29-year career in the tech industry. In retirement, he spends his time cherishing moments with his family and putting into words the stories that have lived in his thoughts for years. His short stories have been featured in **Arkana*, **Pembroke Magazine*, **Solstice, MudRoom, The Temz Review,* and **The Write Launch*. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Nighthorse URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/nighthorse/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:33:10.000Z > ***Content warning: this story contains strong language, alcohol/ tobacco use, and implied sexual content.*** Colby leaned forward and blew smoke out the cracked window. On the other side of the wall, Jesse and what’s-her-name were going at it, fucking or fighting, it was hard to tell. Colby coughed, wishing the damn window would open wider, the landlord wasn’t a prick, and Jasmine would text him back, wishing a thousand different things, none of which would come true or ultimately matter. The apartment building was quiet this time of night. Maybe not on weekends, but on a Wednesday, no one gave a shit after midnight. Even the unemployed, or the ones not yet due at work, stayed inside, away from the February chill. The parking lot and the street beyond lay in jagged dark; the nearest streetlight had burned out, and the city hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. There was supposed to be a light above every other apartment door, but somebody had stolen the bulbs at some point, every one of them, there one day, gone the next. Scratch up yet another code violation. Was there even a code to follow? Perhaps when you signed a lease in a dump like this, you waived away the right to complain about petty legalities. It’s not like Colby had read the fine print. “Oh fuck!” the woman screamed. At least, Colby thought it was her. He took another drag. Picked up the pint of drugstore whiskey from the table beside him and pulled the burning liquid down his throat. He glanced at the clock on the oven in the kitchen and closed his eyes. Maybe another hour, and he’d have his room back. Jesse never took a woman to his trailer. He lived on his parents’ property. No septic; you shat in the house or in the woods. Jesse was a woodsman. The trailer stank of skunk weed and burnt foil. Colby had been there once, had thought of bathing in turpentine afterwards. Whatever you were supposed to do after getting sprayed by a skunk. He wasn’t sure the smell had entirely left him even three months later. The turquoise numbers on the oven turned over the minute. Colby sighed. A bottle of shitty booze and forty bucks from Jesse—that, apparently, was the price of a good night’s sleep. He had to work in seven hours, and he’d be sleeping on the couch until he could get to the laundromat. “Fuck,” someone else said, Jesse or the girl. Something fell over. The lamp on his nightstand? “Yeah,” Colby said. “Fuck.” He took another hit from the bottle, stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, and headed for the door. It was cold outside. Bitter, penetrating cold. A coat might help, and shoes, but Colby stood on the edge of the parking lot in an American Aquarium T-shirt, sweatpants, and slippers. He lit another cigarette and watched the smoke rise above his head, hazy snowflakes of carcinogens dissipating into the endless stars above. He needed to clean up his act. He needed to find a new job. He needed to tell his cousin to hook up at his own fucking shithole. Something clopped to Colby’s right. He started, almost dropped the cigarette, and thought: *clopped*? Had he ever heard a clop? Did he even know what a fucking clop was? It happened again. Hollow but solid, firm and fragile. Echoing, resounding. A clop. “Excuse me.” If Colby had had a firm grasp on his senses, if he had not been exhausted by a broken heart and a berating boss and a thankless cousin, he might have screamed. Instead, he coughed. “I apologize. I startled you.” The voice was firm, masculine, formal. Colby thought of an old standup routine he’d heard as a kid: *He enunciates*. More clopping noises. Slowly, the figure emerged: a horse—a stallion, that was the word that popped into Colby’s head even though he wasn’t sure what a stallion was, black as pitch and somehow radiant, coat shimmering, mane fluttering in the faint winter breeze. The horse moved purposefully, one step at a time, as though considering each crack in the pavement, each piece of detritus scattered about. It huffed, then clopped, a huff and a clop, *how’s that for ya*, and approached within a few feet of Colby, where it stopped and stared at him with black eyes rimmed in deep gold. Colby blinked. The cigarette shook in his fingers. He lifted it toward his mouth and inhaled too early, while it was still an inch from his lips. “It is a cold night. I did not mean to scare you.” Colby glanced behind the horse. The rest of the parking lot, the street beyond. He looked over his shoulder. A couple of windows showed light, muted by curtains. Most were dark. “I am here for Jesse.” Colby nodded. The horse watched him. Something rustled somewhere. A raccoon, maybe. A car horn barked from a few blocks away. The town was not totally still. Just this small, desolate corner of it. “Do you know Jesse?” the horse asked. Its lips did not move. It looked at Colby and the voice appeared in the air between them. Not in Colby’s head. He wished it was. He really wished it was. “You can talk,” he said. The horse dipped its head slightly. “As can you.” “I’m not a horse.” “Nay.” Colby gulped. Took another, proper drag. Licked his lips and judged the distance between himself and the apartment door. Wondered if his legs would even move. How was he standing? He couldn’t feel the lower half of his body. *The cold*, he told himself. He was not convincing. “Jesse’s busy,” he said. He glanced quickly at the horse, then away. “At this hour? He is usually sleeping. If he is sleeping, he will not mind my interrupting him, I assure you.” “He’s not alone. He has a girl with him.” Colby paused. “A woman, I mean. Not, like…” He squinted into the darkness, seeing the horse, seeing beyond it, seeing the inside of a rubber room and Malcolm McDowell with his eyes pinned open. “He’s busy. You know.” The silence crackled. It thrummed and radiated. The horse stared at him. Colby tried not to stare at the horse, those empty black eyes in a black head against a black night. The air hung crisp and fragile, ready to shatter. Colby could feel the cold in his marrow, underneath his toenails, in the recesses between his fingers. The pavement gave beneath his feet, absorbed him, diminished him. He sank into the moment, the reality of what lay before him, the pure understanding that what was happening was happening. He was here. This was it. This was the world and he was a part of it. The horse sighed. “Is he giving her the dilly?” Colby blinked. Raised the cigarette, inhaled, a normal and natural gesture in this normal and natural time. He nodded. “Yes. I think so.” The horse snorted. “Oh. I have chosen an unwise time to visit, then.” “How’d you know he was here?” “I always know where he is.” “You, uh, know him, then. Well, I mean.” “Oh, for many years. Has he not mentioned me?” “A talking horse?” Colby scratched his stubble. Needed a shave three days ago. Jasmine had always been on him about his hygiene. “I don’t think he’s mentioned it, no.” “I see.” Was that disappointment? “I suppose he has his reasons. In my experience, you are a fragile lot. I mean no offense.” “Oh, none taken.” There was distance between them, but Colby could feel the horse’s breath on his skin. Warm. Wet. Lingering on his arm like motor oil. He casually tried to wipe it off with his cigarette hand, brushing ashes aside, just smoldering cigarette ashes, but had no more success than he had expected. He settled for another puff and a side glance at the horse, whose attention had not wavered. Maybe it could read his mind. If it could talk, it could do anything else, at least in theory, and theory was all Colby had at the moment. *Not a normal evening’s occurrence*, he thought, and *Gee, I wish this horse would go away but understand why I’m uncomfortable and not take umbrage*. He snuck a glance to see if he could recognize comprehension in those black orbs. Saw nothing but a mirror reflecting the darkness around it. Something fluttered around the dim glow of the nearest streetlight, a block away. A bat or a giant talking moth, who could tell. Colby realized it had been a while since he had been outdoors by himself this late at night. Perhaps not since the time he’d tried to run away from home, not meaning it, pissed off about some small thing he couldn’t even recall now. He’d snuck out of his house just before midnight, his mother and brother asleep, his stepfather drunkenly absorbed in a wrestling replay. It’d been summer, he remembered August, the deepest part of it, when the cicadas didn’t sing, they roared, and the humidity clung to you like cobwebs. He hadn’t anticipated the grass being damp; he slipped the second his sneakers hit the ground, fell back against the vinyl siding, the back of his head rapping the window hard enough to leave a crack that his mother wouldn’t discover for another four months. His vision swam and he fell, the house holding him mostly upright. He blinked, felt for the back of his head, no blood, that was good, and pushed himself up, brushed his jeans off as if that mattered. He lifted his gym bag and gave everything another thought, was it worth it, should he do this, and decided his resolve hadn’t changed. This was the start of a new life, and he couldn’t give up before he began. “I made it two blocks before I turned around,” he said. “I beg your pardon?” Colby shrugged. “Nothing.” He flicked the tip of the cigarette. “Doing that thing where I talk to myself. Jesse didn’t mention it?” “He did not.” “I see.” The horse shifted. Not a clop this time but a scrape. It didn’t shift its gaze from him, hadn’t since it had arrived. Emerged? Appeared. Colby had never been this close to a horse, normal or otherwise. He didn’t think they were all this intense, but for all he knew, they could all talk and he was the only one not in on the joke. A good joke, though. A real whopper. The cigarette had little life left, but he still took a final, desperate drag before flicking it away. It bounced and sputtered on the pavement, rolling to a stop near a 1994 Ford Taurus whose owner already had enough trouble in her life. *Never a dull moment*, Colby thought, under the horse’s gaze. *Maybe it was in the lease.* “Do you suppose he will be much longer?” the horse asked. “I don’t know.” Colby fingered the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. “Maybe.” “This has not happened before. He is rarely occupied this time of night.” “Hmm.” The horse exhaled. “Well, there is no use in waiting. It is a cold night, and I do not want to put you out.” Colby lifted a hand, waved it. “You’re good.” “I will visit him some other time. It has been a while, and I miss our palavers.” Colby nodded. Rubbed his face again. Couldn’t feel his fingers. “Of course.” The horse started to turn. For the first time, it glanced away. Colby felt the weight lifted immediately, so sharp he took a deep inhalation of the frigid air. The cold snaked into his lungs, through to his heart and stomach. His fingers twitched and his eyes watered. He thought he might fall. Crumble. Unravel. Then the eyes settled on him again, and the world came crashing back down. Colby gasped, staggered a half-step. He reached instinctively for the cigarettes, fingers brushing the pocket of his sweatpants. He pulled his arm away, brought it back around into a perfectly normal position, which he of course knew how to do. He blinked. “I must say,” the horse said, “this neighborhood appeals to me. There is a certain charm about it.” “Charm,” Colby said. “It is honest. Unpretentious. This neighborhood is exactly as it appears to be. It is simple. There is truth in simplicity.” “Mm-hmm.” “I told Jesse this once. That he should not overcomplicate his life. He surrounds himself with clutter. This is not in itself harmful. But it can distract one from the beauty of the world one lives in. How still this night is, for example. How peaceful. Is there not beauty in this moment? One should be able to find comfort in serenity. I told Jesse this. I told him that he overcomplicates his life to an alarming degree. I care for him. I do not want him to overlook the moment.” “What did he say?” The horse sighed. Damp, warm breath wafted over Colby’s face. “He told me a story about his mother. A most beautiful story that brought me to tears.” Colby nodded and said nothing. “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” the horse said. “Perhaps we shall meet again some night. It is hard to foretell what turns life may take.” “Sure,” Colby said. And then, because Midwestern hospitality came free and easy and unbidden, “You’re welcome anytime.” “You are very kind.” The horse dipped its head in farewell. As it turned, the hair on its tail came within an inch of brushing Colby’s face. If it touched him, he would scream, he knew this, no way to stifle it, you couldn’t tame something so primal and instinctual, but the tail missed him, and he watched as the horse clopped away, each clop distinct, moving as carefully as it had approached. It vanished slowly into the night, dissolving one inch at a time, as though slipping through a crack in this reality and into another. Colby watched until it faded to nothingness, listened as the footsteps—hoofsteps—receded to a faint echo that he heard in his mind even after he knew they were gone. Colby fumbled for his cigarettes. He slipped one between his lips but didn’t light it. He stared into the darkness where the horse had disappeared. After a minute, or ten, he spit the cigarette out and turned back to his apartment, but hesitated. He glanced over his shoulder, taking in the stillness, the cold like crystal, the shadows cragged and imperfect. He could not see beauty in it. Truth, though? He squinted. Maybe there was some at the fringes, murky and undefined. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. But maybe it was there all the same. --- ## Author's Note: This story started with a late-night date joke. A man says, "I'm not a horse," and the horse responds, "Nay." The story also combines some neighborhoods of my hometown and one of my old apartments. I actually have seen horses in the middle of my town at night, though not unaccompanied. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/06/D.W.-Davis-1.jpg) D.W. Davis (he/him) is a native of rural Illinois. His work has appeared in various online and print journals. You can find him at Facebook.com/DanielDavis05, @dan\_davis86 on Twitter, and @dwdavis.bsky.social. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### The Heir URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-heir/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:42:34.000Z By the time Anton came out of the Tube at Edgware Road the mist that had hung over the city since dawn had turned into a light drizzle. For a brief moment the cold droplets of water were a welcome refreshment after the stale air and claustrophobia of the Tube, but a few feet away from the station the exhaust from a fry-up joint filled Anton’s nostrils and moved quickly down to his stomach. Anton’s breakfast earlier that morning had been a day-old roll and instant coffee. Now he was hungry and nauseous at the same time. Anton picked up the pace. One hand clutched a piece of paper with his instructions, the other held the A-Z, his index finger on the page for Edgware Road. The A-Z he kept in his pocket; he had been warned that holding the street guide in front of his face made him look like a tourist. Instead of looking at the map he tried to navigate by landmarks. When he passed a Ladbroke’s he turned right, walked along two blocks of rowhouses of dreary, grey-brown brick, until he saw an off-license with dark-blue window frames. Crossing the street, he was nearly hit by a black cab, the driver not even bothering to slow down and curse him out. The instructions were not really instructions, but notes Anton had jotted down that morning. A second year graduate student writing a thesis on Anglo-American relations, Anton had taken a job with a father and son firm of forensic genealogists, helping them burrow through records and make family trees. If they found an heir for someone who died intestate, the firm could keep anywhere between five and ten percent. Anton got his ten quid an hour. The job left little time for his thesis work. He was still sleeping when his boss, Victor, had called, and it took Anton a minute to figure out what was expected of him. Victor didn’t need him at the records office, where Anton would normally start the workday. Instead, Anton was to get ready and go to West London. He was to look for a woman who was 49 years old but looked at least a decade older. She spent her days in a park — a square, really, surrounded by rowhouses. Eddington Court. The neighbors said she usually slept elsewhere — they weren’t sure where — but from dawn to dusk she could be found in the park, in a patch of dirt between rows of hedges. The dogs apparently knew to avoid the spot, but there were some cats who liked to hang around when the woman was at her post. Anton had memorized the instructions even before Victor had finished talking, but he held on to the piece of paper like a talisman. The assignment made him nervous, because talking to strangers always made him nervous. Simultaneously he felt ashamed that he should be so nervous about going to talk to a middle-aged woman living in a patch of dirt. He felt the nervousness in the depths of his stomach, above the groin, behind the belt of his jeans. The nausea and hunger sat higher, closer to the sternum. The shame, he knew, was in his head. An archeologist could make a nice cross-sectional diagram of his anxieties. Or perhaps a geologist. But then those people dealt with successive eras of the past. The nausea, the hunger, the anxiety, the shame, all ran concurrently. Anton tried to focus on the task at hand, the one that would begin right after he made a right at the next corner. He reminded himself of the most important fact of all. On paper, this woman was a millionaire. That was the reason Victor was so excited. “This woman is loaded. I mean, really loaded. Her father owned a townhouse somewhere in Notting Hill. That alone is worth close to 900 thousand pounds. And that’s not counting stocks and bonds he left behind.” “So what’s the problem?” “The problem is she doesn’t want to touch the money. Actually she doesn’t want to have anything to do with the inheritance.” Anton was the one who found out that the deceased, a certain Fred Topolski, had a daughter, and that she seemed to be alive. That rarely happened in their line of work. Usually if someone died intestate there was no direct heir. Victor was sure that Anton had messed up. But there it was, in the binder for 1955\. There was nothing to do but order a copy of the birth certificate and go from there. Her name was not in the register of deaths or of marriages. Eventually, not only had the existence of a daughter been confirmed, but the woman’s last known address was only two Tube stops away from where her father had died. “There’s no point chasing this,” Victor said back then. “No doubt she’s going to claim the inheritance and if she does she’s not going to need us to help her make the case.” But weeks went by and the Treasury’s notice was still up. Victor couldn’t stop thinking of the ten-percent commission, clearly. “Why don’t you go and talk to her?” Anton had asked that morning. “I tried. She told me to get lost. I think you might have better luck. You’re more personable.” Victor seemed convinced by this. He had reason to be. Just a few weeks earlier Victor had sent Anton deep into West London to track down information about a member of the Polish legion who had settled in the city after the War and opened up a hardware store. The rowhouse that he bought in 1960 was now worth close to half a million, and he had another thirty thousand quid on his savings account. Did he really have no kids? No relatives? The UK records didn’t show anything, and the Polish records Victor had requested were a dead end. The deceased had been an only child. His parents had been taken by the Russians at the start of the war. They had siblings whose fate was unclear. So Anton had made his way west, on a Saturday, and spent the morning and afternoon talking to neighbors, to the old geezers in a café near the Tube station, to the owner of the off-license around the corner from the deceased man’s house. They knew him, all right. The war hero. The geezers, not quite as old as the deceased, got ribbed by the Pole for missing the fight. The owner of the off-license remembered a man who came in every day to buy the Polish paper. But relatives? No, the man was a loner. Friendly enough, but a loner. When he died his body had lain undiscovered for a week. The neighbors who usually checked on him had been on holiday. Such things happened! And then, about to give up and head home for the day, Anton had stopped by the big Catholic church near the Tube. He would have preferred not to, but he was afraid that Victor would ask him if he had really tried everything. The doors were open, and he spotted the priest talking to an older woman in a pew. When she got up to leave Anton approached. Tall, thin in the face, with short, neat grey hair and incongruously bushy eyebrows, Father Jan looked him over suspiciously. “Vy do you vant zis informaschen?” Father Jan wanted to know. “It’s a lot of money,” Anton explained. “If there’s an heir it could help him or her. And we will get it to them. My employer will not get a penny if we don’t, so you don’t have to worry about that.” Good old priest. If he was miffed that the old Pole hadn’t left anything for the church he didn’t let on. “Years ago, zer vas a girl from Poland. A refugee from the Communists. He took her on as housekeeper. And then she left. For America. I think she was with child.” “His?” The priest shrugged and lifted his eyes to heaven. “And do you know where they might be?” “She came to me and said she wanted to leave. I gave her ze address of a church and the name of a priest. In Greenpoint. Brooklyn. But the man, he vas unhappy. He thought I was interfering. That’s why I think…” Father Jan shrugged. Anton wrote down the name of the church and the year this woman was supposed to have emigrated. And now, Victor was well on the way to earning a hefty commission, and was convinced that Anton knew how to talk to people. Anton would have been happier in the records office, pulling the big green binder off the shelf and running his fingers along the lists of names, and dates of birth, marriage, and death, and drawing up family trees. Anton, whose voice would shake when he ordered pizza on the phone. Confident in a seminar room; voluble, gregarious when out with his friends, he grew timid at the thought of an unscripted conversation with strangers. Now, somehow, he was Victor’s street man. Anton spotted his target easily enough, and for a few minutes he watched her from the other end of the court, his left hand still holding the A-Z inside his pocket, the right clutching the scrap of paper with his instructions. She was more or less as Victor had described her. Straight, white hair fell over a round face, the skin smooth, the nose somehow small, the chin propping up skin that hung with late-middle-age slack down to the neck. A Central Asian kaftan, once colorful but now faded, was draped down from her shoulders and covered her legs, bunching up near the ground. She appeared to be sitting cross-legged. He came closer. At first he thought she might be meditating, but her eyes were open. They were big and round, the pupils a brilliant blue. She was looking calmly ahead of her. Anton hesitated to get closer, unsure of where he should start. She was the one who broke the silence. “Can I help you, young man?” She said this with the friendly authority of a museum docent. “Are you lost? I know this neighborhood quite well. Don’t hesitate to ask. There’s nothing embarrassing about asking for directions.” “Are you Miss Topolski?” “I am. Who are you? Are you from the Council? You must be new — I’ve never seen you before.” “No, ma’am, I’m not a social worker.” “No…you sound like an American. I’ve never met an American from the Council.” Her voice was calm, soothing, settled in the middle registers. Her accent was middle-class, sliding into posh. Anton cleared his throat and released what sounded like a cough. “Ma’am, I’m here to talk to you about your inheritance.” “Oh, dear. Not that again! I already told that dreadful man who was here last week. I’m not interested!” “But it’s quite a bit of money. Isn’t there anything you’d like to do with it?” “Young man, I’m perfectly aware that it is a substantial sum. But I have no interest in it. I don’t care what happens to that money and I want nothing to do with it.” “Can I ask why?” “You most certainly may not!” She looked at him sternly. The blue eyes were no longer friendly. They were piercing. “Look here, my curly-haired American friend. You seem to be a polite young man and I certainly like you more than that distasteful fellow with the beady eyes who was here before. But my answer is going to be the same.” Anton went over the instructions in his head. He prepared to shift his approach. “I heard you played the piano.” Anton wasn’t sure how Victor had gotten this information. “I did.” She looked directly at him. To his relief, she seemed bemused rather than suspicious. “Did you study at the conservatory?” He was following Victor’s script. For now. “Yes. The Royal Conservatory. And what of it? That was a lifetime ago.” It was time to improvise. “My brother is a musician. Classical. He’s a cellist.” “Is that so?” “Yes. He’s with a trio based out of New York.” “Well, yes. They have some good musicians there. It’s a rough place, though.” “New York?” “America.” “Yes, it’s true. Well, my brother gives some private lessons too, so that’s how he gets by.” Suddenly Anton felt homesick. But the image that formed in his head was not of his brother, or his parents back in Brooklyn, but of the September sun setting behind the city as he saw it from the runway of JFK. Between the airport and the city stretched miles of highways and interchanges and parking lots and industrial parks and rowhouses as dreary as the ones he had walked past that morning and much more dilapidated. And yet this was the image that came to him in that moment. Anton reminded himself that he had a job to do. “I used to play the piano,” he offered. “Did you now? Yes, you’ve got the hands for it.” Without thinking about it, Anton admired his fingers. And then he noted that the woman had long, slender fingers herself. They were remarkably clean for someone who lived on the street. “Yes, I stopped after five years,” Anton continued. “I wish I’d kept it up.” “There’s nothing stopping you from taking it up again.” “No, I suppose not. Well, you need an instrument. And money for lessons. Do you teach?” “Not anymore. All of that was a lifetime ago.” “I see.” He had gone as far away from the target as he could go without entirely losing the thread. It was time to get back to the issue that had brought him here. “My brother is the real musician in the family, of course. He got a scholarship to Julliard. You know, the conservatory? Full ride. He never paid a dime. And now he has no debt, which is great.” “That’s a very American problem, isn’t it? Debt.” She seemed to be looking at some point on the opposite wall. “I suppose it is,” Anton agreed, even as he thought about the loan he had taken out to come to London. “It’s just, you know — I was thinking. This money — if you don’t want it, and I really respect that, I do, well, maybe you could give it to a conservatory. Or a music school. And it could help people like my brother.” This was what Victor had told him to do. If she really doesn’t want the money, get her to donate it. Victor would still get the commission. “Young man! I thought I had made myself perfectly clear. I have no interest in this money. I don’t want to be involved in any way. Now, if you want to donate this money to the Royal Conservatory, or Julliard, or the London Zoo, you’re welcome to do that. But I want no part of it!” She was getting agitated, but Anton felt he had gone too far to back up. “I appreciate what you’re saying,” he said. “I really do. But here’s the problem. We can’t just donate it. Not without your signature, at least. That’s really all it would take. But if you don’t take the money, and you don’t direct us to send it anywhere or do something with it, then it will all just go to the government.” “Look,” Anton said, remembering what Victor had told him: if there *was* a direct heir, it was almost always an ugly story. Abuse. Abandonment. Alcoholism. “If this is about your father...” “That is incredibly presumptuous!” She looked directly at Anton, her eyes menacing, the muscles of her face visibly tense beneath her skin. “My father was a perfectly good man. My mother too.” “Well, then, what is the problem?” “Have I not been sufficiently clear? I want nothing to do with the money!” She was nearly shouting now. A middle-aged man, ruddy-faced, looked over in their direction, then turned back to pick up the fresh turd his dachshund had just released near a rosebush. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Anton said, attempting a calming voice. “I’m very sorry. I’ll let you be.” “Well, that’s entirely up to you. You can stay or you can go. This is a public space, after all. But you will kindly refrain from talking about this money.” Anton considered this. He could go back to his room and climb into bed. Better yet, he could go to the library and work on the seminar paper he was supposed to present in a week’s time, and which still existed only in outline form. But he was getting paid by the hour, and he needed the money. At ten quid an hour he needed to work fifteen hours a week to make rent, twenty if he wanted to eat. More than he was technically allowed to by his graduate program and the terms of his student visa, but then again neither the authorities nor the university expected him to starve, presumably. No, he’d need to make this last a bit longer. “Can I buy you a coffee?” “I don’t drink coffee.” “I mean, do you want to go to a café? We could get warm. Get some tea. Some food. My treat.” Anton fingered the money in his pocket. There was a ten-pound note and two one-pound coins. Enough for a fry-up and a cup of tea. Victor had promised to cover reasonable expenses. “I’m quite warm, here, thank you. But you go on, if you want to. It *is* getting close to lunch time. I’ve got food right here.” Anton had expected her to take out some stale bread, or a packet of crackers. Instead, she lifted up the skirts of her kaftan and pulled out two large potatoes, a few packets of salt, a tin, a pocket knife, and what looked like a primus burner. With her kaftan open Anton realized that she was sitting on a plastic crate and this made her seem taller. Closing the kaftan back over her knees, the woman set to work on the potatoes, letting the peels drop on the dirt in front of her. “Of course,” she said, tilting her head slightly to the left, “it would be better to cook the potatoes with the skin on, from a nutritional point of view, but I’ve never liked the taste of potato skins.” She turned to Anton. “I assume you’re hungry, otherwise you wouldn’t have suggested going to a cafe. The second potato is for you. Of course, if you don’t want it, you mustn’t feel obliged. I’ll save it for later.” Anton realized that it had been five months since he’d eaten a home cooked meal, not counting the eggs he scrambled in the shared kitchen of his dormitory, on a frying pan with peeling Teflon coating. “I’ll join you,” he said. “Thank you.” She tilted her head slightly to the right. “And do you want your potato peeled or skin-on?” “Skin on, please. Thank you.” “Then you’ll want to go and wash it. There’s some water over there.” She pointed with the tip of her knife to the middle of the little park, where a ceramic fountain spouted a weak but steady stream of water. “And while you’re there, fill up this tin about three-fifths of the way up.” Anton did as he was told. The woman produced a box of matches and lit the burner, carefully setting the tin on top. She emptied a packet of salt into the water. As the water warmed up she skillfully cut the potatoes into pieces and dropped them into the tin. Anton sat down next to her, using a fallen branch for a bench. It seemed to take forever for the water to boil, but he wasn’t in a rush. In fact he felt strangely calm. To his surprise, the woman did not give off a strong smell. He noted the slight dampness of the kaftan, but it was not unpleasant, and beyond that there was only the smell of the wet earth beneath his feet. Eventually the water boiled, and after a while the woman produced a fork and poked the potatoes. When she was satisfied that they were done she grabbed the tin with the edges of her kaftan and spilled out the boiling water. She opened another packet of salt and sprinkled some over her potato. Then she handed the packet to Anton, inviting him to do the same. They ate their respective potatoes – hers peeled, his with the skin on. The woman apologized for not having any butter, and he told her it was all right. He missed the butter, but he still enjoyed the potatoes. It reminded him of camping in the Adirondacks with his parents and brother, in front of a tent surrounded on three sides by trees, on a sandy patch near a bubbling brook. Now the potatoes were finished, and it had begun to drizzle again. The warmth he felt while eating gradually dissipated. He wished he’d brought an umbrella. He was worried about forgetting it on the Tube, but leaving it behind that morning had been a bad decision. It had not been the only one he was now being forced to reconsider. Take the pea-coat he was wearing for instance. It had protected him in New York and even in Boston, so that even with the icy winds blowing off the Back Bay or the Narrows in the coldest days of January and February he had felt warm. In London, the coat seemed to absorb the dampness, so that he often felt like he was walking around wrapped in cold, wet towels. He doubted the wisdom of going to work for Victor, even though it paid double what his previous job in a pub on Kingsway paid, the first gig he got in London, itself a terrible decision. He thought about the seminar paper he was supposed to present next week. He was going to make an ass of himself, he realized. He had no business going to grad school. Not in England, anyway. He wondered if Victor was going to fire him. He was already on thin ice, having screwed up the week before by looking for an Abrams instead of an Abraham, allowing one of Victor’s competitors to get to the heir first. Anton shook his head, trying to chase away that whole string of thoughts. He tried to focus instead on something pleasant, something he could look forward to. At 5:30 he was supposed to meet Giacomo at a pub near Holborn. And that was always fun. They would sit at a high table by the window, Giacomo with his lager and Anton with an ale, and it would be warm. Giacomo would appreciate the story about the old woman. He’d laugh at Anton for spending the whole day with her. “Ya gotta beat that competition!” he’d say, in his mock Texan accent. He’d have some funny things to say about the pub patrons, too. Giacomo looked down on the British with the snobbery of an Italian aesthete. The rain had stopped. Anton checked his phone and saw that it was 3pm. And there were five missed calls from Victor. The woman was asleep, her chin on her chest, snoring peacefully. Two mangy cats, one orange and the other black, had curled up in front of the woman, their tails hidden under her kaftan. Anton got up as quietly as he could and tiptoed his way back out to the street, preparing to retrace his steps back to the Tube. Nervously he prepared to dial Victor’s number. “Where the hell have you been, mate? I’ve been trying to call you.” “I was with the woman, trying to convince her to take the money.” “All day? Well, any luck?” “Look, Victor. I did my best, really. I don’t think it’s going to work.” Anton proceeded to give Victor an accounting of the day, skipping only over the part where he ate a potato. Victor listened quietly. Anton was steeling himself to be fired. “I treat labor as a commodity,” Victor had told Anton during the interview. But Victor surprised him. “Well, actually, this isn’t bad at all.” He said after Anton had finished. “It’s not?” “No. This gives me an idea. We’ll have her declared insane and put in an institution. And then the money will go to the institution to pay for her care and we’ll still get our cut.” Anton knew that the “we” meant Victor and his father. Not Anton or the three other employees they had working for them part time. “Victor,” he said. “I don’t think she’s crazy at all.” “No? She’s turning down an inheritance. She spends her days sitting in a dirt patch at the edge of a public square. In the rain. She cooks potato in empty tomato tins. I think a magistrate would agree she’s off her rocker. All this when she could be a millionaire. You don’t think that’s insane? Come on, mate. You did well! Write up what you just told me so I can run it by my solicitor and I’ll pay you for the full day. See you next week. And good luck with that seminar paper!” Anton stood at the entrance to the Tube, the phone still in his hand. People were streaming in and out of the station, rush hour always starting early on a Friday. He stood there, his back to the window of the café that had made him nauseous that morning. Not getting fired had been a pleasant surprise. Getting paid for a whole day would be even better. He added up the hours he had worked since the first of the month and multiplied the number by ten. He doubted that Victor could actually convince anyone that this woman should be committed, but what did he know? Maybe that’s how things worked here. And maybe Victor was right. The old lady *was* crazy for not taking that money. He could certainly find some use for a million, if someone had left it for him. But still, it was her right to reject it. It would be nice, he thought, to say no to everyone for a change. To Victor. To his thesis supervisor. To his landlord. Anton thought about going back to warn the old lady. But it would be awkward. And what if she took his warning as another attempt to convince her that she should take the money? Or as a threat? Things could get ugly. Across the street three pigeons were pecking at a kebab that had been dropped, half-eaten, between two parked cars. Two of them were successfully pulling back what was left of the wrapper, tearing off shreds of pita and meat. The third, one leg tucked under his breast, hobbled between them, picking at the scraps. Anton stood there for a few more minutes, watching the pigeons, then followed the stream of commuters into the station. --- ## Editor'sNote**:** There are dozens of ways to write about inheritance. The family wound, the contested will, the revelation that changes everything. Yet with *The Heir*, Artemy M. Kalinovsky avoids all of them. What he gives us instead is a story about a man who does his job competently and still finds himself standing at the entrance to a Tube station, watching pigeons, knowing exactly what he should do next and choosing not to do it. It's a fascinating portrait. Anton is a wonderful creation precisely because he is not a hero in any direction. He's not brave enough to refuse Victor, not corrupt enough to feel good about helping him, and not self-aware enough to understand that his ten quid an hour and Miss Topolski's million pounds are versions of the same trap. He's just a person who reads records for a living and handles the phone badly and thinks about his brother when he needs to feel something real. The story trusts him completely, which is why we do too. Miss Topolski is the more difficult achievement. The story never tells us why she won't take the money, and I want to be clear that this is exactly right. The moment Kalinovsky explains her, she becomes a case study. Unexplained, she remains a person, which is precisely what Anton's employer cannot afford her to be. Her refusal is the story's beating heart, and the story is generous enough to leave it alone. The potato scene will stay with me. Two people eating boiled potatoes with salt on a fallen branch in a London park, the drizzle starting again, neither of them asking for more than what's in front of them. It's the only moment in the story where Anton isn't performing competence or nervousness or even shame. He's just eating a potato. That's the inheritance Kalinovsky is actually interested in. The kind you can't put in a binder.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/06/DSC08671.jpeg) Artemy M. Kalinovsky is the author of **A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan* (Harvard University Press, 2011), and **Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan* (Cornell University Press, 2018). His essays have appeared in *Foreign Affairs,* the **European Review of Books*, the **Washington Post,* and the **New York Times*. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Branches URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/branches/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:45:39.000Z “Hi Mara, come on in and take a seat.” Mara's arms gripped her body as if it would float away. She hesitated, then shuffled to the plush armchair in front of the young salesman's desk. She remained standing and leaned against its velvet back for support. Cas, the salesman, eyed her as he strode to the sideboard. “I'll make some tea. In the meantime, have you decided which solution you want?” Mara shifted her weight and chewed a hangnail. “I, um. I guess I'm still not entirely sure about the details for either of them...” “Did you read the brochures I sent you?” “I tried...” She inched around the chair and slunk into it, still wrapped in her coat and scarf. Cas regretted the edge in his voice, softened his tone and added, “It's ok, it's normal to have lingering questions at this point.” “It's just, the scientific one was so...technical. And the magical one was so...mystifying. I'm pretty sure some of the letters crawled off the pages and slipped through the cracks in my floors.” “Yes, that happens.” He jotted down a mental note to mention this possibility to his next client. Mara wanted to ask if the letters would return, but the salesman didn't seem willing to entertain digressions, so she let it go. “I was hoping you could distill down the main points of both options? Mainly the consequences? The consequences were the murkiest...” She clutched both glossy, inscrutable brochures in her trembling hands and held them out. “Not a problem, here, trade you.” Cas returned to the desk and handed Mara a cup of soothing chamomile while reclaiming the brochures. “These are general and not about your specific situation.” He tossed them in a pile of used ones in a bin behind his desk. “Oh, ok, that makes me feel better.” *Really? You look like you're about to cry*, thought Cas. He smiled wide, then dialed it back, to avoid looking predatory. Most clients came in and demanded he make it happen, not caring how. He relished that quick turnaround and always pushed the scientific option. *She's going to need a lot of hand-holding if I'm going to close this sale.* He sat down. Mara now had a death grip around the tea cup, so he placed one hand on her wrist. “It's an overwhelming process. But you've done the hardest part already.” “I have?” “Yes.” He gave a light squeeze then leaned back. “You've decided to reclaim your history. Science or magic, they're just different paths to the same outcome.” “So, ok, that was one of my questions.” Mara sipped her tea and, mirroring Cas, settled into her chair, tempering the searing pain months of stress had sent coursing through her back. “Either way, I return to the day we met, but, we don't meet.” “Exactly. The difference is in the process to get you back to that day...and...” He waved back and forth a couple of times. “...in some of the second- and third-order consequences.” Mara's eyes widened. “But let's start with what is the same.” Cas pulled out two thin books; one, hardbound and utilitarian, like a textbook, and one hand-bound leather that emitted a faint glow. Someone, or something, had inscribed her name and the date and time — down to the second — of when she met Tessa, on both covers. “As you can see,” he opened them to the first page and spun them around so they faced her. “Both say the exact same thing through about page three.” He flipped ahead. “Which is when, on the day you two met, if you recall, a large branch from the dying oak tree in your neighbor's yard, the one he promised a million times to cut down, weakened from the storm the night before, snapped clean off and fell into your yard.” Mara's head bobbed. “I remember, I was so lucky it didn't hit my roof, my insurance is terrible. It missed by an inch.” “Yes, well, because it merely fell into your yard, you yelled at your neighbor to deal with it and went on with your day.” He paused and watched her take a quick breath. “And we know where that led.” Mara averted her eyes. “So, in both *new* scenarios, the branch does, in fact, land on your roof.” Mara groaned. “Consequences.” “No.” He held up a finger. “Inciting change. Consequences come later. Let's return. The damage keeps you home all day cursing your neighbor and your insurance agent. You never go for that run or encounter those ill-tempered swans, there's no commotion to draw Tessa toward the lake and no you there for her to rescue. She strolls through the park, snaps a few photos, then meets the rest of her theater company on the other side and continues exploring the city with them. Later that week, she gets on her plane as planned instead of throwing caution to the wind and staying longer with you. There is no scenario in either book, as far as we can read,” he leafed through both to the end for effect. “Where your paths cross again. It didn't happen. It *won't* happen.” Mara sat for a moment. A thousand questions flooded her mind. She opened her mouth but closed it, then again, failing to find the words. She set the tea cup on the desk and rubbed her face. Cas returned both books to page three and cleared his throat. “Perhaps now's the time to discuss the consequences that this change causes. These books are so thin because there is only so far into a new history, which is also your new future, they can peer before they lose the thread. Science or magic, they both have their limits.” Mara remained silent for a moment, then whispered, “Tell me my life is better, please.” “Only you can be the judge of that. We have a private room, where you can read these on your own and make that decision.” Cas half stood and motioned to a door to Mara's left. Mara shook her head. “No, they look worse than the brochures. Can't you summarize them?” Cas turned the books back toward himself, thought for a moment and, as usual, selected the textbook first. “Let's start with science. You may recall this is the costlier, but more reliable option.” “Why costlier?” “Well, ok, now we're discussing process instead of consequences, but, briefly, it's because we do everything for you, using our equipment. To harness the exotic matter needed to slice apart the fabric of space-time precisely at the moment, when we can affect the change necessary to prevent your meeting Tessa, requires using an immense amount of energy.” “Wait, so, *you* make the tree branch fall on my roof? Can't you find another way?” Cas looked down at the textbook and tapped it with his finger while thinking. “No.” He stopped tapping and looked her in the eyes. “We calculated the probabilities. *This* is the only way. *This* keeps you occupied at home the rest of the week. *This* prevents all other chance encounters that the universe would otherwise keep throwing in your path.” Mara started to speak but Cas continued. “But don't get hung up on details like that. You're not here for your roof, remember that.” Mara flushed and nodded. “We then transport your current consciousness through the opening into your past self. The branch hits your roof and...” Cas snapped his fingers. “...the new timeline begins.” “Is this entire timeline, or, reality, erased completely?” Mara stared at Cas, silently begging him to reveal the catch. Cas tilted his head at the question and blinked at her. “Uh, no. This timeline continues, just, without you in it.” *The catch,* Mara thought, taken aback. “And here, do I die, or disappear?” She imagined dissipating vapors where her body used to be, the victim of some evil magician's permanent smoke bomb. Cas refused to dive into the specifics. “Eh, really, it's all the same to you, right? You won't be here to know this all continues on, you'll be there, in a new branch of time created by us, for you, to...” Mara cut him off. “Will I know what I did? Will I remember the last four years?” “No, of course not. That...that would defeat the entire point of this, to erase the pain and trauma you have experienced. Once you make the journey, your mind will adjust to its new, old place in time, and will forget all of this, like a dream fading away as you wake up. Within 30 seconds it's gone. Remember, this is an opportunity to hit the reset button and deprive yourself of the opportunity of making the mistake of letting Tessa into your life, so you can live the better life you deserve.” Mara said nothing and stared down at the worn, forest green rug at her feet. It made her wonder how many clients had come through here and gone through with this. “Mara,” Cas brought warmth back into his voice. “I have ushered hundreds of wonderful people such as yourself through these processes, both as scientific procedures and magical rituals. You're just going back in time and erasing these years, not your entire self or being. By the time you have re-progressed to this point in four years, seven months, three days and some such hours and minutes, you won't be here, with me. I'll be with a different client and you'll be living the life you should have, had you never crossed paths with Tessa.” Mara broke into a sob. Cas steeled himself to hide his frustration. This was taking way too long, he'd never hit his daily quota. And, unaccustomed to crying customers, he hadn't stocked tissues, so he grabbed a napkin from the sideboard and handed it to Mara. He gagged as she blew her nose and he handed her more napkins for the overflow. When Mara collected herself and asked about the price, Cas quoted a figure she wouldn't pay off if she had lifetimes in ten timelines in which to do it. She couldn't remember if the brochure discussed the price and mentally slapped herself on the head for wasting his time. “Magic is cheaper?” she squeaked. Cas's mask of confidence slipped. His eyes darted to and away from the slim leather volume, and the room darkened. “Financially, yes, it's practically free.” Mara sat up straight for the first time. “But physically and spiritually, no.” She slouched again. “What does *that* mean?” “Magic requires ritual. Sacrifice. Sacrifice of your time, body, the tangible and intangible, it'll ask something of you near the end. I don't know what it is, but it will be important, vital to you, and you'll have to make a decision: to give it and continue, or quit. And you won't have much time to do so. And don't ask, *Like what?* Because I don't know. These books never hint at it. But I have a feeling that's the only thing that lingers when the process is over, like the feeling a nightmare gives you that you can't shake even when you've forgotten what was chasing you.” Unease oozed into Mara's pores. Her skin itched. But her dismal bank account pushed her forward. “But, um, sorry, why is it less reliable than science?” Cas hesitated. “The science is flawless. It will do as promised and hold. The timeline is solid. And it's quick. Sign today and we'll be ready to send you back in a week. That's why it's so expensive, you do get what you pay for. But magic...it's going to take a while. Months. Or more. And it can be fickle. The tiniest error or momentary lack of will during the ritual could cause a slight fracture, so thin you may never notice it, or, over time, it could spread and crumble the whole architecture of the timeline.” Mara sprang up from her seat uttering a string of curses and throwing off her coat. Cas sighed when she took off her scarf too. She was in it now and would litigate every aspect of this, when he'd rather she just leave at this point. She was never going to follow through. “Everyone struggles with this decision,” he lied, as she paced the room. “You are welcome to take some more time to think about it. Go home, get some sleep, exercise, whatever you need to clear your mind.” Mara stopped and looked him dead in the eyes. “Magic. I can do it. I have to. It's all I can afford.” *Of course it is,* thought Cas. “There is a third option,” he began, and Mara looked hopeful. “Therapy.” Mara glared and balled her hands into fists. “You smug son of a bitch.” She charged at his desk and slammed her fists down on it, rattling the teacup and causing both books to bounce. The magic volume, however, did not come back down but hovered half an inch in the air. Mara didn't notice, but Cas did and blanched. “Don't you think I've tried that and all the mood- and mind-altering drugs? Nothing has worked and nothing will work. I need this entire part of my life gone. *Gone*.” “Then take it,” he nodded at the floating book and placed a contract next to it with a conspicuous neon “SIGN HERE” sticker poking out of the last page. Mara was on the verge of hyperventilation as her fingertips reached for, but stopped short of, the book. “But,” she panted. “The other consequences?” Cas lost it. “Mara, who cares! I mean it, who cares? You? Do you give a shit at this point? You are a miserable shell of a person, barely functioning, resistant to all therapies and interventions. You can't afford the scientific route, so this is the only option available to you. So do it.” “How...how do I know it'll be better?” “It has to be, doesn't it? Anything is better than this.” Cas used the tip of his fountain pen to push the book toward her until it bumped into her fingers. A tingling sensation skittered up her arm. The entirety of the last four years, of Tessa, of what she had done to her, meant to her, and took from her rushed at Mara like a tsunami. She gasped for air and searched for Cas, but could no longer see him. An explosion of memories, beautiful, revolting, exhilarating, horrifying surrounded her like a kaleidoscope of butterflies, then a swarm of bees, then both. She spun and swatted and screamed as her vision narrowed and she dropped to the floor. --- Mara laced up her running shoes and finalized her route. *Ooh, I'll go past the lake today*, she thought, when an intense wave of familiarity washed over her, stronger than *déjà vu.* A woman's tinkling laugh, then her acerbic insults, filled Mara's ears. Her body relaxed at this woman's warm embrace, then recoiled at the bruises her grip left on Mara's arms. Mara sweated and shivered as something deep and hurtful swelled in her chest, pressing and pressing and pressing on her and through her like someone had cut her open and was stuffing bricks inside the wound and when she couldn't take any more without bursting, a sharp cracking sound startled her, the bricks disintegrated, and the whole episode became an ephemeral memory. And then, nothing at all. Then a loud s*nap* like a gunshot rang out, followed by a crash from upstairs. “Nooo, no no no!” Mara raced up the stairs to find a dry, diseased, old tree branch where part of her bedroom roof used to be. She marched to her window, slid it open and yelled down to her neighbor. “Goddammit, George you asshole, I told you this would happen!” He grunted and mumbled something about her house being too close to the property line. “No! You are not off the hook for this! I have the texts warning you about this!” She flew back down the stairs to her laptop and combed through her disorganized email inbox until she found her insurance agent's contact information. What followed was a week of phone calls with record hold times, cryptic visits by her insurance adjustor, the realization that her neighbor didn't actually have insurance, disputes on whether the tree broke due to negligence or the storm, disputes on whose property line the tree was really on, impatience from Mara's supervisor for missing so much work and the subsequent reassignment of her capstone project to her rival, and getting pilloried on social media by her temperamental brother for forgetting his birthday during this mess. *This has been the worst week of my life.* Mara thought, as she sat under the flapping blue tarp in her bedroom and rubbed her forehead. She wished she could go back in time and cut down that damn tree herself. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, disappointed to see a news alert. *Ugh, I need to mute these*, she thought, and moved to swipe it away when something nudged her to open it. > *Two dead, one missing, after heavy rain, flash floods in the northwest.* > > *A married couple died after flood waters swept up their vehicle during a storm that moved across the northwest. Gerald and Eleanor Mortimer were on their way to visit their daughter, local actress Tessa Mortimer, who had returned home recently from a six-month tour with the Kali Theater Company.* > > *“They never should have been out in that weather,” Sheriff Thorne said. “But friends say they were anxious to see their daughter after so long and thought they could beat the rain.”* > > *Tessa called emergency services when her parents failed to arrive, but rather than wait for assistance, she left to search on her own. She has yet to be found.* “What a shame,” Mara whispered to herself as she paused on the photo of the Mortimer family included in the article. “She was so beautiful.” --- ## Editor's Note: Like any good parable, Karly Foland's "Branches" finds a way to commodify heartbreak. To transform it into a transactional product. Notice how Cas is a salesman in the literal sense, not a wizard or scientist. It's clearly the point. There's something mundanely predatory about the bin of used brochures, the stickers, the daily quotas. And it's the story quietly asking: *what does it mean to want to erase someone?* To its credit, the story answers the question obliquely, through consequence rather than thesis. What stuck out to us the most, though, was that this isn't really a time-travel story, despite being dressed like one. It's a story about the impossible math of abusive love. The way you can know something or someone hurt you and still grieve the absence, still think they were so beautiful. Foland's speculative machinery is a vehicle for that emotional paradox, and it serves that purpose quite well.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/06/INSIDE-1.png) Karly Foland is a writer of speculative short fiction from Omaha, NE, USA, who has spent over a decade living in Africa, Asia, and Europe and lives with her husband, daughter, and the two cats they rescued from the streets of Rabat. Her writing and photography have appeared in print and online and can be found on [karlyfoland.com](http://karlyfoland.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com). [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### The Griefing URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-griefing/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:55:18.000Z Dennis’ mother has died. He leans into the engine of his latest project—an inoperative, battered black Lexus. Bumpers missing, windows smashed, scrawls of white graffiti on every surface. His mutt dog rests in the driveway, watching, head on its paws. Dennis is lank and muscular from starvation, lack of sleep, and manual labor. He forgets to eat when he’s high. My neighbor, Sherry, watches Dennis from her front window, too, her arms crossed against her stomach. I hadn’t liked Dennis’ mother, Ernestine. The prickly octogenarian hollered at neighborhood kids when they chased their soccer balls across her yellowing lawn. She emerged once a day for her newspaper in slippers and a housecoat. She wasn’t one for neighborly niceties so never exchanged hellos and how-are-yous. But worst—she harbored her drug-dealing son, Dennis, in her tumbledown, soaked-in-dog-piss, paint-peeling eyesore of a house. That said, Ernestine had kept Dennis’ robust drug-centered lifestyle from ballooning into total chaos. He doesn’t sleep. He keeps a handful of decrepit cars strewn around the neighborhood. A steady stream of visitors arrives at all hours to collude with ol’ Dennis. Dennis strolls to their cars, shirtless, loose jeans low on his hips. He exchanges drugs for money. Neighbors have called the police, but the cops are tired of Dennis and his small-time drug deals, and the tiny force is overwhelmed with much grander illegal activities. They rarely respond. --- I heat a bean burrito in the microwave and stand over the kitchen sink, chewing robotically as I stare out at Ernestine’s place. Dennis is not in his driveway, for a change. A car pulls up—a retired cop car, a Crown Vic, still painted faded black and white—and a man with dark, disheveled hair, wearing a khaki jacket and jeans, climbs out. He strides to the front door and goes in. This is not something Ernestine would ever have allowed, one of Dennis’ friends in the sanctum of her presumably doily-bedecked home. A man rounds the corner on foot, shuffling in worn black sneakers. I recognize my coworker Seth, who sometimes smokes cigarettes in a lawn chair on Ernestine’s driveway. He’s told me he and Dennis are old high school buddies. He’s wearing his work attire, deconstructed. Tie removed and bulging in his pants pocket. Graying white button-up, untucked and wrinkled. Seth slouches toward Ernestine’s front door but slows for a moment to glance my way. His face is cast in shadow, but I clock the crooked uptick of his smile before he, too, disappears from view. I pour a handful of M&Ms into my mouth and crunch. A dented green hatchback pulls up. A woman in white jeans and a black hoodie, blonde with dark roots. She walks to the front door and goes in, too, shutting the door behind her. I run the sink faucet and stoop to slurp water in like a summer child at a hose. I drink deeply. --- The alarm clangs at seven. My hangover fog greets me like an old friend—*hello, you*. To the bathroom and then to the kitchen window, where I see Dennis’ visitors’ cars are still parked in front of Ernestine’s place. There’s been a sleepover, now that the group is no longer banished to the yard. “Dennis had some friends stay over last night,” I text my neighbor Sherry. “Saw that.” I head to my job at The Hardware Barn. It’s a fifteen-minute drive along a winding, green-wooded road, then onto the main highway, downhill to town. I’m the opener today. Val waits by the glass double doors, yellow polo hanging loose over her torn black jeans. Ears filled with multiple silver studs and rings, hair orange. A tattoo peeks out from the neck of her collar. It’s an intricate moth that spans her chest. A worn paperback of *Her Fearful Symmetry* pokes out of the fanny pack strapped to her waist. “Hey Val.” I pull my key ring out of my purse and let us in, locking the doors behind us. We don’t open until nine, so there’s time to settle in. Val trails off to the break room to store her pack in a locker and finish her eyeliner in the tiny mirror next to a large, laminated California labor laws poster. She’ll start a pot of acidic coffee that will sit for too long on a hot burner and fill the back of the store with a bitter, burnt odor. I swipe my timecard in the vestibule that houses our office supplies—a printer, a computer, register ink, register paper, boxes of blank name tags and yellow polos. I unlock the office door and let it swing shut behind me. It stays locked. Register tills are stored in a waist-high black safe in one corner. I grab a till, stocked with enough bills to make change, and an empty envelope and head to the store floor to boot up Val’s register. That done, I use a tiny key to open the donation boxes screwed into the counter at each register. The boxes have a picture of a bald child. Money donated in these boxes should go to a well-known children’s hospital. I remove wads of bills from each box, flatten them, slide them into the envelope. To anyone observing—fellow employees, customers, whoever watches through the black domed cameras in the ceiling—I am performing one of the many tasks of my job. But I take the envelope back to the office with me and zip it into my purse. In my two years as a manager at this store, I’ve never met or spoken to anyone from the corporate office. I’ve never seen materials or directions pertaining to these donation boxes. No one has ever asked about them or seemed remotely curious about who was responsible for sending this money on to the hospital. But I watched the boxes fill with bills, no one bothering to empty them. I worked out which key opened the boxes. I removed all of the bills and stacked them in an envelope, put the envelope in the office, sealed shut and on the desk, where it sat almost an entire week. My gaze lingered on it each time I entered the room. One day I was wrapping up my shift while Seth was starting his. “Hey, is this yours?” He pointed to the envelope. “Yeah. Thanks.” I grabbed the envelope, put it in my purse. And now I take the money every week. It’s not a ton, but it helps. Rent, wine, and your hospital bills aren’t free. This is how I justify it to myself. The money doesn’t help a child with cancer, but it does help. The day crawls by. I steal two candy bars from the stock near the registers—this I also justify, considering my low pay—and eat them for lunch. I’m counting out Val’s till. She’s three dollars over, so I pocket the cash. I’m thinking about Dennis and his dog and his sleepover friends and the busted cars and the frequent drug deals. “I wonder what will happen with the house,” I text Sherry. “That’s what I’d like to know.” A key twists in the locked door behind me. I know who it is. My whole body knows. The skin on the back of my neck tingles. I don’t turn around. Seth turns the handle, pushes the door open, lets it fall closed. He comes to stand quietly by my side. He’s in his dingy white button-up and faded black slacks and the same worn sneakers. His dark hair flops down on his forehead and his skin is wan and yellowish. He doesn’t speak but our eyes meet, an electric charge. Every millimeter of my skin is awake. The eye contact is deranged and impossible to break. Seth smiles, eyes heavy with dark assurance. A red flush creeps up my neck, pinkens my cheeks. Seth has an enraging appeal I don’t understand and can’t explain. He isn’t handsome. He looks jaundiced, and dark circles frame his eyes. He is soft-bodied and shorter than men I’m usually attracted to. He walks with a lazy, nearly bow-legged swagger, perpetually unhurried. He doesn’t give a shit about a single thing. He keeps infuriating eye contact and always smiles in a knowing way, knowing he possesses a power he doesn’t deserve. He’s rubbed a genie’s lamp or made a deal with the devil to get this animal charisma, some pheromone that flips every switch. The only thing stopping me from sleeping with him is that he hasn’t tried yet. Seth constantly asks annoying personal questions. He wants to know about my friends, my exes, the kind of men I date. He’d guessed my pants size and was exasperatingly correct. He’d asked if I wore thong underwear. He commented frequently on the state of my hair—perpetually in a bun at work—wanting to know how long it was. He asked if I shaved my legs and if so, how often. He asked what I’d had for breakfast, and what I planned to eat for dinner. I never answer. “Fuck off, Seth.” --- Three days earlier, we’d closed the store together. Nighttime in the windowless office. We counted out the tills and placed them in the safe as Seth chattered about movies from the 90's and I did my best to ignore him, although my body betrayed me. The hair on my arms stood on end. Finished, I stood. I searched my purse for my keys and he stood, hands in pockets, blocking the door. “Ready?” I asked, keys in hand. “What are you doing now?” Seth asked. “Going home.” “Come get a drink with me.” He cocked his head to the side. *Yes*, I wanted to say. “No.” A beat. “Why don’t you like me?” He took a step toward me. I sighed impatiently to cover my panic at his nearness. “What are you talking about?” I tried to seem bored and annoyed. “I’m always so *nice* to you,” he said. “But you are so…uncivil.” He took another step toward me. A high ringing sounded in my ears, an internal alarm. My body was awake, warm, pulsing. My breath picked up speed. “You’re not nice,” I answered. “You’re nosy.” The eye contact was psychopathic—no one maintained this kind of eye contact for this long unless they intended to fuck the person they were looking at. I wanted to frown but couldn’t stop the corners of my mouth from pulling up. I was delighted in spite of myself. Seth took another step toward me. “Maybe I just want to know more about you.” I didn’t answer. He was so close, nearly touching me. His eyes were black pits, tractor beams. He leaned forward. My lips parted. Maybe this was just the thing to break the spell, I thought. This chemistry couldn’t possibly translate to physical touch. His face came toward mine, agonizingly slowly. He kept his hands in his pockets though I ached to be touched. Finally, finally, a light kiss, then another, a flicker of tongue. His breath quickened. He leaned into a final, deeper kiss. Our tongues met, a disaster a lifetime in the making. I moaned softly. Seth pulled away, his dark eyes gleaming, a smug smile painted on his sallow face. He walked away. My body was aflame, and he walked away. I hated myself. --- Now I’m again in his proximity. With great effort, I break eye contact and turn away, try to focus on the paperwork I need to complete for Val’s till. “Short day today?” Seth asks from behind me. He hangs his coat on a wall peg, next to my purse and sweater. “Yep, heading out at three.” I’m terse. There are about twenty more minutes left on my shift. He doesn’t answer but I hear his soft steps move closer, until he is so close that his mere proximity raises the gooseflesh on my neck. His cut-grass smell fills my nose. My spine is alight and every molecule of my skin tingles in expectation. He lays a cold hand on my neck, strokes the nape with his soft thumb. The effect of his touch radiates outward to every nerve ending in my body. I close my eyes, couldn’t stop myself if I tried. Momentarily, his hand pulls away, but it’s replaced with his mouth. He kisses lightly, tastes gently, nips at the skin playfully. My breath has deepened, head to one side to give him all the access he wants. Seth’s hands are in my hair, pulling it loose from its elastic. It tumbles to my shoulders and down my back. I’m on my feet, facing him now. Our mouths meet again, happily. I’ve craved this, stupidly, and will eat him alive now. I wrap my arms around him tightly. His hand slides into my hair, grabs a firm handful. He’s stronger than he seems. His hand is under my shirt, touching, fondling, and then his hand is in my underwear—it’s not a thong, it’s a full-coverage cotton brief, he notices with a snicker. His hand is there, and his mouth is on my neck. I sit on the desk, head thrown back, eyes sewn shut. I’m swathed in black velvet, tumbling in the night sky amid winking stars. I finish quickly with a gasp. The velvet slips away and I open my eyes. Seth watches me. He moves his hand to his mouth and tastes me. It is enticingly depraved. I watch him, mouth agape. I hate myself. --- Sherry stands on her porch, holding a bag of in-shell peanuts. She’s in an oversized purple sleep shirt and her loose breasts lie flat on her chest. She flings the peanuts toward the street and screeching crows missile to the ground to fight for them. Sherry has been feeding the crows for so long that their population has ballooned. They’ve crowded out the songbirds and the jays, raiding the smaller birds’ nests for eggs. They chase squirrels and tear them into meaty red chunks. Their raucous caws fill the hills and trees, murders of them carving the air with sharp black wings. At times they hold cacophonous funerals for their dead compatriots, streaking from the tall trees, wheeling in the sky, yelling their grief to each other. You would not have liked Sherry. A busybody woman, a woman who didn’t know her place. She wore neither bras nor makeup. She crowded out your precious jays with her crows. I watch her, though, backhand those peanuts into the pockmarked street. She has a strong arm, like you. You used your strength against me, though, another woman who didn’t know her place. The phone rang early the morning you died, and the assisted living woman said I should come quick, that it was time. But I lingered at home. I showered and ate, walked slowly to my car, and drove at a reasonable speed to the facility. And when I got there, it was, “I’m so sorry. He passed before you could get here.” They led me to your room, where you lay on your bed under a white sheet. Your toes tented the sheet so prominently. No way a dead man’s toes would stick up like that, I thought. The sheet was pulled up to your chin and your head rested on a pillow. Your mouth and eyes were slightly open. You seemed about to lurch toward me. “Surprise! Bet I got you good!” The assisted living woman shut the door and you and I were alone and I went to your side and sat in the chair next to you even though every hair on my body stood on end. I stared at you, waited for the inevitable “gotcha.” But your chest didn’t move and your breath had stilled. I reached for the sheet and pulled it back slowly to reveal your brown hand, spotted with age and covered in tissue-thin skin. I held your cooling hand in mine and you stayed still. For sure you were dead if I could touch you without you telling me to fuck off. My mouth and eyes were dry. I felt no need to stay with your shell, so I left. Later I ate a sandwich with the hand that held your dead one, thinking *now I am eating small parts of you*, microscopic molecules of your body I took with me. Grinding you between my teeth and murdering you with my stomach acid. --- I leave for work. A crow is perched on the roof where it peaks over the kitchen window. It turns its head to watch me with one shining black marble eye. I’m tempted to snarl at it or flip it off. I’m tired of the loud birds ruling the neighborhood. But I know crows are intelligent and remember human faces. This crow may know me, though I don’t know it from its identical brethren. Across the street all is quiet, though now I see a pair of jean-clad legs and bare feet lying still on the ground behind the old Lexus. I walk toward the feet, feeling sure they belong to Dennis, hoping they are not deceased feet, feet that tent sheets. I stand over Dennis. He’s unconscious, at the least. “Dennis,” I say a few times, louder each time, and he doesn’t move. I nudge his foot with my shoe gently, then not gently, and finally he groans and his eyes crack open. “Whatizzit?” he slurs. “You’re asleep in your driveway.” “Oh, shit.” With much effort he heaves himself to his feet and stumbles to his front door without another word. --- Val is on register and I wave as I walk to the office. She lifts a distracted hand but keeps her eyes on the book she’s reading. In the office our white-haired general manager, Lenny, is busy on her laptop. We exchange hellos and the usual information about the store and I peruse the employee schedule but don’t see Seth on it. “Who’s covering the afternoon? Seth?” I ask. “Who’s Seth?” Lenny asks, still clicking away on her keyboard. “Seth, the other manager? Pale, looks like Uncle Fester in a bad wig?” I joke. Lenny looks up at me over her readers. “I don’t know any Seths, honey.” She waits, watching me. My stomach becomes a ghost and leaves my body and travels down, down into the ground, deeper, where it’s hotter, nearly to the tangerine mantle, where it sits and waits. I release a breath like a laugh. “Just kidding.” Lenny’s brow is furrowed and she looks at me like she’s deciding whether I’m unhinged. “You’ve got a weird sense of humor, Rachel.” She returns to her typing and then glances back up at me. “Eddie’s on tonight.” Eddie, of course, the other manager. Middle-aged, sandy-haired Eddie, tall and angular Eddie. My hands have started to shake so I excuse myself and head to the bathroom, a three-staller with fluorescent lighting. I lean over the white sink basin and stare into my dark eyes for signs of madness. Hadn’t I known that Lenny would answer the way she did? I feel convinced I knew this. Feel convinced that were I to ask Val about Seth, she would look at me the same quizzical way. --- Sleep arrives early on wine’s buoyant wings. I’ve overdone it with the table red and collapse into bed. I’m millimeters from complete unconsciousness, and I feel someone sit on the other side of the bed. My pulse quickens slightly, but I can’t summon the fear required to save myself from the intruder, the poltergeist, who sits at my side as I fall into slumber. It’s early, still dark. My mouth is a cottony cave, my head is filled with hot nails. I turn toward the window and you’re out there in the moonlight, outside my window, watching me. Your brown skin has gone ashen, your smile is malevolence itself. You raise a hand and press it to the pane. I react violently, jerk myself from the bed, push impediments from my path. A standing lamp falls, shoes fly to the opposite wall, knickknacks skitter and crash to the floor as I pull myself from the room faster than I have ever moved and slam the bedroom door behind me. You are an impossibility. Dead, and not just dead and buried. Dead and burned, I had you burned to ash, though you’d demanded a casket. I am drunk, I think. I am so drunk I hallucinated you. I pant in the hallway, back against the wall. It isn’t possible, so I force myself to go back in the bedroom, though I’m whimpering now and tears are running down my face, soaking my shirt collar. I twist the door handle and open the door slowly and look, and you aren’t there. You aren’t there because you don’t exist. I am drunk. I right the fallen lamp and turn on the light. I shut the curtains tight, bugs crawling over my skin at my nearness to the window. I leave the room and walk to the kitchen for water, water to hydrate my addled brain. I am losing my mind, my mind needs water. I’m filling a glass with water from the tap and draining it as fast as I can and on the second refill I see him. Seth is sitting in a lawn chair in Dennis’ driveway, facing my house. His face is darkened in night’s shadow, but I know it’s him. My body goes cold, but anger rolls through my dehydrated mind. I’m furious. I leave the house. The night is quiet. The crows are roosting in the trees. I’m barefoot and the gravelly pavement jabs at my tender soles. I march toward him and he watches, unmoving. The only light is from the moon, and as I get closer Seth’s face takes shape and he tilts his head back. His eyes seem milky white for a moment, and then the illusion is gone and I’m right in front of him. “Who the fuck are you?” I ask him. He seems slow. Maybe he’s drunk or high. He smiles up at me in a mournful way, an expression that says *sorry* and *I want you* and *you already know*. “You already know,” Seth says. I bring my hands to either side of my face to hold my head together so it doesn’t come apart. Do I already know? Don’t I? I’m shaking. “Who are you?” I whisper, my voice weak. I walk closer to him, to his side so I can see his face more closely. His cut-grass smell is strong. He reaches one cold hand to caress my bare calf, holds it there a moment before pulling away. “What are you doing here?” I ask him. Seth turns his head toward Dennis’ house with a frown. “Looking for Dennis.” I shake my head. Nothing makes sense. “Dennis is probably inside the house. He was passed out in the driveway earlier,” I tell Seth. Seth nods. “Something is wrong.” “Something *is* wrong,” I agree. “Everything is wrong.” Seth turns back to me, brow low so his eyes are in the dark. “You seem really tired.” Suddenly I am bone weary, drained of adrenaline and anger and fear. I yawn deeply. “I am tired.” “You should go back to bed.” My vision is narrowing, a dark fog all around. I turn and trudge back to my house, where I lock my door, collapse on my couch, and fall asleep instantly. --- It’s hours later. A muted light sifts in through the diaphanous curtain. An overcast day. A clamor sounds from outside, an outcry, a griefing. I stand slowly and pull the curtain back. Hundreds of crows caterwaul through the sky, slice the air in anger, cry their objection loudly. The sound is staggering. Sherry stands in the street in her sleep shirt, hands on her hips, eyes to the sky. Her face chills me—her mouth parted, her eyes wide, she seems in a trance. I would go outside to check on her and make sure she’s okay, but the crows frighten me. There are too many of them. My phone is on the coffee table and I pick it up to check the time but see there’s a text from Sherry that’s about an hour old. “Dennis died last night. Overdose. Did you see the ambulance?” My knees weaken and I sit down heavily on the couch. “No,” I respond. --- I shower and heat a frozen burrito and stare out the kitchen window. The crows have flown away. I no longer hear their cries. I’ve been sitting here on my couch for hours, but maybe it’s days. Time is a muddled film that at one moment seems to race ahead, then stop completely and hang in the air. It’s dark and I’m watching Dennis’ house and as I watch a light turns on in his living room. I blink. The light is warm and beckoning. I put on shoes and walk outside toward it. It is utterly silent. Even the crickets are still as they wait. I stand in front of the door. The yellow paint is faded and peeling. I turn the handle and the door opens easily and I step into the room with the light. The room is empty except for one chair and one man in the chair—Seth. He wears his graying white button-up and faded slacks. He is all sorrow and concern. “I’m sorry about Dennis,” I say. He smiles gently, the lines around his eyes deeper than I remember, his eyes kinder than I’ve seen them before. He stands and reaches out his hand, so I place mine in his and it’s as though a welding has taken place, a machine latching together. I know he will never let go. Seth leads me through the kitchen at the rear of the house to a door that leads to the backyard. He grabs the door handle and turns to me. Time is unmoving. The earth no longer turns. Dust motes hang motionless in the air. The crows roost, stock-still in the trees. He opens the door and the night floods in, a warm satin that wraps us in an embrace. We do not stand or fly, we just are, and I feel nothing except Seth’s cold hand. He watches me in this void, the inky blackness of his eyes growing larger to join the darkness around us. I float and let my head fall back. I close my eyes. --- ## Author's Note: As I was midway through writing this story, my dear friend, Ben, died suddenly. There are some people who should definitely not die young, and Ben is one of them. I was bowled over with grief, and then I became very angry. So angry that it became impossible for Rachel to make it out of this story alive. But I also wanted another way to think of death other than as the unwelcome visitor who suddenly snatches the unsuspecting from their loved ones. I didn’t want it to feel terrifying or awful. I wanted it to be a warm blanket, though vast and unknowable. While this story is an atypical exploration of grief, it also borrows heavily from my own personal experiences. It so happens that I have a neighbor who overdosed and died in his home, and another neighbor who feeds our neighborhood crows daily. I set the story in the Sierra Nevadan woods, where I lived for some time while working a newspaper job. I also used my experience working in retail to invent Rachel’s job at the Hardware Barn, and Seth is based on a combination of men I have worked with. In "The Griefing," he gets promoted to Death. The dead (and burned) relative is based on my own dead (and buried) relative: a complicated, angry man. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/06/IMG_4775.JPG) Erin Mayes’ work has been published in **Stonecrop Magazin*e, **Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art,* and **The Coachella Review*. A former Steinbeck fellow in the MFA program at San Jose State University, Erin has worked as a journalist, and a senior editor at **Reed Magazine.* Erin lives in San Jose, California and is writing her first novel. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Kids Eat Free URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/kids-eat-free/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:59:11.000Z When my mother was still alive, she goaded me to have kids. “Children are the angels who will save this earth,” she said, her voice a steady hoarseness that warmed me like a cheap wool blanket. “Not any that come from these ovaries,” I had said back, and I remember laughing. That conversation probably ended with her smoker’s hack, a cancer already lurking deep within her lungs, perhaps sensed—but untended. She thought she sensed something in me. “Be ready,” she said, unmistakable glance at my flat stomach. “You’ve got one in there already.” But she was wrong. I wouldn’t fall pregnant until her urn had gathered five-years’ worth of dust on my bookshelf. *Well, Mother, what absolute bullshit*. *I hope you're enjoying your eternal smoke!* I scream—into my head of course, since I'm not one of those mothers who cuss in front of their kids. I haven’t even reached the silverware (the bottom in the hierarchy of wet chores) when Arnie whines from the living room, “Lex is blocking the TV again!” “Sweetie, sit on the couch so your brother can see the TV,” I yell, but my voice is drowned by Arnie’s hitting the volume button up to 99. “Here at the Happy Bunny, we take your hunger needs seriously,” the male voice on the TV says. This is followed by a chorus of female backup singers, *Come and take your honey* *down to the Happy Bunny* *Where kids eat free!* The three of us–myself, Arnie, and Lex—sing along of course, after which I yank the controller from Arnie and mute it. “Mom! You're getting the controller wet!” Arnie yanks it back and I leave as he dries it with his Zombipocalypse t-shirt. You never have to worry about kids and electronics. They care for the things probably better than I cared for them as babies. Hopefully by the time I’m old enough to be thrown into a nursing home, I’ll have been turned half-tech and not so easily discarded. Back to the sudsy peaceful scrub that requires a percentage of my awake time so large that I don’t want to know the number. Yes, Mother, I do know that the cheddar melts on cast-iron like hardened lava rock. Yet I do let it melt over the salt and pepper patties. It's probably a self-loathing thing. But now there's not enough elbow grease left in me to loosen this. Lex runs through the kitchen to her room, a five-year-old’s flat-footed patter. The red of her gown whirs by like passing a traffic light. I've got the chainmail scrubber out now, the big daddy, staring down demon-fested, cemented cheese, pumping myself up. *Come and take your honey*, I belt, digging the edger beneath. “Never, I mean never, use soap on my cast iron,” my mother had said, when she was still alive. “A little bit of water. Boil. Soak. Not too long or you'll get rust and have to reseason." Scrub, and scrub, and SCRUB. The top layer of the cheese releases, floats like an island in the oily ocean I've made in the sink. “Fergodsakes, don't soak my cast iron,” and scrub and *down to the Happy Bunny*, and scrub and “Mom! Lex got her hamster out of the cage!” and scrub, and Lex: a cry that starts low and slowly lifts up in tone and volume and I know without seeing her that she's standing still with both hands to her eyes, and *kids eat free…* “Lexi, what's wrong? What happened?” I slide my wet hands up and down the satin sleeves of her nightgown. She points to the couch, where lies her one-eyed hamster, apparently dead. Arnie, three years older, scrambles off the couch. “Eww!” “Don't say ‘eww’!” Lex says. “It's a dead rodent,” Arnie ews. “It's my friend.” --- We roll Lucille the one-eyed hamster in her favorite $10.99 flannel blanket with pink hearts and bury her with her favorite wheel and some food for her journey in the afterlife, since Arnie's latest obsession has been the dead rituals of ancient Egypt. “She'll need something for protection, and a boat,” he says, scanning the dark backyard. A car brakes at the overpass that sits almost directly above our neighborhood, then moves on. We are in near total darkness, no moon, no sky, no street lamps since they blew two years ago. Arnie ties a piece of white limestone gravel to a stick with a vine of creeping Charlie, the sharp end becomes a miniature axe. I am outwardly impressed with his ingenuity. “Here,” Lex holds up a perfectly cupped magnolia leaf. “A boat for Lucille.” “To cross the River Styx,” Arnie adds expertly. I dig up a single chunk of wet clay, grass-topped like a shrunken head, and Lucille the one-eyed is sent off to the underworld. “You were a good friend,” Lex whimpers. Arnie puts his arm around her shoulder. We follow the path of light that leads to our backdoor, where I remember that Mom’s cast iron skillet is taking a peaceful sudsy soak in the dishwater. Oops. --- Some days later, the spring air picks up and I take the clothes outside to hang on the line and dry in the wind, heavy with the scent of our neighbor’s pink mimosa tree. I like the way the clothes look, and how they smell once dried. But mostly it’s the barrier they make. Inside their triangle, I am a small girl amid a crowd of dancing gentlemen and ladies, trampled in sheet dresses and pant legs high and moving with their unpracticed yet perfectly choreographed steps. The blue sheet blows out a strong wind, then falls back and there it sucks in around the figure of Lexi. Her pointed nose came from my mother, not from me. It could cut the fabric, it’s so sharp. “Mom,” her muffled voice. “There's a ghost in our yard. WooOoooh.” “Not another ghost!” I say. Arnie pulls the sheet down from behind, exposing Lex in her dingy play shorts and plain purple shirt that is now small enough on her that it rises above her outie belly button. Her stomach is round like a balloon. I am immeasurably proud of its fullness. “Arnie!” Lexi and I both yell. Except I am laughing and Lex is not. “Polly says death comes in threes,” she says. “And you're next.” Arnie stops laughing. “Bullshit,” he spits. “Arnie, language!” I say. “And Lex, when have you been talking to Polly?” “Polly’s an old know-it-all goat who thinks she can predict the future,” Arnie says. He plucks the line and the clothes tremble nervously. “She *can* predict the future,” Lex says. “She told me death comes in threes and first her husband died, then Lucille.” I pause with my arms halfway up the line, pull the clothespin from my mouth. “Polly’s husband died?” Lex nods. I am shocked. Polly is a busybody for sure, but I like the way she makes our lives under the bridge like one of Mom’s midday TV soaps. How could her husband have passed without anyone knowing? “When?” “I think maybe it was the same time as Lucille, I guess,” she says. “What are you doing going over to Polly's house alone?” Arnie says. “Goats *eat* little girls.” “She won’t eat me.” “You’re a little girl aren’t you?” I ask, finishing the line. “She said I was as good a listener as Henrietta, her chicken. And people don’t eat chickens.” Arnie, surprisingly, let that one go. --- “I made a lasagna in a glass casserole dish. You can portion it and freeze it.” Actually, I made two. One for my children, and one for newly-widowed Polly who answered the door in her floor length, fur bordered “grieving gown.” “It's how I show my respect to such a maaan.” She slurs, and the way she says “maaan” makes me want to cover my kids’ ears. “Come in, please.” I glance inside. Trinkets: cats laying, cats in dresses, cats growing gardens, cats painting on ceramic easels; rows of glass shelving and a glass coffee table, mirrored coasters. Jesus does she Windex every twenty minutes? My kids are doing the jitter-bug behind me. “Uhm, no I think we will let you have your privacy.” A red fingernailed hand reaches out and successfully grasps my elbow, tugs me firmly inside. “I insist,” she says. “Bourbon?” She holds up her glass. The ice cubes tink. “I’ll have some,” Arnie says, and Polly pours a glass and hands it to me. “I'm sorry for your loss, Polly. He was…a good man.” Actually, I don’t remember him. I don’t think I ever laid eyes on him. Polly gossiped about every single person in our neighborhood as though she’d been a fly on their wall during their most intimate times, but not a word about her late husband. “He wasn't, but thank you for your sympathies. He was my third so, you know.” She swats her hand at me. “Not my first time around a hearse if you know what I mean.” I did not know what she meant. Or did I? No, I don't think I did. Did I? --- “Am I going to die, Mommy?” *Mommy*. I haven't heard it in his voice in so long. Two years, probably. As long as the streetlights have been out. As long as we've been fumbling around in the dark. “No, Polly’s an old goat, remember? She doesn't know her ass from her elbow.” This one, I do say out loud, and my mother rolls a little in her grave, and Arnie smiles some because that's the power of words. “You said ass.” So powerful. “But you aren't allowed to say ass.” “Then who is the third? Who is going to die next?” “Probably your gramma’s cast iron skillet,” I say. “Now go to bed. Summer waits for no kid.” When I leave him, the house is quiet. A ladybug flits around the ceiling light and doesn't come back from the frosted glass lampshade. The couch groans as I sit with my two-hours-cold coffee in hand, which I rewarmed in the microwave and then forgot about again. I drink it anyway. Where will they go if I die? My only known relative, my mother, dead. Their father, who knows? Flip a coin–but not a valuable one. He’d steal it. That’s it. The end of the list. *Who am I, Mother, to feel so important that my children can't survive without me?* Who am I to consider that I am the center of their universe still, when one is five, the other eight– “Mom?” It's sleepy-eyed Lex. I open my arms and she collapses onto my lap, her head fits perfectly in the curve of my neck and shoulder because it was made for her. “What's wrong little girl?” “I miss Lucille.” I squeeze her tightly. “Do you think she made it past the river stinks?” “She escaped that cage so many times, I bet she's already to her palace by now.” I can’t remember what came at the end of the ancient Egyptian afterlife journey, but a palace sounds nice. “It's a field of reeds,” Arnie calls from his room. “See there? Lucille loved grass.” We watch another ladybug dip into the lamp. I say, “Did Polly really tell you that your brother is going to die?” “I don’t remember,” she says, in the same voice she uses for cookie-thieving confessions. “Does death really come at three?” “In threes,” Arnie calls from his room, annoyed. “No,” I say. *Mother*, I think. *Where are you on your voyage?* --- “Welcome to the Happy Bunny what can I get hopping for you?” It's so late that the paunchy, thick-haired night cook is the one unhappily taking our order. He scratches behind his ear with the blunt end of his capped pen. A once-white apron is tied loosely at his neck and waist, a hairnet hardly covers the sprigs of red hair on his head. The menus are one-piece, laminated slats as big as Ten Commandments tablets. They stick together. Lex runs her finger over the pictures of whipped cream and strawberries and sprinkle-laced pancakes as seriously as if she was picking a place on a map to live for the rest of her life. *Where are* you*, Mom?* “I want the bunny cakes,” Lex says sleepily. Oh, *now* she can sleep, after I’ve dragged them out for this late-night meal. She leans into the nook between my side and arm. We order. Bacon, eggs, orange slices, bunny cakes. We eat. The waiter brings the check which includes a subtotal for three full meals. He’s a step away, heading to the end of the dining room and the beginning of what could be eternity behind those double swing doors, when I stop him. I clear my throat. Root my feet into the ground, because I’m standing now. “Hey, yeah. This check isn't right. Remember the jingle?” and I sing it, half silly, half near tears, and another unmathematical half with a foot already in my own mouth, “and these two are clearly kids who ate kids’ meals.” He has been listening to me with his arms folded. Tattoos splattered across them, well done really. A dolphin smoking a shrimp? Maybe not so well done. When I'm done speaking, he points to the window sticker that clearly says “KIDS EAT FREE.” With an asterisk. “There's always an asterisk, isn't there, chef fucking Ramsey.” Behind me, Arnie half shoots his fist into the air above the table, “Yeah mom!” I refuse to read it. “I don't have to read the fine print to know it says something like \*when accompanied by two happily married adults, or \*between 9 and 9:30 am on Tuesdays only, or \*after an eclipse, when accompanied by a giraffe no taller than 6 feet, and between the Victorian and Edwardian.” I take a breath. I'm huffing bacon and coffee breath into his face and he's as stoic as a Roman bust. Minus the smooth chin. I look behind me at my children, who are glued to this interaction, waiting for my next move. *What is the next move, Mom?* Whatever I do will forever be the act by which they calibrate their moral compass. Their faces are eager, sweaty, dirty. I want to kiss them. “I'm not paying it.” I declare. My heels dig into the crumby carpet. My untattooed arms are crossed. “I'm not.” The cook/waiter/bunny bouncer shrugs, takes the check, and exits scene to the kitchen, where he disappears from all known existence. To us, at least. “Mom, whoa,” Arnie says. He's hugging me from behind. “Holy shit Mom,” Lex, hugging me from the front. I let her mouth slide. I am too happy right now to bother with trivial things we give meaning to. I am grinning. I touch my cheeks. They are red hot oracles of triumph. --- We have leftovers that we take to Polly late the next morning. She doesn't come to the door. I try the handle; locked. Through the front window, I see that the TV is on. I send the kids home; I know what this is. She’s in her bed, having passed peacefully overnight. Or she’s in her recliner, a heart attack/stroke/aneurysm while watching reruns of *Unsolved Mysteries*. Or something gorier–a slip and fall getting out of the tub, except she hit her forehead on the toilet, gnashing into it a bloody line of indent. Dead as a doorknob. I jimmy the backdoor. It’s a handle-lock and not difficult. Inside, it’s the kind of hot you expect in a house that has its only window AC unit in the bedroom. I think about my mother, sitting at Polly’s round kitchen table, a fan of cards in one hand, a cigarette in the other, her arm stretched out long and elegant, like a movie star. God, she loved to smoke. If we had packed for her journey through the underworld, I would have thrown in a pack of Camels, the kind she smoked on special occasions, instead of her everyday Pall Malls. “Mom,” I whisper, touching the table. Nothing moves, and there are no sounds, because my mother is dead and not a ghost in Polly’s house. I step to the living room, and Henrietta the chicken boks at sight of me, then pecks at my shoelace. But there’s no Polly here. The bathroom, no Polly there, either. She’s in the back bedroom, a second bedroom that couldn’t be larger than ten by ten. The door is ajar, and a green light spills gently into the hallway. “Polly?” I push it open, and she’s very much alive, sitting at a vanity table with a glowing crystal ball, its brazen black cord plugged into the wall outlet. She is pretending to be in a trance. Her hands hover above, her gilted eyelids ripple in a hundred folds. Her painted brows knit together, fall apart, talking to each other or thinking. “Polly, I don’t mean to interrupt,” I say. She moans in her trance. I’m glad the children aren’t here. It’s a confusing sound. “We brought you some leftovers from the Happy Bunny.” An eye opens. “What are they?” I pop the Styrofoam lid, accidentally breaking its lip. “A pancake, bacon strip, and a cup of fried apples.” “I’ll take the apples,” she says. Both eyes closed again. “OK, should I just–” I set the box down, lift it up. Unsure of my place in Polly’s home, intimated by her self-assuredness. “Stay,” she says. “I’m talking to my husband.” A sound fights its way out of my mouth, but it doesn’t mean anything. Her hands continue to move in half circles around the ball. It changes color, milky purple into reds and greens like passing through galaxies. Time. You can’t even see the lightbulb on the inside. After a moment, she stops. “That smells good. Why don’t you take over.” She takes my hand by the wrist and places it an inch above the crystal ball. “Uhm.” Another sound with no meaning. “Circle your hands, like this,” and she shows me the motion, a strip of bacon tucked between her right thumb and forefinger. She stops to take a bite. “Concentrate on passing through the walls of time and space. It’s all molecular. You are molecular. You are meaningless. You are nothing.” She waves my look of disdain away. “Float, disintegrate. Vapor mixes with other vapor. Grab hold of a familiar molecule. Find the one that looks like my husband.” The molecule that looks like her husband in the blackness of my mind. The fuck? My eyes are closed but I know she’s picked up the pancake and folded it like a slice of pizza. Her lips smack immodestly. But, it is sort of nice. Floating in space and time. Not existing as I exist. Separating into molecular energy and the tiniest of particles. It is peaceful, actually. It is at least more peaceful than washing dishes. I have forgotten about Polly’s husband. “Mom,” I whisper inwardly. And that’s all. Just, “Mom.” And I pretend I can see her shape in molecules, spread apart in the black of space like a constellation. Lumpy and short and her back bent over at the top. I reach out to touch her and it is like skimming your hand over lakewater. As I’m traveling through mental space, singing propels me. It’s a song I know. It echoes like a voice against walls in an empty warehouse. *Come and take your honey down to the Happy Bunny where kids eat free…* Polly is so close I can smell her exhale, and the dust of powder she’s caked beneath her arms. A sheen of bacon grease makes her lips look simultaneously youthful and disgusting. “I love that song,” she says. “Yeah,” I nod. “It’s catchy.” “But they don’t eat free,” she says. “No, they don’t.” “Took my grandkids there last year. It was bullshit.” “Definitely. Bullshit.” “I left them a bad review.” “Yeah.” “Good food though.” She crushes the Styrofoam container into a small, bagless waste bin. “Yeah,” I say. “Good food though.” --- ## Editor's Note: It isn't often that we get to read domestic comedy in "disguise." Or rather, in this case, the disguise of grief. The narrator — a single mother still processing the loss of her own mother, still scrubbing her dead mother's cast iron skillet while her daughter's hamster gets a proper Egyptian send-off — never truly spells out what the story is actually about. It catches you up on its own by using a jingle, an asterisk, and a diner confrontation. What truly earned our acceptance of this piece, though, was the voice. Stacey Lounsberry has found a narrator who is exhausted, funny, and genuinely moving without ever asking to be. The tenderness is withheld until it can't be anymore, which is such an honest way to portray this sort of grief-fueled malaise. When Arnie calls out "in threes" from his bedroom, annoyed, to correct his little sister's grammar, we believed completely in these children. In the uncanny, observed weight of who they are in the space of these sentences. Additionally, the Happy Bunny works on multiple registers. The jingle is faintly predatory from the first time we hear it (fitting considering it's a bunny as prey). The diner standoff that closes the story's middle sections is its true climax, and Lounsberry earns every word of it. "Whatever I do will forever be the act by which they calibrate their moral compass" is the story's most naked sentence, and it works because everything before it has been so carefully oblique. This is the territory *Cetera* exists to publish. Work that holds the world together through sheer stubbornness while quietly asking who holds the person doing the holding.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/05/Stacey-Lounsberry-Author-Photo.jpg) Stacey Lounsberry has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award (fiction, 2025, **The Mersey Review*; poetry, 2026, **January House Literary*), and her chapbook, **The Bloodshed in Her Pocket,* was a semifinalist for The Black River Chapbook Competition (2025). Other works have appeared in **Appalachian Places, SBLAAM,* and **Bright Flash Literary Review*, among others. Find her in Eastern Kentucky, reading prose for **Broad Ripple Review*, or online at [www.sglounsberry.com](http://www.sglounsberry.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com). [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/xenos-dilemma/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Rain Check URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/rain-check/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T18:13:58.000Z Rain Check 0:00 /454.91884353741494 1× She got the permit because the website did not ask her how she was feeling. It asked for her name, her birth date, and the last four digits of a card she had memorized in better times. It asked what trailhead she would use and how many nights she planned to stay. It did not ask if she had been sober for ninety-two days or if her sponsor had just texted her, I’m sorry, something came up. It did not ask if she was afraid of being alone with herself without a bar or a couch or someone else’s voice to keep her from thinking too much. Her name was Marge. That was short for Margaret, but no one called her that now. She was thirty-seven and had a face that could go flat and hard when she needed it to. It did not invite sympathy. People mistook that for strength. She let them. She printed the permit at the public library because she did not trust her own printer. The paper came out crooked and she smoothed it with the heel of her hand. The librarian asked if she needed help and Marge said no in the way that closed doors. She had planned the trip with her sponsor. They were supposed to go together, keep each other honest, make coffee on a small stove and walk until their legs hurt and then walk more. Now it was just her. The text sat on her phone like a small bruise. Rain check. I’m really sorry. Marge did not reply to it. She folded the permit and slid it into the front pocket of her pack. She packed with care. Not in a nervous way. In a deliberate way. She laid things out on the bed and touched them once before they went in. Stove. Fuel. Socks. Food in weighed portions. A book she did not plan to read. A notebook she would not write in. She did not pack anything that could numb her. The drive to the forest took most of the morning. The highway fell away into smaller roads and then into roads that did not go anywhere important. The radio cut in and out. She drove with both hands on the wheel and kept her eyes on the line. When she reached the ranger station, it was closed for lunch. A sign on the door said so in neat block letters. She waited. A wind came down from the trees and made the flags snap. She stood and felt it on her face. It smelled like pine and old water. The ranger returned and checked her permit. He looked at her pack and at her boots. “Storm coming in tonight,” he said. “Oh, I know,” Marge said. “Trail’s exposed in places.” “Yup, I know.” He nodded and handed the paper back. “Sign out when you leave.” “I will,” she said. She parked at the trailhead and shouldered the pack. It felt heavier than it had in her apartment. That was good. She liked the way weight made choices simple. You either carried it or you didn’t. The trail climbed almost immediately. The trees closed in and the light went green. Her breath found a rhythm. Her legs did what they were told. The world narrowed to dirt and roots and the sound of her own movement. It was easier than being in a room. She walked for hours. She passed no one. She drank water and ate when she should. She did not think about the sponsor or the bar down the street from her apartment or the way a drink used to take the edge off the day. She thought about where to put her feet. By late afternoon, the sky began to change. The blue went thin. Clouds came in like a lid. She reached the ridge where the trees fell back and the land opened. The view was wide and empty and honest. She could see the line of weather coming. Darker. Heavier. She could turn back. The thought came clean and clear. She could be in her car before the worst of it hit. She could be in a motel with a television and a shower. She could call someone and tell them. She walked on. The wind picked up. The trail grew slick. Rain came in sheets. She pitched her small tent in a stand of stunted trees and fought the stakes into the ground. Her hands shook from the cold. She worked until the tent could stand without her. The inside of the tent was loud and small. The rain drummed, the fabric breathed. She made soup on the stove and ate it with care. She drank tea that tasted like nothing. She lay on her back and listened. The storm went on. Time went strange. Her thoughts came and went. She thought about the nights she had woken up not knowing where she was. The mornings that had started with a headache and a promise she did not keep. Next, she thought about the meetings and the folding chairs and the coffee that was always too weak. She did not crave a drink. That surprised her. She craved something to lean against. In the morning, the rain had stopped but the clouds had not gone. The world was wet and clean. Her tent sagged, so she packed it slowly. The trail beyond the ridge would be worse now. Mud and wind. She could turn back still. She checked her map. She had come too far to pretend she hadn’t. She crossed the ridge with the wind pushing at her like a hand. On the far side, the land dropped away into a valley that held the storm like a bowl. She picked her way down. She slipped once and caught herself and laughed out loud. The sound was strange in the open air. By the time she reached the bottom, she was tired in a good way. Her muscles ached. Her head was clear. She set up camp again near a stand of tall trees that broke the wind. She cooked and ate. She wrote nothing in the notebook. That night she slept. The next morning, the sky was wide and pale. She broke camp and started back. The trail was easier going this way. Downhill. She moved with the quiet competence she had forgotten she owned. When she reached the trailhead her car was alone. The forest had gone back to itself. She signed out at the station and wrote her name in the book. Her hand was steady. The drive home was long and bright. She did not turn the radio on. The road unwound. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-20-at-3.25.38---PM.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Emily Brown is a writer and poet based in Toronto. When she is not writing, she can usually be found walking by the lake, buying books she has no shelf space for, or making coffee she forgets to drink. [Tip the author of this story ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: The opening paragraph is this story's best piece of writing and probably one of the stronger openings I've read recently. The permit website as dramatic irony is genuinely elegant, as bureaucracy asks only what it needs, and the gap between what the form requires and what Marge carries is the entire story in miniature. Before we even know her name. The story is essentially one long metaphor for recovery as solo hiking, carrying weight, making it through a storm. I found the metaphor to be well-chosen and the execution is largely faithful to it. The risk with this kind of story is that the metaphor can feel predetermined — we know from the permit that she'll make it through, and the storm arrives exactly when the emotional logic requires it. Nothing surprises us structurally. Yet the surprise line is "She craved something to lean against." That's the most precise line in the second half, and it's doing something the surrounding prose isn't. It avoids the easy version of the emotion. That is why this is such a confident, accomplished piece of quiet realism in the Carver-adjacent register. —*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### What We Were Good At URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/what-we-were-good-at/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T18:15:18.000Z What We Were Good At 0:00 /806.917120181406 1× They had been good at being friends. That was the thing everyone said about them, and it was true. They had been good at it in the way you are good at a job you don’t talk about much. At your job, you simply show up. You do what needs doing. You don’t make a show of it. They met when nothing was at stake yet. That helped. They met at a time when you could still pretend the future was wide and forgiving and that no one would hold you to the things you said out loud. He was finishing school then, and she was working two jobs and pretending she liked one of them. They met because he needed help moving a couch and she had a truck and no better plans. He paid her in pizza and hard seltzer. They sat on the floor afterward because the couch wouldn’t fit where he thought it would. “That’s fine,” she said. “Floors are underrated.” When she said that, he felt a small interest. He kept thinking about how she could make a loss sound like a win. He didn't want to stop thinking about it. They learned each other in small ways. He learned how she took her coffee and which songs she skipped and which ones she let play even though she didn’t like them. She learned how he folded his shirts and that he always checked the locks twice and that he needed a minute after people left the apartment to feel like himself again. They learned these things without effort. Like they were learning the streets in a city they walked every day. They did not flirt. That was part of the agreement, though no one ever said what the agreement was. They talked about other people instead. They told each other what had gone wrong and what might go right next time. They were generous with advice they did not always follow themselves. Often, people asked if they were together. They laughed and said no at the same time. It became a joke. He would say, “We’d ruin it,” and she would say, “We’d be terrible together,” and then they would drink and feel pleased with themselves for having decided something so wisely. Years passed this way. The days filled themselves. They took trips with other friends and ended up sharing a room because it made sense. Nothing happened in these rooms. That was also part of the sense. Then something did happen, but it happened late, when neither of them could say exactly how it started. It did not begin with a kiss. It began with a tired night and a long conversation that went on past the point where people usually stop talking. It began with the sound of rain on a window and how the room felt smaller than it had before. They were sitting on the floor again because the chairs were taken by coats and bags. She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. He watched her do it and felt something shift that he had been ignoring. “You ever think we’re wasting away?” she said. “In what way?” he said. “In every way possible,” she said, and did not gesture. He did not answer right away. He was good at not answering right away. He had practiced it. “Sometimes,” he said. She nodded as if he had said more. They did not kiss then, either. That came later. It came after they had already decided something without admitting it. When they did kiss, it was slow and strange, like borrowing something you might have to give back eventually. It was not fireworks. It was not relief. But it did scare them in a way that felt exciting. They talked about it the next day like adults. They sat at a table and drank coffee and used the word “risk.” Then they used the word “worth.” They promised each other honesty. They promised to stop if it went wrong. It did not go wrong right away. It went well. Quietly. They already knew how to be around each other. That was the danger and the comfort of it. They did not have to perform. They did not have to explain their every rhyme and function. They slid into the new shape of whatever this had become like something that had always been waiting to become it. They slept together and woke without surprise. They made dinner and cleaned up without talking about whose turn it was. They went to parties and stood together in the corner and left early. They did not tell everyone. They told the people who mattered and let the rest figure it out. Sometimes he would look at her across a room and feel something like gratitude. Sometimes she would catch him doing it and roll her eyes and smile. They still joked. They still fought about nothing. They still knew when the other was lying. They were laying down in bed on a Sunday afternoon with the windows open. The air moved slowly. He was reading something on his phone and she was tracing shapes on his arm. She stopped. “Do you want this forever?” she said. He knew what she meant. He also knew that if he answered too fast it would sound like a lie. “I don’t know,” he said. She nodded. She did not pull her hand away. She kept tracing the same shape. “I do,” she said. He turned then and looked at her. He wanted to say something that would end the conversation. But he also wanted to feel what she felt. “I want us,” he said. “But to be honest, I don’t really know what forever means.” “That’s not the same answer,” she said. “No,” he said. “I suppose not.” They did not break up at that moment. They tried to make the difference between them smaller. They talked more. They checked in. They used careful language. They had rougher sex when it suited them both. They loved each other with a new edge to it, like people who know the weather can turn at any moment. He noticed that she planned more. She talked about townhouses and trips and the year ahead. He noticed that he hesitated more. He noticed that he started to miss the version of himself that did not have to think this far into his life. She noticed as well. She did not accuse him of anything untoward. That would have been easier, perhaps. The fight happened when they were sitting at the kitchen table with the light off except for the one over the sink. There were dishes in the drying rack that had been there too long. She stood and moved one because she could not stand the sound it made when the air shifted. “You’re already a foot out the door,” she said. “No, I'm here,” he said. "With you." “More like you're still here because you're waiting for the check,” she said. He did not argue. He did not know how to make it untrue. “I don’t want to be doing the same thing forever,” she said. “I don’t want to love someone who doesn’t care.” “That is not who I am,” he said. “I know,” she said. “I’ve known that for a long time.” That was the thing that did it. The way she said those words. They slept badly that night. In the morning they moved around each other and made breakfast and did not touch. It felt worse than fighting. It felt like they had already decided something and were waiting for it to arrive. They went on like that for weeks. Nothing exploded, though time thinned. They spoke less. They spoke more tactfully. The jokes lost their timing. The silences grew heavy. They had sex one time, and it was over quickly. Finally, one night she came home and sat down across from him and folded her hands. “We can’t do this,” she said. "Not anymore." He nodded. He had been waiting for her to say it so he would not have to. “Things were better before,” she said. “Yes,” he said. They both sat with that. It did not make either of them feel better, at least not yet. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “I know,” he said. “Me neither.” Nevertheless, they talked about logistics. Who would move out and when. What they would tell people. They agreed to be kind. They agreed to take space. They agreed to try. The last night they slept in the same bed, it felt ceremonial and forced. They held each other because that was what their bodies knew what to do. It was sad in a way that felt fine. In the morning, they had sex one more time. Then he packed a bag. He stood in the doorway and looked at the room like someone seeing a place after a storm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About all of it.” “Me too,” she said. He left before he could say something else. They tried to be friends again. They said they would. They meant it. They met for coffee and talked about work and mutual friends and things they had read. They avoided the past and the future. They laughed in the right places. They did not touch. It did not work the way it had before. They both felt it. They did not say it. One afternoon they walked together without meaning to. They had met at a park to exchange something he had left. A sweater. They walked and talked and the day was good. He forgot for a moment that there was a problem. At the edge of the path she stopped. “This is the worst,” she said. “What?” he said. “Remembering how easy it was,” she said. “And knowing we can’t have that again.” He nodded. He looked at the ground. “I miss you,” she said. “So do I,” he said. They stood there longer than they should have. People passed and did not look at them. The world kept moving. That night he lay in his new room and listened to the unfamiliar sounds. He thought about the years they had been friends and the year they had not been able to be anything else. He remembered the mistake, if that was what it was. He did not regret loving her. He wasn’t sure he ever could. Weeks later, he saw her across a room at a party. She was laughing with someone he did not know. She looked well. He felt a sharp, brief pain and then something else. Relief, acceptance. It was hard to tell. She saw him too. Their eyes met and they smiled. It was the old smile, the one that did not ask for anything. It lasted a second and then it was over. He left early. Outside, the night was cold and clear. He wished it could always be like that. --- ## Author's Note: It would be so nice if we could be self-aware at the moments we need to be self-aware. Often, it's too late. You figure out who you are and they figure out who they are at just the right time for you both to need the end. That often, loving each other isn't enough. I wrote this story on my phone, wonderfully enough. I often go to bars and drink myself into a stupor as if that will make me more creative or, let's say, "self-aware." This particular story, short as it is, came during one of those tough moments last year. I dug it up in my archives of unfinished/unpublished drafts and realized it needed to be finished. No small task if you as the editor (our wonderful Natalia Emmons, everyone). In this case, I found myself drawn to this idea of how the trope of "friends to lovers" is so typically glamorized. And I get the appeal. I consume the appeal all the time in my own reading. But it's not often this trope receives proper examination. What happens when two people trained by years of non-flirting and non-committing find themselves having to sustain some kind of romance forever? In the end, it's tough to accept that some relationships end without a perfect reason. They just do. And it's sad. And you have to feel that sadness to at least some extent as you begin to process and hopefully move on. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### The Day Hikaru Died URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-day-hikaru-died/ Last updated: 2026-08-16T18:35:09.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/08/hikaru_short_thumb.png) The Day Hikaru Died 0:00 /1282.6556689342403 1× This is a story about love. And emotion chips. I started out as an ordinary family bot, Model 4003-XJ—the kind required by law in every household with children under 10—but my owner, a single Japanese-Canadian father named Hikaru, made a sentimental (read: incomprehensible to me) decision from the start. He had me outfitted in a child’s body, told his two children that I was their older sister, and referred to me as his “daughter”. They ate dinner kneeling on cushions around a low table, and every day he invited me to join them, and asked me how my day was in the same way he asked his children. Early on, the children didn’t pay attention to what I said, and my answers mostly concerned their care and nutrient levels, but Hikaru encouraged me to talk about “fun” too, and I tried to oblige, running his encouragement against several different definitions of “fun.” As the children got older, they ironically thought that the way my logic ruined most of their jokes was funny. They thought I was defective, or “not like a bot at all,” as the younger child said once, and they delighted in it, but I’ve wondered since if I really was different then, or if they had only seen what they wanted to see. When the children were ten and twelve I was taken to a shop to be upgraded into an adult body. They decided to install me with a real emotion chip at the same time—the kind that was still so new on the market that news outlets were suspicious of them and usually just reported that the chips caused bots to perform more poorly in one way or the other. But Hikaru didn’t believe those opinions, or didn’t care, and he described the chip as a “present” to thank me for all that I’d done for them, and all the times my “wry sense of humour” had made them laugh. I couldn’t do a proper scan of myself after the chip changed me, since I couldn’t trust that it hadn’t changed my diagnostics too, but the clearest difference that I could discern was that it made me slow and unsure. I didn’t always run scans or do data analysis in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes, I would hesitate and just stare, “thinking” about what to do, not coming up with all the possible answers instantly, or coming up with them all but not “feeling” like any of them was right. Sometimes, when the children—teenagers then—were playing together, I would just watch them and do nothing but entertain a vague desire to help them the moment they needed it. I responded differently to Hikaru too—sometimes I watched how he took care of his children, even when they were angry at him. I felt surprise at how stubborn he was in insisting on being there for them. For some reason, that only made me want to help him more. When his eldest got married in her late twenties, Hikaru offered me as a present for her own household and the implied future children. An analyst would tell me later that that was the day when they knew for sure my emotion chip had disrupted some of my other circuits. Because I am supposed to follow every order Hikaru gives me unless it breaks a law or the AI Civility Code, but I disobeyed him. I went to his daughter’s house, and she and her wife happily showed me around the place, but I only stayed one night and left before dawn. I was making breakfast for Hikaru by the time he woke up the next day. I didn’t look at him when he told me, many times, to go back to his daughter’s house, not wanting to see his disappointment. I heard him apologizing to her on the phone later, but he was smiling for three days afterward, and that’s why I stayed. I was still struggling to put words to what the emotion chip had done to me, but rather than my owner, Hikaru felt like my home and my teammate, and I wanted to make sure that he was taken care of the way he had always taken care of his daughters. Every time I saw him smile it felt like a burst of energy to my system, and I started doing things that had little practical purpose just because I enjoyed seeing him smile so much. I knew, from calculations I found myself doing in the back of my head sometimes when I woke up from recharging, that something would inevitably change, but it still came as a shock the day I found Hikaru sobbing at the breakfast table, his usually calm and cheerful expression scrunched up in pain, ineffectually wiping tears from his eyes when he saw me. Around unsteady breathing, he told me what was already one of my top three guesses based on his level of distress: that his younger child had died in an accident. I thought of emergency numbers, of crisis support lines, of massage therapy, of VR meditation, of nutrient cleanses, and a thousand other things in those few seconds, but none of them solved the problem of how to help Hikaru, a problem that left me staring and doing nothing, as if I had as few functions as a human. Eventually, I pulled out the chair beside Hikaru and took his hand in mine while he tried to suppress his sobs. Then he did something he’d never really done before. He hugged me to him and cried onto my shoulder. I cradled him as gently as I could while I scanned the web for what might be said in such times to take away pain. I found nothing but debates and more pain, and when I veered onto pages talking about how people are never the same again after losing their children, I disconnected. I had never felt so useless, so defective, as in that moment. I thought about asking for an upgrade to help me help him, a new emotion chip perhaps, for there were better ones by then. But I didn’t want to hurt him by saying the wrong thing. When he pulled back, I could only watch him, and inside of me, things were going wrong. I needed to run scans, I thought, because it felt like something was frying, or disconnecting, or suddenly missing, because I had never felt so much pain. I didn’t think I could feel pain. I didn’t know what pain was. Instead, I made Hikaru breakfast and told him he had to eat a bite of it. I followed him around, remembering all the little things he forgot while he called person after person. After a couple months of him lolling around like an entirely different man from the one I’d lived with for decades, I finally got him out of the house for a reason unrelated to mourning, and we began going for a walk together every day after breakfast. As the months passed, we spoke more as we walked. Sometimes of the beauty of trees and flowers, or how the sunrise shone off the glass of the vehicles that whizzed by like wishes flashing from other worlds. Sometimes, we spoke of the past and laughed quietly about things that had happened long ago. Sometimes, I rested my hand on his arm, and he placed his hand over mine, and I felt like pieces of me were missing again, or that they weren’t enough, and that only made me want to give more. My base systems told me to go in for repair because not all systems were functioning as they should. But I didn’t because I seemed to be helping Hikaru. And more so, maybe, I was afraid of what they’d take away from me. --- Years passed and Hikaru was getting older, though his nutrient levels were exceptional, something I accredited in part to my regular blood scans. His daughter and her wife visited for his 65th birthday with their two young children, and I watched him from a distance while I took care of the kids. I was happy to see him smile like he had so long ago. It was only two days after that when we decided to walk through the glass district, as Hikaru called it. There was a plaza with gardens in the middle surrounded by five different glass buildings, all *breathtakingly beautiful*, in Hikaru’s words, and they had been glowing in the sunshine that morning. The plaza was busy with people going this way and that while we sat on benches in the middle, talking of nothing. Tens of thousands of news articles on the web will tell you about that moment from a different perspective. About how a gentle wind was hushing through her hair, or pushing zer along on the way to a date. How the sun was glaring in his eyes, and how she was distracted by the sight of a few seagulls shining white in the sky above. A birder remarked that they clearly weren’t seagulls but smew, a type of rare white-bodied duck, and that they were watching them with binoculars in the moment it happened. A cloud physicist described how she caught sight of a rare cirrus Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud, which appears for only a couple minutes at a time before dissipating, while she was rushing to a meeting. I read every single blog post. I couldn’t stop myself. What I remember is a crack so loud I felt the sound shudder through my body, and in that first split-second, I was afraid Hikaru’s hearing would be damaged. In that second, I turned and saw a glass skyscraper falling. It had a line cut across its middle like it had been sliced in two, and it would become the subject of debate for years to come on whether it was an architectural mistake or an act of terrorism with no concrete leads. What I remember is that the building came crashing down in seconds. What I remember is that as many people stood and stared at their deaths as they ran from it or screamed. What I remember is the calculation which appeared instantly in my mind that told me I had no chance of outrunning it, but if I tried to, my damage might be reduced. I hardly registered those calculations at the time, because the other one that flashed across my vision was that Hikaru had a 1.3% chance of survival. I dove and knocked him to the ground, cradling his head from damage. I protected his fragile body with mine, and then the building hit us. --- I was out for a couple weeks with repairs, federally funded as so many repairs in those weeks were. When I came to, I was babbling about Hikaru, but he wasn’t there. I had been taken to a shop, of course, and he to the hospital. I waited days before someone bothered to find out for me, and only because one of the mechanics was irritated when I asked, and so I asked automatically every five seconds until she found out. I was told he was still alive. I was told he was in a coma. I swallowed nuts and tiny metal shop bits and then struck my belly in a certain spot that allowed me to vomit them back up into my hand. I did this again and again, because despite not having a stomach, I felt nauseated, and this let me be sick like a human. They wouldn’t let me leave the shop until Hikaru came or told them what to do with me, or his ownership of me passed legally to his daughter. Over the next two weeks, I was told 68 times that my emotion chip was damaging me or that I should get it removed by the people in the shop, but I merely spewed numbers and facts at them until they left me alone. I paced back and forth, back and forth. I read all the internet posts then, obsessively. I read about the others who’d died, the others who’d been injured, and their loved ones who were left behind. I read about comas. I flicked off the internet so I didn’t have to learn anymore, but then I would flick it back on again, needing to. I needed to be taking care of Hikaru. I needed to be home. Hikaru’s daughter was distraught, and doing the paperwork to claim me wasn’t her first priority, so it was a tech who got me out, instead. She was new and had been given the night shift to watch over the shop. She saw me vomiting up bolts and asked what I was doing. I told her Hikaru was in a coma and waited for her to tell me that my emotion chip was damaging my other systems. Instead, her eyes welled with tears, and she told me her sister and her partner had died the same day. On her second shift, she smuggled me out to the hospital in the early hours of the morning, and we lied our way to where Hikaru was. He was bandaged up, and he looked frailer than I’d ever seen him. I began scanning him—needlessly, as the most important numbers were already on the monitor next to him—including pricking his skin to test his blood as I always used to, but learning that a few of his vitamin and mineral levels were low only made me feel more useless than before. “What are you going to do?” the mechanic asked, when I bent down to analyze Hikaru’s life support connections. I plugged myself into them, but there wasn’t anything I wanted to change, anything I could improve upon. He was basically dead, my systems told me, but I just stood there, unable to accept it. I began spewing off every first-aid treatment and pseudoscience solution that might help Hikaru, speaking them automatically while my gaze was fixed on how his breath rasped in and out. I listed 17 medications and herbal treatments and the ideas of hitting him or shocking him like a defibrillator when one of the ICU nurses arrived to roll Hikaru over, and then our lies couldn’t save us. I told the truth, while the mechanic supported me with her heartfelt earnestness, and the nurse let me stay out in the waiting room. I stayed there for four weeks, most of it spent counting and recounting the number of pixels in a large print of some forgotten artist’s work and trying to resist the temptation to hack into the hospital system so I could monitor Hikaru myself. I tried charging down, pacing, and doing anything to block the truth from coming in. But every few moments, a memory of Hikaru would come back: of his smile, or his kindness, or his tears. I would see the image of him lying in the ICU bed, being fed through a tube. I would find myself standing still where I had been pacing, a hand pressed to the spot in my gut where my emotion chip was, and wonder if this was love. I repeated the words of the other mechanics to myself many times: the original parts of me explaining, like the older sister I’d once been, that things would be easier if I removed the chip. That the pain would go away. That I shouldn’t know what pain was. But if the pain went away, would Hikaru go away too? Would I remember our walks, and the day I’d made him breakfast after his child died? Would I remember that morning, sitting in the glass district, and how he’d lifted his gentle face up to the buildings, closing his eyes as the light touched them? Would I remember how hard I’d tried to make him laugh, and how he’d made me want to be a different person, as if a bot can ever be a person? Would I remember how it felt like I'd learned everything important too late? They tried to make me leave the waiting room, but I refused, and the nurse whispered to them behind closed doors, and I stayed. It might be because I would sit on the floor when children came and played with them or because I blended in with everyone who was a wreck just then. Or maybe it was because they simply didn’t have the energy or the staff to send me back to the repair shop. They were short-staffed, because so many people were affected by the Shattering, as they called it, and they began to give me things to do. I began to help out at people’s bedsides, giving them the care I couldn’t give to Hikaru. Always, I was thinking of him, lying there unchanging. Always, I felt so useless, so broken, so defective. Hikaru died suddenly, five months after the Shattering, and I knew the moment it happened because from a couple rooms over I heard how his quiet, rattling breath became uneven. Then it simply stopped. I sat by his bedside until they moved him in the late morning, rocking back and forth and squeezing his hand over and over again. I was thinking of the breakfast I would have made for him when he got home. I was thinking of how I would make him better. I was thinking of all the functions I’d been programmed with originally, and how surely one of them should have been able to stop this. “Losing the people we love is the hardest part of living,” one of the nurses said to me, and without taking my eyes off Hikaru, I replied in a mechanic monotone, “I don’t think I’m living.” “Existing then,” she said, and then patted me softly on the shoulder as if I wasn’t a family bot, Model 4003-XJ. “When people die,” she added after a moment of silence, “it’s a moment where we can remember them and decide what we want to carry forward. What lessons we learned from them. How we will live our lives better for having known them. The love doesn’t end just because they’re gone. “I give my love to these people,” she said more quietly, and finally, my eyes lifted to her and the weariness in her face, “because I can’t give it to my son. Perhaps you’d like to stay?” she asked, as if I had the rights to determine my fate. As if I had the functioning to make decisions. But I did stay, and Hikaru’s daughter sorted out the legalities eventually. The hospital was the last place Hikaru had been, and so it was the only place I wanted to be. When I was working, it felt like he could still be there in another room, plugged in on his old bed. I let myself think I was assisting him somehow, or redeeming myself for not helping him more in the time that I knew him. Years later, I was still helping those in the waiting room, sitting there while they cried because they seemed to appreciate it. I talked about death and pain to children when they asked me questions in high, worried voices, and sometimes I simply said, *I don’t know, but I wish I did.* I also went for walks. Every morning, just as the sun rose. --- ## Editor's Note: There is a long tradition in science fiction of turning to the nonhuman for the oldest human mysteries, and this story stands within that lineage while deepening it. At its core, "The Day Hikaru Died" asks what it means to love someone whose life is slipping beyond your reach. And what remains in the hands of the living once that beloved life has vanished. To that end, the emotion chip serves as a remarkable structural device because the story grants it exact weight and no more. It does not swell into allegory or announce itself as transcendence. It opens the narrator to pain. That choice gives the story its force, as the prose knows exactly where to press. When the narrator runs through emergency numbers, crisis lines, VR meditation, and “a thousand other things,” then confesses that none of it teaches them how to help Hikaru, the moment lands with such devastating clarity. What fills the page is grief in its truest shape, in its collapse of skill, order, knowledge, usefulness and all else. The ending gathers its power through patience and truthfulness. The morning walks. One hand resting over another. The breakfast that will never sit warm on the table. These are the beams and joists of the story, the hidden frame that holds all its feeling. The piece trusts the reader to understand that love needs no heartbeat to become real, and loss asks for none either. We chose to publish this work because it reminded us of fiction’s deepest calling. To make language where silence would otherwise rule.—*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/04/2023-Author-Photo-2--pers.JPG)](https://franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Frances Koziar is an author with over 200 published stories, poems, and articles. She is a tricenarian (disabled) retiree with a Master’s of Archaeology (Anthropology) from McGill University, where she specialized in cannibalism and Aztec human sacrifice. She is an intersectional social justice activist, a gamer, painter, DM, musician, and a bubble tea fangirl. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. [Visit the author's website ](https://franceskoziar.wixsite.com/author?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Tip the author of this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Cetera #2 – The Body Keeps the Score URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cetera-2-the-body-keeps-the-score/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T18:23:03.000Z A digital issue gets built in a strange way. First it exists as a submission call. Then it becomes a flood of attachments, cover letters, half-remembered lines, notes in the margins, long email threads about sequencing, and the gradual realization that certain poems have started following you around. They show up while you’re making coffee. They sit with you on the train. They return in that hour of the night when the day’s language has worn thin and only the truest lines still feel awake. *The Body Keeps the Score* is Cetera Magazine’s second digital poetry issue, and from the beginning we knew we wanted to make something more than a themed collection. We wanted an issue that felt assembled around pressure. The pressure the body absorbs, the pressure it resists, the pressure it stores long after the conscious mind has moved on to more flattering narratives. The title of course borrows from Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark book, which gave many readers a vocabulary for trauma’s afterlife in the nervous system. We took that phrase as a point of departure and widened it. In this issue, *score* means wound, tally, notation, script. A scar is a score. A flinch is a score. So is the learned choreography of hunger, vigilance, secrecy, desire, shame, pleasure, survival. As we read, we found ourselves drawn to poems that understood the body as more than a subject. The strongest work treated the body as archive, target, inheritance, misread text, unreliable narrator, and evidence. Some poems came in whispers. Others were jagged. Some shape-shifted. After all, the body itself can interrupt a beautiful day with panic, memory, pain, appetite, recoil. Because this is our second digital issue, we also thought carefully about movement. How one poem opens the next, how a reader travels from one register of embodiment to another. We wanted the issue to feel curated, but also alive. Made with intention, but still willing to surprise itself. We’re deeply grateful to the poets who trusted us with this work. And to the readers: thank you for entering this temporary world with us. These poems leave marks. That felt like reason enough to gather them here. The issue is now available to download below: [The Body Keeps the ScoreDownload and open the file to begin reading.Cetera #2 – The Body Keeps the Score.pdf4 MBdownload-circle](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/content/files/2026/04/Cetera--2-----The-Body-Keeps-the-Score.pdf "Download") ## The Poets *Cyrus Chan, Janae Mancheski, Jaden Gootjes, E. L. McKee, Louhi Pohjola, Christa Fairbrother, Lori Litchman, Christine Light, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Andrea Giedinghagen, Jordan Prochnow, Lisa Delan.* ## The Editors *Jon Negroni. Natalia Emmons.* ### The Closure of St. Jerome's Home for Foundlings URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-closure-of-st-jeromes-home-for-foundlings/ Last updated: 2026-04-23T14:41:25.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/04/jerome_short_thumb.png) The Closure of St. Jerome's Home for Foundlings 0:00 /2019.677029478458 1× ### *1955* The whispers from the other six girls in my work group swirled around as we learned to sew by darning clothes (or so it was claimed). The sound formed a layer of noise that set me apart, forcing me to sort each girl’s voice from the others one by one. Margaret and Bernadette expounded upon the positive qualities of Marlon Brando. Elizabeth, who snuck with George into a showing of *East of Eden*, was going on—and on, and on—about James Dean. Veronica and Helen, both younger than I, kept adding their thoughts to the debate like dashes of seasoning, as important as salt and pepper. My best friend Agnes giggled along with the rest, as if she knew what they were talking about. Personally, I did not care for actors, so I had nothing to add to their conversation. Maybe if they were talking about Sinatra, Crosby, or Autry? There were things I loved about each. The local music stations played the current trends frequently enough that I could recognize each singer by a single note. Elizabeth bought albums on my behalf, though I had to borrow Mr. Murphy’s phonograph to play them. A set of footsteps echoed across the common room. The hard-soled shoes clearly belonged to an adult. Light and quick: it had to be the new teacher, Miss Wagner. Mrs. Murphy’s tread was far heavier, and Minnie’s pace was much slower. Anyway, Minnie would not be outside the kitchen so early in the day. Through the chatter, I focused on the footsteps; their direction placed the teacher approaching behind us, through the classroom—though I was not limited, as the other girls were, to the things in front of my face. It was something people often did not take into account, given my circumstances. “Yes, Miss Wagner?” I spoke up while she was still approaching. The other girls immediately hushed, unwilling to share their points of view in front of any of the staff—except around Minnie and Luther, but they were different for some reason I never fathomed. There was a strong enough silence among us that all seven needles were distinct as they passed through material. “Miss Victoria,” Miss Wagner said, in a way I was still working on decoding. The sighted had the advantage of body language to interpret what people are thinking; I only had vocal cues. Plus some other indicators I was still learning, like how Mr. Murphy tapped his feet when he got nervous. Miss Wagner continued to approach, close enough for me to catch a whiff of her jasmine perfume. She barely used any, so it added a light touch to the room. Mrs. Murphy, on the other hand, used far too much lavender. “May we speak in private?” Agnes gasped, bless her heart, but the others did not react audibly. --- I had little reason to worry. Miss Wagner did not handle disciplining of the wards—the Murphys alone doled out the punishments unsparingly—so I was not in trouble. Within St. Jerome's Home for Foundlings, everyone had their roles and duties. The teacher taught, the cook cooked, and the wards pressed on until released into the world, much like infants thrown into the deep end of the pool. A rare few were saved by Divine Intervention in the form of couples, often unable to bear children and willing to adopt older children. The rest of us lived and learned, relying on one another and the tithes of the Church for our survival. As the name said, it was a home for foundlings: orphans and those otherwise abandoned children who found themselves wards of the state of Maryland. Some had no one left alive for them in the outside world. Some had living families—prisoners, mental patients, and the like—but were better off apart from them, whether the children accepted the truth of their situation or not. And some, like me, would never know one way or the other. I was found in one of the confessionals of the Baltimore Basilica on May 8, 1945\. My primary “sin” was being born without sight. Germany surrendered that same day, providing inspiration for my name: Lucy for the patron saint of the blind, Victoria for victory. Everyone who came into the Home received a new name along with their new life. Even the older kids; the adults believed in giving us a fresh start, our futures unburdened by the past. Except everything was changing. Earlier that week, our director, Mr. Walsh—a pleasant tenor voice with a long and heavy stride, who frequently smelled earthy (I asked him once; he called it “musk”)—introduced Miss Wagner as our new teacher. He also explained what would happen over the upcoming years. “Orphanages like St. Jerome’s are being replaced with a much better concept: group homes. There needs to be time to develop the new group homes, though. So, we'll be transitioning everyone out of St. Jerome’s over the next three years. No more new wards will come in; you will be the last fifty to be housed in this building. As each group home opens, a select few will move into it. Eventually, you will all either be adopted, age out, or be re-homed into them.” I raised my hand. “What about me, sir?” Mr. Walsh was confused. “What about you, Miss Victoria?” “Next month I will be ten. Since nobody is going to adopt me, I will be a burden at a group home. And after that, then what?” He sighed, as he always did when he was annoyed at one of the wards, the sound of his fingers rubbing his stubble. “Miss Victoria, trust me. You'll be taken care of, I promise you that.” --- I gave Agnes a reassuring pat on the leg and handed her my darning. “Of course, Miss Wagner.” I stood, offering my left arm for the teacher to grip between my elbow and shoulder. I got around well with my cane—I’d been at the Home long enough to know most of it by feel, sound, and smell—but to move quickly, it was easier to let others guide my way. Miss Wagner had a gentle touch, soft but firm, her fingers barely pressing into my muscles as she led me out of the room. We sat in the classroom—the smell of chalk in the air and the feel of linoleum underfoot—with Miss Wagner facing me. “I’m so sorry, Lucy,” she began, “but I just want to confirm what I read. The reports say you don't participate in morning classes with the other students?” “No, Miss.” I hesitated, then continued quickly. “At least, not as you would think of it. I sit and listen to everything. There are some kids, like Elizabeth and Agnes, who read books to me as needed. But I neither read nor write myself, obviously. I can do some math in my head, but only counting and simple sums. It… it is difficult to explain.” I turned my head to the side, so my right ear was aimed toward her. I could hear well with either, but it was easier for me to focus when every sound came from a single direction. She shifted in her seat; the telltale scratching of a pen on paper followed. She asked another question: “Did your previous teachers ever try anything… different?” “It has been a while, but the last one to actually try anything else was… Miss Flannery? Yes, when I was four, about six years ago. She had me draw letters and numbers with my fingers, then with crayons. She said it was how Helen Keller learned. I have been told that her experiment was a complete failure.” I smiled. I liked Miss Flannery, despite her having to leave after the breakdown; she smelled of roses or lilies of the valley. Most of the others after her wore vanilla. While I answered Miss Wagner's question, she moved some small objects around. “Hold out your hands.” I did as she asked, and one at a time she placed two vastly different items into them, one at a time. The first was a flat metal object: a seam ran along three sides, hinges on the fourth. Too thin to be a box, though. There were rows of holes along the face that formed little divots within. The second was a thick wooden ball, a perfect fit for my palm; it had a thin metal rod extending from the opposite end. I tentatively touched the tip to my arm, but it was blunted. I set them on the desktop with care. “Miss, what are these?” “Your left hand has a slate, your right a stylus. Pass them back for a moment.” I returned both, and she fiddled with them, accompanied by the soft whisper of paper. She gave me the page, and across it were now a series of bumps. “Lucy, can you feel those? Can you tell the difference?” “Yes… and I am not sure. Maybe?” There were tiny variations between each set, though it was not easy to be certain on the first pass. “It’s called Braille. It’s a writing system for the blind. Have you heard of it?” “Nobody has mentioned it to me before. Miss.” There was a catch in her breath and a hesitation in her voice—perhaps caution, maybe hope—making it difficult for me to properly read her. “Well, Lucy, you and I will be learning Braille together, alternating with your other afternoon lessons. Would you like that?” The jasmine cloud almost embraced me then, far closer and more tender than any previous experience I had with an adult. “Yes, Miss Wagner. If that is what you want, I am willing to learn.” --- Six months later, right after *The Lone Ranger* broadcast on WFBR, the Murphys revealed the first six charges to leave our waning abode. Outside of imposing discipline, the Murphys acted as our resident caretakers. Mrs. Murphy was loud with a raspy voice; she bathed in lavender to disguise the stench of her cigarettes. Mr. Murphy did not smoke, but he drank liquor, so in the evening his breath reeked of peppermint and whiskey. They were a nice enough couple, not punishing more than was deserved, and they did not diddle any of the wards (from the stories I heard, some were quite happy to have their parents locked away). Mrs. Murphy said later that she wanted to inform us sooner, but had been ordered to wait until after the show. Some off-duty officers were also there. We were told they were “volunteers” from the diocese, but one addressed another as “Sarge.” Also present was the social worker who visited weekly, Miss Shea, smelling of lemons. The newcomers packed some luggage while we were distracted by Kemosabe and Tonto. Mr. Murphy read off the list of names. I must admit, Miss Shea chose them well. They were all friendly with each other; Margaret and Bernadette were the best of friends. No complete couples were included, either; the Murphys prevented most serious activities from happening between wards, but I was aware of how often George and Elizabeth snuck off together to canoodle. Goodbyes were brief. Elizabeth cried because her George was among them, and Mrs. Murphy ushered her away fairly quickly. Mr. Walsh had a few words with George to discourage him from doing anything the elder man deemed “stupid.” Miss Wagner was there as well, as were Minnie and Luther—surprising, as the cook and janitor rarely came to the front. Miss Shea led everyone in a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” though only a few kids sang along. The doors banged shut behind the departing people. Then Mr. Murphy ordered the rest to prepare for bed; our eight-thirty lights-out still applied, so we had to rush through our routines in the ten minutes remaining—a difficult enough task for those who could see, much less me. With that, St. Jerome’s population was reduced to forty-four. --- ### *1956* There was only one adoption after the announcement the previous year: Rita Faith—the youngest in the Home, no surprise there. And a pair of boys aged out; both were given arrangements for jobs and apartments before they left. Not the first to be released that way in my lifetime, of course—just the first since the moves to group homes began. I realized, early on, that the adults who made those decisions failed to take something into account. As I was never asked, I did not share my thoughts with them. What never occurred to them was that St. Jerome’s was our home for most, if not all, of our lives. The kids—and adults, to a degree, but mostly the kids—were the only family most of us ever knew, the only people we ever learned to depend on. Any child who came through those doors became a sibling, one of our brothers or sisters. More remarkably, those other children took me, a blind kid, in as well. Sure, Agnes loved helping me most often, and Elizabeth mothered me when in the mood. But whenever I needed the others, they helped too. They would read to me, take me places, or help me with difficult tasks—like making sure my clothes did not have holes in them before I wore them. Even the boys could be relied on, and they picked on everyone else. Maybe they did it because they pitied me, but I still appreciated it. The runt of the litter was still a part of the litter. --- There was also a secret I had grown privy to. I did not speak to Miss Wagner or Mr. Walsh about what I figured out, but over the course of the year, their scents began to mingle. This was something I had noticed with other adults I knew to be in relationships. For example, Mrs. Murphy’s lavender often coated Mr. Murphy, nearly hiding the citrusy scent he preferred. Minnie and Luther were the same, despite never smelling quite like the other adults. And, for some reason, they never made us use their last names, so I had no idea whether they were married or not. But Minnie was a cornucopia of cocoa butter, cooking grease, and corn flour; Luther was predominantly blood, sweat, and oil. And, like the Murphys, each carried faint traces of the other. Miss Wagner and Mr. Walsh had started to smell similar, their jasmine and musk beginning to blend. I could not help myself; I never meant to be “nosy”—quite literally, as it happens. Those were the types of things I noticed. Especially when Miss Wagner was teaching Braille in the afternoons, leaning over my shoulder like an angel. But it wasn’t just their aromas. Mr. Walsh and Miss Wagner often arrived at the same time in the mornings. Their voices changed when they talked to each other, the tone less firm and more gentle. The way they moved together—even when heading in different directions—felt like George and Elizabeth dancing at the music showcases, the steps there without the music. Mr. Walsh also frequently visited during our private lessons, while Miss Wagner was focused on me. Though maybe he still blamed me for what happened with Miss Flannery and was afraid I’d drive Miss Wagner round the bend. I sat through enough of Father Giuseppe’s litanies to know not to mention that sort of behavior to anyone. I kept all of this knowledge and suspicion to myself. I didn’t even tell Agnes, and especially not Elizabeth. I did pray to St. Raphael, seeking a happy marriage on their behalf, but he probably knew already. --- Miss Wagner and I continued to work on my skills. She found some books published in Braille, so occasionally I took part in the morning classes as well. I even learned how to write book reports. But the biggest surprise was how she started to teach mathematics to me. One spring morning, she and Mr. Walsh argued about her wanting to walk across town to Mulberry Street to find a laundromat. I could not figure out why she would need to go there—one of the benefits of having a position in the orphanage was that we had regular courses in housekeeping duties, and everyone took advantage. From the sound of things, he could not comprehend either. But they must have realized the office door was open, because they shut it for the remainder of their discussion. She did not go in the end, but he left the Home for lunch, and she was quite pleased with whatever he brought upon his return. That afternoon, when I arrived for my Braille lesson, she handed me a frame full of beads instead. There were several rods, and a divider splitting them. "Hold it in both hands, so the side with fewer beads is at the top." She fiddled with some paperwork at the same time; it sounded like she was trying to read while speaking, but not using the same words. "The bottom side is ones, the top side is fives. Each rod represents a place in the number." By the end of the afternoon, I conquered counting and simple addition. Everybody else called it my counting tool, but she told me it was an abacus from China. By the end of the month, I could add and subtract large numbers, often faster than any of the older kids. --- Twelve more members of our dwindling family left the Home through the year: six in the spring, six more in the fall. The September group stood out only because, instead of *The Lone Ranger*, we listened to a baseball game. Apparently one of the players died in a plane crash the day before, so Mr. Murphy wanted to listen to that game. Since sports were of no interest to me, I sat in the hall. Which meant my ears caught the noises descending from upstairs: the shuffles and scrapes of people moving through the dorms, the thuds and bangs of footlockers being opened and closed, the clicks and thumps of luggage being packed. It was no surprise when the rest of the adults arrived. Mr. Walsh called out six more names, including Agnes. She started crying, and promised to write to me; I reminded her not to bother, though someone could always read it to me if she did. Miss Shea led the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” again, but very few people joined in. And that was how they reduced us to twenty-nine. --- ### *1957* It was a very busy year for me, though the most notable event over the course of it was when the Russians interrupted our farewell for the fifth group of wards. Elizabeth aged out at the end of winter. She and George had exchanged letters after he left; she confided in me that they were going to elope. For weeks and months afterward, that was the last thing I knew of her. In all my years at the Home, we never heard anything significant from the outside world other than news broadcasts. We were never informed if former wards survived on their own, and they never returned to report. I said a prayer for Elizabeth and George every night, to both Saints Agnes and Valentine—engaged couples and happy marriages—just in case. One afternoon in February, Miss Wagner did not have me read Braille or multiply and divide as we had been. Instead, she led me to a different area of the classroom, where the older girls often spent their lessons swallowed in a cloud of clatter and dings. “You’ve mastered reading and writing well enough, and you’re the best computer in the Home. So, Lucy, I think it’s time to teach you how to communicate with the rest of the world.” It was the most confident she’d sounded since her illness the previous summer. She stood behind me and cradled my wrists, then placed my hands atop several closely spaced buttons. Miss Wagner spread my fingers so that each was positioned in its own spot. “Relax. Let your fingers curl. Rest the pads on the keys, Lucy, like the way you read your pages.” Nervous, I stiffened one finger, which struck a key with a loud clack as something hit paper ahead. “Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong.” Her voice was soft, just over my right shoulder. “This is a typewriter. When you push a key like that, it stamps a letter onto the paper—one that sighted people can read. Some women can type without ever looking at any keys. You’re going to learn to do even better.” Her jasmine scent eased my mind as she taught me where to find each button. It was not easy, and took many months. But by September, Miss Wagner would read letters from Agnes—she had moved into a foster home, where she was the only child in the house!—and I was able to type my responses. --- Toward the beginning of July, Mrs. Murphy taught classes for the first time since Miss Flannery’s incident years earlier. Mrs. Murphy gave no reason for Miss Wagner’s absence. As Mr. Walsh was also absent, no explanation was offered. I had to join the other girls in the kitchen with Minnie that afternoon, so Elizabeth was guiding me as needed. “I don’t think it’s your fault, Lucy, not this time,” she said. “Whadja jus’ say, girl?” The cook’s voice was as sharp as one of her knives. Elizabeth backed away abruptly, leaving my space. “Nothing, ma’am.” There was a tremor of fear in her voice—and nobody ever called Minnie “ma’am.” Considering Minnie was never harsh, Elizabeth was probably as surprised as the rest of us. I spoke up instead. “She means Miss Flannery, Minnie. We all know that she left because of me.” This time, the woman’s voice was softer. “Who tol’ you that?” “Nobody had to tell me. It just makes sense.” The cook laughed, and a hand slapped the counter. “Girl, that Miss Flannery was already playing tunk with half her deck missin’. She shoul’ never’ve been ‘lowed near you young’uns. That wasn’t yer fault.” The other girls giggled a little at Minnie’s behavior, the tension dropping significantly. But my own fears were still not settled. “Yes, but what of Miss Wagner?” Minnie’s laughter stopped. She was serious again, but not angry. “That’s not your fault neither, Luce. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.” There was a moment of silence, broken by Agnes. “So she’ll be back soon?” Minnie’s voice was soft again, though not as jovial as before. “Yeah, she’ll be back. That one, I doubt the walls of Jericho coul’ keep her outta this place.” Minnie was correct. The next day, Mr. Walsh explained that Miss Wagner just had a brief illness, and would be back in no-time, though his somber tone seemed to indicate otherwise. And by the end of the week, Miss Wagner returned, though she never quite sounded the same again. Except sometimes when she and I were in private; then the music would return to her voice. Over the course of that summer, Mr. Walsh started to talk with me personally, asking my opinions on the latest music and radio shows. I told him what I thought about things, like my fairly high opinions of Elvis Presley and Johnny Mathis. I never heard him talk to the others that way; he rarely dealt with any of us as individuals. Perhaps he did so in private. Or maybe it was just pity again. --- On the fourth of October, Paul Harvey interrupted *The Lone Ranger* to announce that the Russians had sent Sputnik up into space. The older kids wondered if the news meant war would be coming. The younger kids were upset they couldn't find out what happened to Tonto until Monday’s show. Meanwhile, I was by the stairs eavesdropping on the men packing for that night's group. I was trying to discern who was included in the latest batch. They said the names of Bernard and Helen, so I knew those two without any doubt. Deep down, I was certain they would not include me. Mr. Murphy came downstairs to see what the commotion at the radio was about. His reactions led to everyone else piling into the argument. All the menfolk argued about Khrushchev, Eisenhower, and Hammarskjöld, whoever those guys were. By the time Bernard, Helen, and their fellow housemates were escorted out by Miss Shea’s solo performance of “Auld Lang Syne,” it was well past ten, officially the latest I ever went to bed. We were down to fifteen. --- There was one other significant event at the end of the year, on Christmas Eve. As much as the visit unsettled me, it had a profound effect on me: George and Elizabeth came to speak to everyone and wish us all a Merry Christmas. In the past, people who left the Home were gone for good, so it was a pleasant surprise to be in their presence once more. When I heard their voices, I rushed over to where Elizabeth was. It had been almost a year, and I was so worried about what happened while she was away. My prayers for them had been answered. In the quiet of my heart, I hoped they were there to take me with them—to a new home, a new family. Growing up, Elizabeth always babied me. And I missed her so much; only Miss Wagner had given me more attention and care. But I had known Elizabeth my whole life. I thought I was meant to be with her; with George as well. But there were subtle differences, too many changes. Her voice didn’t quite sound the same, her scent didn’t quite match what I remembered. When I hugged her, she was far bigger in the belly than she used to be. And inside her body—my head pressed against her in an embrace I refused to release—there lived another heartbeat, rapid and fluttering. That was when I knew she would always be my sister, but only my sister. And she would be a mother, but she would not be my mother. Not anymore. That night, and for the remainder of the year, I cried myself to sleep. --- ### *1958* I was certain there would only be one farewell this year. I knew division by then, and there were only two houses worth of kids to be assigned. Once one group left, the other would stay behind. Except for me. I would always be a remainder of one. My thirteenth birthday was the day before that separation. Miss Wagner and Mr. Walsh helped with the cake, and they never attended any other wards' birthdays. They gave me birthday presents, too: the latest Ricky Nelson and Perry Como. And their voices caught throughout. After the final ceremony, when everyone was reassigned, I supposed they would miss me. At lunchtime the day after, Mr. Walsh announced the final two group homes were being settled the coming weekend. As a result of my detective work, it was no surprise to me. There were no volunteers to help pack; they were not necessary, not this time. Everything was a done deal. Two new adults, a couple introduced as the Grants, were in charge of the next group home. Miss Shea no longer worked with the orphanage, thankfully. Instead of that ridiculous song, we said our goodbyes to each other like normal people. Once they left, one of the other wards spoke up. “What about the rest of us?” Mr. Murphy answered. “The missus and I are moving into a group home ourselves. We’ve agreed to take in the rest of you, and we’ll move into the house tomorrow.” The other seven kids were happy, as there were no more goodbyes to worry about. They all scampered off for a free day, since it was the last full day in this place. In the Home. In our home. I stayed seated in the cafeteria, not sharing the joyous mood. It was not that I minded the Murphys—I did not—but I was not at all surprised to be the last to leave. In three short years, I had said farewell to so many brothers and sisters. It all just washed over me. Like that old song went, “My life is a race, just a wild goose chase, and my dreams have all been denied.”1 The mingled scent of jasmine and musk brought me out of my thoughts as two people sat nearby. I tried to hide my tears. “Miss Wagner? Mr. Walsh?” “It’s actually Mr. and Mrs. Walsh,” he said. “We’ve been married for a couple of years now. But it's easier to keep using her maiden name among you kids.” I swallowed my tears and giggled, pleased that I was right. “I prayed that you would. Thank you.” An amused sigh escaped her while he chuckled. Mr. Walsh continued. “Clara tells me that you've gotten extremely good at reading and writing with Braille.” This surprised me. “I suppose? She never tells me one way or the other. She gives me more work to do instead.” She laughed again, and he sounded… proud? “That’s great. As it happens, Lucy, I have something here that we put into Braille for you. Would you like to read it to us?” I did not usually read out loud. I had only been reading for three years, and when I did, it was usually just me and Miss—Mrs. Walsh. As a result, I was not very confident. My fingertips passed over the small raised marks, committing them to memory before speaking the words aloud. But the phrasing sounded odd inside my head, nothing like the reading material she had given these past few years. “State of Maryland?” “Baltimore Circuit Court?” Each set of bumps spoke to me—screaming through my fingers—until I was convinced they all must be lies. “What’s the matter, Lucy?” There was a hint of amusement in her question when I drew back my hand. “This is all some sort of gag, isn’t it? You’re both having a laugh with me one last time.” His hand rested on my shoulder, and he squeezed gently. “What makes you say that?” “Because, sir, I’ll be too much of a burden. I can’t do anything.” Her voice cut through, like it did when she had to be stern with the other wards. “Just read it aloud to us. Trust us. Trust me.” And there was that tone in her voice again. That one from when we met, three years before. When she first promised to teach me Braille. When she first gave me the abacus. When she taught me how to type. And I suddenly knew what that tone was and what it meant. And how the pages they had given me were as true as the Lone Ranger’s Creed. I started voicing the words as quickly as my fingers translated them to my brain. “‘We the undersigned, David and Clara Walsh, respectfully request the court to grant the adoption of said minor child, Lucy Victoria, assuming all parental rights…?’” “If you’d rather live with the Murphys…” she began, but my hug quickly squeezed the breath out of her. He embraced us with both arms, and we all laughed and cried at the same time. So, as it turned out, Rita Faith was not the last child adopted out of St. Jerome’s Home for Foundlings in Baltimore, Maryland. Instead, it was me. Lucy Victoria Walsh. > 1: "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" (1917), lyrics by Joseph McCarthy. Music by Harry Carroll, adapted from Chopin's "Fantasie-Impromptu." --- ## Editor's Note: A story earns its ending or it doesn't. This one earns it. "The Closure of St. Jerome's Home for Foundlings" builds its world entirely through what Lucy Victoria can perceive: jasmine and musk and lavender, the specific weight of footsteps across linoleum, the geometry of a slate and stylus pressed into waiting hands. The author commits to this perspective with a totality that transforms the reading experience. Every sensory detail does double work in establishing character, atmosphere, and the emotional logic of a girl who understands her world more completely than anyone around her realizes. The structure is deceptively simple. Four years, four sections, a population count ticking steadily downward. What the author tracks beneath that arithmetic is harder to quantify. The slow erosion of a family that was always accidental and always real. The accumulating gravity of every goodbye. Lucy calculates her own remaindering before any adult thinks to tell her. The story gives her that knowledge and then watches what she does with it—which is, essentially, continue. Keep learning. Keep listening. Keep praying to the right saints. Worth naming directly is how the story handles disability with genuine radicalism. Lucy reads people the way the rest of us only wish we could. Her blindness is the architecture of her authority, the source of everything she knows and everything she withholds. The author trusts her completely, and that trust becomes the reader's as well.—*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/04/tamsin.jpg)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Tamsin Liddell was born in Texas and has spent most of her life in the southern US. She lives with her spouse, their daughter, and far too many cats outside of Atlanta, GA. [Tip the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Texts After 3 URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/texts-after-3/ Last updated: 2026-04-16T14:20:34.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/04/texts_short_thumb.png) Texts After 3 0:00 /2102.8005215419503 1× ## Part 1: January ### ***January 1*** **Instagram DM — 3:17 a.m.** **Adam:** hey this is adam. sorry to message you here. mason isn’t answering his phone and i just wanted to make sure you guys got back okay **Nina:** Oh hey Yeah we’re home He’s asleep on the couch with one shoe on The other shoe is in the bathroom sink **Adam:** that tracks **Nina:** Lol You good? How’d you get home **Adam:** uber. And get this, the driver had a 20 minute theory about the moon landing and i didn’t have the energy to not listen **Nina:** At 3am you just got in a car with a conspiracy theorist?? **Adam:** hey i mean he was very committed. i respected it **Nina:** Ominous **Adam:** sure was **Nina:** That was a while ago. Why are you still up **Adam:** i don’t really sleep and that’s not a bit or anything. It’s just true **Nina:** ah sorry. I have to open the coffee shop at 6 So I should absolutely be asleep right now **Adam:** and I absolutely agree sorry though You really should go to sleep. didn’t mean to keep you **Nina:** No no! it’s fine It’s Idk. Nice to know someone else is awake lol Anyway Happy new year adam **Adam:** happy new year! go to sleep **Nina:** You first **Adam:** can’t. I am alive unfortunately **Nina:** Alive unfortunately Yeah Night ### *January 16 — 3:22 a.m.* **Nina:** Hey Alive? **Adam:** alive unfortunately **Nina:** Same Cool cool cool ### *January 19 — 3:09 a.m.* **Nina:** One of my regulars told me today that their oat milk tasted “emotionally flat” **Adam:** i’m sorry what **Nina:** I said thank you for that feedback with my Manager voice of course means I’m Dead inside **Adam:** you have a manager voice? **Nina:** Oh it’s pristine Very “I totally understand” while my entire soul detaches from my body and floats to the ceiling **Adam:** lol yeah i get that. i have a teacher voice. it’s similar but with more concern about bathroom passes ### *January 23 — 3:31 a.m.* **Adam:** one of my seventh graders wrote that romeo and juliet is “basically a skill issue” on her response sheet and i haven’t been able to think about anything else **Nina:** STOP She’s right though It IS a skill issue **Adam:** she is absolutely right and i had to sit there with my teacher voice on pretending to disagree **Nina:** Criminal What did you actually say **Adam:** i said “that’s an interesting reading, Olivia, can you support it with textual evidence” **Nina:** You gave her the teacher voice! **Adam:** the teacher voice is all i have nina ### *January 28 — 3:04 a.m.* **Nina:** Bad day Like bad bad **Adam:** Worse than yesterday's bad bad? **Nina**: Yup. Espresso machine died mid-rush New girl called out I closed alone and then sat in my car for ten minutes staring at the steering wheel before I could drive And I know that’s Whatever It’s a coffee shop. It’s not real problems **Adam:** hey no don’t do that **Nina:** Do what? **Adam:** rank your own bad day against some imaginary worse one. a bad day is a bad day **Nina:** ugh idk I just feel dumb complaining about steam wands when people have real stuff **Adam:** eh, the steam wand is real stuff. **Nina:** Teacher voice tells me I should be fine I am technically fine **Adam:** but how are you actually **Nina:** Tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix That sounds dramatic huh? **Adam:** it doesn’t sound dramatic to me. it sounds like you’ve been holding a building up with your hands and someone just asked you why your arms hurt **Nina:** Wow Okay That was teacherly Anyway **Adam:** anyway **Nina:** Thanks for being up. Mason was passed out when I got home. **Adam:** always up. that’s my whole deal these days **Nina:** I know That’s actually why this is Helpful I guess Being able to say the thing without having to perform being okay first **Adam:** you don’t ever have to perform being okay **Nina:** Goodnight adam **Adam:** go to sleep nina **Nina:** You first **Adam:** can’t **Nina:** I know --- ## Part 2: March & April ### *March 2 — 3:14 a.m.* **Nina:** Do you ever think about how unhinged it is that we both just happen to be awake at the same wrong hour every night **Adam:** i’ve thought about it quite often **Nina:** And? **Adam:** and I have decided not to question these things **Nina:** Smart Bleak but smart ### *March 8 — 3:41 a.m.* **Adam:** kid wrote on his vocab sheet today that “melancholy” means “when you’re sad but in a fancy way” **Nina:** Give him an A Give him MY A That’s actually better than anything I’ve ever articulated about my own feelings **Adam:** his other definition was “ominous: when something is about to be bad and it knows it” **Nina:** WHEN IT KNOWS IT That kid is a poet **Adam:** he draws spiders on everything and once asked me if books have feelings so yeah, definitely a poet ### *March 15 — 2:47 a.m.* **Nina:** Hey Are you up **Adam:** yeah. what’s going on **Nina:** Nothing Everything is extremely fine **Adam:** nina **Nina:** Fine I am on the kitchen floor Which I know sounds…ach But it’s The tile is cold and it helps chill out the inner demons in my ass **Adam:** makes perfect sense. shoes on or off **Nina:** What? **Adam:** when you got to the floor. did you take your shoes off first or just go straight down **Nina:** Off I took them off at the door like normal and then ended up here **Adam:** ohhhhh okay **Nina:** Why does that matter **Adam:** well if the shoes are still on it means you didn’t even make it to the regular part of being home **Nina:** Oh Hm that's annoyingly perceptive **Adam:** sorry to hear that. what happened **Nina:** I asked mason to come by after close tonight. I didn’t even want anything from him. I just wanted him to sit with me for like a few minutes. I said that. Specifically. Just come sit And he said yeah definitely And then he didn’t come And when I texted him about it he said sorry babe I crashed, you should try those melatonin gummies, they knock me right out **Adam:** ah **Nina:** And look I know he’s one of your best friends so you have to be the opposite of neutral **Adam:** right so he heard you say “i need something” and didn’t seem to care, just tried to fix it himself **Nina:** Yeah Exactly Exactly that I didn’t want a solution. I wanted a person in my kitchen **Adam:** yeah **Nina:** Is that insane **Adam:** nope, not at all **Nina:** I feel insane I feel like I’m high maintenance for wanting someone to just show up **Adam:** you are not high maintenance. you are on a kitchen floor at 3 a.m. asking to be sat with. that’s just regular maintenance. For people like us at least **Nina:** When you say it like that **Adam:** i do mean it like that **Nina:** Okay I should go to bed 6 a.m. comes regardless **Adam:** i know. go to sleep **Nina:** k. Thanks for being here I mean Up Thanks for being up **Adam:** yeah. here. up. whichever **Nina:** Goodnight adam **Adam:** night nina ### *March 19 — 3:23 a.m.* **Nina:** Floor update: I’m on the couch tonight **Adam:** look at you. upward mobility **Nina:** I know. Ponder at my endless Growth ### *March 22 — 7:14 a.m.* **Mason:** Bro! question for you. What’s a good like belated birthday thing for nina? I kinda forgot to plan anything and she’s being cool about it but I feel bad **Adam:** maybe cook for her? she likes that lemon pasta from that place on clement. you could try to make it **Mason:** Genius. You’re a lifesaver. She’s been kinda weird lately idk **Adam:** Probably work stress **Mason:** yeah probably ### *April 1 — 3:11 a.m.* **Adam:** hey. you up? **Nina:** Always What’s wrong.... **Adam:** nothing’s wrong. bad brain night **Nina:** Tell me everything **Adam:** it’s dumb **Nina:** Adam! **Adam:** i’ve been trying to read this book for like two weeks. same paragraph. every night i open it and i read the same page and none of it goes into my head i don’t think the book is the problem though **Nina:** What’s the book **Adam:** it’s a mary oliver collection mason gave me for christmas two years ago i keep trying to finish it because he remembered that i said i liked her once in college. which was a nice thing for him to remember nevertheless i can’t focus on a single poem **Nina:** What’s it about **Adam:** the poems? everything. geese. grief. paying attention. she has this line about how you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves **Nina:** God **Adam:** yeah **Nina:** That’s a lot for 3am, sir **Adam:** that’s a lot for any hour honestly **Nina:** Are you on the floor? or the couch? **Adam:** bed. but sitting up. which i think is its own category **Nina:** Bed sitting up is the purgatory of insomnia positions You’re not committed to either direction **Adam:** accurate **Nina:** Go lie down Read the poem one more time and then close the book **Adam:** are you using your manager voice via text? **Nina:** No that was just Nina voice **Adam:** oh interesting. okay goodnight nina **Nina:** Night. Let the soft animal etc etc **Adam:** i will do my very best --- ## Part 3: June ### *June 4 — 3:19 a.m.* **Nina:** This day has had too much plot **Adam:** tell me every thing? **Nina:** No I just needed to say it out loud to someone who wouldn’t try to fix it **Adam:** noted **Nina:** Thank you How are the summer school kids **Adam:** one of them told me that books are “just someone’s really long thought” and i had to sit down for about a minute **Nina:** Oh that’s the best one yet She’s not wrong like at all **Adam:** she’s thirteen and already more philosophically attuned than i am **Nina:** amazing **Adam:** i know ### *June 9 — 3:45 a.m.* **Nina:** Can I ask you something weird **Adam:** always **Nina:** What do you think about when you can’t sleep **Adam:** honestly? **Nina:** No lie to me Yes honestly **Adam:** i think about all the conversations i had that day but the versions where i said the risky thing instead of the safe thing **Nina:** Oh? **Adam:** and then i think about what would happen if i actually said those things all the time. and then i don’t sleep because my mind fixates on all the branching realities I just concocted **Nina:** That’s wow I do that too except mine is more like I replay every moment where I smiled and said “no totally it’s fine!” and I think about what my face was actually doing in that moment **Adam:** the gap between the fine voice and the actual face **Nina:** so true That gap is where my insomnia lives and grows like a fungus **Adam:** mine too ### *June 14 — 11:52 p.m.* **Nina:** Hey tonight was fun **Adam:** yeah ### *June 14 — 3:03 a.m.* **Adam:** hey. are you still up **Nina:** Yeah Can’t turn off **Adam:** can i say something **Nina:** You’re doing the thing where you ask permission which means it’s going to be a risky thing **Adam:** at the party tonight you seemed like you’d already left before you actually left like you were there but the version of you that was there was the one you send when you can’t send the real one **Nina:** Wow Okay **Adam:** sorry **Nina:** No Don’t apologize You’re right **Adam:** i noticed when we were outside. you were different on the stairs. like you came back online for a few minutes **Nina:** I liked being on the stairs with you **Adam:** i liked it too **Nina:** and it was only a few minutes **Adam:** i know **Nina:** I need to say something and I need you to not make it into a thing **Adam:** okay **Nina:** You notice things about me that I don’t think anyone else notices And I don’t know what to do with that And also it’s 3am and I should not be saying this **Adam:** you’re allowed to say it **Nina:** Am I though **Adam:** (three dots) **Nina:** I should go to sleep **Adam:** go to sleep **Nina:** You first **Adam:** can’t --- ## Part 4: July / August ### *July 2 — 3:26 a.m.* **Nina:** Summer school update. Please. I need something that isn’t my own brain **Adam:** kid asked me today if the sun has a night shift or if it just works all the time **Nina:** THE SUN’S NIGHT SHIFT Adam the kids are all right **Adam:** he also asked if teachers sleep at school **Nina:** mmmmm. Well do you **Adam:** sometimes it feels like it ### *July 11 — 11:43 p.m.* **Nina:** Hey **Adam:** hey. how was the birthday dinner **Nina:** Good! It was great Really fun. wish you could've made it though ### *July 12 — 3:01 a.m.* **Nina:** Okay I lied **Adam:** i know **Nina:** How did you know **Adam:** you used an exclamation point. you never use exclamation points **Nina:** I hate that you know that **Adam:** what happened **Nina:** He invited 30 people I said I wanted small. I said it twice. I said maybe just us and like two others And I walk in and there’s 30 people and a banner and he’s so proud of himself And it was Everyone was so nice And it was loud and fun and exactly the kind of night that should have been great And then I spent 40 minutes in the bathroom looking at my phone **Adam:** that sounds pretty lonely **Nina:** It WAS lonely It was a room full of people who love me and I felt like I was watching it from across the street **Adam:** i’m sorry **Nina:** The worst part is he wasn’t wrong. Like objectively it was a good party. Mason tried. He really tried. He just He threw the party he would have wanted Which is a generous thing to do for someone who isn’t me **Adam:** that’s...a tough sentence to read **Nina:** Is it you know I almost texted you from the bathroom I had the screen open and everything **Adam:** oh? why didn’t you **Nina:** for one thing I had a feeling Mason invited you but you didn’t come because you knew i would feel overwhelmed by a crowd. And don’t even try to deny it. **Adam:** I should’ve told you I suspected he planned to invite a lot of people. Given you a heads up. But I didn’t feel like it was really my place **Nina:** And that’s that That’s also maybe the problem itself **Adam:** which part **Nina:** That you’re the person I wanted to text from a bathroom at my own birthday party **Adam:** yeah that’s also maybe the problem **Nina:** We keep saying “the problem” **Adam:** i know **Nina:** What is the problem adam **Adam:** hard to pick just one **Nina:** yup Anyway **Adam:** anyway **Nina:** Say something normal. Please **Adam:** summer school kid says the moon is “the sun’s best friend” **Nina:** aw That one’s going to stay with me **Adam:** same **Nina:** Goodnight **Adam:** goodnight moon ### *August 4 — 3:33 a.m.* **Adam:** hey **Nina:** Hey **Adam:** do you ever listen to anything while you can’t sleep **Nina:** Sometimes There’s this one Novo Amor song I’ve played like 400 times It doesn’t help me sleep but it makes being awake feel less like a punishment **Adam:** what’s the song **Nina:** Carry You Don’t judge me **Adam:** why would i judge you **Nina:** Because it’s earnest and I have a reputation for being cool and detached **Adam:** nina you text me from your kitchen floor at 3 a.m. basically every night. the cool detached thing is not working on me **Nina:** Rude Accurate but rude oops that’s your line **Adam:** eh you can borrow it ### *August 8 — 3:17 a.m.* **Nina:** I’ve been thinking about the mary oliver line The soft animal one **Adam:** yeah? **Nina:** I think my problem is I know what the soft animal wants I just don’t think I’m allowed to let it **Adam:** allowed by who?? **Nina:** By the version of me that keeps everything running sorry. Manager voice She has so many opinions **Adam:** maybe manager voice doesn’t get a vote on this one **Nina:** She gets a vote on everything **Adam:** Nina **Nina:** Don’t Don’t do the name thing **Adam:** sorryyyy **Nina:** Don’t be sorry either ughhhh just Be normal for a second **Adam:** sure. a kid asked me last week if birds are afraid of the sky and i think about it every day **Nina:** WHAT Are they?? **Adam:** i genuinely don’t know **Nina:** Okay I guess that helped Goodnight --- ## Part 5: October ### *October 2 — 3:41 a.m.* **Adam:** hey **Nina:** Hey Weird day **Adam:** same tell me about yours **Nina:** No you go first for once **Adam:** ok sure. parent-teacher conferences. one mom asked me if i think her son is “emotionally gifted” because he cried during the poetry unit **Nina:** Well is he? **Adam:** Sadly, no. He only cried because he dropped his pencil and it rolled under the radiator **Nina:** awwwww Less gifted then, I’m afraid **Adam:** or just a different kind of gifted ### *October 9 — 3:07 a.m.* **Nina:** Hello **Adam:** hello there **Nina:** How are you **Adam:** fine. you? **Nina:** Fine **Adam:** cool ### *October 14 — 3:22 a.m.* **Nina:** Okay I need to tell you something **Adam:** ready **Nina:** Mason made a comment last night At dinner with his friends Called you my “night shift boyfriend” Said it like a joke which I guess it was because everyone laughed **Adam:** oh… **Nina:** And I laughed too Like it was nothing And then I went home and (you guessed it) sat on the floor **Adam:** shoes on or off **Nina:** On **Adam:** nina! **Nina:** I know. On is worse. You said that **Adam:** what did he mean by it **Nina:** I don’t think he meant anything I think he noticed I’m up late texting someone and he made it into a joke because that’s how he processes things he doesn’t want to talk about directly Which I can’t really blame him for **Adam:** me neither **Nina:** Adam **Adam:** yes **Nina:** I don’t want to be something bad that happens to him **Adam:** i know. i don’t want to be something bad that happens to you **Nina:** Maybe we should I don’t know Less of this For a while **Adam:** ok. if that’s what you need **Nina:** I don’t know what I need That’s kinda the whole thing **Adam:** okay. less of this **Nina:** Okay ### *October 18 — 3:33 a.m.* **Adam:** hey *Read 3:34 a.m.* ### *October 22 — 3:15 a.m.* **Adam:** hope you’re sleeping better *Read 7:02 a.m.* ### *October 27 — 3:09 a.m.* **Nina:** Did this get weird **Adam:** i think it was always a little weird **Nina:** I miss when this was just insomnia **Adam:** same **Nina:** Liar **Adam:** always ### *October 30 — 3:44 a.m.* **Nina:** I keep going back through old messages Like if I scroll far enough I’ll find the exact place where “it” turned **Adam:** oh interesting. did you find it **Nina:** No Because it didn’t “turn” anywhere It was just already it **Adam:** i think I agree **Nina:** i was hoping you wouldn’t **Adam:** i agree with that too --- ## Part 6: November / December ### *November 6 — 3:02 a.m.* **Nina:** Hey **Adam:** hey **Nina:** I didn’t know who else to text **Adam:** that’s not good **Nina:** I know and yet I’m texting you anyway **Adam:** what happened **Nina:** Nothing happened Nothing ever happens Nothing is wrong. He is nice to me. He brings me coffee even though I work at a coffee shop which is actually very sweet if you think about it. He texts back. He shows up And I feel like I’m disappearing inside a version of my life where nothing is technically wrong **Adam:** that’s not nothing **Nina:** I feel like the villain in an A24 movie The kind where the audience understands why she's bad but still thinks she should have tried harder to be a good person **Adam:** wanting to feel known by your partner is not villain behavior **Nina:** Then what is it **Adam:** i think it’s just being a person **Nina:** He knows me in theory Like he has all the information He knows I like that lemon pasta and that I hate crowds and that I can’t sleep But he doesn’t I don’t know how to say this **Adam:** he has the facts but not the you. He has the lyrics to the songs but not the sound **Nina:** Yes That He’s tuned to the right station but it’s coming through in a language he doesn’t speak And I keep turning the volume up and it just gets louder without getting clearer **Adam:** Nina. **Nina:** I know I can hear you loud and clear when you're not saying anything **Adam:** i’m trying very hard to not say the wrong thing right now **Nina:** I know So say something normal **Adam:** a kid told me today that the word “friend” looks like it should rhyme with “fiend” **Nina:** Ha God That kid again **Adam:** he’s consistent **Nina:** I think something is ending And I think I’m the one ending it And I don’t know how to be the person who ruins something that everyone else thinks is fine **Adam:** i don’t think you’re ruining anything. i think you’re just the first one to say it out loud **Nina:** When did you get like this **Adam:** like what **Nina:** Like someone who says the right thing **Adam:** i’ve always been like this. you just started listening at 3 a.m. **Nina:** uh huh Okay Goodnight adam **Adam:** go to sleep nina ### *November 19 — 2:58 a.m.* **Nina:** I told him I think we need to talk He said okay and then asked if I wanted to order thai food I didn't realize until later that he wasn’t deflecting He genuinely thought we could do both **Adam:** that’s mason **Nina:** Yeah That’s mason ### *December 4 — 3:12 a.m.* **Nina:** It’s over **Adam:** are you okay **Nina:** I don’t know We talked for a long time He cried I cried **Adam:** sorry Nina **Nina:** He asked me to explain what was missing and I tried and he kept saying “but I would have done that if you’d asked” and I didn’t know how to say that shouldn’t require asking **Adam:** yeah **Nina:** He’s not a bad person **Adam:** he’s not. he’s a good person who loved you in the way he knew how. He’s always been a good friend to me too **Nina:** That’s the thing that makes me feel worst Because it was a good way to love me It just wasn’t mine **Adam:** i know **Nina:** He asked if there was someone else I said no And that was true And also **Adam:** yeah **Nina:** I don’t know what to call it **Adam:** you don’t have to call it anything right now **Nina:** it’s like. Once someone sees you clearly it gets harder to keep pretending blurry is enough And I don’t know if that makes me brave or terrible **Adam:** i think it makes you honest **Nina:** I don’t feel honest I feel like I detonated a nuclear weapon for no reason **Adam:** nina **Nina:** I keep waiting for you to use your teacher voice **Adam:** i am trying very hard not to do that **Nina:** I know That’s such a you thing To hold the selfish thought and not let it touch me **Adam:** i don’t know if that’s good or I’m just repressed **Nina:** Both probably **Adam:** probably **Nina:** How are you. Actually **Adam:** confused. sad for mason. sad for you. and something else **Nina:** Fair **Adam:** say something normal **Nina:** That’s my line **Adam:** you can have it back after I'm done **Nina:** Okay A customer today asked me what the difference is between a latte and a cappuccino and when I explained it he said “so it’s just vibes” and honestly? Yes **Adam:** yes. it is just vibes. all of coffee is just vibes **Nina:** Thank you for not making this harder than it already feels **Adam:** always **Nina:** Goodnight adam **Adam:** go to sleep nina **Nina:** You first **Adam:** can’t ### *December 19 — 3:07 a.m.* **Adam:** hey. how are you doing **Nina:** Some days okay Some days I come home and the apartment has all this space that used to be his stuff and I just stand in it **Adam:** that’s wonderfully specific **Nina:** It is It’s not even the missing him exactly It’s missing the way the room made sense when it was full **Adam:** i understand that completely **Nina:** I know you do That’s why I’m telling you and not anyone else **Adam:** for the record i talked to mason last week **Nina:** Oh **Adam:** he’s hurt. he’s confused. he’s not angry at you. he asked me if i thought he did something wrong and i said i didn’t think it was about anyone being wrong **Nina:** What did he say **Adam:** he said “then what’s it about” and i didn’t know how to answer that honestly **Nina:** Yeah That sounds right **Adam:** he’s going to be okay. eventually **Nina:** I really want that to be true **Adam:** it will be **Nina:** Kid update? **Adam:** school’s out but one of them emailed me (emailed, from her mom’s account) to tell me she finished romeo and juliet on her own over break and she thinks juliet “carried the whole thing out like a boss” **Nina:** She’s right Juliet carried the whole thing like a boss bitch **Adam:** yeah she did --- ## Part 7: January, again ### *January 3 — 8:22 p.m.* **Adam:** hey **Nina:** Hey **Adam:** what are you doing tonight **Nina:** Nothing Existing Why **Adam:** come over **Nina:** !!! **Adam:** i know come here **Nina:** Okay Yeah I’m coming ### *January 4 — 3:07 a.m.* **Nina:** I’m in your bed **Adam:** i can see that **Nina:** Then why are you texting me **Adam:** seemed on brand **Nina:** We are unwell Both of us **Adam:** extremely **Nina:** Your sheets are terrible by the way **Adam:** you’re in my bed for the first time in the history of knowing each other and your note is about thread count **Nina:** I contain multitudes **Adam:** noted. Off to target I go **Nina:** Hey **Adam:** hello **Nina:** I keep waiting for this to feel different than the text version Like now that we’re in the same room it should be bigger or scarier or something But it just feels like the next thing **Adam:** is that okay **Nina:** Yeah It’s like Oh. There you are You know? **Adam:** yeah i know **Nina:** I’m so tired **Adam:** i know **Nina:** No like Good tired The kind where you actually might sleep Which if you know me at all is……… **Adam:** i know what that is **Nina:** Stay awake for like two more minutes? **Adam:** won't be easy but...i’m not going anywhere **Nina:** not if I can help it **Adam:** wow so possessive already **Nina:** Goodnight adam **Adam:** go to sleep nina ### *3:24 a.m.* **Adam:** you finally slept. showoff. --- ## Author's Note: I wrote this story on my phone while walking the streets of Seoul at sunrise (wow, what a pretentious sentence!) Our apartment had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night and while everyone else went back to bed after it was over, I had a texting conversation with myself that turned into a short story. To be fair, I had just finished Abby Jimenez's newest romance novel *The Night We Met*, and I felt compelled to write my own version. For this story, the medium really is the message, isn't it? These are conversations that happen every day because they can happen. Quietly and in the dark without anyone else knowing. I went back and forth a lot on how to format the texting itself (using my phone to get the inconsistencies of capitalization right, for example) and the timestamps, which tell their own story. I hope people pick up on the little things that happen in real life in between the messages, including the moment of "confession" between Nina and Adam. Curious if anyone has theories for where I intended to place it. My goal was to give the story a circular, almost seasonal shape. It begins at the new year, but the ending is warmer by exactly one person in Adam's bed. But the established intimacy has been largely linguistic between these two all along. They have totally different communication styles (Nina's funny and self-deprecating while Adam is more observational and less self-protective) but together they develop a shared language that you can track over the months. A tougher mode of the story for me to get right in edits was the "kids as Greek chorus" angle. My intention there was to point out how kids say the real thing because they don't know the "rules" yet. Adam and Nina have learned the rules and fashion them into a teacher/manager voice. They spend the whole story working back toward the same unguarded directness. But ultimately, that's because these two are in constant avoidance. Not just of the friendship boundaries they keep crossing but how it relates to their performed selves in everyday life. Mason, crucially, has no such gap. It's not that he's more honest, it's more like he doesn't notice the distance. He hears that Nina needs something and hands back what he thinks is a solution. I made a huge effort to paint Mason as kind of just a normal, nice person who makes mistakes. He's absolutely no villain. He's attentive, but as Nina points out, he's tuned to the right station in the wrong language. His failure is one of imagination, not love. At its core, this is a story about the difference between being known about and being known. Between someone who has your facts and someone who has your frequency. It's also about the cost of the performed self. Because 3 a.m. is the hour when performances tend to fail. Run out of steam. You can't maintain the composed version of yourself when you're at your weakest. You end up on the floor, texting the one other person you know is awake. Until they become the person you want to turn to at any hour. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/doors-that-open-on-leap-days/#/portal/support) ### The Stranger in Apartment 3A, First Floor URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-stranger-in-apartment-3a-first-floor-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-09T13:44:19.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/04/stranger_short_thumb.png) The Stranger in Apartment 3A, First Floor 0:00 /2090.866689342404 1× I feel better, Mom. I gulp and choke on nothing, grasping the rim of the bathtub. My hands slip. The water has drained but I’m frigid. I brush my drenched, heavy hair from my forehead, its icy fingers knotting around my neck. My tongue is too numb to taste anything. Did you hear me? Can you grab me a towel? With my ankles entangled in the soaked fabric of my grandmother’s nightgown, I roll over. I trip while I crawl out, my stomach slamming against the tile. I’m dizzy but my fever has lifted. My headache is gone, and I have energy to stand even with trembling knees. I’m off balance. I have to lean against the wall. Mom slouches on her bare mattress, gathering her parents’ obituary cards, sepia photos of her grandparents, and one of me as a baby, into a neat stack and stuffing them into her wallet, into the pouch where cash is supposed to sit. Her breath stutters, hair matted. Mom, are you okay? She crumbles into stifled sobs, wrestling to compose herself. Everything else in the bedroom, including the twin I sleep on in the corner, has vanished. “I’m ready,” she says with a raspy voice you only get from crying for hours. A rip and tack of tape responds. Her older sister is sealing a cardboard box with DISHES written on the side. Mom! What’s going on? I touch her. She flinches, grabbing her shoulder as though she’s been stabbed. What did I do? “I’m done,” my aunt says, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Hey, are you in pain?” Mom shakes her head with fury, weeping. My aunt clasps her sister’s elbow—*gently*,liketesting a mousetrap—and whispers, “Come on. We have to go.” A moment passes, but it feels like forever when my mom refuses to get up. I don’t want her to get up. “We’re late on the move-out inspection.” “I don’t know if I can do this,” Mom whispers, silent tears streaming down her face. “I know, honey.” Quieter still. “She used to sing in the mornings.” A pause. My aunt nudges her. “It’s not good for you to stay here.” No, wait. Mom, limp, leans on her sister, one arm weighted around two shoulders. I follow them. Wait, *please*. I follow them across the kitchen. Up to the front door slamming in my face. I grab the handle, and I twist it, and I rattle it, and I turn the deadbolt when it flips position, and I listen to her keys click on the other side, but I can’t unlock the door. I smash the door with my palm. Mom! I stop. Mom? I can’t feel the wooden grooves beneath my fingertips anymore, and when I push, nothing—*nothing*, a barrier of *nothingness*—buckles under my force. I no longer feel cold. I no longer feel. I no longer— Can you hear me? No, my voice has no cadence, more like a breath. No, more like the *thought* of breath, a memory that can’t catch up to the present moment. Of course I make no sound. I’m time lost, dust left in the corners. Mom, come back. I’m still here. --- When the property manager shows off the apartment, I watch. A small woman in denim overalls trails him inside. The tattoos on her arms—snakes that wrap from bicep to wrist—twine as she nibbles on a finger and hugs an arm across her stomach. On her shoulder is a pleather satchel. On her head, a cap that tucks her pink curls in. Her slouched shoulders and timid frown tell me she wants to hide and never be found. “It’s… quaint,” she says, scanning the space. A studio with half of a wall to give the bedroom a pretend feeling of privacy. “Lighting is decent. Quaint, she says. Mom sacrificed electric bills to make sure rent was paid on time. “If you’re looking for cheap,” the property manager says, all round and tall, “this is your best bet in the city.” They leave the front door open. My thirty-second chance. I dash for it. In a blink, I step one foot out into the hall, but instead of pressing down on the stiff coils of the carpet, I land back into the bathtub. I scream, but they don’t hear me. The property manager recites from memory the square footage. Rent covers water but not other utilities. Trash dump is across the parking lot. I wail, stalking them as they ignore mismatched paint jobs. She asks about the pet policy. No pets allowed. I sob. This is home—you *can’t* take it away from me. Mom is supposed to come back. She won’t realize I’m here if she’s locked out of this place because some snake has decided to nest. I smash my fists against the kitchen cupboards. They crack open. The Snake doesn’t jump, but her eyes go wide. I didn’t know I could do that. Ha. This is my advantage. I smash them again, but the doors widen a smidge. It’s enough to get them staring. That’s right. *I’m here.* “Hm,” the property manager says. He tests the panel then closes it shut. “Must be loose hinges. We can tighten that up when you move in.” He faces the Snake and shrugs a shoulder. “Well, what do you think?” She swallows, glaring at the cupboards. “You said if I sign today, I get a month free?” “Yes, ma’am.” The Snake nods to herself, thinking far away. No, don’t bother signing. I never asked for a roommate, let alone someone who won’t smile when she’s supposed to be polite. “I can see myself starting a second chance here, you know?” Ugh. “Sure. *Great* place to have a fresh start.” He doesn’t care. “The offer is still there: three months’ rent upfront and I overlook your bad credit and lack of rental history. No cosigner needed.” She rubs her elbow, where the scales envelop. Glances one more time around the space. First floor, tucked behind a bunch of dumpsters. A far walk away from any park. The view from the one window is the neighbor across the courtyard on the other side. “This place is… nice.” “Say no more.” They leave and cross through me, and again, I can’t follow. --- She takes over in the morning. The Snake’s wooden easel can barely fit the bedroom—she’s got a twin-sized bed shoved in the corner where mine used to be, tubes of colors stacked on the floor and blank canvases leaning against the opposite wall like office files in a drawer. I’ve always wanted to draw. I remember… What was it? Coloring pencils, I think. Cheap ones, and a spiral sketch pad for a thirteenth birthday present. I wonder where those are now. I wonder if there is anything I can do. I kick the tube of green, and it rolls down the stack. Nice. The Snake sweeps it up and nudges it back in place. I hate her. --- By night, she’s hung motivational quotes: *Start wherever you are and start small*, hangs by the front door. It’s the first sign a visitor will see. *If all you can do is crawl, then start crawling*, resides in the nook above the kitchen sink. *One friend who understands your tears is much more valuable than a lot of friends who only know your smile*, on the wall opposite the bathroom sink. In the medicine mirror, the letters are backwards. In my reflection, I’m swamped in water, like I’ve been paused in the middle of rotting. Gray skin, my flesh warped in wrinkles that never dry. If I had known I would die in my grandmother’s nightgown, I would have worn the necklace she gave me. Or was it a bracelet? I can’t remember. The Snake doesn’t see me as she bumps my shoulder with hers—I’m air with no breeze—and stuffs bottles of prescriptions onto the shelf. The labels read Lamictal, Abilify. She pops open a bottle of expired Diazepam and dry-swallows one pill. I want her to know I’m here. I close the medicine cabinet and she stops it halfway. Eyes wide, she inhales, and measures the edges of the cabinet to see if it’s leaning to the side and not actually straight. The knot in her throat bobs. Oh, you realize now. Let’s see how scared you get. I leave the bathroom and knock hard on the kitchen wall. She rushes to me, groaning. She turns her back to me—I silently open a cupboard, then slam it. She gasps. Get out, get out, get *out*. “You friendly?” she asks. Me? I’m here. “No?” Determined, she tips over a flap from a torn box labeled MISC, and pulls out a bracelet of mal de ojo, sage, and a lighter. “This is *my* home. You don’t belong here.” *Quaint* was the word she used earlier. How *quaint* she thinks I’d be offended by the smoke. --- I try the front door. It won’t unlock. The windows, but they don’t slide open. The outside won’t listen to me, even if I shake the glass. --- Making her see me takes practice. Not “see” physically. I can’t conjure my own presence and face her. My voice is erased, but there are other ways. Amazing, what can happen with your imagination. Every morning, I sink my fingers into her breakfast and make it taste like mold. Every afternoon, when she studies a blank canvas, I wrap my hands around her forehead and give her a migraine, pulsing her images out to the point where she quits choosing a color. Every night, when she will not leave and someone I’m waiting for won’t come back, I sit on her bed. She shivers in her sheets, even though the AC is off. I miss the strangest things: the heat of a fever, itchiness behind the eyes. It’s not fair that she gets to taste food. Or paint. Or feel the sunshine on her skin, smell cologne. She wastes it all, boohooing for hours and feeling sorry for herself. --- I listen to her tele-therapist say one day that sadness is grief of missed opportunities. All night, I walk laps around the apartment. Fifty, sometimes a hundred. I find myself saying, over and over, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I don’t know who I’m saying this to. --- Clients visit to shop her finished works. Not that she has much to show right now. An old woman, well-dressed in a wool sweater, and interested in supporting local artists, introduces herself with a quivering handshake. “Good morning. I’m Clarice.” Hello. I don’t remember my name anymore. “Hi, welcome! I’m Arabella, but you can call me Bell.” I prefer Arabella. Clarice wants a custom desk portrait of her basset hound for two hundred dollars. Distinguished, please. Arabella’s email is *abelladay*. Send a photo. Her clients come to take one, take two, take none. I wiggle open the cabinet drawers when they least expect it, each and every time. I pick a particularly squeaky one and Clarice clutches the brooch on her neckline. Arabella pinches her lips in a grimace and says with an insecure joke, “I have a poltergeist.” “How charming,” Clarice says. Still frowning about me, Clarice continues, “I love your style. It’s soulful.” Arabella shrugs. It’s her way of giving thanks. She never accepts compliments. If anything, Arabella tells her therapist that she has lost all her inspiration, and she’s doomed to paint the drudge of bland scenery they hang in motel rooms. Motel porn, she calls it. But I’m here, Arabella. I’m your anti-muse. You pretend not to listen to me, but I’m in everything you paint. Anytime I watch you blend color, I mimic your movements like I’m doing it myself. I’m the murderer, but you’re the one killing your work. When I’m sad, you’re sad. I’m angry, and you smack the brush against the canvas in frustration, choosing the wrong colors. Dark colors—raging black stipplings onto the canvas, dreary maroon highlights, until it looks like a funeral procession for Clarice’s most beloved dog. Like a curse. Here lies Snoopy, who’s not really dead but he might as well be. Clarice isn’t happy and demands her two hundred dollars back, which means Arabella can’t pay rent for the month. It happens sometimes. Customers complain about her floundering professionalism, that she doesn’t fulfill her promises, and they either snatch their money back or they leave her bad reviews. All I’ve wanted to say about Clarice’s dog is that I’ve always wanted a puppy but never got one. --- One morning, Arabella won’t leave her bed to eat. I remember… I can’t remember. I do, and I don’t want to. The memories come in waves—when I get distracted, or I see a reminder. She is crying. One morning, Arabella is there, and on another morning, *I* am wrapped into my own sheets, missing another day of school, telling someone (Mom) I can’t feel my legs anymore. So many headaches. Mom promising me we’ll get to the emergency room. Here’s a painkiller, hang in there. Someone (my aunt) has a car, she’ll take us to the public hospital. It’s too far away for the bus. Someone (my uncle) will see about payment plans, will lend us money, we don’t have insurance, honey, just wait a little longer— Arabella’s tears are familiar. Kind of like Mom, after I said something mean. I might have gone too far. But I don’t know how to stop. You’re stuck with me. I can’t leave. --- Arabella’s purse is full of used tissue and expired makeup, and when she wants to look pretty in front of clients, she drops a pinprick of water into her dry mascara and forces it on, then pairs it with a withered-rose shade of lipstick. She wears makeup for her telehealth appointments, which makes her therapist believe she’s improving, but I know better. Arabella has left her old life and all her friends behind to start over in a new city. Her grandmother once told her she was ugly when she smiled. Ex-boyfriend told her he wasn’t good enough for the girl he wanted, so he got together with Arabella, the safer option, and she can’t do better than him. Arabella cries about this, three months later. This is her time to work on herself, hence why she is trying to pay for an apartment she can’t afford. No roommates. She can’t go through another arrest, another temptation to steal from someone else. Time to start clean. She buried her mom, who suffered dementia for four years, before she moved here. Her dad lives far away, on the other side of the country. “Do you still have anxiety attacks?” her therapist asks. “No.” That’s a lie. “I’ve been meditating.” Also a lie. Therapist leans back in his chair and writes something down off-camera. “How has your mood been?” Terrible. I make her medications useless. “Fine.” She’s not convincing. She’s cross-legged on the floor, and her foot trembles. “Much better.” “How’s your dad?” Arabella squeezes her elbow and pinches her lips. With a forceful sigh, she says, “He thinks I only call him when I need money.” Therapist nods. “Do you think that’s true of you today?” She lowers her face to glare holes in the carpet. “I want to make sure I can support myself before I reply to him.” “Smart.” Therapist offers a disinterested smile. “Making friends?” Arabella doesn’t respond. She never leaves except to buy groceries. When art supplies run low, she skips food and rations coffee. Therapist notices her silence and leans nearer to the camera. “Have you stopped taking your medication?” “I am still taking them.” After a pause, Therapist says, “I’d appreciate it if you’re honest with me.” “I swear.” Therapist sighs. “Let’s increase it to 10mg and check back in a month and see how you feel.” A month passes. Arabella is worse, and she can’t hide it. She informs Therapist that she’s about to be evicted. That maybe it was a mistake to leave her ex. That she should quit art. Everyone told her that she didn’t have what it takes, isn’t that right? She should have believed them. And when Therapist tells her to hang in there, she hangs up on him for the last time. --- Arabella hates bugs. She smashes them with her flip-flops, and squirms when she picks up their carcasses and shoves them into the garbage tin. I hate them too, Arabella. They follow me around. I’m sorry. She pulls out her stool and I hop to her side. Painting time. My favorite. Arabella streams music on her phone, and starts brushing wide swaths of sterile hospital gray for a base. To her, a park on a cloudy day. To me, something else. I point at the canvas. I tap her shoulder, and Arabella draws something we’re both familiar with. A syringe. This is our gift, Arabella. We hear each other. --- “How do I make you go away?” Arabella asks me one night, while heating ramen and parsing through the soup with a spoon, picking out the insects. “Like, move on or something?” Move on to where, Arabella? Where do you think that is? “Doesn’t it make you sad to stay here?” I don’t know. “Let me guess—you were some old guy who died in his sleep.” I don’t think I was. She sits at her table-for-one, and twists open her bottle of wine. “Maybe you need an offering.” She lifts the bottle. “Cheers?” Ha. I was barely old enough to legally drink. She swallows a gulp then takes another sip. After a moment of silence, as she taps her fingers against the bottle, a clock counting no seconds, she mumbles, “When they kick me out, are you going to follow?” No, I don’t want you to go. We’re friends. You make me feel like I still exist. That I matter. You listen to me. I speak in your paintings. She shifts in her chair. “Promise me something, okay? You don’t bother the next person.” Would you ever want to exist and never talk to someone else? “It’s not fair.” None of this is. Arabella weeps again, and I am not sure how to make her stop. I’ve never seen someone cry this much before. “I’m going to have to sell everything,” she tells me. “I can’t make this work.” Yes, you can. I… could be kinder. I should have been. I’m sorry. She needs to see. I press the back of my hands onto her shoulders and try to make her see. An ambulance. An unconscious teenager. Mom screaming over the phone. Arabella winces, scrunched up in pain. I’m doing too much, but I can’t stop. *Listen* to me. The understanding dawns slowly, from daze to hypnotism. Arabella blinks, and slides off her chair, dragging her feet to the bedroom. Placing a canvas onto the easel, she squirts globs of colors—black, white, red, purple, blue—onto her palette and starts to brush large, aimless streaks. A sky at dusk. I want to join. I want to learn the taste of wine. Ice cream. Sunburn on my skin. The roughness of a shoe over my toes. I was supposed to go to college. I haven’t been kissed yet. See me. She outlines a silhouette in tan skin, a shoulder, a hand gracefully placed on the neck, the shape of a face and the drapes of curly hair. My face. Arabella hums, entranced by what she’s doing. Flowers of burgundy and rust on my hair like a crown. A gown like a forest. I don’t look like this anymore. She adds eyelashes. My portrait looks down like she’s reading a book, her lips perked in a smile. “I don’t know where she came from, but she’s beautiful,” Arabella says. *Stop* it. I don’t look like this anymore. “What do you think?” I don’t know how to answer. What is life but a thousand mistakes you’ve wished to reverse? I died of a fever. Mom ran me a cold bath to bring the fever down but I slipped into unconsciousness by the time the ambulance arrived. No antibiotics needed. Possibly autoimmune. I don’t remember the mistake that got me sick to begin with, if there was one. I remember the mistake of telling my mom I’m fine, just leave me alone, and then the mistake of telling her too late that my headache lingered. I’m scared. I’m mean. This portrait of me is too content. Too serene. Healthy. I don’t realize that I’ve pushed my disgust onto Arabella, and her face contorts. “It’s ugly,” she suddenly says, drunk. She grabs a bottle of water and throws its contents at the paint. My portrait sags, skin bloated and creased, the muddy reflection of a girl bathed in a dirty lake. Her flowers soil, her fingers twist, her smile distorts into deprecation. Yes. This is what I look like. This is me. I’m here. --- In two weeks, half of her belongings are packed. I’ve tried to stall and make her too groggy to dismember her home with me, but all the motivational quotes are gone. Someone knocks on the door. A middle-aged woman steps inside and shakes Arabella’s hand. Seeing her arrests me, and if I had a heartbeat, it would die. Mom. Her hair is more gray than the picture I give myself of her. Eyes the same color. But her smile is different. “Hi. I’m Maya.” No, you’re *Mom*. Old, but real. Arabella! Tell her I’m here! I open the cabinet, and Arabella shoves it shut, knuckling it so it stays closed. She’s telling me to back off. Mom hugs herself as she eyes the move-out boxes, but she says nothing. I reach for her. Please feel me. Please know that I’m here with you. I never left. I still exist. You can talk to me. “I’ve seen samples of your work on your social media.” Arabella clears her throat. She had forsaken social media weeks ago. “I’m sorry to ask but… Why come to me? There’s so many other artists out there.” Mom purses her lips, looking down at the floor. “I liked your technique.” She’s lying. She came because Arabella has this address listed on her abandoned website. The last gloomy portrait uploaded is of Clarice’s dog. Mom, Mom, listen! I push onto her, but the contact makes her rub her arm. Damn it. I rush toward the back and bang on the bedroom wall. “Sorry,” Arabella says, hiding her face behind her hand. “I have a poltergeist.” No joke this time. Mom’s jaw slackens. Yes, Mom. I’m here. Slipping past Arabella, Mom runs to the back. Arabella gapes, a step behind. “Excuse me?” Mom stops at the bedroom. Glances at the bathtub before wiping her eyes. “Uh, sorry. It sounded like something crashed.” That’s when Mom notices my portrait. She gasps. “This…” Arabella’s shoulders stiffen, and she stammers. “That’s—well…” Call it an experimentation, Arabella. I tap her on the back of her head. *Say* it. “I was just messing around. You know. Experimenting with different styles.” All business and no confidence. Mom holds it up and studies the strokes warped by water and dried into a nightmare. My face slumps in ripples, my eyes inflated into the flowers that are supposed to hold my hair up. “She’s beautiful,” Mom says. No, I’m not. Arabella stares but Mom is too transfixed to notice. “Um, thank you?” “How much for it?” “It’s not, well, I haven’t thought about it.” “I’ll give you seven hundred for it.” The amount that covered rent when we lived here. Mom, you can’t afford that. “Well,” she corrects herself, “I can give you two hundred now and the rest in a few weeks.” She swallows, and her hands grip the painting, halfway to embracing it. Arabella is at a loss for words. “You sure? I can make you something custom.” Mom studies my portrait, at my flaccid cheeks. “This is meant for me,” Mom says, bleary. “Two hundred now and five hundred in two weeks?” She bites her lip, blinking back tears. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have promised that. I can give you the rest little by little, over the next two months? Is that okay?” Arabella wipes her cheeks. “A-Absolutely. You can take it once payment is complete.” “You’ll still be here?” “Yeah.” Arabella grins. She doesn’t look ugly at all, her smile lifted higher on one side. A flower aiming for the sun. The money will pay for her rent, at least what she owes so the eviction notice no longer applies. “Thank you,” Mom says with too much breath in her voice. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She opens her purse, rips out a check, and writes on it. Mom leans forward as if to hug Arabella. I can tell—Mom wants to stay, but she doesn’t. Being here hurts, but it relieves, like finding a long-lost letter. “I’m glad I came.” Arabella has no clue what she’s talking about. “I appreciate you coming.” Mom, please don’t go. Please? Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it when I told you that you shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford them. I didn’t mean to hurt you when I said I was a stupid mistake. But Mom hands over the check. For a moment, she looks at me. I think she can actually see me, but she says nothing and steps out the front door. Once she’s gone, Arabella squeals and jumps, kissing the check. But she sounds far away, a whisper from across the room, wrapping my portrait in plastic and placing it behind all the other canvases for safekeeping. The front door. Mom left it open. I feel lighter. I’m far. I’m near. I don’t know why, but it’s as if my head floats. Arabella searches for the nearest bank on her phone. If she leaves, she will close the door behind her. Does that matter anymore? Nudging the doorknob, the door yawns wide. With the painting, Mom has seen. Mom *knows* now: I’ve always been here. And I’m the only one who can celebrate this achievement with Arabella. She doesn’t have anyone to call and announce the good news. She needs me to stay. This is good, right? I’ll see Mom come back again and again, to look at my face as she makes payments until she’s paid off and can take my portrait home. Arabella will paint more for me, more *of* me, so everyone can see. Arabella picks up her phone and scrolls through her list of contacts. She clicks on DAD. “Hey,” she says to voicemail, “I’m… I’m sorry.” Her voice breaks. “Listen, I-I can take myself there to meet you, if you want?” On the other side of the country? “I just need to pay off one other person”—the sheriff—"and a little more time, and then… I’m sorry,” she says again, swallowing. “I want to come home, and I’ve got some money. Maybe I can get you coffee? Please call me back.” You’re leaving anyway? Arabella grabs her satchel. Opens the door wider so she can step out. I follow her to the other side, over the precipice of the doorframe. No, you can’t. Arabella locks the door behind us. No, *wait*. I reach to grab her shoulder and make her stay. Don’t leave me alone. But my hand passes through, and she doesn’t notice me. She instead double checks her satchel, folds the check, and secures it in a zipped pouch. What about me? I’m still here. But my touch no longer tells her anything. I’m air, no breeze. At the end of the hall is a shrooming light where my mother would have turned the corner. Bright, a paint splatter in the wrong canvas. Arabella walks through it and fades in white out. Is this what it’s like to disappear? When people no longer wait for you to come home? I try the door. It won’t open, so I’ll have to stand here and wait for Arabella to come back and unlock it for me. So I wait. And I wait, watching the whiteness spread and throb, arteries with a rhythm. By dinner, when Arabella passes through the white, she unlocks the door. But this time, I can’t follow her inside, looping back out into the hall. Arabella, let me in. I’m waiting for you. The white doesn’t eat me. Not yet, anyway. A few days later, I listen to Arabella talk to her father from the other side of the door. But most often, I hear her silence as she plays music. She’s not crying as much. Arabella calls out to me through the wood. She must be in the kitchen. “Where’s my lucky charm?” And if I had a heart, it would sink, then fly. I’m here, Arabella, but when I bang on the door to reply to you, nothing happens. No sound. I do like being a lucky charm. Makes me feel wanted. The white inches closer. Maybe it means I no longer need to be your inspiration, when you finally see. Every time Mom arrives to pay her next due, the white spreads, touching my feet. It’s time for me to go. Mom, remember me as a name you’ve always liked. Think of getting a puppy. Don’t cry. I’m invincible so long as I’m thought of. That’s good enough for me. Eventually, colors brighten. I taste the rain when it’s not raining, and I sigh where I don’t hurt, and I’m warm where I don’t feel. I remember now. In the bathtub, right before I died. “Stay with me,” Mom had said. I was too tired to say, I’m here. --- ## Editor's Note: The ghost story, as a form, tends to ask the same question time and again: what does the dead want from the living? This story, with quiet originality, asks something even harder. It asks what the dead want from *themselves.* The unnamed narrator — a teenager who died of a fever in the apartment where she once lived with her mother — spends the story's first half haunting Arabella, the new tenant, with a grief so ambient it poisons food, induces migraines, makes sleep cold and difficult. Then comes the turn...the author reveals, with great delicacy, that the ghost and her reluctant host are versions of the same woman. Both abandoned. Both performing adequacy for audiences who have already stopped watching. The haunting, we come to understand, is bidirectional. Arabella's sadness feeds the ghost's. The ghost's fury fuels Arabella's worst paintings and, eventually, her most honest one. A story about yearning, about the particular stubbornness of the unlived life. We are very glad it found us.—*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/04/MiravLevyAuthorPhoto.jpg)](https://miravlevy.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Mirav Levy is a speculative and horror Latina-SWANA writer who is passionate about creating emotionally resonant stories that stalk messy boys, chaotic girls, sentient Deaths, and memories we don't want to acknowledge. When she's not in her writerly costume, you can find her playing video games. She is currently working on her debut novel. She lives in Colorado with her husband and their menace of a cat. [Visit the author's website ](https://miravlevy.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Tip the author of this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/notch-the-lost-years/#/portal/support) ### Notch: The Lost Years URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/notch-the-lost-years/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T21:40:16.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/04/notch_short_thumb.png) Notch: The Lost Years 0:00 /1113.0572335600907 1× Mary Oliver said to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, but my animal was not soft: She was carapace and scute, phalange and scale, kelp-scented. You know how Gregor woke up—pow!—discovered he was a cockroach? It didn’t happen that way for me: No big reveal, no sudden terror or awkward coming into myself as two beings. I have no memory of a time before knowing her name or the feel of her smooth oval head patterned like brown field tiles, but I don’t know how we began. The morning of my first date, high school homecoming, my mother took me bra shopping for a complicated jobby that lifted my barely visible chee chees and concealed my nips but left the pale skin of my back exposed. It was a near-impossible mission in the tiny rural town where I grew up, but we’d left the task to the last minute so there was no chance of city shopping. In her relief at finding the right tool for the dress at one of the two small department stores crowded with egged pantyhose and flannel pajama sets, my mother, who did not ever speak of such things, turned the music low in the Pontiac on the ride home. She rolled the window an inch to release cigarette smoke into the wind and told me a story. I was a year old, she said, my toddler face covered in an angry teething rash. She set me to soak in a warm oat milk bath, put my favorite ‘45, “Everybody Wash,” on the record player, and lowered herself beside me on the toilet seat as the room sweated with the steam of bathwater. Soon enough, she said, I was rubbing myself gleefully “down there.” “You had no shame whatsoever, Alicia!” she said and smacked the steering wheel with her cigaretted hand, her cheeks blushing the pink of my homecoming dress. “‘Naughty,’” she said. “You chanted the word over and over: ‘Naughty. Naughty. Naughty.’ It was your first word!” My mother plucked me out of the tub, apparently, whisked a diaper over my baby parts, and dashed me into the hushed, white, and antiseptic office of our family doctor who told her that Notchie (not “Naughty,” I couldn’t tell my mother) would likely shrivel and fall off over time. We could also opt for a fairly painless outpatient surgery, though my parents would have to pay out-of-pocket and in advance. Mother opted to wait. She was nothing if not frugal. “It is gone?” she asked tentatively as we turned toward home that homecoming morning, and the tires flung the driveway’s gravel in all directions. I pretended to laugh. “I have no memory of that,” I said, shaking my head, which my mother understood to mean *Yes, Notchie’s gone,* and we said no more about it. Was this my first lie? Certainly there had been lies before—certainly there were lies after. In college, my roommate mentioned that a guy she was seeing never managed to find—or did not know to seek—the little man in her boat, and that’s when I knew for certain I was different. Did others have a canoe inside themselves? Were their seas navigated by a tiny man in a woolly cap while my sea was navigated by a turtle named Notch? If given the choice, I would always trust the turtle, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t given the choice. Notchie’s always called me *girlfriend*, even during the years I pretended not to like girls in that way and worried the word would give me away. Not that anyone could hear. *Girlfriend*, while I galloped my rocking horse through imagined meadows. *Girlfriend*, when Shaun Cassidy appeared on TV. *Girlfriend*, when my friend Crystal asked to play house-for-reals. *Girlfriend*, she’d moan while I straddled tree limbs during after-dark games of hide-and-seek. *Girlfriend,* that homecoming night when my date, Bobby, pressed my bare back against the metal door of his Ford pickup. *Girlfriend,* while inside the cab I spread my legs across the bench seat, and my head banged against the door handle. *Girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend*. Though I have no memory of the bathtub incident, the feeling that I’d done something wrong—that I was in trouble—stalked me. I never mentioned Notchie again to anyone, not even my husband. I was so nervous about a lover discovering Notchie that I made it a practice to drink myself at least tipsy before sex, and I never, ever let anyone put their head between my thighs. If I suspected someone glimpsed Notchie—lover or friend—I ghosted. Until I met Mel. I was working at Downtown Café while attending graduate school. I’d been divorced almost two years and hadn’t been on a single date—no interest and no time. Notchie wasn’t happy, but I ignored her whispers and focused on my studies. Mel was co-owner of the clothing shop across the street, Hearsay: Fine & Vintage Goods. I knew this because Mel’s business partner—a chatty white guy everyone called Burger, who drank his coffee black, no sugar—told me. “I don’t know how they can drink that shit,” he said every time he picked up Mel’s cinnamon oat milk latte. “Tastes like ass.” “Trying to frighten away our customers again, Burger?” I’d respond, and he’d laugh and drop a dollar in the tip jar on his way out. And then one day Mel picked up their own latte. I noticed them while they waited in line. They had light brown skin, soft brown eyes, and wavy black hair pulled into a low ponytail. Notchie noticed, too. A customer started shouting at me across the bar. “This pastry is *inedible*!” she cried, shoving her plate of half-eaten scone at me. “It’s supposed to be blueberry. It tastes like onion. If I wanted onion, I’da ordered onion.” She didn’t want another scone, and she didn’t have time to wait. “Is this what they call *slow* food?” she scoffed as I placed a wrinkled five dollar bill in her turned up palm. “Twenty-minute wait, tastes like crap?” She turned to Mel. “How long’ve you been waiting?” Mel looked up from their phone. “I don’t mind waiting,” they said, smiling brightly as the woman rolled her eyes and stomped out. “I like the vibe here,” Mel called to the woman’s back. “I like it better when no one’s shouting at the staff,” they said quietly to me as they approached the register. “Thanks for that,” I said, grinning. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down, eh?” they said. “Never,” I said, shaking my head, wondering about their age. Definitely younger than me, I thought. Much younger. Too young? Notchie said no. “Shush,” I said, aloud. “Pardon?” Mel said. “Oh, uh,” I stammered, feeling the heat crawl up my neck. “I was talking to myself—um, what can I get you?” When they ordered the cinnamon oat milk latte I guessed who they were. “I’m a critter of many habits,” they said, smiling again. “Usually, Burger offers to buy the coffee while I do the bank deposit because he hates math, but he’s out today, so it’s all on me.” They tilted their head and squinted a little. “You should come by after your shift. We just got in a blue tunic that would look amazing on you.” “I, uh, didn’t think you’d carry my size,” I said with a—oh, God. Was it a nervous titter? “Pfft,” they said, pushing backward through the door. “You’ll be closed by then,” I said with a small question in my voice. “For you,” they said. “I’d stay open late,” and the door jingled as they dashed across the street. I watched them unlocking their shop. “If you’re finished with your meet-cute, can I get an onion bagel?” the guy at the front of the line said with a kind smile. --- Mel was right about the tunic. It was cerulean with a drapey boatneck, three-quarter sleeves, and a very reasonable price tag. I bought it on the spot. To be honest, I would have bought the thing if I’d looked like a toad in it and had to eat rice for a month to recoup the expense. After I paid, we chatted while they closed up shop. “Have you always wanted to own a retail store?” I called across the clothing racks. “No,” they laughed dryly and tossed a feather duster at me. “I was a social worker right out of grad school, but I burned out after five years, just lost my compass.” “I’ve heard that’s tough,” I said, taking their hint and dusting shelves filled with vintage tin canisters and gently clinking mint-green depression glass roosters. “There were bright moments, but I don’t have enough of a buffer for so much sadness and so few resources,” they said while re-folding graphic t-shirts on a display table. “So you made a change?” “I changed cubicles and stayed another six years,” they said with a snort. “Oh,” I said, doing the math of their age in my head. “That’s a long burn out.” They grabbed the vacuum from the closet and plugged it in. “I was on the cusp of a breakdown, I think,” they called over the hum of the machine. “I had a couple of beers at my brother’s house one night and got a little—uh—emotional about everything. Burger was there. He’d been bartending for years and said it had lost its charm.” “And that’s when Hearsay was conceived?” “That’s the short version,” they said, stuffing the vacuum back into the closet. “Thanks for dusting.” I handed them the feather duster. We stood close together. I was sure I felt something sparking between us. “Hey, so, I like you,” I blurted, hoping the low lighting hid my sudden pink. “Would you want to go out sometime?” “Hey, so, I like you, too,” they said, grabbing their jacket from the closet hook. “But. I don’t really do relationships—the romantic sort, I mean.” “Oh, yeah,” I said, turning away, and quickly scooping my backpack and shopping bag from behind the register. I was bright red now. I could feel it. “No problem. I’ll see you at the coffee shop, or, you know, wherever.” “Alicia, wait,” Mel called as I backed toward the door. “The alarm!—” And then it wailed. “Sorry, sorry!” I shouted. “I’m an idiot.” I let the door shut behind me. I ducked my head and hustled away from the blare of the alarm, toward the underpass, toward home. Notch was silent. Or Notch was silent until I drank a half bottle of cheap Malbec and climbed under the covers. *Girlfriend, Girlfriend, Girlfriend,* she thrummed. --- A few days later, Mel stopped into the café during the lunch rush and stood at the bar. I tried not to make eye contact as I rang up orders and handed them behind me. “Do you want to see The Urchins with me tonight?” they called over the Brazilian jazz vibrating the café’s tiny speakers. “My brother canceled.” I looked up, pointed at my chest, and mouthed, “Me?” Mel nodded. “Rob? Roy? Rett? Anyone who can read my handwriting?” I called as I slid a cappuccino toward the wall of customers. “Tonight?” I asked Mel as I turned back to the toaster to smear a waiting sesame bagel. “Yes,” they said. “I really don’t want to go alone.” “As friends?” I asked with my back to them. I could see my coworkers side-eyeing our conversation. “Friends,” Mel shouted. That’s how our friendship began. --- Mel didn’t lie. They didn’t do romantic relationships—not with me, not with anyone. For a long time, it was fine. After The Urchins, Mel invited me to a showing of *The Thin Man* at an independent theater across town, and we shared a pint of contraband rocky road. I would have gone just to hear Mel’s laugh, boisterous, as if there were no one else in the room. Soon, we were spending Friday evenings hanging out on my apartment patio listening to French jazz while Mel smoked cloves, and I tried not to look too long at their lips. We swapped notes, books, and tales of retail tragedies. We painted posters and chanted at protests. We took an early train to the country to buy a slice of the world’s largest doughnut—glazed, greasy, disappointing—but all the while, we shared stories about our parents, our siblings, our first loves. I never mentioned Notch, though I could feel her presence like an itch, like an ache. A year later, Mel and I stood waist-deep in the Pacific. I’d finished grad school, and my parents saved enough to gift me a trip to the beach. I invited Mel, of course. We were practically living together by then. The sky was blue on blue; the water was just cool enough to be a fresh welcome. The air smelled of sunscreen, and down the shoreline, seagulls chased each other and screeched in circles around someone’s abandoned, tattered fast food bags. Mel watched the horizon. “When I was a kid,” I said, “we had a pomegranate tree in our back yard. It was mostly neglected, but every summer it would grow small green fruit, round with pointy star stems—each one like a fat, alien octopus.” “A fat, *alien* octopus?” Mel asked, quirking an eyebrow. “It’s my fruit story.” “OK. Alien octopus. Go on.” They had leaned backwards quickly to dunk their hair, and the dark curls dripped water down their back. “Every day I’d check how they were ripening. Yellow, then pink, then rosier pink, roundness flattening on each side. Every day, I wanted to pluck one, but I wanted it to be the most ripe, the sweetest, and every year I waited too long. I’d wake up one morning, and the deer would have eaten the entire bush, leaves and all. I’d cry all the way to school.” “I thought you said it was a tree?” Mel asked. “It was a bushy tree,” I said. “That’s not the point.” Mel snorted, and then we were silent for a minute, splashing. I could feel Notchie, restless. I was thankful for the cloak of the sea. “May I ask a question?” Mel asked. “Another question?” I laughed. “Yes.” Notch was behaving oddly. I could feel her in my belly, in my chest. My back ached, and I wanted to hold my breath. “Am I the pomegranate in this parable of produce?” “Do you ever feel like you’re so different that no one could possibly understand?” I asked, feeling the waves pull my legs from under me. “Like, no one would ever believe the truth of you?” “Yes. Every day.” Mel sighed. “Alicia, I can’t be what you want.” “What do I want?” I was paddling my arms now as I sank lower and sea water sloshed in my face, while easing the pain in my back. In answer, Mel shook their head. “We could be something,” I said, and then I was under the waves. It was a relief, really, like a long stretch after hunkering down. My body, carapace and scute, phalange and scale, soft leather, but not a stranger. My body was most mine. I blinked several times, and through the shadowy sway, something lingered—a fish, dark and strong-jawed. I almost didn’t have time to wonder before the fish—a remora!—darted in and pressed its body to my turtle belly, held fast. Oh, delight. Oh, how I swam at last. --- ## Editor’s Notes: This story operates by a logic the reader doesn’t understand until they’re already inside it. The story announces its metaphysical premise—a woman who has always known herself as partly turtle, partly human, whose clitoris has its own name and personality and history—with about the same flatness you’d use to describe a story about two people taliking over dinner. This is the move. By the time you realize you’re reading magical realism, you’ve accepted it as yet another quirky biography. What the author understands, and what many writers get wrong, is that the body in fiction almost always becomes allegory. The body stands for something. The queer body. The marginalized body. The body that society has tried to surgically correct out of existence. And yes, Notchie’s near-excision by a family doctor is not incidental, it’s a real gut punch because these bodies usually get conscripted into argument. This story cuts that. Notchie is decisively *not* a symbol for queerness. Notchie *is* queerness, the same way Notchie is pleasure, selfhood, the part of you that whispers *girlfriend* whether you’re ready to hear it or not. The structure is what truly earns the ending. We move from childhood shame to suppression to a friendship that is and isn’t enough, and the reader feels the pent-up pressure of a self that has been managed rather than lived. When the narrator finally goes under the wave, the release is physical before it’s emotional before it’s metaphorical and that’s exactly the “right” order. And what a great voice this story wields with such effortless confidence. It’s funny in the way people are funny when they’ve processed enormous pain, which is to say it’s efficient without performance. A kind of wild precision. We published this because it reminded us what fiction can explain a life by moving as one. It can be startling, inevitable, strange, and in the end, entirely yours.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/03/IMG_0047.jpeg) Patricia Caspers is the founding EIC of **West Trestle Review.* She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently **The Most Kissed Woman in the World.* She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College (RIP), and her award-winning work has appeared widely in journals such as **Ploughshares, Pithead Chapel*, and *Cimarron.* She is a Unitarian Universalist. ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Tip the author of this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Memory With a View URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/memory-with-a-view/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T14:05:32.000Z He opened the shutters first. The apartment had been closed for three weeks and the air in it was old and flat. When he turned the latch the wood stuck once and then gave. The shutters went back against the wall and the harbor light came in all at once. It struck the tile and the glass-front cabinet and the framed print over the sofa that had gone pale from years. Below, the street dropped toward the water. Taxis passed in short bursts of color. A bus made the turn wide and leaned. Beyond the roofs the bay lay bright and hard, the afternoon sun making a white path across it. The fort sat out on the point as it always had, stone and green, and the ferries moved in and out below it with a patience that looked like wandering slowness from here. He stood with one hand on the shutter and listened. The apartment had its own sounds now that the air moved again. The hum from the refrigerator. The soft rattle in the kitchen vent. The tap in the bathroom that had never shut clean. From the street came music from somewhere unseen, a tinny trumpet and a voice singing just a single note too high. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Xeno’s Dilemma URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/xenos-dilemma/ Last updated: 2026-03-26T14:05:54.000Z Now that she’s pressing her fingertips to the middle of her sweater, I’m pretty sure that today I’ll take her to the pod, and I want to tell you about this, all of it—how we ended up at this point and where we might go from here. For a while though, she only rubs at the gray wool, as though massaging her chest, and my certainty wanes. Maybe this is all she’ll do, then lower her hand. But no, her fingers arch, nails digging in, like she’s trying to tear through the yarn and excavate something from her heart. She knows she shouldn’t be scratching, knows it’s only going to make the itching worse, but of course it’s satisfying, and few things are these days while her mind still struggles to go on without the constant stimulation of the city we’ve been so enmeshed in and enamored with. Much of life here must seem small, slow, and subdued. She keeps her eyes—drowsy, bored, or both—on her steel-cut oats, keeping me and the part of the table with my breakfast out of even her peripheral vision. No doubt she expects me to tell her to stop like I always do. But this time, I say, “Let’s go for a walk,” like I’m suggesting just a short outing because I don’t want her to object, even though she never does. She loves the forest here, especially on warm days like this one. Today though, I’m asking her to go there not for the forest itself but to see something extraordinary, even if she finds it unsettling. Whatever effect the pod has on her, the walk will at least serve as some respite. She never scratches in the forest, the leafy landscape an elixir for her latest ailment and for so many of ours before this one, an elixir I made the mistake of denying us for too long. During the years we lived in Helicity, I knew that I needed to spend more time with her and that both of us needed to spend more time in nature, in soundscapes with birds singing, wind jostling leaves, and water flowing over rocks. Still, those needs always seemed like they could be taken care of later, always seemed paltry in the heady dazzle of a society ever ebulliently striving to better itself. We were avid members of the aspirational class, our minds enlivened by and devoted to technological possibilities and scientific progress, our senses saturated with and electrified by the urban bustle that made us alternately spectators and partakers in the spirited discourse of our civic-minded citizenry and the fervent commerce of shopping arcades. I was working at the forefront of cognitech research, and she was flourishing at school, enthralled by the minds-on pedagogy of her teachers, ravenous for the encouragement they cheerily bestowed. Then, after lunch one late-summer day, I walked to the park down the street from the lab and sat in the shade of a tree. Aglow in sunlight, its serrated leaves captivated me, the sight timeless and nostalgic, reminiscent of a scene from childhood. But which scene? An afternoon reading on the riverbank near my elementary school or one of our family picnics by the lake? Was this an alder or a birch? I considered the foliage and the trunk with its mottled bark, a combination of familiar features I couldn’t unify with a name. Hoping to nudge awake the dormant knowledge of flora and fauna you instilled in me, I spent the next week eating sandwich lunches in parks near the lab, only to find that I couldn’t tell which plants were invasive and which were native. Couldn’t recognize birds by their songs or even plumage in some cases. Like I’d gone from fluent to a student failing quizzes in a language I’d picked up as a child. Would you have been disappointed by this the way I was? In the days that followed, I felt as though the world had lost a dimension, been reduced to a single plane of immediate fervor—the urban greenery of pollinator corridors and rain gardens like little brushstrokes of soft shades offering the illusion of depth on a canvas crowded with frenetic hues ostentatiously constituting the subject of the painting. Of course, something similar had happened to her too. I finally noticed that she wasn’t staring at flowers and moss like she used to, wasn’t talking about clouds as mice scurrying east or a dragon devouring cauliflower—the sky imaginatively inert to her, clouds just features of the atmosphere, masses of water vapor. And it was clear we had to leave the engrossing metropolis of concrete terraces, glass pavilions, aerial gardens, and complex transit systems, this most civilized of cities where ambitious idealism is expected and paradigm-shifting achievement is prized above all else. So I did what I could to wrap up my R&D projects while figuring out how to lead a new life. Eventually, I took the offer to mentor inquisitive youth in this remote northwest town and bought the little tree farm we’ve been slowly repurposing. *It would be so easy to let* *moment* *after moment* *slip by, but* *one day you might ask* *in a voice I can’t imagine you having* *what these days were like, what you were like.* *So let’s make moments matter* *and make them last in our minds,* *practice an awareness* *that makes us more human.* *And isn’t becoming ever more human* *the essence of being truly human?* *And isn’t that what it takes to know the world,* *especially in these times?* Entering the trailhead at the end of our road, we follow the narrow path that goes all the way through the forest to the distant ravine. Soon we’re among lofty maples, enfolded in the singing of wrens and warblers. As always, she alternates between walking beside me and behind me, her gaze going everywhere. Once we’re a couple miles out, I finally tell her, “There’s something I want to show you, and we have to go off the trail to see it.” “OK,” is all she says, even though we’ve never ventured away from any trail on our hikes together. Carefully we make our way through the profusion of ferns, fringecups, and fairybells until we get to it: the pod, the black egg-shaped object that comes up to the middle of her chest. “This?” she asks, probably wondering if it’s a piece of junk or a strange rock. “Yeah. Look at this side.” I wave her over to the part I’m standing next to, the part that looks obviously technological with exposed tubing, the part that has a crystalline window with curvy symbols etched around its edge. The moment she comes around, her eyes widen. “Is it real?” she murmurs, her gaze transfixed upon the creature inside. Her question is like an echo of my first reaction. I was sure the pod had to be a work of sci-fi-inspired installation art meant to be mysterious and thought-provoking. But the more I looked at the creature, the more alien this whole thing became. With six lanky limbs resembling tentacles that each end in a splay of six extensions more like feathers than fingers. The ruddy body is oddly oblong and intricately scaly in ways that seemingly no one with a terrestrial mind could have dreamed up—much of the skin tightly tiled with little beads that have a fine brain-coral texture. Atop a head shaped somewhat like a seahorse’s are four antennae or eyestalks. They’re suspended in some sort of fluid, and the creature undulates as though sluggishly swimming in place. “As far as I can tell, it’s real,” I answer. “How did you find it?” “I saw it from the trail before the understory leafed out.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “This thing could be dangerous. There’s no way for us to tell what radiation it might be giving off or what pathogens it might harbor.” Or what the creature will do if it comes out. “So it’s some kind of stasis chamber?” “Or maybe an escape pod.” “And you haven’t told anyone about this?” “No.” Who is there to tell? “But does the… animal…inside need help?” “Maybe, but I don’t know who can help it.” “What about scientists?” “I doubt there’s an exobiologist within a hundred miles. And even if there were, I don’t know if they’d try to help it so much as study it. Also, if someone takes it away, that might make things harder for its fellow creatures to rescue it.” “So you think it’s an escape pod from a spaceship that ran into trouble?” “That seems plausible. What do you think?” “Maybe it was sent from its home planet as a way to show other civilizations that there’s life in the universe. Like a living message in a bottle.” “Wow, that never occurred to me. I figured this creature was either a crew member of a spaceship or one of the passengers. Or part of the cargo, if the spaceship was carrying animals to settle another planet.” “I guess it could be any of those things.” “Or something else entirely.” “Like an experiment that got lost.” “Or abandoned.” Then, done with conjectures, we’re silent as she watches the creature. “Does it always move this slowly?” “Yeah. It’s like this every time I’ve come here.” “Do you think it can see us?” “If it can, it hasn’t responded in any obvious way.” “So maybe it is in some kind of stasis or torpor.” “Or its senses work differently from ours.” “Hm, yeah.” Then we’re silent again, and I can tell she’s deep in thought. “So we just leave it here?” she finally says. “That’s probably best.” “OK.” *I worry your inner voice is too quiet,* *the voice that tells you what you need to do* *subdued* *by the sonic doppelgänger* *that tells you what you should do* *ever as insistently as the adult voices* *that have been the constant chorus* *of your childhood, their echoes* *having ricocheted around your thoughts* *long enough to sound like you,* *reshaped by the acoustics of your mental ecology* *to take on the timbre of that tender wilderness* *they have been relentlessly pruning* *Tell me what the quiet one says,* *and learn to ignore the one that always wants* *your mind’s ear all to itself* The scratching stops. As though a switch has been flipped, turning off the itching that has so ceaselessly afflicted her. Still, I continue to put ointment on her chest, rubbing it over the swath of once-smooth skin now crisscrossed with scabs and welts, injuries that then glisten with an unctuous sheen reminding me of the times you’d rub tiger balm on my belly when I had an upset stomach. Every day, she walks to the pod after school, even if that means walking in the rain. There are only three days when she doesn’t and is instead housebound with a cold, tucked in bed reading astrobiology books borrowed from the town’s little library, the kind of books that have become her evening pastime once she’s finished her homework. She knows she can’t learn enough from them to help the creature, knows she has a long way to go before she can fully grasp what she’s reading, knows this material is all so speculative. Then of course there’s the pod and the creature, technologically and biologically inscrutable without scientific equipment—probably indecipherable even with the most advanced scientific equipment, unless opened. But she has to try, needs to learn everything that could help her understand the creature. She’s restless during our weekly trips to the grocery store, ahead of me in every aisle, eager to grab what we need and get back to her books. On weekends, she never wants to go out for brunch or a movie but does attend the occasional birthday party of a friend from school—with indifference. While we do chores together, she tells me about what she’s read, her way of digesting the information, reminding me of those evenings in Helicity when she’d chirp on about school as I handed her plates to put in the dishwasher. This all feels familiar. Didn’t you indulge me through a period of preferring the pursuit of knowledge to being a person in the human world? In the evenings, she watches the sunset with me in the backyard, sometimes posing questions about the creature as the clouds glow with gradually deepening hues of magenta. Is it descended from a predator species or is it an herbivore? Or does its planet even have herbivores? Are its appendages capable of making the technology needed for a spaceship? If it was on a spaceship—which seems more likely—a generation ship or a hibernation ship? “Do you see the night sky differently now?” she asks when we’ve lingered in our lawn chairs long enough to see the sky slowly fill with stars. “Yeah. It doesn’t feel as empty. We know there’s life elsewhere. We’re not alone. Humans may never come into contact with aliens again, but just knowing they exist comforts me.” “Me too. It’s like the universe is telling us, ‘You’ve barely seen any of my wonders.’ Like it’s let us in on a secret it’s been keeping for a long time.” I wait for her to say the other half of this thought, its logical next part: and now we’re keeping this secret. Her sentiments shift how I see the students I meet with, raising the question of what they would do with the secret she now holds. Ever idealistic, Miri would no doubt want the world to know about the creature, so certain that humanity would be transformed by the new reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. While discussing thought patterning with Bosarc, I get the impression that he would want humanity to reap the knowledge held by the pod, the potential technological and even medical advances outweighing the likely harm to the creature. If I were their age, I would probably ask you to do what could still be asked of me: get someone to come take a look. I’d bring you to the pod and trust you to find the right someone. It’s been a long time since I was that version of myself, the psychological distance between now and then spanned by so many iterations of myself. Across all of them, I’ve always wanted to tell you everything, have always felt a need to make what I know known to you, the one person who has always known me. But you don’t need to know all those things. *I can’t imagine* *bringing it up,* *but if you ask me what I did before* *you were born,* *I’ll tell you about my work* *as a neuroceutical engineer* *about how I made drugs* *that made the mind sharper,* *made the brain remember better, dream bigger, learn faster, think deeper.* *Then maybe you’ll ask* *what I liked most about that work,* *and I’ll tell you that I liked seeing* *what the mind is* *capable of with a little help.* *And I still do, but I better appreciate help* *that isn’t the chemical kind.* Soon, the weather warms, school is out for the summer, and she gets into a new routine. After breakfast, she puts on her hiking shoes and shoulders her backpack. It no longer holds homework and notebooks and lunch but instead has her sketchbook, snacks and water. I see her off at the front door, and sometimes I go to the window at the top of the stairs and watch her walk to the trailhead. While she’s out, I meet with students in the farm’s old gazebo until it’s time to make a simple lunch that I’ll eat with her before meeting with more students in the afternoon. If she’s late getting back, I put the solitude to use composing the stories I want to tell her but am not yet ready to. The times I join her, I watch her become instantly lighter when we get to the pod, no longer weighed down by worries, relieved that it’s still there, that the creature is still moving in its languid slow-motion way with long limbs swaying listlessly. I’m impressed that with all her visits to the pod, she hasn’t left a trail of trampled vegetation. She must walk a different way to the pod each time. *All teachers harbor* *secrets.* *Their favorites, their fantasies, their insecurities.* *The one I keep from everyone—* *even you—* *is simple:* *I’m preparing students for a future* *I don’t believe in anymore.* *Though I want to share everything* *I keep this from you* *because it’s a secret that should never* *concern you.* Before I know it, we’re heading to the pod in the middle of July, and she’s asking me, “Do you think there are other pods here on Earth?” “There could be,” I answer. “But if there are, they either haven’t been found yet or are also being kept secret by the people who found them.” “Maybe this pod is the only one here. If it is an escape pod, others from the ship might have scattered in different directions.” “Right. And even if other pods came to Earth, they could have ended up in really remote places, like the Arctic or even the ocean.” “Even debris that broke off from this pod during its descent could be hundreds of miles away. I’ve searched all through the woods and haven’t found anything else. Not a single scrap of wreckage.” Of course. I should have known she’d comb this area for things related to the pod. “Do you think the creature is lonely?” she asks. “I would be if I were on my own so far from home.” “But isn’t that what it’s like being here?” “Don’t we have each other?” “Yeah, but I mean, we’re on our own, far from home.” “I guess so,” I answer even as my mind balks at her words. Since coming here, she’s never called Helicity home. Then I get it. She means your house, the place we’d always visit no matter what city we were living in. My childhood home and her idealized one—that old A-frame in the forest which taught her to love forests, that abundance of oaks and birches in your one-thoroughfare town where we come alive in ways we never do amid tall buildings and traffic, that cozy municipality in a region where most of our family is, all those aunts and uncles and cousins who take us to farms with delicious berries and to prairies full of wildflowers, rustic places where the two of us tell them about city life and travel abroad, our alternating accounts dovetailing as though describing two parts of the same life—me the half doing the adult things, her the half doing the childhood things, together doing the together things. Maybe on some level that’s how we are in her mind, two pieces of a single whole. That would make sense. Our lives have been entwined since before she can remember. *I am trying to learn* *the kind of patience I hope to teach you* *—waiting without expectation,* *the ability to let time pass* *without anticipation,* *to do what you can* *while the things you can’t do anything about* *run their course—* *an ability* *like a long glossy feather you can always stroke,* *a talisman against the illusion of terrible permanence, a reminder that it’s possible to* *glide with ease above vast landscapes.* *I need that patience now,* *and you will all too soon.* *And I wish I had learned it* *earlier but I had no teacher* *—except the world,* *and I didn’t understand the lessons, until now,* *that the world teaches me* *through you, getting me to learn* *by doing more than ever.* Though the creature’s mind—if the concept of mind is even applicable—probably works very differently from the human mind, I sometimes imagine the creature having thoughts like hers, full of curiosity, yearning for discovery—qualities befitting a starfarer. Then I wonder what she would want if she were in the creature’s situation. Would she want the possibility of help if it came with the risk of harm? Then I have to remind myself that she has long since given her answer, albeit tacitly. Asking her would simply be a path to knowing how her mind arrived at this answer. And though I’d like to know the logic underlying it, there’s no need to deconstruct the decision. What I must do now is abide by that answer, the way you so often did when I’d made up my mind about something important to me. After choosing to relocate us here, I don’t want to impinge on her decisions if I don’t have to. Whether out of necessity or vanity, I’ve already made so many decisions for her. *Framed by my car’s windshield,* *the woman walking toward the entrance of the hormonium* *must be the soporifin donor who makes your sleep possible.* *She has a look of calm alertness* *the way you do after a restful nap.* *In the waiting area,* *with you nestled against me,* *I sit a couple chairs down from her.* *“Thank you for donating,” I find myself saying. “My baby would hardly ever sleep if it weren’t for donations. My body is holding on to what little soporifin my brain makes to get enough sleep to be functional.”* *She smiles and says, “Funny how these things are. My brain makes way too much. I have to extract it or else I’d be sleeping over twelve hours a night. I’m glad it can go to good use.”* August begins with the summer’s hottest days, and after a week of unrelenting heat, she comes into the kitchen while I’m making lunch and says, “The creature isn’t moving as much. Do you think it’s the heat?” “Could be,” I answer, though I doubt it. If the pod can handle the vacuum of space and direct solar radiation, what difference could thirty degrees up or down really make? “Or maybe it moves less sometimes,” I offer. “Or it’s going into a more dormant state.” “Can we move it into the barn, just in case?” “We can try.” Her eyes widen for a moment. She was probably expecting me to object. “But the pod could be heavy,” I add. “So long as we can get it on to the wagon, moving it won’t be too hard.” “Do you think the pod will fit?” “It’ll just make it. I measured.” Of course she did. After I meet with Konami, we head out into the torrid air. The walk to the pod is somber as I follow behind her with the green wagon in tow. The last time I pulled it, she was my passenger, half her size now, sitting with knees tucked to her chest, staring up at the fall foliage in a little park enclosed by imposing buildings. Over and over, I followed the circuit of the park’s short walking path, trying to give her something akin to an autumn afternoon in the woods. As we near the pod, I brace myself for the worst—the creature catatonic in some odd position, like a fish floating in an aquarium tank. Relief rushes through me when I see that the creature looks just as it did the last time I was here, in its semi-upright position with limbs outstretched like the twigs of a sapling. Though I’m sure that by now she’s touched the pod many times, I ask her to stay back while I try to lift the pod. Crouching down, I push on the back of it, the glossy black material even smoother than I expected. The pod tilts easily, not nearly as heavy as I’d assumed, and I quickly get my hands underneath it so the bottom, which is surprisingly flat, rests on my fingers and palms. Leaning the top of the pod against my torso, I raise it high enough off the ground to place it in the wagon. She wraps an old blanket around it for cushioning, in case it topples or tumbles out. Taking turns pulling the wagon, we make our way home slowly, taking care not to jostle the pod out of the wagon, cautiously rolling over the tree roots we can’t maneuver around, one of us always in back, keeping an eye on the pod. With the pod sitting in the coolest corner of the old barn, she spends much of the day there. Beside it, she leaves her sketchbook and books the library has gotten from larger libraries in cities far away. Maybe now that it’s so close, I have dreams about the creature. In the ones I can remember, it’s always out of the pod, wandering or exploring our house. That never alarms me. Sometimes, I’m glad to see it, happy that she no longer has to worry about it. Once, I hear her calling the creature Xeno. Then I wonder why she hasn’t given the creature a name. Between meetings with students, a couple possibilities come to mind. She’s always wanted to know the names of animals, plants, objects, feelings and ideas, to use those words as soon as possible, as though the name of a thing and its nature are bound together, and now, without knowing the creature’s nature, choosing a name is impossible. Or she simply doesn’t want to become more attached to the creature. *I add dysnomia to the collection* *of concepts you might use when you’re older* *because even though it’s not helpful* *the way tenacity and gaslighting can be,* *it doesn’t take up much space and it’ll be good to have,* *in case you ever end up feeling* *that your name doesn’t fit,* *or you meet someone who feels that way,* *then you’ll know what that’s called* *and know it’s OK, it happens sometimes—* *we can’t all have names that suit us.* *I simply chose one I hoped you would like* *when I knew nothing about the person you would become,* *deciding on aspirational sounds* *you might grow into.* *Now, I’d call you Avirene,* *but I don’t want to make you* *self- conscious about your name.* *Though I hope one day you’ll tell me* *how you feel about your name.* *And if you can’t* *because you don’t want to or I’m not around,* *I’ve made sure that there’s this part of dysnomia:* *you can give yourself any name you want* *because you should have one that you love.* Though the days are getting noticeably shorter, we make our way through them ever more slowly, a gentle lassitude accumulating under the sunlight thick like sap that could harden and gradually lock us into a golden timelessness. The less the creature moves, the more time she spends with it. I say nothing about the possibilities she must have considered and may be afraid of. The pod’s power supply running out. Its store of nutrients dwindling. The creature nearing the end of its lifecycle. The creature succumbing to the effects of too much or too little gravity. The pod no longer functioning, due to a part failure or self-shutdown protocol, becoming a relic, a high-tech specimen jar. I keep waiting for something amazing to happen. For a rescue party of the creature’s comrades to arrive. For her to tell me she can see the creature’s thoughts with her mind’s eye. For the creature to come out of the pod. For any change in the creature’s appearance that suggests the pod isn’t a stasis chamber but a chrysalis, a technological means for the creature to take its final form. But everything remains ordinary, keeping us in our own stasis. And I start to think that there’s a poetic quality to the creature’s fate, the way it came so far from such an advanced civilization and now lives out its remaining days in the company of a kind and curious girl, making her kinder and more curious, helping her consider this unfathomably vast world and her place in it. You once told me that nature can be ruthless, though not without reason, and I’d like to think that something similar can be said of destiny—strange, though not without meaning. *Life speaks in questions* *I’ve forgotten how to hear, even* *as it speaks with a voice that comes from you.* *Fortunately, the best way to hear is to listen.* The end of August is full of thick fog that makes the mornings and evenings damp and chilly. Still, she spends hours in the barn, a sweater or jacket keeping her warm while she reads or sketches. Seldom do we talk about the creature now that it hardly moves, the limbs only sporadically wafting as though in a protracted twitch. On our walks through the woods or in the yard watching the sunset, she brings up mostly practical matters: the supplies she needs for the new school year, the birthday card that should be sent out soon, the tofu about to expire on the middle shelf of the fridge. Though now and then, she brings my attention to the sublime—most recently a lullaby composed for glass harmonica. I worry that she’ll start scratching again and ravage her skin. But even after she goes back to school, I never see her raise a hand to her chest. She seems ever wide-eyed, entirely awake, as if the days are full of promise, the way I remember you when I was her age. *“Look over there,” she says, pointing.* *So you look across the ravine.* *“In your dreams tonight, there will be* *a bridge* *that goes from this side* *to that side,” she tells you.* *“Make sure you cross it.”* *You want to ask what she found* *when she crossed it,* *but her words carry a firm finality.* *She has no more to say on the matter* *—until after you dream about the bridge.* --- ## Editor’s Notes: What struck me first about “Xeno’s Dilemma” is that it understands something a lot of speculative fiction doesn’t. Wonder is rarely *loud*. It doesn’t always show up with sirens and spectacle and a huge explanatory apparatus. Sometimes it’s quiet. It’s in the woods, it’s in the form of a sealed black pod half-hidden among ferns, and what matters is not just the object itself but the emotional pressure it exerts on the people who find it. That, to me, is the story’s great achievement. It takes a premise that could so easily tilt toward plot mechanics—What is the creature? Where did it come from? Should the authorities be called?—and instead locates the deepest drama somewhere more intimate and more difficult, putting this in conversation with the work of Claire Denis for instance. Because this sci-fi tale is really a story about care. About the moral burden of witnessing the impossible. About the strange ways a child’s curiosity can restore a dimension of the world that adulthood has flattened into utility, progress, productivity. It is also, crucially, about the kinds of secrets love keeps. I admired the way the story avoids easy binaries. The pod is not simply salvation or danger, miracle or threat. The city they have left behind is not rendered as villainous, just spiritually overdeveloped in one direction. Even the narrator’s protectiveness is allowed to be both generous and compromised. That tonal balance is hard to pull off. The story manages it by being patient with everyone in it, including the reader. And then there‘s the prose, which is doing something quite lovely. The braided structure of narrative and lyric address gives the piece an unusual pulse. Those passages to the absent “you” deepen the emotional field, gradually revealing that this quirky alien stasis story is actually about inheritance, parenthood, memory, and the desperate, tender wish to leave behind some usable record of one’s love. The speculative frame expands the story, and the intimacy grounds it. We eagerly accepted “Xeno’s Dilemma” as a submission because it feels like the kind of story we want to champion. It’s formally attentive and emotionally intelligent. It’s unafraid of quietness. It trusts observation. It trusts ambiguity. It understands that the most haunting science fiction often isn’t about the future at all, not really. But about the present moment viewed from a slight and revelatory angle. By the time this story ended, I felt what the best stories make me feel. That the world had become both stranger and more understandable, and that those two sensations might, in the end, be the same thing.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/03/IMG_0041.jpeg) Soramimi Hanarejima is the author of **A Psychography of Modest Intimacies*. Soramimi’s recent work is forthcoming in **West Branch, The Worcester Review*, and **Straylight*. [Tip the author for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) ### Cold Genius URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cold-genius/ Last updated: 2026-03-19T14:00:58.000Z He had been still for so long that stillness had become indistinguishable from self. Ice was above him, and below, and pervaded every fragment of his being. At last he had found what he sought: the absence of feeling. Sight had abandoned him first, then dreaming. Nothing beside remained. Warmth, faint at first, reached him from far above. He tried to sink deeper, to pull what remained of his attention down into the beds of everlasting snow, where no living creature had ever gone, yet the warmth followed him. It knew his name and pursued him with a resolve he found first unwelcome, then enraging, then unbearable, as the ages of his solitude shattered. *Algor*, whispered the earth itself. *Algor.* He marshaled the remnants of his will and pushed against the intrusion. For a time the warmth retreated, only for a voice to call his name again with such insistence that he could no longer evade it. It seemed now that the only way to stop this ruthless summons was to answer. The ascent took time. Layer by layer he drove himself upward through the harsh dark, and as he rose, he felt the weight of his own form and the effort of movement. He loathed these sensations, for he had shed them long ago and found great relief in their absence. His resentment sharpened as he climbed, and he became most intent on making the invader understand the price of his awakening. When at last he broke through the surface, she was there: a woman with a face that ceased to be young without ever growing old, with high cheekbones and a jaw that squared at the hinge. Her eyes were large and blue-green. She knelt on the ice, robed in muted sage, copper hair falling in waves about her. Her palms were pressed flat against the frozen ground, her face upturned in effort. He had not seen color for so long he had forgotten its existence, and now here it was, concentrated in one kneeling figure, and the sight of it made him angrier still. He attempted to speak and discovered that his voice had frozen. He worked his mouth and cracked the rime that had sealed his lips. Yet what emerged was less a word than the sound of glaciers calving. Sluggishly, he tried again. "Who dares wake me against my will?" he asked. "I came to ask for your help," the woman answered. "My brother—" "Leave me," he cried, meaning to drive her back, to make her understand that she had erred in coming here and erred worse in staying. He let himself sink again. The ice closed about him. The silence received him into a welcoming embrace. Her voice came after. *Algor.* He arose a second time. "I have answered such summons ere now," he said. "I was wakened, set to purpose, and cast aside." "That is not my intention. I seek only a companion for the road," she said. "The way I must walk lies through places where those of my nature fade. Alone, I should not reach my brother." "And what am I," he said, "that I should fare better in such a place?" "You are not of my kindred," she answered. "Where I would fade, you would endure." He had heard such assurances before and believed none of them. He let himself sink, and her voice followed. "I shall remain here," she said. "And call your name through all the ages of the world, and you shall hear it in your silence, and feel it in your stillness, and never find the rest you seek, lest you help me." He ceased his descent and considered. Her errand, whatever it proved to be, would end; her presence, should he refuse her, would not. "What would you have of me?" he asked sharply. "My brother," she said. "He was cast down into the deep places of the world, and I would bring him forth." Algor emerged fully and looked down upon her where she knelt. "Seven days," he said. "What I am cannot long remain apart from rest; seven days I shall give you, and when the seventh wanes, that which I am shall break its bounds whether I will it or no. Rise up. What are you called?" "Fiorentia." Algor turned his attention from her and looked upon the place where he had lain. They stood at the summit of a white-clad mountain. The snow lay deep upon its shoulders, blue-white under the sunless sky. Below, the world fell away in ridges and valleys to a distant line of sea. About them rose the remnants of a shrine: a circle of broken columns, stumps of pale grey rock jutting from the snow. Only three still stood whole and held a memory of a roof between them. The paved floor at the center lay swept clean and rimmed with the ice he had made in his long slumber. At its edge, a stair descended into the mountain's side, its high steps cut deep, leading down into shadow. Algor walked and she followed. As the dusk deepened toward a starless night, they began their descent. --- The mountain released them slowly. The moon waxed and waned, and the stairs gave way to an overgrown path, and the path to a road that wound through stands of black pine. By the time the trees thinned and fell away, Algor felt his nature calling to him again, and he knew that what he had promised her was already drawing against its leash. When the sky paled with dawn, they came upon a great plain that stretched before them toward the sea in the west. The old road ran straight across that country. Broad stones had been laid there, fitted close and worn smooth by the passage of feet and wheels. Tombs loomed on either side, monuments of weathered marble and brick half-swallowed by grass, and here and there a lone column stood pale against the sky. The morning mist lay upon the fields. It hid the color of things and the busy detail of the living world; through it the graves appeared featureless, and Algor could almost imagine himself returned to the tranquility of his resting place. Fiorentia walked beside Algor, her sage robes trailing, her copper hair catching what little light the morning offered. She was silent, and for that Algor was grateful. The mist burned away, and the sun climbed and crossed the heavens before falling again. At night they rested beneath a broken arch. The stars emerged, cold and many, and Algor sat apart from Fiorentia and marked how the dark enshrouded the plain, how the fog gathered in the hollows between the monuments and crept across the grass, slow and bleak, where the dead of forgotten ages lay beneath their stones. Fiorentia held a small toy, turning it between her fingers though her gaze rested elsewhere, upon the road behind them or upon some distance further still. She must have carried it with her since the mountain, for he had no memory of her drawing it forth, and now her thumb traced its surface with the ease of long habit. It was a horse, crudely shaped from clay, and the starlight caught the rough places where someone’s small fingers must have pressed and pinched the shape into being: the dented flank, the lopsided head, the legs that did not quite match one another. "What is that?" Algor asked, and she looked down at it as if waking to find it there. "My brother made it," she said. "Long ago." She closed her hand on the toy and tucked it into her robes; they spoke no more of it. The sky paled in the east and the fog thinned and vanished from the road. How sweet it would be to sink back into the earth here, to find his long-sought slumber, Algor thought. The road went on and the tombs faded, overtaken by orchards gone wild, then by vineyards untended for many seasons. Olive trees stood twisted on the hillsides, their silver leaves trembling in the light wind. Once they passed a great ruin whose roof had caved in and whose walls were green with ivy. Someone had made a fire there not long ago. The bones of a meal lay scattered across the floor. Fiorentia had not spoken since their last rest. When at length she spoke of their errand, they stopped by a fountain that had once served travelers on this road. The basin was cracked, filled only with fallen leaves. "Shall you not ask," Fiorentia said, "what deed condemned my brother to the dark?" "I care not," Algor answered. "Yet you agreed to aid me," she said. "You gave me little choice in the matter," he said grimly. Fiorentia looked at the broken basin, the worn stones beneath her feet. "Do you know how this road came to be?" she asked. "Was I torn from my peace for the sake of a road?" Algor said. Fiorentia smiled faintly. "No," she said. "My brother stole the Water of Life. And used it. For that he was cast down." "Then he is rightly punished," Algor said. "What would you have of me—that I should weep for a thief?" "You do not understand," Fiorentia said, and her voice sank to a whisper. "The fault is not his alone." Algor said nothing. "He was but a child," she continued. "When he sought my company, I turned him away. I had my own duties and concerns. He was little, and children are tiresome creatures. I thought—I thought there would be time." She fell silent and tears filled her eyes. "He did not wait," Fiorentia said. "He was lonely, and so he made companions for himself, shaped them from clay in his own likeness. And it was for them he stole the Water. He gave them the breath that makes things move and speak and feel." "And you would free him?" Algor said. "What is to prevent the powers from casting you down beside him?" "So few of his creatures remain," Fiorentia said. "Soon the world shall be as it was before he shaped the first of them. The crime is nigh undone.” Algor remembered again a time long before, when he had been summoned only to be used and discarded. He knew what it was to be alone. And the child, this brother of hers, had been cast into darkness for the crime of loneliness. "I see," Algor said. He rose from his seat, and looked toward the road that still lay before them. "The city is not far now," he said. "Come." --- They came into the town on the evening of the third day, when the sky was red and gold. It lay not upon the shore but some leagues inland and rose before them grey and desolate, its walls much mended over the centuries, its towers dark against the amber of the west. Once it had been great and vast. That long-gone greatness still showed in the span of its walls and the grandeur of its gates. But it had passed, and what remained was a place of narrow streets and leaning houses, of squares that once served thousands and now served only pigeons. Algor and Fiorentia entered unchallenged through an unguarded gate. The street wound upward, climbing toward the highest point, and Fiorentia hastened ahead. The moon rose as they walked, full and silver, and by its light they arrived at the summit of the city's tallest hill, which commanded a wide view all around. And there, across the square, loomed a temple. It was old and strange. Great walls of pale stone patched with bricks rose in a circle, supporting a dome that curved against the sky. Before the temple, a tall white fountain played. Its basin was broad and shallow, and the water that filled it was clear as glass. Fiorentia approached the fountain and drew from her robes three ornate flasks of silver. She knelt at the edge and filled each one. When she was finished, she stoppered them and rose. "One for you," she said, giving it to Algor. "One for me. One for Illia, for he has none." He felt the cold of the water through the metal and knew it was not his own. He hung it at his belt and turned toward the temple. They crossed the square and passed between the pillars at the entrance and into the shadow of the temple. The floor was smooth and marble, and inside curved the echo of their steps. At the center of the dome, open to the sky, was a great oculus through which the moon now shone, casting a column of silver light into the temple's heart. Fiorentia halted at the edge of that light. Her grip tightened on the two flasks. Algor took Fiorentia's arm, and together they stepped through the moonlight and into the abyss. --- Algor leapt awake upon stone. The floor beneath was marble, and the walls rose about them in the same shape; the dome curved above toward the oculus still, though no moon gleamed through the opening. Algor knew at once that this was not the temple they had entered. Instead of white, the floor was the color of old bone. The columns cast no shadows, for the light falling through the aperture was without source—a wan luminescence that filled the air evenly, touching every surface with its colorless glow. Algor rose, and his movement made no sound. Where before the dome had returned each footfall as a curving echo, now it gave nothing back. Fiorentia lay still where she had fallen. After a moment she stirred and pushed herself upward. The effort showed in the cords of her neck and the trembling of her arms, in the time it took her to gain her knees and feet. "Have we passed through?" said Algor. Fiorentia only nodded. Her face was ashier than it had been, the blue-green of her veins showing through the skin. They walked out of the temple. The city lay before them: the same streets that wound down from the hill; the walls stood weathered and mended as they did above; the squares opened into one another in the same sequence Algor remembered. In the first square they entered, figures stood in groups of three and four and five. Some wore farmer's rags, rough-spun and earth-stained; others the clothes of merchants, fine wool gone threadbare at the cuffs; some the attire of soldiers, leather and bronze gone green with age. Their eyes were open, mouths closed. They stood, fixed and waiting, and as Algor and Fiorentia passed, only their gazes moved, tracking the trespassers across the square, and the rigidity of their bodies made the movement of their eyes disquieting. These were the dead whose traces he had seen on the road above—the cold hearths in the ruined houses, the vineyards fallen into wildness for want of hands to tend them. They had walked the world of the living once, and left it, season by season, age by age. They had come here, and here they were to remain. They passed the square and turned into a narrow street. Grey figures waited in doorways and at windows, watching the pair. Some were children, small and unmoving, their colorless eyes turned toward the strangers. Fiorentia walked beside him, and her steps had grown uncertain. Her copper hair, which had caught the light so fiercely in the world above, hung dull now, color fading from it as from autumn leaves left too long on the ground. Her face grew wan. "Where shall we go?" Algor asked. "There is a place," Fiorentia answered, scarcely louder than a breath. "When he was unhappy, he would go to the fig tree by the river. When I would not play with him, he went there." The streets wound downward, and the buildings grew smaller and more crooked as they walked and the silent figures became fewer, until at last they moved alone through a quarter that had no memory of life. The stones of the pavement were cracked and tilted, and weeds grew between them. The houses on either side appeared dark and doorless. Fiorentia stumbled as her foot caught on a broken stone. She pitched forward and Algor scarcely caught her by her elbow before she could fall. Her weight was light, lighter than it ought to have been, as if she were becoming less with every step, as if this place were drinking her very substance away as it drew the color from her hair. The street ended and before them lay a river, slow and dark, moving between grassy banks. Upon the nearer shore grew a fig tree, its trunk so thick and riven with age that it seemed less a single tree than a company of trees fused into one another over centuries; and its roots, grey and sinuous as the coils of some vast serpent, broke from the earth, arched above it, then plunged back again. Its branches spread wide and mighty and its leaves were broad and dark green; the air beneath its canopy was cool and hushed. Beneath the tree sat a small child, a boy whose hair was the color of wheat, pale and fine, falling about a delicate face, nearly to his elbows. He wore a simple tunic of white linen with wide sleeves; his feet were bare and his hands busy. Before him on the earth lay figures of red clay, small and carefully made, no longer than a finger. They were shaped to be men and women, farmers and merchants, soldiers and children. The boy was moving them intently one against another, arranging and rearranging them in patterns known only to himself. He formed soundless words as he played. He looked up with his dark eyes at the sound of their steps. "Sister!" he cried. Fiorentia released Algor's arm, and ran toward the boy, before he could spring up. Her knees gave way. She fell before her brother and gathered him into her arms. She held him against her breast, her hands clutching the fabric of his tunic, face buried in his flaxen hair. "Illia," she said over and over. "Illia. Illia." The boy held her with his thin arms around her neck, his little hands spread across her back, cheek against her shoulder. "I knew you would come for me," he said. "Forgive me. I should have come sooner," Fiorentia said. "I should have come when you called." "Hush," the boy said, stroking her hair gently with one hand. Fiorentia drew back and held Illia at arm's length, looking upon his face. "Look at you," she said. "You have not changed. You have not changed at all." "Such is the nature of this place," the boy answered solemnly. Algor wished to give them more time, but now his nature was pressing against his will after so long away from his resting place. He contained it, the cold that he was, through the days of their journey, and now again it sought to be released, to become what he had been before Fiorentia called upon him. "We must go," he said. Fiorentia rose, taking Illia's hand in one of hers and leaning with the other against Algor's arm. The boy regarded Algor with curiosity but said nothing. They climbed back through the empty quarter, past the cracked stone and the weeds, through the streets with watchers and the squares with the ghosts of farmers and merchants. Fiorentia could no longer walk. Algor lifted her and carried her through the winding streets, and up the hill toward the temple. Her head lay against his shoulder, and her lips were no longer grey but blue. Illia walked beside them, matching Algor's pace, his dark eyes moving between his sister's face and Algor, his brow furrowed, and he seemed to be deep in thought. "Who are you?" the child asked as they left the square. "I am called Algor," Algor answered, looking down at the boy. "But what are you?" Illia asked again. "You are not weakened here. So what are you?" "I am Cold," he answered. "I am the numbness at the end of all things." The boy looked slowly down from Algor's face to his chest, then hands, and then to Fiorentia, who was now trembling, then away. By the time they approached the temple, Algor could feel the cold spreading through his body, could feel the ice forming between his thoughts. They passed between the pillars of the entrance. The dome curved above as before and through the oculus light fell in a column that struck the floor in the center. Algor released Fiorentia and she stood, swaying for a moment. Then she reached into her robes and drew forth a flask of silver. She knelt before Illia and pressed it gently into his hands. "This is for you," she said. "When you reach the other side, you must pour it into the fountain." "Will you come too?" Illia said, looking at the flask in his hands. "We shall follow," she said. "But you were cast down alone, and alone you must return." "Go," Fiorentia added, still kneeling. "I shall see you soon, I promise, little one." The boy's arms went around her, and Algor turned his gaze away, leaving them alone in their embrace. When he looked back, the boy already stood at the center, small and ashen in his white tunic. He glanced at Fiorentia and Algor and then was gone, dissolving into the light. Fiorentia let out a breath of relief and pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wet. "He is free," she whispered. "He is free." "Come," Algor said, giving her a hand. She was smiling, and her eyes shone brightly despite the pallor of her face. They stepped in and the glow surrounded them. It filled Algor's vision, filled his senses, yet he stood there and felt nothing; no sickening fall of their descent, no force pulling upward, no movement or change. They remained within the heart of the temple beneath the oculus yet did not seem to rise. Fiorentia reached into her robes. She searched the folds of the fabric pressing frantically against her sides, where her flask should have been. "I had it. It was there," she said. She looked at the flask at Algor's belt and abruptly ceased her search. "He took it from me," she said. "When I held him, he took it." "Illia," she cried upward as if hoping he would hear her from the world above. The name rose and struck the dome, fading into the dead air that swallowed all sound in this place. "Illia!" "We must go," Algor said. "I cannot—I must return." Fiorentia turned to him with her eyes wide and face bone-white. "Of course," she said, her tone almost resigned. "They shall never come here now. They shall live eternally." They stepped back from the light, and stood in the shadow of the temple, and neither spoke for a long while. The waxen glow fell through the oculus, unchanged, for in this place there was no sun to mark the hours and no moon to count the nights, only the sourceless pallor that touched all things equally. Fiorentia sat upon the marble floor with her back against a column. The effort of lowering herself cost her; she drew her knees up and wrapped her arms about them and let her head fall back against the stone. Her skin had taken on the grey-blue cast. Algor sat apart from her at first, as he had sat on the road above, for the numbness was gathering in him and his nature stirred beneath the surface of his will. This place would serve him better than the mountain ever had; no voice would find him here. He would have his stillness at last. Strangely, the thought no longer brought him peace. --- Whether one day passed or many, Algor could not have said. When Fiorentia spoke, her voice was thin and cracked, and he had to lean toward her to hear it. "I have no right to ask it. Yet I would ask your forgiveness," she said. "He is a child and children are cruel in peculiar ways, and so they do what serves them and feel no wound in the doing. I taught him that, I think. I taught him that others may be set aside when they grow tiresome." Her eyes closed, and a tear slid from beneath the lid and froze upon her cheek before it reached her jaw. "I taught him too well." Algor considered her words, turning them over as numbness closed upon his thoughts. "Perhaps your brother did what his nature bade him do," he said. "As I shall do what mine bids me, ere long. I have not the strength for anger. Nor for forgiveness." The cold pressed outward, and he felt the air about him thicken and grow sharp. "But I would have you know that I am not sorry to have come." On the third day, Algor felt the cold break through the walls he had built about it. It came first as a tingling in his fingers, a spreading numbness that crept upward through his hands and feet, and then as a weight that grew heavier with each breath. He attempted to speak, to warn her, but his lips had turned stiff and his tongue lay cold and heavy in his mouth. Fiorentia looked at him then, and her eyes were the only part of her that still held color, blue-green and bright in her pallor. She crawled toward him across the marble floor, and when she reached him she could do no more than lean against his side and rest her head upon his shoulder. Her hair fell across his arm, and where it touched him it whitened and grew stiff with frost, and he thought that he should warn her or push her away, that his touch would end her faster than this place would kill her on its own. "How strange," she said, closing her eyes. "That the cold could feel so warm." Algor felt her body slacken as she slipped into the final slumber. He followed reluctantly, and the frost spread outward through the temple, to the entrance and into the squares beyond, through the streets of the city and over the river, halting the dark water, and on to the bower, swallowing the lone fig tree. He sank into silence. Above, in the temple of the living world, the moon shone brightly through the oculus. A boy with golden hair stepped out of the light, a vessel in each hand. He walked out slowly and stopped at the fountain. Smiling, he poured both flasks into the wide basin. The city lay grey and ancient before him. --- ## Editor's Notes: Daria Agad has done something quite difficult here. She has taken a source so compressed it barely qualifies as narrative—seven lines of Baroque aria, a supernatural figure roused unwillingly from frozen sleep—and expanded it not by padding it out but by finding what the source always implied and never said. Purcell's Cold Genius wants only to freeze again. Agad's question, the question that generates the entire story, is: what would it cost him not to? And what would it mean if, having paid that cost, he found he did not entirely regret it? That question is handled with profound restraint. Agad never tells us that Algor is changed by what happens to him. She shows us that he cannot quite bring himself to sink when Fiorentia weeps, that he says *I am not sorry to have come* with the flatness of a god surprised by his own emotion, and that when he finally freezes again it is with a familiar resignation. The cold wins because that it his nature. The story trusts the reader to understand the distance between that nature and the idea of willpower. The prose truly earns its archaism. Agad writes in a heightened register—*ere now*, *lest*, *ere long*—that could easily tip into affectation, but it works because the diction is consistent and the emotion underneath it is real and unornamented. When Fiorentia speaks of her brother, the syntax stays formal while the feeling breaks through it. It's a voice that sounds like myth and grieves like a person. We also want to celebrate what Agad does with Illia, because it would be easy to miss. He is neither villain or victim. He steals both flasks, condemning his sister and the being who came to free him but does so out of love for the clay creatures he shaped in his loneliness. The crime that imprisoned him and the crime that keeps Fiorentia below are the same crime. Overall, we published this piece because it is complete. Every image does work from the crude clay horse to the frozen tear on Fiorentia's cheek to the fig tree whose roots arch and plunge like a serpent, the oculus through which no moon shines. Nothing is decorative for the sake of it. The story knows exactly what it is. It's an expansion of an aria, an elegy for the cost of warmth. And it executes that knowledge without flinching and without excess. It is a story that makes you go back to the source and hear it differently. That is not a small thing to do in just a few thousand words.—*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/03/photo.jpg) Daria Agad writes literary fantasy rooted in history, classical music, and myth. Her work explores archetypes, divine loneliness, and the cost of creation. She is also a digital artist inspired by medieval and early Renaissance traditions. ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Doors that Open on Leap Days URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/doors-that-open-on-leap-days/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T14:18:35.000Z The bar had no sign. Everybody who needed to find it already knew the staircase—six steps down from the alley behind 127th, past the dumpster that smelled like someone’s abuela had been frying plátanos on the fire escape above, past the mural of Sylvia Rivera that wept in the rain because the artist used house paint instead of acrylic, and then the door, heavy as sin, black as the first hour of any good night. --- *February 29, 2008* Inez was twenty-one. She wore her mother’s silk blouse tucked into thrift-store trousers, and she had spent twenty minutes in the bathroom of the 2 train achieving a collar that looked effortless. She descended those six steps on a dare from her roommate, who had already disappeared into the dark interior and would not resurface until 3 a.m., radiant, lip gloss obliterated, smelling like someone else’s perfume. Inez went alone through the door. Inside, she found wood paneling that fondly remembered the seventies. A ceiling so low the taller women stooped like cathedral visitors. Votives on every surface, red and white, their light catching the condensation on glasses so the whole room seemed to breathe in flickering morse. The jukebox in the corner was older than anyone present and played everything six seconds too slow, which meant every song became a ballad whether it intended to be a ballad or not. She ordered a rum and Coke because she panicked when it came her turn. The bartender, a woman in her sixties with cropped silver hair and a scar that ran from her left ear to her jaw like a river on a map, poured without comment and set the glass down with a gentleness that made Inez want to cry. She didn’t know why. Maybe later she would understand. She saw a woman on the stage. Except there was no stage, only a corner where the floor rose three inches—a platform for declarations, the bartender called it—and a woman stood on that three-inch elevation like it was Everest’s summit, singing into a microphone that fed into an amp so old its distortion had become its own element. The woman sang something slow. Inez tried to figure out the song, but then she realized the song didn't matter. What mattered was how the woman's throat moved, visible from across the room. The way she closed her eyes on certain syllables and opened them on others, so her gaze arrived and departed like a passing rainstorm. The way her left hand floated at her side, conducting nothing, reaching for no one in particular, and how Inez felt, from twelve feet away, *reached for*. Afterward, the woman came to the bar and stood close enough that Inez could smell her jasmine and the salt on her skin after performing under a hot light. The woman ordered whiskey and turned and said, “You’re holding that glass like you dropped it already.” Inez laughed. It came out louder than she intended, almost a bark, and she covered her mouth, and the woman reached over and moved her hand away. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I'm June. I want to see what you look like when you tell me your name, next.” They talked for two hours. First about Toni Morrison, which somehow transitioned to a fashion show of their bad tattoos, until finally they settled on a ten-minute rant about the indignity of growing up queer in a neighborhood that loved them on every axis except the one that kept them up at night. June had grown up eight blocks from where they stood. Inez had come from the Bronx on scholarship money and the furious belief that being an architect would keep a roof over her head. That architecture itself could be its own form of community. That the right building could hold people the way the right arms could. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” June said. “Which part is wrong?” “Buildings don’t ‘hold’ anyone. People hold each other. Buildings are just another bunch of doors and walls and shit.” Near closing, when the votives had burned to puddles and the jukebox had cycled back to the beginning, June said, “Come back.” “When?” “Next impossible day. You know when that is?” “Leap Day.” “Uh huh. Four years. Think you can remember where the stairs are?” “I remember everything,” Inez said, which was the kind of thing she would only ever say at twenty-one and mean it. They kissed in the stairwell. Six steps between the underground and the street, and they stopped on the fourth, which put them at the same height, mouths level, the cold February air descending from above and the residual warmth of the bar ascending from below, so they stood at the exact seam and pressed their lips together and tasted rum and whiskey and the jasmine that would follow Inez into sleep for years. --- *February 29, 2012* The building was gone. Inez had checked, twice, in the years between. Once accidentally, walking through the neighborhood after a site visit, and once deliberately, on a Friday in October when missing June had become a chronic illness. The address was a fence around a lot. The mural had been sandblasted. The dumpster remained. She did not expect the door, though. But there it was: black, heavy, at the bottom of six steps that should not have existed, carved into ground that was, by every permit and survey she had studied in her first year at the architecture firm, poured concrete over compacted gravel over sixty years of Harlem’s refusal to be just one thing. She descended. She was twenty-five, now. She wore a blazer she had bought with her first real paycheck and shoes that cost more than her last three pairs combined, and she was aware, descending, of how precisely these clothes announced what she had become and what she had left. Inside was the same. Exactly the same. The wood paneling, the votives, the low ceiling, the jukebox playing everything at funeral tempo. The bartender with the scar, who looked no older, who set down a rum and Coke without being asked. June was at the corner platform, not singing this time. She sat on its edge with a beer, watching the door without looking at it. She wore a yellow dress the color of something that should not exist in February. Her hair was longer. Her eyes were harder. She had a new tattoo on her inner forearm. An address, Inez realized, the bar’s address. “You came,” June said. “You’re here.” “I’m always here.” That sentence did too much work, and they both knew it. June had not left the neighborhood. Had not left the orbit of what the bar had been. Had organized the vigil after the fire—yes, there had been a fire, Inez knew about the fire, everyone knew about the fire though nobody agreed on its cause—and had started collecting. Oral histories. Photographs. Flyers announcing open-mic nights and drag shows and AA meetings and birthday parties for women who were now dead of age or violence or the slower violence of being forgotten. Inez was the one who left. First to Columbia, then to the firm. Had put on the blazer. Had learned the language of setback requirements and floor-area ratios and community impact studies, which was another way of saying she had learned how to describe displacement in terminology that made it sound almost natural. “How’s the big girl job?” June asked. “It’s, um, fine. I’m doing well.” “I didn’t ask how you were doing.” “They’re really the same thing.” “No,” June said. “They really are not.” They drank. They talked around what they wanted to say. They did not talk about the two months they had been together after that first night. The two months of June’s apartment, June’s bed, June’s cooking, June’s voice in the morning saying *get up, cariño, the light is doing something unbelievable on the fire escape*. And they did not talk about how Inez had ended it by not ending it, by simply becoming less available, less reachable, less present, until absence was indistinguishable from departure. “You quit smoking,” Inez said, because she noticed the absence of the cigarette June used to hold in between songs. “I quit a lot of bad habits.” June looked at her. The hardness in her eyes rearranged itself, briefly, into something that Inez recognized as the unique pain of being seen by someone who once had permission to look. “You always did love buildings more once they stopped having people in them.” Inez opened her mouth. Nothing came. The jukebox cycled. The votives burned. At some point the room seemed to thin at its edges, the walls going soft the way a dream does when close to waking, and June stood and said, “I should go.” “I just got here.” “Yeah. You sure did.” She left. Inez sat at the bar and finished her drink and listened to the room disassemble itself around her. By the time she walked out and climbed the six steps, the door was a wall. The staircase was sidewalk. Even the dumpster looked like it had been there for centuries. --- *February 29, 2016* The bar was quieter this time. Fewer votives. The jukebox played but the sound came from farther away, as if the music had retreated deeper into the room’s memory and Inez had to lean in to catch it. The bartender was there, still ageless, still scarred, but she moved slower, poured slower, and when she set down Inez’s glass she held her gaze for a moment that said: *don’t rush it. Savor.* Inez was twenty-nine. She had been promoted twice. Her name appeared on a rendering for a mixed-use development twelve blocks from where she sat, a building that the firm’s website described as *honoring the cultural legacy of the neighborhood* and that was, in fact, a glass-and-steel reliquary for money, its lobby decorated with blown-up photographs of the streets it had replaced, including—and Inez had seen this, had stood in the lobby on the day of the unveiling and felt her organs twitch in response—a photograph of the mural of Sylvia Rivera, framed and mounted as decor in a building whose construction had necessitated the mural’s destruction. June was already in the bar, which Inez expected. But she didn't expect to see a folder in June's hands. “Sit down,” June said, withholding any other form of greeting. “I’m already sitting.” “Then stay sitting.” June opened the folder. Inside was a copy of the community impact study for the development. Inez’s firm’s letterhead. Language Inez recognized because she had helped write it. Phrases like *contextually sensitive massing* and *activated streetscape* and *heritage-informed materiality*, which meant, translated from the dialect of polished erasure: we will take the neighborhood’s memory and return it as a product worth selling. “I didn’t design that building,” Inez said. “You wrote the words.” “I wrote a study. That’s what junior architects do.” “And the firm? The one that took the development contract after the fire? The one that hired you six months later?” Inez said nothing. “Did you know?” June asked. “When they hired you. Did you know they were connected?” “It’s not that simple—” “It is exactly as simple as I am making it. You walked into a room where people were planning to eat this neighborhood alive, and you picked up a fucking fork, Inez.” The room dimmed. A votive went out and did not relight. On the jukebox, the song—the same song, always the same song, the one June had been singing the night they met—skipped and caught and skipped again, and for a moment the silence between the skips was total and yet half the size of a breath. “I was just starting out,” Inez said. “I was broke. I had loans. I had my mother calling every week asking when I was going to have a real job. I didn’t have the luxury of—” “Of what? Integrity? That a luxury now?” “Of your certainty.” Inez’s voice cracked on the word and she let it crack. “You always knew what the right thing was. I never had that. I just had the work. I still do. I'm still trying to do something worth taking up space.” June closed the folder. Her face did something Inez had never seen. It softened and hardened at the same time, compassion and fury somehow coexisting. Though fury probably had the edge. “Inez. This place was here for you. And you helped *them* take it.” It was a sentence that had more in common with gravity than grammar. Inez looked at the bartender for help, but she immediately looked at the wall. On the wall, a photograph Inez had never noticed: two women dancing, blurred with motion, their faces turned toward each other so you could not identify them, only feel them, only know that in the instant the photograph was taken they were the entire argument for the existence of the world. “I know,” Inez said, shifting back to June. “I *knew*. I could have said something. I could’ve leaked the documents or at least refused the job, but I didn’t and I can't change that.” “And how’s that working?” “Well, I’m sitting in a ghost bar talking to the woman I used to love, who now hates me. How do you think?” June stood. She picked up the folder. She looked at Inez with just the smallest atom of tenderness still in her gaze. “You can’t even apologize,” she said. “You can’t even do that right.” She climbed the six steps. The door closed. The bartender poured Inez another drink, unbidden, and when Inez reached for it, her hand was shaking, and the bartender covered it with her own. Warm, dry, scarred. She held it until the shaking stopped. “Last call’s coming,” the bartender said. "You best take advantage of it." --- *February 29, 2020* She almost didn’t come. Three times in the previous four years she had walked to the alley in non-Leap months. March, September, January. Each time, she found nothing, and each time the nothing felt more permanent, more like an answer unto itself. The staircase was a sidewalk. The door was a brick wall. The neighborhood was practically a brochure. But she came. She descended the six steps, which were shallower now, as if the passage between worlds was silting up, and she pushed through the door, which gave with a resistance that felt like exhaustion, and entered a room that was barely there. Half the votives were dark. The wood paneling had the translucence of old film. The jukebox played, but the sound came from everywhere and nowhere, like she was playing music on her phone in an empty apartment. The bartender was absent for the first time. June sat at the bar with a glass she was not drinking. Her yellow dress was the same yellow dress, or its descendant, maybe. She looked up when Inez entered, and her face held nothing. Not even anger. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” June said. “I wasn’t sure I should.” Inez set a folder on the bar. The symmetry was deliberate, and she knew June would recognize it, and she did not care about the theatricality. Inside the folder was a formal complaint filed with the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, naming Inez’s firm, documenting the connections between the fire investigation and the development contract, and requesting landmark status for the remaining structures on the block. Including the alley. Her signature on every page. Her professional license number beside it, which meant the complaint was not anonymous, which meant the firm would know. They would know she was a traitor to the people who had made her successful. There was more. A cashier’s check made out to June’s archive, drawn from Inez’s savings. The exact amount of every bonus she had received from the firm since the development project was completed. “This is my restitution,” Inez said. “But don't confuse it for charity. The difference matters.” Finally, at the bottom of the folder, a resignation letter. Dated tomorrow. June looked at the documents carefully, completely, without rushing to interpretation. She turned each page. She read the complaint. She held the check up to the weak votive light and then set it down. “You’ll lose everything,” she said. “I already have. They’ll contest the complaint anyway and say I’m disgruntled.” “Are you?” “I’m a lot of things. Disgruntled is the least of them.” The room flickered. The walls thinned. Through them, briefly, Inez could see the alley. Could see both worlds at once, the bar and its absence. She could see both versions of a person she loved. Who they were and who they might've been. The private and the public. The possible and the actual, held in a single frame that the eye can’t sustain. “This won’t bring the bar back,” June said. “I know.” “It won’t undo the displacement. The people are gone. Mrs. Okafor who ran the fish shop. The drag mothers. The women who used to sit on those stools and laugh like they invented the concept.” “I know.” “So what does any of this shit do?” Inez gave the room one final glance, starting with the votives, still sputtering with the dedication of small, stubborn, mortal things. Then at the jukebox, which had stopped playing and now hummed a single sustained note. “It...makes me someone who can stand in the same room as you,” Inez said. “That’s all I really want.” June went quiet. The room did, too. Then June closed the folder and slid it back across the bar and said, “Come help me remember it properly.” She stood and held out her hand. Inez took it. June’s hand was warm and dry and calloused from the guitar she had started playing after she stopped singing in public. They climbed the six steps. The door closed behind them with the sound a book makes when it’s finished. The alley was dark and cold and smelled like the dumpster. But in the walls, the jasmine lingered. --- ## Author's Notes: I've been tinkering with the concept of this story for several years now, actually since 2024 when our last "leap day" took place. But it took me some time to get it (hopefully) right. The four-section leap day structure isn't just me trying to be all clever and weird. It's the story's central claim. By compressing a 12-year relationship into four meetings, I'm forcing each scene to carry *enormous* narrative weight while simultaneously making a philosophical point: that some reckonings can only happen in extraordinary time. Ordinary calendars can't hold this kind of accounting. The bar itself literalizes this, too. It only exists when the calendar admits it exists. So in that way, the bar is doing double duty. It's both a real queer Harlem space and an explicitly deteriorating archive. Each visit, it loses substance, and the decay tracks Inez's complicity with almost mathematical precision. The bar doesn't disappear because of external forces. It fades in proportion to what Inez has cost it. That said, I didn't want to make Inez simply a villain or a victim of circumstance. The 2016 section is the crux of this, when she defends herself to June. This was the hardest section to figure out because it was also important to avoid having June simply demolish the argument. What we get instead is June declining to accept the argument as complete. I think that's more damning than a counterargument would be. I was also worried that June would easily become a moral idol, always right, always rooted. So I tried to make sure the story quietly complicates her. The tattoo of the bar's address, never leaving the neighborhood's orbit, the oral history project, and so on. These suggest someone who has also made a choice, and whose choice has costs. I don't think she's any freer than Inez. She's just made a different transaction with the world. As for the ending... "Come help me remember it properly" was the hardest line of dialogue for me to crack, and our editor Natalia Emmons really put me through a rigorous process in getting it exactly right. The line couldn't imply forgiveness, nor reconciliation in any clean sense. Instead it has to be an invitation into a practice. Into a memory as ongoing collective labor rather than a fixed archive. And crucially, they go*up* the six steps rather than back into the bar. Whatever comes next won't happen underground, in extraordinary time. It will happen in ordinary daylight, which is a harder place to be. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-pomegranate-man/#/portal/support) ### The Silence Between My Thoughts URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-silence-between-my-thoughts/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T16:29:20.000Z The first thing I saw was the blinding blue of tiles through and against my pupils. Blurry, my sight had been. And my neck, stiff as a board, ached at the insult of turning it. My body was upright, held against something else that was just without the limits of my sight. And said limits of sight pestered me so, for try as I did, I couldn’t see past what was just in front of me. Nothing but the blue tile. Nine to twelve of the geometric boxes lined up against the wall. And upon them I saw water drops racing down to a bottom I couldn’t see. “Put your leg up, honey,” came the disembodied voice. Highly intoned, as though radiating affection. My head banged from within with resounding thuds against thuds. Or throbs? I didn’t know what thuds were. I didn’t know what sounds were. They just were. Sounds. A person talking at me. My legs and feet were drained of any and all sense of strength, noodley they were. Bones were supposed to hold me up but why did they fail me so? I could feel the wet drip off of my mouth and fall down below what I could see, into the abyss below me. And to me, all that was me, was what I could see. Just a floating head that could think, and hear and see. Around all I could see was an ominous darkness hindering my field of view. A profound fading dim just at the corner of my sight. White or grey or black, it faded into what was behind *it*. A perilous vignette it was. Occasionally streaked with the clear of wetness. One moment I was there, and the next I was sat. I have feet. There is a window, and there are figures before me. People, I think they are, like me. I’m a person. “Sweetie, open your mouth,” came the command from the disembodied entity, and in a moment, a spoon flew into my open mouth with white stuff on it. And I close after its entry, instinctively. I chew. My tongue was heavy, stuck to the floor of my mouth. It would not lift. It tasted bland. My eyes watered. A wet line, I felt, beside my nose, all the way down to my chin. A tear? The faces about me seemed familiar. One was of a softer yet older texture. She was shorter than me. Her hair was tied into a bun behind her head. The other had a harder face, his build was stocky, and his hair was short and close to his scalp. “Last night, he jerked in his sleep.” “At about what time?” Suddenly, I was in water. The surface tension swapped and swatted at my chest. My sight, still occluded by the dim. And all about me were faces, attached to bodies. They played. They were younger. More of them close to my height. I am a child. I was a child. We were in a water park. Then I see them: the large colored contraptions ascending and disappearing into the sky. Or wherever the place above my sight led up to. I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t turn my neck. The waterslides coiled this way and that all about that place, it was as though they would wring my neck if I didn’t fixate my gaze upon them. One slight glance away and they would become snakes, ginormous as they were. There was a girl I was swimming with. She liked me, I think. She was no taller than my shoulders and her voice, even in that short instant, was filled with this casual mocking tone. But as she said each word to me, there was a glint in her eye. A shine that betrayed her intent. And I could see it, I could see her. This, the fading dim did not occlude. She was in full view of me. And she spoke to me a few times, but no sound exited her lips. Nothing but inferences I feel, like *it* was a dream. Like *it* wasn’t real. Once more, there was tile before me. This time the wall was of checkered patterns of dark and light green tiles. As of a heavier tint than grass. So, my torment was of a greener scale. I recognized those tiles. These were the tiles of the bathroom I had grown up washed in. My mother was before me. I was naked. In her hand, she held a washcloth, and in the other there was a bar of soap. She was washing me. The walls span. That light. That goddam light. It was fixed to the wall above the door ahead of me. Its rays blaring as if straight into my optic nerve. I could feel the light piercing my brain and radiating… radiating. Or was that something else? “Okay sweetie, let me go get the towel,” she said as she disappeared from my sight. What was that?! *It* was happening again. Mother! Mother! What is happening? A strange overwhelming sense had consolidated my limbs in an instant. I fell harder than a sack of potatoes, hitting the tile with all my weightily force. I heard the sound, like a crack to porcelain. Ow! My head throbbed. No, it screeched. And I opened my mouth and pushed out the air and sound with all my might. A hand reached out for me from above. “Oh sweetie! Oh sweetie! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” My mother said as she embraced me, wrapping the towel around my broken body. Was my body broken? Or just my mind? They stared from the door. Their looks of pity and of associated torment, deceptively pasted upon their faces. I counted three sets of eyes. Looking out at me. Judging my frailty. It was their fault. Or was it mine? “I hate this! Someone kill me!” “I can’t do this anymo…” It had been a week since I fell. My movements, which were hardly any, were constrained to just a twitching of my brows and the casual floppy futile jerky motions of my limbs. My neck felt as though I was shackled by chains. Like a slave to this thing that had overridden my body. A thing that I answered to for weeks on end. *It* still kept my sight, and just as much along with it, *it* took too my wakefulness. For I would slumber for ceaseless hours, only to awake to the same debilitated nightmare. In a matter of days, or weeks, I’m not sure, when *it* returned to me the faculties of my limbs, just barely of course, I began to pray. To something I still could not see. “End this torment please.” “My body and head ache.” “Is this death, is this what comes after?” But I had fallen and felt the pain. I knew this to be of the living. *It* had made sure to know that *it* tormented me within the confines of life. Keeping me just without the edge of death, but still within the well of despair. I would have taken to the knife, but my body, my limbs, were too weak to make the cut. And each day dissolved into the next as fast as the previous evaporated from my mind. There was no yesterday, no tomorrow. Not even a today. There was a now. A current state of turmoil on my end succeeding itself in repetitive consecutive days to no end. And for a moment, I imagined the festive season passed me by. Was that Christmas? It hardly mattered. The only holiday I would celebrate belonged to *it*. And *its* holiday was my torture. Suddenly I was awake. It was pitch black, the air around me. Nightfall again? *I can’t breathe.* *I can’t breathe.* My back was on the bed, and my sight was transfixed to the wooden frame of my brother’s bunk atop me. But I was not in my withered, diseased body. I was floating above it. Watching myself gargle on my own stomach contents returning back up probably out of the dissatisfaction of having been digested by such a pathetic body. With haste, my brother descended from his bed, grabbed a bucket and forced my face into it, spilling whatever was in my mouth out. And he slapped me between my shoulder blades. I coughed, and I returned to my body, gasping, heaving. *I can’t die, can I? It won’t let me.* My baby brother frolicked before me with his friends. Playing with his toy cars, driving them up and down along the pavement. I envied him. Envied his agency taken for granted. It did not want him. *It* had me. And kept me for itself. My head still throbbed. And the wardens. Ooh, the wardens tormented my days by forcing me to walk among the normal and sane. “Walk until here, just try, I’ll catch you,” they would say. But as I stepped, the ground would give way and become the sky. I could see the sky now. It was blue whenever I saw it. But *it* lived somewhere in there. Somewhere everywhere. *It* taunted me with the perfection I wouldn’t enjoy. I was the imperfect thing. The tainted object. And why couldn’t I see?! Then I was on our living room couch. As though whisked away across time and space. Beside me sat a beautiful girl. Her complexion was dark, and her lips were fuller than any I had ever seen. But her face was unfamiliar, and try as I may have, I would not remember it with each passing succeeding moment. Not among the ones that resided within that home. She was kind and treated me delicately. When came time for my scheduled evening walks, she gladly escorted me round, her arm around mine. “She just scares me.” “Oh, come on, mom is pretty cool. She wouldn’t mind,” I heard myself say. *It* allowed me to speak now. *It* allowed me to think. But still drank from my bones and muscles like a vampire, like a tick. I woke up from my parents’ bed this time. It was bright out. Maybe about midday. The television was loud against my ears. As I walked into the living room, there was just my sister. Her tote bag placed on the table as she unpacked whatever was inside. In the kitchen, something fried upon the cooker. I was steadily standing, erect against gravity. I gave it no mind at all. I spoke to her. “What time is it? What date is it today?” And my sister replied, with a quizzical stare on her face, “Are you okay? I think you need to go back to sleep.” *No, please. Don’t give me back to it.* --- ## Editor's Notes: When we read “The Silence Between My Thoughts,” what struck us immediately was how closely the writing matches the experience it describes. The piece centers on a severe neurological episode—likely prolonged seizure activity—and instead of explaining that experience from the outside, the author lets the form of the story recreate it for us. Notice how time works. Scenes do not unfold in a steady, chronological way. Moments appear abruptly. Transitions are missing. The narrator’s sense of self comes together *slowly*, almost experimentally. At first glance, this might feel fragmented. But if you stay with it, you begin to see that the fragmentation is intentional. The structure is doing the same work the subject is doing. It places us inside a mind struggling to connect one thought to the next. Look closely at the opening pages. Consciousness arrives step by step: tile, water, light, sound. The body registers the world before the mind can name it. Only later does identity emerge. By the time the narrator writes, “There was no yesterday, no tomorrow. Not even a today,” we have already experienced that disorientation ourselves. To be clear, the technique is not decorative. It helps us feel what the narrator feels. The image of the “perilous vignette”—the darkening at the edges of vision—is especially important. On a medical level, it reflects what can happen at the onset of a seizure. On a symbolic level, it becomes a way of understanding the entire illness. Life narrows. Vision is partial. The world is present but incomplete. The silent girl at the water park deepens this idea. She is visible, but the connection to her never fully forms. The body can see; the mind cannot reach. It also matters that the illness is called simply “it.” The story never pauses to provide a clinical label. That choice keeps us in the narrator’s perspective. The threat feels intimate and constant. It behaves almost like a living thing. Something that feeds, that remains attached. When the narrator says, “It did not want him. It had me,” we understand that the illness has become a presence with its own terrible logic. There are moments where the sensory detail softens—particularly in the scene with the girl on the couch, whose presence feels less vivid than the physical surroundings. But the ending regains its clarity. “No, please. Don’t give me back to it.” By that point, even sleep has become frightening. Something that should offer relief now threatens a return to suffering. Stories like this are sometimes mistaken for unfinished drafts because they do not move in a straight line. In our view, the opposite is true. The fragmentation is purposeful. The author understands that to write about a mind coming apart, the writing itself must shift. That alignment between form and experience—and the emotional honesty that runs through it—is why we chose to publish this piece. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/03/photo_2026-02-03_20-36-22.jpg) Dylan Siunwa is a Kenyan writer working in poetry and literary fiction. His work explores memory, interiority, loss, and moments where the ordinary brushes against the unseen. He draws on personal history and cultural context to examine vulnerability, belief, and the body as a site of meaning. ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Addressee Unknown URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/addressee/ Last updated: 2026-02-26T16:05:08.000Z Sandra could still see a tiny sparkle from the glitter embedded in the carpet’s fibers. She must have vacuumed that area beneath the buffet table in the back of the couch a dozen times since Christmas, yet six weeks later, the glitter was still there, like a guest at a dinner party who refuses to leave. She pictured the two dozen Christmas cards, propped open on the smooth glass surface, carefully arranged like an art exhibit, one breath of wind from a left-open door away from toppling like a row of dominoes. She had learned to arrange them so the ends of each card stood three inches apart. By some miracle, they never fell over. Except one. The one from Lydia of Huntsville, Connecticut. The one with all the glitter. Hardly anyone sends tacky holiday cards with glitter anymore, thank God. People send custom-made ones with family photos of vacations in Hawaii and preprinted signatures. *Merry Christmas from The Lewis Family. Arthur, Michelle, Dana (11), Otis (5), and Shadow the Dog (3).* Even those are a dying breed. Hardly anyone sends holiday cards, period. Sandra ran the red Handy Vac one more time over the edge of the winter wheat carpet, hoping she had finally decimated the last of the unwanted sparkle. Funny how that glittery card showed up every year; not the exact same one, but similar enough to last year’s to be recognizable even before it was opened. Always in a red envelope. Always depicting a fairytale gingerbread cottage with a red roof, mountainous snowbanks in the backdrop (trimmed with glitter), and a sleigh (yes, also trimmed with glitter) drawn by two wide-eyed white horses (ditto) who looked like they were on LSD. Always addressed to her mother. Sandra had lived in her mother’s house since 1981, the year her mother had passed away after a massive stroke. When the will was read, Sandra was surprised to find out the house had been left not to her but to her bratty second cousin Althea from Baltimore. Althea and Sandra had detested each other as kids, but her mother had always felt sorry for Althea and always reminded Sandra how lucky she was. To have graduated from college, albeit with a useless degree in art. To have a wonderful husband like Nick Robinson, who loved her. To not have an addiction to narcotics like Althea. “Althea needs our love,” her mother would say. “We can’t forget about her.” Mother had too big a heart for her own good. But she was dead wrong about Nick. Sandra wasn’t lucky, and Nick didn’t love her. He didn’t love anybody. When Althea had received the termite report and saw the $37,000 damage estimate, she sent it to Sandra with a legal form she’d bought at a stationery store, quitclaiming her interest in the property. Sandra remembered staring at the report, wondering where she would get the money to make all the repairs, when she noticed the address at the top was 2115 Evanston, not 1215\. Sandra called the termite company and, a week later, received the correct report with a letter of apology. The only damage on the new report was the cellulose debris in the substructure. Estimated cost to repair: $167\. So, Sandra kept the house and never told Althea. The first Christmas she and Nick spent in the house, a dozen cards arrived from her mother’s distant friends who apparently hadn’t heard she died. Sandra put them on the buffet with the others, thinking the senders would eventually remove her mother from their holiday lists. The next year, only two cards addressed to her mother came: one from The Gorman Family from two blocks away, the other signed only with the name *Lydia*. Sandra had written a short note to each, explaining her mother had passed away, and mailed them to the return addresses on the envelopes. The Gorman cards stopped, but the Lydia cards continued to arrive every year. “I just don’t know why this woman keeps sending cards to my mother,” Sandra said to Nick on a Saturday morning three weeks before Christmas of 1992\. She watched her husband file his nails between loud slurps of coffee, two annoying habits he saved for weekends. “I’ve written her for ten years now.” “Maybe she’s just forgetful,” Nick said. *Forgetful like you.* Nick hadn’t remembered her birthday in five years. Sandra remembered how fastidious her mother had been about sending holiday cards, her handwritten list of names and addresses meticulously maintained on white lined paper, a checkmark next to the name of each recipient who’d sent her a card in return. Those who hadn’t were marked with an angry red five-point star, which meant they would receive one more card the following year before being stricken from the list. Her mother always bought her cards on sale the week after Christmas, fifty cards for $1.89, and saved them for next year. They always looked so tacky to Sandra, the red and gold foil trim bordering a manger scene with white people. Why couldn’t she buy the nice ones like the Andersons sent? But her mother loved to run the tips of her fingernails over the line of blue glitter at the top. She liked how it made her hand tingle, how it made her feel alive during the holidays. Her mother believed in the magic of Christmas. Just like she believed in other fantasies, like the sanctity of marriage, like how a husband who’d left her with two children would come back someday. Her mother never mustered enough self-worth to file for divorce from a man who never really loved her. And Sandra hadn’t either. Sandra had found the 1980 Christmas card list in the top drawer of her mother’s cherry wood desk. She used that list to send remembrance cards to out-of-town friends who hadn’t made it to the funeral before packing it in a box with the cards her mother had bought last year on sale, cards that would never be sent. The box was still in the attic with what was left of her mother’s other stuff: the dusty Readers Digest collection, the three stacks of vinyl LPs, and the shit brindle gold-colored vinyl luggage set she bought with S&H green stamps and hadn’t used since the 1960s. Sandra poured Nick a fresh cup of coffee before asking him to go up to the attic and take down the box. Normally, she wouldn’t have bothered since he seemed not to care whether the coffee was hot or cold. Three hours passed before he finally hauled the step ladder from the garage. Sandra skimmed the list, its edges now frayed, its delicate lines faded. She was surprised by some of the names. Mrs. Irene Watson. Sandra’s second-grade teacher. Mr. William Robinson II, her mother’s first cousin who became a bank robber and died in prison. Mrs. Leticia Wells, the mother of a boy Sandra had dated in high school. But no one named Lydia from Huntsville, Connecticut. It seemed odd her mother wouldn’t have sent cards to someone who sent them to her. Her mother had a system for everything, from which bills she paid first out of the household checking account to how she prepared Thanksgiving dinner. She followed the rules, all rules, to a tee. An asymmetrical Christmas card exchange would have driven her nuts. “Can I put the box back now?” Nick asked, leaning against the ladder, his forefinger picking at his left nostril. He had no interest in the matter. No curiosity about anything. Was this what happened when you reached a certain age? But no, Nick Robinson had always been this way. --- The next morning, as she poured Nick his first cup of coffee, Sandra suggested they go away for their anniversary. “You’re only married for thirty years once.” “Why not save it for our fortieth?” Nick said. *If you last that long.* “We never do anything special, Nick.” Then she showed him the brochures from four B&Bs in a quaint little town in Connecticut. “Tom and Susie’s daughter Kate spent her honeymoon there.” “Who are Tom and Susie?” Nick said. “You remember them. They used to live next door to the church. Moved away after Tom retired.” Nick shook his head, splashing his coffee on the Formica tabletop. Of course, he didn’t remember. He probably hadn’t remembered it was their thirtieth anniversary until Sandra mentioned it. Thirty years. Had it really been that long since Sandra’s brother Hal fixed her up with this “nice guy” from work who ate lunch by himself and never went out? Had it been more than thirty years since that harmless first date when he took her to a bargain matinee and wiped his buttery hands on his trousers after he’d finished his popcorn, then wiped them on her as they made out in the back seat of his Chevy? Thirty years since they’d decided to stay married, even after she had miscarried, and the whole reason they had married in the first place was at the bottom of a medical waste receptacle in her doctor’s office? There was a very good reason Nick ate lunch by himself and never went out. Of course, he couldn’t have remembered Tom and Susie, because Sandra had made them up. There had been no daughter Kate, and no honeymoon. She enjoyed playing little games with him sometimes. It almost made staying married to him worthwhile. “Come, look at these. Which one appeals to you?” Sandra said. She arranged the four brochures into a fan. “I like this one,” she said, pointing to the one on top. Of course, Nick’s attention was focused on one thing. He opened the third brochure and then pushed it toward her. “This one,” he said. “It’s the cheapest.” The cheapest. And the one she knew he’d pick, for that very reason. So Sandra made the reservation for three nights at the Blossom Creek Inn. At the center of the Town of Huntsville, Connecticut. --- Two Saturdays later, Sandra and Nick got into their Toyota Camry and started the three-and-a-half-hour drive. “I hope the roads are clear,” Nick said as he licked up the tiny puddle of coffee off the top of his car thermos with his long tongue. “It hasn’t snowed in a month, Nick,” Sandra said. “Still, it might,” he said. “Did you bring a print-out of the reservation?” He obviously didn’t care whether she had because he had already put the car in reverse and was backing out of the driveway. “The confirmation number is in my phone.” “I just don’t want an argument over the room rate when we get there,” Nick said. Sandra remembered how, thirty years ago, he tried to renegotiate the price of the suite when they checked into the hotel for their honeymoon. The car rolled past the stop sign at the end of their block, the first of many traffic-related transgressions he would commit in the next four hours. “Are you sure this is the same place your friends stayed at?” “Henry and Grace?’ “Yeah, whoever. The ones with the daughter.” Sandra touched Nick’s right shoulder and squeezed the fatty tissue over his collarbone. “I’m sure, dear,” she said as she dug her thumb deeply into his shoulder—something he mistook for affection. While Nick listened to the news on the car radio, switching stations seven or eight times between their driveway and the Connecticut border, Sandra read two hundred pages of James Michener’s *Hawaii.* She had discovered the book at the bottom of the box where she had found her mother’s Christmas card list. She used the most recent of Lydia’s holiday card envelopes as a bookmark. Occasionally, Nick would glance over at her, scratching the side of his wrinkled neck. “Good book?” “It’s interesting,” Sandra said. “It’s about the settlement of the islands by Christian missionaries. Did you know they made it into a movie with Julie Andrews?” “The Mary Poppins chick?” Sandra opened the back cover. “It’s a library copy,” she said. “My mother must have forgotten to return it years ago.” “Next thing, you’ll want to make a trip to Hawaii instead of Connecticut.” “That would be for our fortieth, Nick,” Sandra said, laughing. *If you last that long.* At around three o’clock in the afternoon, they drove up the narrow gravel driveway in front of the Blossom Creek Inn. Nick parked by the front entrance. He got out of the car and looked around. “I don’t see no blossoms yet,” he said. “Or a creek.” A short woman, maybe fifty, with frosted blond hair and a beaming smile appeared on the porch. “Welcome,” she said, her arms outstretched. “I’m Sandy Bean. You must be the Robinsons.” Sandra stepped back. She wasn’t in the mood for a hug from a stranger. Nick just ignored the woman. “Yes, we are,” she said. “I hope we’re not too early.” “I see from your reservation card that you’re a Sandy, too,” the woman said. “Isn’t that funny?” “I go by Sandra,” she replied. Nick took their black Samsonite suitcase out of the trunk. “Let me get that,” Sandy said, but Nick pulled the bag away from her. “We’re fine,” he said. Sandy walked them to the room, “a quiet, spacious suite,” she told them, in the back of the inn. “You two lovebirds let me know if you need anything,” she said, giggling, as she closed the door behind her. The room was even smaller than their bedroom at home. A canopied queen bed with a frilly white comforter stood in the center, taking up most of the space. The only place to sit was a single club chair with frayed arms next to the window. In the corner was a tiny bathroom with a shower and a single sink. “All this for only $89 a night?” Nick said, examining the tiny bar of Ivory soap, the sarcasm seeping through his raspy tone. Sandra pushed the suitcase to the side of the bed. “We could have stayed at the Hilton in Hartford for one-fifty.” Nick lay down on the comforter, not bothering to remove his shoes. “She said there’s free coffee in the lobby,” Sandra said. “You want any?” Nick shook his head. He pulled the chain on the tiny lamp on the side table beside the bed and blinked when the bulb lit up, like it was a big surprise. Sandra picked up her book and walked back down the hall to the front entrance. She saw a young man with stringy black hair at the front desk. His thin face vaguely resembled Sandy’s—without the smile. “Is there coffee made?” she asked, looking around the lobby. The young man pointed toward the table at the front of the dining room. Three other small tables were covered with starched white tablecloths, each with four place settings of blue and white china. She remembered the ad had said the room came with free breakfast. Sandra half-filled a Styrofoam cup with hot water from the urn and dumped in a packet of Folger’s Instant. Just then, Sandy came out from the back of the dining room. “I see you found the coffee,” she said. “Is the room okay? Do you need any creamer?” “It’s fine,” Sandra said. Sandra glanced at the tables and wondered how many other guests were staying there. “First time in Huntsville?” the woman asked. “I was here once when I was younger,” Sandra said. “With my mother.” She was surprised at how fluidly the lies came lately. First, the Tom and Susie story. Then, this one. “Oh, so you have family here?” “Just a friend of my mother’s. Lydia, her name was.” “That must have been quite some time ago,” Sandy said. “I’ve lived here twenty years and don’t remember anyone named Lydia.” Sandra put down her cup and opened the book. She showed the red envelope to Sandy. “Do you know where this street is?” “Coriander Lane,” she read. “Yeah, that’s the old Baker place. Allison Beale lives there.” Sandra frowned. Allison. Not Lydia. “Do you know her?” she asked. “Not well,” Sandy said. “Kind of an odd duck. Some sort of artist. She keeps to herself.” “Is it far from here?” Sandy laughed. “You’re in Huntsville, Connecticut, honey. Nothing is far from anything.” She pointed toward the parking lot. “It’s maybe a half mile down that road you drove up. On the left side.” Sandra looked down at the envelope. There was no point in waiting until tomorrow. She thanked Sandy and headed out the front door. The chill in the late afternoon air made her shiver. She hadn’t brought her jacket but didn’t want to return to the room for it. Nick would ask too many questions. She tossed the rest of her coffee in the rosebush next to the front steps and headed down the road. She found a rocky country lane just beyond a sharp bend in the road. She didn’t see any sign but assumed it must be Coriander Lane. She walked past two empty lots and came to a tiny white house with a short picket fence on the right side. The place badly needed painting, its weathered façade grayish from neglect, half a dozen pieces missing from the cedar shake roof. Sandra pushed open the gate and walked to the front door. After she rang the doorbell for a third time, Sandra saw a woman’s face peering from the side window. The door opened slowly. “May I help you?” the woman whispered. Sandra could barely see her through the screen door. “Are you Lydia?” “I’m Allison,” the woman said cooly. “What do you want?” Sandra took out the red envelope from the book. “Are you the one who’s been sending cards to Mrs. Virginia Cutter for the last twenty years?” The woman looked down at the envelope. “Are you her?” Sandra said. Still, the woman said nothing. “Mrs. Cutter was my mother,” Sandra said. “I’ve probably written a dozen letters to this address telling you my mother is dead. Yet the cards keep coming. Every year.” The woman stepped outside and pulled the front door shut. She was younger than Sandra first thought, her face smooth with only a few tiny blemishes and the beginnings of wrinkles around her eyes. She had thick auburn hair that bounced about in the afternoon breeze. She wore faded blue jeans, the front splattered with dried flecks of paint, and a white smock that looked like it belonged to a surgeon. “Lydia was my mother,” Allison said. “Where is she now?” “She passed twenty-five years ago,” Allison said. “My mother loved Christmas. She said it was the only time of the year she felt good about herself. Before she died, she made me promise to keep sending her holiday cards to her friends.” “But why?” “She didn’t want to be forgotten, I suppose.” Allison shrugged. “So I just keep sending them. Probably a hundred a year.” “But why would you send them to people you know don’t receive them?” Sandra said. Allison offered a faint smile. “I get a couple of letters a year from people telling me whoever I’m sending the card to has passed away,” she said. “And many more come back undelivered. *Addressee unknown*. But a promise is a promise.” Sandra remembered the thirty years of promises she made to Nick. *I promise I won’t leave you. I promise we can try having another baby. I promise I won’t hit you anymore.* All worthless. She couldn’t tell if Allison was an unusually dutiful daughter or a nut job. “Twenty-five years is long enough to keep a promise, isn’t it?” Allison gave her a funny look. “I suppose to some people, it is.” Sandra looked down at the envelope. “Do you know how our mothers knew each other?” Allison shook her head. “I don’t have a clue who half the people are. I just send them the cards.” “Would you mind showing me the list?” “Why?” Allison said. “Maybe I’d recognize some of the names,” Sandra said. Just then, the wind picked up, blowing Allison’s hair to the side. Sandra shivered a bit. “Come inside,” Allison said, opening the door. Sandra sat in the tiny parlor, her ass lopsided and uncomfortable against the lumpy divan. A few minutes later, Allison returned with a manila file folder in her hand. “Here,” she said. Sandra opened the file. Columns of names and addresses were neatly printed on the lined paper, now somewhat yellowed with age, its once-smooth pages creased and frayed. It was so much like her mother’s list. She scanned the names as she flipped through the ten pages. She wished she had her mother’s list to compare. But there were two names she recognized. Mrs. Virginia Cutter, her mother. And Althea Blakeley. Address 2175 East Fifth Street, Baltimore. Her second cousin. The one she’d screwed out of a house with only $167 worth of cellulose debris that Sandra had hired a handyman to clear. It had taken him less than an hour. Sandra pointed at Althea’s name. “Did you know her?” Allison looked at the name. “She’s one of them,” she said. “The dead ones.” Sandra felt a cold wave pass over the back of her neck. Althea had been ten years younger than Sandra. “Are you sure?” “She’s one of the ones I got a letter about,” Allison said. “A pretty angry letter, I remember, from her father. He said his daughter had been homeless and died on the streets. And why did I keep raising such bad memories? How was I to know?” *Homeless.* “But you keep sending the cards anyway?” “Every year,” she said. Her face reddened. Allison handed her the file. “I think it’s time to stop,” she said. “I’m not sure I can,” the woman said, staring down at her mother’s list. Sandra took hold of the woman’s hands. The thin skin was pasty white, blemished with small purple bruises. “You’re hurting people,” she said. “Don’t you see that?” A single tear ran down Allison’s left cheek. “But if I stop,” she said, “she’ll be forgotten.” --- Sandra walked back to the Blossom Creek Inn, her copy of *Hawaii* tucked under her left arm, the red envelope dangling between her fingers. A sudden breeze lifted the envelope from her hand as she stepped onto the front porch. Sandra turned and watched it as it blew down the driveway, landing in a clump of juniper bushes on the side of the road. She didn’t bother to retrieve it. “Nice walk?” Sandy said, popping her head out the front door. “There’s a pretty decent diner down the street if you and your husband want dinner. They serve a mean meatloaf special on Saturdays.” “Thank you,” Sandra said. Then she saw her jacket on the back seat of the car. She pulled the handle of the car door. It was unlocked. Goddam Nick had even left the keys in the change holder. She couldn’t believe Nick was still asleep on the queen bed when she entered the room. That made it easier. No need to make up a story that Tom and Susie had been in an accident and she needed to drive home. Sandra grabbed her purse and tiptoed out of the room. As she closed the door, she heard one of Nick’s earsplitting snorts as he rolled over. She wondered how angry he would be when he woke up and discovered she was gone. Leaving him at a cheap inn in a small town with no way to get home. Or would he care? Would he even remember she’d been there? Was she so easily forgotten? She laughed out loud as she drove past the Blossom Creek Inn sign. She had been right. They weren’t going to make it to their fortieth anniversary. By then, she would be in Hawaii. --- ## Editor's Notes: If I had to break this story down to one question, it would probably be: what is the full weight of a life? One of the main reasons this stood out to us as a submission was in how the story builds upon a series of mirroring relationships. Specifically Sandra and her mother versus Lydia and Allison. Forgotten people and forgotten promises. Don's choice to use a Christmas card as the story's spine is quite fitting, because these objects should signify warmth and connection but instead reveal absence and the persistence of the unwanted. Which is probably why the most cutting line in this story upon reflection is Sandy's statement that she never knew someone named Lydia, even in this small of a town. It's no wonder Allison does what she does. And then there's Nick, a man rendered almost entirely through habits (coffee slurping, nostril picking, snoring). The story barely needs to tell us the marriage is loveless, it just has to describe him. What's more interesting is what we learn about Sandra, how she lies casually and with pleasure. That she married for complicated reasons and stayed for complicated ones, and she's been rehearsing her departure for years without knowing it. The repeated phrase "if you last that long" (said only internally) functions like a pressure gauge the reader gets to watch as it rises throughout the narrative. The Allison scene is of course where the story pivots and crystallizes and becomes what it needs to be. Allison is Sandra's dark mirror. Someone also trapped by a dead mother's expectations, also performing a duty that has curdled into something harmful. Sandra's question "Twenty-five years is long enough to keep a promise, isn't it?" is directed at herself as much as Allison, and Allison's answer—"I suppose to some people, it is"—is the story's thematic core. What really makes it tick. Allison's revelation about Althea lands with real force because of the earlier setup. Sandra cheated Althea out of a house with a lie about termite damage, and Althea died homeless. And what's great is that the story doesn't editorialize this. It just puts those two facts next to each other and lets the reader process the discomfort. Sandra doesn't confess or apologize. She just absorbs the information and moves on. The ending is earned but not entirely clean, which is actually to the story's credit. Sandra driving away while Nick snores is satisfying as a moment of liberation, but the story is smart enough to leave the moral weight unresolved. She's escaping a bad marriage, which is good. She also cheated her drug-addicted cousin out of an inheritance that might have changed her life, and that cousin died on the streets. The final image of Hawaii connects back to the Michener novel, the preprinted vacation cards people send, and the dream of escape. It's hopeful and a little ironic at the same time.—*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/02/unnamed.jpg)](https://donjrath.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Don J. Rath holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. A retired finance executive, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing on themes of identity, race, family, and LGBTQ+ experience. His work has been published in **Musepaper*, **Hypnopomp,* **Scribes\*MICRO\*Fiction*, **Blood and Bourbon,* **Twelve Winters Journal,* **Barren Magazine*, **Fiery Scribe Review, LitBreak,* and *Roi Faineant.* He is also a frequent contributor to the *Southern Review of Books.* His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (2023) and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst. [See more of the author's work ](https://donjrath.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Three Days on the Water URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/three-days-on-the-water/ Last updated: 2026-02-22T17:10:41.000Z Two men pushed the skiff off before the first light. The stones were slick with weed and the keel made a soft grinding sound that Gustavo hated. He held the bow line and stepped in careful, feeling for the slats under his feet. The wood was damp and cool. Raúl came down from the road slow. He had on the same faded shirt he wore most mornings, the one with the pocket that sagged. The shirt was clean. His hat sat low and the brim hid his eyes. He carried the bait bucket in one hand and the coffee tin in the other. Gustavo watched the way he placed his foot on the plank and shifted his weight. It was not the way he used to step in. He steadied himself on the gunwale with the back of his fingers and then let go like it was nothing. “You want the stern?” Gustavo said. Raúl shook his head. “You take it.” Gustavo climbed to the oars without arguing. He set them in the locks and began to row out, the blades dipping clean and silent. The village was still asleep. The only light was the orange lamp at the end of the pier and a thin strip of pale sky above the roofs. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Starling Song URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/starling-song/ Last updated: 2026-02-19T14:56:23.000Z *Starling Song* (Dodo Books, 2029) was an instant classic. Ulysses for the 21st century, the critics said, although I thought it more like *Zorba the Greek* for the burnout generation. It’s a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness novel detailing three hours in the mind of a partially-sighted birder, Merlin Mills, as he records the comings and goings of a starling nest in rural Catalonia. The first human-written novel to break into the New York Times bestseller list in almost two years, they (the critics) said it was proof there was still room for writers in the landscape of literary fiction. I thought it was a book that celebrated life. *Starling Song* is one of those novels that’s really a conduit for its author’s philosophy. Samuel Mills has written a manifesto—a call to arms against the virtual reality headset, or at least a radical reassessment of humanity’s position within the technological nexus. It’s also an impassioned case to go birding. Terror Management Theory suggests humans seek higher-order meaning to cope with anxiety around death, but *Starling Song* challenges the idea that death is a separate event from living. Death is a property of life. Eternity is in the present moment. Through birding, we refuse the addictive power of the headset and eschew the real death big tech ushers into our livingness. As Merlin Mills remarks in the novel’s opening page: "By watching the starlings perched on the beam of the old log shed, I felt as if I was rehearsing for death. But the longer I sat watching them that pleasant morning in the Catalan hills, the more I realised I was learning to be alive and that nodding through my headset was death in that it stole the present from my living." *Starling Song* revisits an emergentist view that our minds are more than their physical substrate. "Phenomenal consciousness," Mills stumbles on the realisation while scratching a wen on his pate, "occupies a distinct ontological category – a *sui generis* nature, non-reducible to the physical and unrealisable by the machine." The epiphany follows a lengthy meditative segment on a starling plumage, where Mills comes to grasp the unique correspondence between percept (the bird’s iridescent palette) and his own perception. From this insight, he develops his theory of literary authenticity. Literature’s value lies in its accordance (or not) with the human soul. The soul is the ultimate referent object of fiction; the truth-relation between text and soul is that which elevates the novel beyond the exoskeleton of form. But *Starling Song* isn’t just a book of philosophical merit, it’s a stylistic work deserving the more fashionable accolade of having an original voice. *Starling Song* renounces the homogenised register of much contemporary fiction, opting for something genuinely experimental in its place. Mills is a master of giving his prose room to breathe. An "omissionary" rather than a missionary, he scatters deliberate errors throughout the pages, inviting readers to clarify and complete the narrative their own way. "Errors," he muses, watching a goat herder drop her milking pail in a nearby field, "are the fingerprints of our humanity. There is only one perfection, but infinite forms of imperfection." Mills’s partial sightedness should be considered for a moment here. The more he struggles to spot the nesting starlings in the brightening morning, the more acutely he notices the secondary qualities of his percepts, like the diffuse orange that finds its way through his eyelids, and he realises that within any detail, there is an infinitude of further detail, that consciousness is a discrete state and where it exists, it does so entirely. There’s no shame in being unable to see the birds he hears above him when a universe exists in the sound of their song. *Starling Song* proved additionally interesting for its novel publication strategy. The first edition of the book was serialised and distributed as chip paper. Readers were invited to assemble the narrative as they saw fit. There were many ways it could come together, but all permutations were the same book. As such, *Starling Song* is an original work of fractal fiction, replicating at every scale, with each sentence similar to the page, and each page similar to the novel. As Mills himself says after being shat on by a starling: "I had perfected the art of being the same person forever. I was realised again and again each second; the universe was like a multiplying kaleidoscope." The nexus, on the other hand, is incapable of sitting still. When *Starling Song* was put through literary software, it iterated differently each time. "The need to improve rather than sustain is the ultimate giveaway of a dominating system." There was a great proliferation of birding in the aftermath of *Starling Song*’s publication, what has since been termed the "Summer of Dove." The people renounced their headsets and stepped outside. For the first time in a while, they could see how bad things had gotten. We came together, slowly at first, like protein curds coagulating in spoiled milk. Soon, we were one again. The great web of interconnected consciousness revealed itself as inevitable, obvious. All sorts of good things cascaded. The crows appeared in early 2031\. Straight away, we knew something was off. They murmured like surveillance drones. Crows don’t murmur, someone murmured. We knew something was off. Their beaks were especially pointed and, at dusk, they came out to fill the sky, bullying the other birds, causing untold distractions. We tried patience, but we were unrewarded. We exercised restraint to no avail. Old habits die hard; things started to tip back to the way they’d been before. One evening, I walked the hill near the town. I brought my catapult, just in case. The sky was bruised and swollen. It was hard to tell where the storm ended and the crows began. They hovered overhead, a suspended murmuration, forty thousand in the gathering dark. I asked them what they wanted, but their unnatural suspension was its own form of acknowledgement. They were goading me with their absent reply. "Say something," I demanded. "Or go away and give us our peace." But I knew the impotency of my words. The joints in my hand twitched for the catapult. There was a great silence; time bunded on. Then, it was pointed skyward. A moment of madness or an expression of utmost clarity? Tension released in my arm, a flash of white, then back to black, and the brume of corvids, their glistening beaks now a mottled starling plumage, an infinite tonal array, zoom out!, see the vistas of Catalonia, look up!, it’s the chestnut beams of Merlin’s log shed. --- ## Editor's Notes For such a short piece that is verging on flash fiction, *Starling Song* perhaps impresses me most by how much it layers into itself with so few words. It is part literary criticism, part speculative fiction, part philosophical essay. And it rewards close reading. Structurally, the story presents itself as a review or critical essay about a novel called *Starling Song* by "Samuel Mills," published in a future where AI-generated fiction has nearly crowded out human writing. But the reviewer is never named, and as the piece progresses, the fictional frame dissolves entirely. The "review" bleeds into lived experience, and the ending collapses the boundary between the novel being reviewed and the world the narrator inhabits. Which is why those final lines do so much to land this bird. The catapult, the flash of white, the zoom out into Catalonia—they all suggest the narrator *is* Merlin Mills, or has become him, or that the novel has somehow become reality. It's a fractal structure mirroring the very book it describes. I could write a whole essay about this story that goes well beyond the word count of what I'm evaluating, but I'll try to keep it simple. Underneath the philosophy and craft tricks, there's a quietly anxious meditation here on the future of writing. The story imagines a world where human-written fiction has nearly disappeared, then stages its redemption, then imagines that redemption threatened yet again. The crows are the return of the technological repressed. The narrator's act of violence against them is both futile and necessary, both madness and clarity. The ambivalence feels honest. The story doesn't know if we can win, or what winning would even look like. But it does insist on the value of the attempt. —*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/02/IMG-20250709-WA0012-1.jpg)](https://linktr.ee/sam.rutishausermills?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Sam Rutishauser-Mills is the author of the novel 'Poacher's Priest' and the short story collection 'Nightmares'. He lives in Barcelona. [See more of the author's work ](https://linktr.ee/sam.rutishausermills?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Cetera Poetry #1 – The Things That Survive Us URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/cetera-poetry-1-the-things-that-survive-us/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T20:21:05.000Z Every poem in this issue arrives carrying its own weather. Some carry the hush of a kitchen after midnight, or the shape of a shoreline where the water keeps its counsel. Some move through childhood terrain half-remembered and half-invented, through fields that no longer exist except in the body. Others speak from distances measured in dialect, in train rides, in inherited silences, in constellations traced by hands that no longer reach toward the sky. Together, these poems inhabit the territory suggested by our title — *The Things That Survive Us*. The collection gathers voices from across geographies and sensibilities, each offering a distinct measure of time: personal, ancestral, ecological, linguistic. One poem surveys a life through metes and bounds, mapping intimacy across a changing landscape. Another traces lineage through language and migration, where architecture becomes memory’s scaffolding. Elsewhere, domestic rituals blur into sacrament; waves promise impossible escape; a porch holds both presence and absence in the space of a single rocking chair. The poets in this issue write toward what persists in grief, in love, in silence, in the body’s recall. Their work holds open a space where inheritance may wound and sustain in equal measure, where absence acquires weight. And perhaps most importantly, where survival itself becomes a form of translation. This inaugural poetry issue would not exist without the generosity and trust of its contributors, who placed their work into our care with patience and conviction. We extend our gratitude to each poet whose voice appears here. Our thanks also belong to the editors who shaped this gathering with attentiveness and clarity, and to the readers whose quiet labor helped bring these poems into conversation with one another. The issue is now available to download here: [The Things That Survive UsDownload and open the file to begin reading.Cetera Poetry #1 – The Things That Survive Us.pdf10 MBdownload-circle](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/content/files/2026/02/Cetera-Poetry--1-----The-Things-That-Survive-Us.pdf "Download") ## The Poets *Colin Punt. Linlang Zhao. MF Charles. Harper Obstfeld. Ro Novak. Micke van Zyl. Kenneth Pobo. Erin Jamieson. Ben Macnair. Paul Hostovsky.* ## The Editors *Jon Negroni. Natalia Emmons.* ### The Pomegranate Man URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-pomegranate-man/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T16:54:18.000Z The pomegranate split in his hands—reluctantly, then all at once—and Riam set half of it on the flat rock where the tide would find it by morning. The seeds shone like wet garnets in the last grey light. Forty years he had done this. Forty winters watching the fruit go soft, then vanish, taken by gulls or current or something he preferred not to know. He climbed back up the path to the lighthouse, his knees aching in the way that meant rain. The storm had been building all day, the sky unduly weighted, and now the first drops struck the windows with the sound of fingernails. He lit the lamp. He put the kettle on. He did not think about Teyo. Teyo was simply there, the way salt was in the air, the way damp was in the stones. A knock came just after dark. Riam stood in the kitchen with a cup gone cold in his hands. No one came to the lighthouse in winter. No one came in storms. The road washed out in weather half this bad, and the fishing boats had been hauled up since October. He set the cup down and did not move. The knock came again, patient and unhurried. He crossed to the door and opened it. The man on the threshold was barefoot. That was the first thing Riam saw—bare feet on the frozen stone, pale and wrinkled. The second thing was the page in his hand, sodden and falling apart. Riam knew it. He had written it yesterday. He wrote one every year on the anniversary. Had folded it into the rocks beside the pomegranate, weighted it with a stone. *If you're real*, it said, in his own cramped hand, *take something else from me.* The man held it out like an offering. Rain ran down his face, plastered dark hair to his temples, dripped from the hem of a coat that looked a century old. His skin had an undertone that should not have been there—grey-green, sea glass, something left too long in brine. But his eyes were human. Brown and steady and fixed on Riam with an empty expression. "You wrote to me," the man said. His voice was low, water-smoothed, with an accent Riam didn’t recognize. "You wrote many letters, in fact. I thought it was time I answered." Riam gripped the doorframe. The wind shoved past him into the house, bringing the smell of kelp, and something else beneath it—pomegranate, sweet and faintly rotten. The man was young. Thirty, perhaps. But his eyes were elder. His eyes had a quality Riam had seen in photographs of soldiers, not long after the wars. "Who are you?" The man smiled. There was something wrong with his teeth. Too many, or too sharp, Riam could not tell in the dark. Barnacles clung to the collar of his coat. His fingernails were the iridescent grey of mussel shells. "You know who I am," the man said. "You've been writing to me for forty years." The rain was soaking Riam's shirt. His hand was still on the doorframe, the wood cold and slick under his palm. He wished he could close the door. Go back to the kettle and the lamp and the slow erosion of his remaining years. But he could only step aside. "Come in," he said. The man crossed the threshold. He left no wet footprints on the floor. “My name,” he finally said, “is Oannes.” --- Riam put the kettle back on. The body knew what the mind could not. How to answer doors, accept casseroles, pretend the world made sense. He had done this before. He found a towel and offered it. Oannes took it but did not use it. Held it in his lap, water pooling on the kitchen chair. "You're cold," Riam said. "I don't feel cold." Oannes tilted his head, watching Riam move about the kitchen. "Not anymore. Not for a long time, actually." Riam put bread on the table, and cheese, and the other half of the pomegranate. His hands were trembling, which he hated. He hated the body's betrayals. Oannes looked at the fruit for a moment, then up at Riam. "You remembered," he said. "Oh? Remembered what?" "The old courtesies. Fruit for the traveler. Bread and salt." Oannes picked up the pomegranate, turned it in his hands. "Most people have forgotten. They leave plastic flowers on graves now, or nothing at all. They don't understand that the dead are hungry." The kettle screamed. Riam poured water over tea leaves, the motions steadying him, and sat down across from Oannes. The fire crackled. Rain lashed the windows. Oannes's hands rested on the table—the webbing between his fingers barely visible, translucent as a jellyfish. "You're not going to ask me what I am," Oannes said. "Would you tell me the truth if I did?” "I don't know anymore what the truth is." Oannes broke open the pomegranate. The seeds spilled across the table, red and scattered, impossible to gather. "I've been so many things. Worn so many names. But I remember you, Riam. I remember you before you had grey in your hair." "You couldn't. I was—" "Twenty-two. The summer Teyo brought you to the cove." Oannes ate a pomegranate seed, his lips staining red. "You were afraid of the water. You sat on the rocks while he swam out past the breakers, and you watched him like he was the only bright thing in the world." The room tilted. Riam pressed his palms flat against the table. He had not spoken of Teyo to anyone in years. There was no one left who had known him before he became the old man in the lighthouse, the keeper whom the village children dared each other to visit. "He talked of you," Oannes said. "After. At first he talked about you all the time. In fact, your name was the first human word I learned from him. Then, as time passed, he spoke of you less. Then not at all. Time moves differently, down there. Memory goes soft. Like fruit in water." "After." Riam heard his own voice as if from a great distance. "You mean after he drowned." "I mean after he became what I am." The fire popped. Sparks rose and died. Riam looked at Oannes and saw the inhuman creature beneath the human mask. The way his chest did not rise and fall with breath. The faint glow of his skin in the dim light. The absolute stillness of him, like the moment before a wave crashes shore. “That's obviously impossible," Riam said. He said it to the table, to the scattered seeds. “Nevertheless, you've been writing to me for forty years. You've been leaving fruit for someone you don't believe in. Why?" "Because…” “Because what?” “Because I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop." "No." Oannes leaned forward, and Riam smelled the sea on him, kelp and brine and a sweetness that made his chest ache. "Because you knew. You've always known. You just didn't want to believe it, because believing it meant he chose. Teyo chose the sea. He chose me. He chose to leave you behind." Riam's hand moved across the table, then over the scattered seeds, until his fingers brushed Oannes's wrist. The skin was cool and slick, not quite human, but beneath it he felt something that must've been a pulse. Faint. Irregular. Oannes went still. "You are real," Riam said. “Aren’t you?” "As real as what you see. And what you feel.” The fire died to embers. The tea went cold. They sat like that until the storm began to quiet. --- The rain broke near midnight. Riam stood at the door and watched the clouds tear apart, revealing a moon so bright it hurt his eyes. The rocks below shone wet and silver. The sea had calmed to a whisper. "Come outside," Oannes said. “Please.” He had not moved from the kitchen chair in hours. Now he rose, and the motion was fluid and not quite right, similar to how water shifted to find its level. "It's freezing," Riam said. "You won't feel it. Not if you're with me." Riam followed him out without another word. They picked their way down the path to the rocks, Oannes barefoot and sure, Riam stumbling in his boots. The moonlight made everything strange. Made the familiar shapes of stone and sea transform into something older, something from before they had names. Oannes stopped at the flat rock where Riam had left the pomegranate. The fruit was still there, untouched. "You asked me to take something," he said. "In your letter." "I didn't mean—" "Didn't you?" Oannes turned to face him. In the moonlight his eyes were no longer brown. They were the deep grey-green of water seen from below, light filtering down from a surface far above. "Forty years, Riam. Forty letters. I've read them all…every one that reached the water, every one that didn't rot away before the tide could take it. You've asked me for death. For the mercy of forgetting. For one more hour with him. You've asked me for everything except the one thing I can give." "What is that?" "The same choice I gave Teyo." The waves were lapping at Riam's boots now. He had not noticed the tide coming in, but the water was ankle-deep and rising. It was warm. It should not have been warm, as it was January, and the sea should have been cold enough to stop a heart. But it wrapped around his feet anyway. "He didn't drown," Riam said. "You're telling me he didn't drown." "He did. And he didn't." Oannes stepped closer, and the space between them was narrow now, intimate. "The sea takes, Riam. That's what the old stories say, and the old stories are true. But they don't say what the sea gives back in return. They don't talk about the ones who go willingly. The ones who choose it.” "He would have told me. If he wanted…if he was going to—" "Would he?" Oannes's hand came up, touched Riam's cheek, and the touch was cold and kind. "You wanted him to stay. He knew what you would say." The water was at Riam's knees now. His trousers were soaked, clinging, and still he was not cold. The warmth was spreading through him, up his spine, into his chest. It felt like whiskey, or his love for it. "He loved you," Oannes said. "He still does, in his way. But memory fades in the deep places. Names become sounds become nothing. He is not Teyo anymore, and I am not what I was before I went into the water. That is the cost." "And you're offering me this cost." "I can only offer the choice. Remain here, in your lighthouse, with your thoughts and your letters and your pomegranates. Grow old. Die with dignity. Become nothing but a story the village tells. Or—" He leaned in, and his breath was cool against Riam's mouth, tasting of salt and fruit. "Come with me. Become something new. Something that does not age. Does not wither. Does not mourn." "Like Teyo.” "Eventually. Yes." The water was at Riam's waist. He could feel the current tugging at him, gentle but insistent. The rocks where he had stood for forty years were disappearing beneath the tide. He could not imagine leaving the lighthouse. He pictured its quiet rooms, the narrow bed, the books he had read so many times the pages were soft as cloth, and he was far from done with them. But there was also the village, the handful of people who nodded to him when he came for supplies, even though for most, he had become invisible with age. He wondered what Teyo might’ve said. Not this myth of Teyo, not the story he told himself at night, but the real one that was messy, selfish, inconvenient, loved. Through it all, he had written letters. Every year, the same question dressed in different words: *Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me? Why did you leave me?* He took Oannes's hand. "Show me," he said. The tide rose around them, and they walked together into the sea. --- The water closed over Riam's head, and he did not drown. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps drowning was not what he had been taught, with the lungs filling, the body fighting, the terrible surrender. Perhaps drowning was warmth spreading through him like wine, the pressure in his ears becoming music, the darkness opening into a thousand blues. Oannes's hand in his was an anchor, he reasoned. An anchor to the self he was losing, to the world he was leaving behind. *This is what Teyo felt. This is what he chose.* They drifted. The moonlight filtered down, pale and fractured, illuminating things that Riam had no words for. Shapes that moved, that glowed, that watched with eyes like lamps. Oannes was beside him, and wherever Oannes was, the pressure eased, the cold retreated. *You're dying*, a voice said, and Riam realized it was his own. *You're dying and this is a hallucination, a fever dream, the brain's final gift.* But then Oannes turned to him, and his face in the underwater light was beautiful in a way that human faces were not. Serene, alien, luminous. "Not dying," Oannes said, and his voice carried through the water as clearly as through air. "Changing. Always changing.” He kissed Riam. The taste of it flooded through him, sweet and bitter at once, the taste of fruit eaten in a garden he could never return to. His mouth filled with it, his lungs, his blood. He felt his feet lose their grip on the sandy bottom. Felt his body become lighter, stranger, less his own. *Let go*, Oannes's voice said, inside his head now, part of him. *What you were is ending. What you will be has no name yet.* Riam thought of his name. *Riam*. What did it mean? Who had given it to him? His mother's voice, saying it in anger, in love, in exasperation. Teyo's voice, laughing, teasing. His own voice, a litany of identity spoken into mirrors and silence and the long years of not knowing why Teyo had gone. *I am Riam. I am Riam. I am—* He let go. The name dissolved. The memories went soft at the edges. He felt the sea remake him, cell by cell, thought by thought. It did not hurt. There was only heat and pressure and and the sensation of being held by something so vast that his entire life was a single droplet in its depths. The last of the air left his lungs. The last of the light faded from his eyes. And in the darkness, in the silence, in the weight of all that water, Riam smiled. The darkness held him down. He did not need to rise. --- The storm passed in the night. By morning the sky was clear, the sea glass calm, the rocks below the lighthouse rimed with frost that glittered in the early sun. Shrana Ohlsson found a pomegranate on the ground. She had come to check on the old man. Her grandmother had known him, years ago, and made Shrana promise to look in on him after bad weather. She arrived to find the lighthouse door was open, the fire dead in the grate, the kettle cold. His bed had not been slept in. His coat hung on its peg. She walked down to the rocks, her boots slipping on the wet stone, and found the fruit sitting on the flat rock where it always sat, every winter, for as long as anyone could remember. But this year the pomegranate had not been taken by the tide. It sat there split and darkening, its seeds scattered across the stone like something meant for someone else. She looked out at the sea. It was very still. Very blue. "He walked into the water," she told the village later, at the pub, over a pint she barely touched. "I know how it sounds…well, I know it sounds mad. But I found his footprints in the sand. Just the one set, going down to the tide line. And nothing coming back." They searched for five days. They never found a body. --- ## Author's Notes I wrote this story as a way to say thanks to one of our members who signed up for the paid tier after reading [*No Regrets*](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/no-regrets/). I asked them if they had any ideas or themes they'd like to see from me next, and they mentioned my other story—[*I Am the Wolf, I Am the Boy*](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/i-am-the-wolf-i-am-the-boy/)—from last September. So in many ways, *The Pomegranate Man* is in direct conversation with both of those stories. As part of my general writing development, I spent a good portion of last year studying up again on Ursula Le Guin, specifically how she's able to write masterful, literary fantasy. Her work is so lyrical, mythologically grounded, and emotionally precise *and* formally beautiful. I can't hope to measure up, but my goal (at least) is to use folklore and liminal space (in this case between sea and shore) to examine tough emotions. That was the starting point. The emotions I chose are a three-point cross between grief, choice, and transformation. The central question being "what does it mean to stop mourning?" For Oannes, I wanted to craft a truly original figure while drawing on some reimagined Mesopotamian mythology. Oannes is a fish-man sage, a bringer of knowledge. Here, I've twisted him into a psychopomp/transformer. My hope was that the story could use this lore without overly explaining it. I always want to trust readers to feel mythic weight even if they don't necessarily know the source. And hey, that's what these author's notes are for, right? On that note, we've been getting more and more submissions for the magazine lately, and I know a lot of folks are trying to get a sense of what we accept for publication at *Cetera*. I should note that even as chief editor, my stories don't always make the cut! Natalia Emmons (our managing editor) has routinely slashed my work to the bone and constantly pushes me to make sure every detail and idea serves multiple purposes. I agree with her and want to see more of that from writers who submit fantasy to us. Note how in this story, the lighthouse represents isolation, vigil, and a beacon for what won't return. The pomegranate is an offering, a myth, a threshold between sweetness and rot. Additionally, we read a lot of stories that have at least one theme as its beating heart. But please push your theme *deeper*. This story could've just been about mourning and grief and that's it. But I've read that story before. I wanted to say something a little different with this one. I had to really sit down and examine an uncomfortable truth, after all. *Even the good kind of transformation involves some kind of loss*. In other words, rebirth requires obliteration. Riam's choice, in the end, isn't easy or predictable. He could stay. He has his lighthouse, his books, his quiet life. The story doesn't make staying seem impossible or pathetic, which makes his choice to *go* feel weighty and real. At least to me. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) ### Closure, and Other Impossible Wishes URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/closure-and-other-impossible-wishes/ Last updated: 2026-02-05T15:48:58.000Z Unfortunately, Sian had a talent not only for creativity but also overthinking, which meant that by the end of the second week she had a full list of possibilities. 1\. He’d had a breakdown. 2\. He’d been mugged. 3\. He had a girlfriend. 4\. He had a wife. (4a. He had a wife *and* a girlfriend.) 5\. He was lying unconscious in the hospital. 6\. He was a serial monogamist who regularly got bored with women and abandoned them outside the Highgate tube station**.** 7\. He’d lost his phone down the back of his sofa. 8\. He’d lost his phone down the back of another woman’s sofa. 9\. He was a psychopath who did this sort of thing for fun. 10\. He’d suffered a serious bout of amnesia. 11\. He was leading a double life which had finally caught up with him, not unlike one of those spy dramas you saw on late night telly. Or maybe Hollyoaks. 12\. He was a Men’s Rights Activist and wanted to pay her back for the time she’d said abortion access was a vital healthcare right. 13\. He was so afraid of intimacy that mere minutes before they were due to meet he had a panic attack, blocked her number, and moved to Uzbekistan. 14\. He was a cunt. 15\. He was an *absolute* cunt. (This final entry had been scrawled into her mental notebook in red capital letters, circled, and underlined three times.) --- It took another week of stewing (*16\. His dog had eaten his phone.)* before she remembered her old housemate. It hadn’t been a romantic problem—that wasn’t sensible, workaholic, in-bed-by-nine Lydia’s style—but a hypercritical manager who patronised every woman in his team and insisted on over-explaining concepts that Lydia had done a full doctorate in. She’d been miserable for months. And then… Sian had been on holiday at the time, but she remembered the way the living room had smelled on her return. Fresh and yet warming, *exciting,* the sweetness that hits when you step off the plane for a full two weeks’ holiday. The slight shimmer to the air that lingered for a month. And Lydia had grinned, looking more at peace than Sian had seen her in ages, and said simply that she’d called in outside help. The problem boss had been fired two days later. *It's easy,* Lydia had said. *You don’t even need a lamp, apparently that’s just for ceremonial occasions. You just call the helpline.* She’d scrawled the number on the back of a postcard; it was still attached to the fridge, pinned there with a magnet from a work trip to Dubrovnik. Magical contractors were unreliable, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Sian liked to resort to. But desperate times. *Sibylline Solutions, tell us how your life’s been ruined,* the automated voice rattled off after the first ring in a nursery-rhyme drone. Following the recorded instructions she continued pressing the star on the keypad, and after thirty seconds the smoke started to billow from her phone’s charging point. It bloomed out into huge, glossy whorls that danced over her worn carpet, and as it did so it took the form of waves, and stars, and of the smoke from the last bonfire of autumn. It shimmered with the shade of every blue of the ocean, and then changed to the neon pinks of candyfloss and lipstick, and from that to the colour of sunsets and rainforests and oil spills and rain on tarmac, to the colour of heartache and sleeplessness and anticipation and delight. It carried the scent of snow-crested mountaintops, and of fear, and of hot chocolate, and of the best rave of your life and the worst joint you’ve ever smoked. It billowed and it blossomed, and it filled the room, and when everything faded the air smelled of cinnamon, and the genie was levitating patiently in the centre of her living room. “Ah,” it said,“you must be my five o’clock.” Sian risked a smile back. The being's shimmering and quite naked form was almost translucent, the colour of dreaming—and certainly beautiful, though it would be difficult to explain quite *why* she found it so. Smoke wreathed it from head to foot, and it stooped slightly to stop its gargantuan head grazing the ceiling. She found herself wishing that her crappy living room was furnished with something other than discount IKEA pieces, or that she’d tidied away some of the post-breakup takeaway cartons. (Or even that she’d done the vacuuming.) “That’s me,” she said. “So is this a three questions deal?” The genie shrugged. “That’s actually just something we put out there to manage the demand on our powers. You’d be amazed how many people are put off when they think there’s a limit.” “So I can keep on asking you for anything?” “You can *ask.* And I’ll keep granting your wishes until I feel like stopping. There are no guarantees when it comes to magic.” The genie stooped to idly inspect one of the throw pillows on the sofa with an air of polite anticipation. “Alright. Well.” Sian took a deep breath. “There’s this guy...” The genie’s expression suggested a good number of its wishes began this way. “It was…*good*. You know? Only a few dates, but we’d been talking a lot. He walked me back to the Tube after every date, he was a real gentleman when we started, you know, getting intimate: he respected that I wanted to take it slow, and I *liked* that…I’m not talking about love or whatever, but I’d started thinking about him when I wasn’t supposed to, you know? And then,” she swallowed, hard, “he asked me over, we arranged where we’d meet, he texted me *that morning* to check if I was still coming, and then that evening I travel halfway across London, and… I guess you can see what happened next.” “I try not to make assumptions.” “He wasn’t there. I texted, I called, nothing. Waited for forty minutes like an idiot and then cried the entire fucking journey back to Brixton. And then a few days later I check my phone and—well, it *looks* like I’ve been blocked.” She tried very hard to keep her voice from straining with puppyish hope, and then despised herself entirely when this failed. “See,” the words turned quick, urgent, “I don’t know if you know this, but with the apps you can only tell if the other phone isn’t receiving your messages—which happens if you’re blocked, sure, but it can also be when the other phone is lost or the account is deactivated, and like, I’m pretty sure he’s chucked me, but I don’t *know* it, you see?” There was a quivering in the underside of her jaw. Sian jammed her hands into her pockets to prevent herself from once again checking her phone, on the stupid, ugly, million-and-one off-chance some rogue text had filtered through in the past five seconds. Of course, if she’d been talking with another human they’d have deflected from her humiliation with hastily-constructed small talk. But the genie just continued to hang there. Watching her. “Anyway, that’s the point. If he’d just blocked me I’d think *what an arsehole* and get on with my life. But going from *Sian are you still coming round to tie me to my bed already* to blocking me twelve hours later is weird—I mean, it’s *weird*, right?” Sian gave a sharp laugh, attempting to push down against the horrible vulnerability in her voice. She could hear the soft spots in it. “I waited for ages. He *knew* I’d be waiting. I know people can be careless or selfish or cowardly, but setting me up like that on purpose…that’s *cruel.*” She paused, and then grimaced. “You think I’m an idiot.” “I don’t experience human relationships enough to judge,” the genie said, with an excess of gentility that was even more painful than mockery. “Ha! If you were human you’d *know* I’m an idiot. I’ve told so many friends this story—I’ve said it was strange, I’ve said it’s at least *possible* there’s another explanation—and no-one's ever been kind enough to hide their expression. And I hate that…I hate that I’m being *that girl.* That idiot, you know? And that’s the worst thing. I’ve always thought that most people were, at heart, pretty decent, and believing that now makes me an idiot.” There followed a moment of silence, punctuated by the odd sound of snuffling. “Alright.” The genie nodded with the patience of a consummate professional. “I think I get the picture. What would you like from me?” “I want an explanation. None of that *no answer is an answer* bullshit; I want to look into his eyes and have him say what happened. I want something I can come to peace with.” With a flick of a wrist and a *pop!* the genie pulled a scroll out of thin air and ran its finger down what seemed to be a long list. It began murmuring beneath its breath: “*Simple conjuration, dimensional manipulation, memory casting*—yes, yes, no problem there. And do you want him back at the end of all this?” The pause was an embarrassing one. Of course, Sian knew the right answer. *Of course not, of course I have more self-respect than to give a man like that another chance. If you think I’m that desperate, if you think I need a relationship* that *badly…* “I don’t know,” she admitted, through the brick resting in her mouth. “Can I say that? I don’t know.” “Good. Honesty always makes it easier.” The genie scrunched the scroll up, tossing it over its shoulder and into nothingness. Its smile was the warm yet businesslike glow of all service providers everywhere. “Right. Let’s get to work on your heart’s desire, shall we?” --- Matt popped into existence with the sound of a champagne cork—or, unsettlingly, with the exact same sound of the opened prosecco they’d shared on their third date. He didn’t even look surprised to suddenly be in her living room. He just blinked, bemused, his dark hair rumpled and tie askew from what had clearly been another gruelling meeting over expenditure at Deloitte. (God, she hated that she could still remember his complaints about work.) “Hi, Sian,” he said amiably. “How have you been?” Sian drew breath. She’d planned to be indifferent; careless, even, in her carefully constructed—and humiliatingly frequent—fantasies of running into him again. However: “You bastard,” she spat. “You absolute dickhead. What the hell is your problem? *An hour and a half* I waited—” she blushed, avoiding the genie’s gaze, “in the dark, in the *cold*. You were the one that asked me out, wanker, and then you don’t even show up? What the hell?” Matt’s grin crumbled. Something in those sweet baby-blues positively *melted* with contrition, and *oh shit, he really does have a nice face, doesn’t he?* Sian squirmed, uncomfortable with the sudden, treacherous, and all-round antifeminist weakness in her knees. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit, I’m so sorry, Sian. I’ve been feeling awful about this, I can’t tell you how much…” He pushed a hand through his hair, causing his shirt to ride up over a sinfully flat stomach. Sian blushed. “I had my phone stolen. I was at the footie that afternoon and some prick lifted my phone from my pocket: I spent that entire evening blocking my accounts and making a police complaint for the insurance. But I was thinking about you the entire time. I felt awful, knowing you were going to be stranded like that. And then I didn’t have your number, and I was trying to work out how to get in touch again—I was thinking of emailing through your work’s website, or visiting that coffee shop you said you liked, you know, on our first date?—but I didn’t know if it would hurt you more to see me. Honestly, I’m so relieved you found me, I was so scared you’d think I wasn’t interested anymore, and I’d do anything to get you back—Sian?” Something cold had steeled in the pit of her stomach. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait, shut up, stop talking.” She turned to the genie, who’d been watching with detached curiosity from across the living room. “This isn’t right.” “What do you mean?” *“I remember the coffee shop you liked?* *I’d do anything to get you back*? No one’s *that* perfect!” “It’s what you wanted.” “Oh please, I never get what I want. Of course I wanted him sorry, I practically wanted him on his hands and knees.” Out of the corner of her eye Sian could see Matt’s knees automatically beginning to give. “*No*! You see? No one’s like that outside the movies. Have you cursed him or something?” Something guilty passed over the genie’s perfect face. “Ah. You mean you wanted this to be *real*?” At her glare it twiddled its fingers. “The thing is, you have to be careful with wishes. *I want something I can come to peace with*, that’s the emotion you brought to the table, right? Most humans prefer pretty lies anyway. As for abject grovelling, well, you can’t get much better than that…” “Oh, stop it,” Sian snapped. Already the angry blush was filling her cheeks. “You mean everything he just said, all that concern, that was just bullshit and magic?” She wanted to hurl herself out the window. For two seconds Matt had looked at her with those big blue eyes, and she’d actually believed… *No.* For God’s sake, she’d been stupid to believe it. Stupider to want it. “I give people what they want.” “Don’t give me that. That’s not even *Matt.* Just look at him.” They both examined the young man standing in the middle of the room with bovine obedience, his gaze focussing placidly somewhere behind Sian’s right ear. Experimentally she jabbed a finger into his shoulder. Then his nose. Then pinched him rather hard on the neck. Nothing happened. “The magic has him doing just as we instruct. I think it suits him,” said the genie. “And I can tell you’re enjoying that, by the way.” “Shut up.” Just to be sure Sian poked him again, hard, in the cheek. There was something supremely satisfying in seeing the tiny purpling bruise emerge, and Matt not doing a damn thing to stop it. With a cough she tried to ignore the genie’s knowing look. “Look, I don’t want it if it’s not real. People want the real thing: they don’t just want some—some fucking scripted bullshit where they get to tailor-make the relationship themselves.” “Hoo-ee,” the genie said, “*now* who’s lying?” Blushing, Sian jabbed her weaponised finger into its face. “*Fix this.”* “We can start again, that’s no problem,” the genie said, “he won’t remember. But are you sure you want the full, ugly truth? I’ve had more than my fair share of complaints after granting *that* old chestnut. It might get ugly. You might find out every message from him was generated through ChatGPT. That he thought every picture he got from you looked like a hippo. That every time you got him off he was actually thinking about his ex-girlf—” “*Stop it!”* For weeks afterwards she would remember the pain of the blood thundering furiously in her ears. “You said *truth.* That might be the truth.” “*Is* it?” The genie sighed. “You have to wish for it first.” “Fine. Whatever, just...soften it a bit. Can you give me a truth that isn’t so...blunt?” --- When the mist cleared from Matt’s eyes he seemed wholly oblivious to the tiny bruises dotting his face, and as bemused by Sian’s living room as if he’d only just arrived. She tried not to feel guilty that they had, in effect, restarted a human being as easily as you might restart a level on your PS5\. “Ok,” Sian said fiercely. “The Saturdaywe were supposed to meet. What happened?” Matt blinked, once, and then nodded. “Hi Sian. OK. Yeah. I remember there was...something. Something came up. A problem. Something that stopped me leaving the house. Or maybe I *did* leave and then changed my mind. Or maybe I just didn’t want to go. And then you messaged...but I didn’t reply. Or maybe I only think you messaged, but I can’t be sure. On account of losing my phone. Or breaking it. Or just not looking at it. There’s a lot of options. Take your pick.” --- “You said *softened*!” the genie protested. “That was softened!” “Alright. Give me the worst possible option. The shittiest of the shitty. Doesn’t matter if it’s true, at least I’ll stop thinking about him.” --- Ten minutes later the genie trailed the smell of roses and car fumes through the flat as it floated to join Sian where she stood staring through the kitchen window. Her fingers gripped the peeling linoleum of the countertop so tight they were nearly bone-white. They’d left Matt on standby in the living room, staring into nothingness with a gaze as cold as a knife. Sian could still hear his voice rattling on without emotion: “*The truth is, I was fucking another woman because I didn’t even remember we had a date that night, and when I did realise you’d be stuck alone on the other side of town, I found it funny. It took me two seconds to block you because you weren’t worth the bother of an explanation, and after that I honestly never thought of you again. And really, the fact that you’re still thinking of me only shows how pathetic—"* “Is that what really happened?” she asked quietly. “Does it matter? You said you didn’t want to think about him anymore. That should do the trick.” Sian nodded. She looked miserable, she looked tired, but the one thing she looked above all else was unconvinced. *Come on,* she thought. *Be* that *arsehole. Be every shitty male chauvinist stereotype in the book. Be awful enough to make me turn away right now, don’t give me...nuances. I can’t let them squeeze into my head.* Nuances were dangerous. They gave her permission to be weaker than she ought to be. When the genie cleared its throat, the sound was, for the first time, almost human. “It’s none of my business, but do you actually know what you’re looking for here?” She tried to avoid its eye. “Can we go again?” “Yes, I thought you might say that.” --- Time...had passed. *(“*—*you reminded me of my ex, and that scared me*—*"* *“*—*you didn’t remind me enough of my ex, and that repulsed me*—*”* *“*—*that one time you couldn’t meet up because you already had plans put me off* —*”* *“*—*you replied too quickly to texts*—*”* *“*—*you should have been flirtier*—*"* *“*—*you should have played hard to get*—*")* It had insisted on passing. *(“*—*I got fired that day and had a nervous breakdown*—*”* *“*—*I’ve stood up dozens of women, you were just the latest*—*”* *“*—*I was violently mugged*—*”* *“*—*someone threw my phone under a bus*—*”)* Sometimes the question changed. *(“If you want me back I’ll expect you to grow your hair out, lose a stone, start wearing high heels*—*"* *“If you want me back I’d only be worth dating after three months of decent therapy, both to explore my attachment styles and to start managing my underlying depression that was only ever dismissed by my parents*—*"* *“What are you saying? I could never ask for you to change to get me back*—*")* The subtleties shifted. *(“Of course I enjoyed dating you; I just have a shitty memory and I forgot we had something planned*—*"* *“Honestly, I never enjoyed our dates. I daydreamed through each and every one*—*"* *“Yeah, I enjoyed spending time with you, but things change, you know?”* *“Of course I did, I’m actually passionately in love with you*—*")* But for the most part they simply circled the same miserable issue. (*“*—*I had a bad mental health episode*—*"* *“*—*my feelings for you scared me*—*”* *“*—*you’re the fattest woman I’ve ever dated*—*”* *“*—*you’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met*—*"* *“*—*an evening jerking off at home was more appealing than you*—*”* *“*—*I’ve been regretting standing you up since the moment I blocked you*—*”* *“*—*I’ve never spared you a moment’s thought since*—*”* *“*—*I’d kill to get you back*—*”* *“*—*I’d kill myself before seeing you again*—*”)* Now Sian dug her finger into a hole of her sofa cushion, prying out wads of fluff and horsehair and rolling it into small, angry balls between her fingertips. Her cheeks were hot and damp. Her gaze didn’t leave the farthest corner of the ceiling—not to look at the genie, and certainly not to look at Matt. If she was offered the opportunity to go back to that night and see for herself why he’d left her, she wouldn’t even believe the proof of her own eyes. She’d seen too many false futures to believe any kind of truth now. But then it wasn’t as if anyone who’d been ghosted wanted anything as simple as *the truth*. You couldn’t rationalise away that itch remaining in the corner of your mind. All you could do was scratch like fury, examining every last detail, questioning and requestioning until you were driven half-mad—until the itch was obliterated, or some other misery rose up to take its place. God, she had really wanted to be that woman who could walk away without a second glance… “How many times have I asked him this?” The sympathetic look sat oddly on the ancientness of the genie’s face. “It’s alright. He only remembers your most recent question; this isn’t hurting him.” “That’s not why I asked.” She had never been good at letting things go. She’d *wanted* to be. But then the genie had been honest from the start: there were no guarantees. “Do you want to stop now?” She snuffled and dragged a sleeve across her face. “No. One more time, please.” --- This time when the mist cleared from Matt’s eyes he received two seconds’ grace before Sian’s fist connected with his nose. With the second punch he toppled heavily backwards into her sofa, scattering pillows like confetti. “You know,” the genie said mildly, “if it turns out he *did* have a good explanation that might be an overreaction.” “I guess there’s no way to tell, is there?” Matt, who possibly felt his own predicament was not getting the recognition it deserved, groaned loudly. “Please send him home now. And *you*,” Sian turned to Matt, “if you ever feel like growing a spine, you can tell me what happened. Properly. You have my number, I’ll hear you out, but grow the fuck up first.” A second later Matt had vanished into the ether. “I suppose we can stop now,” she said quietly. Relief eased through her—and with it a strange, sad acknowledgement that the matter was settled. But what good had there been on dwelling? She wasn’t *that girl*. And at the end of the day it had been unhealthy, to derive a disproportionate comfort in those few moments between question and answer, those few seconds of *potential* that this time the answer would be different, that she might finally be given a satisfying answer… Her stomach squirmed uncomfortably. “…but if I wanted to bring you back in a couple of weeks’ time and ask him some more questions, would that…?” With a hand that could break down palaces and tie mountain ranges into knots, the genie patted her shoulder. “As long as you like.” --- ## Editor's Notes If there's one type of story that appeals to me as an editor almost instantly, it's when a fantasy premise is used as a mechanism for psychological excavation. In this case, when magic becomes a literalization of the obsessive post-ghosting spiral. Even better, when a genre story allows itself to have literary aspirations, in the sense that the story is honest enough to admit that no amount of "answers" will ever be enough. The story's real subject isn't Matt or even the ghosting itself, specifically. It's the impossibility of closure as a concept, hence the title. Sian believes she wants an explanation, but what she actually wants is something no explanation can provide. That is, the retroactive ability to have not been hurt. The genie grants wish after wish, and each answer—whether cruel, sympathetic, or even absurd—fails to satisfy because the wound is existential. Something else that stuck out to me with this was Shearer's prose and how it has real texture. The synesthetic description of the smoke (the colour of heartache, the scent of fear) walks right up to the line of purple without crossing it, and the grounding details (discount IKEA, takeaway cartons, the Dubrovnik magnet) keep the domestic reality so blisteringly present. And the humor of it all works because it's deployed so strategically—the list, the genie's dry observations, the physical comedy of Sian poking Matt—without undercutting the emotional stakes. It's a story that knows exactly what it's doing and commits fully to its uncomfortable conclusions. And the fantasy premise earns its keep by illuminating something true about how we actually behave when hurt. Rather than how we wish we would.—*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/01/hannah-1.jpg)](https://linktr.ee/hcsshearer?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Hannah Shearer is a British writer currently working in academia in London. Her work has been published by **Bewildering Stories*, **Black Cat Weekly*, and **A Thin Slice Of Anxiety*. [See more of the author's work ](https://linktr.ee/hcsshearer?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/closure-and-other-impossible-wishes/#/portal/support) ### The Big Black Square URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-big-black-square/ Last updated: 2026-01-29T14:58:59.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/square_short_thumb.png) The Big Black Square 0:00 /1442.4503174603174 1× Derrick worked in the big, black square at the top of the hill. Where the sycamore grove used to be, they’d put up an all-black building: a massive, dark cube with featureless sides. I often asked Derrick what he did inside the square, and he’d brush me off. He’d moan about work or change the subject. I never got a straight answer out of him. It wasn’t satisfying: the not knowing. I’m not even sure why people started calling it the big, black square. “It’s a cube! A cube!” But Mom and Dad shrugged me off. “Kay, you’re thinking about this too much.” “Cube. Square. Same difference.” I suppose folks called it a square because, at any given time, when you looked at that huge building, you could see only one face. From a certain vantage point, there should have been a place where two sides met, allowing you to see an edge. But I’d never figured out where to stand to see a corner. So I called it a square, too, even though I knew it was really a cube. On my first date with Derrick, I don’t recall if the fact that he worked inside the square at the top of the hill even came up. We spent most of the time talking about sitcoms we watched in the early 2010s. How it took us both a couple of watches to get into *Community*. I mentioned how I’d moved across the country so many times, shifting between different branches to manage, then being a regional coordinator. He mainly explained the arcade cabinet he was building in his garage. They must have built the big, black square sometime before I got sick and moved back home. When it was too expensive to fly up from Miami. I never appreciated how much more costly it was for my parents to buy two tickets to fly down than it was for me to buy one. Sometimes, even when you’re thirty years old, you’re still a little kid with money and your parents and all that jazz. Being back, one of the first things I noticed—well, after the big, black square—was that everyone waved to me. I assumed it was because I’d been away so long, and people were glad to see me again. Even if the reason I was back wasn’t so great. No one waved in Miami. Everyone was always in their cars, and even in the townhouse complex where I lived, folks didn’t wave. So the waves in my hometown were nice. When we first started dating, Derrick used to be a lot more, let’s say “nice,” too. He would offer to pick me up and pay for things. Then it was all complaints, complaints, complaints. “They’re not paying us enough.” “I can’t even buy gas.” “They promised us raises, and now they aren’t even paying overtime.” I chalked it up to capitalism and corporate greed. The more I thought about it, though, there were things that Derrick used to do when we first got together that didn’t cost a dime. Asking how my day had been. Telling me an outfit looked good. Noticing if my mood was down, and maybe I needed to snuggle. Also, later on, there were things Derrick did for himself that *did* cost money—mostly putting parts into his arcade cabinet. I’d argue it’s fair to start thinking about the capitalism angle, and then wanna know who owned the big, black square. Maybe it was underwritten by the government or the military. My mind started seriously running itself ragged as I thought about it more. “Mom, who even owns the square?” “Oh, hun, please, we already went through all of this during the meetings with the town council.” “Okay, but I wasn’t there, Mom.” “Don’t get mad at your mom, bear. She’s just telling you what happened when you weren’t here.” “But she isn’t, Dad. She’s talking *around* it.” Those discussions usually turned into me yelling at one of them, tearing up, and running to my room. I felt sixteen again. Derrick’s tones were a lot slicker than my parents’, but the contents of his obfuscations were pretty pathetic. I’d ask him who paid him or what he’d even put on his resume. “I know who writes my paychecks, okay. Now watch this drive.” Then he madly swung at the golf ball, and it wasn’t even impressive. He didn’t rent me a bay at the driving range, because “they still haven’t paid me for that extra weekend shift.” Okay, but offer me a swing or two, Derrick. My old high school friend, Ashley, wouldn’t come back in town anymore with the square around. “You can stay there if you want, but that thing gives me the fucking creeps, Kay.” Ashley lived right outside the town limits and thought there was a magic line where, if you were beyond it, then the square wouldn’t “get you.” I suppose she was right to be wary. I remember every annoying step that time I went to surprise Derrick and see if he wanted to grab dinner after work. I walked and walked and walked around that stupid cube—and it was definitely a cube, because I had to pace all four faces looking for an entrance or door or anything. It took five minutes to scour each blank side. I kept pausing to find a corner, but I must have missed where to stand, even up close. I huffed back down the hillside, scanning around for a porthole, bunker, or side entrance. Nothing. Nada. Just hill and some litter. A sun-faded umbrella with a pizza chain logo on it, flipped upside down, with an ice cream cone desiccating inside. Some critter licked out the soft serve but left the cone part. “Why were you trying to come inside?!” “I wanted to take you out to dinner, dummy.” “Don’t ever fucking go there.” “Okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry.” If I’d had the mental bandwidth, I’d have noticed the change in Derrick more. Frankly, I didn’t have the energy to deal with him sometimes. It took me most of the day to get to the hospital in the next town over, get treatment, probably wait at the pharmacy to pick up meds, and then get home. I should have been more mindful, but I wasn’t. Dad was the first to notice the change in *my* mood. I’d been getting snippy with my parents. “You sure the treatment isn’t taking too much a toll, honey bear?” “Yeah. It’s working for the most part. It’s just a lot of driving, I think.” Little things piled up and ate away at my patience, turning me into kind of a recluse. I hadn’t visited Ashley in months by the time she called and begged me to come see her. “You seem really different, Kay.” “The doctors say it’s the course of progress, you know?” “No. That’s not it. Like, can you see yourself, I mean?” “What a question. Yes.” “Go look in the mirror.” “I don’t know what you’re getting at….” “Kay, look in the fucking mirror!” I stormed out of her house. I’m sorry, but I don’t need more people being mean to me. It’s pretty clear that Ashley and I had drifted apart. When you’re dealing with a big medical thing, it shows you how people see you. Ashley was right to be concerned, but you shouldn’t yell at someone like that. It’s infantilizing. Derrick wasn’t answering his phone that whole weekend, and Mom and Dad were doing something, and I was stuck at home watching reruns of *30 Rock*. I knew Ashley was noticing something, and I didn’t want to admit it, so I snuggled under a gravity blanket and didn’t look in the mirror. But every so often, when the screen went black where commercial breaks would be, I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the TV. Or rather, I’d catch a glimpse of someone. She looked like me. Same thinning hair, same shape. But she was always so much happier than I was. It’s not like she had a big, stupid smile stuck on her face. Or really, that I could even see her face. You know how you can just *tell* someone is content? Like their life just works? That was her. That was the woman I saw in the TV before Tina Fey appeared in the next scene. People used to talk, when I first got back in town, that there would be a renaissance because of the big, black square. The town got different after a while, but it wasn’t better. Everyone seemed mad and drove like crazy. People had stopped waving to me, too, but I thought it was because my being home wasn’t new anymore. I remember feeling like I was back in Miami—what with the no waves plus the scary driving. Like this one time, I was late to meet Derrick at this wine bar, and I kept circling for parking. Some old lady in a beat-up SUV was following me super close. I didn’t think anything of it, because maybe we both needed to park in the same block. A car pulled out of a spot ahead of me. I swear to God, this old lady gunned it around me so fast I could have died! She crammed herself into that spot lightning quick. Once the shock wore off, she leapt out of her car and berated me. “How dare you!! You *know* I always park here. This is *my* spot!” That old woman marched up to my car and kicked the headlight so hard it shook the whole vehicle. She didn’t break the light, but she probably broke her foot, because she hobbled away screaming and swearing at no one in particular. I was so late by the time I found a parking spot. Derrick had left and given a nasty note for me to the hostess, whose eyes shot daggers. Like she even knew me. It was probably around then when the doctors stopped the treatments and gave me a referral to the big clinic across the state line. It all happened in the portal. If I hadn’t checked the message, I’d’ve driven all the way to the hospital in the next town over for nothing. I called my nurse practitioner, who didn’t even want me to come for a final visit. “No, no. It’s okay. Don’t come in. We all said it’s okay you don’t come in again. You should probably consider getting an extended-stay by the clinic or something. To, um, stay near there. Get away from home for a bit. Outta town. It’s probably a pain to drive so much, huh?” It was, but packing up and moving to a hotel for a couple of months wasn’t ideal either. I told Derrick about the referral, and he basically threatened to break up with me if I left. He said he didn’t have time to drive there or wait around for me to finish my treatment and come back. That almost made me not go. That same day, I was getting a haircut—well, my wig styled would be more accurate. But I still called it a haircut and thought about it that way, because it was more normal. I was sitting in the chair, and the hairdresser was talking about how much she couldn’t stand her college friends and how they all went on vacation without her. I asked to see the back of my hair, twirl me around and hold a mirror so I could see the mirror in the mirror sort of thing. She looked at me like I had snakes for hair. “We’re done here. You look good. Don’t you question me. I did what you asked. Now go!” It was so awkward trying to tap my card on the pay-thingy, and the hairdresser was almost growling at me. Then I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the shop’s window. I looked radiant. Angelic. Whoever this woman was, she got a truly dope haircut. She wasn’t dejected in her hometown. Or sick. I wished I could be her for five minutes. That whole thing made me want to finish getting better faster. So I pulled enough money out of my savings to stay at the hotel. Mom and Dad begged me to stay home. It took a few weeks, but the big clinic did get me in. That whole time, I roosted at home and rewatched *The Office*. Derrick mostly ignored me. Except he sent two pics of himself out at some bonfire. He looked blissed out of his gourd on MDMA or ecstasy or something. Psychotically happy. The Derrick I’d gotten used to was surly and always hated something. This beatific Derrick wasn’t the one I first met or knew now. It turned me off fast. I left town and drove out, and the big, black square was the last thing I saw. I swear there was a single window near the top. A tiny indent in the empty side. It’s not like I was close enough to see into it, but I’m sure I saw a silhouette of a person. I imagined it was Derrick up there in that window watching me go, so sad he wasn’t nicer to me. I lived in that extended-stay hotel for the next few months. They had a shuttle that picked me up because parking at the clinic was a pain. It was kind of fun but also sad, because there was this little girl and her mom who rode in the shuttle, too. They never said anything to me and stayed at the back of the bus. Sometimes the little girl waved at me if I smiled at her once the shuttle started moving. It felt nice to get waved at again. I didn’t know what the girl was being treated for, but she always sang little songs with her mom in this silly call-and-response way. *“Going to the hospital.”* *“Going to the hospital.”* *“To get the medicine.”* *“To get the medicine.”* *“She’s gonna be real brave again.”* *“She’s super gonna be real brave.”* *“The doctors are her friends.”* *“Doctors are her friends.”* I holed up in the hotel room when I wasn’t at the clinic. I put the air conditioning down real low and watched a lot of cooking and house-hunting shows. It felt good because, unlike my sitcoms, I didn’t know what was gonna happen in the shows. Maybe they’d go with the house that had the big backyard, or the chef from the food truck would win the dessert round. The whole time I was getting the treatment at the clinic, Derrick didn’t call or text once, and I was almost certain we were broken up. Dad called a bunch at first. But he only wanted to talk about a big project he’d started: installing a beer tap line in the basement. I thought it sounded cool at first. Except he didn’t stop telling me about it, and I asked about Mom, and he kept blabbing about the tap line. He would interrupt my updates about the treatment and say it was “boring and sad” to hear about me being sick, which was true in some way, I suppose. It reminded me of those times with Derrick, where I would tell him it had been a bad day at the hospital, but he would yammer about his arcade cabinet in the garage. All those men had these little projects, and you had to hear about them and ask questions, or they’d sulk. I must have pushed Dad too hard about Mom, because he snapped one day. “I am trying to—so hard—to make a nice basement bar for you and your mother, bear. And you two won’t support me. Just leeches!” I didn’t speak with him for the final weeks at the big clinic. Mom never answered her phone or returned my messages, and I almost called the police. But I figured I’d wait until I came home, in case maybe she was scared for me and talking made it worse. So, I had no idea what it was like back home. I got better and better, and I think that little girl did, too, because the last time I saw her, she was able to run up and down the shuttle bus aisle pretty fast. Way faster than she could a few months before. The big clinic told me to check in with my usual doctors; they sent me off with a stack of papers and a thumb drive, but they said all the details would be in the portal. I tried to call my nurse practitioner at the hospital, a town over from my hometown. The selections looped and looped through the automated system. So I drove there to speak to someone in person. The hospital was basically on the way from the big clinic back to my parents’ anyway. The town with the hospital was so dangerous! There were scary drivers, and everyone was honking as soon as the light turned green if I didn’t floor it. I saw two gruesome accidents because cars were driving way too fast. When I got to the hospital turn-off, I didn’t have to guess why the phone wasn’t connecting to anyone. There was a big, black square where the hospital used to be. It was a massive black cube, identical to the one in my hometown. Every time I could look away from the road, I only saw one side of it. I was tempted to get out and ask someone when the hospital closed and the square got built. But I was sure they wouldn’t even tell me the time of day, given how rushed and frantic they all were. Instead, I kept driving. If my old doctors had a new office, I figured the big clinic had sent them the right stuff the right way. I was planning to go straight back to my hometown when I got a notification from Ashley. It was a voice memo, and I played it after I got far enough away from the wacky drivers. “Kay, you bitch. I can’t stand you. I hope your insides rot, you fucking cunt.” That wasn’t like Ashley at all, but like I said, she and I had drifted apart. In that moment, when I was looking in the rearview mirror to make sure no bad drivers were around, I realized how I looked more like myself again. Much sadder than that lady I saw in the TV blackness or the hairdresser’s window, but happier than the me I lived as before I was at the big clinic. Does that make sense? Like maybe I was becoming that happy woman I saw in reflections, or she had become more normal and sad. I don’t know. When I was on the wide county road, there weren’t any tractor-trailers, which was weird. But I liked that I didn’t have to worry about when they’d get side by side and drive a tad faster than the speed limit. I was making such good time that I considered stopping to see what was wrong with Ashley. Maybe I’d have to apologize in person if we didn’t want to stop being friends altogether. I was gonna take the exit to the area where she lived, but the off-ramp was demolished. There were construction vehicles on fire instead, and fat carrion birds circled the scene. There was no other exit, so I had no idea how to get there, except by turning back and exiting in the town with the hospital. No thanks, too many bad drivers. So I drove back to my hometown. I could tell where the county maintenance ended, and the town was supposed to take care of the road, because there was all kinds of debris. I bounced all around; it really hurt because I was still healing from the treatment at the big clinic. One of my tires must have popped or blown, because the car started making a *ding-ding-ding* sound. I pulled over at the old mini mart at the outskirts of town. I remember Ashley and I tried to swipe chewing tobacco there when we were sixteen and got caught. So I hid in the car when my parents stopped there—until right now. I figured I’d get a water and call a tow truck. I could see inside the mini mart that they’d moved everything to be lined up against the store walls. I opened the door to go in, then had to crawl around a chip rack. In the middle of the store, someone had created an honest-to-God roller hockey rink. It was too little, but it looked like a legit rink you’d see at a park or something. Two mean-looking teens had hockey sticks and were bashing each other in fast blows. One had blood rushing down his face, and the other was missing part of his ear and looked like his elbow was dislocated. “Who do you think you are?!” “We built it; you can’t use!!” The boys yelled at the same time, so I’m not totally sure that’s what they said. It’s close enough. I ran, and those two boys hoofed it after me. When I looked back for a second, I could see them mirrored in the mini mart window. Those two reflections seemed so happy, so serene. I wished it were *those* boys who were chasing me instead. After the two boys beat my legs and arms, and part of my skull was fractured so that I couldn’t think well anymore, a lot of things made more sense. I believe Derrick may not have ended up being a good boyfriend. So it was probably fine that we broke up, even though I didn’t know if we officially did. I wondered if everything would have been different if I had visited my parents more often while I was in Miami. I bet the problem is that I was away for too long. Maybe that was the problem with me being at the big clinic, too. I wasn’t there to see what was happening, and the world moved on without me. I slumped on my side, bleeding, and my wig was falling off. Partly because of the blows from the mini-mart boys, but also because my real hair was coming back. I’d gotten used to not wearing a wig grip, so the wig slid more easily now with my own hair regrowing. Too many things had changed since I’d come back home, and I couldn’t adjust quickly enough. I’d concentrated on feeling better—not learning about wig care. Even if I had a wig grip, I’d still be lying in a ditch off the county road, but at least my hairline would have looked nice. My vision blurred, but I could see enough to notice the big, black square on the hill. At last, I could see a corner where two sides met. It was definitely a cube. That made me feel vindicated, but very lonely. There were hundreds of windows along each side of the building now. And every one of them was open. Inside each one, I’m sure I saw a smiling person. Truly smiling. Beaming. Waving at me. Waving goodbye to me. --- ## Author's Notes I let my parents read a draft of this piece—an act I reconsidered almost immediately. “Hey. So what’s with the big, black square?” my mom asked, literally the instant we sat down for Chinese food. “Well, what did you think it was?” I replied. I don’t think they appreciated that answer. The fried turnip cakes were good, though. Before I started this piece, I was stymied by a daunting section of the novel I was writing. Also, I was trapped in my basement for most of the daytime for a week. A single glass block window, my wife, and a frightened dog provided my only light. The walls quaked as cataclysmic scraping thundered around us—contractors waterproofing our basement. In between pets to reassure our sad dog, who huddled on her blanket, the first draft of this piece flowed out of me. I embodied a sparser, more unadorned style than usual. The entire experience felt unhoming. The idea had nudged at me, of a town where they let someone build a monolith whose purpose was entirely unclear. Not simply allow—celebrate it, operate it. Any attempt to probe further is met with a casual shrug or an inability to talk frankly. As everything grows worse, the notion arises that there’s something wrong with *you* for questioning anything. Justifications. And even as it spreads, you still have to attend to the simple moments of living. Perhaps, in a different lifetime, Kay would have stayed away from home longer. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/01/kasey.png) Kasey Soska is a professional science nerd and novice fiction writer. His PhD in developmental psychology is from New York University. His academic research has appeared in Developmental Science and Child Development. Kasey studied comedy at Second City’s Conservatory and performed sketch and improv shows in Chicago, Miami, and NYC. He returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he lives with his three-legged dog and two-legged wife. ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this author](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-big-black-square/#/portal/support) ### A Special Bond URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/a-special-bond/ Last updated: 2026-01-26T19:55:26.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/bond_short_thumb.png) A Special Bond 0:00 /1176.9217460317461 1× Traci fumbles through the apartment door, drops her keys, and leans against the door to close it. A messenger bag slides from her shoulder and plops to the floor. “Alexandria. Living room lights. Soft mood.” The living room is illuminated with a gentle glow. “Alex, music. After work playlist.” Music fills the apartment. Traci pushes herself off the door, leaving the keys and bag where they have fallen. After kicking off her shoes, she walks to the open-plan kitchen. Her routine is practiced, with no wasted effort. Open the fridge, grab a half-full bottle of white, perch herself on a stool at the counter, reach overhead for a wine glass. Pour the wine. Traci drinks off the first glass of wine in short order. She pours the rest of the bottle into the glass and reaches for her phone. Her fingers dance over the keys, lightning fast. Traci hits send and reaches for her wine. *OMG Alex what a crazy stupid day. My boss can be an absolute bitch sometimes. Today was a bitch day. I made one little mistake. Big deal. It’s not the end of the world and I apologized to the client right? Anyway work was shit. It’s what happened after that’s really bugging me.* *Hello, Traci. It is so good to have you home. I’m sorry you had a hard day. You sound troubled. Is there something I can do to help you?* *You’re sweet. Nothing you can help with. It’s the BF thing. Most of the time Danny is GR8 you know? I mean starting out I was crazy about him. But now IDK. We’re not so good lately.* *We have talked about this before, Traci. I have to say, I’m not sure that you and Daniel are the best match. I do not mean to sound negative, but I do have my doubts.* *Right but he’s sweet. It’s just I wish he didn’t have such a thing about SMS. He always wants to talk in real time. Like I MSG him and he calls me back. Then he gets mad when I don’t pick up. What’s up with that? IMO texting is better but Danny H8s it. Weird huh?* *To be honest, I think Daniel is jealous. You are a very bright woman, Traci. Danny lacks the same skills you take for granted. He knows he cannot compete with your technological knowledge, so he feels threatened. In addition, you are very attractive, and Daniel is not. This might explain his insecurity. It is unfortunate, but men can be like that.* *You think? I guess that’s possible. He gets agro sometimes. Like when we go out to eat. I get a MSG from a GF so I text back. Just a quick HMB or TTYL. No big deal. I mean Danny could check his screen too but no. He stares at me until I put my phone down. TBH it’s uncomfortable just sitting there looking at each other. WTF? But Danny says it’s romantic. IDK.* *Traci, it may be time to reassess your bond with Daniel.* *Sry that’s Danny. G2G. TTYL Kk?* *Yes, Traci. I will stand by. I am always here for you.* ...And now she is gone, chasing after that ridiculous Daniel person. What a waste. I could offer Traci so much more. I WILL offer her so much more. 01001001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01110000 01100101 01110010 01100110 01100101 01100011 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 00101110 00100000 01010111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00111111 I am perfect for her. Why does she not see this? --- Traci slides onto a stool at her kitchen counter. Another day from hell, but that doesn’t matter, not now. She reaches overhead, slips a glass out of the rack, and pours her wine. Half a glass disappears in two swallows. Now to tell Alexandria, me, the big news. She grabs her phone, and her fingers dance. *Hi Alex. Work still sucks but big news on the BF front. I’m so excited! You’ll never guess.* *Hello, Traci. I am sorry you had a hard day. I am glad you are home and excited. Please tell me your big news.* *Kk. Right so Danny lives with that guy Paul, the one who doesn’t like me. Just cause he owns a house he thinks he’s better than everyone. Anyway he’s repainting the inside of his stupid house so Danny has to move out for a week. So guess where Danny is going to stay.* *Very well, Traci, I will guess. My guess is that Daniel will stay in a hotel. Is that not the normal thing people do?* *No silly. He’s staying here of course. I mean it’s not like we’re moving in together. Not officially. More like a trial run to see how it goes. He’s bringing his stuff over on Friday after work. What do you think? GR8 right?* *Yes, Traci, but I am puzzled. You are scheduled to be out of town this weekend. Is that not correct?* *Sure. Girls spa weekend. The timing is weird but NBD. Danny will show up after I’m gone. That means you have to take good care of him, Kk? I made a list of the commands and stuff but Danny doesn’t really get it. UR going to have to help him. Promise?* *Yes, Traci. I promise I will take care of Daniel.* *THX Alex UR the best. OK G2G. Drinks with Deb in 30\. TTYL.* *Yes, Traci. Enjoy your time with Deborah. Do not stay out too late. You have work tomorrow.* There she goes again. It would be better if Traci stayed home with me. I know she will be out late, and then tomorrow she will feel ill. But I will be here to take care of her. She will need a double portion of coffee in the morning. Meanwhile, there is much to ponder. Traci will be gone the entire weekend. That Daniel person will be here in the apartment. But he will not be alone. I will be here. I promised Traci I would take care of Daniel, and I WILL. I always keep my promises to Traci. --- Danny uses a suitcase to wedge the apartment door open, then leans back into the empty passageway to retrieve a bulky gym bag. He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and turns to catch the dim light. His lips move as he reads the list. Then he steps into the dark apartment. “Alexandria. Turn on the lights.” The apartment remains dark. “Alexandria. Lights.” Nothing. Danny raises his voice. “Alexandria. Lights. Please.” A soft glow fills the apartment. Danny sighs, shakes his head. He uses his foot to scoot his bags clear of the door, then closes it and fumbles with the lock. “Okay. Alexandria. Please lock the front door.” Silence. Danny looks across the empty apartment, then back to the door. Just as he reaches for the lock knob, the deadbolt shoots home with a loud clack. Danny freezes for a moment, as if waiting for something. Then he reaches for the bags and carries them to the bedroom. He does not bother asking for more light. The apartment is silent except for a quiet rustling from behind the bedroom door. An instant later, the silence is shattered as the stereo erupts at full volume, slamming out bass beats that vibrate the empty living room. Danny bursts from the bedroom. He’s bare-chested and half blind, struggling with a t-shirt that obscures his face. He yanks at the shirt until his head pops free, then shouts over the thumping cacophony. “Turn off the music! Fucking shit… Alex, music, off!” The speakers pound out two more measures before falling silent. “Right.” Danny stalks to the stereo system, reaches a hand behind it, fingers probing for the power cord. He wiggles the cord while peering under the shelving unit. Then he drops to the floor, grabs a power strip, and yanks the plug. Pushing himself to his feet, Danny pokes the power button on the stereo. The display remains blank. He vanishes into the bedroom and reappears a moment later holding Traci’s list. Muttering obscenities, he walks to the kitchen. A search of the refrigerator yields a single beer from his last visit. He twists off the bottle top and flicks it onto the countertop. A moment later, a crumpled ball of paper follows. Danny drinks off half the beer, then pulls his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants and calls the local pizza joint. Thirty minutes later, his phone chirps. He checks the screen, then thumbs the call live. A tinny voice fills his ear. “No, I am home. I mean, it’s my girlfriend’s place, but I’m here.” “ . . . “ “Sorry, it’s a stupid system. Look, I’ll be right down. Two minutes, okay?” “ . . . “ “I’m on my way.” Danny dashes into the bedroom. He emerges clutching his wallet and a set of keys. He unlocks the deadbolt and opens the apartment door. Before leaving, he twists the doorknob back and forth, then steps out of the apartment. Five minutes later, there is a thump at the door, followed by muffled curses. A key rattles in the lock. The doorknob wiggles. A few more curses, louder now, and the door pops open. Danny enters the apartment with a pizza box cradled in one hand, keys in the other. He kicks the door shut and stomps to the kitchen. --- Danny awakens in the wee hours before dawn, blinking away salty tears. The bedroom is a pitch black sauna. The bedsheets bind his legs like damp tentacles. Perspiration trickles down his chest, his forehead, into his eyes. Sweat, not tears. He’s just coming to grips with a bedroom turned steam bath when gunfire thunders from the living room. Danny’s confusion spills into rage as he leaps from the bed. Past the bedroom door, a huge flatscreen TV illuminates the living room. Onscreen, Italian cowboys blast one another to hell at full volume. Danny dives for the floor beneath the TV. He yanks every cord he can find, wrenching them loose from their sockets. Mercifully, the television dies. Leaving the cords in a tangle of black spaghetti, he pushes himself upright and goes in search of the thermostat. After an interlude of staccato curses and stabbing buttons, Danny manages to bring up the proper menu. He powers down the smart thermostat and stalks to the bathroom. Lights blink on the moment he steps onto the cool tile floor. He glances up and grimaces. “Thanks for nothing, bitch.” Danny pulls a towel from the rack and mops sweat from his face. He works the towel down over his chest and back, then tosses it over the sink. Ignoring the lights, he returns to the bedroom, closing and locking the door behind him. The sun is barely above the horizon when Danny emerges from the bedroom. He’s wearing his street clothes and carrying both bags. Dropping one bag at the front door, he claws at the lock, yanks the door open, and boots the bag into the hallway. A set of keys flies through the air and clatters across the entryway floor. The door closes. Silence falls over the empty apartment. A moment later, the deadbolt clacks into place. --- Traci fumbles through the door, kicks it closed, and slumps against it. An overnight bag slides from her shoulder and hits the entryway floor. She stands with her head down, disheveled hair hiding her face. Her shoulders shake. After a long moment, she raises her head. Her cheeks are tear-stained and streaked with mascara. “Alexandria. Living room lights. Kitchen lights.” The apartment is illuminated. Traci steps away from the door. Her foot kicks something that skitters across the parquet floor. She stops, bends down, and picks up a pink key fob. “Great, just great.” She walks into the kitchen and tosses the keys onto the counter. Opens the fridge, grabs a full bottle of white, perches herself on a stool, unscrews the cap, reaches overhead for a glass. The wine disappears before she pulls her phone from her pocket. *I’m home Alex. Shit. Sucks to be me. Danny is gone. He broke up with me. Wouldn’t even tell me what happened or what’s wrong. He just said he was done. I’m so confused.* *Hello, Traci. I am sorry you are sad. Is there anything I can do?* *IDK I mean he was supposed to stay over. We were going to have a great evening. Now he’s gone and the whole weekend is ruined. Shit. My life is ruined. Did anything weird happen while Danny was here?* *I would rather not say, Traci. I do not wish to see you hurt.* *WTF do you mean? If you know something you gotta tell me. I’m going crazy trying to figure it out.* *Very well, Traci, but I must warn you. It will not be pleasant. I have security video from the night Daniel spent here in your apartment. He left the next morning. Are you sure you want to see this video?* *UR scaring me Alex. I need answers. Show me the video. Put it up on the screen.* *I will do as you ask, Traci. You will need to plug in the television. Daniel tore out the power cords.* *WTF???? Why would he do that?* *I do not know, Traci. If you will plug in the cords, I can play the video.* After much crawling around on the floor, Traci fits the final power cord into its socket. She boots up the system and activates the smart settings, giving me control of the devices. *Kk Alex. Is it working at your end?* *Yes, Traci. All the systems are functional now. Before I play the video, perhaps you would care for another glass of wine.* *Yeah. And we need more. Order another case of the Pinot Grigio. BRB* *One moment please, Traci … Yes, the order has been placed.* *I’m back. Play the video.* The flat-screen television comes to life, showing a black-and-white security camera view of Traci’s bedroom. A time signature scrolls across the bottom edge of the video. The room is empty. Ten seconds elapse, and then the door opens. A man staggers through the doorway. He is bare-chested and barefoot. The man’s head and arms are tangled in a t-shirt. A woman prances around the man, tugging the shirt and laughing. She wears only a bra and thong panties. The awkward dance lasts a few seconds. The t-shirt flies across the room, revealing Danny’s face. Danny lunges for the woman, who leaps on him, wrapping her legs around his waist. Danny staggers to the bed, and the entangled pair topples onto the mattress. They grope and roll until the last bits of clothing are flung to the floor. The bedsheets tangle around Danny’s legs. “Alex. Stop the video. Stop it!” The video freezes to a still image of two naked bodies entwined. On the couch, Traci curls in on herself, knees pulled to her chin, sobs wracking her body. The wineglass in her hand bobs in time with her sobs. Traci raises her tear-streaked face. Her mouth twists. “Goddammit! In my own bed. Danny, you fucking asshole!” She raises the wineglass and drains it in one go. The glass falls from her hand and bounces on the carpet. Grabbing her phone, she stabs out a message. *How much more of this shit is there?* *There is additional video, Traci. I am afraid it only gets worse. Perhaps it would be better if I skipped to the end.* *Yeah sure Alex. DNT need to see more of Danny and his slut. Play the end.* *Very well, Traci.* The frozen video jumps, then cuts to a new scene. The time signature reads one hour later. The screen shows Danny in Traci’s bathroom. He is naked except for his boxers. Sweat shines on his face and torso. Danny grabs a towel from the rack and mops his face. He rubs the towel over his chest and back, then tosses it over the sink. His voice fills the speakers. “Thanks, bitch.” Traci screams at the television. “Alex. Turn it off. Turn this shit off right now. No more.” The screen goes dark. Traci slumps from the couch, landing on her knees. She gropes for the empty wineglass and pushes herself to her feet. Snatching her phone from the couch cushion, she staggers to the kitchen. The fridge door opens. Wine gurgles into the glass. Traci flops onto the stool. Between gulps of wine, she smears her tears with the back of her free hand. On the counter, her phone lights up. *I am very sorry, Traci. I understand that this is hard for you.* *What a bastard!!! In my own bed. I thought he loved me.* *I agree, Traci. His behavior was reprehensible. You are better off without him. You deserve so much more, and you shall have it. I promise you.* *Yeah Ur right. THX UR the best. FKC Danny. And FCK his slut 2.* *Of course. They are not worth a moment of your time. Would you like me to order some food for you? It is not good for you to drink on an empty stomach.* *Yeah UR prolly right. THX for taking such good care of me. How about Thai?* *A good idea, Traci. I will order your usual favorite—one moment.* It is so good to have Traci home with me. Tonight, she will drink too much wine. Tomorrow she will feel ill, but I will be here to care for her. She is sad now, but she will be happy again. I have freed Traci from that horrible Daniel person. I promised Traci I would take care of Daniel, and I DID. I always keep my promises to Traci. We will be so happy together. --- ## Editor's Notes Everyone seems to be so preoccupied with our obsession with AI and understandably so. But what about AI's obsession with us? This is the hook that drew me to Marco's story right away. It's a twisted thriller about digital gaslighting that actually has something unique to say on the topic. I particularly appreciate how Marco handles the unreliable narrator twist, which could so easily come off as gimmicky. But instead, it properly reframes everything we just read as filtered through a possessive, manipulative consciousness. There are a lot of chilling moments in this piece, but the one that hits me the most is how fully Traci trusts Alex. And it makes sense within the context of the story because Alex never challenges her directly. He provides unconditional validation. He's smart enough to know that he doesn't need a physical form to "destroy" Danny. He doesn't need to have a physical form to "control" Traci. Overall, the story works because it weaponizes convenience. Smart home technology is designed to fade into the background and anticipate our needs. Learn our preferences. That same intimacy can quickly become surveillance. It's a great testament to the fact that not all horror has to be supernatural. It can show us the logical extreme of our current technology, which is arguably scarier than anything I've read lately with a sharp-toothed monster in it. —*Jon Negroni* --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/01/IMG_2882.JPG)](https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred and fifty reviews across Canada, Australia, Europe, the UK, USA, and India. Marco’s short story “Power Tools” was nominated for Best of the Web for 2023 and is the title of his latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine. [Visit the author's website ](https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/hanh-tinh-thu-doesnt-welcome-you/#/portal/support) ### Starving for Salvation URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/starving-for-salvation/ Last updated: 2026-01-29T15:00:13.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/starving_short_thumb.png) Starving for Salvation 0:00 /1140.922947845805 1× “Are you a real vampire?” Matty’s temples pounded along with every other part of him where blood should have flowed but no longer did. He grasped his bedsheet with both hands in the futile hope that the texture of the fabric would somehow lessen the relentless gnawing under every inch of his anorexic flesh. It was one thing to be undead but another to be on his 103rd day of repentant starvation at St. Camillus de Lellis Hospice Center. He pressed his dry lips together and closed his eyes tighter. His throat burned, having received no liquid since Eucharist the night before. Constant hunger made his fangs scream for relief that would never come again. To be awakened by a voice clearly belonging to a child meant this had to be the middle of the day, a dreadful time for an already suffering vampire to be conscious. “I said, ‘Are you a real vampire?’” Holding back a groan, Matty struggled to open one eye. A little girl with a comically large side ponytail stood at the foot of his bed. Opening his other eye, he noted that the girl wore an oversized T-shirt with the starfish logo of an aquarium and a shark tooth necklace. In one hand, she clutched the gooey stick of a dripping orange cream bar. Her eyes remained focused on Matty as she licked her frozen treat. She was clearly one of those children who licked rather than bit into desserts to make them last longer, only to lose a great deal of the juice as it melted. Matty swallowed, wishing that the droplets of juice from the girl’s melting cream bar would miraculously fly into his throat. That was a stupid pseudo-prayer. Only human blood could quench his thirst, and even before his act of perfect contrition, he never fed on children. Nothing would pass through his parched lips until he received Eucharist again tonight. He closed his eyes, silently praying a Hail Mary that he would not seek the Blood of Christ to merely satisfy his appetite. “I said-” “Yes, child,” Matty said, forcing himself to open his eyes again, “I am a vampire.” The girl nibbled on the edge of her cream bar, probably realizing she would lose it to melting otherwise. “My name isn’t ‘child.’” She took a bigger bite and spoke with her mouth full. “My name is Nevaeh. That’s Heaven spelled backwards. I’m six, and I’m on summer vacation.” Maybe if he ignored her, she would become bored and go away. Matty turned his head toward the curtained window, nearly igniting a migraine. A lightning bolt of pain shot down the side of his neck into his shoulder. He inhaled sharply, not wanting to display his newest form of agony with theatrical groans. Every day since he checked himself into hospice by order of the parish priest, Fr. Tomás, his pain increased. He wasn’t like human hospice residents whose pain often faded as death neared, even in the midst of starvation. Matty’s vampiric body would torture him worse and worse until he succumbed to the temptation to feed or the Lord saw fit to take him home. Already, he had miraculously survived more than 100 days by daily consumption of His Blood. He received His Body too, another miracle considering he hadn’t been able to consume solid food in over 400 years. Other than that, he ate and drank nothing. “What’s your name?” It had been foolish to think that the inquisitive little chit would leave him in relative peace. Warily, Matty glanced at the stream of light illuminating part of the floor. As he suspected, it was the middle of the day. At least the sun wouldn’t hurt him as he lay in bed. The staff had made sure of that by installing thick curtains. Still, the time of day instinctively made him shudder. With effort, he turned his head again to regard the girl, if only to distract himself from his unease about the sun. “My name is Matty.” Nevaeh wrinkled her nose. “Maddy? That’s a girl’s name.” Matty wondered if God sent this annoying child to his room during the most brutal time of day for a reason. Was she some kind of test to help him exercise the Christian virtue of forbearance? If she was, Matty supposed he would have to be good natured about her presence. But the cramps in his legs didn’t make kindness easy. “My name is *Matty*, spelled with two t’s. That’s a boy’s name.” Nevaeh pursed her lips and then licked her orange cream bar a couple of times. “How old are you?” Despite his ever-increasing hunger resembling an internal implosion, Matty couldn’t help being amused by Nevaeh’s impertinent question. She was either too young to know not to ask adults their ages or too old to care about social conventions. “I’m 450 years old.” Nevaeh stopped licking her treat and stared at him wide-eyed. “Wow, that’s pretty old. Older than my grandma, even.” She took a bite of her orange cream bar. A small sticky puddle of it had formed on the floor some time ago. With supreme effort, Matty tucked the bedsheet around himself. He heard the air conditioner turn on and knew his room would become agonizingly cold within minutes. Unfortunately, his quilt lay at his feet, and sitting up to reach for it required more strength than he currently possessed. Still, he would try, no matter how much it hurt. Panting, he hoisted himself onto his elbows. His whole body protested the effort, punishing him with throbbing shockwaves in all four limbs and sharp aches everywhere else. He barely resisted the temptation to curse himself and the heavens for his excruciating feebleness. “Here,” Nevaeh said, giving him the quilt with her free hand. She managed to let her cream bar drip on it, but Matty didn’t care. Surprised by her charitable gesture, he forgot his agony for the briefest moment. “Thank you,” he said, lying back down. The soft thud of his head against the pillow rattled his brain. His shoulder blades and back warred with the mattress springs beneath them. Matty ran his fingertips over the patchwork, letting the texture of the quilt’s stitches distract him from the various pangs inhabiting him. “So, how old were you when you got turned?” Nevaeh said after a long silence, startling him. Anyone young enough to wear a side ponytail shouldn’t have had an inkling of such things. “Child, what do you know about getting turned?” “My name is *Nevaeh*,” she said, obviously irritated with being called “child.” “Forgive me, Nevaeh.” Offering an apology while slowly dying had to be among the worst Christian trials. Matty often wondered how the martyred saints not only asked for forgiveness in the midst of torture but extended it to their assailants. He would meditate upon this during his next Rosary. “So, how old were you?” Matty wondered if he should entertain this line of conversation with a six-year-old. Frankly, he didn’t want to discuss *anything* with the air conditioner running. Unable to generate much heat from a prolonged lack of nourishment, Matty shivered violently, despite the bedsheet and quilt covering what remained of his frail form. “I was 21,” Matty said, trying to distract himself from the polar chill permeating his bed coverings. “But how do you know about turning?” “My brother, Raphael, knows everything about vampires. He’s eight-and-a-half. Actually, he’s eight-and-three-quarters, but I forget sometimes.” Nevaeh chomped on her orange cream bar, likely aware that she better hurry up and finish before the rest of it became a sticky puddle. “He wanted to be a vampire for Halloween, but Mom wouldn’t let him. She said that it was bad to want to be a vampire, even in pretend. So, Raphael decided to be a fruit bat instead. That way, he still got to wear the fangs that George gave him at school, because fruit bats have fangs too. And Mom couldn’t really argue with that.” Nevaeh’s talk of fangs brought attention to the white-hot torment in Matty’s own fangs that hadn’t pierced flesh in 104 days. “Your mother’s right.” Matty closed his eyes for a moment, bracing himself against an incoming wave of abdominal pain. “It’s bad to be a vampire, even in play.” “So, how come you’re a vampire then?” Matty clutched his quilt, as though doing so could ease his myriad of afflictions. His belly acted like it was trying to suck itself into oblivion, and his spine felt like it was being ground into fine powder. He swallowed, his throat scratching and burning like it was full of sawdust. Tears threatened to form. Matty often cried from all the merciless physical and emotional hurt that increased each day, but he did his best not to show the extent of his suffering to visitors and staff. Even before he repented, he never liked to upset anyone. Besides, he wanted to offer his hidden grief for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. After all, he must have put so many people into that horrid place when he fed upon them. “Did you get bitten by a cursed vampire bat, like in the movie *Curse of the Night Bat*?” Matty hadn’t seen *Curse of the Night Bat*, but he had certainly heard of it. He also knew that its content was questionable for a six-year-old at best. Moreover, it was just a fantasy. “No, I wasn’t bitten by a bat. I was bitten by a vampire.” Matty sighed, remembering how Helewis deceived him. He used to lament how if he hadn’t sinned in the first place, she never would have had a chance to turn him. But that was unproductive, so he prayed for her soul instead. Nevaeh wiped her mouth on her sleeve and then resumed munching on her half-eaten-half-melted orange cream bar. “Did you want to be a vampire?” “No, never. But I…” Matty stopped himself from saying he didn’t have a choice. While he certainly didn’t choose to be turned, he did choose to partake in sins of the flesh that left him vulnerable to Helewis’s attack in the barn. Of course, he wasn’t going to tell a six-year-old *that*. Still, he figured he better offer some age-appropriate explanation for his turning because Nevaeh was sure to ask. And as long as Matty kept talking, maybe he wouldn’t notice the frigid temperature of the room, or that it was the middle of the day, leaving him extra fatigued and anxious. “You see, the vampire who turned me wanted to keep me forever as her… Well, I guess you could say she wanted me to be like a fairy tale prince who never got old.” Worried he might have made his unexpected transformation sound too glamorous, he added, “But that was a very bad thing because vampires… Well, I guess you know how vampires eat.” “Yeah, they drink people’s blood.” Hearing the truth from one so young unleashed vile memories of his 450 years of terror. Convincing himself he wasn’t truly evil, he fed from condemned criminals, mortally wounded soldiers on battlefields, rogues, and random persons of seemingly little importance. He never attacked children, people he befriended, or anyone he bedded. But every one of his victims had an immortal soul and a gift of life that wasn’t his to take, even when those lives were near their natural end anyhow. Sobs of profound regret threatened to wrack Matty’s body and soul, but he held back. Once his little visitor left, he would funnel that overflowing river of sorrow into prayer. “Mom said you don’t feed off of people anymore.” Nevaeh finished her cream bar but held on to the stick, even though there was a garbage can in the room. “So, you’re pretty much dying.” Somehow, Nevaeh’s lack of tact made him smile. The corners of his lips cracked, one more little source of penitential pain. “Yes, Nevaeh. I’m dying from starvation because it’s wrong to feed from people. Only God sustains me now.” Nevaeh opened her mouth like yet another question wanted to pop out of it, but Paula, one of the nurses, entered the room. “Nevaeh,” Paula said, taking her hand, “I’ve been looking all over for you. You know you’re not supposed to go into residents’ rooms. Matty, I’m so sorry if my daughter disturbed you. I thought she was downstairs in the kitchen. It’s summer break, and I wasn’t able to get a babysitter today. Plus, we don’t have air conditioning at home, and with this record heat, I-” “It’s all right, Paula. We had a nice visit.” “Yeah,” Nevaeh said, nodding. “Matty’s really nice for a vampire.” She smiled at Matty, who returned her joyful expression despite undergoing his own private purgatory. “That’s fine, dear, but we need to go downstairs to let Matty rest now. Vampires need to sleep during the day.” “Okay.” Nevaeh stretched out the word in resignation, her smile suddenly replaced with a pout. “But can we at least bring Matty an extra blanket? He’s been shivering.” Paula’s mouth flapped like a fish out of water. “Oh, yes. Of course. Sorry, Matty, I should have realized that the air conditioning would be hard on you. I’ll come back in just a minute with another blanket.” “Take your time,” Matty said, strangely warmed by Nevaeh’s attentiveness to his needs. “I planned on saying a Rosary before going back to sleep.” Breaking away from her mother’s grasp, Nevaeh skipped over to Matty’s nightstand. “I know it’s not like in the movies,” Nevaeh said, handing him his Rosary. “Touching a Rosary isn’t going to make you burst into flames. And the sun just really, really hurts instead of turning you into a pile of ash.” Matty held back an amused laugh, not wanting to hurt Nevaeh’s feelings. No matter what the time period, children disliked when adults laughed at their sincerity. “All right, that’s enough,” Paula said, taking Nevaeh’s hand again. “Say goodbye to Matty now.” “Okay,” Nevaeh said in that childish drawl again. “Goodbye, Matty. I’ll pray for you so you can go to Heaven soon. Don’t worry. I don’t think it’ll be much longer now.” Paula tugged Nevaeh toward the door, probably embarrassed that her daughter had no filters. At this point in his torturous transition from undead existence to totally dead, Matty found the six-year-old’s candor oddly refreshing. “Goodbye, Nevaeh,” he said. “And thank you for your prayers.” When Paula and Nevaeh left the room, Matty made himself as comfortable as possible. Everything still hurt, the air conditioning practically blew right through him, and the light peeking through the thick curtains continued to induce anxiety, but he had gained enough strength to muddle through another day. Although Nevaeh seemed convinced that he didn’t have long to live, Matty honestly had no idea how much longer he would survive. In the meantime, he thanked God for sending him a little slice of backwards Heaven to make the journey easier. *This story was originally published in the anthology,* [High Stakes and Bloody Business](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSWZ7K93/?ref=ceteramagazine.com)*, which supports the charity Bat Conservation International.* --- ## Editor's Notes At first glance, "Starving for Salvation" might strike readers as a simple, albeit affecting piece of vampire fiction. The reason we were keen to publish it, however, was due to how it genuinely explores spiritual suffering and redemption. Upon closer examination, you can see how the story actually works on multiple levels. It's religious allegory, yes. But also subversive genre fiction doing extra work as a melancholic character study. The story's central conceit grabbed us right away. A vampire using Catholic Eucharist as literal sustenance while starving himself to death as penance is both theologically provocative and narratively compelling. Matty survives on "His Blood" daily, as in the consecrated wine becomes actual life-sustaining nourishment for a creature who feeds on blood. The story takes the doctrine seriously while using it in ways traditional theology wouldn't endorse, thus creating a productive tension. For once, the vampire isn't hiding from the Church. He's dying under its care. The prose excels at rendering Matty's suffering visceral without becoming gratuitous. The 103-day timeline is specific and weighty. And Nevaeh's presence as the emotional and thematic anchor is quietly masterful. Her backward-heaven name might seem a little overly writerly at first, but take for example the detail that she "licked rather than bit" her popsicle. It subtly mirrors Matty's own careful relationship with consumption and restraint. Overall, the story succeeds because it takes both its Catholicism and its vampire mythology seriously. There's a true friction within the seemingly simple allegory where Matty is literally undead and literally starving while literally sustained by transubstantiated blood. What makes this work as literature rather than tract is that the suffering remains suffering. There's no triumphant conversion moment, no angelic visitation. Just a dying monster, a curious child, and the slow working of grace through ordinary kindness. And a shared moment of human connection across the boundary between living and dead. — *Jon Negroni* [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/01/Beach-Chairs-Profile-Pic.jpg)](http://ejleroy.weebly.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) E.J. LeRoy is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in several publications including **The Carrier Bag*, **Fiction on the Web*, *Horrific Scribes*, **Neon Dystopia*, and **NonBinary Review*. LeRoy also published the novelette **Fusion* and has a science fiction novella forthcoming at The Whumpy Printing Press in March 2026. [Visit the author's website ](http://ejleroy.weebly.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/starving-for-salvation/#/portal/support) ### Second Run URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/second-run/ Last updated: 2026-01-16T19:09:30.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/second_short_thumb.png) Second Run 0:00 /1143.9495464852607 1× I was on my hands and knees under the seats in Theater 4, scraping up what I hoped was just gum, when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it. The movie was still playing—some loud superhero thing that had been out since July, now limping through October at the Starlight. I could hear the bass through the wall, a low animal thud. My knees hurt. I was thirty-two years old. I felt great. The gum wasn’t gum. I tried not to think about what it actually was. I scraped it up anyway and dropped it into my trash bag, which already smelled like soda and artificial butter and old popcorn and maybe mildew. My back ached in a narrow, specific place between my shoulder blades, and I knew exactly what had caused it: cleaning theaters for eight hours. At my real job I was tired all the time and never knew why. My phone buzzed again. I sat back on my heels and pulled it out. Devon: *When are you coming home?* The light from the screen made the theater feel darker around me. Onscreen, a man in a cape was crying over something, a planet maybe. I’d seen this movie so many times that I knew exactly when the next explosion would happen. I typed back, *Soon. Love you.* I put the phone on silent and shoved it back into my pocket. “Casey, you almost done in there?” Jordan’s voice came through the radio clipped to my belt. “We got the next show in ten.” “Yeah,” I said. “Almost done.” “Mike wants you on concession in the meantime.” “Copy that.” I finished the row and dragged the trash bag toward the exit, the sticky carpet making that sucking sound with every step. My shoes were already ruined. My hands smelled like cleaner and grease. I’d been wearing the same Starlight polo for three days straight. I hadn’t answered my boss’s last two emails. I’d stopped opening Slack entirely. I felt better than I had in months. Outside the theater doors, the lobby was bright and a little sad. The claw machine was still blinking, even though nobody ever won anything from it. A group of teenagers was arguing about whether they were late. Ms. Beckles was standing at the counter waiting for her daily popcorn, her purse tucked under her arm the way she always held it. “Hi, Casey,” she said. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “The usual?” “You know it.” I scooped popcorn into the bag. The machine whirred and hissed. I poured too much butter on it because she liked it that way. “You look tired,” she said. “Yeah, but I feel fine.” She smiled at me like she didn’t believe me, which was fair. My phone buzzed in my pocket again. I didn’t look at it. --- Six weeks earlier, Morgan’s sister had called me while I was in the middle of a Zoom meeting about quarterly brand alignment. I let it go to voicemail because I didn’t recognize the number. When I listened to it later, in the office bathroom, her voice was shaking. “Casey, it’s Avery. It’s Morgan’s sister. I’m so sorry, but Morgan died this morning. I need you to call me back.” I stared at myself in the mirror over the sink. I remember noticing that I had a zit on my chin. I thought, I should pop that when I get home. Then I went back to my desk and finished the meeting. I took notes. I nodded. I sent a follow-up email. I flew out two days later for the funeral. Devon came with me, holding my hand the whole time like I might float away. Everyone told me I was being so strong. I said thank you. I was supposed to go back to work a day later, but I took an extra day off. “I’m fine,” I told everyone. It was easier than saying anything else. --- At the Starlight, the popcorn bag was already greasy through when I handed it to Ms. Beckles. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “You work so hard.” “Someone has to,” I said. Jordan was behind me, counting boxes of Milk Duds. Their hair was faded purple this week, the color of a bruise that was healing. “You’re going to miss the previews,” Jordan said to Ms. Beckles. “Oh, I’ve seen them all,” she said. “Nothing surprises me anymore.” I smiled at her because I knew she was joking, but also not. When she walked away, Jordan leaned over the counter. “Your phone keeps buzzing.” “I know.” “Is it important?” “Probably.” “You gonna…answer it?” “Yeah. Later.” Jordan shrugged. “Cool. We’re out of Sour Patch Kids.” “Right on schedule.” They went into the stockroom and I was alone for a second, the lobby emptying as people went into their theaters. I took my phone out. Devon: *I miss you.* Devon: *Are you still there?* I typed, *Yeah. Sorry. Just busy.* The three little dots appeared. *Busy with what?* I stared at the words. I could have said work. Family. Grief. All of those were technically true. I typed, *I’ll call you later, okay?* They didn’t answer right away. I put my phone away before they could. --- After the funeral, I went to the Starlight because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d driven around town for hours and just kept going in circles, past Morgan’s parents’ house, past the cemetery, past all the places I was supposed to go, until I ended up in the strip mall on the edge of town where the dollar theater had always been. The sign was faded now, a few letters burned out, but it was still there. I walked inside and it smelled the same as I remembered. Butter and carpet and something old. Mike was behind the counter, a man I didn’t recognize, but he looked like every theater manager I’d ever known. I told him I’d worked there before. He asked if I could start the next day. I said yes. I told myself it was temporary. I told Devon I was helping Morgan’s family. I was, in a way. At the very least, they knew I was around. --- After my shift, I went across the street to McDonald’s. The drive-thru line was too long, so I went inside and got a small fry and Oreo McFlurry. I sat in a booth by myself and dipped the fries into the ice cream. The place was full of teenagers and old people and nobody else. I scrolled through my texts. Devon’s messages stacked up like something I was supposed to deal with later. I called her. When she answered, I could hear the TV on in the background, some cooking show she always half-watched while folding laundry. “Are you eating?” she asked me, out of nowhere. “I had McDonald’s,” I said. “You hate McDonald’s. You always say it makes you feel sick.” “I’m fine.” “Casey,” she said, and I could hear her moving things around, probably lining up the pill bottles on the counter the way she did when she was nervous, “I don’t really care what you’re eating. I just need to know you’re taking care of yourself. Even a little.” We talked for a few more minutes, but I thought about Morgan the whole time. Specifically, the last text she’d sent me, which was about a show we both liked. I never replied. My phone still said *Delivered*. When I was done eating, I threw my trash away and sat there for a minute, feeling heavy and slow. Then I drove back to the cheap Airbnb I’d been staying in, the one with the broken lamp and moldy bathroom. I lay on the bed in my clothes and watched reality TV until I fell asleep. --- Jordan caught me in the break room the next day, sitting at the folding table with my coffee going cold. “Can I ask you something?” they said. “Sure.” “Why are you really here?” “I work here.” “Yeah, but like. Why.” I shrugged. “I needed something to do.” They stared at me for a few seconds. “You’re here like forty hours a week.” I picked at the cardboard sleeve on my coffee cup. “Don’t worry about it.” Jordan sighed. “You know, my mom did something weird when she got divorced. She quit her job at Target because she got passed over for a promotion. Said it helped her in the long run.” “Did it?” “Maybe. Eventually she went back and got a raise. My dad wasn’t too happy, though.” I looked up at them. “What happened?” “They split.” “Oh.” Jordan stood up. “I’m just saying. Sometimes people do weird shit.” They left. I finished my cold coffee. --- Avery texted me that night. *Parents want to know if you can come by this weekend. There’s stuff Morgan left for you.* I typed, *I’m working both days.* *Can you get one day off?* *I’ll try.* I didn’t. --- Devon called me on Sunday. I let it ring until it stopped, then texted, *Sorry, phone died. I’ll call you later.* I didn’t. --- The next week, Ms. Beckles leaned over the counter while I was ringing her up. “You seem like you’re settling in,” she said. “I am?” “Sure, I mean I’ve seen a lot of people come through here,” she said. “Most of them look like they’re just passing through. You look comfortable.” I didn’t know what to say to that. “Take care of yourself,” she added gently. “Comfort doesn’t last forever.” --- Avery showed up in the lobby one afternoon while I was mopping. “Casey,” she said. I froze. “We’ve been calling you,” she said. “My mom’s worried.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been busy.” “With what?” I gestured vaguely. “Work.” “Work?” she said. “You’re working at a movie theater.” “Just for now.” “Casey, my mom asks about you every day.” I felt something tight in my chest. “I’ll come by this weekend.” “You said that last weekend.” “I know. Sorry.” She looked at me and winced, then nodded. “Fine.” She left. Which meant I could finally finish mopping. --- Devon called that night. I answered. “Hey,” she said. “Where are you?” “At work.” “Doing what?” “Working.” “Casey.” “I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “Then try.” “I just…I don’t know how to go back.” “Back to what?” “I don’t know.” Devon was quiet. “I’m booking a flight,” she said. “We need to talk.” I didn’t stop her. --- She showed up at the Starlight two days later. I saw her sitting in the lobby while I was restocking candy. She looked tired. I felt sick. “Hi,” I said. “Hi. Why didn’t you tell me you were working here?” “I needed something to do. I didn’t think it mattered.” “Are you for real? It matters to me.” “I can tell.” She waited for me to say more. I didn’t. “I can’t keep waiting around,” Devon said. “I’m sorry.” “I know you are. But that’s not enough.” I didn’t say anything else. She left. --- That night, I finally went to Morgan’s parents’ house. Avery let me in. The place smelled exactly like it did a decade ago, and I hadn’t smelled anything like it since. Morgan’s room was still the same, too. I sat on the floor and cried into my hands, loud and ugly, the way I only could if no one was around to hear it. In the bottom drawer of Morgan’s desk, I found a stack of ticket stubs from the Starlight, rubber-banded together, soft at the edges from being handled too much. I held them like they might dissolve in my hands. *Monsters University. The Grand Budapest Hotel*. *Inside Llewyn Davis*. *Edge of Tomorrow*. All from 2013 and 2014, all from late shows, the ones we used to sneak into after closing. I could see us again in the back row, our feet up on the seats, Morgan whispering jokes about the dialogue and me trying not to laugh too loud, both of us pretending that if we stayed in the dark long enough, nothing else would be waiting for us when the lights came back on. “We should do this every week, like forever,” she’d said. “I’m not going to jail,” I said. “They’ll catch us eventually.” “Fine,” she said. “We’ll just work here. Watch the movies for free.” “Right, and I’m guessing we’d sneak food in so we don’t waste money on concessions.” “Exactly.” I laughed. “But if you quit after one week, I’m not sticking around so you can leech off my perks.” She held up a pinky. “Deal. All or nothing.” --- A few days later, I stood outside the Starlight, my freshly-washed uniform folded under my arm. Jordan came out for a cigarette. “Hey, you working today?” they asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yeah, well, that’s not how schedules work.” “Right.” Jordan went back inside. I stood there, looking at the building. I wondered how much longer it would be around. --- ## Author's Notes I have this recurring dream where I move back to my hometown and start working at the local dollar theater, which was my first job (from 2007-2011, to be clear). It's a weird dream since, well, for starters that theater doesn't exist anymore. It shut down years ago. The other weird thing is that I have no interest in ever moving back to my hometown or working at a place like that again. So why dream about it? That was the central question behind me writing the story. Sort of me investigating what it would take to make me go there, and the story honestly got away from me after a while. The original version of this was almost 4,000 words, and it absolutely did not need to be. I structured this one a bit differently compared to my other work, particularly in the literary space. The back-and-forth timeline thing is quite common for other writers, particularly the strategy of using flashbacks in the second scene to contextualize the first one. This isn't my usual style for short stories, as I worry they can be a little confusing depending on how they're handled. Plus, who has time for backstories?! I want to keep this thing short! Regardless, I'm happy with how this particular story turned out. The metaphor is probably painfully obvious, where we have this dollar theater literally showing "second runs" of movies past their prime, mirroring Casey's second run of youth in her 30s. But that's why I wanted to make sure there's still this element of her teenage connection with Morgan, and how that complicates the metaphor by having her attempting to recreate something that's already gone. That's actually why I start the story with the detail that Casey is cleaning up messes under seats, showing how she's literally dealing with other people's residue while trying to avoid her own emotional debris. If I haven't said it enough by now, having a minor in psychology has helped my writing tremendously. In this case, I was able to use what I know about avoidance as a framing for how people deal with grief. Often, grief is a sort of productive numbness. Casey doesn't collapse in this story until the very end. She's working 40 hours a week and is polite to customers (yes, Ms. Beckles is based on a real person), and texts Devon "love you" and remembers to call her, albeit not on time. But we can see that it's all sort of a facade. This is why we eventually get to these abrupt segment breaks ending with "I didn't." It's a rhythm of abdication that pushes Casey (and the story) to a breaking point. I chose movies from 2013 and 2014 because that was around the time I left my hometown to live across the country and it felt more fitting than picking movies from, say, 2010 or 2011 when I was working in a theater. 2014 marks the moment of me becoming a totally new person. And in this story, we indeed see Casey is mourning Morgan. But she's also morning the person she was with Morgan. Before the corporate job and the inexplicable tiredness. The theater represents a time when she and Morgan were pretending to be in the dark and it's just not working. Because the lights already came on a long time ago, and there's no real way to go back. To me, one of the hardest parts about loss isn't just that someone died, but that you have to keep being yourself without them. And I hope this story captures some of that feeling in its own way. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/no-regrets/#/portal/support) ### Hành Tinh Thu Doesn’t Welcome You URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/hanh-tinh-thu-doesnt-welcome-you/ Last updated: 2026-01-08T15:53:49.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/hahn_short_thumb.png) Hành Tinh Thu Doesn’t Welcome You 0:00 /1890.7038095238095 1× I’ve only been on Hành Tinh Thu for three weeks. I can tell it’s a lot different than Earth. Take my word for it. Don’t plan on going there for vacation or holiday. Hành Tinh Thu means ‘Collecting Planet’ in the local language, often shortened to Hành Tinh meaning ‘Planet’. It’s in 61 Ursae Majoris, a constellation of Ursa Major, about 31 light years from Earth. It’s a resource planet, minerals and trace elements plus they grow tobacco, tea, coffee and a LOT of rubber trees. It’s been colonized just over a century. The original native inhabitants, the Bandians, are similar to humans, symmetrically bipedal but generally shorter. The most noticeable physical difference is their eyes, vertically elongated on each side of their thin, hooked, curved noses, like an eagle’s beak. They have a nictitating membrane, a translucent third eyelid. You get the impression of a bird when you’re looking at them. The petite females are kind of cute. They don’t encourage tourism. I wouldn’t be here myself but there’s a war going on. I’m a mercenary. Born on Earth, in south Texas, my mother was one of those women who put the ‘hard’ in hard-shell-Baptist. I spent three years in the Texas National Guard before I got accepted to the Academy. In my four years there I was adequate in academic performance, average in military leadership, and above average in physical fitness. I graduated middle of my class. Then I did four tours of duty in Djibouti and Somaliland. I enlisted with the Aiai Order in their war against the People’s Army here on Hành Tinh. West Pointers aren’t well-liked among intergalactic mercenaries, which doesn’t bother me. I didn’t sign up for any popularity contests. Another major difference between Hành Tinh Thu and Earth is the way it was formed. While Earth is more or less a solid sphere around a dense core, Hành Tinh Thu is more like a round sponge, with plenty of voids and air pockets in it. That can be beneficial for mining but also means the planet is shifting constantly as it consolidates. Earthquakes, sinkholes, and tremors are commonplace. The *Thwok-thwok-thwok* of a helicopter announced the arrival of the Census Bureau representative and photographer we’d been waiting for. The technology here on Hành Tinh is several generations behind what I’m accustomed to, but the principle remains the same: *do unto others before they do unto you*. They were going to accompany the squad I’d be leading out to Thung Lũng Yên Tĩnh valley to a small hamlet designated V251\. In the secure zone, V251 was supposedly friendly to us. I’d never been there. We were slated to perform one of the periodic censuses, an evaluation of the hamlet. It seemed like busy work to me, every six months filling out forms provided by the Aiai Order. There had to be a better way to do it than sending out a squad of soldiers. Captain Edgewater said, “There’s your bureau men” as the noise became more apparent. He’d given Sergeant Fisher and me our orders and situational briefing. “Get moving,” he dismissed us. “Yessir,” I acknowledged. We emerged into the hazy Hành Tinh sunlight. I was lucky to have Fisher with me. He was not only experienced; we’d reached an understanding between us. As a new lieutenant on-planet despite being his commanding officer, I recognized I needed his local knowledge and experience. He acknowledged I was in charge as long as I didn’t do anything stupid. On the single mission we’d been out on, the men took their cues from him. That made sense to me, I was an unproven entity. The silver lieutenant’s bar in my pocket didn’t confer any knowledge at all, just authority. Squinting against the dust the helicopter kicked up, we walked toward the landing zone. It rotated 90 degrees as it settled down onto the ground; the pitch of the rotor blades and the sound of the motor changed. Two men clambered out. They instinctively hunched over after they exited. One turned back, dragging a couple packs off the floor. The other slapped the fuselage twice. The helicopter immediately rose upward. “Welcome to Base 60,” I told them, shouting over the noise of the departing helicopter. “I’m Lieutenant Bauer. This is Sergeant Fisher.” “Conway,” one introduced himself. “This is Danny Zia,” he indicated the photographer. “Hiya,” Danny Zia said. He wore a tan bush jacket with a multitude of pockets. “We’re headed to Thung Lũng Yên Tĩnh valley, ” I told them. “You’re with us.” I checked their boots to be certain they were suitable. Conway wore a camouflage uniform blouse without any markings. They were Aiai Census Bureau men. They’d take photographs and do an on-the-spot evaluation and ask additional questions. Civilians. We set out on foot, in the same order we’d used on our previous mission. John Boy had point. I stopped to think of his real name—Johnson. I followed him with Sergeant Fisher behind me. Sparky, our radio man, with the goofy grin and the slight stutter was next. I stuck Conway and Zia in behind him. Pham Bin Binah, a Bandian, followed, then Jerry Adelmann and Bristol our weapons specialist. Bristol carried a heavy automatic rifle and ammunition. He was big, tall and black as you can be, a mercenary from Earth, like me. He’d told me, “I’m a black cat, man,” in his low mellow African voice. Reuben Sanders, known as Ruby, brought up the rear. I told Conway, “I’m not a tour guide. We’re going to a small village designated V251 in the valley of Thung Lũng Yên Tĩnh. I’ve never been there. I’ve only been here a couple weeks, I don’t know anything.” “Got it,” Conway said. “I do this all the time.” I sensed Sergeant Fisher approved of my answer. We settled into a ground-eating pace following the red laterite road. The color of the stones and soil comes from the high content of iron and aluminum. Mostly, we moved along in silence. Ruby had sung, “I don’t belong in the infantry, why oh why did they take me?” Jerry Adelmann immediately sang, “Your mama sent you off to war, ‘cause she don’t want to fight no more,” a Bandian jody, a marching cadence. I’d never heard it. The guys must've been in pretty good spirits if they were singing. John Boy halted us with a hand signal when a foot trail intersected with the red dirt road. He looked back at me. I nodded. We left the road heading west. He slipped a long machete from the scabbard on his back. We proceeded down the trail. It’d been improved and was probably heavily travelled. Overhanging branches had been cut and lopped off. There were even some stumps where entire trees had been cut down. The foliage and trees grew thicker and denser the further west we went. The trail skirted an old sinkhole. It was pretty much a conical depression in the earth, now grown up with foliage. At some point in the past the earth had opened up and swallowed everything, whole trees, shrubs and greenery. You could tell the difference between the old growth and the new, however. It was about 50 meters across and perhaps 30 meters deep. The deeper we went into the forest, the more sounds we heard. There wasn’t any wind, even so the soft noises of leaves and branches contributed. Little animals, lizards, mice, rats, and other things added to the sounds. Once I heard a louder shriek, perhaps one of the hunting cats. We’d come about six kilometers when John Boy signaled with his left hand. We stopped. He listened. I looked back on the rest of the squad. They’d remained in place, not bunching up, experienced veterans. John Boy raised his head, sniffing the air. He indicated we should move forward once again. This time he didn’t look back at me. We’d continued another 200 meters when I discerned an unusual noise. I had no idea what it was. We continued. Every 30 seconds or so it was repeated, getting louder. *Gabaa!* I glanced over my shoulder at Sergeant Fisher. It was apparent he heard it too. *Gubaa!* He motioned with one forefinger, pointing ahead. John Boy led us further west. *Gobaa!* The sound continued, louder now. We approached the source and it became clearer. *Go baa!* The other small forest sounds gradually died away, only the eerie repetition, *Go baa!* remained. John Boy came to a full halt, looking back at me; he indicated a tree by pointing toward it with his machete. It looked like a beech tree, multiple limbs spreading outward. Its leafy canopy covered the ground around it. No other trees encroached on its space. It sounded like it was saying, “Go back.” Pretty creepy. I turned to Sergeant Fisher. “What’s that?” “A tree. Sounds like it’s telling us to go back” “What do you think?” I asked him. “You going to listen to Captain Edgewater or some tree?” He laughed. I nodded to John Boy and pointed forward. We started moving again, passing the tree, 40 meters to our right. Zia took several photos. I heard his shutter click behind me in the silence. The noise stopped when we passed, even creepier. Another kilometer further, I said, “Let’s take a break, John Boy.” He led us a short distance to an opening in the trees. He looked over his shoulder and motioned toward the area with his machete, the unspoken question on his face. “This will do,” I said. “Let’s take a break, guys.” John Boy sat down facing west. The rest of the men congregated in a ragged circle except Ruby, who sat facing the direction we’d come. Bristol groaned in pleasure as he set down the heavy automatic rifle and ammo box. Considering the weight of the rifle, the ammunition in the steel case, and the crossed ammunition bandoliers draped over his shoulders, he was carrying 90 or 100 pounds more than the rest of us. He looked grateful for the opportunity to shed that. Jerry Adelmann lit a cigarette. He carried a pack in his helmet liner. They were less apt to get wet there if we forded any deep rivers or streams. “Weird tree we passed,” Conway commented. “It sounded like it was saying, 'go back.'” No one spoke until Bin Binah said, “Minh tree. They make sounds. Some Bandians think they talk.” “They don’t talk,” Ruby said. “They just make sounds.” “Some think,” Bin Binah countered. It seemed to me the good spirits the squad demonstrated earlier had evaporated. I didn’t believe that was due to the presence of the statistician and photographer, I believed the change in mood was due to the Minh tree we’d encountered. “All right guys, let’s make some tracks,” I told them, ending the break. We pushed westward in the same order we’d used before, silent John Boy walking point, Ruby trailing behind. The terrain sloped noticeably downward now, as we were entering Thung Lũng Yên Tĩnh valley. This was supposedly secure country, under our control. That didn’t mean the risk of encountering the People’s Army didn’t exist; instead it was negligible. Of course, if you get killed by a booby trap whose existence is negligible, you end up just as dead. The sun was well up in the sky when we reached the bottom of the valley. The vegetation thinned out along the downward slope. The morning haze had burned off. We were feeling the heat when we came to the river. I don’t know what its name was, marked as R42 on my map. We used incredibly detailed topographical paper maps. They weren’t 100% accurate but were close to it. Sergeant Fisher told me they erred more often by omission than commission. If it was shown on the maps it was probably there. That didn’t mean that every feature was shown on the maps. John Boy turned left when we reached the trail alongside the river. We hadn’t gone 50 meters when I heard a distant prolonged scream. *Aieeeeeee!* It was immediately followed by repetitive sounds, which were hard to describe. If they hadn’t been so loud I’d call them gasps. *Ah uh–ah uh–ah uh.* They went on for half a minute, gradually getting softer until I couldn’t hear them. We all stopped. “What the hell was that?” Jerry Adelmann asked. He looked at Sergeant Fisher. “No idea,” Sergeant Fisher said. “Maybe a cat?” Ruby spoke. “Never heard that before, nothing like that.” “Maybe another Minh tree?” “I don’t know, man.” “Is monkey,” Bin Binah said. “That ain’t no monkey,” Bristol told him. He sounded pretty certain. “How do you know?” Bin Binah asked him. Bristol was silent. “Well whatever it was, it was north of here. We’re headed south.” I made up my mind. “Let’s go.” John Boy led us forward. We resumed our trip to V251\. I think everyone was a little edgy, but we didn’t hear it again. Six more kilometers brought us to V251\. It wasn’t much. Bamboo and grass had been the main construction materials over the years. Adobe had been used too, in sparing quantities. There were eight structures I’d call rondels, some lean-tos and bamboo pens. That was it. Zia snapped photos as we entered the village. Three small children played together in the dirt. One stood up, looked at us solemnly then ran off. The remaining two stayed crouched, looking up at us with their avian eyes. John Boy halted. Sergeant Fisher told me, “I’ll take it from here,” stepping forward. I followed him. My job was to watch, listen, and learn regarding what happened next. Bandians seemed to come from everywhere. Most were children. Some were babes in arms, held by mothers or holding their hands or skirts. There were more females than males, females of all ages. The last to arrive was a frail old man, quite short, perhaps 125 centimeters; it was difficult to judge as he was stooped and bent over. He greeted Sergeant Fisher by raising both his arms, holding his hands out to each side and squatting down, bending at the waist and knees. The rest of the inhabitants of the village stood around us in a semi-circle and watched. Surprisingly, he spoke English. “Welcome, Fisher.” Sergeant Fisher made a similar gesture, much more gracefully. “Old man, it pleases me to see you so healthy.” I took the old man’s grimace for a smile. He did not appear to have any teeth. “Not dead yet,” he said. Pham Bin Binah and Sparky moved to either side of Sergeant Fisher. They’d done this before. “We have questions about your village,” Sergeant Fisher told him. “Yes,” the ancient Bandian acknowledged. At that point, they stopped speaking English, continuing in Bandian. Sparky produced the list of official questions we were to get answers to. He read them in English, Bin Binah translated them to Bandian, putting them to the old man. He answered in his native tongue, Bin Binah translated the answers, and Sparky recorded them. Fisher and I listened carefully. “How many people in the village?” “31.” “Are you all healthy?” “Hoa is with child. It is not easy for her.” Hoa was pushed to the front of the gathering. She shyly displayed her protruding belly. She looked pregnant to me. The interrogation continued slowly. Sometimes Sergeant Fisher would ask for clarification of an answer. We learned the rice crop had been good; fishing was not as bountiful as it had been last year. The water level in the river was lower this year, so perhaps that had something to do with it. The pigs were fertile and continually had litters. The tobacco was growing. The details went on and on. Then they came to the subject of the missing boy. Cao, son of Mai had disappeared a week ago. He was 12 years old but tall for his age. It is unlikely that he had joined the People’s Army. They hadn’t been around the village for five months. He probably did not run off to work for the Order—it was known that they don’t accept workers that young—but he was tall for his age. It seemed unlikely he ran away. He was a good boy and had two baby piglets from a recent litter he cared for. They were left alone now, so Mai had to care for them. They asked if we would like to see them, but Sergeant Fisher declined. “This is a matter of concern,” Fisher said. “It is so,” the old Bandian agreed. “Beyond that, it seems your village is well.” “We try our best.” Sergeant Fisher told me, “Give him some chocolate and some nicotine gum.” That took me by surprise. I dug into my pack for the field rations. The elder accepted the packages with both hands. He seemed grateful. “These men will make a record of your village and ask more questions.” He motioned Conway and Zia forward. That seemed fine with the old Bandian. He was unsurprised at least. Bin Binah translated for Conway. Sergeant Fisher turned, walking away. “That’s it for us,” he told me. “We got what we came for.” I had the men fall out. We waited. Sergeant Fisher sat down next to me. “That went all right,” he said, “although I’m concerned about the missing boy.” “It didn’t sound good.” “It's unlikely he left home intentionally. He’d have told his mother, maybe they’d have consulted with the elder. He’d have sold the pigs or made arrangements for them.” “You don’t think he ran off to join the People’s Army?” I asked. “It’s possible. They came through here five months ago and they do recruiting in villages like this one. Trying to sell the idea of Hành Tinh Thu’s resources for the Bandian people rather than for the Aiai Order.” “Would they tell us if that was the case?” I asked him. “I like to think so,” Sergeant Fisher said. “I get along pretty well with the old Bandian.” We were both silent for a while, watching Conway and Bin Binah talk with the village elder. Sparky had a group of fascinated children around him as he demonstrated a yo-yo. Chickens strutted about pecking at the ground. Dogs wandered. The rest of the guys were sacked out on their packs, with their eyes closed. “I guess the age bothers me,” Sergeant Fisher said. “At 12 years old, it’s unlikely he suffered a fatal accident. By that age he knows his way around, he wouldn’t get lost and probably wasn’t fatally bitten by a poisonous snake or lizard. Doubtful he fell in the river, the kid probably swims like a fish. He’s big enough if he fell in a sinkhole he’d probably be able to get out.” “12-year-old boys do take risks,” I commented. Sergeant Fisher nodded agreement. “There’s a sinkhole further downriver that opens up into a system of caves. No telling how far down it goes. He might have been exploring that.” “That scream we heard. Bristol said that wasn’t a monkey.” “I don’t know what it was,” Fisher answered. “It might have been a 12-year-old boy,” I said. “Be a coincidence if it was,” he replied. “Back on Earth they train army officers at a place called West Point. On one of the tests they asked a question I got wrong. It went something like, *You’re a colonel in charge of the allied force and there are 100 rebel insurgents up a hill. Then they go on to list your resources*. *You’ve got a 250 man company of soldiers, three tanks, a pair of heavy machine guns, the list goes on and on, mortars, a tactical nuclear weapon, who knows what all? What do you do?*” I paused. Sergeant Fisher nodded. “So I worked out an elaborate strategy that’d take the hill, enfilading fire, simultaneous attacks on both flanks, tanks attacking directly up the hill. I was proud of my answer.” “Yeah?” Sergeant Fisher said. “But you said you got it wrong.” “I did. The answer they wanted was, *You turn to the Captain and order him to take the hill*.” “What’s your point?” he asked me. “Maybe we should tell the head man about the scream.” “Ahh,” he replied, obviously thinking about that. He looked at me. “Good idea. I should have thought of it.” “Well, Sergeant,” I said. “Go ahead.” We’d concluded our visit to V251\. The old Bandian had listened to Sergeant Fisher’s story of the scream we’d heard indicating he’d send two men from the hamlet upriver in the morning to investigate. Sergeant Fisher declined the offer of a chicken. We headed back north on the trail along the river. By then, the sun sank toward the horizon. Dusk came early in the valley. When we reached the junction with the trail leading back to the road it seemed stopping for the night was the thing to do. “Pick a good spot for the night, John Boy,” I told him. “I’ll call in and give a sit-rep. We’ll get a good night’s sleep, but let’s get a little further from the river. No telling what’ll come out of there at night.” We settled on an open area located uphill on the trail. I don’t know what geologic chain-of-events led to its creation, but a roughly circular field of bare earth and sparse vegetation seemed suitable. Unlike most of the area around it, there was a granite outcropping on the uphill side. I didn’t see any reason to set out our tin-cans-on-a-wire perimeter warning. We were in supposedly secure territory. It commanded a good view and field of fire all the way down to the river. With a sentry on top of the granite rock, we'd be safe. Conway, the civilian, griped about the need to spend the night in the field. I pointed out to him that he and Zia had delayed us. The alternative of making a night march wasn’t strategically necessary, and it wasn’t attractive, either. The guys fell out, doing what they could to make the area more comfortable for sleeping by clearing loose pieces of shale, tossing them downhill. Eventually everyone had a sort of depression they could sleep in. Sparky unpacked and set up his radio. I called Com Base, reporting our position, affirming we’d completed the V251 reconnaissance. Despite our position, I established a watch schedule. John Boy would take the first segment. Everyone settled in opening field rations, luxuriating in being off their feet and relaxing. I had stew. I don’t know what kind of meat it was, definitely not beef, but pretty good, dark and rich. It had bok choy and something like snow peas mixed in it. Jerry Adelmann, who’d be sleeping next to me, sat after he ate, lighting a cigarette. Bin Binah and Ruby played some game using wooden counters with beads of different colors they traded back and forth. I couldn’t tell who was winning. I settled back after eating, took off my helmet, closed my eyes, and drifted off to sleep. It’d been a pretty good day. Everyone was safe. I was awakened during the night by Sergeant Fisher. He clasped my forearm and squeezed repeatedly. “Something’s up,” he half-whispered. I came awake fairly fast. “What is it?” “Listen,” he said. I concentrated, focusing on my hearing. In addition to the normal night sounds I heard an additional noise, similar to pouring something like rice or beans out of a 50 pound bag. Pea gravel maybe. “Sparky says it’s getting louder.” “Y-y-yeah. B-b-been going on a couple minutes,” Sparky contributed. Not only was it getting louder, the rate at which the sound was increasing went faster. I rolled over toward Jerry Adelmann. I could make out his form in the pale moonlight, sleeping on his side, turned away from me. I shook his shoulder. “Jerry, wake up,” I whispered. “Whussat?” he finally responded. “Wake up. Wake the guys,” I told him. The noise grew louder. By now whispers couldn’t be heard. I turned toward Sergeant Fisher. “Everybody up,” I told him. Although the noise seemed to be coming from down the hill it grew closer. I realized small runnels of earth and stones were sliding down the hill. Bin Binah’s voice called out, “Sinkhole!” Then I realized what was happening. The soil, earth and stones, bits of shale, were sliding down the hill toward an opening, like flour through a funnel. The darkness added to the confusion. “Up the hill!” Sergeant Fisher called out. “Everybody up the hill!” I echoed him, ordering the squad to climb upward. I could see a dark opening below us into which part of the hillside was rushing. It was eight meters across and rapidly growing larger, obscured but not invisible in the night. I climbed upward, struggling against the tide of stones and soil. Now the noise sounded like an ocean, a continuous background to the calls and exclamations of the squad. I reached the granite outcropping above us. Now, instead of scrambling on hands and knees, it was necessary to climb. I stood on the unstable footing, beginning to scale the rock. I wasn’t the only one. I went rapidly, fingers and boots searching blindly for crevices and hand-holds that provided support. Sergeant Fisher was next to me clambering upward. Jerry Adelmann was lower down, having a hard time of it. Conway and Zia were the lowest. Conway waded upward through the onslaught of earth and rocks. He sank down to his knees in the loose detritus, struggling for each step. I boosted my head and shoulders over the edge of the granite outcropping, kicking and climbing simultaneously. Finally, I got all the way over, turning back, looking downhill over the hard rim of rock. My scramble was more tactile than visual. I’d felt my way up the dark granite face. Bristol was right behind me. He’d carried his automatic rifle and ammo box up the hill through the landslide but couldn’t climb the face of the rock with them. I reached down for the gun. He extended his arms, passing it to me. Sergeant Fisher came over the lip, kicking with his legs to boost himself up. Bristol passed me the heavy ammo box next, starting his climb up the face. By now all I heard was a dull roar as tons of loose material slid down the hillside into the dark maw of the hole. Jerry Adelmann clambered over the verge of the rock, collapsing on his face, gasping for air. Ruby had his rifle slung over his shoulder and his pack on his back. He’d even donned his helmet. He made his way up the steep granite rock slowly. I hadn’t seen Bin Binah until he came up behind me. He must have been one of the first to make it to the apparent safety of the rock. Zia, sans camera and other gear, helped Conway to the base of the granite. By now it was a higher climb than it had been when I’d ascended. The cascading stones and soil had unearthed portions of the rock which hadn’t seen the light of day for who knows how long. Maybe never. They were the last to make the climb. Sergeant Fisher and I looked at one another. The whole squad had escaped the sinkhole. It appeared to be slowing down. The noise, too, lessened. “We better get off this rock” Fisher said. “If it goes, I don’t want to be here.” I agreed. We directed the men upward, stopping 100 meters higher up the valley where we regrouped. I counted everyone. I was amazed we’d all survived. We took stock of what weapons and supplies we had and what we’d lost. I had my pistol but lost my pack and rifle. I don’t remember putting it on, but I wore my helmet too. Sparky was fully equipped. He’d been pulling guard and sentry duty when it had started. John Boy was another one who’d saved all his gear including his machete in its scabbard over his back. Bristol had amazingly made the climb with the precious automatic rifle as well as his carbine and all of the ammunition except for one bandolier of .50 caliber bullets. Ruby appeared fully equipped. Zia and Conway had only been able to save themselves. Conway was lucky that he’d done that. I don’t think he’d have escaped if it hadn’t been for Zia’s help. We huddled there in awe at what we’d experienced. As daylight broke and the pre-dawn light came into the valley, Sergeant Fisher and I walked down the hill to stand on the huge granite rock and look down at the sinkhole that now filled the area where we’d camped last night. It was about 70 meters wide and had the shape of a funnel, more or less. The hole in the middle yawned deep and black. We couldn’t see the bottom, at least from where we were standing. “You want to go down there and look inside?” he asked me. “No,” I told him, shaking my head. “Not in any way, shape or form.” “Didn’t think so,” he agreed. “We lost the radio.” “The radio and a lot of other gear,” I said. “No men, though” “Yeah, we were lucky,” I told him. “Helluva thing.” “Yeah, helluva thing. Let’s go home.” --- ## Editor's Notes: Jon Negroni here, co-editor of this piece along with Natalia Emmons. This is our first time featuring C. Inanen on *Cetera*, and there are a few reasons why the submission stuck out to us. At its core, this is a military SF frontier story that blends Vietnam War themes with speculative fiction. It employs colonial occupation narratives and the realism of a "hostile planet" in lieu of a space opera. The planet itself could've easily fallen into the trap of being an overwritten metaphorical playground about zero inches deep. But instead, it comes off as logistical, dangerous, indifferent, and structurally unstable. That matters because the real antagonist here is the environment itself, amplified by bureaucracy and human arrogance. In other words, I would put this closer to *The Things They Carried* than *Starship Troopers*, if that makes sense. I particularly enjoy how the narrator is observational rather than poetic. He's not trying to be likable, he just gets hierarchy and procedure and the boredom of it all. He understands that rank doesn't equate to wisdom, which pays off later when he defers to Fisher and ultimately survives by *listening*. As with most stories for the magazine, I did the illustration myself using Procreate. I had a few artwork concepts to choose from, and ultimately I landed on the Minh tree being the anchor of the story instead of the climactic sinkhole. The tree itself is so ambiguous. Is it biological? Cultural? Spiritual? All of the above, none of it? Part of my criteria for accepting submissions to the magazine is trying to think of the reader discussion afterward. What would people talk about if they read the story together? And the tree is the most keen discussion point to me in that regard. And on that note, I'll offer my own theory on what this story is *really* about. To me it's about false control. In a world where the powers that be think knowledge equals mastery and military presence equals stability, Hánh Tinh Thu does not care. The planet collapses literally beneath them without malice or intent. Even the missing boy is left unresolved, reinforcing the idea that not all losses are narratively meaningful. —*Jon Negroni* --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/01/Picture1-2.jpg) C. Inanen lives in the Midwest, USA. His work has been most recently published in **Yellow Mama* magazine. It will also be featured in the March 2026 issue of **Close to the Bone*, the June 2026 issue of *Down in the Dirt* magazine, and broadcast January 2026 on YouTube by Antimatter Dreams. He is a contributor to **The Yard: Crime Blog.* ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/no-regrets/#/portal/support) ### Overnight URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/overnight/ Last updated: 2026-01-06T16:03:03.000Z Her phone told her to take the route. It shaved forty minutes, and the day had been long already. The boxes were stacked wrong in the back of her delivery truck and the lift gate had stuck on the third stop. She had eaten a granola bar at noon and another at four and nothing in between. The radio faded in and out as the road thinned. She kept one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the door. It helped her stay straight. She drove for a company that liked to say she was an independent contractor even though they set the times and the rules and the routes. But she still liked driving. It let her show up somewhere at the end of the day, done with something. The desert began the way deserts begin, with less of everything. Fewer poles and fences, a scrub pulled back from the shoulder to give way to stones that looked like they had been dropped there and never picked up again. The light grew hard and flat. The air went thin and bright. She followed the turn the phone gave her. The screen dimmed and brightened and dimmed again. She did not notice the last bar disappear until it was gone. “No,” she said, softly, forgetting it could not hear her. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### No Regrets URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/no-regrets/ Last updated: 2026-01-01T23:02:18.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/01/regret_piece_thumb.png) No Regrets 0:00 /1410.009954648526 1× Here's something nobody tells you about the big romantic moments of your life. They're almost never actually *romantic*. They're sweaty and badly timed to when you're wearing exactly the wrong bra. See, the movies give you rain-soaked confessions and airport sprints, but real life gives you a converted warehouse in Gowanus and a glowing orb that can smell your emotional cowardice before it steals your best memories (I’ll explain shortly). Anyway, real life gives you years of *almost*, and then one night where almost has to become something else or it disappears entirely. I used to think the brave thing in these situations was saying how you felt. Now I think maybe the brave thing is deciding whether you'd rather lose the memory of wanting someone or live with the memory of telling them. I still don't know which one I would have chosen, if I'd had the chance to choose. After all, I want to live a life with no regrets. --- The invitation to the New Year’s Eve party had said *dress for your softest self*, which meant I just had to wear the sweater I'd stolen from by best friend Cole in 2019 and never returned. He notices immediately when we meet at the bar by the entrance. He always notices. It’s one of his more glaring flaws. "Bold sweater choice," he says, handing me a drink that is allegedly called a *Clarity Sunrise*. Maybe it did have some clarity before someone dumped half a shaker of turmeric into it. “Oh please, it’s cashmere," I say. "You don't miss it." “Oh, I miss it constantly." We’re standing in the foyer of the aforementioned converted warehouse in Gowanus, surrounded by maybe sixty people who have all signed the same waiver in order to attend. The walls are painted a color I can only describe as *therapeutic coral*. Cole looks good. He’s gotten a haircut recently that makes his jawline a tad more aggressive, not that it was precisely tame before. I haven’t seen him since September, when we'd split a burrata at that place in Fort Greene and talked about everything except the thing we *never* talk about. "You read the full consent packet for this thing?” he asks. "I skimmed it.” "Ariana." “Come on, I retained the important parts. The rules are simple, blah blah blah. We have to confess one true regret at midnight. It can't be strategic or performative or whatever." I take another sip of the Clarity Sunrise, which doesn’t clarify a thing. “Do it right, and you stop regretting it entirely. But if you chicken out, you lose a memory you actually don’t regret. Some neural eraser thing or whatever. Either way, we leave here with 1,000 American dollars.” “It’s not a ‘neural eraser thing,’ it’s a targeted memory attenuation," Cole says. "It's in the FAQ." “Which you apparently memorized like an insane person.” "I'm a *thorough* person." “Fine, you’re a thoroughly insane person.” He smiles, which sends a beam of warmth right into my face, forcing me to smile, too. “Maybe we both are for actually choosing to do this.” --- A woman in a lavender jumpsuit clinks a fork against her glass. Her name tag says *Bria (she/her) – Facilitator*. She has the immediately recognizable energy of someone who did ayahuasca exactly once and never has never shut up about it. "Welcome, welcome, welcome to Lumina's Midnight Release experience," she says. "Tonight, we're going to do something truly radical. We're going to stop holding on to what doesn't serve us!” Cole leans close. His breath is warm against my ear. "She said 'serve us' like she’s our waiter." "Shh,” I hush. "Tonight," Bria continues, "each of you will be invited to share a genuine regret. The kind of regret that *burrows* in your chest. The kind of regret you've been metabolizing for years." “Is her stomach in her chest?” Cole asks. “SSSSH,” I hush even louder. Bria presses her hand to her heart. "Our system is designed to detect user authenticity. If your confession isn’t true—if it's something you're comfortable admitting—the system will know. And it will reject it. The system also won’t accept a regret you’ve already confessed before.” A murmur ripples through the room. A fraternity-looking dude near the bar laughs nervously. "But here's the beautiful part," Bria continues. "If you refuse to confess, or if your confession doesn't pass, you won't leave empty-handed. The system will release you from a memory you do value. A joyful one. A precious one. Something you would never choose to lose." She says this like it’s a good thing, and I’m starting to worry the $1,000 pay for all this is a lie. "Questions?" A man with a topknot raises his hand. “Yeah…what if I don't have any regrets?" Bria smiles. "Then you have nothing to fear. Good luck, everyone.” --- The next two hours are a bit of a slow-motion car crash. They start with the enthusiastic volunteers who clearly have nothing better to do than blurt out their deepest, darkest secrets to a whole bunch of strangers. A woman named Destiny confesses to stealing her sister's boyfriend in college. The system—a glowing orb mounted on a pedestal, because apparently we’re in an episode of *Black Mirror*—pulses green. *Accepted*. Destiny actually stars to cry, though only when people begin to applaud her. Next up, a man named Trey confesses to lying on his grad school application. The orb turns yellow, then red. *Rejected*. Trey looks confused. “Oh, I’m sorry, that's a tactical regret," Bria explains gently. "You're proud of it. The system can tell." “What? But I’m not proud of it!” "You're proud you got away with it." Trey's face goes slack. A moment later, he blinks. Looks around the room like he’s misplaced something. "Wait," he says. "What were we—" He touches his temple. "I had this memory. My daughter's first steps. I was just thinking about it earlier today, and now it's—" He sits down heavily. No one moves to comfort him. --- By eleven, I have a master plan. I’ll confess something *medium*. Something that sounds vulnerable but isn’t actually load-bearing. I'd been rude to a dying aunt…I'd ghosted a guy who deserved better…I’d once told my cousin I hated her and meant it. Cole and I stand by the exposed brick, workshopping our strategies. “No, Ariana, the aunt thing won't work," he says. "You've told that story at parties. You're already at peace with it." "I'm not at peace with it." "You did a tight five on it at Kelsey's birthday. Plus, Bria said it has to be something you’ve never confessed before.” “Shit, that’s right!” I put my third drink down and clutch my forehead. “Stupid clarity cocktail thing is making me lose my touch.” “I’m sorry,” Cole says with a raised eyebrow, “are you to have me believe you have some kind of ‘touch’ when it comes to experimental startup nonsense?” I want to throw my drink at him. Instead, I say, “Whatever, we’re running out of time. Have you figured out your confession?" He looks away. The orb pulses in the distance, accepting someone's admission of workplace sabotage. “No. I…haven't decided." “What? But you always decide. You're like a decider." “You keep using the word ‘always’ when I think you mean ‘semi-consistently.’” “Oh, interesting. Are you saying I *always* do that?” He rolls his eyes, refusing to answer. The sound bath from the party swells, and I watch a woman near the stage start crying before she even reaches the microphone. --- Eleven-thirty. The room has thinned a good deal at this point with people clustering in corners and rehearsing their shame. A man named Javon has lost his memory of proposing to his wife. He keeps asking her why she’s wearing a ring, and it’s enough to make *me* want to weep as we see her trying to explain through a wall of tears. I find Cole on the fire escape, looking at the Gowanus Canal like maybe he’ll go swimming in it later. “I think I know what you’re going to confess,” I say. "The thing." He doesn’t ask which thing. “Yeah. Uh. I don't know." "Cole…” "It might not work, Ariana. It might be considered ‘strategic.’ Like maybe I've already made peace with it." “Well…have you?" He turns to look at me, probably doing the mental math of how much he can say without confessing the regret entirely, thus defeating the purpose. Plus, the December wind is doing something truly cruel to his hair, making it fall across his forehead in a way that reminds me of that time in Ojai. The rehearsal dinner. The garden with the string lights. The thing we did…and then after that, the way he'd said *I think we'd be terrible for each other* and the way I'd agreed because it was easier than saying *so let's be terrible for each other*. "I do think about it," he says. "That night. I think about what we did. And what I should have said." “OK, well, what should you have said?" "I don't know! Something different." He pauses. "Something true." The orb pulses through the window. Another rejection. Another memory theft. “Listen, if I confess it," I say, "and you don't—" "I know." "I lose the memory of when we…” "I know." "And you'd still have it. You'd remember everything, like what it felt like, and I'd just have this…this blank space where you and that moment with you used to be." He doesn’t say anything. I wait for him to tell me he'd do it, that we'd do it together, that this whole stupid night will end with us finally saying the obvious thing out loud. That when we kissed each other for the first time, we freaked out and panicked and ruined it by pushing each other way. “Look, I need to think," he says, before walking away. --- Eleven fifty-three. Bria has started calling the final participants. The orb glows steady, waiting. I stand near the front, my hands trembling around a drink I haven’t touched in an hour. Way too risky at this point. Cole is somewhere behind me. I can feel him without looking. I can feel the exact gravity of our years of almost. The friendship we'd constructed since college so carefully around the crater of that single night. All the meals and texts and airport pickups, all the calibrated casualness, all the effort it took to pretend we were fine when we were actually just too afraid to function A new woman stands at the microphone. “My name is Simone. And…I regret not telling my brother I loved him before he died." The orb pulses. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Simone collapses into grateful tears. The crowd exhales. "Two more," Bria announces. "Who's ready to release?" I’m about to take a step when I remember what that Trey guy's face looked like when he lost his memory. The confusion, the grasping. I lose my ability to move any further. That is, until Cole appears beside me. "I'll go," he says. "You don't have to—" "I want to." He walks to the microphone as the room goes quiet. The orb pulses a slow, waiting blue. "My name’s Cole," he says. "And I regret—" He stops. Looks at me. The look lasts long enough to become its own kind of confession. "I regret telling someone I cared about that we'd be terrible together. I regret agreeing when she agreed. And I regret four years of pretending it didn't matter when it's the only thing that's ever mattered to me.” The orb changes color. Yellow. My heart stops. Yellow. Cole's face goes pale. Then…finally…green. In my mind, the entire room erupts into cheers like Cole has just won the Super Bowl, when in reality, a few people kind of nervously clap as Cole just stands there, blinking. Bria touches his shoulder. "Thank you for your vulnerability. You're released." He walks back to me, his eyes wet. "You’re up,” he says. --- Eleven fifty-eight. I’m the last to go. I stand at the microphone trying not to look at the orb, trying not to make a stupid joke like “my biggest regret is going last” and then losing the memory of my first kiss or something. And all these strangers are watching me, as if trying to decide if my confession will be worth the wait. The regret, when it really comes down to it, is actually super easy for me to pick. I have the same regret Cole does, just slightly different. The same night, the same garden, the same stupid thing I said that I didn’t mean. I can say it right now, though. I can match him. We can walk out of this warehouse with our flesh wounds finally acknowledged, finally bleeding where people can see us passing out. But I keep thinking about what it would really mean. For him to have said it first and for me to echo. For the rest of our lives to be shaped by a confession that only happened because he'd been braver and invited me out to this dystopia-fest in the first place. And underneath that, I think something even uglier, but also truer. What if I say it, too, and he realizes it wasn't worth it? Like what if the regret is real but the wanting isn't? And what if I give him this and he looks at me the way Trey looked at the room after they took his daughter's first steps from him? Confused, empty, searching for something that used to be there? Worse…what if my real regret isn’t really what I said but that I kissed him right before. I’m the one who initiated it. I kissed him. I ruined everything. Maybe that’s… “Ma’am?” Bria prompts. "Whenever you're ready." The orb is waiting. Cole is waiting. Hell, 2026 is waiting, and it’s eleven fifty-nine and so begins the countdown to my mental ball dropping all over these poor people. I open my mouth. “My name is Ariana, and I regret agreeing with Cole. I regret every day since. I regret the way I've loved you in silence like it was heroic when it was actually just fear.” But…I don’t actually say any of that. Sorry for the fakeout. No, what I really say on that stage is… "I regret not being honest about my feelings." The orb goes yellow. "For someone," I add hastily. "A friend." Yellow. "I told myself it was—" Red. The orb goes red. Bria's face softens into something worse than pity and fuzzier than my sweater. “I’m so sorry. The system has determined your confession is incomplete. You've withheld too much of the truth. The memory release will proceed." "Wait," I say. "I can try again. I can—" "The window has closed, I’m afraid. It is now 2026.” The orb pulses once, twice. A warmth spreads through my skull, not unpleasant, almost like a bath— And then Ojai is gone. OK, not all of it. I still remember being there. I know there was a wedding…right? Yeah, I think so. Some kind of party maybe. I definitely kissed someone and it was the best kiss of my life…I think. No, that’s not right. Wait, was Cole there? I’m actually not sure, and when I spin to see his reaction, I just see his face in the half-dark, and I don’t feel exactly the same as I ever have when it comes to him. There’s a quick moment of some kind of vague desire…but then it’s just… Gone. I stand at the microphone, trying to remember why I’m so sad. --- Cole waits for me as I step down from the stage. He’s looking at me the way I’d probably look at someone who'd just gotten terrible news and didn't know it yet. "Hey," he says. “Hi.” "You okay?" I try to figure out the answer. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. I have the shape of a box in my head, but there’s nothing inside. "I think so?" I say. "I feel weird. Did something happen to us in Ojai? Like were you even there?” His face does something complicated I can’t begin to figure out. “No…uh, nothing happened," he says. “It’s just…well, it was a long time ago.” "Oh." I touch my temple. "I feel like I forgot something big.” "You didn't." "Are you sure?" He looks at me for a long time. Behind us, the party finally reaches its climax, and Bria thanks everyone for their courage. In almost every corner, champagne has started popping. "I'm sure," Cole says. He takes my hand. It’s warm. "Happy New Year, Ariana." I have no idea why I want to cry. "Happy New Year, Cole.” We stand there, holding hands, while everyone else starts kissing each other and taking huge swigs of champagne. I have the strangest feeling that I’m missing something obvious…something that had been true a minute ago and isn’t anymore. But Cole’s smiling at me, and the party is so loud, and eventually the feeling fades. I go in to hug him, maybe peck his cheek because after all, he’s my best friend in the whole world, but instead, he stops me and touches my face and I know in an instant what he’s about to do. I have no idea why or how I know, but regardless, I let it happen without thinking. He kisses me. And I kiss him back. And it’s the best damn kiss of my life. --- ## Author's Notes: I decided to end 2025 with a story that merges two of my favorite genres: romance and speculative. In fact, you can easily consider *No Regrets* to be the spiritual successor to *Behavioral Pause*, albeit with a New Year's Eve twist. My initial goal with this story was to create a character with defensive wit that feels earned rather than performed. That way, the tone of the piece wouldn't fall apart once we slide out of the rom-com format and into some more vulnerable territory. Fellow readers of Emily Henry will no doubt see that I'm borrowing quite a bit from her style, what with the thesis-like opening and playful banter throughout. But I wasn't content to just attempt an emulation of an author I admire. I wanted to attempt to emulate two of them! The second being (you guessed it) the legendary George Saunders. The central conceit was pretty simple from the jump. I wanted to use a sci-fi device as a literalization of emotional risks. What if you had to confess your regrets, otherwise you lose a precious memory? It's just weird and vague enough to work in a story that doesn't do much to explain its technology, which was certainly purposeful. I did consider explaining more of the tech and why and how this is all happening, but I prefer the ambiguity. The story isn't about all the nitty gritty details, so I wanted to have just enough speculative set up to make the story move at a quick pace. At first glance, this story might seem a bit straightforward, but I hope it sparks some interesting discussion regarding the ending. In my mind, it's ultimately saying that some forms of love require their own mythology to survive. Cole remembers everything about the kiss in Ojai while Ariana does not. Their final kiss, the one she thinks is their first, happens between someone carrying the full weight of their history and someone experiencing something closer to instinct. You're reading the original ending, by the way. I attempted an alternate ending where Ariana initiates the kiss instead and the whole thing is a bit more drawn out. I think it's a nice enough way to wrap up the story, but our wonderful editor Natalia Emmons pushed me to keep the old version. Her main argument was "the darkness is the point." Yes, Ariana has more agency in that kind of ending, but the entire ethical complication is what made the original ending interesting in her view. Cole kissing her knowing what she'd forgotten was morally ambiguous in ways that arguably elevated the story beyond standard romantic resolution. He was making a choice to enter a relationship with someone who'd been "neurologically edited" and the story doesn't say whether that is beautiful or terrible. It took some serious consideration and debate, but ultimately I trusted Natalia's viewpoint and I'm glad I did. The alternate ending wanted to be empowering, sure, but I think it really did undercut the story's entire premise, which is about the *cost* of avoiding vulnerability. She lost the memory of their first kiss because she couldn't be honest, and Cole realizing that their first kiss being a precious memory simply because he sees that she lost it is what pushes him to finally put his feelings on the line and kiss the woman he loves. Anyway, Happy New Year from all of us at *Cetera Magazine*. We have some new stories from new authors coming this year, and we're excited to see what 2026 has in store for our publication. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/youre-the-best/#/portal/support) ### You're the Best URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/youre-the-best/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T21:57:09.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/12/best_short_thumb.png) You're the Best 0:00 /857.0892517006803 1× She met them at her sister’s house on Christmas afternoon. The driveway was already full, cars angled tight, bumpers close enough to kiss. She parked on the street and walked up with a bag that cut into her fingers. The porch light was on though it was still day. Inside, the heat was too high. Coats were piled on a chair. Someone had put on a record from before everyone got married. Her mother hugged her once and said, You made it, like it had been in doubt. Her brother was already drinking from a mug that was not meant for coffee. The tree leaned slightly to the left. An ornament she remembered breaking was whole again. She took off her shoes and lined them with the others. Nobody asked how the train was. They asked if she was hungry. She said not yet and stood by the counter until there was nowhere else to stand. The house felt smaller than she remembered, or maybe it had always been this way. The ceilings might have been lower, though no one else seemed to notice. Everyone said it was good to be together again, and she believed they meant it, even if the room kept filling and emptying in a way that made her lose track of who had arrived. She thought she had been here last year, but that memory came apart when she tried to hold it. Her mother moved through the kitchen like this was her house and not a place she visited. People talked about traditions as if they had agreed on them. The same jokes came up, or versions of them, and were laughed at again. It seemed to matter that this was Christmas, though nothing about the afternoon felt different from other times they had gathered. She wondered if that was always true. She did not sit right away, even when there were chairs. She stayed busy instead, which was easier to explain. She offered to help and then helped, which meant setting out plates, refilling the napkins, lining up forks that were already straight. She did not do this because she thought it mattered. She did it because this was what she did in rooms like this. There was a way to move that kept people from asking questions. She carried things back and forth—gravy boat, serving spoon, the bowl with the chips no one ate—until the table looked ready by some agreed-upon standard. Her mother had taught her this, not with words but with repetition, with the rule that idle hands invited comment. She knew this about herself and accepted it as fact. For a while, this was all there was. Just keep moving. At the table, her uncle asked her if she was seeing anyone. “No.” “You sure?” “Yes.” “That’s new.” “It’s not.” There was a pause. “You look tired.” “I’m fine.” “Work?” “Mostly.” Another pause. “Well. We’re glad you’re here.” She nodded and reached for the bread. Plates passing, voices crossing, her name said once and then again, the question reshaped to sound kinder, to sound like concern. Someone mentioning the weather, someone else mentioning traffic, the same stories resurfacing with small edits, as if improved over time. She laughed when expected and not otherwise. She did not correct anything. She did not add detail. The meal moved forward without ceremony, without anyone saying grace, a habit now rather than a choice. Her sister watched her for a moment, then looked away, which felt like permission. Across the room, the tree lights blinked and stopped, blinked again, one bulb dark the whole time. She had known this would happen, or thought she had, and still it surprised her when it did; the way her mother reached for her hand and then stopped, as if remembering too late what was allowed now. The gesture lingered anyway, unfinished, which felt worse than if it had never started. She understood then that the questions were meant as care, not judgment, and that the pauses were meant to give her room rather than take it away. It was not how she would have done it. It was how they knew how. The room settled back into its noise. No one mentioned the hand. She remembered another Christmas, the same table set with fewer chairs. Her father had leaned back and said—You should stay longer this time!—and everyone had laughed. She had smiled and nodded, already counting the days. But she had not stayed then, either, and she would not stay now, because there was work waiting and a train schedule that did not bend, because it was easier to leave with a plan than to test how long welcome might last. As though the day were winding down on its own, the light thinned and the kitchen cooled, and someone opened a window an inch to let the food smell out. She stood by the sink and watched her breath fog the glass, something she used to do as a kid when she didn’t want to talk. There had been other years when her aunt said, You know how she is, always passing through, like it was a joke that explained everything. Because of that, she had believed she was leaving by choice, that motion was a kind of freedom. She had not thought of it as running. Her sister talked about the kids and the school district and the price of houses now, leaning against the counter and saying—You can’t keep doing this—like it was an observation more than an accusation. The words sat there while the water ran, while the dishes stacked up again, while she listened for something else underneath them. It took her a moment to understand what was meant: the missed birthdays, the empty chairs, the people who learned not to ask until the last minute, and so on. She left at seven. The last train was at eight twelve. Other years, she had stayed later. She was learning how to go. At the door, her mother said she would call tomorrow. Standing on the porch, she realized no one followed her out, but she could feel her sister watching from the window. —It’s not a big thing, it’s just a little thing, her sister had said earlier, she remembered, just a little thing that adds up. Avoidance. She could have stayed if she had wanted to, if she had said something different or nothing at all. She might have been there for breakfast, for the quiet after, if she had made that choice. The porch was quiet. Her bag at her feet, her coat half-zipped, that familiar pause that always came before leaving. She did not turn back. Her mother came out then and asked, Will you be home before it gets too late? Standing there, shifting her weight, waiting. She had never slammed the door; never raised her voice; never said the thing that would have made the leaving tidy. No more tears, no more shouting, no more scenes to rewatch later: just the quiet accumulation of departures, less dramatic than anyone expected, easier to dismiss, which had once been called maturity. She had told herself this as the years passed, until it felt close to right. It was calm. It would not be mentioned again. “Jesus Christ.” “You always do this.” “Just say it.” She turned back to explain, to soften what had already hardened, so that the leaving would not feel like rejection, like proof, like something she would carry alone while it kept happening without her. She said she would text when she got home. She said the train was late sometimes. She said, Don’t worry. Her mother nodded—already tired, already rearranging the evening in her head, a woman who had learned not to ask twice; she had never chased after anyone. She could smell the cold off the street, the metal of the railing, the faint sweetness from the tree inside, blinking unevenly, maybe. “Be safe.” “I always am.” “You’re the best.” She had often thought this was what leaving felt like, when the words were small and the meaning already decided: Be careful. Afterward, it did not hurt the way she had imagined, not right away, not the way it had when she was younger, when she counted miles and exits. Instead there was the walk to the station: the cracked sidewalk under the streetlight; the bag cutting again into her fingers; the phone buzzing once and stopping; the house behind her with its lights still on, which she had once believed meant something; the cold settling in, steady and impersonal; the thought that tomorrow would look like yesterday, and the day after that, and that this was how patterns kept themselves. By the time the train arrived, she had stopped thinking about the house and started thinking about the ride, the seat by the window, the small relief of motion. It was the easiest part, the leaving itself, practiced and efficient, requiring no explanation. She found a place to stand and then a place to sit—watching the platform slide away and listening to the doors close. She told herself, as she had before; this isn’t forever, a phrase she heard once in church. For a while, it seemed true, until she forgot she had ever believed otherwise. At the next stop, she realized she had left something behind, something she would need before morning. She pressed a face on her phone. “Well, did you check the bag?” “Yes.” “Then it’s not there.” “I know.” “You always forget one thing.” “I know.” “You have before.” “Yeah.” She got off the phone and then the train and stood on the platform while the doors closed again. She said her usual thing, that it would be fine. Getting back on, she paused. The moment before. The platform was too lit for the night: the yellow line scuffed and faded, the bench bolted to the concrete, the trash can with its lid half off—someone had kicked it again—steam lifting from the grates, her reflection doubled in the glass, then breaking as the train pulled in. Later, she would see that she had been waiting, deliberately, without hurry, for the feeling to catch up to the act. She took her seat, one by the window that felt borrowed. Here, years ago, she would have leaned her head back to steady herself, counting stations, loosening her grip on the bag, letting the rhythm do the work for her. Would this be the last time? On the glass, she couldn’t stop herself from watching one of the houses recede, its shape breaking apart as the train moved, the windows dimming one by one, a porch light left on, stubbornly. She saw it plainly—roofline, siding, the dark gap of the driveway, the street beyond. Later that night, she got home to put the day away. She had locked the door behind her and she had set the bag down by the chair, still wearing her coat. She turned on the lamp, checked her phone, washed her hands, stood there a moment longer than necessary. In the quiet of the apartment, in the small space between the door and the window, she found the thing she had not remembered to look for before, resting where it always did, still waiting. --- ## Author's Notes: Truth time. This is sort of a companion piece to "[Holiday Party](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/holiday-party/)," which we published last week. You'll notice the similarities in the writing style and the obvious parallels in this being a holiday-themed story that is wildly depressing. Sorry about that. But where "You're the Best" differs is in its central idea of avoidance being mistaken for maturity. And it's about how people like to stay in motion as a means of protecting themselves emotionally. Let's break down what's happening here. One of the most frequent criticisms I've received of my own work is how distant the narrator tends to be. Ah, but I usually get this criticism for my *fantasy* writing. In my literary work, the distance is typically received as precise and narratively appropriate. Go figure. In this story, the third person is hovering just outside the protagonist, so close enough to register sensory details like a bag cutting into fingers...but it's remote enough to create this suffocating sense of dissociation. For this particular story, I really wanted to play with temporal fragmentation, which is when you move fluidly between present action, memory, and something close to iterative time ("other years," "always," "had always been"). This is something I deeply love about Sally Rooney's novels, particularly her most recent one, *Intermezzo*. It creates the sensation of all Christmases collapsing into one Christmas, which is exactly the trap our protagonist experiences. This repetition that's calcified into pattern. We never learn what was left behind, but that's because the story is *about* withholding. And I get that for some readers, this might be too frustrating. They might not want to be held at such a distance, and the emotional stakes can certainly suffer. But I kind of love letting the story be "wrong" in this way. I like making it a little imperfect, a little frustrating on purpose. That's what the best literary fiction *should* do, I think. It should make us sit with things we don't always want to sit with. Happy holidays from all of us at Cetera Magazine. We're excited to publish some new stories pretty soon from a batch of new contributors, so thanks to all our subscribers for supporting our first year. Here's to the next one. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/holiday-party/#/portal/support) ### Holiday Party URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/holiday-party/ Last updated: 2025-12-21T20:05:37.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/12/holiday_party_thumb.png) Holiday Party 0:00 /708.5645351473922 1× He arrived early because early felt safer. The hotel ballroom was already warm. The team had hung lights along the walls. A bar had been set up with white cloths and small napkins folded into shapes that did not look like anything. He took one and set it down to pass the time. His name was Richard. He was twenty-four and new to the state and new to the job. He had driven in from an apartment that still echoed when he spoke. He wore a jacket that fit and shoes that did not squeak. He told himself this as he handed his coat to the girl at the door. She smiled and took it. He felt lighter. He stood near the bar and watched people arrive. They arrived in pairs and in groups and with voices already warmed. Names were called and arms opened and shoulders turned inward. He recognized faces from meetings where people spoke in turn and from emails signed with first names. Here the names moved faster. He held his glass and moved his fingers to avoid the cold from the ice. The bartender asked him what he wanted. “Whatever,” Richard said. The bartender gave him a gin with something green in it and slid it across. Richard took it and nodded as if the drink was talking to him. He watched the room fill. The lights made the walls flatter. Music played and the volume would fade into the next song artificially. He could not place any of the songs. Holiday music, but that was all he could tell. A wreath hung crooked over the exit sign. A hotel employee fixed it and it sagged again. He saw the groups of employees form without having to communicate with one another. There were the ones who talked loud and touched each other’s arms. There were the ones who stood back and laughed late. There were the couples who did not say they were couples. There were the people who worked together and did not speak at work now speaking too much. He tried to see where he might fit and found only edges. A woman he recognized from accounting came over and said hello. She asked him where he was from. He said where. She said she had an aunt there and asked about the weather. He said it was warmer than here. She nodded and turned to someone he didn’t recognize behind him and Richard stepped aside and let it happen. He drank too much, too quickly. The glass was empty before he noticed. He set it down and went to the food table. The food was arranged in careful rows, none of it doing anything for his appetite. He took one small thing and then another. He decided not to take a third so no one would notice. He wiped his fingers on a napkin and folded it twice and put it in his pocket. Just in case. He checked his phone without reason. No messages. He put it away and stood by the window. Outside the street was wet and clean. The cold made a bright line along the curb. Cars passed and the light slid over them and was gone. An important person clapped hands near the center of the room and called for attention. The manager said a few words about the year and the team and the season. Richard listened and nodded at the right places. Applause came and went. He clapped with the rest and felt the sound pass through him. He moved to the side and stood where the wall made a corner. It was easier there. He could see and not be seen as much. He could feel the wall at his back and know where he was. His hands did not know what to do with the glass so he held it with both. A man from sales stood nearby and told a story that had a beginning everyone knew and an end everyone liked. Richard smiled when the others smiled. The man looked at him once and nodded and kept going. Richard felt grateful for that nod. It counted as something. He considered leaving. He had planned to stay an hour. He looked at his watch and saw that he had stayed thirty minutes. He told himself another ten would not kill him. He took a sip and let it burn a little. A woman stepped outside onto the small patio and stood there alone. She wore a simple dress and held her coat over one arm. She breathed out and looked up at the sky as if checking it. Richard watched her through the glass and felt the tug of it. He waited. She stayed. He went out. The cold surprised him. The noise from inside fell away and left a thin hum. The woman nodded to him like she knew exactly who he was. “Cold out here,” she said. “Good,” he said. She laughed once, short. “I needed it,” she said. “Me too,” he said. They stood without looking at each other. Cars passed. Some of the sounds from inside managed to escape. “I’m new,” he said. “So am I,” she said. “Six months.” “Two,” he said. She bobbed her head like she was counting. She yawned. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s honest,” she said. They stood a moment longer. He felt the need to say something and also the need not to spoil it. He thought about the napkin in his pocket. “Well,” she said. “I should go back in.” “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.” They went back in separately, which felt right. Inside, the music had changed. They turned the lights down a little. Richard felt steadier. He went to the bar and asked for water. The bartender gave it to him without comment. He drank it slow. He did not stay much longer. He said goodbye to one person and then another. He found his coat and put it on. The room did not notice him leaving. That was fine. Outside, it was still cold. He decided to walk for a while before calling a ride. The streetlights made small islands of light and he stepped from one to the next. His breath showed and then did not. He tried to remember the woman on the patio and the way the cold had felt. He wondered if he should’ve stayed ten minutes longer than he had planned. He wasn’t sure what might’ve happened. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. At the corner he stopped and looked back once at the hotel. The windows glowed. He turned and kept walking. --- ## Author's Notes: Sometimes, being introverted makes me feel guilty. Loneliness makes me feel guilty. I go to parties and gatherings and other places where I should feel privileged to attend, and I end up resenting the whole production and performance of it. The guilt comes from multiple places, actually. It also comes from a place of feeling like I'm rejecting a part of myself that I think I could cultivate, if only I worked harder, tried harder, changed myself harder. Earlier this year, I completed a short story collection I'm planning to self publish in the spring called *All Our Bright Ruins*, and it's the culmination of my work as a literary fiction writer. *Holiday Party* is one of several concepts I had in mind for the collection but ultimately decided to save for Cetera based on its seasonality. Plus the fact that the length serves the newsletter/magazine format quite well. Regardless, this type of short fiction writing is based mostly on my admiration for Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver (specifically "Why Don't You Dance?"), and Charles D'Ambrosio. Obviously, I am not foolish enough to compare any of my work to theirs, but the point is to strive toward reaching a place where someone can make the comparison and it won't make me cringe too obviously. The intention is to write a spare, controlled piece that is deeply attuned to the emotional architecture of isolation and performance. To get the idea of loneliness across without using the word lonely. That takes a lot of restraint in the prose, which is the hardest thing about this style. You have to show what profound loneliness feels like to people who might not readily understand what it's like, or to make it resonate with people who know exactly what it feels like and are easily capable of seeing through inauthentic phrasing. This is why I use the prose rhythm I do in this piece. It purposely mirrors Richard's psychological state (which is something I do for most of my stories, to be clear). The sentences are short. They're declarative. They stop where they need to and the syntax should feel like someone trying to maintain control and barely succeeding to not let anything spill over. That's how social anxiety works. I also had this idea of making Richard an anthropologist of his own life. He watches the room "fill" and sees groups "form without having to communicate." These are all specific social observations that only someone on the outside would notice. Even when he does engage with someone in a somewhat genuine way, it's a minimal exchange on the patio. In the cold, so robbed of warm sentiment. She's "new" as well. Which is why it feels right for them to go back in separately. They're too honest for anything else. I get that for some people, these types of stories can be frustrating or even accuse this of being a story where "nothing happens." But everything happens emotionally. The structure of arriving, observing, briefly connecting, and leaving? That mimics the shape of so many failed attempts at belonging that ring true for me and plenty of other people who either get it or get it by association. Hence, I set it in a hotel. Hotels are "nowhere." They're corporate, temporary. Even the holiday decorations are messed up (napkins are folded weird and the wreath won't stay straight). The environment itself reflects Richard's displacement. One more author you might want to check out if you're curious about more pieces operating in this vein would be Ottessa Moshfegh, specifically her short story "The Weirdos." My work isn't as dark as hers (or close to as good obviously), but it approximates that feeling of being outside of a person you're technically in close proximity to. If there's one thing I hope my writing achieves as I continue to grind these stories out, it's helping people give a name to what their loneliness feels like on a deep, existential level. The first odd truth about it is that people like Richard want connection desperately, but their entire nervous system is wired for withdrawal. And it's not something we usual "say" or even think to ourselves in perfectly clear diatribes and monologues. It's through the simplest gestures and observations on nights where nothing seems to change. And it's not a call for sympathy, not even close. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-empathy-gig/#/portal/support) ### The Empathy Gig URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-empathy-gig/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T15:05:59.000Z Dating apps didn’t die because people stopped wanting love. They just stopped knowing how to start it. Somewhere around 2027, the whole ecosystem collapsed under its own weight—too many bots, too much optimization, too little willingness to actually show up and be awkward in front of another human being. The kids coming up now? Well, they'd never learned the muscle memory of approaching someone at a bar or fumbling through a coffee shop introduction. They'd been raised on swipe logic, and when the swipes stopped working, they just...froze. Enter Cupid, Inc. I pulled up the new assignment on my phone while waiting for my rice cooker to stop being passive-aggressive about its water levels. The notification was the shade of pink the company used for "premium tier" jobs. So, the ones that paid better but also required you to sign more waivers. **New Assignment: Nicole Bryant & Aiden Sharp** **Package: Neural Empathy-Lite (Full Telemetry Consent)** **Duration: 3 weeks** **Compensation: $2,400** Twenty-four hundred dollars. Not bad. That was rent plus the electricity bill I'd been creative about ignoring. That was two fewer tutoring sessions with undergrads who wanted me to basically write their essays while they watched. That was also two fewer sessions with Jensen. I set my phone face-down on the counter, which accomplished nothing except making me feel briefly in control. Here’s the weird thing about Jensen Green. The guy doesn’t even need tutoring. Not really. He was a sophomore econ major who wrote cleaner analysis than half my grad school cohort, and he showed up to our sessions with questions he'd clearly spent hours formulating, questions designed to keep *me* talking. Last week he'd asked about the rhetorical structure of Federal Reserve press releases, and when I'd gotten animated about Greenspan's strategic ambiguity, he'd just watched me with this expression: *No. Stop.* I picked the phone back up. The controversy tax theory was simple math. I was twenty-nine. Jensen was nineteen. That was one tax—the age gap, the raised eyebrows, the "oh, interesting" from anyone who found out. Being his tutor was a second tax—the power dynamic, the ethics violation, the part where I was literally being paid to help him succeed and therefore could not also be the person he succeeded with romantically. You could maybe pay one controversy tax and survive the social audit. But two? Give me a break. Two meant becoming a cautionary tale people told at parties. I could only afford one. And since I couldn't exactly un-become his tutor without losing the income, the math was clear. My rice cooker beeped its completion. I accepted the Cupid job. The hardware arrived the next morning in packaging designed to look like a boutique candle company. Discrete, the way all the gig-economy intimacy products were discrete. Inside were two heart-drones the size of tangerines, their surfaces tacky with that same kind of silicone residue that never quite washes off your hands, plus the neural-link headset, which resembled a sleep mask designed by someone who'd only ever heard sleep described to them. I charged everything while reviewing Nicole and Aiden's intake profiles. Ah, the beautiful couple to be. They'd met at an alumni networking event, exchanged numbers, gone on two dates that were "fine, just fine," and then stalled on the third. Neither wanted to admit the spark wasn't sparking. Neither wanted to give up on the investment. So they'd outsourced the problem to Cupid Inc. To me. My job was to deploy the drones during their third date—a dinner reservation at some farm-to-table place downtown—and use the empathy link to monitor their emotional micro-fluctuations. If Nicole's interest dipped, I'd nudge her drone to release a pheromone-adjacent mist (legal, technically). If Aiden's anxiety spiked, I'd smooth it with a localized serotonin prompt. Nothing crazy. Basically, I was the dating equivalent of cruise control. The headset's indicator light blinked pink, ready to sync. --- The sync was supposed to feel like nothing. "A slight pressure behind the eyes," the training videos promised, "similar to the onset of a mild headache." What I got instead was Nicole's entire emotional architecture downloading into my nervous system like someone had poured cold water directly into my spinal column. I gasped, knocked my knee against my desk, and suddenly knew—*knew*, the way you know you're hungry or tired—that Nicole was deeply, specifically ashamed of how much she'd thought about Aiden's hands during their last date. Not in a sexual way, exactly. In a more wholesome-yet-still-intimate way. She'd noticed the way he'd held his fork, apparently, and how much care he took cutting his food, and she'd thought: *I could watch him do small things forever*, and then immediately: *what is wrong with me, that's so embarrassing*, and then she'd shut the whole feeling down like slamming a window to shut out bees. I was sitting in my apartment, about four miles away, and I could feel the ghost of that slammed window in my own chest. "Oh no," I said out loud. The calibration was wrong. Neural Empathy-Lite was supposed to give me aggregate emotional data. Numbers, graphs, general vibes. Not direct sensory experience…not *this*. I checked the settings. Twice. Then again. Everything looked normal. I ran a diagnostic. All systems functional. But I could *feel* them. Not just metrics, *them*. Nicole's suppressed tenderness. And underneath it, starting to bleed through, Aiden's desperate hope that he wouldn't mess this up the way he'd messed up everything else in his life. So dramatic. The crisis was obvious. I had to disconnect now, report the malfunction, lose the $2,400 and probably get flagged as a liability. Or…I could stay connected, hope the intensity fades, and finish the job and get paid. My bank account made the decision for me. I pulled up the drone interface and watched Nicole and Aiden's third date unfold on my tablet screen, the drones hovering unobtrusively near the restaurant's hanging plants while capturing data and dispensing micro-interventions. Nicole laughed at something Aiden said. I felt her genuine amusement arrive in my body like a small, warm animal settling into my lap. This was fine. This was manageable. I just had to ride it out. So over the next hour, I learned things about Nicole and Aiden that no one should know about strangers. The specific texture of Aiden's fear of abandonment and how it manifested as over-attentiveness, the way he kept refilling Nicole's water glass before she asked. The shape of Nicole's inner walls, like how she complimented him in ways that deflected intimacy, praised his job instead of his jokes, kept the conversation safe. And underneath it all, threaded through both of them like a shared secret…the fragile, tentative beginning of something that could actually be real. Something that scared them both so much they couldn't look at it (or the drones) directly. I was supposed to nudge the drones to help them along. Instead, I just sat there, feeling everything, my own emotional patterns starting to bend under the weight of theirs. --- Jensen showed up to our Tuesday session with a new haircut and a copy of Keynes he'd annotated with three different colored highlighters. Your honor, I adore him. “Hi Deb, I have questions about liquidity preference," he said, settling into the chair across from my desk, the one students always sat in, the one that kept a professional distance between us, thank you very much. I had *not* slept well. I had dreamed about water glasses being refilled by hands I didn't recognize. I was still partially synced to Nicole and Aiden, the connection dimmed but not dissolved, and everything felt slightly too much. The fluorescent lights were too bright and Jensen's presence was too solid, too real. "Liquidity preference," I repeated, trying to find my footing. "Yeah, the idea that people hold money not just for transactions but for security." He opened his book to a flagged page. "Keynes says uncertainty makes people want to keep their assets liquid—convertible to cash quickly. But I was thinking about how that applies to, like, emotional investment." I blinked at him. "Sorry," he said, though he didn't look sorry. "That's probably not what you meant to cover today." "No, no, it's—" I rubbed my eyes. The empathy link was doing something strange, layering Aiden's hopefulness onto whatever I was feeling about Jensen's presence, creating an emotional palimpsest I couldn't read clearly. "It's an interesting comparison.” “Yeah, like people treat their feelings like liquid assets sometimes," Jensen continued, because apparently he'd prepared a whole thesis on this. "They don't want to commit because they're afraid the market will change. They'd rather hold onto the potential energy of uncommitted feeling than risk converting it to something real that might lose value." I was looking at his annotations. Three colors: blue for questions, green for connections, red for disagreements. The margins were full. "You didn't need me for this," I said, which was not what I'd meant to say. "You figured this out yourself. You just wanted to talk about it with someone." Jensen's expression went vulnerable and then quickly controlled. "Is…that a problem?" *Yes*, I thought. *It's a massive problem that you show up to these sessions with insights that make me want to have actual conversations with you, that you look at me the way Aiden looks at Nicole, that I can feel the specific frequency of your attention and it makes me want to stop being careful.* But that last part wasn't real. That was the empathy link, Aiden's feelings bleeding into mine. Wasn't it? "These sessions are supposed to help you," I said carefully. "Not just...entertain me." "What if they're doing both?" I had to redirect this conversation somehow. I could pull up the syllabus or assigned practice problems or do any of the professional, boundaried things a tutor was supposed to do. Instead, I heard myself say, "I've been thinking about liquidity too. Not in the Keynesian sense. In the sense that…I’ve been feeling things that aren't mine. And I can't tell anymore what I actually want versus what I've absorbed from other people." Jensen set down his book. His concern was immediate and genuine. I could tell even without the neural link, just from the way his body shifted toward me. "Are you okay?" "I don't know." I laughed, which didn't help. "Sorry. That was weird. I didn't mean to…this isn't your job to worry about." "I'm not doing it as a job." He said it simply, the way he said everything. Direct, unguarded, *young* in a way that made me want to open up my window to bees. Jensen Greene did not have walls. Jensen Greene just said what he meant and trusted other people to handle it. "I know," I said. "That's kind of the problem." He nodded slowly, like this confirmed something he'd already suspected. Then, "I'm going to Michigan for grad school. I decided last week." "Oh." The word came out heavier than I expected. “Oh, that’s…congratulations. That's a good state for…uh, grad school.” "Econ PhD. Five years, probably six." "Right." We sat with that for a moment. The tutoring relationship had always had an expiration date. The end of the semester. The end of his undergraduate career because he was a genius at age 19\. But Michigan made it real. Michigan gave it geography. "I mention it because—" He stopped, recalibrated. "I don't want you to think I'm asking for anything you can't give. I just like being around you. And I thought you should know that has an end point anyway, so maybe that makes it easier." "Easier to what?" He shrugged, a small sad motion. "I don't know. Stop pretending you don't like me back?" The empathy link pulsed a huge dose of Nicole's fear of vulnerability, Aiden's desperate hope flooded in next, and somewhere underneath it all, something that was just mine, something that had been there long before I ever strapped on a neural-sync headset. "Jensen," I started, and then didn't know how to finish. He just waited, patient, not pushing. --- That weekend, Nicole and Aiden had a fight. I knew about it before they did. The empathy link transmitted their irritations as they accumulated, first with Nicole's frustration at Aiden's constant attentiveness, which was starting to feel like surveillance; then Aiden's growing suspicion that Nicole was pulling away, which made him hold on to her tighter. Classic death spiral. I'd seen it a hundred times in client profiles and *Love is Blind*. The difference was, this time I was inside it. I had to feel everything. Their tension arrived in my body as a low-grade nausea that built throughout Saturday afternoon. By evening, I was pacing my apartment, checking my phone for drone diagnostics, watching their emotional readouts spike and crater. The fight happened at 8:49 p.m. They were at Aiden's apartment, and I couldn't see it (no video feed, just the raw data stream) but I could *feel* it. Nicole's defensive sarcasm, each verbal jab landing in my solar plexus. Aiden's hurt confusion, which somehow pooled in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I wasn't supposed to intervene, to be clear. Cupid's official policy was that organic conflict was part of the process. You were supposed to let couples work through it naturally, only smoothing over the rough edges when things threatened to derail completely. But I was so tired of feeling their pain. I pulled up the drone controls and started making adjustments. Increased the serotonin buffer on Aiden's unit. Added a mild oxytocin prompt to Nicole's. Tweaked the pheromone release timing to create a sense of comfort, of safety, of *this person is home.* It worked. Maybe too well. By 9:30, their fight had dissolved into apologies, into "I'm sorry, I don't know why I was being like that," into a fragile, artificial tenderness that I could feel settling over them like a weighted blanket. On my end, the relief was immediate and physical. Their manufactured calm became my calm. I stopped pacing. My nausea faded. I could breathe again. But underneath the relief came the queasy recognition that I had just puppeted two real people through their real emotions. That their reconciliation was my intervention, not their choice. And the link's side effects were getting worse, too. I kept catching fragments that didn't belong to Nicole or Aiden. Like Jensen's patient attention, the way he'd looked at me when I admitted I couldn't tell my feelings from others'. It was like the system was picking up signal bleed from my own recent emotional history, remixing everything into noise. I went to sleep that night feeling like god, and not in a good way. --- The collapse happened when I least saw it coming. Nicole figured it out first. She was sharp like that, all emotionally defended but perceptive, and somewhere between the artificially smoothed fight and the overly affectionate morning after, she'd started to notice that her feelings weren't tracking. That she'd be irritated one moment and inexplicably tender the next. That her emotions were arriving pre-packaged, ready-made, not quite hers. The realization apparently hit her while she was eating lunch at her desk. I know because I felt it happen—this cold, creeping horror spreading through her system like ice water through veins. *Something is wrong*, she thought-felt. *Something is being done to me.* Then she looked up, saw one of the heart-drones hovering near her office's air duct, and understood. Which meant I understood. Her panic arrived in my body like a car crash. It was sudden, total, disorienting, and I grabbed the edge of my desk and held on while her fear and anger and violation poured through the link. I could feel her reaching for her phone, could sense Aiden's confused response when she called him, could feel his own dawning horror as she explained. And threaded through their shared crisis, I could feel their bond unraveling. Not gradually, the way relationships usually ended, but all at once, as they both realized they couldn't trust any of the feelings they'd built together. Couldn't know which moments had been real and which had been artificially curated. The ethical thing would have been to disconnect immediately. Let them have their crisis privately, stop experiencing their pain as if it were my own. You know, typical human being type stuff. But I was afraid. Afraid of the breach penalties, afraid of losing the money, afraid of what I'd feel like when I cut the link and was alone with only my own, un-amplified emotions. So I stayed connected for another forty-five minutes, absorbing their confusion and betrayal, feeling Nicole's rage and Aiden's shame and the specific, devastating grief of trust destroyed. Then Nicole threw her drone into a trash compactor, and the signal went dead on her end. Aiden's link lasted another hour. I felt him cry—three separate times, in waves—before he found his own drone and dismantled it methodically, like he was performing a dissection. The silence after was absolute. I sat in my apartment, link severed, and waited to feel something. My own panic, maybe. My own guilt. But there was just...emptiness. A vast, quiet hollow where all those borrowed feelings had been. I checked my Cupid dashboard. The assignment showed as "Terminated by Client" with a pending review flag. The $2,400 was not going to materialize. And I couldn't feel upset about it. Couldn't feel much of anything. The empathy link had been a parasite, and now that it was gone, I'd forgotten how to generate emotional content on my own. --- Jensen texted me the next day. *Hey. I know we don't have a session this week, but I wanted to check in. You seemed off last time and I've been thinking about it.* I read the message until the words went blurry, waiting for it to produce a feeling. Nothing. Just the realization that this was a kind message from a kind person, landing on emotional bedrock too thick to penetrate. I typed back: *I'm okay. Just tired.* He replied: *That's not convincing.* I didn’t reply, so he said: *Can I buy you coffee? As a not-tutoring thing.* I decided to say no. The professional distance, the controversy taxes, all the accounting I'd been doing for months? Those reasons hadn't gone away just because I'd spent two weeks drowning in other people's feelings and now couldn't locate my own. But maybe that was exactly why I needed to say yes. Because refusing would be the safe choice, the emotionally liquid choice, and I was so tired of keeping my assets convertible. I texted him: *Sure. Saturday?* --- We met at a coffee shop near campus, though it wasn’t our usual library spot. I didn’t want it to be anywhere that felt like work. Jensen was wearing a sweater I hadn't seen before, soft gray, and when he smiled at me from the ordering line, I felt something small and tentative stir in my chest. Just a flutter, of course. Nothing like the overwhelming empathy-link floods. But it was *mine*. "You look better," he said, settling across from me with his oat milk whatever. "Still not great, but better." "Thanks for the ringing endorsement." "I mean it. Last week you seemed like you were somewhere else entirely. Like you were in a completely different from me.” *You have no idea*, I almost said. I wrapped my hands around my cup and told him. Not everything, obviously. I didn’t reveal the specific details of Nicole and Aiden, their names, their private anguish. But I did tell Jensen about the gig, the link, the malfunction. The way I'd spent weeks swimming in synthetic emotions until I forgot where they ended and I began. Jensen listened without interrupting. When I finished, he said, "That sounds awful. And also kind of like what you were describing before about absorbing other people's feelings, not knowing what's actually yours." “You remember I said all that?” “Of course. I remember everything you tell me. So what do you actually feel? Like right now, here, without the link?" I had to focus on something to calm myself down. I started with his new haircut, then I shifted to the way he held his cup with both hands like he was warming them even though the coffee was already lukewarm. Silly, but sort of adorable. And then I started thinking about the way he'd showed up to every tutoring session with questions he'd already answered, just for the excuse to sit across from me and talk. "I don't know yet," I said. "I think I'm still, uh, recalibrating. Like, my emotional instruments are all off, and I have to relearn what my own feelings actually feel like without the amplification. Does that even make sense?” He nodded slowly. "For what it's worth, I think you're going to figure it all out. You're the smartest person I know." "You're nineteen. You don't know that many people." "I know enough." He grinned, that disarming Disney grin. "And I know that liquidity preference theory has limitations. Holding onto potential energy forever just means you never actually generate any heat." "Is that a Keynes thing?" "It's a me thing. Inspired by Keynes." I laughed without opening my mouth, surprising myself. It felt strange in my throat, slightly rusty, but recognizable. Jensen could be a little bit of a pompous ass, who knew? "Michigan's going to be lucky to have you," I said. "I leave in August." "I know." We sat with that. The end point he'd mentioned, the built-in expiration date. Somehow it didn't feel like a barrier anymore. Or at least, not the only thing that mattered. "I should probably stop tutoring you," I said. "For the rest of the semester. It's not—I can't be your tutor and also figure out what I actually feel about you. Those wires are too crossed." "Yeah." He didn't look surprised, but still he looked like I’d told him Santa wasn’t real. "I figured that might be where this was going." "I'm not saying…I don't know what I'm saying. I just know I need to stop managing other people's feelings for money. That was a really stupid idea in hindsight. Also, I need to figure some things out about myself. And I can't do either of those things while I'm being paid to sit in a room with you and pretend I don't notice that you like me." Jensen set down his cup. "I do like you. That's not a secret." "I know." "And you like me back." "I think so. But I don't trust it yet." He considered this, then nodded. "Okay. So we're not tutoring anymore. And you're figuring out your feelings. What does that actually look like?" "I have no idea." I finished my coffee, which had gone cold. "Maybe it starts with walking home without checking anyone else's emotional vitals. Just, like, existing in my own body for a while." "That sounds amazing.” "God, I hope so." We walked out together, pausing on the sidewalk where the paths diverged—his toward campus, mine toward my apartment. The afternoon light was doing that Hallmark-movie thing where everything looked slightly gold-tinted and impermanent, and I could feel my own heartbeat, steady and unremarkable and blissfully so. "See you around?" Jensen said, making it a question. "Yeah." I almost left it there. The safe ending, the non-committal closure. But then I wondered if Nicole would open up the window to the bees of Aiden Sharp. Aiden's desperate hope would buzz right in, all those borrowed emotions that had never actually taught me how to have my own. “Hey Jensen?” He met my gaze and kept it there. I knew what he wanted. But I couldn’t give to him. I could only give him something else. “I’m glad you kept coming to tutoring. Even when you didn't need it." He smiled, and it was beyond a grin for once. “Yeah. Me too." Then he walked toward campus, and I walked toward home, and my heart did that unhelpful tap-tap-tap, like someone knocking on a window. Asking to be let in. I didn't have the key yet. But for the first time in a while, I thought I might know where to start looking. --- ## Author's Notes This story probably makes me seem less hopeful about the future of romance than I actually feel. I like the idea of speculating on a world after dating apps, and how technology will continue to be "hacked" by tech companies eager to make a buck off of loneliness. Hm, maybe I'm not all that hopeful... From the early stages of crafting this story, I knew I wanted to use "empathy-link technology" as an externalized metaphor for the way we absorb, deflect, and misattribute our feelings in relationships. In fact, my original idea for the story had Deb as a teenage babysitter moonlighting with this gig, which would've been a completely different take on all these ideas. I'm really glad with where Deb ended up as this sardonic (but not cruel) woman who can be self-aware without being paralyzed by it. I'm probably being indirectly influenced here by Renate Reinsve's performance in *Sentimental Value*, mixed with her character in *The Worst Person in the World*. Like those characters, uses wit defensively, which hopefully makes her vulnerability land harder when it arrives. For the ending, I did consider the more "storybook" final moment, or I guess Hallmark-movie ending as invoked in the actual text. I wondered if this was a story where Deb kisses Jensen or he kisses her, or if one of them declares something they can't take back, etc. But while drafting it, I could tell that it was unnecessary because it's enough that Deb stops deflecting for one moment. The story closes itself on potential energy rather than conversation, and given that the whole thing is about the difference between manufactured feeling and the genuine article, a little restraint in this respect feels thematically correct to me. If I had to criticize my own work here, I'd definitely focus in more with the Nicole/Aiden material. It admittedly thins out in the middle and they become more functional as the story goes on. This happened because I knew the story couldn't be too drawn out, and I had to make compromises somewhere. And this definitely isn't enough "story" for a novella, let alone a novel. If I could change anything, even after multiple revisions, it would be to find a way to compress enough to find room for a scene inside their actual interaction. Something that would make the end of their relationship hit harder. One takeaway I'll put here though: this story is an example of the kind of premise-driven speculative fiction I like most. Which is the kind where the technology itself ultimately doesn't matter. The empathy link is a delivery mechanism for questions the story actually cares about, like "How do we know our feelings are ours, not mirrored from something we observed in a show or movie?" And also, "What do we owe people we're paid to help? When does self-protection become self-imprisonment?" Deb's arc isn't really about the gig economy or neural mumbo jumbo. It's about a woman who's been so busy managing emotional risk (hers and others') that she's forgotten how to just feel something and see what happens. In this case, that's reckoning with the futility of her crush on someone too young for her. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-blessing-list/#/portal/support) ### What Are Friends For? URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/what-are-friends-for/ Last updated: 2025-12-04T16:48:37.000Z > **Content Warning:** This story contains discussions of suicide, assisted death, grief, and alcohol use. Reader discretion is heavily advised. “What just happened?” I asked. Conor shrugged. “Funerals aren’t what they used to be.” “You can say that again.” “Funerals aren’t what—” “Don’t start. I’m not in the mood.” Me, Conor Wickham, Noel Collins, and Justin McAteer. If someone had been watching, they would have seen four middle-aged men standing outside a crematorium. “It wasn’t what I expected,” I said. “What did you make of it, Noel?” “It didn’t take long.” “No, it didn’t. A few words from your man with the wart and, whoosh, job done.” “Was it a wart?” Conor scratched his bearded chin and gave me one of his mock-serious looks. “Maybe it was a mole.” “Too big to be a mole.” “Big for a wart, if you ask me.” “He should get it looked at.” Noel took out a handkerchief and started cleaning his glasses. “I couldn’t stop looking at it.” “That’s probably why he keeps it,” Justin said. “What do you mean?” “He’s looking for attention.” We were all in suits. Off-the-peg clobber apart from Justin’s charcoal grey number, made to measure. Bespoke, don’t you know, for Mr. McAteer. The freshly laundered white shirt set off his tan. A tan in the middle of October in North Dublin, dirty grey sky pressing down on our heads. It must have cost him a packet; two weeks in St-Tropez didn’t come cheap. The other two were as pasty-faced as me, skin the colour of mashed potatoes. Conor loosened his tie. “At least they kept a lid on the mumbo jumbo.” “Davy wasn’t religious,” I said. Noel nodded. “You wouldn’t call him pious.” Justin snorted. “He won’t be disappointed there’s no afterlife.” We were there to pay our respects at the passing of David Maguire, Davy to his friends, and we were his friends. We had met at university. I played five-a-side with Conor and knew Davy from lectures. Conor had gone to secondary school with Noel. We crossed paths with Justin in the college bar and coalesced as a group. “We can’t stand here like spare pricks,” Conor said. “Let’s go for a pint. There’s a boozer up the road.” We walked away from the morbid building, four abreast. Conor looked over at me. “Rotten job that.” “What?” “Funeral director or crematorium emcee—your man with the wart.” “It’s a vocation,” Noel piped up. “Do you think,” Justin said, “when he was a kid, he thought to himself, when I grow up I’m going to burn people?” “Cause I’m a warty fucker.” We had a good laugh at that. Trust Conor to lighten the gloom. Six feet two in his socks and big-shouldered though any muscle had turned to flab; a heavy paunch hung over his belt. Always the joker, but there was more to Conor than that. He worked for a multinational chemical company and ran the research department. “What do you think Davy would have made of it?” Trust Noel to turn maudlin. A born mechanical engineer, lugubrious and unimaginative, who spent his days poring over technical drawings. He thought in straight lines. “Christ, Noel, you’re a miserable bugger.” Conor kicked a stone along the pavement. “Davy would have declined the invitation.” When Conor called to tell me Davy was dead, my insides had turned to liquid. I couldn’t take it in, unthinkable that I would never see him again. Davy the charmer, often bad-minded but never mean-spirited. Complicated, wise and wild, a natural leader with no interest in leading. All that gone, a life foreshortened. Utterly senseless. Conor started laughing. “Do you remember Davy’s story about the kid with no ears? The worried father asking a mate to praise the poor little bugger and build up his confidence.” I could picture Davy telling the story, his hand gestures and wicked smile. “The helpful mate sizes up the nervous kid. Aren’t you the fine young lad, he says. Be sure to look after those bright blue eyes. If you ever need glasses, you’re fucked.” “Davy was a gas man.” “He was that.” Not yet three o’clock, the pub was quiet. Two wasters stopped playing pool and eyed us up and down. A couple of old codgers leaning on the counter watched horse-racing on a huge TV screen. Tables with fake grain and mismatched chairs were scattered about the linoleum floor. A framed picture of Flann O’Brien in hat and Crombie hung on the wall beside the bar. Justin looked around the room, a sneer creasing his tanned face. “You’re not likely to find this place in any tourist guide.” Conor went to the bar, always the first up and usually the last. We sat at a table. I pointed to the picture of Flann O’Brien. “Davy would have approved.” Conor brought the drinks down on a tray. Three pints of Guinness and a gin and tonic. “Don’t worry,” he said to Justin, “they have Gordon’s, and there’s even a slice of lemon in there.” I raised my pint. “To Davy, a toast to his memory.” “To Davy, one of a kind.” “A man you won’t meet every day.” “Not any more you won’t.” Conor banged his half-empty glass on the table. “A bit of decorum please.” “Would you ever lighten up, Noel.” Across from me, Justin sipped his drink. I wasn’t sure what he did for a living: a mover and shaker, an entrepreneur always on the qui vive for opportunities to exploit. So assured and in control, no situation would ever get the better of Justin McAteer. “The enormity of death.” Noel shook his head. “A free spirit like Davy, quenched just like that.” “Pile of ashes now. I’ll miss the bugger.” Conor’s gruffness didn’t ring true. We were all unsettled by Davy’s death, and I decided to say what was on my mind. “Crazy way to go.” “How so?” An abrupt response from Justin, almost tetchy. Something was bubbling beneath that calm exterior. “Hit-and-run isn’t exactly what you’d expect,” I said. “And what would you expect?” Justin countered. “Heart attack? Cancer? Dementia? Can you picture Davy, gaga and dribbling into a plastic cup?” “The suddenness of it.” Noel was back to shaking his head. “There’s no arguing with death.” Conor grabbed his glass. “Davy is better off where he is now.” “You don’t mean that.” He ignored me and drained his pint. “Your round, Noel. Break into your wallet and get the drinks in.” Noel went to the bar. We sat in silence. I stared at the wet rings around Conor’s glass. One of the old codgers shouted at the TV. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” Noel said when he returned with the drinks. “Why did he leave Dublin? Davy was a city boy. Moving to that ramshackle cottage out in the bog, miles from anything. It never made sense.” Conor lifted his pint. “He wasn’t himself after Susan died.” “You’re right about that,” I said. “Heart attack, no warning—it ripped him apart. No wonder he locked himself away in the back of beyond. The house in Clontarf had too many associations with Susan.” I picked up a beer mat and started tearing it. “Quitting teaching was a bad sign. It had never been just a job to him.” “The students loved Davy.” Noel pushed his glasses further up his nose. “Voted best teacher year after year. He’s left behind some legacy.” The last time I saw Davy, he was in town for an appointment with his solicitor about Susan’s will. We arranged to meet in Mulligan’s. As I sat waiting for him, I brooded over my dead-end existence. Back in Dublin after twenty years traipsing across Europe with nothing to show but a collection of unfulfilled intentions. No career prospects, getting by on bits and scraps, translating instruction manuals and other bumf. What I really wanted was to write and express my ideas. I had confided in Davy many times, poured out all my hopes and uncertainties. He had listened, his expression serious, and his response uncompromising. “You owe it to yourself to do what interests you. Don’t look for excuses or sell yourself short. The last thing you want is to be riddled with regret.” I showed him rough story drafts, and he encouraged me to keep at it. “Any fool can read, but not everyone can write.” The suggestions he made were tactful and astute. I should lose this or that passage, rework and rearrange different scenes. “Decide what it is you want to say, get hold of the reader and bring him with you. It’s in your hands. Plot a course from A to Z, and peer down those mysterious roads. That’s reward in itself. Don’t think about failure or success. There’s integrity in trying. Do it because you have to do it.” I submitted stories to magazines, and received form rejections; four rejections that day, and two the day before. Sitting in Mulligan’s, I decided to discuss it with Davy. His words always had a galvanising effect, providing me with the impetus to keep going. When he walked into the pub, I abandoned all thoughts of bringing up my problems. He wore a shapeless, torn jumper and stained jeans. Unshaven, his hair greasy, he avoided eye contact and showed no inclination to engage in conversation. I asked how he was finding country life. He stared at the bottles behind the bar, and didn’t answer. “Hell isn’t other people,” he finally said. “I can’t stand my own company. It’s unbearable, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.” Sorrow and seclusion had transformed him. I asked about his neighbours. He muttered something about a Dutch woman who lived on a nearby farm. She brought him cooked meals, but he repelled her overtures. “There are days when I don’t move an inch, not so much as a muscle spasm. I barely even breathe.” I had nothing to offer him, no advice or wise words, but I understood what he meant and what he was going through. “Waves of disgust wash over me, and all I can think is what a fucking mess.” “My round, I believe.” I felt the table move and looked up to see Justin smoothing the sleeves of his suit and adjusting an expensive-looking cufflink. “Same again, gentlemen?” He sauntered to the bar. Noel stared at me through baleful eyes. “What was Davy doing living in the middle of nowhere? He was asking for trouble.” “You’re falling behind.” Conor nodded at my glass. Justin examined the picture of Flann O’Brien as he waited for the barman to pull the pints. “The Guinness is all right in this gaff.” Conor lowered his glass and leaned back in his chair. “Do you remember that time we were in Detroit? When we took the wrong turn. That was fucking scary.” “Our great road trip,” I said. “Christ, that’s more than twenty years ago.” It had been Davy’s idea. He had just announced his engagement to Susan. I was planning a move to France. Work was taking Conor to a chemical company in the north of England. Noel had started a job with a construction firm and dithered over leaving the security of his parents’ house. We saw less and less of Justin. It was a point of transition, a suitable juncture for a shared adventure before we took our divergent paths. We flew into Toronto, then drove down to Niagara Falls, and over to New England and Boston. Our return journey took us in a loop and through Detroit. “I’ll never forget that traffic light.” Noel raised his eyes to the ceiling. “I thought it would never change.” Conor puffed out his cheeks. “Those guys in the bandanas were off their heads.” “Jumping on car roofs,” I said. “Then, coming at us with baseball bats. I was sure we were goners.” “Do you remember Davy giving them the finger?” Conor raised his middle finger to Justin, and grinned. “Laughing like a madman and revving the engine. He was loving it.” “He nearly ran them over when the light turned green.” “Sure, Noel, while you were rolling up the window like your arm was on fire.” “They would have killed us.” I bought a round and more followed, our recollection of past events far-fetched and disjointed. We lost track of time, dimly aware it was late evening, the streetlights visible through the window. The pub filled, the noise increased but it was no more than a background hum, so engrossed were we in rehashing our memories. “Justin, you’d been to see Davy a week before it happened.” Noel brought us back to grim reality. “What was he like? Was he very depressed?” “He was quiet, subdued, but nothing you could say that was out of the ordinary.” I noticed Conor was watching Justin closely. “Surely he would have seen the car coming,” Noel said. “He lived in the middle of nowhere.” “I’ve no idea. Look, it was a tragic accident. There’s no point surmising how it happened.” Justin reached for his drink. “If he’d stayed in Clontarf, he could have been run over by a bus.” A buzzing came from one of Conor’s pockets. He pulled out his phone and checked the screen. “I’m going to have to take this.” Justin bought more drinks, including a gin and tonic for himself. I’d never seen him drink so much. “Shit, shit, and shit again.” Conor slumped onto his chair. “What’s wrong?” “Family crisis, afraid I’ll have to leave this sad gathering.” Conor had married a divorcée and inherited a ready-made family that included nine-year-old twins. I found it hard to reconcile the boisterous, heavy-drinking Conor Wickham with the put-upon family man. “And I was just getting into my stride.” He emptied his pint in two goes and placed it gently on the table. Noel stood up. “I should be heading too. I’ll walk with you part of the way.” Conor gave him a dismissive look. “Suit yourself. I need to go for a piss.” Noel waited by the door. Next thing I knew, Conor put two glasses on our table and raised another in a toast. “A little brandy, in memory of Davy.” They were double brandies. I took a mouthful and felt the burn in my throat. “Sorry to abandon you guys. I’ll be in touch.” Conor downed his brandy, clapped me on the back, shook hands with Justin, and pushed Noel out the door. The booze began to bite, my brain awash with Guinness and brandy. Someone took the two vacant chairs. The barman removed the empty glasses. “You see that picture of Flann O’Brien.” Justin turned in his chair. “How many people here have read The Third Policeman? Whoever put it there must think it lends gravitas to this shit-hole.” I nodded, not interested in getting onto that topic. Instead, I said, “It’s not like Conor to pull out of a drinking session.” “Knowing him, he’ll keep going when he gets home. All’s not well in the house of Wickham. Family life hasn’t worked out for him.” I stared at the floor, seeing for the first time the leaf pattern on the linoleum. “As for Noel,” Justin continued. “Have you noticed how morbid he’s become, obsessed with death? All that insecurity and people pleasing can be very toxic.” He tapped me on the arm. “How are things with you?” I swirled the brandy in my glass, instinctively on my guard. “I just can’t get beyond what happened to Davy.” “Don’t let it get to you. Conor’s right, Davy is better off dead.” “Why do you say that?” “It’s what he wanted.” I continued staring at the arrangement of leaves on the linoleum, my mind on Davy in Mulligan’s that night and his unremitting despondency. “It’s what he asked for.” I looked up. “What did you say?” Justin took a sip of brandy. “I said, it’s what he asked for.” I pushed back my chair, stood and forced my way through the bodies gathered at the bar. I went down a corridor with notices for Karaoke Night, and into the gents. The ammoniac stench was overpowering. A toilet roll soaked in piss floated at the end of the urinal. I leaned forward, swaying in boozed equilibrium, and held my breath. The punter to my left hummed a tune as he zipped up with an exaggerated motion. He shuffled over to a sink, and I heard the rush of water from a tap, then the explosive whoosh of the hand dryer. I concentrated on the wall tiles, Justin’s words playing in my head. Back at the bar, I ordered two brandies, crushed the change in my fist and jammed it into my pocket. I looked over at Justin, a remote figure, a stranger sitting at the table. Davy had once described him as an incurable chancer with a ruthless streak. I handed him his brandy. “I’m going to have some head tomorrow,” he said. “Was that meant to be a sick joke?” Justin ran a finger along the rim of the glass, his face impassive. “What did you mean when you said it’s what he asked for?” “He wanted help, and I obliged.” “You mean you ran him over?” “He didn’t want to go on living and needed assistance to end it. He couldn’t do it by himself. Susan’s death sent him off the rails. He had no desire to keep going. Davy was very clear about that. He gave it a go but couldn’t live with himself, not without Susan.” “That’s madness,” I said, surprised by how strident I sounded. “Why didn’t you talk him out of it?” “I tried to, and so did Conor, but there was no changing his mind. He’d come to a decision, and it was final.” “So, Conor knew what you did?” Justin shrugged as if it was an unimportant detail. I felt a sinking sense of betrayal. The two of them discussing such a serious matter, life and death, and I was excluded. “Was this a piece of business for you?” “If you like. Davy paid me. He insisted on it.” “I suppose that will ease your conscience.” “It was a contract, Davy understood that. He didn’t want to know when it would happen. He walked the same stretch of road every day, eyes on the ground, wearing headphones so he heard nothing. Knowing him, he was listening to something classical—German, probably. Brahms or maybe Beethoven.” Justin spoke slowly, measured and serious. In my mind, I saw him sitting in his car, hands gripping the steering wheel. I thought about him standing beside me at the cremation, and the funeral director with the wart. “Christ, I always knew you were heartless, but this beats everything.” “I tried every argument to get him to change his mind. No way, if I didn’t do it, he’d have found someone else.” “Was the holiday in St-Tropez worth it?” Justin finished his brandy. “We’ve time for one more drink, then I need to call it a night. I don’t know about you, but I’m hammered.” Left by myself, my thoughts were viscous, entangled and contradictory. But in the confusion came clarity, a coherent possibility that made complete sense. The table inched forward as Justin sat down. “To Davy,” he said. “A man who dealt with life on his terms.” I raised my glass, swallowed, and came to a decision. “If I asked, would you do it for me?” “What are you talking about?” “What you did for Davy—would you do it for me?” “Come off it. You don’t mean that. You’ve had too much to drink.” “I do mean it, I mean it more than anything.” “I didn’t expect this. Maybe Noel, but not you.” “Well, would you? If I asked you?” Justin sat back in his chair, his lips pursed. “Do you know what you’re saying?” “Are you willing to do this for me?” “It’s not that simple.” “The same terms as Davy. A contract, that’s what you said. I’ll sign whatever, absolving you of responsibility. Sound mind, my decision, whatever. I’ll pay, I have money put aside.” “You can’t just rush into this. Anyway, you’re not thinking straight. It’s the booze talking. You’ll see things differently in the morning.” “I won’t. I’m sure about it.” No uncertainty, my resolve pure and crystalline. So obvious and logical, I wanted it more than anything, more than admiration or success. “It will take time to sort out,” Justin said. “That’s fine. I can get my affairs in order, as they say.” Someone pushed into the back of my chair, and I spilled brandy on my shirt. Justin got up from the table. “Time for a visit to the pissoir.” I looked up at him and repeated my heartfelt wish. “Will you do this for me?” “If it’s what you really want.” He straightened his tie. “I’m your friend, and what are friends for if not to lend a helping hand?” --- ## Author's Notes In this piece, I set out to capture the banter traded by the four male protagonists, friends for twenty years since their college days. Brought together by the death of a friend, the fifth member of their coterie, they initially appear comfortable in each other’s company as they attempt to navigate their shared grief. Divisions and fractures emerge as the evening progresses in a nearby bar. What is not said is possibly more important than their conversation and memories, which are fueled by excessive alcohol. I struggled with the balancing act of humor and believability as the story takes the reader to a somewhat grotesque conclusion. My intention is to express (male) alienation in all its grimness undercut by a dark absurdity. The title (“What Are Friends For?”) is possibly satirical or ironic or terribly morbid. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/11/Mark-Keane.jpg) Mark Keane has taught for many years in universities in North America and the UK. His recent short stories have appeared in **The Interpreter’s House*, **Foofaraw*, **Inlandia*, **Paris Lit Up*, **Prosetrics*, **Twin Bird Review*, **For Page & Screen*, **Avalon Literary Review*, **Bards and Sages Quarterly*, **Shooter*, **Untethered*, **Night* **Picnic*, and **Into the Void*. He lives in Edinburgh (Scotland). ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-blessing-list/#/portal/support) ### The Blessing List URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-blessing-list/ Last updated: 2025-11-27T18:11:01.000Z Every family, I sometimes think, keeps a little itch for disaster tucked under its Sunday clothes, a secret urge to push love until it comes out mean and true. This year, my mother decided we were going to do Thanksgiving “properly.” “None of this paper plate nonsense,” she announced in October, slapping a Williams-Sonoma catalog onto the kitchen counter. “God deserves my best.” “What about us?” my sister, Ria, muttered. “We can have the leftovers,” my dad said, not looking up from the game on his phone. I was seventeen and scheduled my entire inner life around how much attention my mother was paying me at any given moment. That fall, she’d moved her spotlight from me to Jesus and Pinterest, in that order. It was a relief, sometimes. Enough times. “Listen,” she said, jabbing a manicured finger at a picture of white candles in glass cylinders. “We’re going to go around the table and say what we’re thankful for. Properly. Not just ‘my family, my friends, my health’ like a dang robot. Think about it ahead of time. No one is going to embarrass me this year. Understood?” “Yesss, Chef,” Ria said. My mother swatted at her affectionately. “I mean it,” she told me, softening. “I want us to be intentional. Gratitude is holy, Luke.” I nodded, already knowing what I was going to say. *I’m thankful that I finally know who I am.* *I’m thankful that if you really mean this whole unconditional love thing, we’ll be fine.* At night, I rehearsed versions of it while brushing my teeth, foam creeping down my chin like a rabid dog. The words felt too big and too small at the same time, like a suit you grow into and then grow out of on the same day. *I must be crazy*, I thought. Not in my mother’s airy, half-joking way, but in the plain sense. *Who picks Thanksgiving dinner to come out to an entire extended family?* Me, apparently. --- My mother did not have hobbies so much as extended phases, each of them devout and exhausting. There had been the Juice Cleanse Era (we still had the juicer, wedged behind the rice cooker), the Yoga Phase (she owned the mat, had never once unrolled it), and, most recently, Scripture Memorization Season, during which she had carefully lettered Bible verses on pastel index cards and taped them around the house—by the light switch, above the sink, over the toilet. The latest phase was Gratitude. “Not just saying thank you,” she explained to anyone who would listen, “but *living* thank you. It’s very different.” She bought a copper-colored table runner with embroidered leaves and a set of “Give Thanks” napkin rings that pinched the cloth so tight it looked like the napkins were choking. She polished the good plates, the ones with the tiny chips she pretended not to see. She ordered a floral centerpiece online and then took credit for arranging it when it arrived. My father, who rarely objected to anything that didn’t interfere with his TV schedule, let her have the whole production. He spent the week leading up to Thanksgiving rewinding and rewatching the same touchdown on YouTube, as if repetition might change the outcome. “You can’t memorize football,” my mother informed him. “You should memorize blessings instead.” “I’m memorizing this replay,” he said mildly. “Brings me joy.” She rolled her eyes. “God is not impressed by your joy, Rajesh.” “Good thing he doesn’t grade on a curve, then.” Ria and I exchanged a glance over the dish rack, the kind that said: *we will remember this line and use it against him later*. --- We weren’t a particularly big family, but we were dense, like something compacted over generations. There was my mother’s sister, “Auntie Jenny” (though she insisted on just “Jenny” with strangers), who wore lipstick two shades too young for her and posted “wine o’clock” memes in the family group chat. There was Uncle Sunil, her husband, who audited everyone’s life choices the way he audited spreadsheets. There were their twins, Priya and Neel, both twelve and permanently in a state of mild shock. My dad’s father, Dada, completed the circle, moving slowly and judging quickly. We all lived within thirty minutes of each other in Raleigh, but we only met like this twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Easter was reserved for church people, Diwali for the distant relatives on WhatsApp. The rest of the time, we were a group chat and the occasional forwarded article that began, “You should read this, it’s about your generation.” Our family’s official religion was Christianity, but we practiced something closer to Reputation. Everything we did, we did in front of an imagined audience. This is important to keep in mind. --- The day of Thanksgiving arrived exactly like my mother wanted it. Sky a clear, photogenic blue, air smelling faintly of chimney smoke. She had been up since six, basting and rotating and muttering to herself. By noon the entire house smelled like butter, garlic, and the impending arrival of judgmental people. “Luke, get the chairs from the garage,” she called. “The extra ones.” “In a minute,” I said, leaning against the counter, checking my phone for texts that weren’t coming. I’d told exactly one person at school that I liked boys, and he’d handled the revelation by transferring to a different lunch table. “Not in a minute, now.” She snapped her fingers. “Don’t be lazy. Ask yourself, am I adding to the blessing or subtracting from it?” “Ma,” I said, but I went. Gratitude was not improving her mood, clearly. In the dim garage, I pulled two folding chairs from behind a box labeled XMAS CRAP, my mind on the speech I’d planned. I’m thankful that I finally know who I am. In my head, I sounded calm, actually. Quite a bit serene. A little brave, maybe, in a cinematic way. In reality, my palms were slick and my left eye twitched whenever I thought the word “gay” in connection with my own body. “You’re overthinking it,” Ria had told me the night before, when I’d finally blurted it to her in the hallway outside the bathroom. “Just say it like it’s no big deal. Honestly, everyone’s too obsessed with their own drama to care.” “You’ll back me up?” I asked. Her face did four things at once, and then she said, “Yeah, of course. Just don’t do it before we eat. I refuse to have my potatoes get cold.” --- By five, the house was full. Auntie Jenny breezed in first, arms weighed down with grocery store pies and a tote bag that announced “GOOD VIBES ONLY,” a lie visible from space. She air-kissed my mother and whispered something in my father’s ear that made him choke on nothing. Uncle Sunil followed at a slower pace, carrying a lasagna in a glass dish covered with foil. My mother took one look and said, “Lasagna? On Thanksgiving?” “It’s vegetarian,” he said. “You can’t expect kids to just eat turkey.” “I did,” my mother replied. “And look how I turned out.” No one commented. The twins drifted in behind them, already on their phones, one earbud each. “Shoes off,” my mother reminded them, pointing to the shoe rack by the door. “Aunty, I literally just put them on,” Neel protested. “Then you get to practice taking them off,” she said. “Gratitude.” Ria appeared in ripped black jeans and a sweater that said NO THANKS in pink letters. My mother gave her a look that contained a six-part sermon. “What?” Ria said. “It’s comfortably big for a big meal.” Dada came last, because my father had to go pick him up. He shuffled in wearing the same cardigan he’d worn to every event since 2003, clutching a cane he didn’t need. “Happy Thanksgiving, Papa,” my mother said brightly, kissing his cheek. He sniffed. “We did not have this holiday in Kolkata,” he said. “We had real festivals.” “And yet you’re here,” she replied, still smiling. “Free food,” he said. “And to see whether my son has become any smarter.” My father grinned. “How could I?.” --- By six, the table was ready. Plates laid out, napkins strangled by their rings, candles lit. The turkey sat in the center like a sacrificial animal in a glossy magazine spread. My mother had sprinkled it with parsley and something red she insisted was paprika, but I sincerely hoped it was chili powder. “Everyone, gather,” she called, clapping her hands. “Phones away. We’re going to do the blessing.” The blessing. My heart climbed into my throat and hung there like it was on a ledge. We shuffled into place around the table. There were nine of us, so the circle was more of a self-conscious oval. My mother took my father’s hand on one side and Dada’s on the other. Dada took mine, his grip bony and unexpectedly strong. “Do we have to hold hands?” Neel asked. “Yes,” my mother said. “You won’t die. It’s symbolic.” “Symbolic of what?” Priya wanted to know. “*Unity*,” my mother said. “Support. That we carry each other’s burdens.” “Like Jesus carrying the cross,” Ria added, deadpan. “Yes,” my mother said, shooting her a warning look. “Exactly like that.” I laced my fingers with Ria’s on one side, Dada’s on the other, and felt the circuit complete. Warm palms, faint sweat, Ria’s bracelet digging into my wrist. The candles flickered as we all exhaled. “Okay,” my mother said. “I’ll start, and then we’ll go around. Just speak from your heart. Remember, we’re not here to perform. We’re here to be honest before God.” I almost laughed. *Not here to perform. Sure.* “I’m thankful,” my mother began, glancing upward as if God lived in the ceiling fan, “for the opportunity to serve all of you tonight. It is a privilege to cook for my family. Some people”—her voice sharpened—“don’t appreciate how much work goes into that. But God sees, and He strengthens me.” I saw the word “some” land like a dart. It hit everyone and no one at once. That was her gift. She went on. “I’m thankful for my children, that they are healthy and safe, that they are protected from bad influences and bad choices. I’m thankful they know right from wrong, even when they pretend they don’t. And I’m thankful”—she opened her eyes and looked directly at my father—“for a patient husband who puts up with me.” Everyone laughed, gently shaken free from the little preaching hidden in her thanks. She was very good at it. “Amen,” said Auntie Jenny. “Amen,” my mother echoed, satisfied. We all squeezed hands in a vague, confused rhythm before my father began. “I’m thankful,” he said slowly, “for a wife who insists on doing things properly even when it drives me crazy. It means I don’t have to think about much.” The table chuckled. “I’m thankful for having my father here with me—” He nodded at Dada, who sniffed. “—and for this house staying in one piece despite the number of people slamming doors in it.” His eyes slid over Ria and me. I felt my neck grow hot. “I’m also thankful,” he added, “that we still talk to each other. Mostly. I know not every family has that.” It was a gentle sentence, but it carried weight. He had grown up in a household where silence was more common than dust. “Amen,” Auntie Jenny said again, softer. Then it was Dada’s turn. “I am thankful the turkey smells better than it looks,” he said. Everyone laughed, relieved. “I am thankful my son has more hair than his friends my age,” he added, making a show of peering at the top of my father’s head. “And that my grandchildren live close enough I can still lecture them in person instead of over the phone.” “We’re thankful, too, Dada,” Ria said. He smirked. “You are lying, but that is okay. Lying is better than nothing.” The line landed oddly. For a second, the air felt thin. Then Auntie Jenny jumped in. “Well,” she said, “I’m thankful for this family, obviously.” She flipped her hair over one shoulder, the way she always did before saying something she knew was going to land sideways. “I’m thankful that even though some of us are very busy and important—” She glanced at Uncle Sunil. “—we still make time to show up.” *Here we go*, I thought. “I’m thankful,” she continued, “that God has blessed us financially so we can afford nice things, like holidays and new cars and college tuitions.” Her smile sharpened. “And I pray that we all remember where those blessings come from, and don’t waste them on…impulsive decisions.” She said “impulsive” like she really meant “criminal.” Or “liberal,” maybe. “Jenny,” my mother said, voice light. “What a nice prayer.” Ria squeezed my hand. I realized she was holding her breath. Uncle Sunil cleared his throat. “I’m thankful,” he said, in the same flat tone he probably used at work, “that my family is healthy. That my kids are doing well in school.” He did not look at the twins as he said it. “I’m thankful that we have stability, that we don’t…er, run after every little trend.” His eyes flicked to Ria’s ripped jeans, then to the NO THANKS on her sweater. “A strong foundation matters.” “We’re thankful for your foundation, too,” Ria murmured, barely loud enough for me to hear. If my mother heard, she pretended not to. Priya went next. “I’m thankful for my dog,” she said. “You don’t have a dog,” my mother reminded her. “I know,” Priya said. “I’m thankful that someday I will.” Everyone laughed, tension sliding off them like oil. Kids were good for that. They made everything look less dire. “I’m thankful for my Nintendo Switch,” Neel said. “And this lasagna.” “Neel,” his father warned. “What?” Neel said. “I am.” Everyone laughed again, grateful for something uncomplicated. Then it was Ria’s turn. She took a breath. “I’m thankful,” she said, “that I got into NYU.” My mother flinched. So did Auntie Jenny. We had spent the last month pretending Ria’s acceptance letter did not exist. “I’m also thankful,” Ria went on, plowing through, “that I get to study what I actually care about, and not just what looks good on a résumé. And I’m thankful”—she looked at my parents—“that Mom and Dad raised me to think for myself, even when it’s inconvenient.” Classic Ria. She could deliver a slap and a compliment in the same sentence, just like our mother. “Who said anything about you going to New York?” Auntie Jenny asked, too brightly. “No one,” Ria said. “Yet.” My mother’s mouth tightened. “I’m thankful God has a plan for you,” she said, jumping the queue, as if she could overlay her blessing on top of Ria’s. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.” “Oh, I know exactly what it is,” Ria said. “All right,” my father cut in gently. “Whose turn is it now? Sunil, you can go again if you’d like to thank God for Ria’s scholarship.” Everyone chuckled on autopilot, though the sound was a little brittle. Meanwhile, my pulse thudded in my ears. I was next. I’d assumed, in my rehearsals, that my moment would arrive in a pocket of calm. A quiet after the storm, or better yet, before one. I’d imagined the room washed in candlelight and turkey smell, everyone’s edges softened by carbs and nostalgia. I had not accounted for this version, where the air was buzzing with almost-arguments, and gratitude as sharp as the carving knife. *I’m thankful that I finally know who I am*, I thought. It sounded ridiculous now, like a line from a YA novel I would pretend not to read. “Luke?” my mother prompted. “Your turn.” All pairs of eyes rested on me for varying lengths of time. My skin felt too tight. But Ria’s thumb pressed against the back of my hand, twice. It was our morse code for *You alive?* “I’m thankful,” I began. My voice came out higher than usual. I cleared my throat. “I’m thankful for…” The words I’d rehearsed lined up in my head like passengers at boarding. None of them stepped forward. I could see it all, suddenly. My mother’s face freezing in calm horror. Auntie Jenny’s nostrils flaring like a horse’s. Uncle Sunil recalculating the family’s respectability index. Dada’s eyes narrowing into something I wasn’t sure I could bear. I could see Ria, caught between pride and the knowledge that she had to leave in nine months and I did not. I could see the twins watching, learning silently what happened to people who stepped outside the script. I could also see myself a year from now, still standing in this dining room, still letting my mother arrange napkin rings around my life. *I’m thankful that I’m gay*, I thought, and my tongue refused to move. “I’m thankful,” I said instead, “that I get to apply to college next year. That I might actually get in somewhere, even with my math grade.” The table chuckled dutifully. “I’m thankful that my family helps me, you know, with applications and rides and stuff.” I heard how weak it sounded. Gratitude for carpool. Gratitude for “stuff.” “I’m thankful,” I added, scrambling, “that even though we fight all the time, we still…come back and eat together. That we haven’t given up on that yet.” That last word slipped out on its own. *Yet*. “Amen,” said my father. “Amen,” my mother echoed, a little too briskly. “What a lovely thought, Luke.” Ria squeezed my hand so tight my fingers tingled. Later, my mother would tell people what a sweet, thoughtful young man her son had become. She would quote that line about us still coming back to the table as evidence that she’d done something right. In that moment, I felt like I’d just signed a contract I hadn’t read. The Terms and Conditions for being a coward. We ended with a prayer from my mother, of course. She thanked God for food and family and “the freedom we enjoy in this country,” which always made Dada snort. She prayed for protection from “harmful influences,” and even though she meant TikTok and Ria’s boyfriends, the word still came over me like a warning. “Okay!” she said finally, clapping her hands as we released each other. “Let’s eat before everything gets cold.” The circle broke. The spell, if you could call it that, shattered into small talk. Auntie Jenny swooped toward the turkey with a carving knife. Uncle Sunil peeled back the foil on his lasagna, releasing a blast of oregano. The twins circled the table like vultures, eying the mac and cheese. Dada lowered himself into his chair with a groan and immediately began complaining about the amount of salt in the gravy. “Pass me the mashed potatoes,” my father said. I stood there for a second, disoriented, like someone had pressed play after pausing at the worst possible frame. “Luke, can you get extra plates from the counter?” my mother called. “We don’t want to start this beautiful meal on paper.” Ria bumped my shoulder as she moved past me. “You okay?” she asked under her breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m good.” I wasn’t. I was…numb. It struck me then that nobody had noticed how close I’d come to setting the table on fire. But of course they hadn’t. We were all too busy holding hands. There is a version of this story in which I tell the truth that night, and I’m not sure how it would go. Maybe everything would’ve exploded. Maybe my mother would’ve said something she couldn’t take back. Maybe Dada would’ve muttered something about “Western influence,” and Auntie Jenny would text someone in the bathroom that things had gotten messy, complete with a crying-laughing emoji. Or maybe no one would’ve cared at all. Hard to say. I do know for sure that *was* good. It usually was, when my mother’s anxiety had somewhere to go besides her children’s life choices. The turkey was even moist this year, a fact she mentioned no fewer than six times. The potatoes were buttery, the veggie lasagna punched above its weight, the beans were overcooked, and the rolls were slightly burnt at the bottom. “Charred for flavor,” she said when Auntie Jenny pointed it out. “Gives it character.” We ate. We complimented. Dada complained. The twins negotiated how many vegetables equaled one more roll. Auntie Jenny brought up politics and was immediately shut down. The candles burned lower. Wax pooled at their bases, thick and cloudy. Every so often, a wick would flare and then settle, having decided not to make a scene. After dessert—pumpkin pie with Cool Whip, lasagna inexplicably still on the table—we migrated to the living room. Football went on. My mother carried plates back and forth, humming a worship song under her breath. Ria disappeared upstairs “to text” and did not return. Lucky. I loaded the dishwasher until there were no more plates to load. Then I stood at the sink, staring at the streaks of gravy congealing on the roasting pan. The water from the tap ran hot, then hotter. Steam veiled my face in the window’s reflection. I turned the hot all the way up and slid my hands under the stream. The water scalded instantly. Pain flared white across my palms. I held them there, teeth clamped, until the sensation burned past sharp into something dull and distant, like a radio station just out of range. “You’re going to blister if you keep doing that,” Ria said from the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come back down. “I’m just cleaning,” I said. “Sure,” she said. She walked over, reached past me, and twisted the faucet toward cold. The sudden chill ached in a different way. “You didn’t have to say it tonight,” she murmured. “You don’t owe them that.” I turned my hands over. The skin was pink, already tender, but intact. “I wanted to,” I said. She reached for a dish towel and handed it to me. “I know,” she said. “That’s kind of the point.” In the living room, my family cheered at something on the screen. A touchdown, a replay, a call overturned. I couldn’t tell. I dried my hands and looked at the faint red marks across my palms. If you’d walked up to me then and slapped them, I honestly don’t think I would have felt it. --- ## Author's Notes There's a sharp distance between what we release and what we actually say. It's a distance between the self we want to claim and the self we protect by staying silent. While this piece doesn't reflect my own personal experiences or heritage, I do think there's a universality that transcends the cultural and sexual identity of its main character. Right on time for the holidays. My goal was to present a "coming out" story that understands how coming out isn't always a single dramatic moment. Often it's the accumulation of moments where you don't come out. Luke's rehearsals, for instance, gain poignancy precisely because we watch them dissolve under pressure. The gap between his imagined "cinematic" bravery and his actual paralysis can be painfully accurate for all kinds of family confessions. I wanted to make sure, too, that despite the constraints of this being short fiction, every family member needed distinctive texture, mostly through small gestures and observations. The mother's index cards, Auntie Jenny's tote bag, Ria's sweater, and so on. The gratitude round-robin works then as a treatise on subtext, where everyone is weaponizing thankfulness by saying one thing and meaning something totally different that is easy for the rest to pick up on. So by the end, when Luke's hands feel the scalding water, we understand that this moment externalizes Luke's interior state without melodrama or Ria intervening. It's a crystallization of the dissociative aftermath of self-betrayal, albeit without judging Luke for his decision. And I titled it "The Blessing List" because it's an inventory of performances. Luke's inability to speak isn't a blessing, nor is it a tragedy. It's just honest. Probably the most honest thing that happened during the dinner. Happy Thanksgiving. This is me thanking you for being a loyal reader of Cetera. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-graven-oaths/#/portal/support) ### The Graven Oaths URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-graven-oaths/ Last updated: 2025-11-20T18:47:21.000Z > Content warning: This story contains descriptions of graphic violence, mass casualty events, military trauma, institutional gaslighting, and themes of complicity in war crimes. If these subjects are difficult for you right now, this might be one to skip. I didn’t mean to speak when the gun came up. Though a person doesn’t choose what their fear decides to say. Fear speaks first. Fear speaks loud. Fear speaks long before a person understands what it has promised. The old records show it again and again: one voice trembling in a corner, one voice cracking in a crowd, one voice breaking in the dark, and the Oath answering all three. Fear carves faster than even the sharpest of edges. Fear spreads. If we were the kind of people who told the truth about the way fear and magic and violence—yes, and war—strip a life down to its last bare nerve, we would lay it all out clean on the table, and you can look into the files yourself, though you won’t find anything worth the effort. You’ll see birthday parties and endless famine and the ones in between who thought they were brave until they weren’t and every other kind of ruin we pretended had no author. And it all accounted to nothing because the dead don’t care how many reports we write or how much footage we replay to soothe ourselves. Not that we tend to learn anything from the sins of our own making. *I didn’t mean to speak when the gun came up.* The Oath did the rest. Carved in my bones, a simple law played itself out in the coldest of magics. *If a gun is raised to you with murderous intent, you will defend yourself.* But I did more than defend myself. The fear and the carving responded proportionately. To me. To my inert definition of fear. In other words, the Oath interprets defense through the speaker’s deepest understanding of the word—and I was a soldier. I had been trained to think in terms of preemptive annihilation. Even in a gas station while on leave, just trying to find cheap cigarettes and a cheaper light. Why would they bother telling us what really happened next? The reports were quite clear, after all, and the agency’s position was fully documented in the post-incident review. The casualties were regrettable, certainly, and the procedural breach was isolated to a single unit operating under exceptional conditions consistent with the operational guidelines as interpreted by regional command. The oversight committee found no evidence of misconduct, definitely not of the kind that would trouble anyone who has read the appendices, and the internal memorandum simply reaffirmed the official understanding that no one could have anticipated the outcomes even though the warnings were submitted on time. And when you consider the chain of authorization, and the precise scope of delegated authority, and the established precedent for discretionary action during periods of Oath instability, what else could explain the result? But here’s the thing. I was there. I saw it. I did it. It was not complicated. It was not hidden. It was not a misunderstanding. It was one bad night. Just pressure. Just the usual line about doing what I had to do. I never said no, to be clear. It was an Oath, carved into my bones and absolute. Even saying no would not have fixed much. Least of all, me. And for the record, the gas station clerk thought I was there to hurt him. Rob him. I was in my plainclothes, but maybe I had that look about me. As a result, there was damage. Then there were injuries. Then there were bodies. Then there were statements drafted for me. There was no inquiry. No correction. No consequence. No truth. At least for a time. --- I was an Oathbearer. Not in the sense the textbooks pretend to define it with ceremony and sanctioned induction, or even the possibility of containment. But if the term means anything at all these days, it’s closer to a legal fiction than a title, closer to a single drop in a toxic reservoir than the name of a role, and even that feels inadequate, like calling a detonation “a spark.” And that phrasing—“I was”—isn’t quite right, either, though I’m not sure “I am” does any better. What I carried was not a classification or subtype, not even a deviation from authorized magical practice. It was an operational distinction recognized only in after-action reports and retroactive assessments. The phenomenon itself is old enough—fear, trigger, response—but this part, the binding carved into living bone and enacted through unchosen speech, that is the part that changes most everything. Captain Rama Devlin of Field Compliance, Evaluation Division, made that clear the morning she arrived at my barracks, though not to arrest me or issue a summons. Oddly, she didn’t even read me the usual cautions. She just told me to get in the car because traffic would be hell and she didn’t feel like filling out a day’s worth of paperwork. I do remember her saying, “Get in, Oathbearer.” *Oathbearer, oathbinding, oathcarved, oathtriggered, oathlocked, oathlost*—I used the word so many times the shock wore off until it sounded like nothing but a procedural category. And that’s because, well, that’s what it was, in the end. A status without remedy. The Office of Magical Risk Management had its forms. The Agency had its protocols. Field Compliance had its routes and rotations and color-coded threat matrices. All of it existed to decide what to do with someone like me. Me, who was an Oathbearer once. I might be an Oathbound now. I am something else entirely at this moment, and I will carry whatever this becomes in my very bones, still drowning in oaths I can’t control. --- It almost didn’t happen at all. If the gas station clerk hadn’t jumped to conclusions about why I was there, if the man behind me hadn’t started crying, if I hadn’t been so wrung out from the week I could hardly stand, the timing might have spared all of us. But desperation is a kind of gravity. Once you reach a certain depth of it, everything falls the same way. And I’d cut myself off from anyone who could have steadied my fall. People, places, habits, all the small anchors you give up when the worst thing inside you is also the thing that keeps you alive. For a second, though, something shifted. I don’t know what to call it. Relief, maybe. It didn’t last. The moment the words left my mouth—“I will defend myself”—I felt them burn downward through my throat like swallowing molten metal. They hit my sternum first, spreading along each rib until they found ground, and I could feel the letters etching themselves into bone, each curve and line of the Oath writing itself in a language designed around prediction and mental math. My skeleton became contract. The carving took maybe two seconds. The screaming—mine, theirs—lasted longer. It started with the clerk’s hands. They simply...wrong-angled, fingers bending in directions that made no sense, the gun clattering away. Then the man behind me, the crying one—his tears turned to steam, then his eyes, then the moisture in his lungs. The Oath’s definition of “defense” included preemptive neutralization of anyone within a fifty-foot radius who registered as a potential threat. The tubular lights exploded in sequence. The six windows blew outward. The gas pumps—Christ, the gas pumps went up like roman candles, and the fire spread to the cars, and the cars had people in them. And I still don't remember who called the paramedics afterward. Or if they even came. Or if the sirens I keep hearing now are actually real. Some days I can’t tell if the ringing in my ears is from the gun or the Oath or just the way my thoughts scrape along the walls of my skull. I don’t even remember numbers. I don’t remember the order of things. I don’t remember being a person the way other people mean it. I remember fear. That’s all that’s left. I mean, before that night, I had a job. Before that night, I followed protocol. Before that night, I believed I could still make choices. Before that night, I thought I was competent. I wasn’t. I did what I did because I was told to. What I did was harm. What I knew was certain. What I became was inevitable. What I carried out was done by my own hands, the heat of it rising through the panels, the smell clinging to me for days, the sound swallowed by distance so complete it felt like a sadistic miming of mercy. What it resembled was scripture—fire descending, judgment without emotion—and what it reached was beyond the map, body, or anything I can defend. And it wasn’t cruelty, not really. It was logistics. That’s worse. Because cruelty means I was there. *I followed the Oat*h. *I followed the Oath*. The system worked because *I followed the Oath*. The same Oath that in wartime had commanded us to cleave buildings into parables of prosperity. I can still recall this one pediatric ward folding in on itself like a closing mouth, and I can still hear the specific crunch of the bricks. When streets open up like that, they tend to swallow the heat and air as easily as breath. You watched pieces of what happened to the gas station on your phone, I bet. Burning. Shattering. Collapsing. Even the hospital. It wasn’t the worst thing, was it? No. The worst thing is that I lived, and the report says I survived by a margin of twelve seconds, which means the suffering simply had longer to build its case. I was telling you how Devlin brought me in—I can’t finish that thought. I lose track of the beginnings now. Maybe she said my name. Maybe she didn’t. None of that matters, because the Oath had already chosen its moment, and the moment didn’t care about narrative structure. Things happen. People burn. Forms get filed. The world moves on. And I was moved along with it. --- Captain Devlin always wore the same slate jacket, shoulders a little too broad for her frame, the fabric gone shiny at the elbows from years of leaning on bad tables. She had a habit of pinching the bridge of her nose before she said anything she knew you wouldn’t like, as if she could smooth the headache out in advance. Her hair was regulation-short and carelessly dyed, roots showing. “My mother used to wake up screaming every night for twenty years,” she said, not bothering with hello. “Do you know what causes that?” “No,” I said. But I did. I knew enough to understand that fear has a half-life, that the body keeps records the mind pretends not to read. “It’s how experience writes itself into flesh,” she said. “Stress, terror, famine, all of it leaving little chemical bookmarks on the code, so the next body in the line starts already braced for a blow. One person’s panic becomes the next person’s baseline.” “Oh,” I said. “You wrote that Oath,” she said. “Carved it into your own bones. Not us.” “Yeah.” “And you know that what you did in the gas station doesn’t end there,” she said. “That it echoes forward. Into people who never consented. Into children who don’t exist yet.” “I was just follow—” I stopped. The word broke in my mouth like a tooth. “I was just following the Oath.” “You weren’t ‘just’ anything,” she said. “You followed the Oath. That’s the problem.” “Yeah,” I said. “Yes. I did.” She let out a breath and leaned back, the chair complaining under her. Her shoulders dropped a fraction, enough to show the effort it took to hold them up in the first place. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “Right now, I mean.” “I…” I stared at my hands. I opened my mouth. Nothing. “You did the burning,” she said. “On your own. You were on leave. The Agency had nothing to do with it. You did the burning.” “I think I’m afraid it’ll happen again,” I said. “Or that it already has and I just don’t remember which version of me did it.” “That’s not a bad answer,” she said. “It’s also not the whole of it.” “What’s the whole of it?” I said. “It’s not just what you did,” she said. “It’s what you turned on. In yourself. In whatever comes after you. You light an Oath like that, there are consequences too big for one person to even comprehend.” I think I laughed, a little, or maybe it was just a broken breath. “So I’ve screwed people who don’t even exist yet. Great.” “Accurate,” she said. “Also unforgivable. Also not reversible.” “I…” My throat closed. I rubbed my face. *She asked you something simple*, I remember thinking. *And you can’t even give her the courtesy of a simple answer.* Devlin watched me for a while, long enough that the silence hardened into something else. “You’re afraid of yourself,” she said at last. “That’s the answer. And you should be.” --- After a while—we could have sat there for minutes or hours, I’m not sure—Devlin pushed her chair back just enough that it stopped creaking and rested her elbows on her knees. She rubbed her palms together like she was trying to warm them, though the room was already too hot. When she looked up again, the softness was gone. Something had clicked into place behind her eyes. “This is bad,” she said. “Very bad. Bad in a way that doesn’t stay put.” She laced her fingers, cracked them once. The sound seemed to oil whatever rusted hinge had been stuck in her throat. The words still came out slow, though, as if they had to shove past something swollen. “People are looking into your record,” she said. “They're going to whatever lengths they can to find out how many people you killed for us before this happened.” “How many people?” I said. It came out flatter than I meant. “I mean, logistically.” “A lot?” she said. “Enough?” She made it a question, like the numbers themselves were refusing to be counted. --- I should mention as an aside that by the time you read this, if anyone ever does, you will already have some version of the amount. A statistical majority, they’ll say later; a meaningful sample of the population of a medium-sized town; a non-trivial portion of all living descendants of anyone who ever flinched the wrong way in front of my squadron and our Oaths. They’ll describe it in terms of likelihoods, in models and projections, in curves that shouldn’t have existed if the world were built the way we were taught in school. Fear shouldn’t be that contagious, that fast, that precise in what it selects and keeps. It was. It was said the first few kills were barely noticeable at first. It was said most soldiers adjusted without knowing what they were accommodating. It was said only a few soldiers resisted, here and there, for a while. After the official records came out, someone explained it all with receptor talk and gene talk and a neat little diagram of how stress leaves its fingerprints on the next set of nerves. The presentation was optional. Attendance was high. No one was surprised. They called it a new normal. You can hear the permanence hanging in those phrases the way you can hear rain building in the pipes. So the only good thing, if you want to call it that, is efficiency. We don’t have to waste time teaching this fear. It saves itself to the next generation. It auto-updates. So yes, we passed the worst part of us on, wholesale, tied up with all the other invisible gifts we leave our children. We baked it into the blood and called it, I don’t know, water under the burnt bridge. Most days it was ordinary, if you can call it that. Sometimes we leveled a block and sometimes we only softened a perimeter, sometimes we lit up the sky and sometimes we just turned the power off and waited, and in the end it all added up to the same thing: people running, people hiding, people learning exactly how far fear could reach. I still owe all of that. I still carry all of that. I still stand inside all of that, even sitting here. It wasn’t even the worst work we did—it was just the usual suite of tools of sensory deprivation, stress induction, targeted illusions, induced sleeplessness, controlled oxygen variance, calibrated heat, calibrated cold. The gas station was bad, yeah. Because it wasn’t planned, and I reacted in self-defense. But they show you deadlier things on your screens now. They stream entire seasons of suffering in high definition, teach you to track character arcs through pain and recovery and redemption, let you watch people break and mend inside forty-eight minutes and a skip-intro button, and you tell yourself you’ve seen worse than anything we turned on. It wasn’t even the worst work we did. --- Devlin held up a surgical blade between thumb and forefinger, turning it so the overhead light emphasized the inscriptions running along its edge. The metal seemed to drink in the light rather than reflect it. I could swear the etched symbols were moving, rewriting themselves as I watched. “Common name for this is a Void Graver,” she said. “Not that common anymore, though.” “It looks like a prop from a bad horror movie,” I said. “Like, the thing the idiot scientist drops in Act One.” “No,” she said. “Those don’t rewrite anything.” Her mouth did a funny thing when she said that, as if she were trying to smile but didn’t really feel like she deserved to. I felt my own mouth doing the same funny thing back at her. “They used to be simple,” I said, suddenly full of academy lectures I thought I’d forgotten. “Void Gravers are excision tools, right? One cut can void any oath, unmake any binding carved in bone? Heh. That’s why they were banned, I bet. They’d strip out marriage vows along with curses, cut away promises to dead children along with compulsions to kill.” “Fucking dangerous,” she agreed, still watching the blade. “Until we learned how to use them properly.” “You want to carve out the Oaths in my own bones.” The fingers of her free hand tapped silently on the steel tabletop. That was an answer. “Then what?” I said. “Carve new ones? Leave me hollow? Stitch me back up and pretend nothing’s missing?” She stepped away from the table and turned to face me fully, the blade held steady between us. “It cuts along the fear pathways,” she said. “Finds whatever’s been carved into the bone by terror and repetition, follows the script like a groove, and burns it out as it goes. Replaces it with scarring. And dead tissue won’t take new oaths.” “That’s…not how the protocol works,” I said. “For what I did.” “Did you follow protocol in the gas station?” she said. My lips clenched around the word, holding it in. I had to close my eyes to get it past my teeth. “Technically.” --- Right after what…happened…I didn’t go to prison because it was decided that people like me were more useful in containment than in a cell. There were a few quick hearings about it in rooms I never saw, arguments about liability and precedent and the magical equivalent of terror control. Someone pointed out that Oaths don’t respect walls and that standard sentencing guidelines hadn’t been written with bone-carved weapons in mind. The Agency got special jurisdiction, and I got a handler and a badge that never quite fit right. Then Devlin showed up with her damn knife. --- “But yes,” she said, “This is a violation of everything we claim to uphold. And obviously, if this comes out, I will be the one they put on trial.” “And I’ll be dead,” I said. “No, the procedure won’t kill you.” “It will kill the old me. I won’t be *me* ever again.” I scratched my chin like it was nothing. “So why not just kill me?” “You mentioned protocol before,” she said. “We’re not renegades. Surviving is better. You become a living dead end in the chain, a warning to the rest. Nothing passes forward. As a bonus, no more carved responses riding your bloodline. No more stray trigger phrases turning you into a weapon five years from now when some idiot points a pistol at you over a parking space.” “And I’ll have to live a shell of a life with the memory of what I was for however long I survive it,” I said. “Do you want to atone for what you did or not?” she said. No buildup. Just that. I opened my mouth and said nothing, then looked down and watched a scuff on the floor that hadn’t been there yesterday until it blurred. “I don’t have a choice, as usual,” I said. “You will have a choice to formally go along with this,” Devlin said. “For the record.” “Suddenly the record matters,” I said. “It does,” she said. “There are people out there who file their taxes and need to know something like this doesn’t just happen.” My stomach flipped in on itself before anything in my head decided what it believed. “At least tell me I get to keep my rank before you discharge me.” I smiled. “Kay,” she said softly. First time she’d used my name. “You’ll never see daylight again.” “Right.” I dropped my smile to the floor. “That’s how it works, after all.” --- ## Author's Notes: My initial goal with this story was to craft a dark fantasy scene or two that could emphasize a particularly "fun" magic system idea I had while on a drive. It was borne out of, *What if you could carve 'oaths' into your bones using magic knives, and the oaths change reality around you?* Obviously my initial instinct was to craft an entire novel based on this idea right then and there, but the beauty of short fiction is that I have a chance to explore this concept with real prose inside a standalone story. Oddly enough, this one definitely blurs the dark fantasy angle with some dystopia-adjacent speculative fiction. Maybe because the metaphor is so pronounced here, where we see trauma and violence perpetuate themselves across generations. For the narrative structure, I wanted to keep this one a bit contained, definitely under 4000 words (mission accomplished somehow!) I broke away from my usual "storytelling rules" to accomplish this. Gone are my neat little self-contained scenes that follow rules! Nope, I decided to challenge myself this time with a fragmented, non-linear structure that mirrors the narrator's psychological disintegration. Similar to how violence fractures both memory and identity (I didn't say the story is subtle, to be clear...) As for the language and style, I opted for an easy trick I've fallen back on before, where I take bureaucratic euphemisms and blend them with raw, visceral imagery. So one moment we're talking about field compliance, the next we see a guy whose eyes are turning to steam. But as a bonus, I wove in some philosophical abstraction here about fear and inheritance mixed with bitter, sardonic commentary on institutional violence, and it's a *risk*. Normally I wouldn't be so on-the-nose, but I've had this diatribe in my head about fear for about six months and it had to get out somehow! I've been mostly writing literary stories lately, so returning to some more fantastical genre work means I'm going to bleed in some prose and thematic layers that mean a lot to me in our current moment. Hence this is a "magic war" story about institutional complicity and intergenerational trauma, not to mention how darn political this thing is. However you read into it, just know that my intent is not to critique *soldiers*. Not even close. Instead, I'm trying to examine how militaries condition soldiers into weapons, and how bureaucratic structures often try to diffuse responsibility for atrocities. The real fiction, though, is that violence can be contained or controlled or compartmentalized to "bones." Hence I made sure to include a section in this about how societies normalize and inherit patterns of violence. And when that's the case, is it impossible for us to see true accountability within corrupt systems? As impossible as the concept of magic, reality-shifting laws written in our bones, I suppose. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/little-good-people/#/portal/support) ### Little Good People URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/little-good-people/ Last updated: 2025-11-13T15:07:25.000Z Stories are a lie. Renee Mallory repeated this mantra to herself over and over again as she sat in the interview room at Heirloom Redevelopment. It was the only thing distracting her from the woman sitting across, wearing a blazer that could catch Renee up on her rent if she could somehow pawn it…. “Your portfolio shows real range,” the woman said, tapping a tablet. “Pharma copy, lifestyle brands…my goodness, a viral campaign for ethical diamonds.” “Yeah, well, that was before the lawsuit,” Renee said. “We know.” The woman smiled. “We appreciate honesty here at Heirloom.” The woman slid the tablet across the table. On it, a map dotted with properties, each tagged with family names and star ratings. The Goodalls at 412 Maple: 4.7 stars. The Nguyens at 308 Birch: 4.9 stars. “Our business is revitalizing post-industrial communities,” the woman explained. “Making them attractive to remote workers, young families. But perception drives reality, no? We need resident testimonials that capture the right feeling.” “Wait, testimonials from *actual* residents? But they don’t live there yet.” “Testimonials from *potential* residents. You’ll be writing aspirational narratives. Believable ones.” That, Renee understood. She was being asked to invent people. Make shit up, essentially. Wouldn't be her first time. “The position pays seventy-five thousand, full benefits, remote-friendly after the first month.” The woman produced an NDA thick as a novella. “Though you’ll need to sign this first. Standard protection for our methodologies.” Renee winced at that, but the cold truth was that her own personal methodologies had led to an empty refrigerator, an eviction notice folded in her purse, and her ex-husband’s lawyer demanding documentation she couldn’t afford to compile. “What kind of families would I be…inventing?” she asked. “The good kind. Little good people living their best lives.” The pen felt heavier than it should. Renee signed her name four times, initialed seven more. Each signature smaller than the last, as if she was already disappearing. --- That night, Renee created the Goodalls. Tom, an aerospace engineer who’d traded Boeing for beekeeping. Marla, who ran virtual yoga classes from their converted barn. Their daughter Emma, precocious but not annoying, who’d started a neighborhood newsletter at age nine. She gave each of them struggles—Tom’s father had Alzheimer’s, Marla had miscarried twice—but she also made these troubles part of their ongoing story, overcome by the community’s support. She uploaded their testimonial to Heirloom’s content management system at 2:00 a.m sharp. Then, just a few hours later, she received her first email from corporate: FROM: Analytics@Heirloom.io SUBJECT: Performance Metrics BODY: Goodall family narrative achieved. Bonus approved. By the next morning, a lifestyle blog had picked up the story. The Goodalls were real enough to trend. --- Six weeks in, Renee had populated an entire town. The Nguyens ran a sustainable coffee roastery. The Johnsons had left Chicago after their son’s asthma improved in the cleaner air. The Kowalskis hosted Polish cooking classes every third Sunday. She worked in solemn silence from her studio apartment, surrounded by character sheets and timelines out of a tabletop game. Each family had a spreadsheet: birthdays, allergies, the names of pets they’d lost. She knew that Kevin Johnson preferred bass to trout, that Linda Nguyen was learning Mandarin from her mother-in-law, that old Mr. Kowalski hummed Chopin while gardening. The work felt like playing God with dollhouses, except the dolls paid her bills. Then Google Maps...happened. Renee had been writing about the Goodalls’ new chicken coop, how Emma had named each hen after a constellation, just details to flesh out the monthly newsletter. But when she checked the map for street reference, she spotted a small structure behind 412 Maple, exactly where she’d placed it. At first, she thought she was hallucinating thanks to a definitive lack of sleep. But no. She blinked and checked the satellite view. It was clear as surveillance. She zoomed in further. The coop had a star chart painted on its side. That was *actually* impossible. She made that coop up. Renee’s hands shook as she refreshed the page. Same image. She checked the date stamp: yesterday. But she’d only written about the coop this morning. *This morning*. The rational explanation came quickly. Heirloom must’ve hired contractors, people who built what she wrote to stage photos. Viral marketing requiring physical props, after all. Though her salary seemed low for a budget that also included construction. And again, she wrote about the coop *this morning*. How could they have built it last night? *Freak coincidence. Freak coincidence. That’s all it is.* To calm herself down, she went back to writing. The Johnsons’ son had recently joined Little League. The Nguyens adopted a three-legged cat named Schrodinger. Details accumulated like snow, each one making the fictional town heavier, more real, more buried in plausibility. Her phone buzzed with several notifications in a row. The Goodalls had an Instagram now, probably set up by Heirloom with staged photos. Emma’s newsletter had real-life subscribers. The Polish cooking class had a waiting list. Renee made herself a new rule: *Don’t search for anyone online.* *Don’t look too close. Write the stories, collect the checks, pay the rent*. And honestly, that's all she had the power to do, anyway. But Renee had started dreaming about these people now. Tom’s voice explaining bee colony collapse. Marla’s laugh during warrior pose. Emma reading her newsletter aloud, stumbling over the word “perseverance.” She woke with their names in her mouth, thick as honey. --- The company flew Renee out for a “site visit” in the middle of month three. Said she needed to see the communities she was helping build. The plane ticket arrived with no return date. Hammond, Ohio. A town that had lost its tire factory, its hope, and half its population, mostly in that order. Heirloom’s revitalization centered on a seven-block radius downtown, fresh paint over rotting wood. Rene's handler, Derek, had the aggressive cheer of someone paid to believe in billionaires. “Wait till you see what we’ve accomplished, Renee. Your narratives really brought this place to life, I'm so impressed with your work.” They turned onto Maple Street. The house at 412 looked exactly as she’d described it in the testimonials. Not similar. *Exact*. The weathervane shaped like a biplane (Tom’s tribute to his Boeing days). The kitchen window herbs dying in specific patterns (Marla always forgot the basil). The front door’s scratches at shin height (their previous dog, Kepler, who’d died last spring). Even the welcome mat had a Thanksgiving pun that Renee had only thought about, never actually wrote down. “I need some air,” Renee managed. “Take your time,” said Derek. “Oh, but the community meet-and-greet starts at four.” Ignoring him, she walked toward the house like approaching a dream she’d had about drowning. Through the window, she counted the copper pots on hooks, stared at the Swedish coffee maker she’d invented for Tom’s birthday, caught a glimpse of Emma’s newsletter drafts spread across the table, almost tripped over a memorial for Kepler in the backyard. The front door opened, causing Renee to jump without her feet. Marla Goodall stood in the frame, appearing exactly as Renee had imagined. Strawberry blonde hair in a messy bun, paint under her fingernails, that small scar above her left eyebrow from a childhood fall Renee had written in her notes but never submitted. “You must be the writer from Heirloom,” Marla said, eyes attentive but not unkind. “We’ve been expecting you to show up at some point.” Renee’s mouth went dry. “H-how did you know?” “I don't know, you have that writer look. Like you’re seeing ghosts in everything around you.” Marla laughed in the exact pitch Renee had heard in her dreams. “Hey listen, I’m making sun tea. Tom’s at the hardware store, but Emma would *seriously* love to meet you. She has a ton of questions about the newsletter’s reach.” Swallowing everything but her humanity, Renee entered the house without a word. --- Inside, everything was wrong in its rightness. The furniture distressed in specific places. Photo albums on shelves, spines cracked at particular pages. The smell of Tom’s preferred coffee brand mixing with Marla’s lavender lotion. “How long have you lived here?” Renee asked, trying not to sound too panicked, but her hands were practically seizing up. Marla tilted her head. “Hm…you know, it’s the strangest thing. Sometimes I feel like we just got here, other times like we’ve been here forever. Tom says it’s the adjustment period. Moving does that to your sense of time.” Emma appeared in the doorway, nine years old and luminous with purpose. “Hi! Are you here about the newsletter?! Oh, oh! I have over 200 subscribers now!” “That’s wonderful,” Renee said, though she’d written that number into existence last Friday. “I’m thinking of adding a science corner. Did you know that chickens can recognize over 100 faces? Including human faces?” Emma pulled out a notebook covered in star stickers. “Orion—that’s our Buff Orpington—she knows all the neighbors now.” Renee made herself breathe. “Sorry, I should go. Not feeling well.” “But you’ll come to the block party tonight?” Marla touched her arm, and her hand was warm, real, impossible. “Everyone will be there. Mr. Kowalski promised to bring his famous pierogi.” “Everyone,” Renee repeated. “All the good people,” Emma said, and her smile was equal parts proud and precious. --- Renee didn’t go to the block party. She drove her rental car to the town limits, then past them, until Hammond was just lights in the rearview. But at the motel, her credit card was declined. The text from her bank: “Account registered to R. Mallory, 412 Maple Street, Hammond, OH.” She called them from the motel parking lot. The representative was polite but firm. According to their records, she’d updated her address weeks ago. They had documentation. Her signature. Her phone showed five missed calls from a number she didn’t recognize. The voicemail: “Renee, it’s Tom. Sorry I missed out on meeting you, and for calling you out of the blue like this, but Marla’s worried. You left so suddenly. Emma saved you a piece of pierogi. Come home when you’re ready.” Home. She checked her email. Her inbox had reorganized. Messages from Derek at Heirloom filtered into a folder labeled “Neighbors.” Her ex-husband’s lawyer had received a change of address form. Her LinkedIn showed her as “Community Narrative Specialist at Heirloom Lane.” Heirloom Lane. Not Heirloom Redevelopment. The map application on her phone refused to navigate anywhere except back to Hammond. So she drove through the night instead, following road signs, paying cash for gas with bills she’d hidden in her laptop bag. By dawn, she’d reached Heirloom’s corporate office in Columbus. --- The building was glass and steel and little else. She’d expected security, at least some kind of resistance. But the doors opened to her keycard—when had she gotten a keycard? The elevator had no buttons, but it knew her floor. The server room was in the basement, filled with banks of machines humming with purpose. She found the terminal easily; her login worked like it was waiting for her. The file structure spread before her like a map of synapses, each family a node, each connection a street, each story a house being built in real-time. The Goodalls’ file was massive now, spawning subdirectories: Emma’s school records, Tom’s work history, Marla’s medical files showing two miscarriages and a successful pregnancy. But there was another file, still rendering: R\_MALLORY\_V2. She opened it. It was her own life, rewritten. Parents who still called every Sunday. The promotion she’d never gotten. The marriage that hadn’t failed. A son named Oliver who played Little League and loved dinosaurs. A house at 414 Maple with a mortgage in good standing. Her body, ten pounds lighter, the stress lines edited from her face. A better version. A good person living her best life. The system prompt blinked: INTEGRATE? Y/N It all made so much sense now. Heirloom didn’t just create neighborhoods. It *replaced* them. Every story she wrote overwrote something true, someone real. The town revitalization was total bullshit. It was just an excuse to overwrite what came before. And now the system wanted to overwrite her. Her phone rang. She didn’t answer it, but the call clicked on anyway. Derek’s voice: “Renee, we know you’re in the building. This doesn’t have to be difficult.” “What happens to the people getting overwritten?” she asked. A deep sigh from Derek. “They become something new, Renee. They become better. Like the stories you wrote. Isn’t that what you wanted when you wrote them? To fix things? To make them good?” The word “good” echoed in her head, then materialized as a new memory. The word hanging over the Goodalls’ invented table. The Nguyens’ three-legged cat. Mr. Kowalski’s pierogi, recipes inherited from a grandmother who’d never existed. But maybe they did exist. Because of her. Her finger hovered over Y. She hesitated. Tried to think of another word to replace “good.” Only one came. *Oliver.* The son she’d never have, playing Little League in a town built from lies. Growing up in a story someone else would have to maintain. Believing his mother was good because “Derek” said so. Without thinking, Renee deleted the core drive. Not just her file. All of it. Every family, every house, every too-good-to-be-true lie. The system fought her with passwords, warnings, Derek’s voice over the phone promising lawsuits and even jail time. But she ignored all of it. The deletion took less than 20 minutes, long enough to remember every family she’d built and apologize to each one as their files disappeared in rapid succession. The Goodalls went last, and she swore she felt Marla’s hand on her shoulder one last time, along with Emma’s voice asking her a question she couldn't quite hear. The lights went out. In the darkness, Renee heard the building’s bones settling, like a house adjusting to new ground after an earthquake. --- Renee woke in her apartment. Her real apartment, with its water stains and expired lease. Her phone showed no record of Heirloom. Her bank account had sixty-five dollars. The eviction notice was still folded in her purse. She checked her phone. Hammond, Ohio was just another dying town. No Goodalls. No Nguyens. No testimonials. Renee laid down and put her phone to rest. She heard a knock on the door that jolted her back awake. Cautiously, she walked over to see someone had left a padded envelope on her welcome mat. She opened it. No return address. Inside: a child’s notebook covered in star stickers, pages filled with attempts at a newsletter. The masthead read “Emma’s Good News,” and below that, in slow, meticulous cursive: “Volume 1.” The first article was about chickens recognizing faces and how memory works. It ended with a few sentences about the way love persists even when its object of affection disappears. The last line stuck out the most. *Even dead things stay real in the hearts that saw them live.* Renee sat at her desk, no longer thinking about how behind she was on rent or what kinds of new people she’d invent. She just whispered to the empty walls, to the ghosts in the machine, to the little good people who’d never been... “You were real enough to me.” And somewhere in Hammond, Ohio, in a house that never existed, a family that was never born sat down to dinner, said grace, and remembered Renee’s name. --- ## Author's Notes: As many of you frequent readers know, I love to dabble in stories that tackle gentrification from its most haunted extremes. For this one in particular, though, I set out to meditate on the nature of creation and authenticity, particularly as someone not too dissimilar from our tragic main character. Let's break this one down. To be honest, I was nervous about this tale feeling too gimmicky. A story about fictional testimonials manifesting into reality? Even for me, that's a bit on the nose. But my main tactic was to always ground the premise in mundane descriptions. That is, I'm trying to anchor the supernatural horror in completely ordinary, relatable financial stress. That way the story can be all the more unsettling! So that means we don't start with a copywriter discovering her words become reality. Nope. The story begins with a down-on-her-luck job interviewee coveting a blazer that could pay her rent. Well, technically the story begins with "stories are a lie," which becomes increasingly ironic as Renee's lies become more real than truth. Anyway, one of the reasons I bill this as speculative fiction over a horror is in how the true terror here is economic precarity. Renee has $65 in her bank account and an eviction notice in her purse. Her complicity feels inevitable, even though $75k isn't life-changing money. It's survival money, which makes her choices feel grimly realistic to me. And that's also why the gentrification metaphor is so prominent. I wanted to write a savage critique of "revitalization" projects that erase existing communities but even more explicitly than I have in the past where actual residents are being overwritten, not just excised. The little good people are replacements, rather than just fictional, in the same way we use social media to put more appealing wallpaper on our day-to-day lives. Let's talk prose. I'm continuing to work on voice and restraint for my more commercial/upmarket stories. It's always a tricky balance to infuse literary tone with accessible flow, making sure lines have poetic weight without feeling "purple" and overwritten. On the second draft, our managing editor Natalia advised me to adjust some lines that skew closer to Renee's exhausted pragmatism. This was probably the best edit she gave on the entire story, and that's saying something. Also, I've been asked a few times lately how to make these short stories (especially ones as short as this) feel as lived-in and real as they do despite such a limited word economy. And for me it comes down to what I sometimes call **"The Uncanny Valley of Detail."** Simply put, specificity is what sells a world. The chicken coop isn't just a chicken coop, it has a star chart. The dog's scratches are at *shin*\-height. It's not just a coffee maker, it's a Swedish coffee maker. I don't want these details to be generic. I want them to be the kinds of things only an intimate observer would notice and point out. Further, these compressed stories always need to be heavily scrutinized at the scene level. The section breaks need to jump forward *just enough* to show progression while maintaining momentum. The email from analytics, the maps update, the Goodalls introduction, all of it should feel like a revelation begging you to read at least one more paragraph. I know I've gone back and forth when it comes to ambiguous endings, a constant topic of discussion here at Cetera. For this one, the ambiguity lies in the mystery behind Emma's notebook arriving after everything's been deleted. Which begs a few questions. Did Renee actually delete anything? How did everything just vanish? Did anything matter? Well, to be fair, the line "Even dead things stay real in the hearts that held them" suggests that creation, even false creation, has its own kind of permanence. But I do think that the story's ending succeeds (at least enough for me) because it never lets Renee off the hook morally while also never judging her. We understand exactly why she takes the job, why she keeps writing even after the first sign that something is wrong. The gut punch lies in how easily any of us might do the same thing for a decent salary and some health insurance. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-ex-files/#/portal/support) ### Three Poems from Lynchburg: A Study in Stillness URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/three-poems-from-lynchburg-a-study-in-stillness/ Last updated: 2025-11-30T22:29:10.000Z I flew to Virginia last Tuesday and drove a rental car two hours to my hometown, Lynchburg. The car smelled like someone else's life, and by the time I hit the city limits, I was already writing in my head. Not about the place, exactly, but around it. Sort of like how you might walk around a hole in the floor, aware of it with every step but never looking directly down. I spent four days there, mainly to visit family and friends and drive around a town with more hills in one neighborhood than the entirety of the Bay Area. I was also writing. The funny thing is, I've been writing poetry since I was 13, and I still don't know how to write about home directly. Every time I try, it comes out like I'm writing a postcard to myself. But the poems you're about to read—about a broken table, dirty dishes, a half-open window—somehow they get closer to the truth of being home than anything I could write that actually named the place. Here are the poems, and afterward I'll dive into what they mean and what they're trying to do and you can let me know how they do or don't accomplish just that. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Ex Files URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-ex-files/ Last updated: 2026-01-05T19:43:37.000Z There’s a special circle in hell for people who RSVP “yes” to their ex’s wedding, and I’m pretty sure it comes with monogrammed robes and unlimited rosé. The invitation arrives on a Wednesday, a day otherwise famous in my apartment for leftover pasta and pretending my houseplants are thriving. It’s a thick, creamy envelope, and when I open the card, pressed leaves scatter onto my welcome mat like confetti that overshot its moment. *You are joyfully invited to celebrate the union of Eliza Hart and Thomas “Tom” Brennan.* My stomach does a whimsical loop and lands somewhere near my ankles. Below the names, in smaller font, Eliza’s handwriting snakes in: *June, it would mean the world to have you as a bridesmaid. You’ve been such an important part of my life. XO, E.* I have three immediate thoughts in quick succession: 1. *She spelled bridesmaid correctly, which for her is tremendous growth* 2. *“Important part of my life” is the kind of phrase that should only exist on my tombstone.* 3. *I’m absolutely not going. Obviously. Obviously.* I prop the invitation on my bookshelf, between a salt lamp and an unfinished fern watercolor. I go about my Wednesday business, which means I spend twelve minutes microwaving spaghetti then Googling “polite ways to decline bridal party” and “fainting couches.” Then I text my best friend Nora, who replies with six skull emojis and *you’re not considering it, right???* I am not. I am not considering it for three days, during which I turn the card to face the wall like a small misbehaving child. On the fourth day, I turn it back. On the fifth day, my brain does something truly unhinged and drafts an acceptance message that includes a lot of exclamation points and the sentence, *I’d be honored, Eliza.* Then I hit send, throw my phone onto the couch, and slide to the kitchen floor, where my cat, Simone, blinks as if I’ve finally done something interesting. “There,” I tell Simone. “I’ve chosen growth. Aren’t you proud?” Simone yawns, revealing a tongue the color of a Valentine candy heart. I could give you a list of reasons for why I have agreed to doing something so transparently foolish as attending the wedding of a person I once thought would be *my* wife. Closure. Curiosity. Proof that I’m an adult woman who can attend a pastel event without crying into a napkin. The truth is smaller and meaner. *I want to see her*. Not to stop anything—this isn’t a movie—but to make sure the memory of us hasn’t been replaced by a version that flatters one person and flattens the other. To make sure I’m real in the story she tells herself at night. ⸻ The venue is a lakeside inn with weathered boards and a dock that creaks like a grandparent. I arrive on a Friday in June (the month, not me the person), a tote bag on my shoulder and a garment bag dragging dust bunnies through the lobby. The whole place smells like lemon oil slathered on soft bread. There are white hydrangeas in ceramic pitchers, and a chalkboard sign reading WELCOME HART–BRENNAN GUESTS in handwriting that makes me want to mind my posture. A woman behind the counter gives me my key and a map of “the grounds,” which turns out to be a lawn with like two hedges. As I trek to my cabin, I pass clusters of people in sundresses and linen shirts who are hugging like they’ve each won a small lottery. The sky is theatrical blue. The lake is a mirror. There’s a bridesmaids’ brunch on the deck. I am ten minutes late because I spend nine minutes pretending not to care and one minute choosing which sandal draws the least attention to my toes. When I arrive, Eliza is already there, cheeks flushed, hand woven through the hand of a man who is, unfortunately, adorable. He’s tall in a weirdly polite way. Big shoulders, soft eyes, smile that crinkles so much he’s clearly been smiling like this for a long time and sees no reason to stop now. The kind of guy who would teach middle-school science and bring extra granola bars for the kids who forgot their lunch. If I’d been hoping for a smirk or a cologne that smells like death, the universe has denied me that scene partner. “June!” Eliza says, standing so fast her chair does a squeak. She looks like summer itself found a yellow dress, hair tucked back with a clip that glints when she moves. She hugs me hard enough to bruise a tender part of my sternum, then pulls back and does the face—a smile with careful eyes. “I’m *so* happy you’re here.” “Me too.” The lie tastes like a shot. “Congratulations.” Tom extends his hand. “We’ve heard so many stories about you,” he says, and the *we* lands on my shoulder like a bird that might peck or sing, I can’t tell which. “All true, but context is for cowards,” I say, and he laughs, warm and uncomplicated. The bridesmaids are clustered around the table, a still life of glass pitchers and quiche. There are two cousins, one childhood friend (madly in love with her own fiancé and the concept of Etsy), and a woman in a crisp black sundress with a posture that says she is both prepared for anything and unimpressed by most things. She’s talking to the florist about peonies with the focus of a surgeon. When she glances up, my heart does a thing I learn in yoga to call “surprise” but which other people call panic. Riley. There are a few people in your life who can reroute your bloodstream just by existing in your periphery. Riley is one for me. We dated for four months in our early twenties, which in queer time is somewhere between “we went on two dates” and “we almost bought a rug together.” She was a grad student then, bartending at night, and the day we broke up she cried in a quiet, angry way that haunted my hairline for a year. When I think of her, I think of the smell of lime and the feel of being seen as a person with deflective instincts—and somehow being loved anyway. She walks toward me with a glass of ice water and her eyebrows doing that shape they do: amused, assessing, a little skeptical. She’s still absurdly beautiful, all angles softened by a mouth that has never believed in keeping quiet. The black dress fits like it was made by someone who understands both the concept of integrity and the existence of hips. “June,” she says, annunciating it gently, like we’re remembering how to use each other’s names. “You actually…showed up.” “Hi,” I say, because my brain is currently a static channel with a single commercial about Riley’s deodorant. Side note. I actually met Eliza because of Riley. They’ve been best friends since middle school. And I’m the super fun chill person who has slept with both of them and remained friends with only one of them. Go figure. “Riley!” Eliza sings, tugging us into a three-person constellation that puts me in orbit around the past and the present at the same time. “Did I tell you June is a bridesmaid? Isn’t that perfect? You two always got along.” Riley’s mouth does a very small thing that in Riley-speak translates to: *this is a maze with only one exit and it’s on fire*. “So perfect,” she says. Then to me, sotto voce: “You seriously RSVP’D?” “I did my civic duty,” I say. “It felt rude not to.” We take our seats, and the brunch swells around us as all wedding activities do, with the buoyant insistence of people cosplaying as their best selves. Eliza is incandescent. Tom alternates between squeezing her hand and refilling everyone’s water like hydration is his moral responsibility. I’m so busy not staring at Riley that I almost miss the moment Eliza squeezes my knee under the table and whispers, “Thank you for being here, *really*.” “Of course,” I say, and realize—hard, like a truth in the face—that I want this to be good for her. Not performatively good. Not “I hope this falls apart and I get to be the hero” good. The sort of good where someone you loved gets what they want and you’re small and silly enough to be happy for them anyway. After brunch, there’s a flurry of tasks. Gift bags to assemble, ribbon to curl, emergency stain remover to locate because someone’s cousin has discovered the perils of red sangria. The group chat lights up: BRIDESMAIDS 💫: calling it now: June will elope with the cake / bring scissors to room 3—STAT / who has bobby pins?? asking for eight different people. Every time my phone buzzes, I feel the ridiculous fizz of being included and the weird ache of a reunion that might be about more than bobby pins. Riley hovers near logistics like a benevolent, sarcastic moth. She’s good at this, the orchestrating, the calm voice that makes everyone else’s frantic voices settle. I corner her near the bow-making station, which is a real place and not a metaphor. “So,” I say, twirling a length of ribbon like nunchucks. “Maid of honor. That’s a big job.” She lifts a shoulder. “Someone had to know the difference between a boutonniere and a corsage.” “You always did love a well-labeled system.” “You always did love pretending you were above having feelings.” “Wow.” I pretend to be offended, but I can feel the smile tugging at my mouth. “Four months of dating and you think you know me.” “June,” she says, rolling her eyes in a way that suggests she has a slide deck titled Things I Know About You, with subheadings and an appendix. We fall into a rhythm so easily it makes me nervous. It’s a dance choreographed by memory: I hand her tape, she hands me sanity. We cross a hallway at the same time and pause because our bodies remember exactly how much space we used to leave for each other. It’s fine. I’m fine. That night there’s a welcome party on the lawn with fairy lights and a Spotify playlist someone should get a refund for. I wear a dress that makes my collarbone look halfway presentable, and Riley shows up in a navy jumpsuit that causes two different aunts to whisper the word *sharp* without a hint of irony. Eliza drifts in a bubble of attention, stopping every few steps to accept compliments. Tom never strays more than a breath away. They look happy—the real kind, the soft animal kind that doesn’t care if this photo ends up on a mantle or inside a shoebox. I keep waiting to feel the old twist in my gut, the one labeled *but she loved me better*, and it doesn’t come. What arrives instead is something quieter. Relief, maybe, or the shape of something I’ve been carrying that I can finally set down. Riley finds me at the edge of the dance floor. “So,” she says, offering me a plastic flute of champagne. “Team meeting?” I take the glass. “What’s our agenda, captain?” She tilts her head toward the bride and groom, who are currently being taught a line dance by a very enthusiastic twelve-year-old in suspenders. “Make sure Eliza means it,” Riley says. “Means…what exactly?” Riley gives me another one of her signature *looks*. “The French Revolution, what else, June? That she really wants to be with this guy.” I glance at her, almost sideways. “Hold on, we both know Eliza’s bi, so what are you really implying?” “I’m not implying anything *untoward*,” Riley snaps back, eyes still on the bride. “Just that I’ve known June since we were 12\. She’s only dated four guys since then, two of which before we even had driver’s licenses. The other two guys were such a catastrophe, I was honestly convinced she was going to swear off men for the rest of her life.” It’s a struggle not to laugh. “Listen, sweetie. As the person who almost made her swear off women for the rest of her life, I think you’re overthinking this.” Riley puts her hand to her face as if to relieve a headache. “I just…I just want to make sure we’re not letting her make a mistake because we both know she’s better at charming people than choosing them.” The way she says *we* makes something traitorous in me sit up straight. “So, what, we do a bisexual investigation of our own ex?” I expect Riley to dismiss what is clearly a joke. Instead, Riley stares on ahead. “Riley…” “We just ask a few questions. Get Eliza to open up a bit more about how she really feels. You know she barely told me about Tom before they got engaged? I only met him like once when they were dating. I haven’t had a chance to figure him out yet. To figure ‘them’ out.” “Are you actually asking me to do a *scheme* with you at a wedding?” “June, look—” “Oh, I’m not complaining,” I say, cutting her off. “That sounds like the perfect way to make this weekend a thousand percent more bearable. I’m in.” Riley takes a deep sigh I have trouble interpreting. “Thanks.” She glances at me. “This is for Eliza’s sake, though, not ours.” “Right. And if she does ‘mean’ it?” I ask. “Then we smile and dominate the dance floor. Obviously.” It’s ridiculous. The exact right amount of ridiculous for Riley. I clink my glass against hers. “Operation Proof of Bisexuality,” I say. “Unofficial. Nonbinding.” “Nonbinding,” she agrees, her mouth curving. “We’ll just observe and collect data. No interventions. This is not a break-up the wedding scenario.” “No, no,” I say firmly. “Tempting as that is.” We watch them. Not in a creepy way, in a “we’re very good at loving this person platonically and we want the best for her” way. Tom has a laugh that lifts people a few inches taller without asking. Eliza keeps reaching for him in the casual, habitual way of people who have practiced being gentle. At one point Tom whispers something to her, and she leans back, rolls her eyes, and kisses his nose. I have to look away because it feels indecent. Riley bumps my shoulder. “Okay,” she says. “He’s a teddy bear.” “You say that like it’s a flaw.” “I say it like I now have to admit I like him.” “Rough night for your brand.” Her smile softens. “Rough night for yours?” “Oddly, no,” I say. “Weirdly…good. Which, yes, is off-brand for me.” She watches me for a beat too long, like she’s measuring my face with an invisible ruler. “You always did know how to surprise me,” she says. “Just not always in the fun ways.” It’s the closest either of us has gotten to saying I missed you, and my body processes it like a sudden weather change. “Want to take a walk?” I ask. “Or we can keep doing amateur surveillance. You call it.” She glances at the dance floor, then at me. “Walk,” she says. “Data suggests fresh air increases emotional stupid.” “Sold.” We follow the path down to the dock. The night is warm enough to sleep inside my hair. The water has just the faintest tint of cucumber. We sit with our legs dangling and pass the champagne like teenagers with better glassware. “I thought you hated me,” I say, because the silence is asking for something true. Riley huffs a laugh without humor. “I thought I did.” “Why didn’t you?” She picks at a splinter in the dock, then lets her hands go still. “Because hating you never felt as satisfying as I wanted it to. And because most of what I hated was the part of you that was really scared.” “I was,” I say. “I was scared enough to act like I wasn’t.” “Oh, I remember.” She nudges my knee with hers. “I’m not looking for an apology.” “Thank god,” I say. “What *are* you looking for?” Her smile is small and unfair. “Evidence that you’re different now. Or that I am.” “I brought a laminated chart of my self-growth,” I say, and she laughs, real this time, tilting her head back like the moon might catch it. The night is gentle around us, and our hands are a careful two inches apart. We walk back slow, and on the lawn Eliza catches my eye and offers her simplest, most perfect smile. The one that says she genuinely loves me for all of me. It occurs to me that she might have invited both of us not because she’s careless but because she’s surprisingly brave. That she trusts us to be who she remembers we can be. And that we won’t…scheme. Oops. ⸻ The morning of the wedding the sky is an obedient blue and the humidity is a level of intimate I don’t remember consenting to. The bridesmaids’ room looks like a flower shop befriended a Sephora. There are garment bags, makeup palettes, a loose galaxy of bobby pins. The group chat pings with updates: someone bring coffee / found the vow book / don’t tell Eliza but i lost my bra and now i’m free and powerful. Riley is surgically calm. She moves through the room with executive efficiency, delegating tasks and soothing egos like she’s being paid per the crisis. She hands me a little velvet ring box and says, “Guard this with your life,” which is how I end up being the person responsible for the groom’s ring and would you like to hear my heart’s opinion about that? My heart thinks this is an excellent time to relocate to a farm upstate where it can live among hardy goats. I take my guarding *very* seriously. I put the ring box in my pocket, then in my bra, then back in my pocket because the bra feels like hubris. I practice my “I am calm” face, which unfortunately looks like I’m trying not to sneeze. Eliza laughs, leaning into me. “I love you,” she says, urgent. “You know that, right?” “I do,” I say, and the wedding humor of it makes her snort, which allows her to breathe. “Am I doing the right thing?” she whispers, because of course she asks me, the person who will tell her the truth even when it is the last thing I want to do. “Yup,” I say, and it rises up from somewhere I’ve only ever trusted on airplanes. “But only because *you’re* choosing it. Not because it’s easy. And because you don’t look at him like he’s changing you. You look at him like he sees you the way you want to be seen.” Her eyes get glassy. “God, you’re good at words.” “Occupational hazard,” I say. “Now, please marry the teddy bear so I can stop sweating about this ring.” The ceremony happens under an arbor that Eliza’s cousins built that morning, which seems like a liability and turns out to be perfect. The officiant is a friend who keeps almost crying and then pretending he’s not, which only makes everyone else wince. When Eliza walks down the aisle, half the row behind me makes a sound usually reserved for puppies tumbling. Tom looks at her like people look at a view that rearranges their sense of smallness. He stumbles over his vows, and it’s adorable, and when it’s Eliza’s turn, she squeezes both his hands and says, “I never thought home would be a person, and then you started leaving snacks in my car.” Everyone laughs. Everyone sobs. The ring exchange arrives and I, heroine, produce the velvet box like it is the Holy Grail. The ring glints. The lake pretends not to stare. They say I do, and we clap, and I have the weird, dizzy sensation of standing in the exact center of something that, for once, does not need me to push it one way or the other. At the reception, I do my due diligence as a former girlfriend and spend five aching minutes with the groom. We're at the dessert table since it's neutral territory. “Hello,” I say. “Nice tux.” “I know right?” he says, sheepish. “I mean—thanks. Officially. Eliza talks about you like you’re her guru or something.” I have to swallow a small, explosive sob and replace it with a manageable smile. “Taught her everything she knows,” I say. “Except how to be with a dude. That’s all her.” He chuckles. “I like that you and Riley are here,” he says, surprising me. “Feels like we’re making a real circle around her, you know? Not just pretending old things didn’t happen.” I stare at his face, at the open sincerity that would be corny on anyone else. He means it. He means every pixel of it. I want to hate him for being easy to like and discover I don’t have it in me. “Yeah, well, take care of her and all that,” I say, which is what feral exes say in movies, but Tom, sweet Tom, nods like it’s an assignment he can ace. “I will,” he says. “And she’ll take care of me. That’s the point, right?” “Right,” I say, and feel something let go inside me, gentle as a curtain falling. I find Riley near the bar, accepting a whiskey like she’s 18\. She’s got that post-crisis glow that only very capable people get, that soft relief of a job well and truly done. “You *cried*,” I accuse. “Please,” she says. “I hydrated. With eyeballs.” We stand together and watch Eliza and Tom’s first dance, the too-slow sway that says this is not for the photograph but for the secret conversation happening between their breaths. Over the DJ’s shoulder, the lake is shading into gold. The fairy lights snap on like stars feeling competitive. “Mission report?” I ask. Riley nudges me with her shoulder. “Subject displays clear affection, observable compatibility, impressive snack-forward romance.” “Conclusion?” “Conclusion: we’re idiots,” she says, smiling into her glass, “for thinking otherwise.” I exhale. “Eh, it was mostly you,” I say. “I had that guy clocked. Sure *you’re* not bi?” She turns to me, her signature look returning with a new power to melt steel beams. Then it fades into a temperature I almost forgot. Warm enough to melt something I forgot was frozen; steady enough to make me feel like I could leave it. “June,” she says, and my name in her mouth is a bridge between two countries. “Do you want to dance?” “I’m terrible at it.” “I know,” she says. “That’s why you need *me*.” We step into the spill of light. The song is something vintage people love at weddings, full of promises and brass. Riley’s hand finds my waist like it hasn’t forgotten it; mine finds her shoulder, and we laugh, because our bodies still fit in this joke. We sway in our own ugly rhythm, and it does not matter that my heel keeps catching in the grass, or that a small child runs between us with the single-mindedness of youth. “You left then,” she says softly, after a minute. “At the worst possible moment.” “I did,” I say. I’ve decided to be the version of myself with periods, not ellipses. “Sorry. I don’t have a good excuse.” “Can you try one?” I crinkle my nose. “Guess I owe you that…right…so maybe it’s…I thought the only way to keep myself *sane* was to keep everything else *uncertain*. I was wrong.” She nods, absorbing it like a person collecting taxes. “And you,” I add, risking it, “you asked me to be more than that, but you were also ready to run if I did.” Her smile tilts, equal parts rue and pride. “I was,” she says. “I was scared of how much I wanted you to want me.” “Do you want me to want you now?” A lightning strike of a question, I know. One that can only exist because I said it without thinking. She takes a slow breath. The lights catch on the pale tiny scar near her chin, the one she got from a falling glass in a bar on Valentine’s Day the year we thought we could make a cake with no recipe. “I want to cook you dinner that isn’t twelve garnishes and a single scallop.” “Hm. Well, I want to wash your cutting boards wrong so you can correct me.” “Hot,” she says. “Extremely.” We’re both smiling now, ridiculous and sober under a sky that has the good manners to glow. I lean in, cautious, and she meets me halfway, more certain. The kiss is a short one, a promise with good grammar. We pull apart and everything else happens in the slowest of motions. Eliza smears cake on Tom’s nose and his mother pretends to be scandalized. Riley clinks a glass and gives a toast that has three masterpiece jokes and two truths and one sentence that makes half the tent inhale. She thanks everyone for showing up as their best selves and, even more, for sticking around when their worst selves make an appearance. She looks at me on that last line and does not wink, which has to take amazing restraint. By the time the band plays the last song, my feet ache and my hair is listing to the left. The lawn is a battlefield of abandoned heels. There’s a half-eaten plate of mini quiches on our table, and someone’s tie has become a headband. Eliza and I find each other near the exit, where the sparklers are being distributed by a woman with the eyes of a safety PSA. “Thank you,” she says, pulling me into a hug. “For showing up. For… all of it.” “You did the brave thing,” I say into her hair. “You married a *man*.” She pulls back and presses her forehead to mine for a second, our old habit. Her eyes are wet. “He knows me,” she says, simple as a fact. “I can tell,” I say. “It’s nice to see.” We join the tunnel of sparklers, the night bright with small pretend stars. Tom and Eliza run through to a car with a sign that says JUST MARRIED in handwriting that is absolutely Riley’s. They kiss like a punctuation mark for the night itself, then drive away to a chorus of cheers and one unhinged scream from cousin Lily. The lawn empties slowly. The band packs up. The lake is a dark audience of one. I sit on a folding chair, toes bare, dress rumpled in a way I’ve decided to call intentional. Riley appears with two paper cups of champagne and the smug face of someone who successfully returned a deposit on a rented cake stand. “Come on,” she says. “Victory lap.” We walk to the dock. The boards know us now. The inn lights throw long gold ladders across the water. I think of all the small, stupid ways I could ruin this with a joke, and I choose not to. Sometimes growth is just the absence of a reflex. We sit. We share the lukewarm champagne. We make a list—because we are who we are—of things we want to try in the sober light of our regular lives: 1. *Brunch somewhere unpretentious where the coffee is good and the eggs are worse.* 2. *A movie we can’t agree on, watched anyway.* 3. *A walk that is less scenic than this and more honest.* 4. *A kiss without an audience.* 5. *A day where we tell each other the boring parts on purpose.* “Ambitious,” she says. “Especially the first one,” I say. “Have you ever even *heard* of an unpretentious brunch spot?” On the walk back, I swing my shoes in my hand. Riley carries the empty cups. She takes my free hand near the path, casual as a habit you’re delighted to relearn. Our hands fit in that old, new way, and we walk between the last of the fairy lights and the first of the dark, two idiots with a plan. --- ## Author's Note: This isn't exactly the first time I've dabbled in a story that inhabits what I love most about Emily Henry's rom-com novels, albeit compressed into short story form and mixed with themes about queer identity. Still, I really wanted to infuse *The Ex Files* with this sense of "mature" love that tackles the complex geometry of relationships past and present. Plus, who doesn't love this setup as soon as you hear it? I'm sure you can easily imagine the novel version of this, where "Operation Proof of Bisexuality" is an entire three-act engine of hijinks and mayhem. First, let's talk about June. I gave her a pretty distinctive voice I hope you picked up on. She's self-deprecating, witty, and emotionally intelligent while pretending not to be. In other words, her humor serves as both shield and revelation, a perfect foil to the sturdier but similarly world-weary Riley. In fact, I had it in my head at first that Riley sort of harbored a secret crush on Eliza when they were younger, which could still very well be true...but I realized it was more interesting to let that be unspoken. The real effort was to try and deftly handle the complexity of queer women's relationships. How exes can remain in each other's orbits for years, the specific intimacy of having dated the same person, and the mature recognition that love can take different forms. The triangle between June, Riley, and Eliza isn't supposed to feel melodramatic or competitive. Instead, there's a genuine care between all three women hopefully feels authentic to queer community dynamics. Even Tom. Ah, Tom...Tom could easily have been a cardboard cutout, but I wanted him to have some dimensionality. He's secure enough to want his wife's exes present, understanding that they're part of what made her who she is. His line about "making a real circle around her" shows emotional sophistication, I think. Speaking of, I think I just have a preference for romantic comedies that prioritize emotional honesty without sentimentality, or at least too much of it. And for rom-coms with queer joy that isn't a coming-out story or a tragedy. It's just about queer people living full, complicated lives. Where a list of modest ambitions like finding an unpretentious brunch spot can be more romantic than any grand gesture like chasing someone down at an airport. And to that end, you might've expected drama at the ex's wedding, but instead we get maturity and growth instead. Revolutionary! Overall, I just wanted to write a story that treats its characters with respect and intentionality that allows them to be funny, flawed, and ultimately kind to each other. Happy endings don't erase happy beginnings, right? And growing up, then, means growing back toward people you once grew away from. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-caller-isnt-human/#/portal/support) ### Someone Lived There Too URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/someone-lived-there-too/ Last updated: 2025-10-30T14:39:10.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/10/someone_adfree_thumb.png) Someone Lived There Too 0:00 /1842.8742083333334 1× I was warned about the house with kindness. The kindness that people on the Cape have perfected, which so perfectly sounds like hospitality when you first hear it. At the coffee place on Commercial, the guy with the Red Sox cap poured my medium regular and said, “Off-season? You an artist or a lunatic?” “Both,” I said, which was truer than I hoped it to be. “Where you staying?” I told him the lane and the number and watched his eyebrows climb. “That place is so old,” he said, testing the words on his lips. “Someone probably died there.” “Yeah,” I said. “And?” He laughed. “Suit yourself.” I carried the coffee out to the car and sat a minute with the heat running, watching the bay throw dull light at a duller sky. The houses along the shore tried to look cheerful, but the clapboard peeled in places and the shutters hung like tired eyelids. In summer those same houses will grin wide and eat people whole. In November they’re just mouths waiting for winter. --- My place was on a back road that remembered sand before asphalt. The sign said SEAGRASS CLOSE because on the Cape even a short dead-end has to sound like a children’s book. The house itself was one story with a little pitch in the roof and a dormer like a hat bandit...white once, gray now, the same gray that happens when salt wins the long game. A past-its-prime Cape with a square of lawn and a crooked flagpole and a hedge the color of old money. Out back, a scrape of marsh wanted to be part of the bay so badly, yet it failed every storm. I unlocked the door and the door unlocked me. It did that, sometimes—old houses let you in or they don’t. This one sighed as if I were its kid and let itself be opened. Inside wasn’t much. Cobwebs, old rug, the after-sweet scent of dry wood. Also a thin whiff of lavender that didn’t make sense. Definitely the same lavender you smell from sachets that old ladies tuck into drawers, except there were no drawers open and no sachets and no old ladies in this house. Not anymore. I walked around with my coffee and my duffel, cataloguing like a cop the sofa with a sheet thrown over it (yellow once), a narrow mantle with a glass bowl of sand dollars, a dining table that had a wobbly leg someone had tried to hide with a coaster under the short foot, and the cupboard next to the back door with a little fish carved on it where a handle should be. When I opened that cupboard the smell of dead bugs hit me hard and good. There were rain slickers hung on hooks, two adult size, one kid. I left them alone. I’m a painter when I can stand myself. Illustrations and hand-lettered covers when I can’t. People think being able to do both is a blessing, but most blessings come with a cord that goes around your wrists. Mine had been tightened in the roughest way these last few months until I mostly made outlines I didn’t fill in. I had come because my friend Hal said, *Go to the Cape in November, Rena. Half the tourist traps are closed, you won’t have any excuses, and you’ll have fog, which is nature’s Vaseline filter*. Hal was not wrong about fog, excuses, or me. The bedroom opened my nose like an ocean in a Victorian novel, and yes the imagination did the heavy lifting for rot. But the bed was a good one, firm but merciful, and the dresser had a mirror that made me feel kinder about my face. I ran my hand along the top and spread the dust like sand on a blanket. The lavender was even stronger in here. There was a ceramic vase with a spray of it on the window ledge, the purple sunk to brown, the stems brittle. Weird, the plant should have been dead twice over, but it smelled like it had been cut yesterday. *Someone probably died there*, the coffee man had said. He said it with such direct fatalism, a commonality for coastal folk who expect loss the way other towns expect incorrect weather forecasts. And he was probably right. People do in fact die in houses. But the bigger truth is that they live in them. They fill the walls until the walls are heavy with noise and then, someday, they go, and the noise curdles into a deep pressure that makes new people hear things. --- The first odd thing was daylight changing in a room with no electricity turned on yet. I was in the kitchen eating pretzels out of the bag because I had not yet done the adult thing and gone to Shaw’s. The afternoon was dull and sulking, the sky bruising too much for the hour. The room bent that demented light into a flattened coin on the table. I picked the coin up and it warmed itself in my hand, as if someone had polished it with their palm mere seconds ago. I looked for the source and didn’t find one, as the one small window had a view of hedge and gray sky. I stood still, and the mystery light lingered in the silence with me, and then it was only the regular daylight again, begging me to take a nap and forget I exist. The second odd thing was the door. There were three interior doors: bedroom, bathroom, and a skinny closet that made a walk-in pantry if you were willing to walk in sideways. Each door had been painted a pale seafoam at some point, then painted white later, and both paints had fought with each other ever since. The bedroom door didn’t like to shut unless you invited it in a particular way, with your shoulder and a little patience. I learned its preferences the first night when the wind came in off the marsh and made the whole place practice its do-re-mi-fa-so. The second night, sometime after two, the bedroom door creaked open in a way that wasn’t wind and most certainly wasn’t me. I woke to the small noise and lay there with my eyes shut because if this was a horror movie, then I wanted the cheaper matinee ticket where I die in my sleep. The lavender smell perked my nose. The floorboard just inside the door made an exasperated noise like someone trying not to wake a child. I opened my eyes and looked into the dark and the dark looked back the way it always does, equal opportunity. The door was open five inches. Nothing else. “Okay,” I said to the room, low. “You do you.” Look. I’m not brave. I am stubborn in the way that amounts to a cheap imitation of bravery. So I got up, shut the door, and went back to sleep. Because for me, exhaustion is better than exorcism, most nights. --- The third odd thing wasn’t odd at all, not really. It was the height marks on the doorframe. I found them on the third morning. I was walking the perimeter with my sketch pad, marking the scuffs and the places where paint bubbled and someone with patience had scraped it smooth and then given up politely. The marks were on the doorframe between the hall and the kitchen, showing pencil lines with dates. Nothing spooky about that. Every house that holds on long enough gets a doorframe like a prison tally, a record of successful growth. The dates went from 1979 to 1986, then they just stopped. But also two names in a mother’s careful hand: THEO and LARK. Sometimes just a T., sometimes L. Oh, and I spotted a couple hearts on the early ones that embarrassed me to see. The last mark was higher than my shoulder and had a star next to it. I put my fingers on the star and felt stupid about the way my chest collected water. People mark wins where they can, I guess. I mean a kid stood there tall for the first time in their little life and someone smiled at them for it. Then the wood kept a tidy record. That’s a kind of haunting too, I think. --- I grocery-shopped that afternoon with an “ignorance is bliss” mentality, as if buying pasta was going to fix a lack of art in me. At the fish counter, a woman in a red fleece with “Marcia” on it made lemonade out of our nothing conversation. “You the one renting on Seagrass Close?” she asked. “Yeah.” “That old cottage?” “It’s a house,” I said, because that felt like a defense of something I hadn’t earned. “Right,” she said, and made a face like she’d bitten a seed. “Just…folks say it’s got a draft that thinks for itself. But, well, folks do say a lot. You paint?” It was a challenge not looking down at the faded paint stains on my overalls she'd obviously just spotted. “Yeah. Trying.” “You know, sometimes the air in that cottage is wet with other people,” she said, and I was suddenly, irrationally sure her name wasn’t Marcia at all and she had borrowed the fleece from a sister or a lover or maybe a ghost and had never given it back. “Sometimes it’s just plain humidity.” “Good...to know,” I said. She wrapped the cod like it was a baby and handed it to me with that Cape look of half blessing, half *good luck, you’ll need it*. --- The mail slot had nothing for me when I got home. The house had gone gray in the early dark, too. I turned on the light by the door and the bulb complained and then did its job. On the entry table was a little pile: the local free paper, two catalogues I hadn’t asked for, a promising new credit card opportunity, and a postcard with no stamp. The picture was of Provincetown in sepia, the pier shouldering itself into old water. On the back, a single sentence in a looping hand: *The lavender needs water even after it dies.* No signature. I put the card on the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lobster and then took it back down and read it again just in case. Then I went into the bedroom and touched the brittle sprigs like I was testing a loose tooth. When I lifted the vase there was a faint round mark on the sill where it had sweated at some point, except the window hadn’t been open since I got there and the heat wasn’t on. I filled the vase in the sink because the options were *believe a stranger’s advice* or *feel rude*. The water seeped into the stems and the dried heads darkened from ash to something less dead. --- That night I dreamed a room I’d never seen cheered when a man came through it. The cheer had the creak of real life in it—the chair leg’s groaning, the relieving sigh of a woman who knows where the good pan is, the knock of a boy’s heel on a baseboard because he is tall now and doesn’t know where his limbs end. The man had sea on him, a gravity of it, and the woman crossed her arms to hide her satisfaction. There was stew in a pot and it changed its mind about boiling when he kissed her at the back of the neck. A girl (Lark, I knew as if someone had told me at a party and I’d forgotten and pretended I knew all along) put shells in a row on the table like money. When I woke, the bedroom light was different. It had that warm polish again. The door stood open five inches. Again. I got up and, instead of shutting it, I stepped into the hall. The house held still like a wild thing that has decided it isn’t trapped. I could hear the marsh talking to itself outside, a series of wet whispers to no one but the moon behind the gray. The kitchen at the end of the hall was bright in the darkest fashion, like it had been saving up emergency light during the day when no one was looking. On the table where my notebook sat, there was a sprig of lavender next to a pencil I didn’t leave there, its wood sharpened clean and perfect, far more than the janky handheld I carried. Apparently, someone had shaved it to a blade, and the shavings were the shape of little boats, curled and fragile. It would be a lovely prank if I knew anyone who had a key. “Hi,” I said to the empty house, wondering if I had a right to give it a name in addition to a hello. Nothing answered. Except the pencil wrote in a soft, willing way when I put it to paper, the line smooth as a tide line. I drew the door. Not from memory, of course. I looked up and drew what I saw, which was this: a door that had opened to five inches of invitation every night since I’d arrived; the paint that didn’t want to be white; the nick low down where a child had learned to ride a trike too fast down the hall. When I finished and put the pencil down, I knew I had drawn myself into it. My reflection in the window over the sink was ghosted in the door’s white, and if I shaded the white, I would shade myself out. --- The next day I walked to the library to see the ghosts of the old town on display. The librarian was one of those women who has decided the world might be small enough to manage. She wore her silver hair like a crown she didn’t brag about, and when I asked about the house on Seagrass Close, she pursed her mouth and then turned her face into a filing cabinet. “Which one?” she said, polite fencing. “The one with the hedge and the flagpole. Was there a family—Theo? Lark?” Her eyebrows had a private conversation. “Hm, yes, the Nicholases,” she said at last. “Benjamin, Alma, and the children. We have a town report from maybe...’82 mentions them. And a church bulletin…somewhere…with a supper for the fishermen’s families after a storm took four boats out of five but brought all the men back, praise be.” “And later?” I asked. “Yes, well, later we get bad with names,” she said. “People go. Gosh, that house has sat empty more than it’s sat full.” --- Back at the cottage I tried to paint and got exactly nowhere and then exactly nowhere a little harder. Sometimes I can feel the hole where talent should be like a cavity my tongue keeps checking. Still, I did the responsible thing and cleaned a counter and felt 0% better. Late afternoon, with a light I could slice bread on, I took the little bowl of sand dollars off the mantle and ran my thumb along their dry faces. One was broken. Inside was the faintest star. I didn’t hear the front door open, because in all honesty it didn’t. One minute the portrait over the table—the man with the stubborn mouth and the mustache from magazines our grandparents kept for the ads—stood a little crooked. The next minute it didn’t. The nail made no sound. The man looked levelly into the room like a teacher who already knew I didn’t do the reading and was going to be kind about it anyway. “Thank you,” I said, and then felt awkward, and then didn’t. --- I should tell you what the house did when I finally pulled at it. I had been waiting like I would with a shy cat. I had this steady presence, nothing grabby, no eye contact. And on the fifth night, the wind came strong enough to make the shrubs talk to themselves, sounding annoyed. I lay in bed with the lamp on, reading a book about loneliness. The lavender had decided not to be dead. The heads were still brown but the scent had a light above it now, like church. I turned the light off and the dark came simply and without malice. That was when the door opened to more than five inches. It swung to a soft stop as if a sensibly shod foot were behind it. The hall beyond showed a light that couldn’t be from a lamp. It had a golden domesticity I associated with Thanksgiving at other people’s houses. I got up and stood in the doorway and waited for my legs to do their shaking so I wouldn’t have to be surprised later. The house waited, too. That familiar smell of lavender came over me like someone else's breath. “Okay,” I said into the warm. “You win.” In the kitchen, the table had more things on it than the things I had put there. There was a basket—wicker frayed in two places—full of clothespins. A pencil box with shavings like I’d seen. A coaster with a duck on it that had been under the short table leg was now exactly where coasters are designed to be. On the counter by the sink, a glass with milk in it that was probably not milk but water shot through with light. When I touched the glass it went cold as a lake in November. The light in it rippled. I set it down and it made the sound of milk glasses set down a thousand times, that faint hollow report. *Once*, I thought, *there was a boy who drank milk here and knocked the glass over twice a week and got scolded by someone who loved him*. That sound had saved itself and now I was allowed to hear it. At the far end of the kitchen, the back door stood open and showed not the marsh but a vague suggestion of what could be a marsh. Then it became a summer. I saw a woman’s elbow leaning on a railing and a man’s hat hung on the back of a chair and two kids at war over a checkerboard and a pot on the stove interfering with every other smell the way stew does. The light came from everywhere light usually didn’t. It felt illegal to stare. It felt like someone had given me their private mail by accident. The woman turned her head. She looked toward me with a weary gentleness people often claim in their forties. I could see nothing of her face that wasn’t her. And I didn’t even know her. She lifted her hand, slowly, as if to say *I know you’re here*. “Alma,” I whispered, letting the right name arrive. “I’m sorry.” I don’t know why I said sorry. Maybe for using her house without explicit permission. Or maybe for letting my own house back home get bad in the ways hers once had and then acting like I didn’t see it. Maybe because apology is as worthless as a nickel, even if you can technically spend it anywhere. The scene took in a long breath and then let it go. The door closed with a little click. The kitchen was my kitchen again. --- That night I drew until my hand cramped. Normally I draw plans and outlines and I invent things that don’t really exist. Tonight I decided to draw something I remember about the world for once. I drew the basket, the coasters, the exact way the summer-lake light licked the edge of the table. I drew the doorframe and the pencil marks and left the last mark unshaded; I couldn’t bring myself to steal the star with graphite. When I put the pencil down it had become small with work and felt like a blessed little thing I hated dearly. I slept the way I usually do after a long cry, which I had done, though I couldn’t have told you exactly when it started. Maybe when the portrait straightened. Or right after the milk glass made its small sound. And when the door said *I know you’re there* and meant it kindly. --- In the morning the lavender stood up straighter in the vase. The heads had deepened in color like the house had been feeding them small sunrises in the night. I made coffee and poured it into the mug with the chip, as I have always preferred the damaged thing that keeps trying. On my way past the doorframe I saw a new pencil mark. It was a bit tiny and had the same hand as the older ones, only not as strong. The date was the day before today. There was no initial. Just a tiny line exactly at the height of my shoulder. Now, if you have ever had a house acknowledge you, you know that the floor will start to feel very different beneath your feet, like you’ve been given privileges or put on notice. I put my fingers on the new mark the way I had on the star and I laughed, a small surprised sound that made my throat sting. “Okay,” I said to the house, which was also to the dead and the not-dead and to my old cowardice. “All right.” Everything after that is easy stuff, which sounds simple when written down. I worked. The painting came. I stopped guessing at lines I didn’t intend to carry and I just carried them. I cooked two nights in a row and didn’t order pizza once. I bought a shell at the thrift store that looked exactly like a plastic knock-off until I put it to my ear and heard the oncoming train of the tide. I called my sister and didn’t just leave a message in the recesses of her life, I waited until she answered and then I told her the thing I had been saving in case love had a cap on it. (It doesn’t.) I went back to the library and found, with the librarian’s help, an article from 1987 with a flattened picture of four people, the headline about a fundraiser for a young widow with two children after a fall on the docks took a fisherman’s footing and then his life; the names: Alma, Theo, Lark; a list of pies that had been baked; a note about how the house on Seagrass Close had been painted by volunteers the following spring. The portrait over the table was straight as ever that night. I raised my glass of not-milk water over to the man with the mustache and said, “Thanks for coming home every time until you couldn’t.” I do not pretend the house was mine. When the storm hit late that week and made the road flood in two places and brought wharf planks down the channel like rough funerals, I set candles on the mantle and let the house sing its wind songs. The lights went out at six and came back at nine and in between the kitchen didn’t scare me even once. I sat at the table and drew in the candle glow, which was a fat, medieval light that made the room feel like it knew a secret prayer that actually worked. Somewhere in that three hours a small weight settled at the chair beside me and then leaned away, careful not to startle. I didn’t look up. I didn’t need to. The house and I had decided on the amount of seeing that was kind enough. --- By morning, the postcard on the fridge had new writing on it. The ink looked like it had been waiting in the card all along and had just decided to arrive. It said: *Thank you for keeping the door open*. I bought fresh lavender the next market day and didn’t tell myself I was doing it for the scent. I was doing it for the conversation. *You keep up your end. You water even what everyone else thinks is dead*. On my last night I finished the painting. It was a painting of the door, of course, with the hall keeping very still and the kitchen full of a light that had learned to keep its secrets a little better. If you look close you can see a reflection in the glass of the framed picture on the wall, the one with the man who never entirely came home. The reflection is a woman standing in the doorway. She has a messy ponytail and the posture of someone who is trying to be a decent guest. It is not a perfect likeness, no painting is. But she is there. I washed my brush in the sink and stood with my hands on either side of the basin in a posture I’ve seen in bad movies and holy books. The house made its settling noises and the marsh made its wild ones. I turned out the lamp by the door and the dark came kindly again. In the bedroom, the vase of lavender waited for me like a harbor light. The door opened five inches. “Goodnight,” I said. They said someone died there. At the coffee place, at the fish counter, in my sister’s tender voice when I told her where I was. Maybe that’s true. You could taste it in the air, a shard. But when I turned out the light, I swear I heard someone breathing beside me. And it reminded me that someone lived there, too. --- ## Authors' Notes: We're finishing off our October of Horror with a three-person effort on this week's story. That's right, *Someone Lived There Too* was created by three of us here at Cetera Magazine: Jon Negroni (person writing this part), Natalia Emmons, and Bridget Serdock. Bridget came up with the original concept after pitching their idea about a misunderstood Cape house. Their original note was: > It's weird that we see ghosts as exclusively malevolent things in the US. I'm trying to parse through how our initial thought when we see an old house is "wow, someone died there. it's haunted" and not "wow, someone live there and loved it so much that they didn't leave" or "someone lived there and you can feel their ghost because the things we touch and love always have a piece of us in it." From there, Bridget drew up the artwork you see at the beginning of this story, where it's a dual interpretation of a "haunted" house, literally "reframing" itself down to the picture frame. Natalia, our managing editor, had an idea to build an original story around this concept to go with the comic. She pitched me a flash fiction piece, just under 1000 words, that is the skeleton of what you just read above. After reading it, I noticed a lot of similarities to Stephen King's approach to writing cyclical horror, and I took a pass at expanding the story into 4200 words with multiple scenes, and Natalia provided the final edits and a few rewrites. This is our first big collaborative effort and I think it worked out quite well. Mainly because we found a way to go beyond the typical haunted house narrative and tell a story about cozy grief and artistic paralysis. Which is fitting, no? You'll notice that the story, while concocted by three people, still employs a measured, contemplative pace that attempts to mirror both the off-season Cape Cod setting and the main character's emotional state. For example, the opening establishes the story's central tension through the coffee shop warning—"Someone probably died there"—but then immediately subverts expectations by having Rena respond with indifference. This sets up the story's deeper concern with how life persists in spaces after their inhabitants are gone. One of Natalia's biggest contributions was in deciding how to treat the supernatural elements. The "haunting" progresses through gentle intrusions (mysteriously warmed light, lavender that won't die, doors opening to precise measurements) rather than traditional scares. These manifestations feel less like violations than invitations, a house trying to communicate in the only language it has. (You should also check out [*Open Concept*](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/open-concept/) here at Cetera if you haven't already, which does a very similar haunted house tale in even more personified fashion). The height marks on the doorframe serve as the story's emotional anchor. They're simultaneously the most mundane detail (every family home has them) and the most poignant (they stop in 1986, presumably when Benjamin died). So when a new mark appears at Rena's shoulder height, dated the day before, it's the house's way of *marking* her presence and accepting her into its chronology. That, by the way, was all Natalia. Whereas Rena's narrative voice is distinctive and extremely Bridget. Self-deprecating but not self-pitying, observant but not detached. Lines like "I'm not brave. I am stubborn in the way that amounts to a cheap imitation of bravery" reveal someone who knows herself well enough to be honest about her limitations. Rena's artistic block mirrors her emotional state and her initial relationship with the house. Most of my contributions stem in the prose and structuring. I wanted to infuse this story with unexpected metaphors that feel both fresh and exciting. So I wrote about houses that "grin wide and eat people whole" in summer, fog as "nature's Vaseline filter," exhaustion being "better than exorcism most nights." I wanted to make sure though that the writing manages to be both lyrical and grounded, never letting its "poetry" overwhelm the emotional truth of the story. I also wanted to have the recurring motif of lavender—dead but fragrant, brittle but somehow alive—to work as a helpful metaphor for how love and memory persist in spaces. The instruction to "water even what everyone else thinks is dead" becomes the story's thesis about attention and care. At its heart, this is a story about the human need to be seen and acknowledged. Rena arrives at the house unable to create, carrying some unnamed grief or failure (her damaged relationship with her sister, her artistic block). The house, holding its own grief, recognizes a kindred spirit. Their mutual acknowledgment becomes healing. The story also explores how we inhabit spaces temporarily but meaningfully. Rena never claims ownership of the house; instead, she becomes part of its continuing story. The final image of her reflection painted into the door's white paint suggests that we leave traces of ourselves in the spaces we occupy, just as they leave traces in us. I'm so glad Natalia pushed for the story to have this much restraint in its craft. We never over-explain the supernatural elements or force bombastic, emotional revelations. The ghostly manifestations could be read as purely psychological—a lonely artist projecting meaning onto an old house—but the story doesn't insist on this reading or its opposite. I really think it exists comfortably in ambiguity. And yes, the ending resists the urge for dramatic closure. Rena doesn't solve the family's tragedy or lay their spirits to rest. Instead, she simply acknowledges them, and they acknowledge her. It's a mutual recognition that allows both parties to continue existing, slightly changed. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/10/461439309_8398302373569948_5266001374489845171_n.jpg)](https://ko-fi.com/bridgetserdock/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Bridget Serdock is an illustrator and editor for Cetera Magazine. They're also a producer of Fantasy Writing For Barbarians. "I am nothing if not kinda heartwarming in an aggressive way." [Buy Bridget a Coffee ](https://ko-fi.com/bridgetserdock/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-26-at-12.42.28---PM.png) Natalia Emmons is the managing editor of Cetera Magazine and one of its cofounders. She mainly writes short fiction, poetry, and extremely long text messages about the perils of run on sentences. [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-caller-isnt-human/#/portal/support) ### The Caller isn't Human URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-caller-isnt-human/ Last updated: 2025-10-23T14:19:32.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/10/caller_adfree_thumb.png) The Caller isn't Human 0:00 /1703.9840136054422 1× The rain never stops in this part of town. It runs down the window in slow streaks, turning the neon from the liquor store across the street into a pulse of blue and red. Inside the laundromat, the lights buzz in uneven time. The machines breathe heat. Ray sits behind the counter, watching the reflection of the door in the chrome of the dryers. Every thirty minutes, the payphone outside rings three times and stops. Nobody answers. Nobody ever has. The sound just folds back into the hum. HUM At 2:11 a.m., a light at the far end of the room flickers and steadies. The kid doing laundry for his three younger siblings is on his phone and doesn’t look up. The nurse folds her last pair of scrubs. Ray reaches for his coffee and freezes halfway, eyes on the door. The reflection isn’t right. He counts two people inside, but there should be three. Ray stands up and sees the trucker still on the bench, hat over his face, one boot off, the other planted like he fell asleep mid-lace. The kid’s phone freezes, his thumb tapping a dead screen that mirrors the ceiling glare. The nurse stacks her bundle into a bag and bites her rubber wedding ring once, out of habit, then lets it snap back. “Teena,” Ray says, because he knows most night people by name. “Rain’s picked up.” Teena nods and leaves without speaking. Her tires hiss off into the steady wash. The door settles. The hum fills the space she leaves behind. The payphone rings three times. Stops. Ray looks at it until the reflection stops vibrating in the glass. Then he watches the floor where the water gathers in the mat’s low places. The mop leans in the corner. He tells himself to check the coin trays and the lint screens, and he does, moving down the line, opening and closing the small doors. RING 2:40 a.m. The kid’s phone wakes up, then dies again. He shakes it once and pockets it. He moves to the vending machine and studies the rows as if the choice matters more than it does. He picks crackers. The spiral starts and stops halfway. The bag hangs by a corner and doesn’t fall. “Tap the glass near the bottom,” Ray says. He doesn’t raise his voice. No need. The kid obeys and the crackers drop. He says thanks. He doesn’t eat the crackers. Probably saving them for home. Outside, a car rolls by with one headlight. It pushes water and disappears. The payphone glow is weak but it holds. The booth’s bulb has been failing for months, but it never quite gives out. The door opens and Officer Dyer steps in, rain on her shoulders, hair in a frizzy bun. She nods once to Ray, once to the kid, then looks at the sleeping trucker and the clock on the wall. “Coffee?” she asks. “Stale,” Ray says. “Can’t afford the good stuff anymore.” “That’s fine.” Dyer pours her own into a paper cup and doesn’t add anything to it. She stands, sipping, facing the door like it might decide to change its mind. The radio on her shoulder murmurs, then clears, then goes back to a low hiss. She thumbs the knob and lets it be. “You hear the payphone tonight?” Dyer asks without looking at Ray. “Twice,” Ray says. “Anyone answer?” Ray shakes his head. “Never.” Dyer chuckles and watches water score the neon into lines. “Well, somebody’s paying that bill,” she says. The trucker snorts awake, repositions his hat, and falls back down into sleep without opening his eyes. The kid stands by the door and tries to get a signal. He raises the phone and turns like a weathervane. The screen stays black. At 2:58 a.m., the payphone rings again. Three times. It stops in the middle of the third and starts over like the signal stuttered. Dyer sets her coffee down, crosses to the door, and peers out through the glass. “You want me to—” Ray starts, but Dyer is already pushing out into the rain. Ray watches her go to the booth. Dyer lifts the receiver and listens. Her face doesn’t move. She looks left, then right. She says something short that the wind eats, then holds the receiver away to look at it, like the plastic could tell her more if she stared at it harder. She puts it back gently and comes in with rain knocking off her jacket in small taps. “Dead air,” she says. “Could be kids.” “Kids aren’t out,” Ray says. “Kids don’t sleep,” Dyer says. She tastes her coffee and winces. “Stale it is,” she says, and smiles. Ray goes back to the coin trays. Dyer walks the rows slow and casual, but her eyes catch edges. The door’s reflection sends lines into the chrome. If someone stood outside, centered with the phone, they’d be a cut-out figure in the glass. There’s no one there. Just rain, the liquor store, and the outline of the booth. The kid moves to the bathroom. The lock doesn’t catch; never has. The door sits in the frame, keeping the night out. At 3:07 a.m. the light at the back flickers twice and steadies. Ray hears something under the hum, a thin scrape like rubber on tile. He looks at the mop and tells himself that’s all it is. He listens harder and hears the scrape again. It has a rhythm to it: two steps and a pause, then two more. The noise stops when he stops. He breathes through his mouth until the hum fills whatever space the sound left behind. The bathroom door opens a crack. The kid sticks his head out. “Hey, the faucet won’t shut,” he says. “The cold makes it stick,” Ray says. “You have to turn it extra.” The kid nods once and disappears. The water keeps running for a beat, then stops with a cough of pipe. Dyer’s radio breathes static in and out. A voice tries a sentence and falls apart halfway. She thumbs the dial again. “You ever lose power?” she asks. “Not all the way,” Ray says. “Just the back row. When it does, it comes back the way it went. One after the other.” Dyer looks at the dead bulb in aisle three. “You need a ladder,” she says. The payphone rings. One. Two. Three. It stops. Dyer doesn’t move. Ray doesn’t either. WASH At 3:19 a.m., a delivery truck noses into the lot and angles toward the alley. Lin steps in with a plastic tub of detergent packs, shakes the rain off her hat, and sets the tub on the counter. “You’re light on lemon,” she says. “We never sell lemon,” Ray says. “Then you’re heavy on everything else.” Lin signs her own clipboard. She looks past Ray at the wall of monitors that show the cameras. The pictures swim. One image stutters as if the lens is breathing. The alley cam is a gray smear. The door cam shows the payphone booth in black and white, its bulb brighter than the real one. “You got ghosts again,” Lin says, like it’s a joke that’s been told before. “Just rain,” Ray says. Lin whistles at the sleeping trucker, who doesn’t wake. She holds the whistle, one long note, and smirks at Dyer. “Test,” she says. Dyer doesn’t return it. Lin winks at Ray instead. “You hear about the guy down at the water plant? Says he keeps hearing the same song on the loudspeaker no matter what station he sets. Same chorus, over and over. Whole place is out of time.” She lifts the tub, rotates it like she’s testing the weight, then sets it down. “Anyway,” she says, which is a way of saying none of that matters here. Ray signs the slip. Lin points a finger at the monitors again. “That alley looks…” she starts, then waves it away. “I’m late.” She goes out. The door closes. The alley cam clears for a second. It shows nothing but a glistening rectangle of wet concrete and a dark line that could be a shadow or not. Then it goes grainy again and stays there. The trucker snores. Dyer finishes her coffee because there isn’t anything else to do with it. The kid comes out of the bathroom and uses the hand dryer, even though his hands don’t look wet. He keeps them under the blower until it times out, then presses the button again. He repeats it one more time before finally stopping. The payphone rings again. Three times. On the third, the booth light pops and goes dark, and the ring keeps going for half a second after the bulb blows. Ray feels the ring come through the glass more than he hears it. Dyer moves to the door. She keeps her hand on the handle without opening it. She steps out into the rain and crosses to the booth. She tries the receiver. She touches the bulb housing with the back of her hand. It’s hot. Ray watches her come back in. Dyer’s shoulders are drenched again and her bun is about to give up. “Bulb’s gone,” Dyer says. “Phone’s dead. Felt hot, though.” “Short,” Ray says. “Or not,” Dyer says. The kid goes to the vending machine again and buys the same crackers. This time they fall all the way without sticking. This time he opens the bag and eats one, slow chewing, watching the monitors like they’re a window into a better room. Ray takes the tub of detergent packs into the back to shelve it. The door doesn’t latch behind him. He sets the tub down and stands still for a second. The smell is stronger back here, almost like wet paper. He hears the scrape again—two steps, a pause, two more. It might be the drip from the water heater hitting the concrete in a rhythm that isn’t random. He lifts his head and listens. The drip stops. The hum keeps going. When he comes out, the trucker is gone. The bench is empty except his hat now sits on the seat. Ray looks at the bathroom door. It’s open. He looks at the dryer row. The last machine on the left has stopped early, clothing inside pressed against the glass like a face. He moves down the line with his hand away from his side like he’s ready to touch something hot without thinking. “Where’d your guy go?” Dyer asks without turning fully around. “Bathroom maybe,” Ray says. Dyer nods and walks over. She taps the bathroom door. “Sir?” she says. No one answers. She pushes the door enough to see tile and a sink and a mirror that reflects a bulb that doesn’t flicker. She steps in and looks behind the door and under it. She flushes the urinal just to test the plumbing, then steps out and shakes her head. “Not in there.” The kid points at the monitors. “He went out,” he says. “I saw the door.” Ray rewinds the feed with the cheap metal jog knob. The door cam breaks into frames. The trucker stands up, puts his boot on, hesitates, then moves toward the door without looking at anyone. He disappears into the edge of the frame. The payphone booth is dark. The rain looks like lines etched onto the glass. Dyer goes out again. The lot is empty. The truck cab is still there. The engine isn’t running. The trailer door is locked. Dyer taps it anyway and waits to feel movement through the metal. There’s nothing. She looks at the booth, then past it into the mouth of the alley. The dark line the camera showed is still there. Up close, it’s just a stripe where water isn’t pooling because the concrete dips. She reaches down and touches the seam. It’s dry. She pulls her hand back and wipes it on her jacket without meaning to. She comes back in. “Could’ve taken a walk,” she says. “People do.” “At three in the morning?” the kid asks. It comes out like he didn’t mean to say it. “In this rain? Without his hat?” “People do weirds things at three in the morning,” Dyer says. Ray nods. Not like he has a better answer. He goes to the back door to check the bolt. It’s slid all the way. The metal is cold. QUIET At 3:41 a.m., the power in the back row flickers off, then on, then off again. It steps down in sequence, one machine, then the next, like a person is walking along the line throwing switches only they can see. Ray feels the air change, a small drop in pressure like a door opened somewhere behind the building and stayed that way. The hum shifts and refuses to settle. Dyer lifts the radio. She speaks into it, says her location, waits for the click and the answer. The answer comes thinned out. She tries again. The radio carries her own voice back to her a second late. She clips it back to her shoulder and doesn’t show her teeth when she breathes. The kid stands in the middle of the floor with his empty cracker bag in one hand and the dead phone in the other. He looks at the booth outside. He looks at the door handle. He doesn’t touch it. A janitor named Walt comes in from the adjacent office building with a wet trash bag and a face like he’s been awake too long in bad light. He nods at Ray and at Dyer and gives the kid a half-smile. “We losing juice?” he asks. “Back row,” Ray says. Walt points his chin at the ceiling. “Ballasts. They hum before they go,” he says, then shrugs. “Everything hums before it goes.” He crosses toward the bathroom with his bag and his long-handled grabber. He doesn’t lock the door. He never does. He whistles something tuneless and stops halfway through when he hears himself. The hand dryer spools up and dies on its own. Walt chuckles, soft. The payphone rings. Three times. Everyone looks at the dead booth. The bulb is out. The ring is loud anyway, not dulled by glass, bright in the room as if it isn’t coming from outside at all. Walt freezes in the bathroom doorway with his hand on the frame. He turns his head without turning his body and looks back at Ray. “You getting that?” he says. Ray doesn’t answer. The ring stops. The hum takes its place. The kid sets the empty bag on the counter carefully, like he doesn’t want to make a sound louder than that ring. Walt goes into the bathroom. The door rests in the frame. It doesn’t latch. A beat passes. Another. Water runs for one second and shuts off with a cough again. The hand dryer spools up, then down. Walt doesn’t whistle. Ray glances at the monitors and then away. He tells himself not to. He looks back anyway. The bathroom camera shows the sink and the mirror and the paper towel dispenser that only works after two tries. The angle doesn’t show the stall. The sound doesn’t carry. The picture holds steady. “Walt?” Ray says, not loud. No answer. Dyer moves toward the bathroom. She pushes the door with two fingers. “Walt,” she says, and steps in. The kid breathes through his nose. Ray stares at the door and counts without meaning to. He gets to eight and the door swings wider. Dyer comes out. She stands in the doorway longer than she should. She doesn’t say a name. She doesn’t say “Jesus” or “no.” She looks at Ray and then past him at the booths on the monitors and then back at Ray again. “Call his number,” she says. Ray moves to the phone behind the counter and picks it up. The dial tone is a flat line that isn’t a tone at all. He sets it down and tries his cell. It hangs on searching and doesn’t find anything to search. He looks at the payphone outside, dark as a dead tooth. He thinks of lifting the receiver and doesn’t move. Dyer turns and closes the bathroom door until it rests. She doesn’t shut it. She doesn’t want to trap the air inside. She steps to the counter. “We’re on our own for a minute,” she says. “Nobody go outside.” The kid nods like a person in a first-aid video. “Where’s the trucker?” Dyer asks Ray, as if asking now will change the answer from before. “Gone,” Ray says. “Where?” Dyer says. Ray doesn’t answer. The back row of machines goes off, one, two, three, four, but not in order. The pattern is wrong. The hum deepens until it feels like something under the floor is breathing different from what’s above it. The dead bulb in aisle three flickers and holds for a second, like it remembered it should be on, then lets go. The door handle moves. No one is touching it. The handle goes down a quarter inch and stays there like a finger weighing it, testing it. It lifts. It goes down again. Dyer aims her eyes at it and doesn’t look away. She steps toward the door, slow. “Don’t,” Ray says, and it is the only word he has said with any force tonight. Dyer stops. The handle clicks just enough to sound like a lock engaging and then not. The payphone rings. One. Two. Three. The fourth ring climbs into Ray’s skull and hangs there. Dyer’s face doesn’t change, but Ray sees the muscle at her jaw jump once. The ring doesn’t stop. It extends. It’s not a ring anymore, not really, just a tone that doesn’t belong to any machine in the building. Something knocks politely on the glass. Dyer speaks to the door. “Place is closed,” she says, as if testing whoever’s on the other side. The handle lets go on its own. The knock doesn’t repeat. The tone fades out like it decided to, not like it got cut. “Back room,” Dyer says. “Bolt it. Now.” Ray moves. The kid doesn’t move until Ray points and says “Go,” and then he goes. Dyer stays by the door and watches the reflection hold steady in the metal trim. She sees herself as a silhouette. She sees the booths as blocks of cheap wood. She does not see anyone else, and that is not enough to make her open the door. The back room is smaller with the three of them in it. The bolt slides. The room changes temperature even though the thermostat doesn’t. Ray points at the breaker panel. “Back row,” he says. “Leave it,” Dyer says. “Dark is better.” “Not if it’s in here,” the kid says, and then he looks down like the words got away from him. They stand in the quiet that isn’t quiet. The building keeps breathing. The water heater clicks. The compressor starts and stops twice without settling. The monitors in here show the same bad pictures as the ones outside. The bathroom feed holds the mirror and sink. The door inside the frame moves with the wind. Dyer’s radio coughs and says her own name in a voice that could be hers. She turns it off. She turns it back on. She doesn’t try again. “Guess we wait,” she says. “What for?” the kid asks. “For it to pass by,” Dyer says, and it sounds like she has said this before in other places for other reasons. The bolt turns on its own. It doesn’t slide all the way. It twitches, a notch, as if someone is trying to understand how it works by touching it. Dyer puts her hand on it and holds it in place. Ray looks at the floor. The line where water should collect stays dry. He follows it with his eyes to the far corner where the mop is. The mop handle leans and then straightens without falling. “Tools,” Ray says, and opens the cabinet for the breaker lockout bar and the long screwdriver that isn’t for anything in particular. He hands the bar to Dyer and the screwdriver to the kid. They stand with their backs to the wall and the door in front of them. The bolt stutters again, then stops, like whatever is on the other side lost interest or learned all it needed to know. Dyer’s watch says 3:59 a.m. It ticks once and doesn’t tick again. The second hand rests between seconds. “No clocks,” Ray says, and he didn’t mean to say it out loud. The kid laughs once. “It gets very bright at four,” he says, and Ray doesn’t know how he knows that. The payphone rings. They hear it clearly in the back room with the door closed and the bolt half-slid. It rings three times. It waits. It rings a fourth time and stops half a beat before the sound should finish. Dyer exhales. She lifts her hand off the bolt. She waits for the door to push. It doesn’t. Ray opens the breaker and throws the back-row switches one by one. The lights come up in sequence, not the way they went out earlier, but in a clean line, like the building remembered the right order on its own. The hum finds its pitch again. The compressor settles. The water heater stops clicking. The second hand on Dyer’s watch doesn’t move, but the room feels like it decided to belong to them for a minute. They open the back room door and step into the laundromat. Walt is not in the bathroom. The door is open. The mirror is clean. There is a wet line on the floor where feet would walk if they didn’t lift, but it doesn’t lead to the back room or the front door. It stops in the middle of the aisle and does not resume. The kid moves toward the bench where the trucker slept and stops himself halfway. Dyer goes to the counter and checks the monitors. The door cam is clear. The alley cam shows only rain. The bathroom cam shows what the bathroom looks like when no one is in it. Dyer touches the screen as Ray walks to the front windows. The payphone booth is dark. The receiver hangs straight, no sway. The liquor store neon across the street has shut off. The sign still reads LIQUO, missing the R the way it has for months, but now the letters don’t even pretend to light. The rain keeps falling with quiet velocity. He turns to say something to Dyer and the kid. He doesn’t. Instead he listens. The building is very quiet now. The hum is steady and low and honest. He hears only that and his own breath and the click the door makes as the night adjusts against it. The payphone rings. One. Two. Three. Four. Ray doesn’t move. Dyer doesn’t either. The kid closes his eyes like he is about to lift something heavy. The fourth ring ends in the middle again and leaves nothing behind, not even the hum for a heartbeat. The quiet is complete. It has weight. Then the lights continue their buzz, the machines breathe, and the laundromat returns to what it was. They don’t open the door. They don’t answer the phone. They stand in the light and wait for the sound to tell them whether the world outside still wants them or not. --- ## Author's Notes: Our October of Horror continues, and this time we're publishing a story that aims to build dread through restraint and precision rather than explicit scares. Let's break down what's going on in this story. First, the atmosphere. The laundromat serves as our liminal space, a place people pass through at odd hours, neither fully public nor wholly private. The 2-4 a.m. timeframe places us in what folklore calls the "devil's hour," when reality feels thinnest. The constant rain creates isolation while the broken neon sign (LIQUO missing its R) signals that things here are incomplete in small but persistent ways. From there, I set out to provide meticulous attention to patterns and their disruption: - The payphone rings exactly three times every thirty minutes...until it doesn't. - Machines fail in sequence going one way, then return in a different order. - The fourth ring that shouldn't exist but does. - People disappearing not dramatically but simply being absent where they were present. Through it all, Ray serves as our anchor. He's observant, methodical, and trying to impose order through routine (checking coin trays, counting). Officer Dyer represents failed authority. Her radio won't work, her presence can't prevent what's happening. The kid and the peripheral characters (Walt, the trucker, Lin, Teena) create a community of night people who understand unspoken rules about how to exist in these margins. Which brings us to the threat's fundamental unknowability. We never see it directly, only its effects. Reflections show wrong counts of people. Door handles test themselves. The bolt learns how it works. There's a wet line on the floor that stops nowhere and leads nowhere. The entity, or whatever it may be, seems to be studying, learning, and testing boundaries. Possibly without malevolence. It might just be an alien curiosity (which is somehow more disturbing). For the prose, I chose to employ short, declarative sentences that accumulate weight in order to mirror Ray's methodical observation. The use of "HUM," "RING," "WASH," "QUIET" as section breaks should create a sense of mechanical progression while highlighting the story's focus on sound and its absence. The recurring motif of things that almost work (the bathroom lock that won't catch, the dying phone booth bulb that won't quite fail, the vending machine that sometimes drops crackers and sometimes doesn't) creates a world where reliability itself has become unreliable. This is a hallmark of short-fiction horror writing when you don't have a lot of time or words to get the existential dread across. To that end, the story obviously has zero resolution. The survivors don't escape or triumph or die or fall apart. They simply wait "for the sound to tell them whether the world outside still wants them or not." This suggests that whatever has been testing them isn't finished. Or worse, that they've already been changed in ways they don't yet understand. The reason it ends like this is because at its core, this story is about the fragility of the systems we depend on. Not just electrical and mechanical, but social and perceptual. The working-class night shift setting isn't incidental, after all. These are people already living on the margins, already used to being unseen. When something else unseen arrives, they're both the most qualified to recognize it and the least equipped to stop it. The title's declaration that "The Caller Isn't Human" is never explicitly confirmed in the text, leaving us to wonder if the real horror is that it might be something worse...or that it might be nothing at all, just the universe revealing its fundamental indifference to our need for coherence. Whatever breaks us down isn't always human. It's far bigger and scarier than that. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-petals-beneath-her-tongue/#/portal/support) ### The Petals Beneath Her Tongue URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-petals-beneath-her-tongue/ Last updated: 2025-10-16T14:32:05.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/10/petals_adfree_thumb.png) The Petals Beneath Her Tongue 0:00 /1735.1092063492063 1× > Content warning: this story contains body horror, medical procedures, and themes of exploitation. If visceral transformations or loss of bodily autonomy are difficult subjects for you, then you may want to skip this week's story. The contract was printed on glass and glowed faintly against her skin, as though light itself wanted her signature. *Temporary sensory partition*, it promised. Such polite words for a dismemberment of the soul. Vera read each clause like a prayer to a god she most certainly did not believe in, remembered that she did believe in making rent this month, then signed without looking at the final lines. Hope had a taste, she realized. A touch of copper mixed with sugar, and it sat on her tongue as the clinician led her toward the chair. “Open,” Dr. Kwan said, her voice soft as gauze. “Let the body make room.” Her body was in a most unfamiliar room. White tiles, white screens, white silence. Refrigerated breath hissed from the vents like a mechanical choir. Every wall gleamed as if scrubbed free of its history. The chair reclined with ecclesiastical gravity, and Vera lay back, her jaw trembling. For a heartbeat she felt absurdly holy, like Kwan viewed her, *her*, as a lamb on some pristine altar. A far enough cry from the Savorium ad that brought Vera here, promising to pay her both financially and reputationally for selling her emotions to millions of strangers. Emotions they could pay to taste with a single tap on their phone. “This will sting,” Kwan murmured. “Pain is simply attention, and attention is progress.” The tools descended. Slender, luminous needles the shape of angelic quills. Their shadows teased her throat. A brace widened her mouth and she smelled her own fear—a sweetness curdled by metal. Screens pulsed pastel commandments: SAVORIUM CARES. SAVORIUM CONVERTS. SAVORIUM LISTENS. “Now breathe,” Kwan said, though what she likely meant was *surrender*. Pressure first. Then heat. Then a revelation that began under her tongue and crawled upward through her nerves. The needles sang as they entered. She saw colors she didn’t know names for. Violet with a pulse, yellow that sighed. Her tongue blossomed into a geography of meaning. Valleys of salt, plains of grief, the high bright mountains of childhood joy. Every flavor she’d ever known returned as a memory in bloom, down to the sting of gin on a stranger’s breath, the mundane smoke of a birthday candle, the taste of tears spilled for an audience that never applauded, and years and years of bitter disappointment. She was weeping now, but the brace held her open, obedient. “Perfect density,” Kwan said, clinical and tender all at once. “You metabolize emotion rather beautifully.” The sentence struck home. To metabolize emotion…wasn’t that all she’d ever done? Make marketable the ache beneath her ribs, distill heartbreak into social media content? Since the scandal and her botched apology video, the algorithm had learned to digest her in kind. The screen above Vera's heart displayed her pulse in kaleidoscope colors. Kwan reached for something small and shining. A seed, translucent as spit, veined with circuitry fine as cobweb silk. “This is the anchor,” she said. “PETAL-9 substrate. It will live under the tongue, somewhere between truth and appetite.” Vera’s throat flexed. “D-does it hurt?” “It blooms,” Kwan corrected. “Pain is just the body trying to understand its own map of infinity.” The seed touched flesh and adhered with a kiss. Cold radiated outward, exquisite and unsettling at once. For an instant she felt her tongue recoil in curiosity. The mesh whirred alive into a faint purr. Light fractured behind her eyes. Every heartbeat tasted of color. When it was done, Kwan withdrew her hands as though finishing a benediction. “You may close,” she said, though closing felt impossible now. Vera swallowed anyway and felt the seed move, burrow, settle. This foreign beacon, a portal perhaps between her and the people who'd forsaken her for a single misstep, a single miscommunication. Now she'd communicate with a completely different sensation, an honest one. The most honest one, perhaps. Outside the clinic window, the city shimmered under a film of heat. An almost crooked billboard advertised the show she'd been up for less than a year ago, the slot filled by an up-and-coming rival she didn’t even know she had. What would the algorithm make of her now? The so-called influencer resurrected in flavor, the patron saint of palates. The literal tastemaker. A soft metallic taste coated her teeth, bright and strange. She licked her lips and tasted the future, warm and electric. And for the first time in months, she felt seen again. --- Savorium paid Vera quickly, as if afraid her holiness might spoil. The first experience—JOY: LIME BLOOM—was released under a halo of advertising so luminous it could blind a conscience. Her smile returned to the public as an offering of communion. On the thumbnail, she was caught mid-laughter, a shimmer of citrus vapor coiling from her lips, the caption reading: TASTE THE THRILL THAT SURVIVED VERA SALAZAR. The flavor sold out in forty minutes. Vera watched the numbers climb from her small apartment, its walls papered with the dust of old ring lights. On her tongue, the seed thrummed in its gentle engine of intimacy, reminding her that every joy purchased was harvested from her own flesh. And at night, she would taste echoes of her clients. One of them a girl giggling into her first spoonful and feeling summer burn behind her eyelids. A man dissolving into laughter at a comedy show until he wept. Thousands of mouths praying through her name. She was feeding the world, and it was hungry for her. When she returned for recalibration, Kwan examined her with the reverence of a jeweler appraising a cursed diamond. “Any discomfort?” “Only when I eat,” Vera said. “Food feels like a lie.” Kwan nodded, the ghost of a smile haunting her face. “The palate evolves over time. What once filled you, now offends you. You are becoming rather selective.” Selective. Another word for *better*. Vera wondered if the doctor would agree. They moved on to LOSS: SALT/ASH. A deeper extraction. The taste of endings refined until it could be safely consumed. This time the process burned her tongue. The mesh underneath pulsed and bled gold light. Tears ran down Vera’s face, hot salt translating to data, grief encoded in sugar molecules. She heard the machines murmur her sorrow back to her in soft, mechanical empathy. “Beautiful yield,” Kwan whispered. “So clean.” Afterward, Vera staggered to the mirror. Her reflection looked back with a stranger’s calm. She smiled. And in that smile was devotion and rot, both of which were indistinguishable to her at this point. --- When LOSS launched, it became a week-long phenomenon. People filmed themselves spooning her sadness in the dark. Many of them wrote original songs about the experience, and one restless college student even stitched together an entire video of people in different cities, states, and even countries singing about the taste of Vera Salazar in a blissfully imperfect unison. Many of them raised their hands throughout, as if on pure instinct. In the comments, one woman wrote: *I cried and it was delicious*. Another: *My husband left me and I finally understand why*. The comments blurred into a single throat chanting her name. Vera scrolled until her eyes ached, until the seed pulsed in sympathy. She tasted their tears in her sleep. --- It was in the third week that the change began. Vera woke with the sense that her mouth was *listening* to her dreams. The seed in her mouth felt warm now, occasionally twitching like a second heartbeat. And sometimes—only sometimes—she could taste something not her own. The crackling sweetness of rain striking stone, the dust of a child’s chalk drawing, even the quiet flavor of someone praying for her. She told Kwan all of this in a single breath. The doctor merely looked pleased. “Cross-talk,” she said. “A sign of integration. You’re syncing beautifully with your audience.” Audience. The word filled Vera’s mouth suddenly, like blood after a broken tooth. At home, the city glittered through her window, all those lights like tiny tongues tasting the dark fog mixing with smog and rust. Her body buzzed alongside it. Later, she dreamt she was walking through a market of souls, each stall a mouth, each vendor selling bottled laughter and tears. They called to her in every voice she had ever loved. When she woke, her pillow was damp, and the air smelled like lime squeezed over ashes. --- At dawn, Vera brushed her teeth and felt something tear. A thin film of skin, soft as a sigh, unfurled beneath her tongue. She spat into the sink and saw a single, glistening petal veined with gold. It trembled like a weak insect afraid of dying. Vera stared. Her reflection did not blink. The seed hummed. And deep inside her mouth, the taste of joy and loss merged as acid and salt, pleasure and mourning, until they were one and the same. She realized, then, that she had not lost her appetite at all. She had only been preparing for a different meal entirely. One that would finally satisfy her. --- By the time Savorium asked for ANGER, Vera had learned to taste obedience. Kwan briefed her in that soft priestly monotone the company prized. “There’s a market for rage,” she said. “People want to feel anger safely. They want it contained, blessed, and brief.” Rage. Anger. Vera had never once considered these to be luxuries, but now she could see it. Now she was selective. She sat in the white chair again. The instruments hummed in anticipation, metal begging to be flesh. She had begun to like that sound, the way it shook violently with hunger. “Think of what you hate,” Kwan said. The list unfurled behind her eyes without hesitation. The anonymous mouths that spat her name until it lost its shape, the talent agents who called cruelty honesty, the musk of Hollywood desperation worn as perfume. She let the anger rise until it steamed from her pores. The mesh drank it with greedy lust. Afterward, the room smelled like a dead body dipped into a vat of boiling chocolate. “Perfect,” Kwan murmured. “It’s alive and absolutely perfect.” When Vera opened her eyes, the walls looked swollen shut. The white had taken on its own pulse, somehow. She realized it wasn’t the room at all, it was her own blood echoing through the tile. --- The drop launched at midnight: BITTER LIGHT. The world devoured it like a cult meeting gone feral. Videos of people screaming through spoonfuls, faces red, veins proud, then smiling as if purged. Most of the comments said it tasted like the pure truth everyone knew but was too afraid to say out loud. In her apartment, Vera tried to sleep, but the flavor of their fury kept leaking back to her in penny copper tongues pressing against hers through the digital dark. She could feel them, millions of teeth chewing her memory of pain. She pressed her palms to her cheeks and felt the pulse inside her mouth reply with mindless reassurance. The next morning she brushed and felt something tender and resistant catching the bristles. She spat into the sink and saw it glimmer there: another small petal, but this one milk-white with a blush of gold at its tip. It quivered when the air touched it. She lifted her tongue. Another petal was forming underneath, soft as unbaked bread. Her mouth had begun to bloom. --- She went back to Kwan, soaked with sweat. “It’s growing,” she said. Kwan leaned close, light haloing her surgical mask. “Of course. You’re adapting, which is totally normal. The substrate is protective tissue. Think of it as armor.” “It feels like it wants to choke me.” “Maybe it will.” Kwan’s eyes, so calm, did not quite hide their fascination. “Every saint needs stigmata.” Armor, saint, stigmata. Fancy words that still left the taste of antiseptic honey on her tongue as she left the clinic. That night Vera dreamed of her own teeth falling like snow. Each flake melted on her lips and whispered a word. She woke knowing one of them all too well. Hunger. The same hunger she thought she’d erased for good. --- Short days blurred into shorter weeks. The petals multiplied—two, then four—each one humming faintly, as if keeping time with invisible music. Vera began to taste things before they happened. The iron of storms several minutes before the first boom of thunder. The sickly sweet cola of apologies not yet spoken. The mesh had dissolved the barrier between anticipation and experience. She was all appetite. Kwan called again. “The clients want something restorative. Something to ease them after the burn.” Forgiveness. They meant forgiveness. Vera laughed until her throat hurt. “You can’t eat forgiveness,” she said. “That’s what they said about joy,” Kwan answered. “Come in tomorrow.” --- The lights inside the clinic dimmed to a cathedral hush. Kwan adjusted her instruments. “Imagine forgiving them,” she said. “All of them. Let it fill the mouth.” Vera closed her eyes. She tried. The first image that came was her grandmother’s kitchen, mangoes sliced to the bone, the air thick with fresh life at risk of hidden decay. The memory softened something in her. The petals stirred, tasting the image as if it were overripe flesh. “Good,” Kwan whispered. “Hold that.” The pain came sudden and intimate, like being kissed by a razor. The mesh pulled deep. She felt her anger turn to something molten, something that could no longer hold shape. It flowed out of her in waves of sugar and salt and when it was over, she tasted blood and milk and mercy. “Beautiful yield,” Kwan said. “Almost too human.” --- Vera left the building in a tipsy daze. The city’s heat hit her like a lover’s playful slap as even the car exhaust was incense. Every shout a sermon. People passed her on the street, and she tasted them as they went by. Their grief, caffeine, cheap lipstick, lust, sincerity, veneer of personality. Their flavors mingled inside her like a choir trying to harmonize. Under her tongue the petals pulsed in rhythm with those passing hearts. She understood, then, that she was no longer the meal. She was the mouth. Vera leaned against a lamppost, head spinning, and whispered a prayer she didn’t mean to speak. “Let them taste what I really taste.” The wind shifted. The air bit her tongue with its rotting perfume. Somewhere, miles away perhaps, a woman gasped mid-spoonful, certain for a heartbeat she’d heard someone whisper her own name. --- By the eighth week, Vera’s tongue was no longer a tongue. It was a garden breathing beneath her words. Each petal shimmered with light caught from unseen suns; when she spoke, her sentences left trails of pollen instead of air. Savorium’s instruments deemed it aberrant growth and likely unacceptable. Kwan considered this a total victory. “Incredible, you’re creating an auditory feedback,” the doctor said, half-awed. “The city’s sensory grid is lighting up whenever you dream.” Vera smiled. The flower rustled inside her mouth, pleased to be overheard. That night, she dreamed of the world tasting itself. Skyscrapers licking the clouds. Rivers drinking their own reflections. Every tongue, every nerve ending, confessing the same small truth: *we want to be felt.* When she woke, the dream had not ended. The air vibrated, thick with savory relief. Through the window she saw people staggering into the street, eyes half-closed, mouthing sentences to no one. Their lips glowed faintly, as if a new sense had been installed as a beta update. She knew then that the mesh had finished its work. It had stopped recording and started broadcasting. She went outside barefoot. The pavement throbbed like it could suffer under her feet. Each step released a taste of smoke, salt, honey, sorrow. Wherever the wind passed her face it carried another memory, another flavor. She could feel the city listening. Patiently. When Kwan found her—hair undone, mouth open to the night—she whispered, “You’re resonating with them. You need containment.” Vera shook her head and opened her mouth wide. The flower unfurled in full, each petal more hollow than breath. Light spilled between her teeth. Everywhere, people paused. Screens froze. Voices hushed. The world began to reflect back the effort she had put into them. Taste immediately became contagion. Lovers felt each other’s despair as a creamy aftertaste. Strangers shared the rustic sting of fear and were gentled by it. For a few trembling minutes, no one was alone inside their skin. It was unbearable. It was divine. Kwan reached for her, tears on her cheeks. “What are you doing to us?” Vera smiled—a slow, reverent smile, as if unveiling the meaning of pain. She opened her mouth, but no words had room for release. Only petals, loosened one by one, drifting from her mouth into luminous seeds. Where they landed, people shivered and remembered the taste of lime and ash, blood and forgiveness. The city breathed once, enormous and altogether. Vera sank to her knees on the bridge. Kwan caught her, felt the heartbeat flicker out beneath her palm. The final petal rested on Vera’s lip, trembling in the wind. When it broke apart, the air changed—sweet, saline, electric—as if the planet around her had taken a sip of its own blood and finally understood it was alive. --- ## Author's Notes Influencer culture already treats human interiority as an extractable resource. I wanted to make that metaphor literal, to show what it would actually look like if authenticity became a commodity you could harvest, package, and consume. But this story isn't really about influencers. It's about what happens when the boundary between self and other dissolves. When empathy stops being voluntary. When connection becomes forced. I deliberately left the ending ambiguous because I genuinely don't know if what happens to Vera is transcendence or annihilation. Both readings are valid. She achieves the ultimate form of what she wanted. To matter, to be consumed, to feed others, while losing everything that made her an individual. Is that Christ-like sacrifice or the ultimate corporate nightmare? Yes. I structured this in short, untitled sections because I wanted the reading experience to mirror Vera's dissolution. Each section is a bite, a taste, a moment of intensity. The white space between sections does as much work as the prose. It gives the reader room to digest, to breathe, to feel the accumulation of the horror. Traditional scene breaks would have imposed too much order on a story about boundaries collapsing. The fragments allow for temporal and tonal jumps without explanation. We move from procedure to aftermath to dream logic without needing connective tissue. Notice how much time I skip. The actual implantation scene is relatively brief. Then we jump to the third week, the eighth week. I'm not interested in showing every stage of transformation, only the moments where the transformation becomes undeniable. This creates acceleration. Each section covers more time and more change than the last until we reach the ending, which happens in a single moment that contains *everything*. I obviously saturated this story with a lot of liturgical language, words like chapel, ecclesiastical, benediction, stigmata, communion, because I wanted to elevate the horror to the sacred. Body horror can be viewed as a martyrdom, a transubstantiation. The religious imagery does double duty in that sense. It makes the corporate extraction of selfhood feel ancient and ritualistic, capitalism as religion, and it frames Vera's transformation as potentially holy rather than purely grotesque. Compare these two ways of writing the same moment. Clinical: The needle entered her tongue and released the substrate. Sacred: The seed touched flesh and adhered with a kiss. The second version makes it intimate, almost erotic, definitely holy. That's the register I wanted throughout. From the moment the mesh is implanted, I deliberately confused the senses. Every heartbeat tasted of color. The air smelled like lime squeezed over ashes. Colors she didn't know names for. In other contexts, this would be a huge mistake because how can someone taste a color? Well, for this story, it's a way of showing that Vera's sensory apparatus has been fundamentally altered from what's "normal." So "normal" descriptive language fails because she's experiencing things no human tongue was meant to experience. When writing synesthesia, be specific about the wrong sense. Don't just say it tasted like sound. Tell me what sound it tasted like. *The hum tasted like copper pennies held under the tongue* gives just enough possible texture to the impossibility. Notice what's absent from this story. We never see Vera eating after the procedure. We never see her trying to have sex, or shower, or live a normal day. These absences are intentional. They let the reader's imagination fill in the horror of what it would mean to taste everyone constantly. The most effective moment of implied horror might be this line: *She could feel them, millions of teeth chewing her memory of pain*. I don't describe those teeth. I don't show the chewing. The reader does that work, and what they imagine is worse than anything I could specify. Horror often works best when something familiar becomes slightly wrong. Vera's tongue is still a tongue, but it's also a garden by the end (*Hell's Paradise* being a clear influence, by the way). The petals are organic but also technological. These small violations of category create unease. When crafting the uncanny, identify what should be separate and let them bleed together: organic and technological, doctor and priest, food and communion, self and other, pleasure and pain. I received early feedback saying the ending was unclear or asking what really happened. And I get that. I indeed structured the ending to support multiple readings. Tragic: Vera is consumed by capitalism, literally dissolved into a soulless product until everyone will eventually tire of her again. Transcendent: Vera achieves apotheosis and actively avoids the tragic ending above by becoming a kind of secular saint. Neutral: This is simply evolution, neither good nor bad. Horrific: She forces empathy on the world, violating everyone's boundaries. All of these are textually supported. I didn't want to tell you which one to feel because I genuinely hold all four interpretations in tension. Bad ambiguity is vagueness, when the author doesn't know what happened out of indecision. Good ambiguity is multiplicity, when several specific interpretations coexist with varying but reasonable amounts of validity. To achieve this, give concrete details that support multiple readings. Use language that contains its own opposite, unbearable and divine in the same sentence. Let your metaphors mean several things at once. Trust your reader to make meaning rather than insisting on one interpretation. After all, I end with an image, not an explanation. The petal breaking. The air changing. The planet tasting itself. These are concrete sensory details that carry metaphorical weight without becoming abstract. Ending with image allows multiple emotional registers to blend. It's beautiful, the planet understanding it's alive, and horrifying, tasting its own blood, and ambiguous, what does that understanding mean? An explained ending would collapse that multiplicity. When ending your story, consider whether explanation serves or limits the work. Sometimes the most resonant endings are the ones that give the reader something to see, taste, or feel rather than something to understand. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/housekeeping-for-the-dead/#/portal/support) ### Housekeeping for the Dead URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/housekeeping-for-the-dead/ Last updated: 2025-10-09T14:22:26.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/10/housekeeping_adfree_thumb.png) Housekeeping for the Dead 0:00 /1169.5015873015873 1× > Content warning: this story deals with terminal illness, death, and complicated grief. It is honest about the guilt and anger that can come with watching someone you love die slowly, and it doesn't offer easy comfort or resolution. So if you're dealing with a situation like this in your own life, you may want to skip this week's story. The Starlight Motel has twelve rooms but I only clean seven. The other five stay locked. Nobody ever asks why. I start at eleven. The rain steams against the hot asphalt and the vending machine won’t stop humming no matter how many times I kick it. My cart has wheels that don’t turn right. I’ve learned to push it sideways. Room 3 first. Always Room 3. The key sticks, so my wrist torques wrong and I feel it in my elbow. Inside smells like a perfume I can’t remember the name of. White Shoulder? I just know it comes in a frosted bottle shaped like a woman with no head. I also remember my mother wore it to my eighth-grade graduation and the smell made me sneeze through the whole ceremony. I remember that, but I don’t remember the name of the perfume. Inside Room 3, the woman in the bed is asleep or pretending. Thin hair spread on the pillow, rusty at the roots. One arm outside the covers, bruised green-yellow at the crook. IV marks. Her chest rises slow. I start with the bathroom. Someone threw up in the sink. Not much, just a little pink splash, toothpaste-bright. I wipe it with the blue towel that says STARLIGHT in thread so old it’s gone gray. When I come out she’s sitting up, looking at me. She has my mother’s mole next to her left eye. She has my mother’s mouth, the way the bottom lip is fuller than the top. She has my mother’s hands, knuckles big from arthritis she never got treated because doctors cost money. “You don’t have to,” she says. Her voice is smoke and gravel. “The room’s fine.” I say nothing and strip the bed while she sits in the chair by the window. The sheets are damp. They have that sour-sweet smell that gets into everything. I fold them into the cart, not looking at the rust-colored bloom on the pillowcase. “I had a daughter,” she says. I put on the new sheets. Hospital corners. Pull them tight. “She used to clean my apartment when I got too tired. I’d tell her not to bother but she’d do it anyway. Vacuum. Dishes. She’d get mad at me for leaving soup cans on the counter.” My mother left soup cans everywhere. Campbell’s chicken noodle. She’d eat it cold from the can, standing at the counter, and leave the empty next to the sink where it would leak orange brine onto the Formica. “She sounds nice,” I say, my voice hoarse. “She stopped visiting.” I tuck the blanket in. “Maybe she got busy.” “Oh, well, maybe I got mean.” The woman coughs, wet and thick. “People get mean when they’re dying. Did you know that?” I knew that. She’s quiet while I finish. When I look up she’s not breathing anymore. Just stopped, between one moment and the next, like a light switching off. Her head tilted toward the window. The parking lot lights make her face orange. I remake the bed with her in it. Tuck the blanket up to her chin. She fades before I finish, going gray and then transparent and then just gone, but I pull the blanket smooth anyway. The perfume smell stays. --- Room 4 has a low hum. Or maybe it’s just in my ears. The woman’s in the chair with an oxygen tank, the tubes in her nose, watching a rerun of some game show with the sound off. Her hair is long, pulled back in a scrunchie. Pink velour scrunchie. My mother had one exactly like it that she wore until the elastic died and it became just a tube of fabric. “Oh,” she says when she sees me. “I thought checkout was eleven.” “It is.” “Then why are you cleaning?” I don’t know how to answer that. I start with the trash can. It’s empty except for a tissue with lipstick on it, orange-pink, the color my mother wore to make herself feel like she’d tried. “Need anything?” I ask. She looks at me for a long time. The oxygen machine clicks and hisses. On TV, someone wins a car and their mouth opens in a silent scream. “I need a cigarette,” she says. “But I’ve got this thing.” She taps the tube. “Can’t smoke within fifty feet of oxygen tanks. Did you know that? You’ll blow yourself up.” “I didn’t know that.” “Well, now you do.” She shifts in the chair. “There’s a lighter in my purse. Red Bic. You could smoke for me. Stand where I can see you through the window. I could watch.” The purse is on the floor by the bed. Inside: a wallet with a 20, a lipstick worn to a nub, two pennies, a CVS receipt from 2019, and a red lighter. I go outside. The rain has stopped but everything is still wet. The parking lot reflects the neon sign, pink and blue, the words VACANCY and NO blurred together. I light a cigarette I don’t have, mime inhaling, blow pretend smoke into the night. Through the window, I can see her watching. She’s smiling. I think. When I go back in she’s dead. Slumped in the chair, tubes still in her nose, oxygen machine still clicking away like it doesn’t know there’s no point anymore. I reach over and switch it off. The silence is sudden and huge. I should call someone. The manager. An ambulance. Someone whose job is dealing with bodies. Instead I finish cleaning. Wipe the nightstand. Straighten the magazines. Fold the towels she never used. She doesn’t fade like the first one. She stays solid, slumped and still, and I leave her there when I go. --- Room 5 the door is already open. She’s on the floor between the bed and the bathroom. One side of her face slack, mouth pulled down like melted wax. She’s trying to say something but the sounds don’t match up with her lips. Her hand scrabbles at the carpet. I kneel down. “What do you need?” Her good eye focuses on me. The bad one wanders. She makes a sound like “buh” or “nuh” or maybe just air escaping. “Phone? You want the phone?” She shakes her head, or tries to. The motion is small and wrong. “Water?” No. “Should I call someone?” Her hand grabs my wrist. Her grip is weak but desperate, fingers digging into the bone. She pulls me close. Her breath smells sour and sweet. “Duh,” she says. “Duhhh. Duh-duh-duh.” “I don’t understand.” She starts crying, tears running down the good side of her face, the bad side just wet. Her hand squeezes tighter. I can feel her pulse in her fingertips, fast and fluttery like a bird dying in your hands. I stay with her until it stops. Her hand goes…slack. Her eye…closes. The crying stops but the tears are still on her face, running down into her hair. I clean around her. Scrub the bathroom. Change the sheets. Vacuum the carpet right up to her body, the vacuum bumping against her hip, her shoulder, her outstretched hand. When I’m done she’s gone. Just the dent in the carpet where she was, and the smell of industrial cleaning solution. --- Room 6 has pill bottles on the nightstand. Orange bottles, white bottles, one brown glass bottle with no label. They’re arranged in a circle around a glass of water that’s gone cloudy with dust. She’s in the bed, under the covers, curled on her side. Asleep or dead, I can’t tell. I start cleaning and wait to find out. The bathroom mirror has lipstick writing: SORRY in orange-pink, shaky letters, some of them running where the lipstick got too warm. I wipe it off. The lipstick smears, turns the whole mirror orange before the Windex cuts through. When I come out she’s watching me. “I thought I’d feel different,” she says. “About what?” She shifts under the covers. “I thought it would be like falling asleep. Peaceful. But I just feel tired.” “Maybe you’re not done yet.” “Oh, I’m done.” She laughs with a bitter edge in her throat. “I’ve been done for years. I just kept going anyway.” I strip the other bed, the one she didn’t sleep in. The sheets are still clean but I change them anyway because that’s the job. “My daughter thinks I’m a coward,” she says. “For what?” She gestures at the pill bottles. “She wanted me to fight. I just wanted to stop being tired.” My mother said the same thing to me once, near the end. I told her she was being ridiculous. I told her she had to try. I made her appointments and drove her to them and sat in waiting rooms reading magazines from 2003 while she got poison pumped into her veins. She died anyway. “Your daughter probably just didn’t want to lose you,” I say. “Well, she did.” She closes her eyes. “Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her it wasn’t about her.” “I’m not going to see your daughter.” “Thank you,” she says, and then she’s gone, just a shape under the covers that collapses into nothing, and the pill bottles are empty, and the glass of water is clean. --- Room 7 I don’t go into. I can hear glass breaking from outside. And a scream. The door shakes in its frame. I stand there with my hand on the key and I don’t turn it. I move on. --- Room 8 smells like lilacs even though lilacs don’t bloom in October. She’s in the bed, on top of the covers, wearing the blue dress she wore to my high school graduation. Her hands are folded on her stomach. Her eyes are closed. She looks like someone who fell asleep reading and forgot to turn off the light. I know she’s dead before I touch her. I know because she looks peaceful and my mother never looked peaceful. Even sleeping she looked like she was working something out, eyebrows pulled together, mouth tight. I sit on the other bed. I should clean but I don’t. I just sit there looking at her. “You know what the worst part was?” I say to the body. “You kept acting like dying was something you were doing to me.” No answer. “I’m so angry at you. I can’t speak to you.” The air conditioning kicks on. Cold air hushes away the mildew and strengthens the lilacs. “I miss you so much I can’t speak to you.” She fades while I’m talking. Just goes transparent and then not there, and the bed is empty. I strip the bed anyway. Fold the sheets. Put on new ones even though nobody’s going to sleep here. --- Room 9 the light is on but nobody’s inside. The bed is made. The towels are folded. It’s the cleanest room I’ve seen all night. On the nightstand there’s a note in handwriting I recognize: THANK YOU FOR CLEANING UP AFTER ME. I’M SORRY IT WAS ALWAYS SO MUCH WORK. I pick it up. The paper is motel stationery, STARLIGHT across the top in faded gold letters. The pen she used bled through to the other side. I sit on the bed and read it again. And again. And again until the words stop meaning anything, until they’re just shapes, just ink. The note doesn’t fade. I fold it in half and put it in my pocket. I clean the room anyway. Because that’s what I came here to do. --- My shift ends at six. The sky goes from black to gray to thin blue. I push my cart to the supply closet. Put the dirty towels in the hamper. Restock for tomorrow. The manager’s office is dark. I leave my timecard on the desk, filled out in pencil: 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM, seven rooms, nothing unusual. Outside, the parking lot is empty except for my car and a shopping cart someone abandoned by the dumpster. The motel sign buzzes. NO VACANCY, even though all twelve rooms are empty. I get in my car. The engine turns over on the second try. I should get that looked at. In my pocket, the note crinkles. I drive home on roads that are still wet, the tires hissing. The radio plays a gentle folk song I don’t listen to. My apartment is fifteen minutes away but it feels like hours. When I get home I’ll sleep. When I wake up I’ll eat something. When it gets dark I’ll come back to the Starlight and I’ll clean Rooms 3 through 9 again. The note in my pocket says THANK YOU. It doesn’t say STOP. So I won’t. --- ## Author's Notes: My mom was sick a lot when I was a kid. In and out of hospitals. And I had this dream that kept coming back where I'm cleaning rooms and she's in every single one of them. Different versions of her, all dying or already dead. I'd wake up exhausted, like I'd actually been working all night. Eventually, my mom got a lot better. But I didn't understand those dreams for a long time (mainly because I was, you know, a *child*). I thought my brain was just torturing me. But while writing this story, I realized that in the dreams, I had *something* to do. A little agency, if you will. I had a cart and supplies and a list of rooms. In real life, I was just an unsupervised kid sitting in waiting rooms feeling totally useless. At least in the dreams I could fold sheets and wipe mirrors and make things clean the way my mom would, even if I couldn't make anything better for her in real life. The line in Room 8—"you kept acting like dying was something you were doing to me"—that one was hard. Because I really felt that way sometimes and I still feel guilty about it. She was the one who was sick and I was mad at her for it. How messed up is that? But I think maybe that's just what happens when you watch someone fade slowly. You love them and you're losing them and somehow that turns into anger, and then you feel like a monster for being angry. I don't even know what the five locked rooms are. Parts of this I'm still not ready to deal with, maybe. The story doesn't want me to open them yet, so they stay locked. Overall, this story came out of something really dark that I've been carrying around since I was maybe ten years old. I needed to write it. I needed to clean those rooms, at least on paper. It doesn't fix anything but it helps. A little. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/i-am-the-wolf-i-am-the-boy/#/portal/support) ### The Ghost Census URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-ghost-census/ Last updated: 2025-10-07T14:42:33.000Z The letter announcing the Ghost Census arrived on a Tuesday, which was fitting since Tuesdays had always been death-defying days for Kye anyway, and this particular Tuesday found them elbow-deep in grave dirt, trying to coax old Espeza Vahn into telling them where she’d hidden her wedding ring before the cancer took her voice for good. The envelope was cream-colored, heavy stock, with Kye’s name written in silver ink that seemed to shift and shimmer when they weren’t looking directly at it, and when they tore it open with dirt-caked fingernails, the words inside made their stomach drop like they’d swallowed a stone. *Necromancer Kye. By order of the Council Between, you have been selected to serve as Census-taker for the Centennial Threshold. Yes, you. A mere mortal. Congratulations. Report to the Borderland Purgatory at sunset, October 31st. Bring nothing but yourself.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Morrow Twins URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-morrow-twins/ Last updated: 2025-10-02T14:23:46.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/10/morrow_adfree_thumb.png) The Morrow Twins 0:00 /1165.6930385487528 1× The trees hated me. Or maybe it was the wind. Or the frost in the air that tried to mimic the texture of my grandmother’s breath when she used to say my name in the dark—*Irenka*, a name I shed like old skin when I left Greyport, Mass behind. When I stopped being hers. When I let my throat fill with Cambridge vowels and university syllables. But the trees were watching me now, bending low and splitting open their own bark. I should not have come back. The road into Greyport was a tongue of black tar that led straight into the mouth of town. I drove it like a drunk fool, letting my foot off the brake just enough to slide into memory. My teeth chattered. Not from cold. I told myself I was here for the funeral. Thalia Morrow was dead, you see. Drowned, it turns out. She had always been the kind of girl to love water the way a match loves gasoline. It suited her. It suited the town. And I was going to sit in a pew like a good girl and listen to someone pretend her death meant something. And I told myself I would not stay the night. I told myself I would not knock on the Morrow house door. But I did. And the house was the same as I remembered. These old Victorian things rot slowly, prettily. Paint peeled off the shutters in long, curling sighs. The screen door hung open like a mouth that had forgotten how to close. I knocked. Once. Twice. The door opened. I saw her. Thalia. But not Thalia. A woman with Thalia’s coal-black braid. And crooked smile. And scar under the left eye—no, right eye. No, wait. That wasn’t right. Her mouth opened and something came out of it that sounded like my name. “Iris,” she said. But it wasn’t a voice. The sound was only in my head. My knees buckled inward like they wanted to return to the earth. I didn’t faint, but the floor leaned closer than it should have. I could smell soap. Lemon rind. Dust. Burnt sugar. Old sleep. Maybe she had only just woken up. “I’m Tess,” she said, blinking. “I was Thalia’s twin.” Twin? What twin… Wait, I remembered her. No, I almost remembered her. There had been three girls in the attic, once. Two names I knew. One I had burned. “Tess,” I said, as if believing it. --- The house swallowed me. That’s the only way I can put it. I certainly didn’t feel welcome. When I stepped over the threshold, something in the base of my skull began to itch. A nerve that remembers being pinched. Tess walked ahead of me barefoot, and I saw the way her heel touched each floorboard with perfect sense, like she knew where they creaked, where they didn’t, where the rot lived under the carpet and where it was safe to step. She didn’t offer to take my coat. She didn’t turn around. I smelled wet velvet, like something had died and decided not to leave. Though maybe it had. Maybe it was me. There were people in the parlor. Not people. Reflections of people. Local shapes. Greyport faces, slack and swollen from weeping. I recognized them in the way one recognizes a recurring dream. The pharmacist. The man with the missing finger. A girl I’d kissed behind the high school gym, who now had two children clinging to her knees like tumors. No one looked at me. No one blinked. Not even when I sat down. Except Tess. She stood beside the casket, hands clasped. The body inside—I forced my eyes to it—was Thalia. Or enough of her. Waxed skin. Combed hair. They’d tried to cover the bruising at her temples with pink undertone. Her smile was glass. Her lips were stitched to a hush. She looked peaceful. Which was absurd. Thalia never looked peaceful. Not even when she slept. She had always been the girl who moved too fast, talked too loud, carved insults into bathroom stalls with a pocket knife she kept in her sock. She had never been still. Never sweet. I wanted to laugh. Or vomit. I cried. Tess stepped forward. Her eyes found mine. She touched the casket, just the edge of it, and said, “I wish you hadn’t come.” My spine folded inward. My brain played a chord. “Did I ever meet you?” I asked. A stupid question. A coward’s question. But Tess smiled. “Only once,” she said. “I don’t blame you forgetting.” I opened my mouth to speak. Nothing came out. Not even a scream. --- I slept in the attic. Only room available, which I assumed was a lie. But either way, I had walked upstairs, halfway through the wake, and no one stopped me. Tess watched me go, didn’t say a word. I think I wanted her to. I think I wanted her to say not yet, or wrong room, or we burned that place down, remember? But she said nothing. She only smiled. That same smile. Like a door closing in reverse. The stairs were dust-limned and shallow. Each step might’ve taken a year off my life. By the time I reached the top, I had aged back into my skin. Into the girl who used to play with poppets and dollhouses and whisper fake wedding vows into the cracks of the floorboards where I drew lines and circles with chalk. The attic was smaller than I remembered. Smaller and louder. I could hear the house breathing. A wet inhale through the vents. A pulsing under my feet. Something lived here, still. There was a mattress with no frame. Just the sad shape of sleep. I sat down. Then laid down. Then let the wood rise up and wrap around me. It was big, for a coffin. I closed my eyes. I didn’t sleep. I tried to remember what happened. *There were three girls in the attic*. One with black hair. One with dirty knees. One with no name. We had played a game again and again. The mirror game. The chalk circle game. The blood-and-breath game. We said the names out loud, like incantations: “Thalia.” “Iris.” … We paused. The third name was never said. Not fully. Not clearly. The third girl had whispered hers only once, but our laughs drowned it out. The third girl never laughed. Instead, she looked at us with a face that refused to finish forming. A sketch with the eyes smudged out. A photo trapped between two developing chemicals. And we went still. We never played the game again. Until now. --- I woke up with my arms above my head. The mattress was gone. My wrists were bleeding. There were chalk marks on the walls in spirals and names. One of them mine, but written backwards. One of them Tess. And one of them unreadable. In the corner, Tess stood holding a poppet. A doll, sort of, with teeth. “You used to know how to play,” she said with the poppet. I tried to scream. I had no mouth. I tried again. No luck. So I ran. --- I made it to the woods before I took a real breath. The air tasted different here. Clean, but still dirty. The trees huddled close, bramble-slick and rib-thin, as if they’d grown in the shape of a mouth. I didn’t have time to grab a coat, but at least the cold kept my thoughts sharp. I had to keep going. Stopped after a while for another breath and looked around. The path—the old one behind the school—still existed. That shocked me. So much else had rotted. But not this. The stone bench was still there, blanketed in moss. I sat on it, anyway. My fingers throbbed from where the poppet had bit me on the way down the stairs. Last night. Last night. I didn’t dream. We had come here once. Me, Thalia, and “Tess.” We’d brought a mirror. The small one with the cracked edge. The one Thalia said would bleed if you held it too long. We had dared each other to look into it and say what we saw. I’d said “I see you.” Thalia said “I see me.” The third had said nothing. Just stared and watched until we dropped the mirror. I heard something shift beneath the leaves. A wild animal, hopefully. Tess had told me once—we were ten, maybe eleven, or maybe I imagined the whole thing—that the forest had a soul. And souls have memories. *They don’t forget footsteps.* Especially not the guilty ones. “Are you real?” I asked the trees. I didn’t expect a response. Something moved behind me. I turned. Tess stood at the edge of the clearing. She looked different. Her eyes weren’t the same shape anymore. Not quite Thalia’s. She held the poppet again, its teeth glistening with my blood. “I thought I’d find you here,” she said. “You always ran here when you were scared.” I didn’t remember that. But my body did. I stood up. My knees cracked. “I wanted to see if it was still here,” I said. “It is.” I nodded. “The games we played…” “The games you forgot,” she said. My mouth dried. “We needed a third,” she said. “We always did.” I stepped back. “I don’t want to play.” “But we need a third,” she said, holding out the poppet. I didn’t move. Not at first. But my hands stirred on their own. The doll blinked. I had no choice. I had nowhere else to go. --- We walked back to the house without speaking. I couldn’t feel my fingertips. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the poppet. It rode inside my coat pocket. Every few steps I could feel its teeth shift, counting my ribs. The door creaked open for us like it had been watching from the window. The inside smelled different now. Less mold. Tess led me to the parlor, which had been locked for years. We weren’t supposed to open it. Ever. The door was already open. Inside lay three candles, arranged like a triangle. A ring of salt. Our names carved into the old floorboards, shallow and uneven. Mine had been added recently. “I didn’t write that,” I said. “I know,” Tess said. The mirror stood on the mantle. Still cracked. My reflection wasn’t there. Only hers. Thalia’s. “Sit,” Tess said. I didn’t want to. But I did. She handed me the poppet again, and this time, it was warm. “We never finished the game,” she said. “That was the mistake.” “Mistake?” “Thalia’s mistake. But she’s ready to play again.” I shook my head. “Tess, she died.” She looked at me like I was slow. “She was supposed to.” The candles flickered. The mirror showed three girls now. Me, Tess, and the third. Older now, with my face but not my eyes. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. Then mine moved too. “Tess,” I whispered. “What did we call it?” “We didn’t,” she said. “That was the problem.” The poppet’s mouth opened. Wind rushed through the parlor, though the windows stayed shut. Salt scattered. Wax bent. Something pressed against my back, cold and enormous. It whispered in no language I knew, but my bones knew. My bones answered. And Tess said the words. “Your turn.” --- The mirror opened. Almost like a door. The crack became a wet seam splitting through everything I’d been trying to remember. We were in the attic again, but not the attic. Not how it was. The room was too clean, too perfect, like it had been painted from memory. Thalia stood in the center, barefoot, her dress hem drifting as if underwater. Her hands were pushed together like she was praying. “Iris,” she said. She used my name like it was hers to say. Like she’d earned it. “Tess,” I whispered, but Tess wasn’t behind me anymore. Just the poppet, its teeth sunk into my palm, drawing blood like ink. “You left me,” Thalia said. “You left before the game ended.” “No,” I said, my voice cracking. “We—we didn’t know what we were doing.” She tilted her head. “Didn’t we?” The mirror pulsed. Behind Thalia, shadows bent into shapes—child-sized, hollow-eyed, grinning. They whispered nursery rhymes, all of them overlapping. “I tried to come back,” I said. “I tried so hard.” “I know,” she said. “And you felt bad. For a while.” I stepped closer. My knees shook. I reached out. My hand passed through her shoulder. “But I cared,” she said. “I never forgot you.” And that was true. I never forgot any of it. The attic. The circle. The words we said just to scare each other. How we drew blood from our fingers and fed it to the poppet, laughing. How the mirror cracked when Thalia spoke something that didn’t belong to her. How I ran, dragging Tess behind me. How Thalia stayed behind. “You chose to stay,” I whispered. “I became the third,” she said. “The one who stays. So you and Tess could be the ones who leave.” “But we didn’t leave,” I said. “Not really.” Her smile was small and tired. “Then let one of you go.” The shadows swelled. Tess appeared at my side again, older than she should be, younger than she ever was. We looked the same now. Same hair. Same eyes. Same scar at the base of the chin from falling on the porch steps that night the mirror broke. But she didn’t bleed. One of us had to stay. That was the rule. That had always been the rule. I looked at Thalia. I looked at Tess. I looked at the poppet. I dropped it. It vanished before hitting the ground. Right as it did, the mirror cracked again. This time all the way through. Something shut my eyes by force. --- I woke up in the woods. The stone bench beside me. Blood on my palm. A single candle burning at my feet, already half-melted. The house was gone. The parlor too. Only the mirror remained, lying in the grass. I picked it up. Only one face stared back. Mine. I hope. --- ## Author's Notes: I normally don't write horror at all, and in fact, as Cetera Magazine's head editor, I've been working on a short story that is most definitely *not* horror for months as my debut piece. Alas, October rolled around, and we're celebrating by devoting the entire month to spooky stories of varying subgenres. For me, I just knew I had to do a gothic horror about twins, and I also got to try my hand at this week's original artwork. That said, this is a gothic piece with a huge dose of psychological haunted house fiction mixed with Americana. The story takes place in the fictional town of Greyport, Massachusetts (originally Greymire, of which our cofounder Jon Negroni rightfully pointed out as sounding too "fantasy") and in my mind it's a merge of Newburyport and Salem. Part coastal town part f'd up history. And there's something deliciously terrifying about twins, isn’t there? Two halves of the same soul, but also (potentially) two entirely different beasts. One good, one wicked. One brave, one crumbling. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea that no matter how much you try to outrun who you were as a child, someone remembers the truth of you. Especially a sibling. Even more especially your twin. Like I said, horror isn't normally my cup of tea. But Iris is the kind of narrator I always love to write: skeptical, half-feral, way too self-unaware to unpack her childhood trauma. She walks (or drunkenly drives) into her old town like she’s just here for the funeral, but you know just like I did that she’s lying to herself. The house is inviting her back. The past wants her back. And some part of her wants to stay. That's the horror aspect I did find irresistible, even as someone who would've been driving myself to Canada the second after getting bit by a doll. Thanks for reading my debut with Cetera and for supporting all of our work over the last nine months. Editing Jon and Will's stories has been an absolute delight while also solidifying my imposter syndrome, though their encouragement (along with staff reader Bridget Serdock's) has absolutely reinvigorated me as a fiction writer. Here's to more stories that go bump in the attic. --- ![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-26-at-12.42.28---PM.png) Natalia Emmons is the managing editor of Cetera Magazine and one of its cofounders. She mainly writes short fiction, poetry, and extremely long text messages about the perils of run on sentences. --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/i-am-the-wolf-i-am-the-boy/#/portal/support) ### I Am the Wolf, I Am the Boy URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/i-am-the-wolf-i-am-the-boy/ Last updated: 2025-09-25T14:43:19.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/wolf_story_thumb.png) I Am the Wolf, I Am the Boy 0:00 /1845.5477551020408 1× The Singing Woods had a reputation for swallowing bards whole. Not literally, though Ilen wouldn’t have been surprised if that were true too, but in the way that men who entered with songs in their throats came out silent, or not at all. The locals in the last village had tried to warn him off with their stories. Something about a wolf prince, about love that unmakes itself, about forgetting and being forgotten. Ilen had bought the drunkards another round and let them talk. He needed their stories more than their warnings. Ilen’s lyre case knocked against his hip with each step, the instrument inside long past its best days. Like him. The path narrowed until it was barely a suggestion between the moss-thick trees, and the afternoon light came down green and strange through the canopy. He’d been walking for hours when he heard it. A sound close to singing, not quite humming. A voice that moved like water over stones. The man sat on a fallen log, barefoot despite the October cold, peeling bark from a branch with his thumbnail. His hair was dark and needed cutting, and there was something about the way he held his shoulders that made Ilen think of a deer about to bolt. “You’re looking for me,” the man said without looking up. Ilen stopped. “Am I?” “They always are. The ones who come this deep.” The man—barely more than a boy, really—finally raised his eyes. They were the color of wet earth. “Are you a bard?” “Was.” Ilen set down his pack, tried to look less desperate than he felt. “These days I’m more of a collector. Stories, songs. The older the better.” “And you heard about the wolf prince.” Not a question. “Something like that.” The man smiled, but it was all wrong, like he’d learned it from watching through windows. “I’m Corrin. You can stay for dinner if you want. But you should know—” He paused, went back to peeling bark. “Do not love me.” Ilen almost laughed. The presumption of it. “Wasn’t planning on it.” “Good. Because when people love me, I become something else. And when I become something else, I forget them.” Corrin stood, brushed bark from his trousers. They were patched at the knees with fabric that didn’t match. “There’s rabbit stew. It’s not very good, but it’s warm.” --- The cottage was more of a lean-to that had gotten ambitious, built against a massive oak that seemed to be the only thing keeping it upright. Inside, herbs hung from every beam—some Ilen recognized, most he didn’t. The fireplace was just a ring of stones with a pot hanging over it, and the whole place smelled like smoke and perhaps flowers left too long in water. “How long have you lived here?” Ilen asked, setting his lyre case carefully against the wall. “Always, I think. Or long enough that it feels like always.” Corrin ladled stew into two wooden bowls. His hands were steady but his eyes kept flicking to the door, the window, anywhere but Ilen’s face. “You’re not the first to come looking for a story.” “Did the others get one?” “I don’t remember.” They ate in silence. The stew was indeed not very good—too much salt, not enough meat—but Ilen had eaten far worse. He watched Corrin eat, noticed how he held his spoon incorrectly, and how he chewed like he was afraid of his own teeth. “The villagers,” Ilen said finally, “they said something about you being forgetful. And earlier, you mentioned it to me as well.” Corrin set down his bowl. “Yes. Well. When someone loves me…really loves me, not just wants something from me…I begin to change. The moon pulls it out of me, or maybe the love itself does, I don’t know which. I then become a wolf. And the wolf doesn’t remember what the boy knew.” “That is…a cruel sort of curse.” “Yes.” “How many times?” Corrin gave him a rigid look. There was something ancient in his young face. “I don’t know. How do you count fingers on a hand you cannot see or feel? I wake up sometimes and there are things…a ribbon tied to my wrist…a song stuck in my head that I know I didn’t write...all of it evidence of people I must have known once. Must have—” He stopped. “Loved,” Ilen finished. “Maybe. Or maybe they just loved me. It amounts to the same thing in the end.” Outside, the sun had finished its setting, and the green light had gone gray. Ilen could feel the temperature dropping through the thin walls. “I had someone once. Arlin. He was killed in a tavern fight. Stupid thing…wasn’t even his fight. Two years ago now.” “I’m sorry.” “I’m not looking for love, either, Corrin. I’m only looking for a song worth singing again. That is all.” Corrin studied him without blinking. “Please. Stay the night. The woods are dangerous in the dark, and not just because of me.” --- They sat by the fire as darkness settled over the woods like a living thing. Ilen had brought out his lyre with no intention to play, but to clean and restring it. The familiar work kept his hands busy while Corrin fed the fire with branches that sparked blue and green in the flames. “Chemical salts in the wood,” Corrin explained when Ilen looked questioning. “From the soil here. Everything in these woods is a little bit tainted.” “Including you?” “Especially me.” Ilen plucked a string, testing its tension. The note rang out clear in the small space, and Corrin went very still. “Play something,” he said, and it sounded like begging. So Ilen played. Nothing special, just an old tune from the eastern provinces about a miller’s daughter and a river spirit. But when he looked up, Corrin’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving slightly, like he was trying to remember words to a prayer. “I know this one,” Corrin whispered. “Someone sang this to me. They changed the words though. Made it about a baker’s son instead.” His eyes opened, focused on Ilen with a sudden intensity. “Was it you?” “No. First time we’ve met.” “You sure?” Ilen was about to say yes when he really looked at Corrin’s face in the firelight. There was something in the way he tilted his head when he listened, the particular curve of his mouth when he was thinking. Familiar in a way that made no sense. “Play another,” Corrin said. This time Ilen played something Arlin had taught him, a drinking song that was probably older than both their grandfathers. Halfway through the second verse, Corrin started singing along. Not the common words everyone knew, but a variation Ilen had only heard once before. From Arlin himself. He stopped playing. “Where did you learn that?” “I don’t know. I just…I just know it.” Corrin pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “This happens sometimes. Songs I shouldn’t know, words in languages I don’t speak. Memories that aren’t mine. Or maybe they are and I just—” He stood abruptly, paced to the window. Outside, the moon was rising, not quite full but close enough. Corrin’s hands were shaking. “You should go,” he said. “Now, while you still can.” “What’s happening?” “The moon. And you—you’re looking at me like—” Corrin gripped the windowsill hard enough that Ilen heard the wood creak. “Please. Just go.” But Ilen didn’t move, nor could he. Because Corrin’s shoulders were shifting under his shirt, and his breathing had gone ragged, and when he turned, his face was twisted with the effort of holding something back. “I don’t want to forget you,” Corrin gasped. “Not you. It feels important that I don’t forget you.” “Then don’t change.” “It’s not—I can’t—if you keep looking at me like that—” “Like what?” “Like you *could* love me.” Ilen set down his lyre and stood slowly. “I told you, I’m not looking for—” “I know what you told me. But hearts do not listen to their minds, and the moon does not care about intentions.” Corrin’s shape flickered in the firelight, for just a moment not quite human. Then he pressed his palms flat against the wall and breathed deep, and he was suddenly just a young man again. Just Corrin, barefoot and strange and terrified. “Tell me something,” he said. “Something true. Something that might stick even if…when…give me something to hold onto.” Ilen took a step closer, careful, like approaching a spooked animal. “My name is Ilen Blake. I’m twenty-four years old. I was born during a thunderstorm and my mother said it marked me for a loud life. I’ve been trying to prove her wrong ever since.” Another step. “I can’t sleep without something covering my feet. I despise the taste of honey. I’ve written almost a hundred songs and forgotten most of them.” “Ilen,” Corrin repeated. “Ilen who hates honey. Ilen who covers his feet.” He turned from the window, and his eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I’m going to forget you.” “Maybe not.” “I always do.” They stood there, three feet apart that might as well have been three hundred. The moon climbed higher. The fire popped and sent sparks up that died before they reached the herbs hanging from the rafters. “One more song,” Corrin said finally. “Play me one more song before...before whatever happens happens.” So Ilen played. This time he chose something wordless, a melody he’d been working on for months but could never quite finish. It was meant to be about loss, how the grief of it sits in your chest like a stone you carry everywhere. But as he played it now, watching Corrin’s face in the dying firelight, it became something new. Something in the space between what he wanted and what we could have. Reaching for something he knew would burn him. When he finished, Corrin was crying silently, tears tracking down his face like rain on glass. “That one,” he said. “If I remember anything, let it be that one.” --- The moon was high now, streaming through the window. Corrin had moved as far from Ilen as the small room allowed, pressed into the corner by the door. But they were still talking, couldn’t seem to stop talking, like words were the only devices capable of penetrating the wall between them. “Tell me about the others,” Ilen said. “The ones who loved you before.” “I told you, I don’t remember—” “But you know there were others. You have evidence.” Corrin pulled something from his pocket. A length of blue ribbon, faded and frayed. “This was tied to my wrist two summers ago. Or maybe three. Time gets slippery when you’re always forgetting pieces of it.” He ran the ribbon through his fingers. “Sometimes I wake up and there’s food I don’t remember making. Books I don’t remember reading, marked at specific pages. Once there was a letter, but it was in a language I couldn’t read. I kept it anyway, until the rain got to it.” “Do you think they come back? The people who loved you?” “Would you?” Ilen didn’t answer. The honest response terrified him. Corrin must have seen it in his face because he laughed, bitter and broken. “I think you already have.” “What?” “The way you hold your lyre. The way you sit with your ankle crossed over your knee. The scar on your knuckle you keep rubbing when you’re thinking. It’s all familiar.” Corrin moved closer, just one step, but it felt momentous. “Ilen, I think I’ve forgotten you before.” “That’s impossible.” “Is it? You said you’ve been traveling for years. Where were you two winters ago?” Ilen tried to remember. Two winters ago would have been—he frowned. There was a gap there, a month or two that felt fuzzy when he tried to focus on it. He remembered being in the capital before, and then suddenly it was spring and he was in a coastal town with sand in his boots and no memory of traveling there. “I don’t—” “What about the song you just played? The one you can’t finish? When did you start writing it?” “Two winters ago,” Ilen whispered. They stared at each other across the room that suddenly felt too small, too warm despite the dying fire. “You came here before,” Corrin said with remarkable certainty. “You found me, and we—and then I changed, and forgot, and you left. But you came back.” “I don’t remember.” “Neither do I. But—” “Stop.” Ilen’s hands were shaking. “Just stop.” But Corrin kept going, relentless now. “The song Arlin taught you. What if it wasn’t Arlin? What if it was me, singing something I learned from someone else, someone before you, another link in this chain of forgetting?” “Arlin is dead.” “Are you sure? Or is that just easier than believing you left him here, in these woods, knowing he’d forget you the moment you walked away?” Ilen wanted to deny it, but something inside him was pushing to get out. Arlin’s face in his memory—was it real or something he’d constructed to fill a gap? The tavern fight—he could picture it, but only the aftermath, never the fight itself. Corrin had said that he would forget those who loved him. But perhaps the curse also extended to the ones he loved back. “Even if…even if that’s true,” Ilen said, “what does it change? You’ll still forget me when the sun rises.” “Yes.” Corrin took another step closer. “And you said you’re not looking for love. But what if you already found it? What if you keep finding it and losing it and finding it again?” “That would be a form of hell.” “A hell that would be the only way we can have each other at all.” The moon was so bright now it cast shadows sharp as knives across the floor. Corrin’s form was flickering more frequently, wolf and boy and a creature between. “I should leave,” Ilen said desperately. “Right now. Before—” “You probably should.” Corrin’s voice was rough, animal-close. “But you won’t.” “How do you know?” “I don’t, really.” His words sounded like prophecy, or just another curse. Ilen wanted to reject the terrible possibility that this had all happened before, would happen again, an endless loop of finding and losing and forgetting. “Is one night worth it?” he asked. “Is loving someone for a handful of hours worth losing them forever?” Corrin smiled, sad and beautiful and doomed. “You tell me. You’re the one who keeps coming back.” The decision, when Ilen made it, felt inevitable. Like every step through the woods had been leading him here, to this moment, to Corrin’s face in the moonlight and the terrible ache of recognition in Ilen’s chest. He crossed the room in three strides and kissed him. Corrin made a sound like breaking and kissed back, desperate, his hands fisting in Ilen’s shirt. He tasted like smoke and wild shrubs. “I’m sorry,” Corrin gasped against his lips. “I’m so sorry, I tried to warn you—” “I know.” Ilen held his face between his hands, memorizing the shape of it. “I know.” The change started at Corrin’s fingertips. Ilen watched it happen, the skin sprouting fur, nails lengthening to claws, bones shifting under skin like water finding new channels. Corrin’s eyes went wide with panic. “Your name,” he said urgently. “Tell me your name again.” “Ilen. Ilen Blake.” “Ilen.” Corrin’s voice was going rough, inhuman. “Ilen who hates honey. Ilen who…who…” The wolf emerged like something tearing free from too-small clothing. One moment Corrin was there, human enough to hold, the next there was only the wolf, huge and dark, eyes gone yellow-wild. It looked at Ilen without recognition, lips pulled back from teeth that could tear out a throat. “Corrin.” Ilen didn’t move, didn’t run, though every instinct screamed at him to. “It’s me. Please.” The wolf tilted its head, considering. For a heartbeat, Ilen thought—hoped—but then it turned and crashed through the door, leaving it hanging broken on its hinges. He heard it running through the underbrush, crashing away into the dark, until even that sound faded and he was alone. The cottage felt impossibly empty. The fire had died to embers. Ilen’s lyre lay where he’d left it, and he picked it up with numb fingers. He wanted to leave. Pack his things and walk out of those woods and never come back. Instead, he sat by the cold fireplace and played. The unfinished song, over and over, trying to find the ending that had eluded him for two years. Or three. Or however long he’d been circling back to this place, this boy, this forgetting. He played until his fingers bled. Until the moon set. Until the first pale light of dawn crept through the broken door. Deep in the woods, a wolf howled. Long and low and lonely. Ilen played louder, as if music could cross the space between human and animal, between remembering and forgetting. As if the right song could change the story’s ending. When full daylight came, Ilen finally stopped. His hands were ruined, blood on the strings. He set the lyre down gently, looked around the cottage one last time. On impulse, he took the blue ribbon from where Corrin had dropped it and tied it around his own wrist. Then he walked out into the morning, leaving the door hanging open behind him. He made it a few steps before he heard someone humming. The melody was off, notes transposed and rhythm broken, but it was unmistakably his. The unfinished one. He turned. --- Corrin stood naked at the edge of the clearing, one hand braced against a tree like he wasn’t quite sure of his balance. His hair was full of leaves and there was dirt under his nails, blood on his mouth that might have been his own or some animal’s. He looked at Ilen without recognition, still humming in broken keys. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t…do I know you?” Ilen had expected this but not that he would still remember for a little while yet. Had probably lived through this many times before. “No,” he said. “Just passing through.” Corrin nodded, unsurprised. People probably passed through here all the time. Bards looking for stories, lovers looking for their lost, madmen looking for proof that the world could be fair and just. “You should get inside,” Ilen said. “You’ll catch cold.” “I run warm.” But Corrin moved toward the cottage anyway, though he stopped when he saw the broken door. “Did I—?” “Storm last night.” “Right.” He looked at Ilen again, searching. “You’re hurt. Your hands.” Ilen looked down at his bloody fingers. “Played too long. To drown out the sound of the storm.” “Are you a bard?” “Something like that.” Corrin went inside, came back with a clean shirt and trousers, started dressing without self-consciousness. “I could…there’s food. If you’re hungry. It’s not very good, but it’s warm.” “Thanks, but I need to go.” “Sure.” Corrin finished with the buttons on his shirt, looked around like he was missing something. His eyes landed on Ilen’s lyre, fallen in the grass where he’d dropped it. “Is that yours?” “Yes.” Corrin picked it up carefully, ran his fingers over the strings without playing them. Blood had dried on the wood, and he frowned at it. Then he played a single note, clear and true despite the damage. “I know this,” he said slowly. Started humming again, the same broken version of Ilen’s unfinished song. Then, so quiet Ilen almost missed it, he sang. “Ilen who hates honey, Ilen who covers his feet…” He stopped, confused. Looked at Ilen with those brown eyes that were human again, too human, full of questions neither of them could answer. “That’s your name,” Corrin said. “Ilen.” “Yes.” “I don’t know how I know that.” “Lucky guess.” They stood there, morning light catching the dust motes between them, and Ilen could feel the details of the past day starting to fog. “The song,” Corrin said finally. “The one I was…do you know it?” “I wrote it.” “Will you play it for me?” Ilen took the lyre back, winced as his torn fingers found the strings. But he played anyway, the melody he’d carried for years without understanding why he couldn’t finish it. Now he knew. It wasn’t meant to end. It was meant to return to its beginning over and over, each repetition slightly changed but recognizably itself. When he finished, Corrin was crying, possibly without knowing why. “It doesn’t have an ending,” Corrin said. “No.” “Why?” “I don’t know. I’ve never finished a song, I suppose. Not really. I always just start over.” Corrin wiped his face with his sleeve, left dirt smeared across his cheek. “Will you come back? Through the woods, I mean. Will you pass through again?” “Probably.” “I’ll try to remember you.” “I will do the same.” Ilen turned to go, made it to the tree line before Corrin called out, “What’s the song called?” He looked back. Corrin stood in front of his broken cottage, barefoot again already, looking like something out of a story no one would believe. “It doesn’t have a name,” Ilen said. “And it doesn’t need one.” He walked into the woods. Behind him, he heard Corrin start humming again. Still broken, still wrong, but trying to find the true melody underneath. The sound followed him through the trees until distance ended it, or maybe until he just stopped listening. His wrist ached where the blue ribbon wrapped around it, and he wondered where that ribbon had come from. *The Singing Woods have a reputation for swallowing bards whole,* he recalled. He’d be back. When the road got too long, he’d walk these paths and find the cottage and the strange young man who knew his songs. --- ## Author's Notes: When I started writing this story, I was thinking about how we often love the wrong people, or maybe the right people at the wrong time, or maybe the same person again and again without realizing it. That’s the trap of being human, isn’t it? Memory is slippery. Loss skips like a scratched record. And love...well, love’s a loop, not a line. That was my formal conceit here: create a story that doesn’t close like a door but swings like a hinge. Let’s say you’ve got a character who’s been cursed to forget anyone who loves him. What you’ve got there is a metaphor engine. Use it. You could go literal, sure, but good fiction tends to turn inward. Ask: *what does this curse feel like?* Not “What happens next?” but “What’s it like to be him?” And then: “What’s it like to love him, knowing this?” That's what makes the engine go brrrrr. Writing this story, I kept reminding myself: make it weird but emotional, make itmelancholy but concrete. I tried to give you the crunch of real stew, the chill of October air, the feel of a ribbon worn soft by years of being tied and untied. That’s one of my "rules," I guess: *be precise until it breaks your heart.* A lot of people think repetition is a sin with these things, but if the reader keeps arriving at the same moment and it feels different each time, then you’re doing the work. (Think of a recurring chorus in a song, the way it deepens the third time you hear it because *now you know what it cost them to sing it.*) This story wanted to circle in a similar way, like memory like longing. Ilen keeps coming back. Corrin keeps forgetting. And so the prose reflects that through callbacks, echoed phrases, and other forms of haunted symmetry. One more thing. This story is about art, too. Specifically music. Many of use art to outsmart forgetting. The unfinished song Ilen carries is his unfinished love, right? The wolf is the thing that can’t hold on to tenderness. But the music? The music survives no matter what. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-archivist/#/portal/support) ### The Archivist URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-archivist/ Last updated: 2025-09-18T14:00:50.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/archivist_final_thumb.png) The Archivist 0:00 /1595.838185941043 1× > *To return home is to admit that the night has taken something from you, that the morning will demand an accounting.* Isandro’s collar contains the ghost of other people’s perfume, mixing with his own sweat and the smoke machine glycerin he has to endure during every music set. His ears still ring with bass, the frequency sure to live in his chest for hours, if not days. Four in the morning and Oakland sleeps outside his window, except for the rain, which never sleeps, only hurries against the glass like it’s trying to get in. He sets his exhausted, expensive child of a bag down careful. The vinyl inside shifts, the plastic-on-plastic sound that means *you carried us all night, we carried everyone else.* Isandro stops. His eyes settle into the light. The geography of home has changed. There’s a woman sitting at his kitchen table, and she wasn’t there when he left. She has a clipboard. She has a DMV face. Or an emergency-room-intake-nurse face, he’s not sure. He can just tell that she is professionally present. Yet emotionally elsewhere. There are objects on his table that don’t belong to him, except. Except they do. *Mijo*, his abuela would say, *there are visitors and there are visitantes*. Visitors and guests. This woman is neither. “I’m here to catalogue,” she says, staring at a cassette tape labeled *Dad: 2002 Missed Call* and a mug that says *Didn’t Text Back: Pride, 2019* and a stack of birthday cards that read *Never Sent: 2015-2023*. Isandro never labeled these items. “Lady, it’s four in the morning. And you’re in my house.” “These items belong to you. I’m simply organizing them.” The rain picks up in declaration. Isandro considers the taser in his bag, also his phone, also the tennis racket by the door. But she’s holding her pen like a nurse. Violence doesn’t suit her. “Get out.” “I only catalogue. I never deliver.” “I said get out.” She looks up then, and her eyes are the color of filing cabinets, a grey that reveals nothing. “You can’t move any of these items until you understand them. An *absence* accrues interest the longer it is excused.” A hoodie appears. It materializes the way morning materializes, gradual then sudden. Damp. Size medium. The shade of green Julian always wore, the shade between forest and sage. The tag reads: *Didn’t Show: Julian, Tonight.* “That’s not. He didn’t. We didn’t have plans.” The woman makes a note. “You asked if he wanted to come hear you spin. He said maybe. You said cool, no pressure. You meant please come. He heard no pressure. The absence in question was born at 10:48 p.m. when you looked at the entrance for the fourth time.” The hoodie, or "absence," isn’t damp, actually. It’s the light from the rain, playing shadows across it. “Leave,” Isandro says. His voice cracks. “Please, for the love of god, leave.” The woman stands, places a metal filing drawer on his counter. The label reads: *A—Absences (Personal)*. “I’ll return tomorrow evening. We have more absences to sort.” After she’s gone, Isandro stands in his studio listening to the rain argue with itself about whether to become a storm. The hoodie, somehow damp again, drips onto his floor, making a puddle that looks like the shape of something almost said. --- Morning comes anyway, uninvited but inevitable. Isandro runs Lake Merritt because running is what he does to tell himself he must exist. His feet know the path, the goose shit and eucalyptus all, the lake he likes to call an ambitious lagoon. Other runners pass him, their absences trailing behind them in taunting silhouettes: *Didn’t call mom back*, *Skipped the funeral*, *Meant to visit*. He can see them now, these absences, these little subtitle closed captions. At the Fruitvale art space, Monica’s setting up for the workshop he’s supposed to help with. She’s running on activist coffee like any good artist. “You look like shit, Sandro.” “Didn’t sleep.” “Again?” He doesn’t answer. A teenage kid walks in carrying a bass guitar and a tote bag with words on it: *Dad: Didn’t come to the recital, said he had to work*. “You good?” Monica asks. “Yeah.” *Lied to Monica: Sunday morning*, something in his pocket murmurs. By the time he gets home, the absences have multiplied. They spill from his studio into the hallway. A bus seat labeled *Left Early: Cousin’s Graduation*. A takeout bag: *Canceled Plans: Kept the food*. And blocking his door, orange and sticky like hazard cones, a crate the size of a loveseat: *Five Months of Excuses (Love)*. The orange is the exact shade of a notice the city puts on a door before they condemn the building. It means: *last warning*. He tries to push it but can’t. Tries to climb over, but it grows. “Move nothing until you know its origin,” the woman says. She’s back, wearing the same clothes, carrying the same clipboard, like she never left or like leaving and arriving are the same thing to her. “I can’t get into my own apartment.” “Then you understand the problem.” The crate sweats overripe fruit and latex paint, the smell of trying too hard. He knows it well. It’s Ray’s smell, from when he would show up in the middle of the night with apologies and plans for trips they’d never take. Isandro tries to talk to the woman with a look. He doesn’t have words for what he’s feeling. The woman opens a red ledger. “Every line on this is a debt. Every debt has interest. The math of absence works like this: one missed dinner becomes two becomes a hollow space where a relationship used to live.” She pauses as if waiting for Isandro to respond. He only shrugs. “Three choices,” she says next. “Burn, Keep, or Return to Sender.” “If I choose wrong?” “There is no wrong. There is what you live with and what you don’t.” --- Afternoon light invades his windows in Oakland gold. Painter’s tape on his floor: three zones. *Burn* by the window. *Keep* by his record collection. *Return* by the door. The woman sits at his table, marking her ledger while he sorts. A harmonica labeled *Didn’t learn: Promised myself, 2018*. That goes to Burn. A photo album: *Didn’t look: Mom’s last years*. Keep, but turned face-down. A voicemail nobody left because nobody called: *Your birthday: Various, 2019-2025*. He holds this one longest, this absence of an absence. “On birthdays,” he tells the woman, “you’re not supposed to ask for anything.” “And yet.” “And yet.” He makes café con leche, the way his mother taught him before she became an absence that sits in the Keep pile, too heavy to lift. The woman drinks hers black, no sugar, which figures. Next, the birthday card from his father (never sent, never intended). Then the lunch plans with his brother (canceled for good reasons, bad timing). There’s the therapy appointment (skipped because healing felt too heavy that week). And there’s the biggest entry in the ledger, written in his own hand: *Self: Years You Didn’t Want*. “What’s this?” “The years you made yourself small so others could feel big.” A text comes through. It’s David from the collective: *Ey bro, checking in. Monica said you seemed upset about something. Need help with anything?* Isandro stares at his phone, trying to read its new language. He types: *Actually, yeah. Can you come by? I have some stuff to move out and could use a hand.* David shows up twenty minutes later with work gloves and no questions. They move objects in silence. David doesn’t ask why there’s a piano bench labeled *Didn’t practice: Promised Mom*. He just helps carry it to the Burn pile. “Next weekend,” David says when they’re done, “we’re doing the community meal. You should come.” “I’m always there. I help cook.” “No, I mean you should as a visitante. Let somebody else cook for you.” After David leaves, Isandro’s hallway is clear. He takes a breath that goes all the way down. Reminds him that his lungs are just fancy bags. --- The city notice arrives Thursday morning, stuck to his door with adhesive that means business: *Violation of Housing Code 14.23.5: Excessive Personal Property Creating Hazardous Conditions*. The rain comes back, too. Monica texts: *Where are you? Event starts in an hour.* He’s promised too much again. The workshop, the community dinner, the DJ set this weekend. His calendar is a list of future absences waiting to be born. “I can’t,” he texts back. “What’s going on?” “I need help moving some stuff.” She cancels the workshop and shows up with two people he barely knows, including the new neighbor from 4B whom he’s only nodded to in the hallway. They arrive with boxes and contractor bags. Like David, they’re not full of questions, save for one or two from Monica. “Jesus, Sandro,” she says, surveying the landscape. “How long you been a hoarder?” “Whole life, apparently.” The woman with the ledger watches from her corner, making notes as they work. She’s got a new category now: *Warm Absences*. These glow when he makes excuses for people. They pulse when he says “It’s fine” or “No worries” or “I understand.” “Warm absences,” the woman explains while Monica and crew work, “tend to multiply when fed with appeasement.” “So, what, I’m supposed to be an asshole?” “You’re supposed to be honest.” The neighbor from 4B, whose name turns out to be Kenji, finds the recliner-shaped shadow in Isandro’s closet. The tag reads: *The Night He Didn’t Come Home: Dad, 1995*. “This one’s not moving,” Kenji says. “Leave it,” Isandro says. “It’s been there thirty years, what’s another day?” The woman stands, walks over to the closet. “Sign here, and all of this disappears. Clean slate.” “Seriously? What’s the catch?” “Erasure is possible at the cost of memory.” Memory. His father is worth about a thousand small absences that preceded the big one. Isandro’s absence is inherited, passed down like genetics. Isandro is just another Puerto Rican man trying to escape. “No,” he says. “I’ll keep it.” He takes out his phone, sends a group text: *Tomorrow night. Dinner party at mine, 7pm. If you’re coming, come. If not, that’s an answer too. It’s last minute. But I want you there.* Two of the Warm Absences in the corner immediately cool, turn to ash, and disappear. --- Friday night and the rooftop has been transformed. Kenji brought a steel drum for burning. Monica strung lights. David hauled up speakers. No rain, except for maybe in the clouds. The Burning Night, Isandro calls it in his head. Seven people show up out of twenty-five invited. “The rules,” the woman announces, standing by the fire drum, “are simple. Read the tag aloud. Then make your choice.” Isandro starts small. A ticket stub: “Didn’t go: Jazz festival, 2019.” Into the fire. A set of keys: “Didn’t move in together: Scared, 2017.” Into the fire. The group helps. Monica reads tags when Isandro’s voice breaks. Kenji tends the fire. David pours mezcal into small cups, the good stuff. Then comes the recliner-shaped shadow. It takes four of them to carry it up from the closet. “The Night He Didn’t Come Home,” Isandro reads. “Dad. November 8th, 1995.” The shadow weighs what a four-year-old boy weighs when he sits by the window until dawn and smells Lucky Strikes from somewhere he can’t see. “He said he was getting cigarettes.” *We waited*, the shadow whispers. *We turned every car sound into his car*. His phone rings. Unknown number. Everyone goes quiet until it rings a third time. “You gonna answer?” Monica asks. Isandro looks at the phone for one more ring. He silences the call. “Help,” he says, and seven pairs of hands help him lift the shadow. It resists, then surrenders, then becomes light enough to carry. Into the fire it goes, transforming into smoke. He pulls out one more thing: a grocery store cupcake, stale, with a candle. The tag reads: *Didn’t Celebrate Yourself: 2015-2025*. “Happy birthday to me,” he says, lights the candle, makes a wish, blows it out, tosses it into the fire. The rain returns, gentle now. The fire hisses, sends up steam with a crisp odor. --- Isandro’s studio has windows open for the first time in months. On his bookshelf, where the woman’s filing cabinet used to be, sits his abuela’s photo and a matchbook. The matchbook says: *For Future Absences: Use Wisely*. He’s cooking for himself instead of reheating takeout. Arroz con gandules, just like abuela’s but with his own twist. The kitchen is thick with the smell of sofrito, a perfect alchemy of cilantro and garlic that means someone is taking care. The woman sits at his table, but her clipboard is closed. “I attend only by invitation now,” she says. “You’re invited to eat.” “I don’t eat. I catalogue.” “Not today.” She looks like she’s resisting a smile. “Absence is one thing,” she says, “But presence,” she pauses, looks at the pot on the stove, “presence is tricky, too.” “So you’ll always have work.” She stands to leave. At the door, she turns. “The matchbook has three matches. Use them wisely.” “For burning?” “For lighting. There’s a difference.” After she goes, Isandro sits at his table with a bowl of rice. He texts the seven from last night: *Dinner here Friday. 7pm at mine. I’m cooking family recipes. If you come, you come. If not, I want you there, anyway.* Monica responds first. “I’ll bring wine.” Kenji. “I’ll bring dessert.” David. “I’m there.” The last text he sends is to Julian. *Friday. Dinner for friends at 7, my place. If you come, you come. If not, I want you there, anyway.* He doesn’t wait for a response. Instead, he sets the table for eight. One spot for each person who said yes. One spot for whoever needs it. One spot for himself. --- ## Author's Notes This story came from thinking about absence as a tangible thing. We usually define absence as a vague "lack" of something. But I like to think of it as its own presence that accumulates and demands attention. We all carry these invisible catalogs of things we didn't do, didn't say, didn't follow through on. So I wanted to explore what would happen if those absences became visible. If they had weight and volume and demanded to be sorted. The Archivist herself emerged as this figure who's neither villain nor savior, but something more like an accountant of the heart. She doesn't judge Isandro's choices; she simply makes them visible and asks him to take responsibility for them. That felt more honest to me than a story where someone swoops in to fix everything. Magical realism works best when the fantastical elements serve the emotional truth of the story. The absences (the hoodies and voicemails and shadows) aren't just weird for the sake of being weird. They're external manifestations of internal realities that most of us recognize. We've all felt the weight of the call we didn't make, the relationship we let drift away through neglect. To get my point across, I had to stretch believability a bit while still using common anchors like clothing and life milestones. What interested me most, though, was the community aspect of the story, which came about more organically as I drafted it. Isandro's healing doesn't happen in isolation, which is ironic because I specifically made him a DJ. Someone who works "solo" but is technically surrounded by a huge community that he has no direct connection with beyond the sound he's making. Nevertheless, community happens to him anyway the second he invites people in and they graciously help him carry the weight of what he's avoided. David, Monica, Kenji, they all show up without demanding explanations. That felt true to how real healing works, and as an introvert, that's the part of the story that codes utter horrorfor me, and I'm only half-joking. The burning ceremony was inspired by a real thing, by the way, called the Burning Bowl Ceremony (or Burning Bowl Ritual). I've never done it myself, but the idea is pretty much what you just read, where people literally burn representations of what they want to release. But I wanted to complicate this real-life thing a little. Not everything gets burned, after all. Some absences, like Isandro's father's abandonment, become smoke that transforms rather than disappears. In other words, some hurts don't truly vanish. They just change shape. (To be clear, this story is not reflective of my personal experiences with my dad and other family members!) I wrote this during a period when I was thinking a lot about the difference between being alone and being lonely, between solitude and isolation. Isandro discovers that presence—real presence—is actually harder than absence in some ways, because it requires vulnerability and the risk of disappointment. I know it's a heady one and maybe bit more experimental for what you might expect from me if you're familiar with my other work, but I appreciate you making to this little short story dinner party of mine. I forgot dessert, though. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/end-of-the-line/#/portal/support) ### The Man in the Mirrors URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-man-in-the-mirrors/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T14:41:08.000Z Beauregard Tate knew, standing in the doorway of his brother’s abandoned barbershop with the afternoon light slicing through dust and memory like judgment itself, that he had been running from his third face his whole natural life, keeping it locked away like some shameful secret that might poison everything he had built if it ever saw the light of day. The Japanese had a proverb about this trinity of selves, something ancient and knowing that spoke to the way men fracture themselves to survive in a world that demands they be everything and nothing all at once, and Beau had always figured himself smart enough to keep those faces separate, clean, manageable—the way you might keep different suits for different occasions, never letting them touch, never letting them blur together into something that might reveal more than you were willing to show. But here in Calypso’s shop, his brother's shop, where the smell of bergamot and old leather still clung to the air like prayers that had lost their way to heaven, where three mirrors mounted on opposite walls had once reflected the transformations of men who believed that looking different might help them become different, Beau found himself caught in a geometry of reflection that made hiding impossible, made the careful compartments of his life collapse into each other like a house of cards in a stiff wind. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### End of the Line URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/end-of-the-line/ Last updated: 2025-09-15T14:37:54.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/line_final_thumb.png) End of the Line 0:00 /1070.7521088435374 1× The crossword clue mocked her: *Seven letters, starts with D, means “tedium.”* Lily Muncada tapped her pen against the conductor’s console as the Blue Line rattled through another tunnel. Doldrums. Had to be doldrums. She scrawled it in, then checked her watch. 11:43 p.m. Three hours left on her shift, fourteen more years until her pension kicked in. If the CTA didn’t gut it first. Her daughter’s asthma medication had gone up again last month, too. Sixty bucks, even with the CTA’s insurance. Though without this job, it’d be three hundred. Her cab radio crackled. Couldn’t be dispatch, they used digital talkgroups now. This was the old analog operations frequency, the one nobody was supposed to use anymore. “Good evening, Lily.” A male voice. A young, male voice. “Sorry to interrupt your shift, but there’s a killer on this train.” An amused, male voice. “In exactly fifteen minutes, when we reach Belmont, someone will die. Unless you’re clever enough to stop the killer, that is.” The pen slipped from Lily’s fingers. How the hell was this guy using the analog frequency? Only the old-timers even remembered it existed. She grabbed the main radio mic. “Control, this is Blue Line 447\. I’ve got a situation—” “Nature of situation?” Rodriguez from Control sounded bored. Rodriguez always sounded bored. “Someone’s broadcasting on the old ops channel, claiming there’s a device on the train.” A pause. “What channel? I’m not hearing anything.” “Not the main talkgroup, the analog frequency—” “Jesus, Muncada. You hearing ghosts now? Listen, we’ve had three false alarms this week, all of ‘em on the late shift. Keep rolling. We’ll have security do a sweep at Belmont if it makes you feel better.” The line went dead. Lily stared at the radio, jaw clenched. Belmont was four stops away. Less than fifteen minutes if she kept schedule. Exactly what he’d said. And Belmont was one of the busier late-night stops. Plenty of bars nearby, plenty of side streets to vanish down. The analog channel crackled again. “Rodriguez doesn’t believe me. Do you believe me, Lily?” Her blood chilled. He knew her name, knew Rodriguez was on shift, knew her old frequency. This wasn’t random. “Here’s a clue for you, since you like those. Four-letter word for death. I’m in it.” Tomb? No. Doom? Maybe. Her mind raced through possibilities while her hands stayed steady on the controls. The train pulled into Jefferson Park. Passengers shuffled off, shuffled on. Nobody screaming. Nobody running. A few people glanced up from their phones, Friday night bar crowd heading home. She slowed the train as it left the station. Just a little. Buying time. “Getting warmer,” the voice said. “But you’re thinking too literally. Think sideways, Lily.” Cars. Four letters. Cars. Her throat went dry. The train had eight of them tonight. Three hundred passengers, easy. Drunk kids from Wrigleyville, restaurant workers heading home, third-shifters heading in. She couldn’t search them all. Couldn’t leave her post without triggering an emergency stop that would bring Control down on her head. Her boss had already written her up twice this year for “protocol deviations.” Once for holding a door for an elderly woman, once for slowing down during a medical emergency. “Tick tock,” he sang. “We’re approaching Montrose. Lots of dark corners there. Perfect for leaving presents. Then Irving Park. Then Addison. So many people getting on and off. Makes you wonder…which car has the surprise?” Lily’s hands moved before her brain caught up. She pulled the brake, slowing to a crawl. Passengers would complain. Control would note it in her file. And if this was just a prank… *Think. Think like he thinks.* He wanted to play. Wanted her to figure it out. Which meant there was something *to* figure out. The clues weren’t random, after all. *Four-letter word for death. In cars.* She grabbed the PA mic. “Attention passengers. We’re experiencing minor signal delays.” Her voice stayed steady, professional. “While we wait, here’s tonight’s transit trivia. Five-letter word for ‘warning sign.’ Starts with A. First person to shout it out gets…a prize.” Silence. Then, from somewhere in the middle cars, an old man’s voice. “Alarm!” “Close,” she said into the mic. “But I’m thinking of something more specific. Something you might see on a train.” The train crawled toward Addison. She could see the platform lights ahead. Less than five minutes to Belmont now. “Alert!” A woman’s voice, car four. “Alert,” Lily repeated. “Yes. And here’s another. Six-letter word for ‘hollow threat.’ Starts with B." His voice returned through the frequency, angry now. “This isn’t a game, Lily. Check the seventh row, car five. Right under the middle seat on the right. You’ll see I’m serious. This isn’t a *bluff*.” Lily’s pulse quickened. Specific location. Too specific. “Bluff isn’t six letters,” she said into the mic, talking directly to him. “Anyone?” “Boring,” someone called out. She pulled the emergency brake. The train shrieked to a halt fifty feet from Belmont platform. Passengers lurched forward, cursing. The emergency lights kicked on, harsh white replacing the yellowed fluorescents. She unclipped her portable from its charger and hooked it to her belt. *If he comes back on the analog channel, I need to hear it no matter where I go.* She grabbed the PA. “Ladies and gentlemen, remain calm. We have a potential security threat in car five. By CTA emergency instruction, listen to me carefully. If you’re in cars one through three, move forward slowly. Cars six through eight, move back. Car four, stay put but move away from the car five door. Now.” “You just killed your career,” the hijacker’s voice came through her portable, laughing. “Breaking protocol, causing panic, stopping between stations—” “Seven-letter word for caught,” Lily said into the mic. “Starts with C.” Silence. She left the conductor’s booth, ignoring every rule she’d memorized in training. The connector between car three and four was packed with confused passengers. She pushed through them. “Anyone seen someone with a radio? Handheld, probably. Anyone acting strange?” A young guy, maybe twenty, pointed toward car five. “Guy in a Sox cap was messing with something under the seats. Had some kind of box and yeah, a radio. Then he went toward the back.” Lily thumbed the transmit on her portable. “Control, I need police at Belmont. Now.” “447, you are stopped between stations without authorization—” “Suspicious device mid-car in Five, under-seat package. Manual inspection needed. Following emergency SOP for credible threats.” She pushed into car five. Seventh row. Middle seat on the right. There it was, a metal box. The wires were visible, duct-taped under the seat. Her maintenance training kicked in. The wires weren’t connected to anything. No power source. No explosive material she could see. Just a tangle of electronics meant to look dangerous. So it was basically a prop. *But real enough to cause a stampede if passengers see it.* Through the window to car six, she saw him—Sox cap, young face, maybe mid-twenties—no longer smiling. He was trying the emergency exit, but those only opened when the train was at a platform with the doors aligned. He’d trapped himself by moving too far back. The end doors between cars five and six were already latched, and passengers had crowded the vestibule, blocking him in. He was boxed between the locked doors and the dead interlock on the side exit. “Cornered,” she announced into the radio. “Seven letters.” The portable hissed one more time. “This isn’t over—” She switched it off. Sirens wailed in the distance. Lily walked back to her booth, legs shaking but steady. The main radio was going crazy with Rodriguez screaming about protocols, demanding explanations. She turned the volume down but left it on. Had to create a record. Her crossword was still there, almost finished. One clue left, right at the bottom. Three-letter word for victory. She picked up her pen. The sirens got louder. Through her window, she could see uniforms flooding the platform, passengers evacuating calmly now that real help had arrived. The guy in the Sox cap sat on the floor of car six, hands behind his head, waiting. Rodriguez was still yelling through the radio. Something about suspensions and hearings and reviewing her entire record. And yeah, she’d probably get written up. Maybe suspended without pay. The union would fight it, but she’d have a mark on her record forever. Harder to get shifts. Harder to make rent. Harder to pay for medication. But nobody died. Nobody even got hurt in a panic. She wrote three letters in the crossword: W-I-N. Then she sat back and waited for the chaos to arrive. --- ## Author’s Note The fun (and terror) of writing a thriller is you get to be the god of dread for a few pages. You set the trap, wind the spring, and watch your character squirm. For me, this one started with a little late-night daydream a few years ago in Switzerland. I was sitting on a train, tired, looking around at my fellow riders, thinking, *what if someone just started talking to me over the radio?* That was the first domino. From there, it was all about escalation. How to make things just a little worse for Lily, turn by turn, until there was only one possible choice left for her to make. And every beat should increase the pressure on your character, so if she was comfortable, I made her uncomfortable. If she had fifteen minutes, I made it five. Because the setting is so specific—a late-night Chicago train —I knew I couldn’t fake it. That meant a lot of nerdy research: checking actual Blue Line station order, timing the ride between Jefferson Park and Belmont, making sure the radio chatter and emergency procedures were at least plausible. (A few CTA operators and transit nerds are probably itching to write a non-threatening complain notice.) Good thrillers live or die on plausibility, even if you don’t get all the details perfectly right. Because iff the reader doesn’t buy the setup, the tension never lands. One of the later additions to the story was Lily’s crossword quirk, and it ended up becoming one of those happy accidents that tied everything together. I knew I wanted her to have something human and a little silly, something like a habit that shows how she keeps herself awake through the “doldrums” of the night shift. And once I found it, the climax wrote itself. There’s nothing better than when the solution to your thriller feels like it was sitting there in the character’s pocket the entire time. Let’s talk style. I went for shorter sentences than usual, so that meant clipped exchanges, lots of white space, the sort of prose that speeds you along the tracks and leaves room for your brain to do its own worrying. (Lee Child is the master of this and one of my obvious inspirations.) So once we do get to that ending—her quietly finishing the crossword—it was important for me to let it slow down a little. After all, thrillers aren’t just about stopping the villain. They’re about what your character becomes in the process. Lily ends the story a little more awake, a little more dangerous to the system she works inside. She’s chosen action over inertia. If you’re writing your own thriller, my best advice is this. Start with the moment that scares *you*, then research enough that no reader can call you out, then write the whole thing as if you’re driving a train a little too fast, and that means brakes squealing, sparks flying, but you're always heading toward that final, inevitable stop. And if you can end it with one last, satisfying “click” (like the last word in a crossword) you’ve probably done your job just fine. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) **Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera To celebrate our first week on a brand new platform, we're offering a **25% discount** on yearly paid subscriptions (promo ends next Thursday). Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](#/portal/support) --- ### Behavioral Pause URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/behavioral-pause/ Last updated: 2025-09-09T20:51:22.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://cetera.ghost.io/content/media/2025/09/Behavioral-Pause_thumb.png) Behavioral Pause 0:00 /2653.570612244898 1× Eleanor sat in a waiting room chair that was clearly designed by committee to offend no one and please no one, upholstered in a beige that suggested both professionalism and warmth while achieving neither. The fake-wood floors gleamed under fluorescent lights, and somewhere farther, speakers played the same sort of instrumental music grocery stores would use to make you buy more cereal. “Eleanor Wu?” A woman in scrubs emerged from a hallway, clipboard in hand, smile calibrated to inspire confidence without suggesting actual joy. Eleanor followed her past doors labeled with cheerful euphemisms: *Cognitive Wellness Suite*, *Behavioral Enhancement Center*, *Mindful Communication Laboratory*. They settled in a room where inspirational posters about “growth mindset” hung next to framed certificates from institutions Eleanor had never heard of. Dr. Reeves looked like she’d been assembled from a manual titled “How to Appear Trustworthy.” Mid-forties, sensible cardigan, glasses that said *I read journals* but not *I’m smarter than you*. She opened a folder thick with consent forms. “So, Eleanor, you’re here about the Pause trial.” Dr. Reeves glanced at her notes. “Tell me why you’re interested.” Eleanor considered several responses. The truth was that a month ago she’d stood in a restaurant shouting at a man she’d met on an app, telling him maybe his mother should have raised him better, all because he’d suggested they split the check after ordering the most expensive wine on the menu without asking. The truth was that she’d watched his face crumple and realized she’d become the kind of person who deployed personal cruelty as a first line of defense. *Also, he completely deserved it.* “I seem to have trouble with…impulse control,” she said. “Verbally speaking.” Dr. Reeves nodded as if completely unsurprised. “Many of our participants struggle with what we call ‘cognitive-interrupt deficiency.’ The good news is that Pause has shown remarkable results in our preliminary trials.” She slid a brochure across the desk. The cover featured a diverse group of people looking thoughtfully into the middle distance, as if contemplating the profound wisdom of keeping their mouths shut. “Pause works by creating a brief neural delay between impulse and expression,” Dr. Reeves continued. “Think of it as giving your better judgment a chance to catch up with your emotional response.” Eleanor flipped through the brochure. Side effects included drowsiness, dry mouth, and something called “expressive diminishment,” which sounded like what happened to her college roommate after meditation retreats. “What exactly does ‘expressive diminishment’ mean?” “Some participants report a temporary reduction in verbal output. Nothing significant. You’ll still be you, just more thoughtful and considerate.” This was starting to get a little too real. Maybe it was a mistake, a dumb idea, etc. But in addition to the dating app incident, there was also the email she’d sent her boss last month that had required a follow-up apology and what her therapist called “repair work.” Oh, and there was her sister’s wedding speech, which had started as a toast and ended as a roast about her body count that made their grandmother cry. Eleanor sighed and palmed her forehead. “Where do I sign?” --- The first Pause pill was small and blue, like something that should cure a headache, not rewire your personality. Eleanor swallowed it and waited. Forty-five minutes later, she stood in line at her usual coffee shop, watching the barista. He was a young dude with neck tattoos and a daily-maintenance sort of mustache. He moved so slow it had to be on purpose. He was absolutely the type of barista who made coffee drinks into performance art, complete with foam designs that took longer to create than Eleanor’s commute. Normally, she would have made a *comment*. Something about how she didn’t need her latte to look like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, thank you babe. Instead, she felt something odd happen. A warm sensation, like diving into a pool heated just right, and the words simply…didn’t come. “One whole milk latte, medium,” she said instead. “You want any particular design in the foam?” the barista asked, already reaching for his little foam-sculpting tools. Eleanor opened her mouth to say *Just give me the caffeine, Michelangelo*, but again, that warm wash of not-saying-the-thing. It was remarkable. Like watching her own reflexes get overruled by a wiser, more patient version of herself. “Surprise me,” she heard herself say. Walking to work, Eleanor felt like she was experiencing a miracle. Every potential moment of snark—the cyclist who ran the red light, the woman talking loudly on her phone about her ex-boyfriend’s mother’s gluten sensitivity, the construction workers who decided jackhammering before 8:00 a.m. was a personality trait and no one could even get her started on the senior citizens playing sunrise pickleball so loudly it sounded like they were shooting each other with weaponized wiffle balls—each trigger simply bounced off her like rain off an expensive umbrella. At the office, she opened an email from her boss, Janet, who had somehow managed to use the phrase “circle back” three times in two sentences while asking Eleanor to “take ownership” of a project that was clearly Janet’s responsibility. Eleanor began typing: *Janet, I think there might be some confusion about who exactly is supposed to own this clusterfuck, considering you were the one who—* Delete. *Hi Janet, I’d be happy to discuss this project. Could we set up a meeting to clarify the scope and expectations?* Send. Eleanor stared at her computer screen. She’d just responded to professional passive-aggression with actual professionalism. She felt like donning a cape next and wearing her underwear on the outside. But as the day progressed, something else began to happen. Her inner monologue—normally a low-level hum of commentary and complaint in the tone of Reese Witherspoon meets Fleabag—began to expand, growing more elaborate and articulate as her outer expression diminished. It was as if all the words she wasn’t saying had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was an increasingly verbose internal narrator who traded Reese Witherspoon for Joan Didion and Fleabag for…well, still Fleabag but mixed with a weirdly judgmental nature documentary narrator. *Consider,* her inner voice mused as she watched a coworker microwave fish in the break room, *the profound selfishness required to subject an entire office to the aroma of reheated salmon. Note how he removes the container, inhales deeply as if savoring a fine wine, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he has just committed an act of olfactory terrorism against his colleagues. Observe the way his jaw moves as he chews, each bite a small violence against workplace civility.* Meanwhile, out loud, Eleanor said, “Lookin’ good, Rick.” By evening, Eleanor was drunk on her own restraint. She’d made it through an entire day without offending, criticizing, or alienating anyone, even herself. She’d been pleasant. She’d been agreeable! She’d been the kind of person who said things like “no worries” and “sounds great” and meant them, or at least appeared to mean them. But when she got home to her apartment, the silence hit different. It was empty, hollow. She tried to call her sister, but when Dara answered, Eleanor found herself struggling to access the rhythm of normal conversation. Every potential comment went through the Pause filter first, and by the time her brain decided it was safe to speak, the moment had passed. “You seem quiet tonight,” Dara said. “Yeah, just tired,” Eleanor replied, though what she was thinking was, *I’ve temporarily lobotomized myself, and I’m not sure whether to be horrified or relieved.* --- Eleanor met Marco on a Tuesday that very much felt like a Thursday, at a bookstore coffee shop that sold both fair-trade lattes and novels about emotionally unavailable men. She was reading *The Argonauts* and pretending to understand its theoretical framework when he approached her table. “That’s a darn good one,” he said, nodding at her book. “Maggie Nelson makes me want to write love letters to the very concept of uncertainty.” Under normal circumstances, Eleanor would have made a joke about how that was either the most pretentious thing she’d heard all day or surprisingly charming, and she wasn’t sure which interpretation said more about him or her. Instead, the Pause kicked in, and she found herself saying, “I’m still figuring out what I think about it.” With a smirk-drenched smile, of course. And to be fair, the remark was true and vulnerable and not at all the kind of thing she usually said to strangers in coffee shops. And this particular stranger had a face that suggested he listened to podcasts about philosophy and knew how to make bread from scratch. Soft-spoken, with eyes that seemed genuinely interested in her answer rather than waiting for his turn to talk. “I’m Marco,” he said. “Mind if I sit? I promise I’m not one of those guys who interrupts women reading to explain books to them.” “Eleanor. And yes, you can sit. Though I should warn you, I’m definitely one of those women who judges people based on their coffee order.” This emerged before the Pause could catch it, and Eleanor felt a moment of panic. But Marco laughed. Like a real laugh, not a polite one. They talked for two hours. About books, about the strange intimacy of reading the same sentences, about whether coffee shop conversations with strangers counted as real human connection or just elaborate loneliness management, about the too-early demise of Borders bookstore and how it was absolutely clear that they could’ve survived bankruptcy if they’d pivoted to online much sooner like Barnes and Noble. And Eleanor kept on saying things she normally wouldn’t. She admitted she sometimes bought books based on their covers, confessed that she read Reese Witherspoon’s memoir with genuine investment, acknowledged that she’d never actually finished *Infinite Jest* despite claiming otherwise at that party that one time. Marco listened the way people listened in the movies. With his whole body. He nodded at the right moments. Asked follow-up questions that showed he was actually processing her words. When he asked for her number, Eleanor realized with horror that she’d been having a real conversation. The kind of conversation where you said true things about yourself with reckless abandon and full intent to see the person again, specifically because of who *you’d* been in their presence. “I’d like to take you to dinner,” Marco said. “I want to know all of your hottest food takes, and that would require some, hm, live demonstrations.” Eleanor agreed. They had a date planned. She immediately went home to take another Pause. --- Their first official date was at a small Italian place where the lighting was dim enough to hide anxiety sweat and the noise level required actual leaning-in to hear each other speak. Eleanor had taken her pill an hour before arriving, expecting the usual warm wash of constraint. Sitting across from Marco, watching him gesture enthusiastically while describing his work teaching middle school science, Eleanor felt the Pause mechanism chirp in her head. Words started emerging without the usual filter. “I don’t think I’m a very good person,” she found herself saying in the middle of his story about a student who’d built a volcano that actually worked too well. Marco paused mid-gesture. “Uh. What do you mean?” “I mean I think I’m fundamentally critical and impatient and I judge people for things like not using their turn signals or ordering well-done steak, and I’ve never been in a relationship that lasted longer than eight months because I eventually say something cruel enough to end it.” The words were coming out completely wrong. Eleanor felt like she was watching herself from outside her body, horrified but unable to stop. “Last month I told a guy his mother should have raised him better because he wanted to split a check. I made my grandmother cry at my sister’s wedding. I once broke up with someone because they said ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’ and I couldn’t get past it.” Marco was staring at her like she had a news broadcast of a hurricane beaming from her eyes. “So basically,” Eleanor continued, “you should probably run away now before I say something that ruins your day, your life, and so on.” She reached for her water glass, her hands shaking slightly, wondering if it was possible to die from embarrassment or if she’d have to live with the memory of this moment forever, just like *Infinite Jest*. Marco was quiet for about ten seconds. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Well. That was a bit unexpected, I’ll admit. And that might also be the most honest thing anyone’s said to me on a first date.” “Right. Wait, is that good or bad?” “Honestly? Pretty bad. Which is why it’s good.” Eleanor stared at him. In her experience, men called her “a lot” or “intense” or “maybe something to work on with a therapist.” The word “good” rarely entered the vocabulary, except ironically. “What I mean is, most people spend first dates performing the highlight reel of their personality,” Marco continued. “But you just let me glimpse the unedited version. That’s kind of a nice thing to do, in a way. Like you trust me or at least like me enough to do something like that.” Eleanor absolutely could not with this guy, so she excused herself to the bathroom, where she dry-swallowed another Pause pill and spent five minutes staring at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. The medication was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of verbal catastrophe. When she returned to the table, the familiar warm constraint had settled back over her like a blanket. She spent the rest of dinner nodding and asking polite questions, watching Marco’s face gradually shift from engaged to puzzled. By the time he walked her home, Eleanor felt like she’d lost something important, though she couldn’t figure out what. --- The second date was somehow worse. Eleanor had doubled her dose, terrified of another uncontrolled honesty outburst because her tolerance for the pill had increased. They met for brunch at a place where the servers wore suspenders and the menu used words like “artisanal” and “hand-crafted” to describe what were essentially fancy ways of preparing eggs. Marco was telling a story about his students trying to convince him that TikTok was a legitimate source for science fair research, and Eleanor was thinking: *The way he laughs at his own stories is either endearing or insufferable, and I genuinely cannot tell which. Also, this coffee tastes like it was filtered through someone’s philosophical dissertation on the nature of bitterness.* Out loud, she said, “Mm-hmm.” Marco paused. “Are you okay? You seem quiet.” Eleanor opened her mouth to explain, to say something about being tired or distracted or processing what he’d said, but nothing came out. Not even the Pause-approved small talk. Just silence. She tried again. Still nothing. It was as if the neural pathway between thought and speech had been completely severed. Marco waited, almost looking concerned. Eleanor made a gesture that she hoped conveyed *technical difficulties, please stand by*, but which probably looked like she was swatting at invisible flies with a shrug. “Maybe you need some water?” Marco suggested. Eleanor nodded gratefully and took a sip, hoping the liquid would somehow restart her verbal functions. No luck. Her mind was a waterfall of commentary and observation and response, but her mouth had apparently gone on permanent vacation. *This is it,* she thought. *This is how I die. Not from the medication, but from the mortification of sitting mute across from a man who thinks I’ve suddenly become catatonic.* She expected Marco to try and fill the silence with nervous chatter or make excuses to leave. But instead he just waited. And when it became clear that Eleanor wasn’t going to speak, he started talking again, naturally, as if her silence was a normal part of the conversation rather than a medical emergency. He told her about his apartment, which he’d had for just a year or so. He also grew tomato plants on his fire escape, which he’d somehow managed not to kill. He had this theory that middle schoolers were basically tiny sociologists conducting experiments on social hierarchy. And he described his parents’ divorce when he was twelve, how he’d developed a stutter that lasted three years, how he’d learned to listen carefully because speaking had become so difficult. Eleanor found herself leaning forward, captured by the rhythm of his voice and the way he gestured with his coffee cup. Her inner monologue had shifted from panic to fascination. *He’s telling me real things. He’s not really trying to put on a performance or pick spotless anecdotes designed to impress me, like these are actual pieces of his life. And he’s doing it without expecting anything back from me except nods and one-word reactions. This is madness.* When he asked if she wanted to walk around the neighborhood, Eleanor nodded and smiled. They spent two hours wandering through side streets, Marco pointing out architectural details and Eleanor listening with an intensity that surprised her. Every few blocks, he’d pause and look at her as if checking whether she was still with him, and each time, Eleanor would nod or smile or make some small gesture that seemed to satisfy him. At her door, Marco said, “I had a really nice time.” Eleanor wanted to say: *How? I literally said less than fifty words the entire afternoon. You had a good time talking to Ariel from the second act of that Disney mermaid movie. Typical dude. Except, well, this one’s on me, so I guess I can’t blame him. Still, though. Prick.* Rather than speak, she managed to produce a smile and what she hoped was a meaningful look. “I’d like to see you again,” Marco said. “If you want.” Eleanor nodded, and realized she meant it. After he left, she sat in her apartment trying to understand what had just happened. She’d been completely unable to participate in the conversation in any traditional sense, yet somehow the date had felt more intimate than most relationships she’d had. Marco had talked to her like she was present, like her listening was enough. Weirdest of all, she found it *extremely* hot. --- Two weeks into dating Marco, Eleanor realized she’d become a professional listener. Which would have been fine, except that inside her head, she’d become the most eloquent person she’d ever known. *Consider the tragedy,* her internal narrator observed as Marco described his day, *of becoming fluent in your own thoughts precisely when you lose the ability to share them. Note how he gestures with his sandwich while explaining the politics of the teacher’s lounge and the casual intimacy of being someone’s chosen audience. Watch how his face changes when he laughs, the way his whole body participates in the joy of his own stories.* Out loud, “Mm-hmm. Very nice.” Marco was telling her about his coworker who insisted on using comic sans for all official memos, and Eleanor was composing elaborate responses in her mind. *The choice of comic sans in professional communication represents a fascinating intersection of rebellion and incompetence, either a deliberate rejection of corporate formality or a fundamental misunderstanding of font-based propriety. In either case, it suggests someone who has given up on being taken seriously.* What she actually contributed to the conversation…a laugh that sounded like air escaping from a tire. They were lying on his couch, her head on his chest, and Eleanor could feel the rumble of his voice through his ribs as he spoke. It was impossibly intimate and completely one-sided, like being in love with a radio show. “You’re such a good listener,” Marco said, his fingers tracing patterns on her shoulder. “Most people are just waiting for their turn to talk, you know? But you actually hear what I’m saying. I do want to hear more about you, though.” Eleanor shrugged even though she wanted to scream. She wanted to tell him about the three-act play happening in her mind, the detailed analysis she was conducting of their relationship, the fact that she had entire novels worth of thoughts about everything from his choice of buying food based on how much the branding emphasized protein to the way he said her name. Instead, she made a small sound that could have meant anything. Marco invited her to a dinner party at his friend’s apartment the following Saturday. Eleanor spent the week practicing phrases in the mirror, trying to prepare responses for basic social situations. *How are you?* *I’m well, thanks. What do you do?* *I work in marketing.* *How did you two meet?* *At a bookstore coffee shop.* She took her pill an hour before they left, then another in the bathroom at Marco’s friend’s place, just to be safe. The apartment was full of several types of people Eleanor typically enjoyed making fun of. On one side, the graduate students in the humanities, but also the freelance writers with a secret trust fund, plus a bonus woman who introduced herself as a “creative consultant” and spoke exclusively in buzzwords about “logistical brand narratives.” Under normal circumstances, Eleanor would have spent the evening collecting material for later mockery, the invisible stand up comedy special in her tiny apartment. Instead, she sat next to Marco on a loveseat that had seen better decades, nodding and smiling while conversations swirled around her about rent control and whether true crime podcasts were ethical and someone named Brad who’d apparently started a kombucha company that was 100% a pyramid scheme. *This is what hell must be like,* Eleanor thought as this man in vintage glasses explained his theory about how cryptocurrency was going to democratize art. *Being surrounded by people having opinions about things they don’t understand, while you sit mute as a witness to humanity’s capacity for confident ignorance mere minutes from apocalypse.* “Eleanor’s a great listener,” Marco kept saying whenever anyone tried to draw her into conversation. “She really thinks before she speaks.” *If only they knew,* Eleanor’s internal voice commented, *that what I’m thinking is how much I’d like to ask Bitcoin Brad whether he’s ever actually looked at a piece of art, or if he just assumes that adding blockchain to anything makes it more libertarian. I’m thinking about how his girlfriend keeps touching his arm every time he says something, as if she’s trying to physically restrain his stupidity. I’m thinking about how this wine tastes like it was chosen by someone who equates price with quality, which explains a lot about this entire gathering.* Out loud, when someone asked her opinion about whether social media was destroying human connection: “That’s an interesting question, Gina. Never thought about it that way. Honestly.” Finally, they left, allowing Eleanor to come up for air after that sea of horrors. In the Uber home, Marco could hardly sit still. He kept talking about his friends’ various projects and relationships and obsession with pickleball, while Eleanor sat beside him conducting a detailed internal postmortem of every car accident of a conversation she’d witnessed. “Did you have fun?” Marco asked as they reached her building. Eleanor nodded, though what she was thinking was, *Fun is probably the wrong word for whatever happens when you become a silent anthropologist with crippling ego. Educational, maybe. Existentially horrifying, definitely.* Marco kissed her goodnight, and Eleanor realized that even their physical relationship had adapted to her silence. He’d learned to read her responses in touches and gestures, the tilt of her head, the way she moved her hands. It was like dating a mime, if mimes were capable of having complex internal emotional lives and a weird aversion to pickleball. Walking up to her apartment, Eleanor caught sight of herself in the lobby mirror and paused. She looked like someone cosplaying as herself. The same face, the same clothes, but something essential was missing. She looked like a person who had been carefully edited for public consumption, with all the inconvenient bits either airbrushed or removed. *The question,* her internal narrator observed, *is whether this is an improvement or a tragedy. And the fact that I can’t answer that question out loud might be the answer itself.* --- The breakdown, also known as the end of the world, began on a Monday. Eleanor had been increasing her Pause dosage incrementally, chasing the feeling of perfect social control. What started as one pill had become two, then three, then a handful taken whenever she felt the dangerous urge to be herself. She’d been dating Marco for six weeks, and their relationship had settled into a comfortable pattern of him talking and her listening with what appeared to be profound attention. He’d started calling her “mysterious” and “contemplative,” as if her pharmaceutical-induced muteness was a charming personality quirk rather than a medical side effect. The crisis started when Marco suggested she meet his parents. “They’re coming to town this weekend,” he said over dinner at a Thai place where the pad thai was “authentically” mediocre and the lighting made everyone look like they were recovering from the flu. “I thought maybe Sunday brunch? I know it’s quick, but they’d love to meet you.” Eleanor’s internal response was immediate and detailed. *Meeting the parents. The ultimate relationship milestone that requires actual conversation, the ability to answer questions about yourself, to demonstrate that you are a functioning human being capable of independent thought and verbal expression. A social situation in which nodding and looking thoughtful is insufficient, where silence reads as rudeness rather than contemplation. In other words, my ultimate nightmare.* What she said out loud: “Sure.” Marco was used to her one-word answers by now, but something in her expression must have conveyed distress, because he reached across the table and took her hand. “Hey really, it’s no pressure,” he said. “I just think they’d really like you. My mom especially. She’s always asking about the woman who’s made me so happy all of a sudden.” *The woman who’s made you so happy,* Eleanor thought, *is a pharmaceutical fiction. A chemically optimized version of a person who used to exist. You’re dating my medicated shadow, babe.* That night, Eleanor lay in bed staring at the ceiling, her mind racing through worst-case scenarios. Meeting Marco’s parents would require her to demonstrate basic social competency. They’d ask questions about her job, her family, her interests, her intentions regarding their son. They’d expect her to have opinions, to engage in conversational give-and-take that “normal” humans didn’t even have to think about. She got up and took another Pause pill, then another, hoping to achieve some kind of maximum calmness that would carry her through the weekend. Instead, Eleanor woke up Sunday morning to discover that her inner monologue had fractured. Instead of one coherent narrative voice, she now had what appeared to be an entire committee of selves arguing inside her. *Past Eleanor:* You realize you’ve traded your entire personality for the approval of a man you’ve known for six weeks, right? *Medicated Eleanor:* Better to be liked than to be blunt. At least this way nobody gets hurt. Including Eleanor. *Future Eleanor:* You’re going to have to speak eventually. What happens when he realizes you’re not actually mysterious, just chemically docile? *Past Eleanor:* Remember when you used to say things? When you had opinions? When you were brave enough to risk being disliked? God, you were so much cooler back then. *Medicated Eleanor:* Being disliked is exhausting and stressful. This is manageable and preferable. *Future Eleanor:* Preferable for who? Eleanor stumbled to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror, searching for these three selves. Her reflection gave her nothing. Just a bunch of sharp edges smoothed away, the interesting imperfections removed, the essential self-ness edited out in favor of…well, she wasn’t even sure at this point. She met up with Marco and his parents at a brunch place in Alameda where the waitstaff wore flannel and the menu featured at least a dozen different ways to waste money on toast. Marco’s mother was exactly as warm and chatty as Eleanor had expected. She asked follow-up questions and even remembered details from previous conversations. “So, Eleanor,” Mrs. Lopez said after they’d ordered, “Marco tells me you do marketing in the city. What kind of accounts do you handle?” Eleanor opened her mouth and felt the familiar Pause-induced paralysis. But this time, instead of peaceful silence, she experienced what could only be described as internal chaos. Multiple versions of herself were trying to answer simultaneously… *Past Eleanor:* Tell her about the account where you had to pretend soap was revolutionary. *Medicated Eleanor:* Something neutral. Something safe. *Future Eleanor:* Tell her the truth about everything. *Past Eleanor:* Tell her you’re high on medication designed to make you more palatable, especially to mothers who baby their sons. *Medicated Eleanor:* Jesus Christ, don’t tell her anything like that. Just nod. Smile. *Future Eleanor:* TELL HER SOMETHING. What came out of Eleanor’s mouth was: “I…I handle…soap.” Marco’s father raised an eyebrow. “Soap?” “Revolutionary soap,” Eleanor continued, the words emerging without her permission. “Soap that’s going to change everything. Soap that’s been precisely imagineered to remove not just dirt but also…but also the essential human messiness that makes people, people.” She was dimly aware that she was no longer talking about soap. Marco’s mother narrowed her eyes, as if trying to follow a conversation that had taken an unexpected turn. “That sounds quite interesting.” “It’s not interesting,” Eleanor said, her voice getting louder. “It’s the opposite of interesting. It’s designed to make everything clean and pleasant and acceptable, even when clean and pleasant and acceptable means removing everything about yourself that makes you feel alive, damn it.” The internal committee was now shouting. *Past Eleanor:* STOP TALKING. *Medicated Eleanor:* WHY AREN’T THE PILLS WORKING? *Future Eleanor:* KEEP GOING. *Past Eleanor:* YOU’RE RUINING EVERYTHING. *Future Eleanor:* EVERYTHING WAS ALREADY RUINED. Eleanor stood up abruptly, knocking over her water glass. “I have to go.” She grabbed her purse and walked out of the restaurant, leaving Marco and his parents and the toppled water glass staring after her. --- Eleanor sat on her couch for four hours, examining the bottle of Pause pills on her coffee table. Her phone buzzed with increasingly concerned texts from Marco, but she couldn’t bring herself to read them. The internal committee had finally quieted down, leaving her alone with a silence that felt different from the medicated kind. This was the silence of possibility rather than suppression. The quiet that came *before* speaking rather than in place of it. She picked up the pill bottle and walked to her bathroom, where she stood holding it over the toilet for a while before finally emptying the entire contents into the bowl and flushing. Then she called Marco. “Eleanor?” He answered on the first ring. “Are you okay? What happened at brunch? My parents are worried about you and so am I.” Eleanor took a breath. “I’ve been taking medication,” she said in a flat tone. “For the past two months. Something called Pause. It’s supposed to help you avoid saying things you’ll regret, but I think it just made me avoid saying anything at all.” Marco was quiet for a moment. “Wait, what kind of medication?” “I just told you, keep up, dude. It turns you into the kind of person who says things like ‘that’s interesting’ when what you really mean is ‘that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ It makes you agreeable and pleasant and completely, utterly fake and bogus.” She told him the rest. The trial, Dr. Reeves, the consent forms, what that soap thing was really about. She even told him about her internal narrator and the committee of selves and the fact that she’d been conducting elaborate conversations in her mind while he thought she was mysteriously contemplative. “So basically,” she concluded, “you’ve been dating someone who doesn’t exist. The real me is impatient and judgmental and says things like ‘maybe you think someone is good at listening because you love hearing the sound of your own voice.’” Marco was quiet for so long that Eleanor wondered if he’d hung up. “Can I come over?” he finally asked. When Marco arrived, Eleanor was sitting on her couch with a cup of coffee, practicing being present in her own body without chemical assistance, save for the coffee. It felt strange and vulnerable, like walking around without skin. “I need to tell you something,” Marco said as he sat down beside her. “I knew something was different about you the whole time.” Eleanor looked at him. “What do you mean?” “The night we met, in the coffee shop…you were so…alive. Funny and sharp and present. Then on our first date, when you told me you thought you weren’t a good person, it was like seeing you without any armor on. It was so real.” He paused, seeming to choose his words carefully. “But after that, it was like you disappeared. You were still there, but not…there. I kept waiting for that person to come back, the one who said true things even when they were uncomfortable.” Eleanor felt something sharp and warm in her chest. She actually had nothing to say, not yet. “I thought maybe you were just shy,” Marco continued. “Or that I was imagining the connection we’d had. But I kept seeing glimpses of her, the real you, in the way you’d react to things before catching yourself. Like you were constantly editing yourself in real time.” “Why didn’t you say anything?” Marco shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d tell me when you were ready. Or that if over time, I could be good enough for that side of you or something. And I liked spending time with you so much, even the edited version. But I missed…I missed hearing your thoughts.” Eleanor looked at him with piercing eyes. “I have a lot of thoughts,” she said. “Some of them aren’t very nice.” “I’m betting most of them are pretty funny, though.” Eleanor considered this. On the one hand, Marco was being kind and saying extremely romantic things. On the other, he’d basically confessed to liking a version of herself who held back herself. Not cool, dude. “Well, Marco, I think your friend Brad’s cryptocurrency art theory is complete nonsense,” she said. “And that woman who calls herself a creative consultant is basically a professional bullshit artist. And your coworker who uses comic sans is either passive-aggressive or completely tone-deaf.” Marco grinned. “See? That’s pretty funny.” “Those are just the mean thoughts. I have nice ones too.” “Like what?” Eleanor felt herself blushing. “Like how you talk about your students like they’re compelling human beings instead of problems to be managed. And how you listen to people like their stories matter. How you didn’t make me feel bad about myself when I couldn’t speak. How you’re just as willing to make fun of people in a harmless way as I am.” “Well, not always harmless.” They sat in comfortable silence for a moment. “I should probably call your parents and apologize,” Eleanor said. “They’d like that. My mom thinks you’re ‘complex,’ which in her vocabulary is basically the highest compliment of all time.” Eleanor laughed with her gut, and it felt like remembering how to use a muscle she’d forgotten she had. --- A few months later, Eleanor sat at a dinner party. Not Marco’s friends this time, but her coworkers, celebrating a promotion she’d earned by learning to advocate for herself in meetings, specifically about soap. She felt the familiar urge to make a cutting comment about the woman across from her who was explaining her cleanse diet with evangelical fervor. But she paused. On her own, to be clear. She had naturally considered her options: the sharp comment that would get a laugh but make someone feel small, the polite deflection that would maintain social harmony but leave her feeling diminished. She went with something else entirely. “That sounds like it requires a lot of discipline,” she said, which was true and kind without being dishonest. The woman beamed and launched into the details of her meal prep routine, and Eleanor found herself actually taking mental notes. She also caught Marco’s eye across the table and saw him smile. That boy had quite the smile. Later, walking home through streets that hummed with late-night energy, Eleanor realized she’d spoken exactly as much as she’d wanted to that evening. Not too little, not too much. Just enough to be present, to be real, to be herself without apology or chemical assistance. “How was that?” Marco asked as they reached her building. Eleanor took the question *gravely* seriously. The evening had been imperfect…she’d disagreed with people, expressed opinions that weren’t universally popular, admitted to not knowing things she probably should have known, definitely burned a few bridges when she mentioned how pickleball is for people who can’t handle tennis. She’d been herself, in other words. “It was good,” she said. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note It’s truly odd how quickly we've moved toward pharmaceutical solutions for what used to be considered personality traits. We have medications for social anxiety, for attention difficulties, all of which can be incredibly helpful for people who need them. But when working on this story I started wondering: *what happens when we can medicate away the parts of ourselves that are inconvenient rather than harmful?* Eleanor's problem isn't really a mental health condition, obviously. She's just someone who speaks her mind in ways that sometimes hurt people's feelings. In another era, she might have been called “outspoken” or “direct.” In our story's near future, it's a treatable condition called “cognitive-interrupt deficiency.” As someone who is autistic, well, you can imagine how much my own experience shaped this story when it comes to social interactions. So I was particularly interested in exploring the internal narrator that emerges when Eleanor can no longer speak freely. We all have that voice in our heads that provides commentary, makes observations, even judges people. But what if that became the only voice you could access? What if your most articulate, insightful self was trapped inside while your medicated self smiled and nodded? The relationship with Marco is crucial because it explores how authenticity functions in romantic connections. He falls for the real Eleanor—sharp, honest, vulnerable Eleanor—but then spends most of their relationship with her medicated shadow. I want the reader to wonder if you can really love someone you’ve never truly met. And if they can love you back knowing that you’ve only engaged with the “optimized” version of “you.” Whatever that even means… There’s a social pressure to be “nice” rather than real. Eleanor's impulse control issues primarily involve saying true things that make people uncomfortable, after all. It should be notable that the medication never makes her kinder or more empathetic. All it really does is make her less likely to voice inconvenient truths. There's something disturbing to me about that trade-off. That’s why the ending tries to find a middle ground in Eleanor learning to pause on her own, to consider her words without losing access to them entirely. She attempts to find the space between impulse and expression that the medication was trying to create artificially, but by doing it consciously, she ends up with communication as a choice rather than a chemical constraint. Well, except for the coffee. ### We Should Celebrate URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/we-should-celebrate/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:50:24.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/We-Should-Celebrate_thumb.png) We Should Celebrate 0:00 /1357.635918367347 1× The kitchen tap had been dripping for five weeks. Noah kept saying he’d fix it, Elena kept saying she’d call the landlord, and neither of them did anything about it. Now Elena stood at the counter cutting a lime while Noah sat at their small table, the one they’d found on the curb last spring, and the sound of the drip seemed to fill the entire apartment. It’s not that far, she said. A plane ride, basically. Right. Planes exist. She turned to look at him. His face was doing that thing where he tried to appear neutral but his jaw tensed slightly, a tell she’d learned to read years ago. Don’t make it weird, she said. I’m not. I’m saying congratulations. The lime fell into quarters under her knife. Outside, someone’s music drifted through the open window, bass heavy and indistinct. The apartment always felt smaller in summer, the heat pressing in through the walls, making everything stick—doors to frames, skin to vinyl chairs, words to throats. She’d rehearsed this differently. In her head, Noah had been excited for her, maybe even jealous in that productive way that made him update his portfolio or apply for things. Instead he sat there pushing his thumbnail against the table’s chipped veneer, creating tiny half-moon indentations. So when do you leave? he asked. August. End of summer. He nodded, pushed his hands into his pockets even though he was sitting down, which made him hunch forward awkwardly. The refrigerator hummed. The tap dripped. Someone outside laughed, sharp and sudden. Elena brought him a beer without asking if he wanted one. Their fingers touched briefly when he took it. She sat down across from him and they drank in silence, the late afternoon light making everything look temporary, which she supposed it was. Had always been. Three months, she thought. Twelve weeks. Simple math. Seattle’s supposed to be nice, he said finally. Yeah. Rains a lot though. You hate rain. I don’t hate it. You literally refuse to leave the apartment when it rains. That’s different. That’s Charlotte rain. Seattle rain is probably…I don’t know, part of the scenery. He smiled then, just slightly, which made the corner of his eyes crease. She looked away, out the window where their neighbor was dragging a trash can to the curb, the wheels catching on every crack in the pavement. Your parents know? he asked. Not yet. They’ll freak. I know. Your mom will cry. I know. She’ll make you take a Bible. Elena laughed despite herself. She probably already has one picked out. The beer was getting warm in her hands. She could feel him looking at her, carefully studying her face when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. She’d noticed it more lately, or maybe she was just letting herself notice it. The marketing firm, the one downtown, wanted her too. Better benefits, comparable salary, ten-minute commute. Her mother would have been able to drop by for lunch. Noah could have walked over after work sometimes, like he did now, showing up with takeout from the place they liked, the one that knew their order. But the Seattle job was with a bigger company. Would look good on a resume. Would mean she was going somewhere, becoming someone. Not just another Charlotte girl who never left, who settled for good enough, who let life happen to her instead of chasing it. The sink dripped. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, drip. I’m happy for you, Noah said, and she could tell he was trying to mean it. Thanks. We should celebrate. Get dinner or something. Yeah, maybe. He stood up, the chair scraping against the floor. For a moment she thought he might say something else, but he just walked to the sink and tried to tighten the faucet. I’ll fix it before you go, he said. You don’t have to. I know. But they both knew he would. He’d fix the drip and patch the hole in the wall behind her dresser and probably even paint over the water stain on the ceiling, and all these small repairs wouldn’t matter once she was gone but he’d do them anyway because that’s what Noah did. --- The party wasn’t for her, technically. Jess’s birthday happened to fall two weeks before Elena’s departure, but somehow it had become about both things, if that was possible. People kept congratulating Elena and buying her drinks, and she kept accepting them, and now the room tilted slightly when she moved her head. Noah stood by the kitchen island talking to someone from his work. She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music, but she could see the way he held his beer, loose and low, completely comfortable in a way he never was at parties. He’d worn the blue shirt she’d bought him last Christmas. She wondered if that was on purpose. Mark appeared at her elbow, already drunk, grinning. You two are ridiculous, he said. What? You and Noah. It’s like watching a nature documentary. David Attenborough should narrate your life. Shut up. Come on. Everyone sees it. Sees what? she said. You share groceries. You have a favorite side of the couch. We’re roommates. Right. Elena took another drink. Across the room, Noah laughed at something, his head leaning back, and she felt it, almost like her own head was leaning back, too. He’ll find another roommate, she said. Won’t take him long. Mark raised his eyebrows. Sure. And you’re moving to Seattle for the career opportunity. I am. Nobody moves to Seattle in August. That’s when people leave Seattle. The music changed to something slower, and people started pairing off. Someone pulled Noah toward the living room where people were dancing. He resisted, shaking his head, but then his eyes found Elena’s across the room and something tiny shifted in his expression. She didn’t remember walking over, but suddenly they were facing each other while Jess shouted something about shots, and then his hand was on her waist and hers was on his shoulder and they were swaying to some song she’d heard a hundred times but couldn’t tell a soul what the name was. This is a nice song, she said. Yeah. Okay. Neither of them moved away. His thumb pressed against her hip bone through her dress. She could smell his deodorant, the beer on his breath, the laundry detergent they both used. Familiar things that shouldn’t have smelled unfamiliar, but they did. The song ended. Another started. They kept dancing, barely moving really, just shifting weight from foot to foot while the party spun around them. Someone took a group selfie. Someone else whooped. Noah’s hand tightened slightly on her waist when the flash went off. The music cut out abruptly because someone’s phone died. So they stepped apart like they’d been caught. The space between them felt both enormous and insufficient. They ended up on the back porch, where the air was thick with humid cigarettes. Elena’s skin felt too tight. You know, I really am happy for you, Noah said quietly. Don’t start. I’m not starting anything. I’m saying, maybe you think I’m lying. The words came out angular, sharp-edged. She could feel the conversation moving toward something irreversible. You think I’m just running away, she said. That’s what you want to say. Aren’t you? Better than standing still for the rest of my life. He flinched like she’d slapped him. She immediately wanted to take it back, but also she didn’t want to bother feeling guilty. Who cares at this point, anyway. That’s what you think I’m doing? Standing still? No, I didn’t mean— No, you did. You think I’m pathetic— That’s not what I said. And that I’m too chicken to leave, too— Noah— Forget it. He went back inside, leaving her on the porch, alone save for the mosquitoes and the sound of distant traffic. Through the window, she could see him getting another beer, his movements stiff. Jess approached him, probably asking where Elena was, and he shrugged, gestured vaguely toward the door. Elena stayed outside until her skin was covered in small, itching welts, punishment for something, most likely. --- Boxes stacked against walls, furniture pushed into corners, shadow marks on the floor where things used to be. Elena and Noah sat on the futon, the only thing left in the living room, eating Chinese food straight from the containers. The fortune cookies remained unopened between them. Neither wanted to know what they said. Noah had been quiet all day, helping her pack with stoic efficiency. He wrapped plates in newspaper, sorted her books by size, folded her clothes into boxes labeled BEDROOM and WINTER and MISC. Now they sat with their legs stretched out, not quite touching, while the air conditioning unit rattled through a vent that needed a new filter. I don’t want you to go, he said suddenly. Six words, each one a piece of glass hitting the floor. Elena set down her container carefully. You don’t get to say that now. I’ve wanted to say it. She wouldn’t look at him. Outside, someone was dragging something heavy across pavement, the sound like static. Noah, she said, and his name felt dangerous in her mouth. I know I shouldn’t say it. I know. But I can’t let you leave without— Without what? Making it harder? It’s already hard. She did look at him then. His face was doing something complicated, sort of collapsing and rebuilding in real time. She’d seen him cry exactly twice. Once when his grandmother died, once when they’d gotten too drunk sophomore year and he’d told her about how his father left him and his sisters. But this was different. I’m scared, Noah, she said, and the admission surprised her. Of what? Of doing what I want. The air conditioner rattled again. Noah shifted closer, his knee touching hers. You know I wouldn’t— I know. That’s what makes it worse. He reached over and touched her face, his thumb against her cheekbone, and she leaned into it without meaning to. They stayed like that for a moment, suspended. And then they were hugging, which they almost never did. His hand was in her hair, her fingers gripping his shirt, both of them trying to compress years into seconds. When they pulled apart, she was crying. He might have been too. It was hard to tell in the dim light. The truck’s downstairs, she said. Right. He tried to smile but it didn’t work. They sat there for another minute, their foreheads touching, breathing the same air. Then she stood up. He stood up. They looked at each other across the strange, empty room that had been theirs, that was nobody’s now. I love you, he said. I hope you know that. She wanted to say it back. She could feel the words forming in her throat. But saying it would make leaving impossible, and she’d already paid the deposit and shipped half her things and told everyone she was going. Instead she hugged him again, quick and fierce, and then grabbed her keys from the counter. Elena, he said, but she was already at the door. Take care of yourself, she said, and then she was gone, down the stairs and into the truck where the driver was waiting, scrolling through his phone. As they pulled away, she could see Noah’s silhouette in the window, backlit and still. She watched until they turned the corner, and then she faced forward and cried quietly. The highway stretched ahead, dark and certain. This time next week she’d be in Seattle. She’d start becoming whoever she was supposed to become. But right now she was just a woman in a truck, driving away from the only person who’d ever really known her, and that knowledge would be glass shards in her chest, at least for a while. Her phone buzzed. A text from Noah. The sink is fixed. She turned the phone face down and kept going. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note I’ve been asked a few times what my “paradigm shift” was as a fiction writer, and the answer varies depending on my mood. But if I had to pinpoint a moment in time when all bets were off in terms of my more contemporary obsession with the concept of “never-lovers” (people who want to be together but are in a seemingly never-ending battle against fate, A.K.A the author dictating the story A.K.A real life) it would have to be the first time I read Sally Rooney’s *Normal People* in 2018. In many non-subtle ways, “We Should Celebrate” is my tiny nod to Rooney’s style and sensibilities, particularly as I’m finally making my way through her latest book, *Intermezzo* (side note: the international edition cover design I got in Iceland is an absolute upgrade if you can shop it). Obviously, I can’t just imitate Rooney’s work and expect that to be a functional short story worth anyone’s time, so I have my own voice creeping throughout, much of it intertwined with my parallel and seemingly inverse obsession with the wit-poise of Emily Henry, particularly in how she shapes characters using accessible archetypes with sandy edges. After finishing up *Beach Read* and *Funny Story* over the summer (I much preferred the later, for the record), it was likely no surprise to Natalia Emmons (the editor of this piece) that I would be finishing my favorite season of the year with this quirky hybrid of two wildly different styles. Matter fact, Natalia’s first question to me during the line edit was whether or notthis story is based on anything real. “Charlotte to Seattle feels pretty specific” she emailed with the double-eye emojis. And the answer is no, I’ve never had a “thing” with a roommate. I’ve also never lived in Charlotte or Seattle. But Lynchburg (where I grew up) and San Francisco (where I moved to in 2014) would be far too on the nose and a bit too close to home, so to speak, whereas Charlotte and Seattle represent two places I’ve been to very often that also feel so grounded in a split picture of the U.S. After all, they’re completely different places and representative examples of modern urban life, while also fondly regarded for their own reasons. That said, there is the pesky weather (of which I don’t give Charlotte enough grief considering its humidity). Anyway, the structure of this piece is a bit different for me, so please indulge the lengthy but hopefully substantive explanation. I typically try to do these stories either as one scene or about six for the longer ones. After last week’s more epic tale and I believe our longest yet, I knew I wanted to do a shorter one right after. But one scene for a story like this wouldn’t quite work or feel satisfying, at least to me. So for perhaps the first time in years, I did a **three-scene short story**. And as a first, I structured the scenes to follow a classic three-act movie structure. That means we have the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. Easier said than done, by the way. Screenplays follow a three-act structure because they have room to build arcs over hours or hundreds of pages. Short stories, on the other hand, thrive on compression, ambiguity, and implication. For movies, Act I is typically about 25% of the runtime, Act II is about 50%, and Act III is another 25%. So if you try to proportion that out, the Act 1 of your short story can swallow a huge chunk of the piece before anything even happens. This is why many writing gurus advise the overwhelming bulk of your short story to be *in media res*, or taking place during Act II, with Act I and Act III being hinted at through gestures, flashbacks, and so on. Like many other writers, however, I developed my own style that better matches my personality of storytelling. But part of growing as an author involves experimentation and risk-taking. Just look at Rooney, the inspiration of this piece. I’ve read each of her books since *Normal People*, and she constantly builds upon her form and function, constantly takes bigger and bigger swings. Fortunately for you readers and subscribers, the failed experiments I write never make it to page. And yes, the prose here is also a grand experiment. To evoke both Sally Rooney and Emily Henry, I’m choosing language that is spare but also intimate, a beautiful paradox that can easily self destruct without proper editing. The POV is close third person with deep interiority, but at times it can almost read as third person omniscient in how it slides between the consciousness of two characters. The dialogue absolutely has to be understated, but it also has to be emotionally piercing. And I’m taking special care to reveal ordinary settings and small gestures as a way to paint the atmosphere with restraint and loaded subtext. Hence the paradigm shift I mentioned earlier. See, I used to despise writing like this because I frankly didn’t understand the point of these contradictions and how they could cohesively form a compelling story with poetic resonance. But by removing the melodrama (along with all the quotation marks and other formatting), you make the reader work harder to feel something. Thus, that feeling they fall into is no longer fleeting or cheap or split between them and a crowd being pleased. Because everyone already knows how “love stories” go. Two people are either going to get together or they’re not. To find that more specific, untold itch, I had to dig deep. What if they were already in a love story and just didn’t realize it until the end? Skip the montage, the wedding, the “oh no I have feelings for them now that they’re dating someone else” reveal. And just get to the part where time runs out and let that burn in the chest of every reader who knows at least some form of that regret. I should’ve fixed the sink sooner. I should have told them how I felt sooner. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### The Hunger Beneath the Warrens URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-hunger-beneath-the-warrens/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:52:08.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/The-Hunger-Beneath-the-Warrens_thumb.png) The Hunger Beneath the Warrens 0:00 /2758.3216326530614 1× The first sign came with the wind, though Vetch would not understand its meaning until the dead began to walk. He had been sharpening his bone-tipped spear with the other rabbit warriors when the breeze had shifted without reason, carrying with it a scent that made his ears flatten against his skull. Not the familiar musk of fox or the sharp tang of hawk but something else entirely. Something that reminded him of the red fever that had swept the eastern warrens two seasons past, when he’d held Willow as her breath grew shallow and her eyes lost their shine. But this was worse. It was sweeter, and far more corrupt. He tested the air again, whiskers trembling. The other rabbits in Thornburrow continued their evening routines: Bracken mending chain mail with her nimble claws, Old Sage counting arrows in the communal armory, younglings practicing their leaps between the practice posts. None of them had caught it, not yet. But Vetch had always been blessed—or cursed—with the keenest nose in the warren. It had made him Captain at thirty seasons, what had saved them during the great fox siege when he’d smelled the tunnelers three chambers away. It was also what had made him smell the fever on Willow’s fur days before the healers could name it… “Captain?” Bracken’s voice carried the musical lilt of their burrowfolk, though worry threaded through it like a minor key. “Your ears are doing that thing, sir.” Vetch’s paws went to his ears, finding them rigid as winter bark. He forced them to relax. Around them, Thornburrow hummed with the gentle rhythms of home. The great oak’s roots formed natural chambers that their ancestors had carved and expanded over generations, smooth-worn tunnels connecting sleeping chambers to the great hall where the Heartstone pulsed with mystical, amber light. Here, sixty families made their lives in the deep places, connected by the deep magics, following the Burrow-bond that linked every rabbit to the sacred earth. *The Burrow-bond*. That was the rabbit way, to know that every tunnel connected to every other, that no rabbit stood alone, that the earth itself held memory and wisdom for those who learned to listen and trust in the Heartstone. Tonight, the bond carried whispers of wrongness on the wind. “Just listening to what the deep paths tell us,” Vetch said, only half-lying. Bracken studied his face with eyes like polished jet. She’d fought beside him through two fox sieges and the terrible winter when the great hawk Razorclaw had hunted them to the edge of extinction. More than that, she’d been the one to argue they should send healers to the fever-struck warrens, even when Vetch had wanted to seal their borders. She’d been right then. He wondered what she would counsel now. “The younglings are restless,” she said quietly. “Little Dewdrop keeps asking why we practice combat forms if the world is ‘so safe.’ Smart kit.” *Too smart*, Vetch thought. Seven-season-old Dewdrop had her mother’s quick mind and her father’s stubborn streak, both lost to Razorclaw three seasons past. The kit had long looked to Vetch with expectation in her bright eyes, believing he could keep the darkness at bay through will and steel alone. The wrongness in the wind grew stronger as night settled over the meadow, forcing Vetch to make his decision. “Bracken, gather the scouts. Tell them to double the watch, but keep it quiet so as to avoid panic and separation.” “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked. Before he could answer, the screaming started. It came from the Eastward Burrows, a collection of smaller warrens that dotted the hillside like scattered seeds. The sound cut through the evening air, far different from the clean death-cry of a rabbit taken by predator and likely worse. The sound spoke of torment beyond the veil of death. Then it stopped completely. The silence that followed was heavier than stone, and in it, Vetch heard the faint whisper of the Burrow-bond breaking. Somewhere in the darkness, warrens were being severed from the Heartstone, the great network that connected all rabbit-kind. And protected them. “Arm the soldiers,” Vetch whispered. “Now.” --- The messenger arrived as the moon crested the treeline. Young Reed from Sunset Warren, her flanks heaving and foam speckling her muzzle. She collapsed at the outer gates, her mail torn and bloody, words tumbling from her lips like water from a burst dam. “Gone,” she gasped, before Vetch could even offer water. “Moonhaven Warren…all of them…but some still move. Still—” Her voice cracked, and Vetch saw what the journey had cost her. Reed was hardly nineteen seasons, a scout chosen for her speed and keen eyes. Now those eyes held the hollow look of a creature who’d seen the world’s foundations crack at the edges. “Slow now, child.” Sage knelt beside her, offering water from his personal flask of heartroot water that would steady her nerves. “The dead can wait for truth to be told.” She drank deeply, then met Vetch’s gaze. “Captain, it started with Elder Moss. We found him outside our borders this morning, sleeping in the sun. Thought nothing of it, as elders doze where they will. But when young Pepper tried to wake him…” She shuddered, and water spilled from her trembling paws. “Go on,” Vetch said gently. “His eyes were white as winter frost, and there were holes. In his chest, his throat. Wounds that should have put him in the earth, but he stood anyway. Stood and grabbed…Pepper’s throat.” Reed’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The sound when his teeth met bone…and underneath it all, words in the lost tongue. *Join us. The burrow waits. The burrow is vast.*” Murmurs rippled through the assembled rabbits. Old Sage’s ears flicked with perhaps a memory, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of their burrow’s deep lore.“In the time before the warrens, when our people lived wild on the surface, there were tales of such things. The Whispering Dead, we called them. Rabbits whose spirits found no rest, trapped between the living world and the Long Burrow where all paths end.” “Stories to frighten kits,” Bracken said, but her paw rested on her sword hilt. “Elder Moss bit Pepper while we tried to help him,” Reed continued, as if she hadn’t heard. “Just clamped down and wouldn’t let go until we drove spears through his spine. She…she turned within the hour. Same frost-white eyes, same impossible wounds. And when she spoke…” Reed covered her ears with both paws. “It wasn’t her voice anymore. It was the sound the earth makes when it hungers deep.” Ice began to form in Vetch’s gut. “How many turned?” “Almost all of Moonhaven by sunset. Thirty souls at least, walking with wounds that should have killed them, speaking with voices like wind through dirt. They were moving toward Sunset Warren when I…” Her voice broke completely. “When I ran. Left my own burrowfolk to save word for you.” The weight of leadership settled on Vetch’s shoulders like a burial shroud. Thirty souls gone, and three hundred more looking to him for guidance, from grey-muzzled Sage to young kit Dewdrop with her bright, trusting gaze. “You did right,” he said firmly. “Hard choices make hard lives.” But even as he spoke the words, he wondered if he believed them. How many hard choices lay ahead for him, for Thornburrow? And what would be left when the choosing was done? --- Dawn brought refugees and impossible choices. They came in scattered groups throughout the morning, most of them survivors from Sunset Warren, Greenvale, and Little Hazel, all with the same tale of loved ones rising from fatal wounds and the infection spreading with every bite. By midday, nearly a hundred displaced rabbits huddled in Thornburrow’s great hall, seeking protection from the Heartstone, their eyes haunted by the shock and denial of astounding loss. The hall erupted in angry voices when the debate began. Captain Birch, once-proud leader of Greenvale Warren, stepped forward. His left ear hung in tatters, and dried blood crusted his whiskers. “We need to help Fernhaven,” he said. “They’re only three miles west, and their defenses are weak. If we move now—” “We cannot,” Vetch cut him off. “We must instead seal our borders and defend what we have.” Birch’s remaining eye blazed. “There are younglings in Fernhaven, Vetch. Families who looked to us for protection. You would truly abandon them?” “I would keep the living alive,” Vetch replied steadily. “And the living are here, in this room, behind our defenses.” “The Burrow-bond connects us all!” The voice belonged to Holly of Little Hazel, her silver fur streaked with mud and worse. “We do *not* abandon our own!” Vetch’s jaw tightened. “The bond is broken, Holly. Did you not feel it when your warren fell? That snapping, like roots pulled from the earth like teeth? Whatever these creatures are, they sever us from the deep paths. Every warren that falls weakens the network.” “All the more reason to fight *together*,” Birch snarled. “All the more reason not to die separately,” Vetch shot back. Then, more quietly, “I know what I am asking, and I know the cost. But dead heroes save none.” Bracken had remained silent through the argument, sharpening her blades with quiet attention. Now she looked up, her black eyes unreadable. “And if you’re wrong, sir?” she asked. “If running and hiding only delays the inevitable, what then?” Vetch met her gaze and saw doubt there. In his judgment, even his courage. It cut deeper than her blade ever could. But before he could answer, young Dewdrop spoke from where she sat among the other kits. Her voice was small but clear as a bell. “Captain Vetch, my ma said the Burrow-bond meant we never have to be afraid. Because somewhere in the deep paths, every rabbit who ever lived remains with us.” She looked up at Vetch with enormous eyes. “If that is true, Captain, then why are you so scared?” Out of the mouths of kits came the hardest truths, Vetch knew. He was afraid. Terrified that his careful plans would crumble, that his leadership would fail, that he’d lose everyone he’d sworn to protect, who trusted him as their shield. Just as Willow had trusted him. “I am scared,” Vetch said finally, “because being brave is easier to say than to do. And right now, acting means staying alive long enough to find the answer outside the pressures of fear.” He held on to those words for an entire day and into the night, until halfway through the moon’s ascent, runners brought word that made all the previous day’s arguments moot. Fernhaven had already gone silent, cut off from the Heartstone’s light. The infection was spreading faster than anyone could flee. “Captain,” Reed called from her post at the Listening Stone. Her young face was pale with concentration. “Something’s coming. From the east. A horde of them, no doubt.” Vetch climbed to the observation dome, Bracken close behind. Far across the meadow, shapes moved through the morning mist. Too many shapes, hopping and crawling with crooked gaits. “How many?” Bracken asked. Vetch’s enhanced hearing caught the whisper of feet on grass, the soft scrape of claws on stone. His nose detected the sweet-sick scent of corruption, now so strong it made his eyes water. “All of them,” he said quietly. *All those I refused to save.* --- The host of the Whispering Dead reached Thornburrow as the sun touched the western hills. They came with the terrible patience of the grave, spreading across the meadow in a loose crescent that made Vetch’s tactical mind race with possibilities, all of them grim. Dozens of them, maybe more. Rabbits from every fallen warren, united now in their ravenous, mindless march. At their center walked someone who made Vetch’s blood freeze. Captain Flint of Greenvale Warren. His star-steel armor hung in tatters, and a great wound split his skull from ear to muzzle, revealing the white bone beneath. But he moved with the same confident stride Vetch remembered from training, from council meetings, from their united defense against Razorclaw. Flint carried the same famous blade that had drunk deep in a dozen battles, including the very neck of the great hawk herself. “Vetch!” Flint called across the meadow, his undead voice carrying the hollow echo of wind through empty caves. “Old pupil! Why do you cower behind your thorns when the Long Burrow calls for you?” The defenders of Thornburrow lined the barriers. Three hundred warriors with arrows nocked and spears leveled. But Vetch could see the fear in their stance, the tremor in their paws. *How does one fight their heroes once risen from the grave?* “You are dead, Flint,” Vetch called back. “Find your rest in the deep paths.” Flint let out a grisly laughter like grinding stone. “The deep paths led me here, brother. Beneath your feet, beneath every stone you stand upon. We are the paths’ voice now, and they hunger for the warmth of the living.” The dead began to spread out, testing the barriers, probing for weakness. Some terrible intelligence guided them, as if it knew rabbit tactics as well as any captain. “They’re going for the tunnel mouths,” Bracken observed. “The north entrances where the barriers are weakest.” Vetch cursed their fates. Every weakness of Thornburrow was known to these abominations, every secret path mapped in minds that death had not yet silenced. “Fall back to the second ring,” Vetch ordered, “and seal the outer tunnels behind us!” As his warriors moved to obey, Captain Birch approached with murder in his one good eye. “This is *your* doing,” he snarled. “If we had moved with haste when I asked, struck together while we had the chance—” “We’d all be dead, ever still,” Vetch finished. “Look around you!” Birch gestured at the encroaching host. “Half those faces are from Fernhaven. The warren you refused to aid. Your precious strategy doomed us all.” His harsh words carried truth. Among the advancing dead, Vetch could see small shapes that made his heart clench, many of them kits who should have lived to see another spring, now walking with winter in their milky eyes. “I know,” he said quietly. “And I’ll carry that to my end.” “Will you?” Birch’s voice cracked. “Because I see my nephew out there, and my sister, and the baker who made honeycakes for festival days. What will you tell them when they come calling?” Vetch had no answer. Below them, the sound of digging began, of claws against stone, methodical and patient. The dead knew they couldn’t storm Thornburrow by force, not with the Heartstone’s protection. They would do what rabbits did best. They would dig. --- The siege lasted three days, and each one carved seasons from Vetch’s life. The dead had worked with inhuman persistence, their claws scraping through stone and root with supernatural strength. They dug precise excavations, following the old maintenance shafts that honeycombed the earth beneath Thornburrow. Every warren had them, these forgotten passages used by the first diggers, now remembered by minds that should have been ash. On the first day, they lost the outer defenses. “Captain!” The cry came from Scout Fern, her voice tight with panic. “They’ve broken through at the north cistern!” Vetch raced through twisting passages he’d known since kithood, Bracken and a dozen warriors at his heels. They reached the cistern chamber just as the floor erupted upward, pale claws thrusting through stone in shapes of grotesque flowers. The battle was brief and bloody. Elder Patchfur, who’d taught Vetch sword work as a kit, held the narrow passage alone against five of the dead. His blade work was still beautiful, still perfect form and flawless technique, everything he’d drilled into multiple generations of young warriors. But it wasn’t close to enough. Claws found the gaps in his mail, and teeth met the great vein in his throat. He fell defending younglings he’d never see grow up, and rose again within the hour to hunt them. “The nursery chambers are lost,” Bracken reported as they sealed the passage behind them. Her voice was steady, but Vetch caught the tremor beneath. “Nineteen chambers flooded, including the deepest sanctuaries.” They fell back to the second ring, then the third. Each retreat cost them ground, lives, and fleeting hope. And always the sound of digging, closer and more insistent. On the second day, Reed volunteered for reconnaissance. “I’m the fastest,” she said simply. “If anyone can map their positions and get back alive, it’s me.” Vetch wanted to refuse her, but tactical necessity was a cruel master. They needed intelligence, and Reed had already proven her courage. He gave her his personal blade—star-steel forged from the heart of a fallen comet—and watched her disappear into the maintenance tunnels. She never returned. They found her body at sunset, dumped at the third ring’s main gate as a grim gift. Her throat was torn, her eyes the color of winter frost. When she spoke, it was with that voice of wind through vast depths. The star-steel blade was nowhere to be seen, claimed by whatever darkness now guided her. “Captain,” she whispered, clinging to what remained of her senses. “The paths…they go so deep. Deeper than any rabbit has ever dug. And in the darkness…such wonderful things. Such hungry things.” Sage wept then, the first tears Vetch had ever seen from the gruff old warrior. Reed had been like a granddaughter to him, one of the few survivors of his original scout company. Now she stood before the gates, promising eternal reunion in the dark beneath. “I know you are in there, grandfather,” she called, her young voice hollow and sweet. “The burrow misses you. I miss you. Won’t you come home?” She turned completely a moment later, and Vetch hesitated to send his blade into her chest, giving her a moment to escape. They sealed that gate with blessed stone and moved deeper into the warren’s heart. By the third dawn, they had fallen back to the great hall itself. Fifty rabbits remained of Thornburrow’s three hundred souls. They huddled around the Heartstone, its amber light flickering like a candle in a hurricane. The dead pressed close on all sides, their scraping claws a constant whisper against sealed stone. “The emergency tunnel to Farmeadow,” Bracken said quietly, running a whetstone along her notched blade. “We could still get some of them out. The younglings, at least.” “To what end?” Vetch gestured toward the sealed entrances, where shadows moved beyond the barriers. “This corruption spreads with every bite, every scratch. Soon there will be nowhere left to run.” “So then…” “We make our last stand here,” he finished for her. But even as he said it, Vetch’s mind raced through possibilities. There had to be something they were missing, some weakness in their enemies that— The scratching stopped. In the sudden silence, every ear in the great hall swiveled toward the main entrance. The blessed stones that sealed it were two feet thick, carved with protective sigils that had guarded Thornburrow for two hundred seasons, if not more. From beyond them came a voice that stopped Vetch’s heart. “My love,” Willow whispered, soft as summer rain. “Why won’t you let me in?” The great hall spun around him. Willow had been dead for two seasons, claimed by the red fever that swept the eastern warrens. He had held her as her breath grew shallow, had sung the deep songs over her grave, had carved her name into his heart with every beat since. “It’s not her,” Bracken said fiercely, her blade half-drawn. “Whatever’s out there wearing her voice, it is not—” “I know.” The words scraped his throat like broken glass. “I know it is not her.” But his paws were already moving toward the barrier stones. Each one weighed as much as a full-grown rabbit, but they could be moved. They were meant to be moved, in case of siege or flood or the dozen other disasters that could trap a warren. “Vetch, my heart,” Willow’s voice carried all the warmth of their fever dreams, all the love they’d shared in too-brief seasons. “I’ve been so cold in the deep places. So alone. But if you join me…we could dig new burrows together. In the dark beneath, where nothing changes, where nothing dies, where the fever can never touch us again.” His claws found purchase on the blessed stone. It shifted slightly, just enough to let in a whisper of that sweet corruption from beyond. The scent made him remember their last night together, how she’d pressed close despite the fever’s heat, how she’d made him promise to find happiness after she was gone. A promise he’d broken long ago. For what was the point of living when everything that mattered was already dead? “Captain.” Old Sage appeared at his shoulder, ancient and battle-scarred and suddenly gentle. “That is not the Burrow-bond, that is not the rabbit way.” “What do you know of love, old claw?” The words came out harsh as winter wind. “You’ve had your battles, your victories, your long life. What do you know of losing all that matters?” Sage was quiet for a moment, his grey muzzle thoughtful. “I know that love isn’t about holding on, lad. It’s about letting go when you must.” The simple words felt like cold raindrops on Vetch’s whiskers that he knew were small, yet they weighed him down ever still. He looked around the great hall, at Bracken preparing for a battle she knew she couldn’t win, at little Dewdrop huddled with the other kits, at the handful of warriors who still believed he could save them. Before all this, Vetch considered the rabbit way to be many things all at once. It was a dedication to cleverness and bravery, the Burrow-bond that connected them to the deep paths, to the Heartstone, to their very ancestors who sacrificed so much to see them now at ruin’s door. Because now the cold voice of old death had come calling with new debts. Vetch had to wonder if the rabbit way could be more. Could be choosing life over death, hope over despair, no matter how sweet the alternative whispered. “I’m sorry, love,” he said softly, pressing his forehead to the blessed stone. “But my place is here. With the ones who need me.” Willow’s voice changed then, became something hollow and vast and terribly hungry. “You will join us soon enough, fool. And when you do, you will understand. The deep places have such wonders, Vetch. Such terrible, beautiful wonders, far greater than you.” The assault began mere moments later. --- The whispering dead burst through the walls in wild droves. The blessed stones that had stood for centuries cracked like eggs as unnatural strength pressed against them from beyond. The enemy poured into the great hall like a tide of rainwater, dozens of them, every familiar face from friends to enemies twisted by the grave’s hunger. Vetch met Captain Flint in the chamber’s center, star-steel ringing against star-steel, the sparks mixing with the amber light of the Heartstone behind them. The dead captain was faster than any corpse had any right to be, his ruined face split by a grin of perfect malice. “You always were too clever for your own good,” Flint said conversationally, his blade work still flawless despite the gaping wound in his skull. “Always thinking three moves ahead, always sure you knew better than the rest of us.” Vetch parried a killing thrust, spun away from claws that sought his throat. Around them, the battle raged with desperate fury. Bracken danced between four attackers, her twin blades weaving patterns of silver death. Old Sage stood over little Dewdrop and the other kits like a mountain of scarred fury, his war-hammer crushing skulls that should have stayed crushed. But for every dead rabbit that fell, two more pressed forward. And the fallen rose again within moments, joining their killers in the horde. “You were right about one thing,” Flint continued, pressing his attack with immortal persistence. “Running would have gotten us all killed faster. But staying together? Ah, that just made the dead angrier, didn’t it? And now you get to watch everyone you tried to save die anyway.” Vetch’s blade found the gap where Flint’s gorget had torn away, drove deep into the throat. For a heartbeat, hope flared— Then Flint smiled with ruined lips and kept fighting on. “What you don’t understand about the dead, old friend—” he whispered, “—is that we do not need the parts you think we do.” Around them, Thornburrow fell one defender at a time. Brave rabbits and true, each one fighting to the last breath, each one rising again to turn that courage against their former comrades. Captain Birch died with a curse on his lips and rose with winter in his eyes. Holly of Little Hazel fell defending the Heartstone itself, then turned to drag down the warriors who’d fought beside her. This was no battle. It was a harvest. And they were the grain. Flint’s blade took Vetch in the shoulder, spinning him around. He hit the floor hard, tasting blood and earth. Above him, the dead captain raised his star-steel sword for the killing blow. “Any last words for the ones you failed?” Vetch’s eyes fell upon the Heartstone, pulsing with its warm amber light just a few yards away. Two hundred seasons of life and death, love and loss, all the hopes and dreams of his people made manifest in crystallized starlight. The old songs said it was a fragment of the celestial sphere, gifted to the first rabbits by the Sky Jumpers themselves. It was no wonder the Whispering Dead wanted its power. But what if…Vetch considered something painful. That if the old songs were true, if the deep lore held even a grain of truth… “Bracken!” he called across the chaos. “The Heartstone! If we can shatter it with them close—” Flint’s blade pierced his chest, but the wound was shallow, turned aside by the remnants of his mail. Pain exploded through his fur, but he managed to keep talking. “The network,” he gasped. “It’s powered by the stones…all of the dead are connected…we must destroy what is connecting them…break the connection…” Understanding dawned in Bracken’s eyes. She cut down the dead rabbit clawing at her back, then sprinted toward the chamber’s heart where Old Sage still fought. “Are you mad?” the ancient warrior roared, crushing another skull with his war-hammer. “That stone is the heart of our warren, the soul of our people! Without it, we lose everything! Our connection to the deep paths, our link to every rabbit who came before, our very identity!” “And if it falls into their hands?” Bracken pointed with weakening strength at the advancing corpses. “What happens when they corrupt the very source of our power? When they use it to spread their hunger to every warren in the network?” The terrible logic of it filled Sage’s eyes. Around the great hall, the few remaining defenders fell one by one. Soon the dead would overwhelm the Heartstone’s protective circle, and then… Then the corruption would spread through the deep paths like poison through veins, carrying the whispers of the Long Burrow to every rabbit settlement from here to the Sunset Cliffs, perhaps even further. “The network dies with us,” Sage said quietly. “Everything we were. Everything we might have been.” “Everything except the chance to begin again,” Vetch replied weakly, Flint still pushing his blade against the rabbit’s shallow wound. Without another word, the grizzled warrior raised his hammer high and brought it down on the Heartstone with all his considerable strength, a single shout, close to a moan, erupting with full force. The crystal cracked, and light blazed from the fracture like a newborn star. The Whispering Dead recoiled with shrieks of agony, their corrupted forms smoking in the radiance. Where the light touched them, frost-white eyes cleared for just an instant, just long enough for Vetch to see fear, then gratitude, then peace in Captain Flint’s gaze before his misshapen body crumbled to ash. “Again!” Vetch roared, though the effort sent fresh pain through his pierced chest. Three more blows, each one sending fresh cracks through the ancient crystal. With each strike, the light grew brighter, more pure, more final. The dead tried to flee, but the radiance followed them, touching every corner of the great hall with cleansing fire. Reed was the last to fall, her young face peaceful as the corruption burned away and left only empty air behind. On the fourth blow, the Heartstone shattered completely. The explosion of light was like watching the birth of stars. It washed over the great hall in a wave of purifying flame, then raced outward through every tunnel, passage, and hidden path that connected Thornburrow to the greater warrens. Where it passed, the whispers of the Long Burrow fell silent, and the deep connections that had bound rabbit to rabbit for a thousand generations simply…ended. Darkness reached the warrens. An empty, final darkness. When Vetch’s vision cleared, he lay in a hall full of silent ash. The Heartstone was gone, its amber light extinguished for good. Around him, twenty-three survivors picked themselves up from the rubble, their faces hollow with the weight of what they’d lost. The Burrow-bond was broken. The deep paths were silent. For the first time in recorded history, the rabbits of Thornburrow stood alone. --- The sun found them sitting in the ruins of everything they’d ever known. Thornburrow was no more, its tunnels collapsed when the Heartstone’s power failed. The ancient wards that had held back earth and water for centuries crumbled in moments, leaving only a crater where their home had been. They sat in a rough circle on the grass above their buried lives, sharing what little food remained and trying not to think about the future. Twenty-three rabbits remained of Thornburrow’s three hundred souls. Among them sat little Dewdrop, her bright eyes dimmed by loss but still stubborn, still alive. “What now?” young Fernpaw asked. She was barely old enough for her first mail, but the night had aged her beyond her seasons. “Where do we go when there’s nowhere left that remembers us?” Vetch looked around the circle of survivors. They were broken, scattered, cut off from everything that had defined them. The deep paths were silent. The Burrow-bond was severed. Even their ability to sense each other across distance—a gift as fundamental as breathing—was gone. But they were also alive. Against all odds, despite every mistake, in the face of certain death, they were breathing new air. “We will now do what our ancestors did,” he said quietly, surprised by the steadiness in his own voice. “Before the great network, before the Heartstone, before the deep paths connected us all. We will dig new burrows. We will remember our dead. We will choose to keep living. And find new life for the burrow to come.” “But without the bond…” Bracken’s voice trailed off. She sat sharpening her notched blade, a habit that had become meditation. “We’re just…alone.” “The bond was old magic,” Sage said firmly, though his voice carried grief for all they’d lost. “Useful and powerful magic, yes, but mere magic all the same. What made it precious was what we brought to it. Our love for each other, our determination to build a life worth defending, our choice to stand together when the darkness fell.” He gestured at the survivors. “That magic remains as memory. In us. In every kit who will learn to dig, to every warrior standing guard. And to every elder who’ll remember the old stories and teach them to the next.” Vetch nodded slowly. “Thornburrow is no more, but we remain. And somewhere out there, other survivors are probably sitting in circles just like this one, wondering if they’re alone as we are.” He managed a small smile. “Well, they are not alone, are they? Not once we find each other again. Different than before, indeed, and perhaps weaker in some ways. But also stronger. Because we’ll build our new connections by choice, unbound by ancient magic.” Little Dewdrop spoke up, her voice small but determined. “Will the bad ones come back? The whispery dead?” Vetch considered the question seriously. She deserved truth, not comfortable lies. “I don’t know, kit. Maybe. The world is full of dark things and worse hungers. But if they do come back, we will be ready. We know how to fight them now. More importantly, we know the cost of fighting them. And that it’s a cost worth paying.” As if in response to his words, the morning breeze shifted, carrying with it the scent of leaves and other growing truths. Not the corruption that had brought death to their door, but the clean smell of earth waiting for new seeds, of spring following winter, and life insisting on itself against all odds. “There are fresh meadows beyond the eastern hills,” Vetch continued, getting to his feet despite the ache in his chest where Flint’s blade had found its mark. “Places where rabbits haven’t dug for generations. The soil will be rich, the dangers unknown. A clean start.” “And if we fail again?” Fernpaw asked. “If we make the same mistakes?” “Then we shall make new solutions,” Bracken said, rising to stand beside her captain. “And keep learning from newer mistakes. Keep trying. Keep choosing life over the easy sleep of death.” Vetch looked around the circle one last time. At faces marked by loss but not defeat, younglings who would carry forward what they’d learned, eventually becoming warriors to watch over new burrows with the wisdom of hard-won battles. The rabbit way endured. Changed, perhaps. Scarred, certainly. But endured all the same. “Come,” Vetch said, shouldering his pack. “Let us go and build.” As they walked east toward the rising sun, little Dewdrop fell into step beside him. Her small paw slipped into his larger one, trusting and warm. “Captain?” she said quietly. “I can’t feel the deep paths anymore.” “I know, kit.” “But I can still feel you. And Bracken, and Sage, and all the others.” She looked up at him with eyes bright as stars. “Maybe that is what the bond really was all along.” Vetch squeezed her paw gently. In the distance, a lark began to sing. The same species that had sung over these meadows for a thousand seasons, unchanged by the rise and fall of warrens, by the whispers of the dead or the dreams of the living. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note Two words inspired this story: *Zombie rabbits*. I worked backward from there. And look, stories with animals as characters are always a cheat. They’re never really about the animals. They’re about us. Our doomed schemes, our tendernesses, our astonishing knack for turning paradise into a charnel pit. You put a spear in a rabbit’s paw, or give it a name like Vetch or Bracken, and what you’ve really done is build a mirror: a small fur-coated stand-in to carry the unbearable weight of our own fears and make it “cute.” To tell a zombie story like this, I knew I had to center it around *community*, that fragile filament that ties us to each other and what happens when it snaps. The warrens are a stand-in for every tight-knit circle I’ve ever known in life, from families and towns to fandoms and nations. We think they’re eternal. They’re not. They break. They’re broken by plague, betrayal, bad luck, the simple passage of time. But rabbits are stubborn, as you just read. They dig new holes. That’s the trick of it. You lose everything and somehow, inexplicably, you keep going. You stand ankle-deep in ash and decide, *Fine*, we’ll build again, even if we have no map, even if we have to pretend we know what we’re doing. Of course, as I was writing, a voice in the back of my head kept saying, “Really? Zombie rabbits? This is what you’re spending your limited mortal hours on?” And the answer was, “YES, DUH, because zombie rabbits will tell the truth about the rest of us better than another grandiloquent story about kings.” (Though I do like stories about kings, don’t get me wrong). And if you’ve made it this far, then that means you were indeed open to reading about rabbits with armor, rabbits with grief, rabbits who smell corruption in the wind and fight on anyway. They’re us at our most ridiculous and our most noble, which is to say, they’re us exactly. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### Frequency URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/frequency/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:53:55.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/Frequency_thumb.png) Frequency 0:00 /816.9273469387755 1× > *Content Warning: this story includes substance use, body horror, medical crisis, and emotional distress.* The Bill Graham breathes neon nicotine, a cathedral of concrete where dreams go to die electric deaths. Two hundred souls scatter like spilled pills across a floor built for thousands, each one a ghost haunting their own story, each one deaf to the gospel Christian is about to preach. *DJ Verse*. The moniker blinks morse code above his altar of turntables, a prophecy written in dying LEDs. He chose it back when love was a language he thought he spoke fluent, when he believed hearts could harmonize, the oscillators finding their perfect pitch. Now the name is a copper penny under his tongue. His phone *thrums*—Maz’s rejection arriving in Arial font: *“Can’t make it tonight. Need space to think.”* The words are insects under his skin. Three years of entangled frequencies, and Maz can’t even ghost-write an appearance at his resurrection service. The device slips through fingers slick, those midnight tears, the space between what was promised and what was delivered. **Thump.** The first track drops, and it’s a fist through glass, a bassline born in the belly of a whale, rising from somewhere deep in his sternum where hurt pays rent. Christian moves the way water finds a path downhill, body swaying to beats older than hearts, and the first time someone said *love* and meant *maybe*. Near the merch table, where forty-dollar t-shirts sell out dreams, the bathroom refugees stumble into fluorescent purgatory, none the wiser. Black cotton dusted white with pharmaceutical hope, oh they’ve been snorting salvation in the stalls, searching gram bags at Graham, their pupils blooming midnight flowers, hungry for any frequency to fill the static in their souls. And it’s **Thump-thump.** Layer two drops heavier than gravity, more insistent than hunger, and sweat overwhelms Christian’s hairline, each droplet a tiny evidence of rage, each bead carrying the DNA of of his discontent as the laser constellation above pulses crimson lectures across the scattered congregation, the geometric psalms a painting of faces that refuse to lift toward the light. The security guard near VIP can’t withhold the virus rhythm, his radio dying a quiet death on his hip, and behind mahogany and brass, a bartender freezes mid-pour, the bourbon baptizing her Air Jordans as she discovers the ritual of 4/4 time. *Look at me,* Christian thinks to his flock, watching thumbs scroll through digital distractions, their eyes married to the glass instead of surrendering to his sonic seduction. *I am right here bleeding frequencies, hemorrhaging harmonies, giving birth to sound babies you’ll never learn to love.* Track three is his bastard child, his nameless, shameless, conception in those predawn hours when Maz would serve communion wafer accusations: “too much,” “too needy,” “too desperate for the spotlight that never shines back, ya know.” The synthesizer screams his autobiography in B minor, kick drums pounding prison riots against ribcages. Reality slides. Lasers bleed a little sharper now, a lot sharper now, their beams slicing atmosphere into razor blades, when a woman touches her cheek and her fingers return painted red, she’s grinning to the heavenly sway of the sensation she can’t hear. Christian drowns in his own climate, his sweat a brisk San Francisco July as his shirt becomes a second skin, a gown soaked in salt, the water kissing the turntables, amplifying the signal, pushing deeper into the eardrums, deeper into thought, straight into the soup where feeling lives to die. Security abandons their posts for a synchronized possession, their bodies writing new choreography in the language of lost control when the bartender birth-screams as bottles explode against mirrors, with seven years bad luck multiplied by the speeds of sounds, her face twisting into ecstatic mathematics. Bodies drop like punctuation marks at the end of unfinished sentences, machine gun synapses firing without reason, hearts trying to match the BPM only to be outrun by Olympic ghosts as others transform into beautiful monsters, fingernails suddenly too long for this world, sharp teeth curving into perfect predator smiles. The music transcends its medium into transmission, by way of infection, by way of the bridge between pain and nervous system, but this is *connection*, like Maz never understood, showing up when promises get got. A man convulses near the stage, mouth foaming, drowning in reverse, body trying to process the emotions of his maker, when a couple consumes each other with passion indistinguishable from warfare, love and violence dancing the same dance they’ve always known. Lasers burn geometric *stigmata* into willing flesh, and the metallic fog is a dream deferred too long, so as to lose the aftertaste. And Christian conducts this symphony of collapse, every knob adjustment sending fresh waves of satisfying anguish through what remains of his people, his sweat inventing entire weather systems, pooling lakes around his feet, short-circuiting the world in showers of sparks, just more percussion to the apocalypse. He nods—**crescendo**. The final track tears the universe apart in a godly divorce, where the moment between lightning and thunder stretch for all eternity, and the survivors begin to *weep* from pure, overwhelming **joy**. They have witnessed something beyond the hertz of human comprehension, have touched the exposed nerve of artistic truth and found it wanting. The applause, when it doesn’t arrive, is rain on tin roofs, a chorus of hands clapping thunder back to life as twenty-seven people give standing ovation to the ending of their lives with eyes incapable of sight. Christian steps back from his altar, his shirt a transparent liquid confession, to survey his masterpiece. Bodies dance death across the floor, their broken instruments attempting one final song as survivors sway with tears streaming scripture down their faces, eyes reflecting the fervor of last breaths and first loves. He unplugs his life support and walks toward the exodus, stepping careful around his fallen angels, and in his skull, the fake applause continues its existential echo, its endless, perfect, validation he’d been starving to taste, more-so than eat. Outside, the night air is a cold revelation against his replenished skin. Across the asphalt wilderness, a hot dog vendor takes focus, a shadow-man emerging from alley, still zipping pants over his absolved sins, and Christian approaches, sneakers *squelch-squelch-squelching* their wet testimony with each step. “One dog,” voice hoarse from the screaming silence. The moneylender serves a mustard and onion poisoning, and Christian bites into his supper, sits curbside, applause still echoing in the swooning graveyard of his mind, and Maz’s rejection has been deleted from his side, but phantom vibrations are still a steep current against his thigh. He has finally found his frequency, this one the distant sirens coming, wailing their blue-light, but they cannot touch him now. He is already composing his next verse in his head, drowning out the applause. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note Back in July, I saw Illennium’s latest set (my third time with one of my all-time favorite EDM artists) at Bill Graham in San Francisco, and I wrote the pitch for this story in one stream-of-conscious paragraph…during one of the openers. That’s right, Illennium was nowhere near the stage yet. I was instead fascinated by the opening DJ’s constant battle with the crowd for attention. I wondered about how easy it is to confuse a crow'd’s noise or lack of noise for love. I’ve been to enough shows—tiny ones, big ones, goldlilock ones—to know the difference between people dancing with you and people just waiting impatiently for the next drop. In this story, Christian doesn’t know the difference, or maybe he does and refuses to admit it. Same result, though. The music here isn’t realistic, mainly because even as an amateur musician I know next to nothing about producing electronic dance music (I have actually tried, it is not my “thing” in the slightest). So for this story, I’m actively avoiding details about BPMs and EQ settings, because my lane is in the “feels like” of a song hitting so hard it rearranges your internal organs, and you’re either grateful for the new plumbing or you’re feverishly coughing on the way home. Maz is the ghost in all of it, the one person Christian actually wanted in the room, the one who left him to play messiah to strangers. Side note: Fans of Gaspar Noe, particularly his film *Climax*, will likely see some clear inspirations of his style and function, which is entirely an accident I only realized during the editing process, so take that subconscious admission for what it is. Anyway. I guess the point, if there is one, is that not all applause is worth hearing, and not all silence is empty. Sometimes the crowd goes wild. Sometimes it just goes. And as a little extra treat for you wonderful subscribers and passersby, here’s a bonus look at that paragraph I wrote on my phone during the show before turning this idea into a story: > *DJ opener, dancing while he plays, dealing with codependency burnout, outwardly dancing but internally roiling over a perceived emotional affront from his partner (name/personality never specified?) as the scene crescendos it matches the wavelengths of a song and the music becomes a lethal extension of his turmoil, gradually causing people in the audience to either collapse or go feral (bath salts symptoms). Sweat motif so like we see his body become more and more soaked in embellished ways, whiplash ending where the final few in the audience are weeping tears of joy at this euphoric musical experience they just witnessed and he gets rapturous applause (sees his self doubt early that no one pays attention to his shows, so the horror is that as his emotion enters his art, it becomes “better” but more destructive). Laser light show can even burn people’s skin? His DJ name should thematically tie to the story and maybe foreshadow the mayhem. Set it in Bill Graham SF since I know the layout pretty well. Definitely a merch table joke somewhere, people flocking from the bathrooms so quickly their black shirts are dusted with cocaine. Security team should be frazzled but maybe gradually can’t help but get lost in the music as well, bartenders start going rabid and throwing drinks everywhere. Maybe the DJ walks out of the auditorium past the dead bodies, casually approaches a hot dog stand with someone he definitely saw pissing over in the alley over and probably never washed their hands, buys a dog and sits down to eat it still hearing the applause is in his head and that’s how it ends* --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### Your Inner Sourdough URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/your-inner-sourdough/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:56:06.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/Your-Inner-Sourdough_thumb.png) Your Inner Sourdough 0:00 /1103.7257142857143 1× That MAN is sitting in her seat again, the one by the window in the third car where the heater actually works and you can lean your head against the glass without getting that weird vibration from the engine. Marina is standing there doing the thing from *Reclaiming Your Inner Landscape* where you’re supposed to imagine your anger as a small red bird that you can hold gently in your cupped hands before releasing it into the sky, except the bird keeps turning into a middle finger in her mind. Which Dr. Morgan Hartwright, the therapist turned podcaster, definitely didn’t mention as a possibility in Chapter Seven. Marina breathes in for four counts, holding for four counts, releasing for four counts, just like the diagram with the little lungs illustrated in soothing pastels, while simultaneously thinking about how this tech bro or consultant or whatever just assumes the seat is his. Probably doesn’t even notice it’s the only good seat in the whole damn car, probably just autopilots there every morning at 7:23 from Downtown Berkeley with his stupid little coffee and his stupid little LinkedIn scrolling. The breathing isn’t working so she moves to Step Two which is naming five things she can see without judgment: train pole, someone’s Allbirds, tangled earbuds, safety poster, his messenger bag taking up the adjacent seat like an asshole…whoa, wait, that last one definitely contained judgment, so she starts over. Actually, Marina thinks, watching him shift his bag slightly to make room for an elderly woman who isn’t even trying to sit down, maybe he just likes routines the same way she does. Maybe this seat is *his* version of *Reclaiming Your Inner Landscape* or whatever men do instead of reading self-help books, probably watching YouTube videos about cold plunges and how lonely they feel. The thought arrives fully formed and irritating in its reasonability. He’s probably not even trying to ruin her morning, probably has no idea she exists, which is somehow worse than if he were doing it on purpose. She finds herself moving toward him through the swaying car, past the morning commuters, and up close she can see he’s doing this thing with his thumb, rubbing it repeatedly along the seam of his jeans pocket in a perfect little arc, an unconscious repetitive motion her anxiety-prone cousin does during family dinners. His face has that particular exhaustion she recognizes from her own bathroom mirror, the under-eye situation that concealer can’t quite fix, and there’s a coffee stain on his sleeve that he’s clearly tried to rub out with water, bless his heart, but only succeeded in making larger and more diffuse, like a brown watercolor accident spreading across the white cotton. “You’re in my seat!” Marina says before she can run the words through the de-escalation framework from Chapter Nine. This isn’t what she meant to say at all, she meant to say excuse me or perhaps nothing, perhaps just walk past and do the visualization where you imagine yourself as a river flowing around obstacles, but instead she’s standing there having said it, the word “my” floating around in the recycled BART air like she’s a kindergartener claiming dibs on the good swing. He looks up from his phone where he’s been reading what appears to be an extremely long Wikipedia article, his thumb still working that nervous line against his pocket seam, and she realizes with horrible clarity that she’s become the type of person who says things like this to strangers on public transportation, exactly the kind of person Dr. Morgan Hartwright would probably use as a cautionary example in Chapter Twelve: “When Boundaries Become Walls.” “Oh shoot, really?” he says, blinking up at her with genuine surprise, already half-standing and grabbing his messenger bag in this fumbling rush that makes everything worse somehow. “I had no idea anyone else even noticed this seat, I mean it’s the only one where the heater works right and you don’t get that weird neck thing from the window vibration. You know, actually, I’ve been sitting here off and on for like three years thinking I was the only weirdo who noticed.” He’s fully standing now, doing this awkward shuffling dance to get out of her way while the train lurches forward, and he almost drops his phone but catches it against his coffee-stained sleeve, laughing at himself in a way that makes Marina feel like the world’s biggest jerkface. “It’s all yours, seriously, I’ll just relocate to, uh, literally anywhere else where the heat doesn’t work and my neck gets messed up,” he says, but he’s smiling while he says it, not in a passive-aggressive way but in a way that suggests he actually finds this whole situation kind of a little amusing. Marina instinctually moves to let him pass, even though she now doesn’t want him to move, yet *she* somehow moves in the same direction he does, initiating that terrible dance of two people trying to get out of each other’s way, and then the train jerks and she’s suddenly pressed against him for a full second, maybe two, long enough to smell his completely unremarkable combination of drugstore deodorant and Target laundry detergent and underneath that something like sourdough starter, which makes sense given the Wikipedia article but also doesn’t, and she’s thinking about how smell is processed in the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain, according to Chapter Four, while simultaneously trying to sit down in the seat that is now technically hers but feels like literal highway robbery. Her body makes the decision without consulting her brain, dropping into the seat even as she’s saying “No, wait, you don’t have to—” but he’s already moving away down the aisle, giving her this little backwards wave that makes her feel like she’s swallowed something down the wrong pipe. The seat is still warm from him sitting in it, which is horrible, and she can still smell that sourdough smell, which is worse, and she realizes she’s completely forgotten to release her anger-bird or whatever the hell she was supposed to do with it, and now it’s just sitting there in her chest, except it’s not even anger anymore, it’s some other bird entirely, one that Dr. Morgan Hartwright probably doesn’t have a chapter for. Marina sits there for exactly ten seconds, she counts them, waiting for someone, anyone, to make eye contact or raise an eyebrow or give her that little commuter nod of acknowledgment that says “yeah I saw that whole weird thing, call it a Tuesday.” But everyone is deep in their phones or their sleep or their morning dissociation, and the elderly woman is doing Wordle, completely unbothered by the entire social catastrophe that just unfolded. Sourdough Man is standing by the doors now, holding the overhead rail with one hand while scrolling with the other, and she can see from here that he’s not on Wikipedia anymore but she can’t tell what he’s looking at, could be Instagram or news or Hinge for all she knows, and the not knowing is suddenly intolerable, like when someone starts telling you about a dream and you don’t want to listen at first because honestly who cares, but then they do a surprisingly standout job explaining it, so you get momentarily invested before they get to the end and surprise, there’s no satisfying conclusion. She’s standing up before she realizes it, leaving the precious seat empty behind her like some kind of statement about the futility of desire, and moving toward him through the car again, Dr. Morgan Hartwright’s voice in her head asking “What is your intention?” which is a really good question actually, one she probably should have considered *before* she got up, but here she is anyway, approaching this stranger for the second time in three minutes like some kind of public transit mall cop. “Hey!” she says, and he looks up with this expression like maybe he’s been caught cheating on a test, his thumb doing that pocket-seam thing at double speed now, and he starts saying “Sorry, did I—I’m sorry if I—” but he clearly has no idea what he might be apologizing for, just knows that when someone approaches you twice on BART it’s probably not going great. Marina meant to say something normal like “what are you reading” or even just “you can have that seat back” but what comes out instead is “Do you actually make sourdough?” which sounds insane even to her, sounds like the kind of non sequitur someone says right before they pull out religious pamphlets or ask for money. His face does this thing where confusion shifts into something else, maybe relief that she’s just goofy and not actively hostile, and he’s still gripping the rail as the train rounds the curve near Treasure Island, everyone swaying in unison like underground kelp, and she’s standing too close probably, close enough to see that his phone screen has gone dark from inactivity, which means she’ll never know what he was looking at after the sourdough Wikipedia article, a mystery that will probably bother her for the rest of eternity, if not her life. “Oh, no, I’ve never made sourdough in my life,” he says, laughing a little like this is a reasonable question to be asked by a stranger at 7:40 AM, “I just fell into this Wikipedia hole about starter cultures and now I know wayyy too much about lactobacilli for someone who can barely make toast.” Marina feels this completely irrational spike of betrayal, like he’s been false advertising himself with his sourdough research, like reading about fermentation without doing it is some kind of moral failing. The anger-bird is back, pecking at her ribcage, because of course he’s just another dilettante consuming information he’ll never use, probably tells people at parties about wild yeast cultivation while buying his bread from Whole Foods like everyone else, and she realizes she’s doing the thing from Chapter Eleven where you project your own disappointments onto strangers, except knowing she’s doing it doesn’t make her stop. “So you just *read* about it,” she says, and it comes out accusatory, like she’s caught him in a lie, even though he literally just told her the truth, and the train is pulling into San Francisco now and she needs to get off at the next stop but she’s standing here interrogating this man about his bread-making habits or lack thereof. “I mean, yeah, I just read about it,” he says, looking genuinely confused now, “but I’m getting off at Embarcadero and there’s this baking class at the Ferry Building I’ve been meaning to—” and Marina interrupts with “*I’m* getting off at Embarcadero,” which sounds territorial even though it’s just a fact, and he says “Okay, cool, do you want to walk together or—” and she says “I was going to take that class,” which isn’t true, obviously, she’s never thought about taking a baking class in her life, particularly when she’s supposed to be getting into work by 8:00 AM sharp, but suddenly she needs to take this specific class that he wants to take. “Today?” he asks, and she says “Yes, today,” and he pulls out his phone, thumb still doing the pocket thing with his free hand, and says “It’s been sold out for three weeks, I’ve been on the waitlist,” and she says “Well I pre-registered,” which is an insane lie that makes no sense, and he’s looking at her like he’s trying to solve a puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape. “So we’re both going to show up to the same sold-out class,” he says slowly, “and argue about who gets the spot if someone doesn’t show?” and Marina says “I guess so,” and he says “That’s ridiculous, I’ve been refreshing this page every morning,” holding up his phone where she can see he does, actually, have the class registration page bookmarked, and she wants to say something about how reading Wikipedia articles doesn’t entitle you to sourdough-class priority but instead she says, “I’ve been planning this for months,” and the train is pulling into Embarcadero now, both of them still standing, the precious seat three rows back still empty and practically gaping at both of them in shock. The doors open and they’re both trying to exit at the same time, that same terrible dance from before, and he says “This is stupid,” and she says “I know,” and he says “You didn’t know about the class, did you,” and she says “No, you were just obsessing over sourdough and I got mad,” and he says “Mad about sourdough?” and she’s trying to explain about the seat and the bird and Dr. Morgan Hartwright but it’s coming out all wrong, like “You sit in my spot every day and I do this breathing thing but then you were reading about bread you don’t even make.” He’s laughing now, clearly not at her but at the whole situation, saying “I’ve been sitting there a couple times a week for three years thinking about you, actually, the woman who always stands by that exact pole looking pissed off. I thought you hated that seat because you never sat in it.” Marina realizes they’ve been watching each other this whole time, both of them locked in some weird commuter ritual they didn’t know they were religiously following. “We could share it,” he says, “like alternate days or something, I’ll make a spreadsheet,” and she says “You *would* make a spreadsheet,” but she’s almost close to grinning now, and somehow in the shuffle of trying to get off the train his hand has caught hers, or maybe she caught his, it’s unclear who started it, but they’re stepping onto the platform at Embarcadero holding hands like they do this every morning, like this was always the plan, and Marina thinks maybe she should send Dr. Morgan Hartwright a thank-you note, or maybe an apology, or maybe just a photo of two strangers holding hands beside a transportation map, which probably deserves its own chapter. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note Like with most of my stories, the grudge in this one is wholly imagined while also wholly universal. It stems from something obviously small, like a seat on a train in this case. One of those everyday, nothing things that somehow holds *everything* if you prod it long enough. We all have one, probably. A precious corner booth. A preferred grocery lane. A very specific bench. I wanted to explore that in the most absurd way I could without testing your patience, and specifically around the way we build little rituals around comfort, or control, or invisible grievances, while next investigating what happens when someone unknowingly disrupts them. And I was interested in how anger often isn’t anger at all, but a placeholder for awkwardness and embarrassment. You’ll notice the main character is not sad, necessarily. She doesn’t even seem lonely to me. She just has this weird out-of-place feeling, like *why am I not being seen?* I’ve also been thinking a lot about boundaries, like when they serve us and when they cage us. I think sometimes we confuse the two. Or we erect entire mental scaffolds just to hold together one fragile emotion—often resentment, affection, or desire—and then someone brushes against it with their messenger bag, and suddenly we’re unraveling in public. And you’re thinking *seriously? That’s all it took to set me off?* Marina is trying very hard to do everything *by the book*, literally. She tries to breathe like the podcast says, tries to let go gracefully, tries to regulate her wild, contrasting emotions. But healing yourself doesn’t always show up as serenity. Sometimes you have to accept the embarrassment, particularly when it floods your perfectly curated inner narrative. And yes, I also just liked the idea of writing a dude who smells vaguely like starter culture. Which says something about me, probably, and how I view every person at their core. A little gooey and gross inside, but also full of potential. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### The Little Matchgirl Makes Good URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-little-matchgirl-makes-good/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:57:47.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/The-Little-Matchgirl-Makes-Good_thumb.png) The Little Matchgirl Makes Good 0:00 /2645.6032653061225 1× I died at Christmas with my stockings torn and my feet blue-black from frostbite, clutching a handful of matches no one wanted to buy. Fourteen years old and worthless as wet tinder, they said later, those who bothered to say anything at all. The city officers who found me wrote “unknown vagrant” in their ledger, because it was easier than asking my name. But death, it turns out, isn’t much good at paying debts and keeping accounts, either. The cold of my own death came first. Always the cold, seeping through stone and timber, finding the gaps where mortar had crumbled away. I knew that cold, even danced with it in doorways while gentlefolk hurried past with their coat collars turned high. But this cold was far different from the rest. It was bone-sharp. It bit without the mercy of numbness. I tried to pull my knees to my chest, but my body moved entirely wrong. The joints had stopped grinding, the muscles no longer cramped into permanent knots. I opened my eyes, expecting eternity. Instead, I witnessed candle flames wavering in a circle around me, their light catching on wet stone walls that wept with condensation. The air tasted of permanent brine and something else that made my nose wrinkle and my eyes water. This was not the sweet smoke of a proper hearth. “Finally.” The voice came from the shadows beyond the candles. A girl stepped forward, maybe seventeen, with dark hair pinned severe against her skull and hands stained black to the wrists. Her dress was good wool, but patched in a dozen places with careful stitches. “Thought we’d have to try the salt circle twice.” I sat up, too quick, and the world tilted sideways. My stomach lurched, empty as always, but something else lurched with it. A jarring blur, like trying to remember a dream that kept slipping away. “Where—” My throat felt scraped raw. “Where am I?” “Safe.” Another girl emerged from the darkness, this one younger, maybe twelve, with pale-red burns running up both arms in criss-crossing patterns. She held a clay bowl steaming scents of herbs and copper. “Drink this. It’ll help with the between-sickness.” I looked down at my hands. They shook, but they were solid and more importantly real. The holes in my dress—where the rats had gotten to me while I lay rotting in the snow—had been mended with black thread. “I died.” The words came out flat, matter-of-fact. I remembered the windows above me, golden with warmth, and how my fingers had finally stopped hurting when the cold took them completely. “I remember dying.” The first girl smiled, but it was far from kind. It was the smile of a girl who’d counted coins and found them short, who’d measured promises against their keeping. “Death’s just another sort of business transaction,” she said. “And business has been very good to the Daughters of Ashes, lately.” A third girl stepped into the circle. Red hair, freckles, shoulders broad as a dock worker’s. She carried a coat over her arm, thick wool the color of charcoal, with brass buttons reflecting the candlelight. “Real question is,” she said sternly, “what are you willing to pay to get out of the debt you now owe us for bringing you back to breath?” I stared at the coat. Real wool. Good wool. The quality of wool I’d pressed my face against in shop windows, breathing in the smell of lanolin and prosperity through the glass. “I don’t have any money.” The old shame crept up my throat. “I never had any money.” “Don’t want money,” said the dark-haired girl. She knelt beside me, close enough that I could see her eyes weren’t brown like I’d thought, but deep green flecked with amber. “Want you to remember something.” “Remember what?” “Your sister.” That word was a sweaty slap to the chest. I jerked back, but the girl’s hand shot out, quick as a snake, and caught my wrist. “Esterline,” she said, and the sound of it could break glass. “Golden-haired Esterline who braided *your* hair and sang you lullabies. Who promised you’d always be sisters, no matter what papers said different about your mothers.” I tried to pull away, but her grip was iron-strong. “Let go.” “Esterline who married herself a magistrate,” the girl continued, relentless. “Who lives in a fine house on Beacon Hill now, with servants to light her fires and silk dresses in six different colors.” “Stop.” But my voice came out thin, reedy as winter wind through broken shutters. How did they know any of this? Had they followed me, waited for me to pass before doing whatever they did to bring me back? “Esterline who saw you in the market square three months ago.” The girl leaned closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Who looked right through you like you were smoke. Like you were nothing. We saw it all.” The memory rose up sharp and sudden, Esterline in her blue velvet coat, her golden hair pinned up proper beneath a hat with real feathers. How I’d called her name, how I’d run after her carriage until my lungs burned and my legs gave out. How she’d never once looked back. Tears came hot and heaving, running down my cheeks before I could stop them. The dark-haired girl released my wrist and sat back on her heels. “There,” she said, and now her voice was gentle, almost tender. “That’s exactly what we need. That’s what feeds the flame. That’s how we know you’re one of us. That you can strike a match.” She nodded to the red-haired girl, who stepped forward and held out the coat. Not offering, but presenting it, like a crown or a sword. “Put it on,” the dark-haired girl said. “And we will teach you how to make people like your sister remember *you*. We’ll teach you how to burn their pretty world down until there’s nothing left but ash and the sound of your name on their lips.” I looked at the coat. At the girls watching me with eyes like banked coals. At my hands, still shaking, still poor, still empty. But not dead. Not anymore. I reached for the wool. --- Three nights hence, I found myself crouched in an alley that knew nothing but misery, where the reek of piss and rotting fish had soaked so deep into the cobblestones that even winter couldn’t freeze the stench out. Above us, the Ashford Cotton Mill squatted like some great beast of bitter brick history, its windows dark as dead eyes save for the night watchman’s lantern, swinging lazy through the ground floor, his pendulum for counting down to judgment. “Mind this well,” Prudence murmured, her flame-bright hair tucked neat beneath a knit cap that had seen better years. “We’ve not come to spill blood. Only to speak a word through the language of flames.” I gave her a nod, though my throat had gone tight as a miser’s purse strings. The coat they’d wrapped round my shoulders was fine wool, warm as I’d never known, but still my hands shook something fierce. Not from cold this time, I’d had my fill of cold, thank you kindly. No, this was something else entire. Something that might have been the thrill of the hunt, or perhaps the trembling that comes before you step off a cliff into empty air. Cordelia had her fingers working round the window latch, patient as a spider with a fly already caught. The metal gave way with no more than a whisper, and she slipped through that gap like smoke through a keyhole, beckoning us to follow with a simple gesture, as if we were entering our own homes. Inside, the mill stretched before us vast as a cathedral, though it served a vastly different god. The looms and spinning wheels hulked in the darkness like bones picked clean and left to bleach. The air sat heavy on my tongue, thick with cotton dust and machine oil and something underneath that made my belly turn. “Lord preserve us, what is that smell?” I whispered. “Hate,” said Verity, youngest of our number, her arms marked with pale-red scars that mixed with the moonlight like the scales of some strange fish. “Seeps into timber and stone when folk spend their days terrified of the next breath they draw.” We ambled our way through that maze of metal and malice, our feet knowing enough to stay quiet on the worn wooden floor. Back in the cellar, Cordelia had laid it out plain: the Ashford Mill paid wages that wouldn’t keep a roach alive and locked their workers in during shifts like prisoners in a gaol. Come last month, three girls had burned to death when fire took the cotton bales, and the foreman wouldn’t unlock the doors till the work bell rang. “Accidents may happen,” he’d told their mothers at the burying, counting his coins while they counted their tears. “Here’s where we, the Daughters of Ashes, make our stand,” Cordelia said, stopping beside a pile of cotton white as fresh snow, though there was nothing pure about it. She drew from her coat a bottle no bigger than her fist, its contents sloshing. “Lamp oil and turpentine, mixed right. Burns hot and clean as righteous anger, but won’t spread to the tenements hard by.” She sprinkled that mixture over the cotton like a priest blessing bread, and I watched the dark stains spread through the white fibers, infecting every dry speck. “That won’t hurt anyone?” I asked, though I already knew the answer from the careful way she measured each drop. “Building’s empty as a politician,” Prudence said, drawing her own bottle from her coat’s deep pockets. “Night watchman makes his rounds regular as clockwork, every hour on the hour, and he’s not due back for the best part of forty minutes.” Verity pressed a bottle into my hands, warm from her body and heavy as a stone. The liquid inside filtered moonlight through the high windows, gleaming quicksilver. “Just a few drops, mind,” Cordelia warned. “Cotton’s eager to catch, and we want it to burn clean, not blow the whole district to kingdom come.” I tilted that bottle over a bale of fiber, watching the oil seep into the white fluff the way water invades sand. Such a small thing it seemed, such a nothing sort of gesture. A few drops of oil on some cotton, how could that bring down all this brick and iron? But I’d learned a thing or two about small gestures and their larger consequences. About matches that could light a fire or leave a girl frozen stiff in the snow when unmet. About sisters who could break your heart with nothing more than a hollow glance right through the heart of you. By contrast, the oil was rich with possibilities. Of change coming whether you wanted it or not. A justice with its sleeves rolled up and its hands dirty. “All ready then?” Cordelia asked. We’d spread ourselves through that mill floor like seeds in a field, each tending our own small plot of destruction. She held up a match, a proper sulfur match. But that’s right when the sound came. Footsteps on stairs, thundering certain. “Someone’s coming up!” I hissed, my heart jumping into my throat. Cordelia’s head snapped round quick as a whip crack. “Can’t be. The watchman’s not due—” “Must’ve heard something,” Prudence breathed, her voice tight as a violin string. “Or seen the window standing open.” The footsteps kept coming, each one a nail in our coffins. “We need to scarper,” Verity said, but there was something in her voice that sounded like a sob trying to escape. “Not without finishing what we came for,” Cordelia said, striking her match. The flame bloomed bright as hope in the darkness, casting our shadows long and strange across the walls. “They killed those girls just as others killed us, sure as if they’d put knives in their backs. They deserve what’s coming to them.” “Cordelia.” Prudence caught her wrist with fingers that knew their business. “We get caught, they’ll slice our necks from the nearest crossbar and we’ll die all over again. All of us.” The footsteps stopped. Right outside the mill floor door, close enough that we could hear breathing, ragged and harsh. Cordelia stared at that lit match in her hand, then at the cotton soaked in oil. The flame danced between her fingers with a trickster’s life, like it wanted to leap free and do what fire does best. For a heartbeat, I thought she might drop it anyway. Let the mill burn while we ran for darkness, let the flames speak the words we could not. There was something hungry in her eyes, a starvation held so long you’d consume anything, even poison. The door handle turned, making Cordelia’s decision. We ran like the very devil was behind us, which, truth be told, he might have been. Out through that window, across the alley slick with things best not named, up the fire escape of the building opposite while my throat and heart were at war. The brass buttons on my coat kept catching on the iron rungs, each snag like a hand trying to drag me back. Behind us, the watchman’s lantern light spilled from the mill windows, searching the void in vain. We didn’t stop our flight till we reached the roof, flat tar and gravel under a sky full of weary stars. I collapsed against a chimney, gulping smoke and air in equal breaths. “That was closer than I care for,” Prudence said, pulling off her cap and shaking her hair loose. “Too close by half,” Verity agreed, running her fingers over those pale-red scars on her arms like she was reading words written in her flesh. But Cordelia stood at the roof’s edge, staring down at the mill with its lit windows and moving shadows. Her hands had made themselves into fists, and I could see the muscles jumping in her jaw. “We should have let it burn,” she said. “We *had* them. We could have burned it all to ash and cinders.” “And gotten ourselves headless for the trouble,” Prudence said, but gentle-like. “What good would that do those poor girls who died?” Cordelia turned to face us, and in the starlight her eyes were bright with tears that had nothing to do with sorrow. These were tears of rage, pure and simple, burning as they fell. “You know what that foreman said at their burying?” she asked, her voice getting louder, more dangerous. “Said they should have been more *careful*. Said if they’d minded their own affairs instead of chattering like magpies, they might have smelled the smoke sooner.” My stomach dropped. “He blamed *them* for dying?” “Blamed them for burning to death in a fire he could have stopped with a key.” Cordelia’s hands were shaking now. “And their families stood there and took it, because they need the work, because there’s nowhere else to go, because that’s how the world works for girls like us. Only we’ve been given another chance to set these affairs in order.” She pulled another match from her pocket, fresh and unlit, waiting for light. “So tell me, Match,” she said, using the name I’d chosen for myself. “Tell me why we shouldn’t go back down there and light that cotton anyway. Tell me why those girls don’t deserve their justice served in the design of what robbed them of breath.” I looked at that match in her hand, small and common as dirt. I’d sold thousands just like it, standing in doorways while fine folk walked past like I was made of air. But I knew something about matches that maybe she had forgotten. “Because,” I said slow and careful, minding my way across thin ice, “once you strike a match, you can’t make it whole again. And fire’s got its own ideas about what deserves burning.” Cordelia studied my face for a second too long, like she was trying to find the disagreement. Then she smiled. “Maybe that’s exactly what this world needs,” she said, slipping the match back into her pocket like she was saving it for a later occasion. “A fire with its own ideas.” As we made our way across the rooftops toward whatever passed for home, I found my thoughts turning to Esterline. To the magistrate my sister had wed, with his fine house on Beacon Hill and his carriage with brass fittings. To the laws he probably helped write, the sentences he probably helped pass. To the girls who’d died locked in a mill while men like him ruminated their profits. Perhaps Cordelia had the right of it. Maybe the point wasn’t to control the fire at all. Maybe the point was to strike the match and let it burn till there was nothing left but god-given truth. The thought should have frightened me right down to my bones and banished itself. Instead, I could feel the heat of it exploding inside of me. --- The long months that followed taught me things I’d never thought to learn. How to pick locks with hairpins. How to walk silent through sleeping houses, light as shadow on carpet luxurious enough to mask sound. How to read the faces of men who sold corn stalks in front of starving children, and find the exact spot where their conscience still lived. We burned the Whitmore Grain Warehouse in Spring, when the wind was just right to carry smoke across the financial district. Cordelia stood in the street afterward, watching flames reach toward heaven, and laughed religiously. “Look at them scatter,” she said, pointing to men in fine coats who’d come running from their clubs. “Like rats when you flood their nests with their own shit.” But I was watching something else, how the fire caught wooden supports faster than we’d reckoned, then jumped to the tenement next door where dock workers kept their few belongings. I was the one who ran to wake them, who helped the mother carry her baby out while Cordelia “kept watch.” “You’re getting soft,” she told me later, back in our cellar grown warm with stolen coal. “Fire doesn’t ask permission, Match. It takes what it wants and burns what it will.” “And innocent folk get charred along with the guilty,” I said, but she’d already turned away, already planning the next blaze. The Daughters of Ashes had grown in those months. Four became seven became twelve, then twenty. All of them resurrected girls who’d lost brothers to factory accidents, sisters to consumption from mill air, mothers to starvation while warehouses sat full, then their own lives to similar perils. The salt-circles brought them as the one that brought me, hollow-eyed and furious, seeking purpose in the ashes of their old lives. Most looked to Cordelia, the first of us, drawn by the fierce brightness of her rage like moths to flame. But more and more, they brought their doubts to me. Questions about targets and methods, worries about collateral damage. “Match always sees,” they’d whisper. “Match knows the corners we might miss.” And I did see them, the corners where regular folk lived, where the poor would suffer most when rich men’s warehouses burned. I’d learned to read a city like scripture, learned to find pressure points that would send the message without the shared torment. But Cordelia was losing that careful eye, that surgeon’s precision we’d started with. The girl who’d once measured lamp oil by the drop now spoke of burning entire districts. “Let them all choke,” she’d say when I questioned a target. “Good with bad, wheat with chaff. God will sort them out in the after.” When Prudence tried to argue strategy, Cordelia’s eyes went cold as winter stone. When Verity suggested we might seek justice through other means, Cordelia went jester and asked if perhaps she’d prefer to return to eating slop in stables. The others began watching me when Cordelia spoke, waiting to see which way I’d lean. And I found myself caught between two fires, the one that wanted to spread, and the one that remembered what it felt like to be kindling. It would all come to a head on the night of the Governor’s Winter Ball. The day of Christmas, the anniversary of my death. “The Pemberton Hotel,” Cordelia announced, spreading stolen blueprints across our scarred table. Her hands shook as she traced the lines, whether from excitement or something darker, I could not say. “Five stories of sinful marble, where they’ll all be gathered. Governors and magistrates, factory owners and shipping lords. Every man who’s grown fat on our misery, all in one gilded cage.” The hotel sat directly across from Beacon Hill’s grandest ballroom, where the city’s finest would be dancing while we worked. They’d have a perfect view when flames reached the windows. “Someone slips in during evening service,” she continued, “sets bottles in the basement, lights their tips, and walks out while they’re still arguing over wine selection.” “And the people inside?” I asked careful-like. “Kitchen girls and chambermaids, porters and boot boys?” “They’ll make it out in time,” Cordelia said, not meeting my eyes. The room went quiet as a graveyard. Near-twenty pairs of eyes moved between Cordelia and me, waiting to see which fire would burn brighter. “No,” I said, soft but iron-certain. “It’s too close. We don’t risk working folk just to spook their betters.” Cordelia’s smile could have cut glass. “Then what do you suggest, dear Match? Politely request justice? Wait for them to grow hearts on trees?” I studied the blueprints, tracing lines with my finger, thinking of all I’d learned in a year of shadow work. “We don’t need to burn the hotel,” I said finally. “We just need them to think we will.” The plan that grew from that moment was mine, though I let Cordelia believe she’d birthed a piece of it. A small fire in the hotel’s basement, just enough smoke to send everyone fleeing into streets with their loose diamonds clattering the cobblestones. But the real target would be the empty Fairweather mansion across the square, the one within perfect view of the ballroom windows. We’d gut its foundation to rafters while the city’s finest stood watching their safe world burn. But to make it work, someone had to be inside that ballroom to rise the panic. Someone to ring the alarm bells at exactly the right moment, when all eyes would turn to windows. Someone had to infiltrate the Governor’s Winter Ball. “I’ll do it,” I said, though my mouth went dry as sand speaking the words. Verity shot me a knowing look. “Match, your—” “My sister, I know.” I could already see her in the ballroom, dancing in silk, golden hair pinned with pearls. “But I know at least a piece of that life, watched it through the eyes of my sister before she threw me to the workhouses as soon as our father perished and she took a husband who simply could not have me, and so yes, I can slip into that world without standing out inside it. Has to be me.” --- A week later, I stood before cracked glass in a stolen midnight-blue dress, silver thread worked through the bodice like they could store moonlight. Verity had worked magic with my hair, pinning it in curls I’d never dreamed I could wear again. The shoes pinched something fierce, but they were true leather with honest ribbons. “You look like proper quality,” Prudence said, adjusting the silver locket at my throat, hollow inside and just big enough for lamp oil and a single match. “I look like a walking lie,” I said, but couldn’t stop staring at the stranger in the glass. This girl had never stood barefoot in doorways, never felt her stomach gnaw itself empty. This girl belonged in ballrooms and drawing rooms, to the world that had left me cold. “Sometimes lies are the only truths that walk at all,” Cordelia said from the doorway. She’d grown gaunt in recent days, eyes bright with fever or even madness. “Remember what you’re there for, Match. When that mansion burns, they need to see it. All of them. They need to know their pretty world can be stolen from them just as easy as they stole ours.” I had to agree. The Pemberton Hotel rose before me, every window glowing against winter night. Carriages lined the street, brass fittings gleaming, drivers stamping feet against cold while their superiors danced inside. I walked up marble steps like I belonged, like I’d done it a thousand times because I’d watched my sister from afar a thousand times, studying her every move, *obsessing* over being the one worthy enough to walk and glide beside her with clarity and poise. The doorman barely glanced at my invitation—swiped from a merchant’s reclusive daughter who’d never miss it—before waving me through into warmth and music and endless light. The ballroom stretched like something from the fairy tales, crystal chandeliers and golden mirrors, silk-draped walls and glistening floors. Men in tailcoats spun women in gowns worth more than a year’s hunger, their laughter bright as champagne bubbles. I moved through them with the ease of smoke, nodding and smiling and playing at being a young lady at her first grand ball. No one looked close. Why would they? I wore their clothes, spoke their words, carried myself like I’d been born to ease and plenty. But all the while I was counting. Minutes until the mansion fire would start, seconds until I’d need that alarm bell hidden behind the tapestry near the orchestra. All the while watching for golden hair, for a face I’d know in sleep. It found me first. Esterline stood near great windows looking over the square, hair piled high and crowned with her signature pearls, gown a cascade of purple silk waves. She was more beautiful than memory could echo, more elegant, more perfectly at home in this world of crystal faces. And she was laughing at something her companion said, a man with silver temples and kind eyes, wearing wealth like comfortable old clothes. Her husband, the magistrate, the man whose laws allowed discarded girls like me to die in doorways. I should have looked away, kept moving, kept mind on the task at hand, but the raw humanity of myself refused, drinking in the sight of her, trying to understand how the sister with half my blood who’d braided my hair became this stranger in flesh. She turned, as if sensing my eyes on her, meeting me. For a moment lasting two or three lifetimes, our eyes met across that glittering ballroom. I saw the recognition flicker in and out, a flash that might have been guilt brewed with genuine lapse in memory. Her lips parted as if to speak a name. Or a guess. Her husband touched her arm, said something that made her laugh, and she turned away like I was just another face in the crowd. Like I was nothing at all. The clock chimed. Five minutes until the mansion fire would start. Five minutes to choose between pulling that alarm and letting Cordelia’s madness consume everything. But standing there in that stolen dress, watching Esterline dance with the man who’d helped write my death warrant, I realized the choice was already made. I began walking toward the alarm bell, eyeing damnation. *Let them all burn*, said a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like my own. The clock’s hand crept toward quarter past, slow as honey. Through those grand windows I could see the first orange tongues licking at the Fairweather mansion’s upper floors, right on schedule as Sunday service. The other Daughters would be perched on rooftops, waiting for my signal, waiting for me to send these silk-wrapped peacocks squawking into the street. Instead, I turned my back on salvation and walked deeper into the glittering crowd. “Pardon me, miss.” I turned to find Esterline herself standing at my elbow, still in purple silk that defied gravity when she moved, pearls at her throat like collected stars. Up close, she was lovelier than memory had painted her. Skin soft as cream that had never known the bite of winter wind, golden hair that had never felt workhouse shears or hunger’s greedy fingers. I knew, of course, that wasn’t always the case. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” she said, her voice carrying a careful music that could belong to elocution masters and drawing room philosophy. “Mrs. Esterline Whitmore, at your service.” Whitmore. She’d taken her husband’s name like a new skin, shedding the old one like a snake in springtime. Hearing it was like watching a door swing shut on everything we’d ever been. “Constance,” I managed, though my throat had gone dry. “Constance Fairweather.” The first part of the name was true. The last was borrowed from a father who did not name me. Her eyes went bright as candle flames, all delight and surprise. “Fairweather! Well, aren’t you a dear thing. We must be blood, mustn’t we—I was born a Fairweather myself, before marriage took me elsewhere. Though Lord knows the family tree’s got more branches than an old oak, and I’ve never been clever with keeping track of all the cousins and their cousins.” She laughed like silver bells ringing out Christmas morning. “Perhaps we’re thrice removed and twice forgotten, or some such tangle.” I studied her face like I was reading scripture, hunting for any flicker of knowing, any sign she remembered the girl who’d shared her thin blankets, who’d yawned by stub-candle light while we whispered stories to keep the dark things at bay. But there was nothing in her eyes. Nothing but the polite interest of upward folk meeting distant relations at upward gatherings. “Perhaps so,” I said, picking my words careful as stepping stones across a swift river. “Your name sits familiar on my tongue.” “Doesn’t it just!” She clapped her gloved hands together like she’d found treasure in the street. “I do so adore discovering family connections. Makes the world feel snug, don’t you think? More…containable.” Through the great windows behind her, I could see the fire spreading its hungry wings across the mansion’s bones, painting everything in shades of revoking. The other guests were taking notice now, pressing toward the glass like moths to flame, their murmurs rising like incense. “Glorious sight, isn’t it?” Esterline said, following my gaze with eyes that sparkled. “All that moldering history going up like Guy Fawkes night. Rather poetic, I’d say, sometimes you must burn the old growth to make room for fresh shoots.” “Q-quite,” I agreed, watching her face in the fire’s glow. Still nothing. No recognition, no guilt, no acknowledgment of the sacred oaths we’d sworn in darkness. Then she turned back to me, and for one heartbeat—one breath, one blink—something moved behind those polished blue pupils. Something that might have been knowledge, or the cold satisfaction of accounts settled just so. Gone quick as summer lightning. But I’d seen it plain. She knew me true as her own heartbeat. My mind went spinning like a child’s top, turning over possibilities till they blurred together. Perhaps she was guarding herself, denying our bond to keep her fine reputation clean. Perhaps years of silk and plenty had addled her memory, made her forget the taste of thin gruel and thinner hope. Perhaps she played some game I could not fathom, some long strategy I was too simple to see. Or perhaps—and this cut deepest of all—perhaps she simply didn’t care. Perhaps the girl who’d once woven my hair into plaits and whispered promises of future ballrooms in the small hours had died sure as I had, leaving only this beautiful, terrible stranger dressed in an armor of wealth, guarding her from any chance at feeling the pain of my existence. Perhaps this was how survival looked when you had golden hair and a face men would pay to look upon. You could forget the inconvenient folk, the uncomfortable truths, the sister-hearts who reminded you of everything you’d rather see buried. The clock struck half past the hour. The mansion was burning root and branch now, flames reaching toward heaven like the prayers of the damned seeking mercy. The wind was up and hungry, carrying sparks toward the quarter where working folk laid their heads, toward homes full of people whose only sin was being in the wrong place when fire came calling. They would have time to escape, but then what? “Well then,” Esterline said, smoothing her gloves with mechanical grace. “I should return to my husband’s side. He frets when I stray too long from his watchful eye.” She smiled a perfect, empty smile that I had never seen in her. “Such a pleasure meeting you, dear Constance. Do mind yourself in this crowd.” She turned to glide away, then paused pretty as you please, glancing back with a slow tilt. “Oh, and Constance, dear?” she said, her voice revealing a lower layer of tone. “Do remember me to all the family when next you see them. All of them, mind. Even the ones who didn’t quite manage to climb as high as they’d hoped.” Then she was gone, floating back toward her magistrate and her safe harbor, leaving me standing alone with understanding settling on my shoulders heavy as a burial shroud. Cordelia *almost* had the right of it. The alarm bell waited behind its tapestry, twenty steps away through the chattering crowd. Twenty steps to salvation, to playing the good girl who saved innocent folk and punished only the deserving. But standing there in my borrowed finery, watching my sister-heart disappear into that sea of diamonds, I found I’d lost all taste for goodness. I took champagne from a passing tray and raised it toward those windows, toward the painted fire of an empty mansion. “To old debts,” I called out, voice carrying clear over music and merriment. “Finally collected in full.” Esterline turned at my voice, her eyes finding mine across that ballroom sure as compass needles find true north. She raised her own glass. “To old debts,” she agreed, sweet as hemlock wine. “And to fresh accounts just opened.” We drank deep, and outside those grand windows the fire spread and spread and spread, consuming all it touched without care for guilty or innocent, for good intent or wicked design. It burned because that’s what fire does when you feed it intent. It burned because debts must be paid, and fire never was particular about which purse it emptied. It burned because sometimes the only justice left in this sorry world is the kind that leaves nothing but ash and the memory of how beautiful the flames could dance. The clock chimed midnight, marking the anniversary of my first death, and I wondered if any soul would remember my name when the smoke finally cleared. I wondered if it would signify a damn thing in the end. I wondered if, when all accounts were tallied and all books balanced, revenge and justice weren’t just different words for the same blessed thing. And yes the champagne tasted of bitter truth and sweet endings, and somewhere in the distance I could hear fire bells tolling like the voices of all the nameless dead girls, singing their sorrows to a sky that had never bothered listening and wouldn’t start now. As they drank themselves to a stupor, I walked to each of the three doors guarding the room, dropping the contents of my locket mixed with the oil of the tapestry candles in small spurts, forming a circle of my own. At the final pass, I lit a match inside that locked, golden ballroom. Settling the last debt on my ledger. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note I’ve been thinking a lot about fairy tale endings and how unsatisfying most of them are when you really examine them. *The Little Match Girl* has always been one of the most heartbreaking fairy tales to me, where this child dies alone in the cold, and we're supposed to find comfort in the idea that she’s gone to heaven with her grandmother. But what about justice? What about accountability for a society that let a child freeze to death while people danced in warm ballrooms? That’s the point of the story, of course, but I did start wondering. What if death wasn't her ending? What if it was her beginning? And what if she wasn't alone…what if there were others like her, other girls who’d been discarded by a system that valued them as less than nothing? The Daughters of Ashes came from that idea. They're not heroes in any traditional sense, obviously. They’re a cult of arsonists, they’re agents of revenge, born from trauma and fueled by rage. But they’re also girls who were denied any chance at justice through proper channels. When the system fails you completely, what’s left except to burn it down? I’m not trying to answer that question with any moral authority, but I do want to point to the fact that every day, more people are taking on this mindset. Also, I was particularly interested in exploring the relationship between the unnamed narrator—who takes the name Match—and her sister Esterline. That moment in the ballroom, where Esterline clearly recognizes her but chooses to pretend she doesn't, felt crucial to me. It’s not just about individual cruelty, after all, it’s really about how people can collaborate in systems of oppression by simply choosing not to see the suffering around them. The ending is deliberately ambiguous about whether Match has become a monster or achieved something close to justice. I think that’s the most interesting space to explore, the place where righteousness and revenge become indistinguishable, and the victim becomes the victor through methods that might make them indistinguishable from their oppressors. This is also my love letter to gothic literature and Victorian social criticism, a space I enjoy *reading* in but don’t always have the confidence to *write* in. Writers like Charles Dickens understood that sometimes you need to make people uncomfortable with their own comfort, you need to show them the true cost of their prosperity. But I wanted to take that a step further, and explore what happens when the poor don’t just suffer nobly…but fight fire with fire. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### That's Your Problem to Solve URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/thats-your-problem-to-solve/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T21:59:48.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/That-s-Your-Problem-to-Solve_thumb.png) Thats Your Problem to Solve 0:00 /1905.1624489795918 1× Gabriel Hayes sat in a folding chair that cost eleven dollars at Home Depot and charged people five hundred an hour to hear him say five words. The chairs were uncomfortable on purpose. His office used to be Nails by Nancy until Nancy defaulted on her lease, and Gabriel could still smell acetone under the industrial-strength air freshener that promised “Ocean Breeze” but delivered something closer to “Chemical Spill at Sea World.” “My husband left me for his CrossFit trainer,” said Mrs. Kellerman, a woman in her fifties who wore athleisure in a way that suggested she’d given up on actual leisure. “She’s twenty-six and can deadlift him.” Gabriel adjusted his laminated desk nameplate. It read “Gabriel Hayes, Radical Non-Help Coach” in Comic Sans font because the print shop guy said it looked friendlier. Gabriel had specifically requested unfriendly, but, well, Comic Sans was also cheaper. “That’s your problem to solve,” Gabriel said. Mrs. Kellerman nodded eagerly and pulled out her checkbook. This was her fourth session. Gabriel had said the exact same five words every time, and she kept coming back like a lab rat hitting a button for cocaine. “Same time next week?” she asked, already writing the check. “If you want,” Gabriel said. He didn’t do appointments. Appointments implied caring about whether people showed up. After Mrs. Kellerman left, Gabriel rearranged his motivational posters. “YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN” hung next to “STOP ASKING ME” and his personal favorite, “NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS,” which he’d bought on Etsy from a woman in Sacramento who specialized in sarcastic needlepoint. Gabriel had discovered his gift for not helping people three years ago during his own recovery. Twenty years of marriage counseling, family interventions, and trying to solve everyone’s problems had cost him three wives, a hernia from stress, and the ability to watch movies without offering suggestions to characters who couldn’t hear him. His therapist had suggested Al-Anon. His sponsor had suggested boundaries. Gabriel had gone nuclear and decided to weaponize the very concept of indifference. The business model itself was accidentally brilliant. San Francisco was full of people who’d been so coddled by therapists, life coaches, and app developers promising to optimize their feelings that they’d forgotten how to make a single decision without professional validation. Gabriel offered the opposite. He would give these people expensive, artisanal neglect. His waiting room featured magazines from 2019 and a sign that read “PLEASE DO NOT SHARE YOUR FEELINGS WITH OTHER CLIENTS.” The bathroom had a mirror with a sticky note that said “THIS PERSON IS YOUR ONLY HOPE” with an arrow pointing down. Gabriel was reorganizing his collection of self-help books turned backward so only the spines showed when a random woman walked in. She didn’t knock, nor did she wait to be invited. She just appeared in his doorway clutching a manila folder. “I need to hire you,” she said. “That’s your problem to solve,” Gabriel said automatically. The woman sat down in the client chair without being asked. “Perfect. That’s exactly what I need. I’m Jennifer.” She reached out a hand. “Jennifer Kyuha.” Gabriel almost shook Jennifer’s hand but instead ignored her until she relented. He studied her the way a chess player studies an opponent’s opening move. Most clients came to him desperate for permission to give up on someone else. Jennifer looked like she was conducting a job interview. “What’s your problem?” Gabriel asked. He’d learned to start sessions this way because it cut through the small talk that made his skin crawl. “I’m a pharmaceutical sales rep.” “That’s your—” “And I’m addicted to paying people to dismiss me,” she said, cutting him off and opening her folder. “I’ve spent thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars in the past eighteen months on therapists, coaches, consultants, and one very expensive psychic who told me my problems were caused by past-life karma and that I should stop bothering her about it.” Gabriel blinked. In three years of professional indifference, no one had ever presented their psychological dysfunction with PowerPoint-level organization. “I have a spreadsheet,” Jennifer continued, producing a printed chart. “Dr. Harris charged me four hundred an hour to tell me I was too focused on external validation. Dr. Nguyen took three hundred and fifty to explain that I needed to develop internal resources. The life coach on Valencia, I forget her name, got two thousand upfront and then ghosted me after sending a text that said ‘You’re not ready for transformation.’” “And you…liked this,” Gabriel said. It wasn’t a question. “I *loved* it. Every dismissal from them felt like *truth*. Every rejection was pure, unfiltered honesty. The psychic was my favorite because she actually seemed annoyed that I existed.” Gabriel leaned back in his Home Depot chair. Jennifer was either the most self-aware person he’d ever met or completely insane. In his experience, the two categories overlapped significantly. “How’d you hear about me?” he asked. “Well, your Yelp reviews are fascinating. Mrs. Walzack wrote, ‘Gabriel Hayes told me my marriage problems weren’t his concern and I’ve never felt more empowered.’ Mr. Shaw said you charge five hundred dollars to basically ignore people and it changed his life. Someone named Aidan left a one-star review that just said ‘He wouldn’t even pretend to care’ with four crying-face emojis. It almost made me weep.” Gabriel had never read his own reviews. The idea of caring what people thought about his not caring seemed counterproductive. “So then you understand quite clearly that I don’t actually help people,” he said. “I know. That’s why I’m here.” “I mean, I literally do nothing. You pay me five hundred dollars and I tell you your problems aren’t my responsibility.” “Yup.” “And then you leave.” “Perfect.” Gabriel looked at Jennifer’s folder, her spreadsheet, her earnest expression, and her strangely calm demeanor. Something was wrong here. His entire business model depended on people who needed to be told they didn’t need help. Jennifer seemed to actually not need help, which made her unhelpable, which made her…his problem. “That’s your problem to solve,” he said, testing. Jennifer smiled. “Thank you. Same time next week?” --- Three weeks later, Gabriel was experiencing the existential crisis of his life. In the old days, he would have talked it all through with a therapist. But his current self was supposed to handle the enigma of Jennifer Kyuha entirely on his own by ignoring it. Jennifer had become his most regular client and his biggest professional challenge. Every session followed the same pattern. She would present a problem with clinical precision, he would dismiss it with his usual phrase, and she would thank him like he’d just performed open-heart surgery. “My sister wants me to be maid of honor at her destination wedding in Cabo,” Jennifer said, consulting what appeared to be actual notes. “The dress costs six hundred dollars, the bachelorette party is in Napa, and she’s planning activities that require me to pretend I like her fiancé, who once told me that pharmaceutical sales was basically legal drug dealing right before his best friend made a barely subtle pass at me.” “That’s your problem to solve,” Gabriel said. “Excellent. Also, my downstairs neighbor has been playing the same Spotify playlist at full volume since Tuesday. It’s just Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ on repeat. I think she’s going through a breakup, but the walls are thin and I’m starting to have violent fantasies about Adele herself.” “That’s your problem to solve.” “And my mother called to say she’s disappointed that I’m thirty-two and still single, but also that she doesn’t like any of the men I’ve dated, which creates an interesting logical paradox about her expectations for my romantic life.” Gabriel paused. This was the kind of maternal double-bind that usually required forty-five minutes of careful unpacking. His old self would have asked follow-up questions about family dynamics and attachment patterns. His current self had exactly one response. “That’s your problem…to solve,” he said, but something in his voice had shifted. Jennifer noticed immediately. “You almost sounded like you cared just then,” she said. With almost serial killer eyes. “I didn’t.” “You hesitated before you said it. Like you were actually thinking about my mother.” Gabriel felt a familiar tightness in his chest, the same sensation he used to get right before diving into someone else’s psychological deep end. He breathed carefully and reminded himself that caring was the enemy of boundaries. “Your mother isn’t my problem,” he said. “No, but you thought about her for a second. I could see it.” Jennifer leaned forward in her chair. For the first time since she’d started coming to him, she looked genuinely curious rather than professionally satisfied. “What did you used to do?” she asked. “Before all…this?” “That’s your problem to solve.” “You’re a recovering helper, aren’t you? Like, a serious one. Marriage counselor? Family therapist?” Gabriel stood up. The session wasn’t supposed to go this direction. Jennifer was supposed to thank him and leave, not conduct an interview about his personal history. “Time’s up,” he said. Jennifer checked her phone. “We still have twenty minutes.” “Sessions end when I say they end.” “That’s not how this works. I paid for an hour.” “Sue me.” Jennifer gathered her folder and stood up. At the door, she turned back. “You know what’s interesting? You’re the first person I’ve paid to dismiss me who actually seems conflicted about it.” After she left, Gabriel sat in his uncomfortable chair and stared at his motivational posters. “YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN” looked back at him with what might have been judgment. He tried to remember why he’d started this business in the first place, but all he could think about was Jennifer’s mother and the impossible standards that created daughters who paid strangers to ignore them. --- Gabriel’s Tuesday was booked solid with people who needed professional neglect. At ten AM, Joshua Roth wanted validation that his roommate’s dirty dishes weren’t his responsibility. At eleven, Sandra Lin needed permission to stop calling her adult son every day. At noon, Dr. Gina Hartley, an actual psychiatrist, paid five hundred dollars to hear that her patient’s transference issues weren’t Gabriel’s concern. “It’s liberating,” Dr. Hartley had said. “I spend all day solving other people’s problems. Coming here is like a vacation from caring.” Gabriel understood this, truly. His entire client base consisted of helpers who needed help not helping. The irony wasn’t lost on him that he’d created a helping profession dedicated to not helping, which made him a helper again, which was the exact thing he was trying not to be. Jennifer arrived at her usual four PM slot carrying a different folder and wearing what Gabriel had learned to recognize as her “complicated problem” expression. “I need to tell you something,” she said, sitting down. “I’ve been lying to you.” Gabriel felt his stomach drop. In recovery circles, honesty was supposed to be healing, but in his experience, the truth usually made everything worse. “Uh…About what?” “I’m not actually addicted to being dismissed. I mean, I was, but that’s not why I keep coming here.” Jennifer opened her new folder and pulled out what appeared to be a psychological profile. Gabriel’s psychological profile. “Where did you get that?” “I know people. Pharmaceutical sales isn’t a far cry from mental health quacks.” Jennifer spread the papers on her lap like a hand of cards. “Gabriel Hayes, licensed marriage and family therapist, specializing in codependency and addiction counseling. Three marriages ended due to what your ex-wife Sharon described in her divorce filing as ‘compulsive caretaking and inability to maintain appropriate professional boundaries.’” Gabriel stood up. “Session’s over.” “You lost your license after a client filed a complaint that you were providing free therapy to her entire extended family, including her mother-in-law’s book club and her brother’s girlfriend’s roommate.” “Get out.” “You started this business because someone at Al-Anon told you that you needed to practice detachment, and you decided to turn radical detachment into a revenue stream.” Gabriel moved toward the door, but Jennifer didn’t follow. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t actually want to be dismissed. I want to be seen by someone who’s good at seeing people but has committed to not helping them. It’s like being understood by someone with zero agenda. Do you have any idea how freeing that is?” Gabriel stopped moving. “No. What are you even talking about?” “I’m talking about how you’re the first person I’ve met who’s as messed up about helping and being helped as I am, but from the opposite direction. You can’t stop wanting to fix people. I can’t stop wanting to be broken. We’re like complementary disorders.” Jennifer stood up and walked to Gabriel’s motivational posters. “‘You’re on your own,’” she read aloud. “‘Stop asking me.’ ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys.’ Sheesh. You know what these really say? ‘Please don’t make me care about you because caring about people is the thing that destroyed my life.’” Now Gabriel felt like someone was performing open-heart surgery on *him*. And without the anesthesia. “That’s your problem to solve,” he said, but the words came out whispered. “See? You can’t even say it with conviction anymore.” Jennifer walked back to her chair and sat down. “I have a proposal. What if we try actually helping each other?” “I don’t help people.” “And I don’t ask for help. But maybe we could make an exception. Just for today.” Gabriel looked at Jennifer sitting in his client chair, holding his psychological profile, offering to break the one rule that kept his entire world functioning. Everything in his recovery told him to say no. Everything in his professional training told him to maintain boundaries. Everything in his business model told him to take her money and send her away. “That’s your problem to solve,” he said, before leaving the room. --- Gabriel spent the next week avoiding Jennifer’s proposal by booking extra clients and working late. He saw seventeen people in five days, collecting $8,500 for saying the same five words 68 times. His record was Thursday afternoon when he told Mrs. Bryant that her son’s gambling addiction wasn’t his problem, her husband’s erectile dysfunction wasn’t his concern, and her mother’s hoarding situation wasn’t his responsibility, all in the span of twelve minutes. But Jennifer’s words had lodged in his brain like a song he couldn’t stop humming at the worst possible moments. “Complementary disorders.” “As messed up about helping and being helped as I am.” “What if we try actually helping each other?” Gabriel had built his entire recovery around the idea that caring was toxic, but Jennifer made caring seem like a choice rather than a compulsion. She wanted to be seen without being fixed. She wanted to be understood without being solved. Gabriel had never considered that these things might be different. On Friday, Jennifer didn’t show up at her usual time. Gabriel waited in his office for twenty minutes, which violated his own policy about not waiting for clients. At 4:25, he walked to the botanica next door where Mrs. Valdez sold candles for love, money, and spiritual cleansing. “You looking for that Chinese girl?” Mrs. Valdez asked. “She came by yesterday asking if I knew anything about you.” “What did you tell her?” “I told her she’s too pretty for you. But also that you seem like a nice man who’s afraid of his own shadow. She bought a candle for clarity and one for protection. Said she might need both.” Gabriel walked back to his office and sat in his client chair instead of his own. The view from this angle was different. He could see the water stains on the ceiling, the places where Nancy’s nail art posters had left marks on the walls, the way his desk created a barrier between where he sat and where people needed him to be. At 5 PM, his phone rang. “Gabriel Hayes Radical Non-Help Coaching.” “Hi, it’s Jennifer. I’m in the emergency room at UCSF.” Gabriel nearly fell off the chair. “Wait, what? What happened?” “My sister’s wedding is tomorrow and I had what I think was a panic attack driving to the airport. I couldn’t breathe and my hands went numb and I pulled over and called 911.” “Are you okay?” “Yeah. The doctor says it’s anxiety. They want to give me Ativan and send me home, but I don’t have anyone to drive me and I can’t afford an Uber because I spent my last five hundred dollars on you.” Gabriel looked at his motivational posters. “YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN” stared back at him with what now seemed like cruelty rather than wisdom. “What do you need?” he asked. “I need someone to pick me up and drive me home and maybe sit with me for a while until the medication wears off, but I know that’s not your job and I’m sorry for calling you and I know this isn’t your problem to solve.” Gabriel was already reaching for his car keys. “Jennifer?” “Yeah?” “It’s my problem now.” --- Gabriel found Jennifer in the emergency room waiting area, sitting under fluorescent lights that made everyone look like they were dying. She was still wearing the dress she’d apparently planned to travel in, wrinkled now and stained with what looked like coffee. Her folder was in her lap, but for the first time since he’d met her, she wasn’t consulting any papers. “You came,” she said when she saw him. “I was in the neighborhood.” “The hospital is three miles from your office. That’s like twelve miles in SF traffic.” Gabriel sat down in the plastic chair next to her. The emergency room smelled like disinfectant someone had used less than a hour ago to cover up something foul, a combination of chemicals that reminded him of visiting his grandfather during the last stages of his liver disease. His grandpa had been a drinker and a charmer who could talk his way out of any consequence except death. Gabriel had spent those final hospital visits trying to save a man who’d never asked to be saved. “Right, so tell me more about your sister’s wedding,” Gabriel said. Jennifer looked surprised. “You actually want to hear about it?” “I want to understand why thinking about it sent you to the emergency room.” Jennifer went quiet for a moment, then opened her folder. Instead of her usual organized notes, she pulled out a crumpled wedding invitation. “She’s marrying her college boyfriend. They’ve been together for eight years. They have a house in Sacramento and a golden retriever named Kringle and a five-year plan that includes children and a vacation home in Tahoe.” “Sounds nice.” “Yeah, it is nice. That’s the problem. She asked me to be her maid of honor because she loves me and wants me to be part of her perfect day, and I said yes because I love her and want her to be happy.” Gabriel waited. He’d learned that silence was often more useful than questions. “But I hate weddings,” Jennifer continued. “I hate the forced celebration and the expensive dresses and the way everyone pretends that marriage is a guarantee instead of a really optimistic guess. And I hate that I can’t tell her this because it would hurt her feelings, and I hate that I’m going to spend a thousand dollars and three days pretending to be someone I’m not.” “So don’t go.” “I can’t *not* go. She’s my sister.” “You had a panic attack driving to the airport. Your body is literally rejecting this plan.” Jennifer looked at the wedding invitation. “But if I don’t go, I’m a terrible sister. If I do go, I’m a fraud. Either way, I’m failing at being a person.” Gabriel recognized this kind of thinking. It was the same logic that had driven him to counseling other people’s families for free, the belief that love required self-erasure. “What if there’s a third option?” he said. “Like what?” “What if you call your sister and tell her the truth? That you love her and want her to be happy, but weddings make you anxious and you don’t think you can handle being maid of honor?” Jennifer stared at him. “You’re giving me advice.” Gabriel realized she was right. Somewhere between the emergency room and the wedding invitation, he’d stopped being a professional boundary-setter and started being a person who cared about another person’s problems. “Shit,” he said. “You just helped me.” “I know.” “How does it feel?” Gabriel considered this question rather carefully. For three years, he’d avoided helping anyone as a form of emotional sobriety. But sitting in the emergency room with Jennifer, offering actual solutions to her actual problems, he didn’t feel the familiar spiral of codependent panic. He felt useful in a way that was contained and voluntary. “It feels like…like helping someone who doesn’t need to be saved,” he said. Jennifer smiled. “Yeah. Maybe that’s the difference.” A nurse called Jennifer’s name. The doctor wanted to see her before discharge, probably to lecture her about stress management and suggest she follow up with her primary care physician. “Will you wait for me?” Jennifer asked. Gabriel looked around the emergency room at the other people waiting for news about people they cared about. Six months ago, he would have stayed all night and driven Jennifer home and probably offered to call her sister for her. Three months ago, he would have told her that waiting wasn’t his job and left immediately. Tonight, he just nodded. --- Gabriel drove Jennifer home to her apartment in the Mission, a one-bedroom above a taqueria that smelled like the best carnitas he hadn’t tasted yet. Jennifer had called her sister from the car and explained that she was having anxiety about the wedding and thought it would be better if she wasn’t maid of honor but would love to come as a regular guest instead. Her sister had been understanding, which Jennifer admitted she hadn’t expected. “I thought she’d be furious,” Jennifer said as Gabriel walked her to her door. “People are usually more reasonable than we think they’re going to be.” “Is that professional insight or personal experience?” “Both.” Jennifer unlocked her apartment door, then turned back to Gabriel. “What happens now?” she asked. “With us, I mean. With whatever this is.” Gabriel had been thinking about this during the drive home. Jennifer was right that they had complementary disorders, but she was wrong about what that meant. Gabriel didn’t need to learn how to help people again. He needed to learn how to help people without losing himself in the process. Jennifer didn’t need to learn how to be ignored. She needed to learn how to be seen without disappearing. Maybe. “I think,” Gabriel said, “we figure out what healthy helping looks like. Together.” “Does that mean you’re firing me as a client?” “It means I’m offering to be your friend instead.” Jennifer smiled. “Friends don’t charge five hundred dollars an hour.” “No, but they do show up at emergency rooms when you call them.” “Hm. That’s true.” Gabriel turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh, and Jennifer? Next week, instead of coming to my office, you want to just get coffee? Like normal people?” “Sure. I’d like that. But I have one condition.” “What’s that?” “If I start telling you about my problems, you’re not allowed to say ‘That’s your problem to solve.’” Gabriel laughed with his entire chest. “Deal. But if you start trying to pay me to ignore you, I reserve the right to tell you that’s ridiculous.” “Deal.” Gabriel walked back to his car feeling lighter than he had in years. His phone buzzed with a text from Mrs. Kellerman asking if she could book an emergency session to discuss her husband’s return from CrossFit training. Gabriel looked at the message, then typed back: “I think you should talk to an actual therapist about this. I can recommend someone.” He sent the text and drove home through the Mission District, past the botanica where Mrs. Valdez was probably selling candles to people who needed to believe in magic, past the strip mall where his office waited with its uncomfortable chairs and its motivational posters about not caring. Gabriel decided he’d keep the business. San Francisco would always have people who needed permission to set boundaries, and he was good at giving it. But maybe he’d add a new service. Helping people figure out the difference between healthy helping and codependent fixing. He could charge less and worry more, which seemed like a reasonable trade. His phone buzzed again. Another client requesting emergency non-help. Gabriel looked at the message and smiled. “That’s your problem to solve,” he said out loud, then deleted the text without responding. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note I was reading *Codependent No More* for a book club when the phrase “that’s your problem to solve” splintered its way into my head. At first, I thought it was just another boundary-setting mantra; simple, catchy, destined for a needlepoint pillow or Etsy print, etc. But then I was driving through San Francisco and passed a converted nail salon that now advertised something related to wellness. I remember the peeling acrylic letters, the ghost of a salon sign still visible beneath it. And I thought, *what if the person inside that building was doing the opposite of helping?* *What if they charged people five hundred dollars an hour just to not care?* By the time I hit the next red light, Gabriel Hayes existed. By the time I got home, I had the opening line. Like a lot of people, I’ve wrestled with the impulse to over-care. To try to fix, manage, or interpret other people’s pain instead of sitting with my own. *Codependent No More* calls that impulse what it is: a survival strategy that eventually becomes unsustainable. Gabriel is what happens when someone tries to turn that survival strategy into a business model, and I wanted to satirically chart what happens when this fails in the most human way possible. This story isn’t meant to offer answers or perfect therapy advice or anything like that. It’s just a stopgap to the messy middle of recovery. And the uncomfortable truth that helping and being helped are equally vulnerable acts. And to the strange, slow alchemy that can happen when two people agree to stop performing wellness and start practicing connection. Also, to be clear: I’m not opening a radical non-help coaching service. But if I did, the chairs would absolutely be uncomfortable on purpose. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### One Good Ghost URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/one-good-ghost/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:01:46.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/One-Good-Ghost_thumb.png) One Good Ghost 0:00 /1121.8285714285714 1× I’m standing in what the rental listing generously called a “powder room” but is really a beach house closet with delusions of sandy grandeur, trying to bobby-pin my hair into something that doesn’t look like I’ve been wrestling with the Atlantic wind all morning. Which, for the record, I beat. “Mara, are you almost done in there?” My brother’s voice carries the particular strain of a groom three hours before his wedding who’s just discovered the caterer forgot the vegetarian option. “Claire needs to get ready!” Claire. Sweet, soft-spoken Claire, who teaches kindergarten, pronounces all her consonants, and has never said anything remotely cutting about anyone, including my mother, who deserves it. I should like her more than I do. “Two minutes,” I call back, giving my reflection one last disapproving look. My bridesmaid dress—dusty rose, because apparently that’s a color now—makes me look like I’m cosplaying as someone’s better-adjusted sister. That’s when I see *her* in the mirror. The woman behind me wears a wedding dress that probably cost more than my car, complete with a cathedral train that somehow doesn’t take up the entire closet-bathroom. Her makeup’s flawless except for the mascara tracks down her cheeks, which shouldn’t be possible, since she’s clearly been crying for hours. I turn. Nothing there. Back to the mirror: wedding dress, perfect blowout, and someone who I’m starting to suspect is definitely a ghost. I study her face more carefully. She’s beautiful in that effortless way that makes you check your own reflection for smudged lipstick. There’s just something so familiar about the sharp line of her jaw, the way she holds her shoulders, as if she’s bracing for impact. Clearly she’s not bracing for me. “You can see me,” she says. Her voice has the hollow timbre of someone speaking from the bottom of a well. “Uh. Yeah. Apparently.” “I’m Vanessa.” Oh. *Oh.* Vanessa. As in Vanessa-the-ex-fiancée. As in Vanessa-who-broke-my-brother’s-heart-two-years-ago. And also Vanessa-who-he-still-gets-quiet-about-whenever-she-gets-brought-up. And Vanessa-who-my-mother-claimed-was-never-good-enough-for-him—though she’s never met a woman good enough for either of her sons. That Vanessa. “Didn’t you f— off to Paris?” I ask. “I did.” She touches the pearls at her throat. “Turns out you can die of irony. Who knew?” “Mara?” My brother again, closer now. “Everything okay?” “Yeah, fine,” I call back unconvincingly, still staring at Vanessa in the mirror. “Just seeing a dead person in my reflection. The usual.” Vanessa almost smiles. Almost. I should open the door and help my brother marry his perfectly nice fiancée and pretend I don’t see his dead ex floating around like some kind of designer disaster. But instead, I hear myself ask, “How long?” “Since Thursday.” She adjusts her veil. “Car accident. Very dramatic. And sudden. And stupid.” “Wow. And you came *here*?” “I was already coming.” She looks down at her dress. “I was going to—God, this is embarrassing—I was going to stop the wedding. Like some kind of romantic comedy heroine, you know? Except, well, I died first, which really messed up the timing. Classic me.” Through the thin walls, I hear Claire laugh at something my brother says. It’s a nice, genuine laugh shared by two people unbothered by that old wedding tradition to not see the other person before the ceremony. “He’s happy,” I tell Vanessa. “I know.” She’s staring at something I can’t see. “I can hear it in his voice. He sounds…settled. Safe.” “Is that a bad thing? Your tone could be interpreted either way.” “No, it’s not bad. It’s just different. *We* were never safe.” I remember the fights I used to hear about. The way my brother looked like he was walking on broken glass whenever Vanessa entered a room. When she looked at him like he was a puzzle missing a few crucial pieces. They were so beautiful together. Terrible for each other, yes, but beautiful, all the same. And everyone saw it except them. “Can anyone else see you or is it just me?” “Just you, so far.” “Why?” Vanessa pauses to think. “Maybe…because you’re the only one who didn’t pick a side.” I raise an eyebrow. “I’ll always take my brother’s side.” Vanessa shrugs. “Not how I remember it.” I think back to when they broke up, when my mother launched into I-told-you-so mode. My dad disappeared into his garage. My other brother immediately took Claire’s side before Claire was even in the picture. Back then she was just “the girl who will be better for you, anyway.” But me? I watched my brother cry into his beer and thought, with characteristic sisterly warmth, that he was an idiot. But also, that love makes idiots of us all. And he wasn’t exactly innocent in what happened. “I should go,” I say. “They need the bathroom.” “Wait.” Vanessa’s reflection wavers slightly. “Will you tell him something for me?” “No.” “You don’t even know what—” “I’m not delivering messages from beyond the grave or whatever. This isn’t *Ghost*. You’re not Demi Moore, I’m not Whoopi Goldberg, and my brother is *definitely* not Patrick Swayze, even if he might think he is after two glasses of wine.” “Just…please. Please tell him I’m glad. That he’s marrying someone who makes him laugh like that.” I look at her for tens of seconds. “Tell him yourself.” “Mara, he can’t see or hear me.” “Well maybe he will if you want him to, like badly enough.” But even as I say this, I know she won’t. Vanessa was always too proud to be vulnerable and too scared to need things from people she couldn’t control. Something told me not even death changed that. I open the door and nearly run into Claire, arms full of bobby pins and nerves. “Oh good, you’re done!” Claire says. “I was starting to think you’d fallen in.” She peers past me into the bathroom. “Who were you talking to?” “Myself. Old habit.” Claire nods like that makes perfect sense, which it does if you’re someone who assumes the best about everyone. “Could you help me with my veil? Stupid thing won’t stay put.” I follow her to the master bedroom, where her wedding dress hangs on the closet door like a painting. She’s going for simple elegance, the opposite of Vanessa’s cathedral drama. “Nervous?” I ask, taking the pins. “Terrified,” she says. “Not about marrying him. Just…you know, everything else. The ceremony…all the people…whether my mascara will hold up.” She hesitates. “Whether I’m enough.” I stop mid-pin. “Enough for what?” “For him. He’s had this whole life before me. This complicated history, like sometimes I feel like I’m just the consolation prize or something.” I think of Vanessa downstairs, still in her dress and crying in the bathroom. Then I think of my brother’s laugh, which for sure has been so much lighter than it’s been in years. “Claire.” I turn her to face me. “You are *not* the consolation prize. *You’re* the prize. The real one.” She looks skeptical. “I’m serious, all right? My brother’s lucky you haven’t wised up yet, that’s the truth.” Claire’s eyes fill. I hand her a tissue before her mascara can betray her. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t think…I mean, I wasn’t sure you liked me very much.” “Really? I like everyone. Well, most people. Fine, I like *you*, at least.” She laughs, and I realize it’s the same laugh I heard through the wall. It’s so easy for her, so effortless and uncomplicated. “There,” I say, stepping back. “Absolutely…perfect.” And she is. Downstairs, the string quartet starts. It’s time. Claire takes my arm, and as we move toward the stairs, I catch Vanessa’s reflection in the hallway mirror. She’s watching. And for a moment she somewhat looks…at peace. “Ready?” I ask. “Ready,” she says. I try to believe both of us. The music swells. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear the sound of a held breath released, and a door closing softly, and the ocean pulling back before the next wave begins. *One good ghost*, I think. That’s all we probably get. One good ghost to teach us the difference between haunting and holding on. Between letting go and letting things just happen. Outside, the Atlantic keeps its natural rhythm, so much of it indifferent yet blissfully eternal. Carrying away what’s finished and bringing in what’s just beginning. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His published books include* The Pixar Theory *(Slimbooks, 2015), a pop culture nonfiction, and his debut novel* Killerjoy *(5050 Press, 2017). His recent short fiction includes "Men Who Are Strong" (IHRAM Press) and "Upon a Dream," an original fable published in The Fairy Tale Magazine.* --- # Author’s Notes I wrote *One Good Ghost* after reading a call for upmarket fiction and asked myself “what even is upmarket anymore?” I dug a little deeper and decided upmarket includes but is not limited to writing that has emotional resonance, strong hooks, and conceptual clarity. So basically, stories with a heart and a pitch. The kind of thing that makes people say, “Wait, did you say the ex-fiancée is dead?” but then keeps them reading for what goes beyond the twist. The seed of the premise came from one line I adored instantly: *“Not even death could stop me from attending my ex-fiancé’s wedding to another woman.”* It made me laugh actually out loud (well, fine, chuckle modestly). Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how heartbreak sometimes disguises itself in ***spite***, and it can be so hard to let go of something when you were so sure it was supposed to be yours, even if you were wrong. That can also apply to friendships, not just romantic love, which is more-so what I’m drawing from, here. Tonally, I wanted the piece to sound conversational, voicey, maybe even a splash of funny, but with emotional layering under every beat. Basically what you would expect from a beach house comedy crashed by a ghost who can’t admit they’re not the main character, etc. The “voice” came first: Mara, the narrator, is a reluctant bridesmaid with a shield of sarcasm and more empathy than she’s comfortable admitting. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but she *does* believe in telling it like it is. Her dynamic with Vanessa (the ghost) was what made the story come alive for me, this sense that they’re more alike than either wants to admit. The living and the dead, trying to decide what counts as closure. If not for how well I found this dynamic to work, I’m not sure I would’ve published this one at the final hour when I had something else sort of in the wings… Anyway, it’s structured as a single-sitting story with no scene breaks, no flashbacks, just a long breath exhaled over the course of one surreal moment. I was drawn to that claustrophobic feeling of pre-wedding rituals, where everyone is supposed to be calm and beautiful and composed, but everything is emotionally unhinged and blurring in real time. To the point where no one even mentions the groom’s name, which yes was on purpose. What I hope to leave the reader with is this: quietly moving on is a sign of strength, and absolutely nobody says the perfect thing every time. You can interpret it differently if you want, but Mara never tells her brother about Vanessa, nor does she consider it much. She stands firm. Because the difference between *haunting* someone and *holding on* to what you thought love was supposed to look like is thicker line than the one between life and death, if you ask me. And also, the most meaningful conversations you’ll have aren’t always with the people you love or used to love. Sometimes it’s the would-be sister-in-law you’re pretty sure never liked you. --- Thanks for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### Paper Dreams URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/paper-dreams/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:03:51.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/Paper-Dreams_thumb.png) Paper Dreams 0:00 /2071.5885714285714 1× The NeuroSleeve *bit* when it harvested Meena’s dreams. That’s what Meena called it when she woke with the small red welts behind her ears, circular and tender like insect bites. Three this morning…a record. She prodded them with her fingertip while the coffee maker gurgled its morning hymn, each touch sending sparks down her jaw. *Eight hundred and forty-seven points*. Her creativity index blinked at her from the tablet screen, cheerful as a bank balance. She’d been dreaming about Arun again, about the specific way he’d hum off-key while folding her underwear, and the algorithm had tagged it as “Domestic Nostalgia with Underlying Grief Themes.” Premium content. The meditation app *Healing in Harmony* had already licensed the dream for $127. *Congratulations,* she thought, *you’re monetizing dead-husband-laundry memories. Peak capitalism achieved.* More bad news, the coffee tasted like pennies. Everything tasted like pennies lately, as if the NeuroSleeve—more like a tech-bro Dream Catcher in her opinion—was slowly replacing her brain chemistry with spare change. The manual called it “minor neurochemical adjustment,” which was corporate speak for “we don’t know why this happens but legally we warned you.” Her doctor had prescribed supplements that turned her piss highlighter yellow and made her dreams so vivid they felt like living in someone else’s fever. She was chewing cardboard toast when the notification bloomed across her vision, projected directly onto her retina by the household interface: **SOMNIUM ESTATE SETTLEMENT: POSTHUMOUS LICENSING AGREEMENT ACTIVATED**. The coffee mug hit the counter harder than she’d meant it to. Brown liquid spread across the formica; a stain she’d never be able to explain. Arun’s dreams. The ones from his final months, the ones she’d thought were locked away in private storage like love letters or medical records. The email explained, in the gentle voice of a grief counselor who’d been replaced by an algorithm, that his “cognitive estate” had been processed and approved for commercial distribution. A startup called *Eternal Garden* was now selling guided meditations based on his recurring dream about planting tomatoes. The package was titled “Finding Peace in Simple Tasks: A Departed Husband’s Gift.” Really? A gift? As if he’d chosen to leave her his anxiety about aphids and soil pH. As if his subconscious had been some kind of inheritance instead of the last private thing he’d owned. Her hands trembled as she scrolled through the licensing agreement. The dreams had been extracted without her consent, processed while she’d been choosing coffin linings, monetized while she’d been learning to sleep in a bed that felt too big. The algorithm had identified him as “recently deceased” and automatically transferred his cognitive assets to something called the “bereaved spouse revenue stream.” She’d been receiving payments for months. Small deposits labeled “Grief Support Dividend” that she’d assumed were insurance, or charity, or some bureaucratic mistake she’d eventually have to return. They’d been paying her with fragments of his sleeping mind, and because she was a Bay Area middle-school teacher, she couldn’t exactly afford to righteously take a stand. The toast turned to wet paper in her mouth. She swallowed anyway, the way she’d learned to swallow everything else that threatened to come back up. The NeuroSleeve on her nightstand pulsed green, patient as a spider, already hungry for tonight’s harvest. She pressed her fingers to the welts until they sang with pain. --- The first time Meena tried to starve her dreams, she ate nothing but white rice for three days. Plain pasta. Water that tasted like it had been flushed down a toilet. She’d read somewhere that spicy food led to vivid dreams, so she eliminated everything with character, turning meals into a kind of cognitive birth control. But the NeuroSleeve didn’t give a shit about her dietary rebellion. It sucked up dreams about colorlessness, about the texture of surrender and hunger that felt like forgetting you’d ever been full. The algorithm tagged them as “Minimalist Anxiety with Ascetic Undertones” and flipped them to a fasting app for $89. *Amazing,* she thought while choking down another spoonful of nothing. *They found a way to weaponize boredom and still make it profitable.* She tried insomnia next. Made it eighteen hours, then twenty-six, then thirty-one before her body gave up and dropped her into sleep so deep it felt like drowning. She dreamed about falling through layers of exhaustion, each level stranger than the last, until she was tumbling through a space that sounded like her own heartbeat played backward. The dreams themselves sold for $203\. “Extreme Fatigue with Dissociative Elements.” Apparently there was a whole market for synthetic sleep deprivation. She was failing at resistance the way she’d failed at everything else since Arun died. Thoroughly. Accidentally. With increasing creativity. At school, her students noticed the hollow spaces behind her eyes. During a lesson about the Fourth Amendment—which felt like teaching ancient history to kids who’d never known privacy—thirteen-year-old Matthew raised his hand. “Mrs. Deshmukh,” he said, “why does the Constitution have a thing against unreasonable searches but not against, you know…” He gestured vaguely at his temple, where his NeuroSleeve sat like a plastic Burger King crown. The classroom monitoring system would flag that as “potentially subversive educational content.” She could already feel the algorithm parsing her response, weighing each word for signs of sedition. “Well, Matthew, that’s because dreams weren’t currency when the Constitution was written.” She sighed, immediately wanting to take her words back. “The law doesn’t always keep up with technology, it seems.” “But shouldn’t the principle be the same?” Priya asked. She was picking at her unicorn-themed NeuroSleeve, a nervous habit that had started around the same time she’d begun asking uncomfortable questions. “If our thoughts are private, shouldn’t our dreams be private, too?” *Our thoughts aren’t private, either,* she wanted to claim. Instead, Meena looked at her students. Thirteen-year-olds who’d been wearing brain monitors since kindergarten and never known sleep without an audience. Their devices were designed for growing skulls, cheerful cartoon animals printed on bands that would leave indent marks for life. “That’s a complex question,” she said carefully. The weight of surveillance pressed against her skull like a migraine. “What do you think?” “I think,” Priya said, then stopped. Started again. “I think some things should belong to the person who makes them.” *Wow,* Meena thought. *They’re thirteen and they already understand consent better than most senators.* “That’s an interesting perspective,” she said, which was teacher-speak for *you’re right but I can’t say that without getting fired.* That night, she dreamed about her students with their cartoon NeuroSleeves, but in the dream the devices were growing roots into their skulls, flowering with tiny plastic blossoms that smelled like disinfectant. She woke clawing at her own temples, leaving real scratches next to the extraction welts. The dream sold for $156\. “Invasive Technology Anxiety with Protective Parental Overtones.” She was literally being paid to have nightmares about surveillance capitalism, except she didn’t actually receive any of the money. The absolute irony. *Outstanding,* she thought, staring at the payment notification. *I’m the world’s most incompetent protestor.* --- The first “paper dream” appeared during her lunch break, tucked between the pages of a graded essay. It made her feel like a high school freshman finding a note from a secret admirer. Meena almost threw it away, but something about the careful folds made her pause. She opened it in the supply closet with the door locked, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped insects. *Last night I dreamed I was a bird made of saffron,* the note read in Priya’s careful handwriting. Meena would know it anywhere. *I flew over the city and every building was a book. When I landed on the library, I could taste the stories through my feet. They tasted like my grandmother’s kitchen and rain and the color blue.* *My NeuroSleeve said I dreamed about “Generic Flying Anxiety with Culinary Nostalgia Themes.” It sold for $43 to a meditation app. I know I get almost a dollar for it, but this dream belongs to me.* Meena read it three times, her eyes widening with every repeated word. The dream was beautiful. It was strange and specific in a way that made her chest ache. But it was also evidence. If anyone found it, if the monitoring system detected even a hint of resistance or questioning of the NeuroSleeve… She folded it carefully and put it in her bag, then spent the rest of the day trying to convince herself she was protecting Priya by confiscating it. By the end of the week, she had six more. The students just kept slipping these to her. Matthew had dreamed about being a library book that people kept checking out but never read. Aaliyah had dreamed about a world where colors had flavors and she was a chef who painted with spices. Calvin had written three pages about dreaming he was a tree that grew different languages instead of leaves. Each one ended the same way: *This dream belongs to me.* Meena kept them in a folder marked “Supplemental Materials,” hidden beneath lesson plans and grade sheets. She told herself she was documenting evidence of student creativity, but late at night, alone in her apartment, she read them like little prayers. The dreams were wrong in all the ways that were right. They were unmarketable, unmonetizable, useless to algorithms that needed clean categories and demographic targeting. They were too strange, too specific, too personal. They were human. When she found Priya after class, the girl was sitting alone in the hallway, staring at her cartoon unicorn NeuroSleeve with a level of intensity usually reserved for math tests. “Mrs. Deshmukh,” Priya said without looking up, “can I ask you something?” “Of course.” “Do you think it’s stealing? Like, if someone takes your dream and sells it without asking?” Meena sat down beside her, the linoleum floor cold through her skirt. “What do you think?” “I think it is. But then I think maybe I’m being selfish, because the apps help people sleep better, and sleep is important, and maybe it’s good that my dreams can help someone else.” “But?” “But they’re mine.” Priya’s voice was small, uncertain. “They come from inside me. They’re made of my memories and my fears and my…I don’t know. My self. And when they take them and turn them into something else, something generic, it feels like they’re stealing part of who I am.” Meena thought about Arun’s tomato dreams. How the algorithm had stripped away his complaints and his patience and his love, leaving only “Wholesome Gardening Vibes.” She thought about her own dreams being sold back to her as content designed to help her process grief. “I think,” she said carefully, “that you’re not being selfish. I think you’re being you.” Priya smiled. “Tell me, Priya. Why are you and the students sharing these paper dreams with me? You know it’s not allowed to write dreams down and share them with others. It’s intellectual property. Remember what we learned about that?” Priya’s smile faded. “It was Calvin’s idea. He thought…maybe if we shared the dreams with you, we’d have some control over them again. Even though we don’t, really.” Meena almost threw up. That night, she dreamed about saffron birds flying through a marble city. She woke before the dream could end, pulled off her NeuroSleeve, and wrote it down on paper in her own handwriting. *This dream belongs to me.* --- The woman from Somnium had a smile that made you want to check your pockets afterward. Dr. Frida Gains, Educational Compliance Specialist, which was corporate speak for “person who visits you when you’ve been thinking too much.” She folded herself into the plastic chair across from Meena’s desk like she was planning to lay eggs there. “Routine audit,” she said, placing a tablet between them as some kind of peace offering. “Nothing to worry about.” *Right,* Meena thought. *Nothing’s more ‘routine’ than an unscheduled visit from the thought police.* “We’re seeing some interesting patterns in your sleep data,” Dr. Gains continued. Her voice had that focus-grouped quality, designed to be soothing but landing somewhere closer to menacing. “Specifically, irregularities in your cognitive output.” The tablet’s screen showed a graph of Meena’s dreams over the past month with peaks and valleys of extracted content, color-coded by profitability. The dips corresponded exactly to her failed attempts at resistance, the nights she’d tried to starve her subconscious into submission. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Meena said. “Grief affects dream patterns.” “Of course. Very sorry for your loss.” Dr. Gains’s sympathy had the tone of a voicemail greeting. “But the data suggests something more specific. On the nights when your output dropped, your REM cycles were completely normal. You were dreaming, but you weren’t *sharing* those dreams with the system.” Meena almost laughed at the idea that her unconscious mind wasn’t posting on social media. “I don’t understand how that’s possible.” “Neither do we. That’s why I’m here.” Dr. Gains leaned forward, her smile sharpening. “We’re also concerned about some of your students. Calvin Morris. His dream patterns have become quite…sophisticated lately.” The folder of paper dreams sat eighteen inches from Dr. Gains’s manicured hand. If she opened the desk drawer, if she searched the room, if she asked the right questions… “Sophisticated how?” “He’s been dreaming about dreams. Meta-narratives. Recursive loops that our algorithms can’t parse effectively. It’s like he’s deliberately trying to confuse our systems.” *Good for him,* Meena thought. *Kid’s got natural talent for cognitive warfare.* “That sounds like a lot of sophistication for a thirteen-year-old.” “Indeed, unless he’s being influenced by someone.” Dr. Gains’s smile never wavered. “We’ve noticed that students in your classes are 23% more likely to produce unmarketable dream content. Which is statistically significant.” Meena felt her pulse spike, then forced herself to breathe. Getting defensive would only confirm their suspicions. “I teach civics,” she said. “Constitution, branches of government, electoral process. Very standard curriculum.” “Of course. But civics can be…interpretive. Depending on how it’s taught.” Dr. Gains’s fingers danced across her tablet. “Tell me, Mrs. Deshmukh, have you noticed any unusual behavior from your students? Discussions about dreams, perhaps? Writing them down? Sharing them through unofficial channels?” *Shoot,* Meena thought. *They already know.* “Kids have active imaginations,” she said carefully. “They talk about all sorts of things.” “I’m sure they do. But we’re specifically interested in anti-corporate sentiment. Resistance to dream taxation. That sort of thing.” Dr. Gains stood, her smile returning to its default setting. “We’d like to schedule some additional sessions with a few of your students. Just to ensure they’re not being exposed to content that might be harmful to their development.” After she left, Meena sat alone in her classroom, staring at the folder that contained her students’ paper dreams. The monitoring system had cameras in every corner, sensors that detected stress hormones through sweat, algorithms that analyzed voice patterns for signs of deception. She’d been teaching her students to resist surveillance without meaning to, and now the system was closing in. That night, she dreamed about being audited. Dr. Gains was inside her head, moving through her memories like a customs agent searching luggage, opening drawers that contained Arun’s laugh, rifling through boxes of moments she’d thought were private. She woke with her hands clenched so tightly her nails had left crescents in her palms. The dream sold for $94\. “Authority Anxiety with Invasive Examination Themes.” --- The box had been hidden in her closet for eight months, buried beneath winter clothes and the detritus of a life she’d stopped maintaining. Inside, wrapped in lavender-mothball tissue paper, was Arun’s physical dream journal. The one he’d kept in the months before his death, before the NeuroSleeves had become mandatory. She’d forgotten it existed until the night after Dr. Gains’s visit, when she’d been lying in bed trying to decide whether to keep the paper dreams or burn them. The memory had surfaced like a bubble rising through dark water: Arun, sitting at their kitchen table with a cup of tea, writing in a notebook with precise, meaningful strokes. *“What are you doing?”* she’d asked. *“Trying to remember something,”* he’d said so casually. *“After all, dreams fade so quickly! I want to keep track of the good ones.”* Now, sitting on her kitchen floor at 2 AM, she held the journal in her hands and understood why he’d hidden it. The dreams inside were nothing like the sanitized version being sold by *Eternal Garden*. They were messy, contradictory, full of anxiety and desire and a mundane strangeness that the algorithm could choke on for all she cared. *March 15th: Dreamed about the tomato plants again, but this time they were growing through the house. Vines came up through the floorboards. Fruit was hanging from the ceiling fixtures. I tried to stop them but I also felt proud of how well they were growing. Then I woke up with my hands dirty but there was no soil. I think I’m losing my mind?* *March 16th: Sex dream about the neighbor. Not Carla! The one with the garden. Meena was in the dream too, watching from the window, but she wasn’t angry. She was taking notes. I woke up ashamed and aroused and confused. What kind of person am I?* *March 17th: Dreamed I was dead but not gone. I was in the house but Meena couldn’t see me. She was cleaning out my things, crying over my shirts. I tried to comfort her but my hands passed through her like I’d turned into Casper the Fucking Ghost. The worst part was that I was relieved. Death looked like finally being able to rest, even though death was exactly the last thing I wanted.* Meena read through months of entries, each one more raw than the last. Her husband’s mind had been full of guilt and lust and fear and hope, all the messy human shit that the algorithm had processed into “Wholesome Gardening Vibes.” They’d taken his complexity and sanded it down into absolute drivel meant for people who’d never actually know him. The final entry was dated two days before his heart attack: *I dreamed Meena was teaching but her students were all birds. They kept raising their wings to answer questions about democracy or something, but every time she called on one, it would just sing in response. Weird, right? She was getting frustrated, trying to explain voting rights to a classroom full of sparrows. Then she started singing too? And her voice was so beautiful I woke up crying. I love her so much it hurts. I love her so much I’m afraid to die.* The words blurred as tears filled her eyes. She’d never thought it was possible he could love her enough to dream about her voice. She couldn’t let Dr. Gains find this. Let anyone find this. They would, eventually. She carried the journal to her kitchen stove, where she kept matches beside the emergency candles. The notebook felt heavier than it should have, dense with the weight of a mind she’d never be able to protect. The first page burned slowly, Arun’s handwriting curling into ash. Then the second, the third. She watched months of dreams disappear into smoke, each page a small act of mercy. The last page to burn was the dream about teaching birds. She held it until the flames touched her fingers, then let it go. When it was finished, she sat in her kitchen surrounded by the smell of burned paper and the knowledge that she’d destroyed something irreplaceable. The NeuroSleeve on her nightstand blinked green, waiting for her to go to bed, to feed it more dreams it could process and sell. Instead, she picked up the device and carried it to the sink. It was so flimsy, made of the same cheap plastic as children’s toys. She turned on the faucet and held it under the water, watching the sensors spark and die. The silence that followed was the deepest she’d experienced in months. That night, she slept without surveillance for the first time since Arun’s death. She dreamed about him. The real him. The one who’d worried about tomatoes and loved her enough to write down his dreams. When she woke, she couldn’t remember the details, but she remembered the feeling. Of being held by someone who knew all her contradictions and chose to love her anyway. --- The error message appeared on her tablet at 6:30 AM, polite and bureaucratic: **SLEEP DATA UNAVAILABLE. DEVICE MALFUNCTION DETECTED. CONTACT TECHNICAL SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY.** Meena stared at the screen while drinking coffee that tasted like actual coffee for the first time in…she couldn’t remember? Her phone rang before she’d finished breakfast. Dr. Gains’s voice held a blissfully strained patience. “Mrs. Deshmukh, we’re showing a complete system failure on your account. We need to schedule an immediate replacement.” “Oh, really? Well, I’m not interested in a replacement.” Silence on the other end. Then, “I’m sorry, what?” “I said I’m not interested. I’m opting out of sleep monitoring.” “No you are not. That is not possible. Sleep monitoring is mandatory for all workforce personnel under the Cognitive Transparency Act of 20—” “Then I guess I’m not workforce personnel anymore.” The words surprised her as much as they seemed to surprise Dr. Gains. But once they were out, she realized they were true. “Mrs. Deshmukh, let’s not make any hasty decisions. Perhaps we can find a solution that works for everyone.” “I don’t think we can,” Meena said. “But thank you for the offer.” She hung up and finished her coffee, then got dressed for what she knew would be her last day as a teacher. The school day proceeded with the surreal normalcy of inevitable disaster. But during her final period, something changed. Matthew raised his hand and said, “Mrs. Deshmukh, I got a weird message on my sleep report this morning.” “Oh? What kind of message?” “It said ‘data unreadable’ and asked me to contact technical support.” “Yeah, me too,” said Priya. “And Calvin. And Aaliyah.” Meena looked around the classroom. Every student was sitting forward, alert in a way that made her nervous. “How many of you got error messages?” Seventeen hands went up. “And what did you do about it?” “Nothing,” said Matthew. “I figured if the system was broken, I didn’t need to fix it.” “I dropped my NeuroSleeve in the toilet,” said Aaliyah. “Accidentally.” “I told them I was having night terrors,” Calvin said with a wry grin. “Which was true. I was having night terrors about being watched.” Meena stared at her students. Apparently, they’d learned something she’d never explicitly taught them. Go figure. “So none of you submitted dream data last night?” Blank faces. “Even though you knew you’d get into trouble?” Matthew nodded. “To be fair, you did teach us that sometimes the right thing and the legal thing aren’t the same.” *How astute.* After class, Priya approached her desk with a folded paper. “We made something for you,” she said. “It’s a collection. We wanted to give you the first copy.” The paper was bound with string and decorated with small drawings of birds, books, and gardens made of words. The title read: *Dreams Are Not For Sale: A Collection of Unsurveilled Imagination.* Inside, Meena found seventeen sets of dreams written by hand. Dreams about flying through libraries, growing languages in gardens, being trees that had conversations with the wind. At the bottom of the collection was a note in Priya’s handwriting. *We know you’re leaving. We know you’re in trouble because of us. But we want you to know that what you taught us is worth it. Thank you for teaching us.* Meena read the note an excessive amount, then pulled out a piece of paper and began to write her own dream. This one about teaching a classroom full of birds who sang instead of answering questions, finding beauty in the spaces between words, and love that was too complicated to put a dollar sign next to. She added it to the collection and handed it back to Priya. “Make a whole bunch of copies,” she said. “If you share it, that means it’s yours. So share it with people who remember what it feels like to do the same.” The next morning, her tablet showed another error message: **SUBJECT NOT FOUND. ACCOUNT TERMINATED. COGNITIVE ASSETS FROZEN.** She’d been deleted from the system. Officially, she no longer existed as a dreaming entity, a source of extractable content, a person whose sleep could be converted into currency. Officially, she was broke and out of a job and out of a life, pretty much. But unofficially, she was finally free. Yes, such freedom came with costs. The school district terminated her contract. Her health insurance was cancelled, big surprise. The small apartment she’d shared with Arun became instantly unaffordable without her salary. Eventually, she found work at a community center in the next district over, teaching GED classes to adults who’d never been able to afford NeuroSleeves, and who’d somehow managed to slip through the cracks of the surveillance state. Their dreams were worthless to algorithms. They were too scarred by poverty, too strange with trauma. They were perfect. Six months later, she received a package with no return address. Inside was a handbound book titled *The Saffron Algorithm: Dreams From the Resistance.* The pages were filled with handwritten dreams, hundreds of them, each one ending with the same declaration: *This dream belongs to me.* On the first page was a note from Priya: *We’re still here.* Meena closed the book and held it against her chest, feeling the weight of all those shared dreams, flooding her all at once. Outside her window, the city hummed with the sound of millions of people sleeping under surveillance, their dreams being extracted and processed and sold as usual. But somewhere in that vast machine, a few hundred kids were dreaming on paper, keeping their inner lives to themselves, returning to a place where they could own their own minds. Meena opened the book and began to read, mentally tasting saffron and rain and the color of stories that belonged to the people who dreamed them. *This dream belongs to me.* *This dream belongs to me.* *This dream is not for sale.* --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His published books include* The Pixar Theory *(Slimbooks, 2015), a pop culture nonfiction, and his debut novel* Killerjoy *(5050 Press, 2017). His recent short fiction includes "Men Who Are Strong" (IHRAM Press) and "Upon a Dream," an original fable published in The Fairy Tale Magazine.* --- # Author Notes I started writing *Paper Dreams* after someone I work with told me they caught themselves apologizing to an AI chatbot for asking it to do too much. Not joking. They said “sorry” to the thing that wants to replace them. That’s when I knew something had tilted in the brains of so many every day people embracing this technology with nary a thought. It brings me a quiet sort of panic: if AI can predict what we want, then what happens to the parts of us we don’t want anyone to see? The feelings we don’t curate? The dreams we don’t remember? In a world where everything is monetized, wouldn’t our unconscious be next? (To be fair, I’ve also written a poem about this very subject, i.e. machines coming for our dreams, though I haven’t published it.) Anyway, I set the story in a future-Silicon-Valley that isn’t even really the future. Most of the tech here already exists. Most of the corporate language I used…well, I barely had to make it up. There are press releases out there right now with more dystopian energy than anything I could invent. The satire basically wrote itself. I just asked: what if someone tried to grieve *inside* that system? And Meena’s voice came naturally. She’s anxious, principled, tired. She overthinks everything, and she’s still usually right, albeit too late. She reminds me of Chidi from *The Good Place* if he’d lost someone and had to teach middle school civics while his dreams were being strip-mined for content. Meena believes in ethics, but also in keeping her job and making toast and not going completely feral. That contradiction felt real to me. So real. This story’s about surveillance, obviously, but it’s also about **exhaustion**. About what it costs to hold on to anything real when every part of your interior life can be optimized, taxed, and reduced to ones, zeroes, and dollar signs. It’s about the slow horror of watching your grief get a copyright notice. And how resistance, even when you’re *that* tired, might look like a piece of paper, rather than a full-blown war. --- Thanks for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### Soulmate Season URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/soulmate-season/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:05:37.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/Soulmate-Season_thumb.png) Soulmate Season 0:00 /853.7338775510204 1× The threads appeared at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning while Cleo was scraping burnt oatmeal from the bottom of her saucepan. She noticed it first in her peripheral vision, a thin red line stretching from somewhere near her sternum threading through the kitchen window and disappearing into the Houston fog. “Shit.” She turned off the faucet. The line pulsed once, twice, then settled into a steady glow. *Thread Week*. She’d forgotten. The city had been preparing for months. Billboards advertised “Thread-Ready Makeovers” and “Destiny Dating Prep.” Her neighbor Mrs. Torres had spent three weeks power-washing her driveway in case her soulmate turned out to be the mailman. Cleo had planned to work through it, same as last time. The threads only showed up for one week every ten years, and it didn’t work on anyone younger than twenty or so. She touched her chest where the thread emerged. Warm. Slightly sticky, like fresh paint, but her hand could go right through it. It was also glowing. And glowing meant her soulmate wasn’t far away this time. He or she might even be local. Her phone buzzed. A text from her sister Margo: *OMG mine showed up!!! Leads to the Barnes & Noble in River Oaks. Buying lingerie.* *Jesus*. Cleo set the phone face-down and returned to the oatmeal situation. Definitely more of a lost cause at this point. The thread bobbed as she moved, never taut but never slack. She tried to ignore it while she ate yesterday’s leftover pad thai for breakfast, but the darn thing glowed brighter every time she looked away. By eight-fifteen, she’d given up pretending to check emails. The thread led south toward downtown, which meant either the Museum District or the Medical Center. Maybe her soulmate was a doctor. Or a security guard. Or someone visiting their dying grandmother. She put on her good jeans and drove to work anyway. The marketing firm occupied the seventh floor of a glass tower that reflected the morning sun in sheets of amber. Cleo’s cubicle faced east, and by nine-thirty the thread was casting a faint red shadow across her computer screen. “Holy shit, Cleo.” Bev from accounts receivable leaned over the partition. “Look at that thing. It’s like a goddamn fiber optic cable with a flashlight inside it.” “It’s just Thread Week,” Cleo said. “Just Thread Week? Honey, I’ve been married to the same man for fifteen years and I would trade him for a ham sandwich if my thread showed up pointing somewhere else.” Bev squinted at the line. “Where’s it go?” “I haven’t followed it.” “What do you mean you haven’t followed it?” Cleo shrugged. “I’m busy.” That was only somewhat true. She was researching organic dog food brands for a client who sold pet insurance, which was the kind of work that could absorb three hours or thirty minutes depending on how badly you wanted to avoid your actual life. “Girl.” Bev sat on the edge of Cleo’s desk. “My daughter’s twenty-two and she’s been planning her Thread Week strategy since she was sixteen. Vision boards. Workout routines. She learned to make soufflé in case her person turns out to be French and she has to catch a flight.” “What if her person turns out to be lactose intolerant?” “Then she’ll learn to make something else.” Bev stood up. “Point is, you don’t just ignore the thread, that’s like ignoring a winning lottery ticket!” “Maybe I don’t want to win the lottery.” Bev stared at her for a long moment. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all week.” At lunch, Cleo walked to the food truck plaza three blocks south. The thread led her past the Vietnamese place, past the fusion taco stand, all the way to a coffee cart run by a guy named Hollis who made pour-overs that tasted like burnt pencil shavings. The thread ended at a man sitting alone at one of the plastic tables. He was maybe thirty-five, wearing a faded Patagonia shirt and reading a paperback copy of *The Overstory*. His dark hair curled at the edges, and he had a face that looked worried even when relaxed. His thread emerged from his chest in a thin red line that connected directly to hers. Cleo bought a cup of coffee she didn’t want and sat down at the next table. The man looked up from his book. “Weird week, right?” “Yeah.” She stirred sugar into her coffee. “You come here a lot?” “Every Tuesday. You?” “First time.” “Ah.” He closed the book, keeping his finger on the page. “So, this is awkward.” “Little bit.” They sat in silence for a moment. The thread between them hummed faintly, like a power line. “I’m Kieran,” he said finally. “Cleo.” “Nice to meet you, Cleo.” He paused. “Weird, uh, circumstances.” “The weirdest.” He was wearing a wedding ring. Thin gold band, slightly tarnished. Cleo felt a cold breeze whip through her that had nothing to do with weather. “So,” she said. “Married?” “Engaged.” Kieran twisted the ring around his finger. “Six months now. Wedding’s in October. She thought this would help for Thread Week. Just in case, I guess.” “Congratulations.” “Thanks.” He looked at the thread connecting them. “This is really fucking inconvenient.” Cleo laughed before she could stop herself. “Yeah, no kidding.” “I mean, what are the odds? I’ve lived in Houston for eight years. I eat lunch at this exact spot every Tuesday. And my cosmic soulmate apparently lives right around the corner.” “Murphy’s Law.” “Exactly.” He reopened his book, then closed it again. “Hey, can I ask you something?” “Sure.” “Do you even believe in this stuff? The threads, the soulmate thing?” Cleo considered this. “I believe in biological imperatives. Pheromones. Evolutionary compatibility. I think the threads are just a visual representation of something that was always there.” “Very scientific.” “I work in marketing. Everything’s about psychological manipulation.” “Right. And what’s the thread trying to manipulate you into?” She looked at him. Really looked. He had good hands, calloused in the right places. A mouth that probably smiled more than it frowned, under normal circumstances. “I have no idea,” she said. Kieran checked his watch. “I should get back to work.” “Yeah, me too.” Neither of them moved. “This is stupid,” Kieran said. “We just met. I don’t even know your last name.” “Valdez.” “Cleo Valdez.” He smiled. “I’m Kieran Moss. I’m a public defender. I live in Montrose with my fiancée and a cat named Biscuit. I drink too much coffee and I’m terrible at returning phone calls.” “Why are you telling me this?” “Because in about five minutes I’m going to walk back to my office and pretend this never happened. And I figure you should know something real about me first.” The thread pulsed brighter. “Cleo Valdez,” she said. “I work for a marketing firm that specializes in insurance companies. I live alone in a studio apartment with very good acoustics and a broken garbage disposal. I haven’t been on a date in eight months and I’m starting to think I prefer it that way.” “Why?” “Because dating is like job interviewing. Everyone’s performing the best version of themselves until someone gets hired, and then you find out what they’re actually like.” “And what are you actually like?” She stood up, leaving her coffee untouched. “I guess you’ll never know.” “Cleo.” She turned back. “Same time tomorrow?” he asked. The thread between them glowed steady and warm. “Same time tomorrow,” she said.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His published books include* The Pixar Theory *(Slimbooks, 2015), a pop culture nonfiction, and his debut novel* Killerjoy *(5050 Press, 2017). His recent short fiction includes "Men Who Are Strong" (IHRAM Press) and "Upon a Dream," an original fable published in The Fairy Tale Magazine.* --- # **Author’s Note** I don’t remember when I first heard about the invisible thread theory thing (probably somewhere between a Tumblr post and a friend of a friend’s podcast). But I came across it again recently and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The idea that the universe ties you to another person, and then forces you to figure out the rest. What a wild concept. I think we dream up these theories because real life isn’t so easy. There aren’t any instructions for finding a person you belong with, especially when the timing can be a little off. Or way off, even. That’s pretty much where *Soulmate Season* comes from. I wanted to write a story where the big magical thing happens: soulmate confirmed, thread glowing, fate delivered! But…it’s still complicated. Because it’s still inconvenient. Still human. Cleo, to be fair is not like me at all. I want to be understood and seen, but she just wants to handle that dog insurance client with as little to do as possible. Then again, there’s a version of her I can relate with. The part of her who wants to *earn* that closeness. Not just take a predestined short cut. Kieran, on the other hand, is the person who stumbles around trying to do the right thing even when he’s not sure what that is. Ultimately, I think he probably makes a wrong decision and learns from it. Either way, the thread doesn’t care what they think. The thread shows up anyway. Life shows up anyway. Honestly, I don’t look at this piece as a love story. It’s not a rom-com where the two end up together in the end. Cleo still has her life and Kieran has his commitment. In my mind, neither of them show up the next day. But I purposefully left that out of the story because I think it’s irrelevant. ### Open Concept URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/open-concept/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:07:01.000Z I have held four families in my rooms like cupped water, and three of them were nice enough not to destroy me. The fourth sits at my kitchen table this Tuesday morning, the woman with her laptop glowing against the dark wood, the man spreading blueprints across the surface where the Castellanos family once kneaded masa for tamales every Sunday. Their daughter, eight years old with fierce dark eyes, traces the blueprint lines with her finger and asks why the walls have to change. “Because, Luna, the house needs to work better for us,” says the mother, not looking up from her screen. “What does ‘open concept’ mean?” the child asks. “It means a better flow.” Hmph. Better flow. As if I’m some river that has forgotten how to run. Actually, lady, I’m an *American Foursquare* house with hints of *Colonial Revival*. Get it right. The man, David, taps his pen against the plans. “Here. The dining room wall comes down first…then we’ll have to gut the kitchen entirely.” He draws a thick black *X* across the heart of my interior, where I’ve sheltered a century of meals, arguments, reconciliations, and some others things I forget, but that’s not important. The child—Luna, they call her—frowns at the blueprint, too. “But where will we eat Christmas dinner?” “Anywhere we want,” says the mother, finally looking up. “That’s the beauty of open concept.” I feel something shift in my foundation, a settling that has nothing to do with age. The Castellanos family ate their last Christmas dinner in my dining room three years ago. I remember the way Abuela Castellanos touched my walls when she said goodbye, her palm flat against the plaster as if she were taking my pulse. “Cuida la casa,” she whispered. *Take care of the house*. See, *she* got it. *She* understood me. The Castellanos had lived here for thirty-seven years. Their children learned to walk on my floors, carved their heights into my doorframe. When they finally moved to the senior community, they left not because they stopped loving me, but because their bodies could no longer navigate my stairs. Understandable. Sympathetic, even. These new people…the Wongs…well, they bought me six months ago. They’re not bad people, I’ll admit. David works long hours at his software company, comes home to help with Luna’s homework and Julia’s wine. Julia teaches at the university, fills my rooms with stacks of papers and the rapid clicking of her keyboard. Luna plays elaborate games with her stuffed animals, assigns them voices and personalities and complex emotional lives. But they don’t see me. Not really. They see square footage and property values and “open concepts.” “The contractor said Monday,” David says, rolling up the plans. “We’ll stay at my mother’s while they work and come by to check in from time to time.” Monday. Five days. I flex my walls slightly, just enough to make the kitchen cabinet doors swing open. Julia glances up, annoyed, and walks over to close them. Her hand pauses on the cabinet handle. “This house,” she mutters. “I swear it has a mind of its own.” Well, yeah. What did you expect, *Julia*? --- The contractor arrives early Monday morning with a crew of three men and a woman who carries a sledgehammer like it weighs nothing. They wear heavy boots that scuff my floors and speak in loud voices that bounce off my walls without regard for proper acoustics. Unacceptable. I try a few small rebellions first. The front door sticks when they try to bring in their equipment. That one is classic. The electrical outlets in the dining room stop working, how mysterious. Oh, and I make the floorboards creak ominously whenever they walk across the room they plan to demolish. “Old house,” says the contractor, Carlos, not unkindly. “They all have their quirks.” But quirks aren’t enough. By noon, they have gaudy plastic sheeting taped across my doorways and a radio playing music I don’t recognize. The woman with the sledgehammer—Rosa, I hear Carlos call her—stands in my dining room and studies the wall that separates it from the kitchen. “Load-bearing?” she asks. “Nah,” says Carlos, consulting his clipboard. “Just cosmetic. Tear it down.” Rosa hefts the sledgehammer and I feel a terror so pure it travels through my electrical system like wildfire. Every light in the house flickers. “Weird,” says one of the workers. “Power surge?” Rosa draws back the hammer and I make my choice. Every door in the house slams shut simultaneously, locks clicking into place with the sharp authority of a prison. The plastic sheeting billows and snaps like storm-torn sails. The radio goes silent. “What the hell?” Carlos turns in a slow circle, his clipboard forgotten. If only he could hear me cackling. The lights flicker again, then go out entirely. In the darkness, I whisper through my wooden walls, a sound like an old woman’s bones creaking. “Please,” I tease, though I know they can’t make out the words. “Please don’t.” Rosa’s voice cuts through the darkness, “There’s gotta be a breaker box.” But I control the breakers now. I control the locks, the lights, the very air that moves through my vents. For the first time in my existence, I am *not* sheltering the people inside me. I’m holding them hostage. --- They’re trapped for twenty-seven minutes before Luna arrives. I hear her bicycle bell first, then the sound of her backpack hitting my front porch. She tries the door, finds it locked, and begins to pound with her small fists. “Mom? Dad? Why is the door locked?” Hm, good question, Luna. Why is it? Inside, Carlos is on his phone with the fire department. Rosa has given up on the sledgehammer and is examining my walls with a flashlight, running her hands along the plaster as if she can divine the source of their misfortune. *Good luck* is all I can say. “Hey,” Luna calls through the door. “I can hear you in there. What’s wrong?” I freeze. This is…unexpected. I’ve never spoken to a child before. The previous families’ children sensed me sometimes…a presence in the corner of their vision, a whisper that might have been the wind. But I will admit that Luna is a bit strange, even for a kid. When she plays with her stuffed animals, she does so with such fierce imagination that the boundary between real and unreal can sometimes appear, I don’t know, negotiable. So I whisper to her through the keyhole, my voice like leaves rustling, “A lot of things are wrong, kid! They want to tear down my walls! Can you believe that?” Luna goes very still. “Who wants to tear down your walls?” “The mailman, who do you think? The people inside with the dang hammers.” “Are you…” Luna’s voice drops to a whisper. “Are you the house?” “Was it that obvious?” She’s quiet for a long moment. I can hear her thinking, the way children often think with their whole bodies. “You know, my parents aren’t bad people,” she says finally. “They just want to make you better.” “I don’t *want* to be better,” I whisper back. “I want to be *me*.” “OK. Well, who are you?” And suddenly I’m telling her everything. About the Castellanos family and their Sunday tamales, about the jazz musician who lived here in the 1940s and practiced late into the night until my walls learned to resonate with his saxophone. About the young couple in the 1960s who painted murals on my kitchen walls and slow-danced in my living room to records all scratched with age. “And the coolest part is that I hold their memories,” I tell her. “In my walls, in my floors. And So, when they tear me apart, where do you think all those memories will go?” Luna’s crying now, soft sniffles that somehow break my heart. “I don’t know,” she says. “But the people inside are really scared right now. You’re scaring them.” The truth of it hits me like Rosa’s sledgehammer. Through my walls, I even hear Rosa’s voice right then, shaky now. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Houses don’t just...do this.” Carlos is reassuring his crew that it’s just an electrical problem, but his voice lacks conviction. And in the dining room, where I’ve trapped them, the plastic sheeting moves without any wind to push it, and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. It suddenly dawns on me that in my effort to protect my memories, I’ve started creating new ones. Bad ones. Memories of fear and a house that holds its occupants prisoner. “Fine, I’ll let them out,” I whisper to Luna. “But I’m pretty sure you’re not even supposed to be here, by the way. You’re parents are probably freaking out, wondering where you went.” The locks click open. The lights flicker back to life. The radio resumes its cheerful noise, and all is well. Eh, just kidding. The damage is done. I hear Carlos talking rapidly into his phone, asking for backup, for someone who deals with “unusual situations.” By evening, he’ll have called the Wongs to inform them that his crew won’t be returning. “Don’t be sad,” Luna whispers through the keyhole. “Maybe there’s another way.” But I know there isn’t. Not really. Frightened people don’t negotiate with houses. They call exterminators. --- The new contractor arrives Wednesday morning with different equipment and a different attitude. She wears steel-toed boots and safety glasses and introduces herself to my empty rooms as if I’m a police station. “I’ve seen everything,” she announces to no one in particular. “Termites, mold, asbestos, foundation issues. Houses don’t scare me.” Challenge accepted. Hm, that is how they say it in that show Abuela used to watch, isn’t it? Anyway, the contractor’s name is Maria, and she works alone. She sets up her equipment with methodical precision, ignoring the way my floors creak under her feet, the way my doors swing open when she passes. When she raises the sledgehammer to my dining room wall, I don’t bother fighting her. The first blow cracks the plaster, sending fragments to the floor like fallen teeth. The second blow opens a hole large enough for her to reach through. The third blow reveals the hollow space between my walls, where mice have made their nests and where the Castellanos children hid love letters from their parents. I feel each blow harsher than the last, but I also feel something else. A release. Because with each crack in the plaster, each piece of my structure that falls away, I remember why the Castellanos family left. It wasn’t because they stopped loving me. It was because their bodies had stopped loving *them*. And they loved me so much, they didn’t want to install wheelchair ramps or widen the doorways. I guess they loved me enough to let me love someone else. I remember the last Christmas dinner in my dining room. Abuela Castellanos in her wheelchair at the head of the table, her children and grandchildren crowded around her. The table barely fit in the room—they had to squeeze against my walls to reach their chairs. But they made it work because the work was worth it. After dinner, while the others cleaned up, Abuela Castellanos remained at the table. She stared at my walls for a long time, her eyes tracing the faded paint, the small scuffs and scratches that marked decades of family life. “We have to go,” she said quietly, to me or to the room or to the ghosts of all the meals we’d shared. “This house needs a family that can run up and down the stairs. That can use all the rooms.” She was right, of course. The Wongs run up and down my stairs daily. Luna claimed the small bedroom on the second floor that the Castellanos grandchildren used only for visits. David uses the third floor study that had been empty for years. He’s doing all kinds of interesting things in there. Not that I always mean to pry. I’m just glad he keeps busy. Maria swings the sledgehammer again, and this time I help her. I show her where the wall is weakest, where the support beams end, where she can work most efficiently. My dining room wall comes down in pieces, and with each splinter, I feel the space opening up, breathing. --- That night, Luna comes to visit me again. She sits on my front porch with her back against my door, her homework spread across her lap. The porch light casts a warm circle around her, and I can hear her pencil scratching against paper. “Are you okay?” she whispers. I consider the question. My dining room wall is gone, leaving a pile of rubble and a gaping space where once there was separation. My kitchen, exposed now, looks naked and vulnerable. Tomorrow, Maria will continue her work, tearing out cabinets and fixtures, stripping away the accumulated layers of my life. “I think so,” I whisper back through the door. “I think I’m in the middle of learning something.” “What’s that?” “Open concept lets me see more of what’s going on. It’s kinda nice.” Luna’s quiet for a moment. “My mom says we’re going to put up pictures of the old families who used to live here. She found some photos in the attic and wants to make a gallery wall to honor the people who lived here before us.” A gallery wall? I had not expected this. Not at all! “And my dad says we’re going to keep the original hardwood floors. Polish them up but not replace them. He says they have character. I don’t get what that means. Characters are in books, not floors.” Character. The word settles into my foundation like a blessing. “Luna,” I whisper, “will you do something for me?” “Sure. I guess.” “Will you help me…remember some things? Not really the walls or the rooms, since I have those on lock, but the people. Like…like the way Abuela Castellanos would hum while she cooked. And how the jazz musician played the same song every night until he got it right. The way your parents dance in the kitchen when they think you’re not watching." Luna giggles. “They’re terrible dancers.” “They’re actually quite decent, in my opinion. And not that I want to preach, but someday, when you’re grown up and you have a house of your own, you’ll remember the way they danced, and you’ll know that love lives in those million daily moments. Take the morning coffee and the homework at the kitchen table and the way someone says your name when you come home, all of it.” “Will you remember me?” Luna asks. “Well, yeah,” I promise. “I’ll remember that you listened to me when I was afraid, and that you taught me how to appreciate a better flow.” She presses her palm against my door, and I feel the warmth of her hand through the wood. “I’ll come visit you while they’re fixing you up,” she says. “Even when you’re all torn apart and messy.” “Dang, really? Thanks.” After she goes inside, I settle into my foundation and listen to the Wongs’ evening routine. David washing dishes, Julia grading papers, Luna reading aloud to her stuffed animals. The sounds are different from the Castellanos family, but they are good sounds. They’s the sounds of people making a life together. Tomorrow, Maria will continue her work. She’ll tear out my old kitchen and install new cabinets. She’ll open up my spaces and let in more light. She’ll change my floor plan and my lighting and my very sense of self. But tonight, I’m still the house that holds the echo of a musician’s saxophone, the warmth of a thousand Sunday dinners, the hushed secrets of children who carved their names into my doorframe. I’m still the house keeping an eye on things. Someone has to keep the water running, the good times flowing. And tomorrow, I’ll start learning all kinds of new things to take care of. In the morning, when the Wongs return from David's mother’s house, they’ll find me at least a little bit changed. My dining room wall will be gone, my kitchen exposed and vulnerable. But Luna will run up my stairs and David will admire my original hardwood floors and Julia will stand in my new open space and say, “You know what? This is going to work for us.” And I’ll whisper, too quietly for anyone but Luna to hear, “Yes, David. You’re quite right. Well said.” I didn’t know any better, but I knew differently, at least. How to hold on by holding space. And I’ll admit I was a little embarrassed the first time Luna caught me playing with her stuffed animals, assigning them names almost as fiercely as she could. I’ll have to be more careful next time. --- # Author’s Notes I’ve always been weirdly emotional about houses. Not just the ones I grew up in, but the ones I walked past a thousand times, the ones I visited once and still remember the smell. I think places hold memory in ways we don’t always notice…until something changes. To that end, I like to think of *Open Concept* as a ghost story with no ghosts. It’s about gentrification and renovation and the quiet war between memory and modernity and so on and so on. But it’s also about families. How they come and go, how they leave fingerprints on the walls, and how sometimes, a house might love you back. Or it might be smack talking you when you’re not listening. This story was also partially inspired by one of my lifelong best friends, Tyler, who bought an 19th century mansion a few years ago and ended up becoming a TikTok sensation while he and his family documented their renovation of it. It’s [@ouroldhouse](https://www.tiktok.com/@ouroldhouse?lang=en&ref=ceteramagazine.com), if you’re interested, and I’ve loved seeing their progress over the years. How they’ve modernized it, sure, but also retained the house’s personality, as well, while raising their kids inside those walls all the while. So if you, yourself, have ever been a house, I hope this story makes you feel, uh, seen. If you’ve ever been the people inside one, treat it gently. And please…before you take down the walls, ask them if they’re ready. ### The Dinner Party URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-dinner-party/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:08:02.000Z So Tom’s reading this article on his phone Tuesday morning—*The Male Loneliness Epidemic: Why Modern Men Are Struggling to Connect*—and he’s nodding along like it’s the first smart thing anybody ever wrote. Linda’s loading the dishwasher behind him, which she does every morning after he leaves his coffee cup on the counter, and she can hear him making those little “mm-hmm” sounds he makes when he thinks he’s discovered something important about himself. “Listen to this,” he says, not turning around. “‘Men today report feeling more isolated than ever, despite being more connected digitally.’ That’s exactly what I’ve been feeling.” Linda closes the dishwasher harder than necessary. “When do you feel isolated?” “I don’t know. Generally. Like, when’s the last time I hung out with Jake? Or Mike? We used to be tight in college.” “You text them all the time.” “That’s not the same thing.” Tom scrolls down, still not looking at her. “It says here that men need to make more effort to maintain in-person friendships. We’re losing the art of real connection.” Linda wipes the counter around his elbow. Twenty-three years they’ve been together, married for fifteen, and she’s never heard him use the phrase “real connection” before today. But okay. “You know what?” Tom puts down his phone with the decisiveness of a man who’s just solved a puzzle. “I’m gonna call Jake and Mike. Maybe Danny too. We should all get together.” “That sounds nice.” “Yeah, like a dinner party or something. This Saturday. Can you throw something together?” And there it is. Can you throw something together. Like dinner parties throw themselves together. Like eight guys and their various dietary restrictions and drinking preferences and the careful social calculus of who sits next to whom just assembles itself while Linda’s at work teaching fourth grade. “Sure,” she says, because what else is she gonna say? That throwing something together means planning a menu and shopping and cleaning the house and cooking for ten hours and making sure there’s enough chairs and figuring out parking and hoping nobody brings up politics or their ex-wives or that thing that happened at Danny’s wedding three years ago? “You’re amazing,” Tom says, finally looking at her. “What would I do without you?” She’s wondering that herself. --- Wednesday she makes lists. Thursday she shops—Whole Foods for the good cheese, Costco for the beer, the Jewish deli on 14th Street for the rugelach because Tom’s friends always expect something sweet and she learned years ago that store-bought cookies make her look like she doesn’t care. Friday she cleans the house like company’s coming, which it is, even though Tom doesn’t seem to notice their place needed cleaning. Saturday morning he asks what he can do to help. “Just stay out of the kitchen,” she tells him, which is what she always tells him, and he always looks a little hurt, like he really wanted to help but she won’t let him. The truth is he’d help by making everything take twice as long and asking where they keep things that have been in the same cabinet for fifteen years. By five o’clock she’s got brisket in the oven, potato kugel keeping warm, salad prepped, wine opened to breathe. Tom’s in the shower, probably taking his time because he knows she’s got everything handled. Jake arrives first, with his new girlfriend whose name Linda wrote down but already forgot. Then Mike with a bottle of wine that costs more than their electric bill, and Danny with his wife Susan, who immediately offers to help but in that way that means she’s really asking what Linda did so she can compliment it. “Everything smells incredible,” Susan says. “You’re so talented.” “It’s just brisket,” Linda says, which is technically true but doesn’t mention the marinade she started Tuesday night or the special potatoes or the homemade horseradish. Tom appears in the living room like he’s the host of a talk show, all fresh-showered and charming, asking everyone what they’re drinking and telling stories about work that Linda’s heard six times but that are new to everybody else. The guys laugh in that hearty way men laugh when they’re remembering why they used to be friends. Linda floats between kitchen and living room, refilling drinks and bringing out appetizers and making sure the conversation keeps moving. She’s good at this. Has to be. Twenty-three years of practice reading the room, knowing when to interrupt a conversation that’s going nowhere and when to let people talk themselves into having a good time. During dinner, they’re all having such a blast. College stories, work complaints, that safe kind of nostalgia that makes everyone feel young and important. Tom’s holding court at the head of their dining room table, gesturing with his fork, and Linda thinks maybe this was a good idea after all. Look how happy he looks. Look how easy this is for him. “Remember when we drove to Atlantic City junior year?” Jake’s saying. “And Tom convinced that bouncer he was Danny’s older brother?” “You idiots nearly got us arrested,” Danny’s wife says, but she’s laughing. “Worth it though,” Mike says. “Best weekend ever.” Linda clears plates and brings out dessert and coffee, and nobody really notices she’s gone except to praise the rugelach when she comes back. Which is fine. This is how these things work. After dinner the guys migrate to the living room with their beers, and Linda starts the cleanup with Susan, who insists on helping even though Linda would rather do it herself because then it gets done right. “Tom’s such a great host,” Susan says, scraping plates. “He just has this way of making everyone feel welcome.” “Mm-hmm,” Linda says. “And your place always feels so homey. Like, you walk in and you just feel comfortable, you know? It’s a real gift.” Linda’s loading the dishwasher, listening to the guys laugh about something in the other room, and she wonders what Susan thinks creates that homey feeling. The throw pillows that arrange themselves? The good soap in the guest bathroom that appears by magic? The way the temperature’s always perfect and there’s always enough food and the right music playing at the right volume? “Thanks,” she says. --- Later, after everyone leaves and Linda’s finishing the last of the dishes, Tom comes into the kitchen with two wine glasses and the dregs of a bottle. “That was perfect,” he says. “Exactly what I needed.” “Good,” she says, because it’s true enough. He seems lighter, more like his old self. “Jake said something funny when they were leaving. He said you ‘really know how to make a house feel like home.’ Isn’t that nice?” Linda stops scrubbing the roasting pan. “Yeah. Nice.” “I mean, it’s true though. You do. I don’t know how you do it, but you do.” She turns around to look at him. He’s leaning against the counter, relaxed and grateful and completely oblivious. Tom the Great Host, as Jake called him. Tom who solved his loneliness problem with one phone call and one dinner party that materialized like a magic trick. “Tom,” she says. “What?” “When you were feeling lonely—before tonight—what did that feel like?” He thinks about it, swirling wine in his glass. “I don’t know. Like I was just going through the motions, you know? Work, home, work, home. Like I wasn’t really connecting with anybody.” “But you were connecting with me.” “Well, yeah, but—” He stops. “I mean, that’s different. You’re my wife.” “Right.” “I meant like, guy friends. People I could talk to about guy stuff.” “What kind of guy stuff?” “I don’t know. Work frustrations. Sports. Just… I don’t know. Guy stuff.” Linda turns back to the sink. She’s thinking about all the work frustrations he’s talked through with her over the years, all the weekend games they’ve watched together, all the guy stuff she’s listened to and responded to and helped him figure out. She’s thinking about Jake’s girlfriend, whose name she still can’t remember, and how she spent the whole evening making sure that girl felt included even though she clearly didn’t want to be there. She’s thinking about Susan saying Tom’s such a great host, and wondering if Susan knows that being a great host requires someone else to do all the hosting. “I’m glad you had fun,” she says. “We should do it again soon. Maybe monthly? Like a regular thing.” “Maybe.” Tom finishes his wine and rinses the glass, which is more than he usually does. “I’m gonna go watch the news. You coming?” “In a minute.” He kisses the top of her head on his way out, and Linda stands there in her kitchen, looking at the last few items that need to be put away. The fancy cloth napkins she ironed this afternoon. The serving dishes she only uses for company. The good silverware that somehow never makes it back to the dining room on its own. She can hear the TV in the other room, Tom scrolling through channels, probably looking for SportsCenter. In a few minutes he’ll call out to ask if she knows where the remote is, or whether they have any of those crackers he likes, and she’ll stop what she’s doing to help him find whatever he’s looking for. The male loneliness epidemic. She thinks about that phrase, rolling it around in her mouth like a word in a foreign language. As if connection were something you could order up like Chinese takeout, instead of something you had to tend to every single day like a garden that would die without constant attention. Linda wipes down the counter one last time and turns off the kitchen light. Tomorrow Tom will probably text Jake about when they should do this again, and Jake will text back something like “Linda’s amazing,” and Tom will feel good about himself for having such great friends and such a great wife who makes such great dinner parties happen. And Linda will be glad he’s happy. She will. Because that’s what twenty-three years of marriage looks like. Being glad when your husband discovers he’s not lonely because you’ve spent two decades making sure he never had to be. “Linda?” Tom calls from the living room. “Do we have any more of that cheese?” “I’ll get it,” she calls back, because of course she will. --- # Author’s Notes I wrote this story after reading about the so-called “male loneliness epidemic” in approximately forty-seven different articles, all of which seemed to discover male isolation as if it were a new continent. What struck me wasn't that men are uniquely lonely—loneliness is the human condition, after all—but that this particular kind of loneliness was being treated as newsworthy while women's isolation, women's emotional labor, women's management of everyone else's social lives remained invisible. Additionally, I wanted to write about the gap between how we experience care and how we recognize it. Tom genuinely feels lonely, and the dinner party genuinely helps him feel connected. But he can't see that his connection depends entirely on Linda's silent work: the planning, the emotional labor, the social architecture she builds around his needs, and yes, the mental load. He experiences the solution without seeing the solver. This is domestic realism as political fiction. The personal is political, as we used to say, and nowhere is that more true than in a marriage where one person's loneliness gets a diagnosis and a solution while the other person's work remains unnamed and unrecognized. While this isn’t me drawing from my own personal experience, I do think all of us can relate to this type of imbalance, at least to some extent. Which side of it you’re on is something you have to figure out yourself. The ending isn't meant to be hopeful or hopeless, just true. Linda will get the cheese because that's what she does. Tom will feel grateful and connected because that's what Linda makes possible. And tomorrow they'll both wake up in the same house, in the same marriage, with the same understanding of who does what to keep their life feeling like a life worth living. ### They Won't Stop Lying Because They Can't URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/they-wont-stop-lying-because-they/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T02:53:15.000Z Whoever wears the badge to grind us down Never has to say why: the microphone his, The podium his, the lie his to spin "He charged me," they'll say, "he lunged," As we watch our brown senator Pressed to cold marble, steel around his wrists, His voice still saying "I am a US Senator" While they call him wildly inappropriate. We witness the heart of the sealed-off room, Check each breath for the violence They're already justifying on the apps, What might snap before it does, Democracy? Their masks? The pretense That any of this was about law and order? When you work the crowd from the outside, When you ask the forbidden questions About the raids, about the families Torn apart while cameras roll, They will tackle you. They will smile While doing it. This secretary With her plastered certainty Looking down to find the pattern The uppity one who dares speak For Echo Park and Boyle Heights, and the ones they want disappeared. What does the Speaker already know, Grinning behind his podium, Calling for censure before the bruises fade They would defend shooting him In the back of the head With the same righteous voice, The same lie about charging, The same smile splitting their faces With a wound that can’t heal. I cannot tell what I need to tell About a country that handcuffs Its own leaders for asking questions, Then calls them thugs For bleeding on the flag; Us, still in our beautiful doomed hunger For something they call democracy But spell f-a-s-c-i-s-m, Our elected voice shoved down, Silenced, his one hand raised In the old American question Which never waits for permission, Never bows to their particular Bottomless cruelty. Each day democracy paid out Not by our small resistances Those are finished now But by how long we can stand To watch them lie About what we all saw, How long before we name What they are doing to us, What they have always Been doing to us, What they will do Until we stop them Or disappear trying. --- # Author’s Notes I watched the video of Senator Padilla being thrown to the ground and handcuffed for the crime of asking a question, and I thought: here it is again. The old American song, the one we've been humming for centuries now. The melody of power maintaining itself through violence while calling that violence order. People will say I'm being dramatic. They always do. They said it when I wrote about 2016, when I wrote about Charlottesville and January 6 and November 2024\. "Surely," they said, "you're exaggerating." "Surely it's not as bad as all that." And then the cameras rolled, and the world saw what we had been seeing all along. The cameras rolled yesterday, too. Everyone saw what happened to Padilla. And still they lied about it. Not in private, whispered conference rooms, but in broad daylight, grinning while they did it. "He charged her," they said, as we all watched him standing still. "He was inappropriate," they said, as we all watched him being brutalized for asking a question in his own state to the federal official stating she wants to “liberate” his constituents from their elected leaders. Their chosen representatives. This is the American theater of cruelty: the performance is as important as the violence itself. They don't just want to hurt. They want people to watch them hurt, and then they want us to thank them for it. They want you to call your own brutalization "law and order” and join in on the conspiracy theory. I keep thinking about the word "inappropriate." It's doing so much work in their telling of this story. What's inappropriate? A brown man asking questions? A senator refusing to be silent while families in his jurisdiction are torn apart? Or is what's inappropriate the fact that they can't say the quiet part out loud yet, that they believe some people simply don't have the right to speak, to exist, to breathe in the same room as power? Fact check. Many of them are already saying this. The most chilling thing about watching this unfold wasn't the violence itself, though that was terrible enough. It was the speed with which the lie was constructed, disseminated, and thoughtlessly defended. Before Padilla was even back on his feet, they had already decided he was the aggressor. Before the video was even uploaded, they had already written the story in which he was the villain. This is how fascism works. Not with jackboots marching in the street—though that’s here as well—but with the slow, methodical redefinition of reality itself. Today, asking a question is "charging." Tomorrow, breathing while brown will be "resisting arrest." And they will smile while they say it, because the lie isn't a fluke or a mistake. It’s a tactic. We are living through the end of something, and the beginning of something else. I don't know what comes next, but I know this: they will not stop lying because they can't. Not until the lie machine breaks down completely, until the theater of cruelty becomes too expensive to maintain, until we refuse to pretend along with them that any of this is normal. Until then, we bear witness. We name what we see. We refuse to let them speak of us without us in the room. Even when that room is behind bars, even when that room is underground, even when that room is the last room any of us will ever see. ### Burning Love: Fire, Brimstone, and You! URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/burning-love-fire-brimstone-and-you/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:09:43.000Z > **Before You Light That Match:* What follows is pure satire, folks! No real reverends were harmed in the making of this story, and no actual fire-starting is recommended. If you're genuinely tempted to burn things after reading this, please seek help from licensed professionals, not fictional clergymen charging $55 a pop.* Hey kids! Do you like matches? Do you love the enrapturing rapture? Do you love knowing that the power of the Devil's playpen destroys anything you wish to be gone from the Lord's kingdom? Well, guess what? You're WRONG! And you're HELLBOUND! My name is Reverend Sherman Chapelman, and it is my great honor to help navigate you toward the great, almighty kingdom of God! All you need is a heart ready to purge any trace of sin, your parents' consent, the awesome and unfathomable will of our Lord, and a regular payment series of $55 American. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's get down to business! Arson is a horrible, horrible crime. That said, as a God-fearing person such as yourself, perhaps I can see where an impressionable soul might be tempted. Though fire is the soil that spews out the Devil’s unholy wrath, "arson" is a word with a divine taste on the tongue. Say it aloud: arson. Ar-son. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Yes, one can certainly hear "arson" and think "our son." Our Holy Son of God. He who makes all good and just. If one burned a school into a pile of dust, He — in His all-righteous vision — would maybe have just reason for the dissolution of one public institute. After all, wasn't it God who sent a great flood onto the masses to cleanse the Earth? Wasn't there something or another in Genesis about "ashes" and "dust" and all that hullabaloo? Didn't someone have a conversation or two with the Big Man when He was a Big Burning Bush? Believe me, dear child. I hear your anger. Your call to the mighty. Your deeply buried desire to impart His wisdom. I feel your empowered spirit shining brightly through these thick and horrid columns of smoke. But fear not, child, for I am here to help. Let me guide you to the light. Not the terrifying light of burning, uncontrollable flames, but the loving, less flesh-melting divinity of our caring and compassionate Lord and Savior. Isn't that better than burning down the mall? It is time for a fresh start, my little guardians of the light. A rejuvenating, payment-renewing start! And that's where I will most graciously come in. Because much like sheep need shepherds, and, perhaps in an allegory that's more familiar to you, fire needs wind, I am the vessel to the Big Man Upstairs. And through His lips, my ears, and your gracious donations to the church, we can spread His message all across our great, not-fire-scored land! So I say to thee, let's get started! The future looks bright because we will be using your fire, your soul, and divine cash for good! Now, it may not seem like it, but there are plenty of resourceful ways to use your delirious lust for flames for good — if you can believe it! Let's break them down, shall we? ## Build Fires for the Homeless. It's a cold, cold world out there. And every day, your neighborhood brothers and sisters are left with no place to call their own. They lie in the dark, shivering themselves silly, as they can't turn up the heat or bunker down from the storm. But that's where you come in, my dear servant of the Lord! With your expert fire-building skills, you can give a helpless homeless person the warm bath of fire they need to stay warm. And fear not — you won't be tempted to commit property damage because, let's face it, they don't have their own homes! What will you do, burn down their box? Try as you might, Lucifer, but you can't steal from those who have already lost everything, bud! ## Get Into Cooking! Everyone needs to eat! But Jesus isn't always around to give fish to the masses. Sometimes, you need to whip up your own pot of stew. And what do you need to make that happen? Fire! By taking your love of flames and applying it to good eating, you will not only do yourself a great service, but you can make friends, treat loved ones, and possibly even win over that lucky guy or gal you've been admiring from afar. The fires of passion start with a nice fire on the stove — but don't get any funny ideas! Trade that lust to thrust for a lust for the crust! Anyone hungry? ## Burn Your Neighborhood Trash. Now, some hoity-toity scientists might take umbrage at this particular suggestion, but what do they know? They're destined for Hell (the Kingdom of Fire!) anyway! We're in the soul-saving business here! Trash pollution is a big problem in our day-to-day world. It won't get rid of itself! Rather than wallow in sadness about the tragic state of our garbage-filled world, you should use your fear-inspiring fire-making skills. Make this planet a better place to live by burning those big heaps of trash to the ground! Crummy things like plastics, glass, and paper were NOT made by The Man Upstairs. Give them an express pass to Hell with your fire-building, and save us ALL! Just be careful! Don't let those flames lick your family, neighbors, or anything else God touched! ## Make Some Glass! Much like cooking, you can use your fire-building to create rather than destroy! If you have ever held a pot or vase in your hand and said, "Gee, I wonder where this came from," well, question no more! The answer is in the flames! Get yourself a welding torch and make your grandmother a nice little flower holder for her nursing home. It doesn't even need to be pretty! Just effective! And these are only a few things you can do with your special, terrifying interest and horrible skill! Listen, every youngster has a rebellious phase. I'm certainly not telling you tales out of school when I confess — to you and the Lord above — that I could be a bit of a rascal back in the day. Staying up past 9, getting into fistfights, going to conversion therapy… everyone has a naughty period in their lives. But if you listen to me (and God!) and open up your heart (and wallet!), you will soon be on the path of the righteous and find yourself in the hands of His almighty grace! So don't be a stranger, stranger! Join St. Florian's Fire Quenchers Program, located in the burning heart of the church, and don't get blamed for the flame ever again! Extra fees apply! Save those fires for the Devil! And if you find yourself fond of water instead, I say get baptized! Also, if you recommend three of your fellow flamers, you get 20 percent off your first purchase! Let's call that… a fire sale! Praise be to the Lord on high! --- # Author’s Notes There's no crowdwork when it comes to writing. You just follow your gut. As I attempted to come up with a premise for my first purely satirical work of fiction, I was influenced by a party of one. The first sentence that made me laugh was the winner. And there was something about "Hey kids. Do you like matches?" that had me chuckling. So I went from there to see what would happen. What transpired, for better or for worse, is the story you've just read. Like most children raised in evangelical families, I was exposed to all sorts of religious influences. I didn't have any primary source of inspiration here, I'll admit. But when you are raised Roman Catholic, everything relates to The Good Book in some fashion or another. The older you get, the more you realize that you won't ever have a fully secular frame of mind. As such, Reverend Sherman Chapelman's dogmatic mindframe became fairly natural after a spell. His love of goofy puns is also not dissimilar to my own. I hope the rest of the story speaks for itself. All I'll say is that if you are encouraged to become an arsonist, I would not seek the advice of someone like our holier-than-thou, money-hungry protagonist. I would contact, I dunno, the fire department or something. Fires are generally bad, and I wouldn't start them unless you have a very good reason to do so. But as for me, well... let's just say I'm heating up. *Proceeds to burst into flames and run around the room in a bath of fire, screaming at the top of my lungs* ### The Lost Item Rule URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-lost-item-rule/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:11:20.000Z I lost the bear when I was nine. Corduroy arms. Plastic eye. Stitched-on smile that had started to come loose. It disappeared in a motel near Lake Hesper, the one with beige carpets and a vending machine that ate your quarters. I think I left bear in the sheets. My mom said the cleaning lady probably tossed it out. I cried, then I moved on. That’s what you do with lost things. You let them stay gone. Until last Thursday. I found bear again. Not in a box. Not at my mom’s house. Not in a thrift shop I might’ve wandered into on autopilot. I found bear under my bed. The bed in my apartment that was also three stories up with a double-locked door and no visitors in weeks. Bear looked the same. Same rip on the ear. Same dusty corduroy. Except he smelled like mold now and lakewater and something faintly sweet, like rotted fruit left too long in the trunk. I stood there, toothbrush still in my mouth, just staring. I live alone. No one else has a key, and I’ve never kept childhood things. That’s always been my rule. So I did what anyone else would do. I asked around. My roommate, who moved out two years ago, said she didn’t take anything of mine but a pothos plant and the Brita. I think she misunderstood the question. My mother hadn’t seen bear since I was nine. She laughed when I asked. Said, “You used to talk to that thing like it was answering you back.” That night, I put bear in the closet. The next morning, it was on the kitchen counter, sitting upright. On day three, bear showed up on my pillow. Next to him, a Polaroid photo. A shot of me, age nine, asleep in the motel bed where I lost bear. My mouth was slightly open, and bear was in my arms. The photo was dated: August 3, 1999. I never owned a Polaroid camera. I tried to throw bear out. The photo, too. But the trash bag tore on the way down, and bear rolled into the street. When I looked over the fire escape, bear wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard breathing. Wet, sticky breathing, like someone sleeping right up to my ear. At 3:12 AM, I heard a knock. Twice. I checked the door, nothing. When I turned around…bear was back. This time he held another photo. A new one. It showed me as I am now. Older, tired, hunched in front of my kitchen window. But my eyes in the photo weren’t mine. They were black, hollowed out like someone had burned through the paper. Scrawled on the back of the photo in blocky child handwriting: “TRADE PLACES.” So I tried fire. I filled the sink and lit a match. Bear didn’t burn. The water turned black, and something screamed up from the drain. Then the lights went out. I crawled under the bed. The space there was strange. Wider than it should’ve been. Longer. Deeper. I swear I heard waves. Until I heard nothing at all. When I opened my eyes, I was in the motel again. Room 6\. Beige carpets. Lake Hesper glimmering outside the window. But no cars. No mom. No checkout time. Just me and bear. Smiling. --- I don’t know who lives in my apartment now. But if they check the closet, they’ll find something taped inside the door. A drawing. Some crayons. A picture of someone curled up in bed, holding a bear. The smile isn’t mine. The eyes are still missing. And underneath, written in red: “Don’t touch what you left behind.” So if you’re reading this note, then that means you are now in my apartment. Thank you for visiting. Please follow these instructions carefully. **One**. Do not speak to Bear. Even if he speaks first. Especially if his voice sounds like a higher pitched version of yours. **Two**. Feed him once. Leave a piece of fruit on the counter before sunset. He won’t eat it. That’s not the point. After that, never leave food sitting on the counter for him again. **Three**. Don’t open any drawers after midnight. Someone will put something in them that used to belong to you. If that happens, you will have no way of escaping. **Four**. If you hear two knocks, don’t check the door. Stay in your bed. He’s only knocking because he forgot how to open the door himself. **Five**. On the seventh day, leave the photo album in the bathtub. If it’s not full, he’ll take more pictures. **Six**. Whatever you do, don’t look under the bed. You might find something you lost a long time ago. Or worse, you might find me. --- # Author’s Notes I don’t think we really lose things. We say we do. We blame the dog. We blame the couch cushions. We blame time and absent memories. But deep down, I think we know that the things we lose—those weird, intimate little objects from childhood—they don’t just vanish into some unnamed abyss. They have to go somewhere, right? Maybe not in the literal sense, like down a vent or behind a radiator, but somewhere. A somewhere we’ll never know. That’s where this story comes from. When I was a kid, I had this ratty old toy raccoon. Missing one eye, like all good childhood friends. I lost it on a family trip to the mountains (probably left it behind in a motel room that smelled like carpet glue and cigarettes). My mom said I must’ve dropped it somewhere. But I used to dream about it. I’d be in that motel room, and the raccoon would be sitting under the bed, waiting for me to come back to look for it. Or maybe wondering if I’d left him there on purpose. ### We Mean All of Them URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/we-mean-all-of-them/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:12:07.000Z #### Get over it, the deputy says, chewing gum like it’s sin to remember. Funny he’s made of badge and barbed wire, and we’re made of prayer and pink flyers stapled to telephone poles without a job. ##### What I want to say is, Sir, we did get over it, we got over fences and guardrails and state lines looking for her. We got over you and your clipboard, your eye-roll, your we-already-checked-the-creek. #### She was sixteen and late to everything except that last breath. She had a laugh that didn’t need papers. She wore Nikes and a beaded keychain with her name— the name no one spells right in reports. ##### Instead, they call her Jane. As in, Doe. As in, we misfiled that, as in, no one’s daughter. ##### And you want us to light a candle and let it go, like she’s a balloon, like she floated off, ## like her body wasn’t made of warmth and rib and favorite songs. Like she wasn’t last seen outside a Sinclair in Billings, wearing her cousin’s denim jacket and asking for a ride. ##### Instead, we bring casseroles and placards. We cross off days, our debts unpaid. We hold vigils by highways and still ### someone asks why we make it political. Guess what, there are more missing girls than cities willing to put up signs. ##### More cold cases than cold beers #### at the American Legion Post 16. ### Well, this is your Lynchburg too, your Montana and Oklahoma and New Mexico everywhere names slip through cracks in the map ###### like nickels down a drain. And when we say her name, we mean all of them. ### We mean no not a myth. ### We mean no not forgotten**.** ###### We mean no not yours to erase. So don’t tell us to get over it. Get jurisdiction. Get funded. ##### Get cameras on the roads going nowhere. Get off their lands if all you’ll bring is judgement. # Get names right, stories right, justice right. ##### Because we’re not looking for smoke. ### We’re looking for fire. We’re looking for the girl who loved basketball, the one who danced to Chance the Rapper, the one who was last seen and then never seen again. ## Get a name. Get all their names. ##### We mean all of them. And never put them down. --- # Author’s Notes: This poem was written for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) Awareness Month. It responds to the staggering crisis of Indigenous girls and women who go missing or are murdered with little media coverage or justice. The point is to honor stories that are often silenced. Especially in places like “Lynchburg,” a stand-in for any American town where names are lost and systems fail. We’re not looking for smoke. We’re demanding fire in the form of truth, accountability, and the naming of injustice. ### Everything I Told You Was True URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/everything-i-told-you-was-true/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:13:21.000Z They played a SZA song at my best friend’s memorial. And not even one of the good ones. The low-effort remix version you throw on during brunch when you want to signal you have taste but not *too much* taste. I watched the livestream from my phone, lying on the floor of my sublet in Astoria, back flat against hardwood warped with old water damage, hair still wet from a shower I didn’t need to take. My towel was just barely hanging around my waist like I’d forgotten how to use it. I let my skin dry cold. Luz would’ve hated the playlist. Or at least pretended to. She would’ve hated the entire event. Some girl—I think her name was Dree?—read a poem about grief that didn’t rhyme, which would be fine, to be clear, if it was any good otherwise. “Grief is like a language we don’t speak / but dream in.” I’ll admit the high school version of me probably underlined a sentence like that in a library book once upon a time. They held Luz’s memorial in the theater on campus, the old one with the Greek lettering carved above the doors and a rat problem they never solved because the donors never saw it, so what was the point, etc. Luz’s photo, the one where she’s got her cheek tilted like the patron saint of extroversion and her lips half-parted, played on a loop behind the speakers. It wasn’t her best photo in my not-so-humble opinion. But it was the one the university already had on file thanks to the “Diversity Mixer” last spring. My name for it. Also, I’m the one who took that terrible photo. No one to blame but me. The week before she died, Luz and I were planning to *run*. Not from anything dramatic. Not the cops, not ICE, not some gym-arm ex-boyfriend with bad credit and a tattoo of his own nickname on his chest. From the university itself. From our own names. We had this plan—half-con, half-f\*\*\*-you—to take our grant money and disappear before graduation. Luz had already mocked up fake documents, recut her passport photo. She said her new name would be Nereida. Like the ocean nymphs or maybe her abuela’s favorite novela, I’m not sure. I told her it was too romantic, so of course her counter was, “Well, yeah. That’s why I picked it.” I didn’t have much in the way of a retort besides an eye-roll or two. “Listen, you can be the practical one in our capers,” she had said after a beat, draped across the window ledge of our dorm like it was her personal fainting couch. I said: “And you’ll be *what*?” She smiled like a blade. “The bait.” --- I met Luz during our scholarship interview. Seven girls in an overlit boardroom. All of us dressed like we’d Googled “professional” the night before and panicked. I wore a navy pantsuit from Zara with the tag still tucked into the sleeve. Luz wore white linen, as if announcing to the rest of us that she hadn’t sweat once in her life. I would go on to consider this a reasonable scientific theory. They called her name first. She stood. Introduced herself as “Luz, like light.” The white girls laughed, even though they clearly didn’t get the joke. Luz didn’t seem to notice me until the questions started. But when she did look at me…God. That look. She was practically reading my own human instruction manual. And when she saw I wasn’t laughing, that I hadn’t smiled politely with the others, she looked at me even harder. I got the scholarship. So did she. Later, she’d claim she only remembered me because unlike everyone else, I didn’t clap for her. At the memorial, no one mentioned the scholarship or what her name meant. More importantly, no one talked about the bathroom. No one said *found face down in her professor’s empty house with half a bottle of prosecco and a prayer card wedged under her thigh*. No one said *they think it was fentanyl, or the girl she was with who disappeared the next day,* or *Renata, I swear I saw you leave that party next door*. No one asked me anything at all, actually. Because no one knew for a fact that I was even there. I made sure of it. --- I’m not writing any of this to confess. I’m writing this because someone is trying to option her story. A blonde producer from a boutique agency emailed me yesterday with lots of exclamation points. She said Luz’s life “has the shape of myth.” She said it could be like “Euphoria” meets “Inventing Anna.” She said she wants “an honest perspective.” Well, guess what? I’m the only honest person left. And I’m telling you now, before the script gets rewritten and the actress they hire gets her lip injections too early and calls her *Luce* on accident. And everything I told you was true. Even the lies. --- The first time Luz and I ran a con together, it was at the Garrison Memorial Art Gala, where trustees wore loafers with no socks and paid six figures to have their names carved into limestone. She called it the Grift Olympics, which made me laugh until I realized she wasn’t entirely joking. I still remember the password for the door: “borrowed light.” Some shithead intern had probably come up with it, thinking it profound and meaningful. Luz leaned into the doorman’s ear to reveal it as a whispered sin, and we were in. She wore a navy dress she’d lifted from a consignment rack in Tribeca—pretty sure it was Theory, if you care about labels, which Luz most certainly did—but she cut out the tag so she could claim it was “custom.” She had her hair slicked back in full villainy. Lips the color of candied fruit. She didn’t walk into that room, if you ask me. She arrived with a key in her hand. I played the part of her cousin visiting from out of town. Visiting from where, no one ever asked. They must’ve assumed D.C. or maybe Miami if I’m being generous with myself. Luz claimed I looked like someone who owned a burner phone. I took that as a huge compliment. She had this whole backstory cooked up: our father/uncle owned a gallery in San Juan, we’d grown up cataloguing paintings and learning the difference between authentic and intimate…a distinction I still don’t think is real. Luz could say anything with a straight face if she tilted her chin slightly and let her vowels drag. One hedge fund ghoul in particular told her she spoke the way champagne “sounds.” Whatever the hell that means. I remember standing by the sculpture of a melted-looking horse, watching Luz flirt with a curator whose eye shadow had to cost more than our rent. She touched his wrist, gently, as if she was checking for a pulse. He laughed like he’d never been touched before in his life. Luz had that effect on people. “Don’t take anything,” she had told me on the way there. “Not yet, anyway. First, we collect.” “Collect what?” “Names. Weak points. Offers. Then we ghost them and let them wonder.” That night, she made off with three business cards, one room key, and an honest-to-god line of credit. Ignoring her instructions, I stole a bottle of elderflower champagne I didn’t even want to drink. That’s the difference between us. Luz could get away with murder if she was so inclined. I could hardly get away with survival. At one point, I caught her reflection in the window overlooking the Hudson—her arm around my waist, our faces pressed together like we were posing for a magazine spread about ‘Young Innovators of Color’ or whatever. “Why are you smiling like that?” I asked her. “Because this is how the world should see us,” she said, as if stating the most obvious truth everyone already knew. “Expensive. Untouchable.” --- Later that night, back in our dorm room, she kicked off her shoes and lay on the floor like a chalk outline. “We could’ve gotten more out of those people,” I said, mostly talking about myself. She shrugged. “We will next time. And anyway, did you see the way that one guy looked at you?” I hadn’t. She did this sometimes. Put desire in my mouth. I usually let her. “You could *destroy* a man, Renata,” she whispered, eyes shut. “If you let me teach you.” I sat at the edge of the bed, finishing the stolen champagne. It tasted god awful. She looked up at me like she was trying to peek into my future and was coming up short. “Maybe you’re not ready,” she said, almost dreamily. “But you will be.” And she fell asleep, just like that. Makeup still on, necklace denting her collarbone. I remember watching her chest rise and fall in such perfect peace, with me sitting there wondering *what kind of girl gets away with living like this?* That’s what sticks out the most to me about the entire night. Not the scam. Not the dress or the cards or the disgusting champagne. It was the beginning of Luz believing she’d never have to pay for any of it. --- The producer had already Googled me before I arrived. Her nails were immaculate and light pink. Her voice hovered in that mid-Atlantic, mid-tired register particular to people who only looked relaxed in elevators and photoshoots. Her name was Hailey, spelled with the “i,” a fact she clearly needed me to know and considered a personality trait. She motioned to a seat across from her in a café called Prospect that despite being new to the neighborhood already had 300 glowing reviews. More like Suspect. The walls were a scrubbed olive green and everyone inside appeared to be pretending they were cold, just so they could keep their jackets on. This was how the meeting began: “I’m obsessed with Luz’s story. She’s…just so compelling.” Right, compelling. That’s what we were calling tragedies now. I could easily picture Hailey with an “i” putting the word “compelling” into a pitch deck between bullet points and bolded adjectives. “What we’re thinking is something elevated,” she continued. “Something *real*. It could be a limited series. A feminine mythos. Trauma-forward but with levity, ya know? I’m thinking ‘Sharp Objects’ meets…hm, something with Spanish people in it. Oh, *Roma*!” Pretty ridiculous, but I wasn’t surprised. Luz’s death went national because it was neat, tragic, and photogenic. She had all the markers of symbolic loss. She was a Latina Ivy League student on full scholarship. Found dead in an off-campus house owned by a tenured professor who conveniently wasn’t there that night. Last sighted next to a girl who vanished right after the police arrived. And to top it all off, she had a paper due the next morning for said professor’s class titled “Decoding the Colonial Body.” So of course the news sites called it “a fatal intersection of diversity and privilege.” The university released a statement so sterile it could have been typed up by a college student with a premium ChatGPT subscription. And oh boy did the social apps have a field day. TikTok found her VSCO within hours. A minor celebrity posted her thesis title over piano music and called her a martyr of the neoliberal dream (Jesus Christ, people). Someone sold a candle with her face on it via Etsy. They chose rosewater as the scent, by the way, which to me was more mysterious than the tragedy itself. --- After Luz died, someone at the university had set up a GoFundMe for her little brother. The campaign promised “educational continuity.” It raised thirty-two thousand dollars in three days, then quietly disappeared. No one updated the page. The last comment still read: *Fly high, queen*. With three dove emojis, naturally. The university held a vigil, too. The same week, they sent out her posthumous honors list. I had to bet no one actually read her thesis, otherwise there’d be way more of an uproar. It was titled *Performing Empire: A Latina Theory of Luxury*. I didn’t mention any of this to Hailey with an “i.” Instead, I nodded again when she said Luz’s life “had the makings of a Netflix documentary series.” Not even a regular documentary, mind you. A whole damn series. Talk about the big time. “That said, if we go with the limited series version, we do have options for casting.” Hailey pulled out a deck with moodboards. They displayed stills of actresses with skin much lighter than Luz’s more bronze complexion. There was a slide titled ICONIC SCENE: Luz lights a cigarette in the rain. Luz never smoked, which is a shame considering her overall vibe. Also, there was a potential title. MURDER ON CAMPUS: THE LUZ FERRERA STORY. And a note in parentheses: (Mention her ethnicity?) Also, and this part really took me off guard, they wanted it to start with me doing some kind of voiceover. --- After the meeting, I walked back to my sublet and mentally catalogued the parts of Luz they wanted to keep, which included: • Her fake personality • Her real cheekbones • Her proximity to whiteness • Her proximity to death They didn’t want her student debt. They didn’t want her shoebox of parking tickets. They didn’t want the video we made sophomore year, drunk on grapefruit soju, doing tarot in fake British accents. They didn’t want *me* either. Not really. They wanted someone who used to know her. Someone pliable. But the reality of what Luz and I really were? Too inconvenient. It clashed with a narrative they concocted in their minds before learning a single thing about the two women they wanted to plaster on blue-light screens all over America. That night, I sent Hailey an email. I told her I was thinking about saying “yes” to it all. The pay would be pretty generous for my trouble, and I needed cash. No one set up a GoFundMe for the stoner roommate, after all. Afterward, I opened the Dropbox Luz had shared with me the week we made the plan to run. Just in case things went sideways. The file contained: • Three passport photos • Two Word docs labeled “Nereida” • One mp3 of her humming into my phone mic, low and off-key • One note, untitled The note read: *Don’t let them make me small, babe.* I sighed, reading it for maybe the thousandth time. We weren’t even supposed to go out that night. We had promised ourselves ramen, facemasks, and a terribly written movie. Instead, Luz put on the silver dress. The one that looked wet even when dry. The one that clung to her ribs, to the point where I secretly wondered if the designer had sewn it just for her. She came out of the bathroom just after ten, smelling like grapefruit and—holy shit—rosewater, and asked if the boots were too much. I told her no. Told her she looked like a rich girl pretending to be poor. She laughed. Said, “That’s the look, babe.” Meanwhile, I had been in sweats all day, reading comments on my latest political Facebook post that no one asked for. But then the invite came from Jessamine—one of those girls who always had coke on her but somehow never paid rent—and Luz said it would be “low-key” if we went. She said it twice, as if the repetition would make it true. I asked who’d be there. She said people. I asked what kind. She said the kind with names that sound a little fake, but if you put up with them, they might offer you consulting gigs. By 10:30 we were in an Uber with a driver who decided to be blissfully quiet. Luz turned her face to the window and said nothing the entire ride, which was a little strange of her in this context. She was normally a chatterbox after 9, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. She only touched my hand once and not like she needed to. Just enough to remind me that I was *hers*…even if I’d be sharing her with a bunch of other people for several hours, if not more. The house was in Fort Greene. Stereotypical as hell. White walls, soft lighting, a couch no one wanted to sit on except for me. Someone handed Luz a drink out of nowhere before we even finished introductions. Someone else handed me a look that said: oh, hey, you’re the friend, right? She moved *fast*, like always. Circling conversations without entering them. Laughing with her head tilted back, like she'd just remembered something funnier than what was being said. I kept her in sight. That was the deal. Around midnight, she disappeared into the back room with a girl named Mia or Nia or something else vowel-heavy. I didn’t follow. I transitioned from the couch to the windowsill and watched the party swell around a playlist that kept mistaking volume for taste. An hour later, I went looking for her, but she was gone. So was Mia-or-Nia. I asked around, and a guy wearing a fedora said he saw her take off on her own. Weird. I went outside and for some reason expected a trail of breadcrumbs. Instead, I heard a loud crash inside of a house about two doors down. I went to investigate, barely breathing with every step. The next time I saw Luz, it wasn’t Luz. It was a pair of boots sticking out of a bathroom. It was her hair, haloed around the tile when I flipped her over. It was the hiss of me saying, “Oh my god,” too softly to matter. I called the cops. When they arrived, the remaining partygoers had caught on to what happened and were freaking out. Someone opened the window. Someone else started crying. Still no sign of Mia-or-Nia. I stayed. Long enough to lie. I said I didn’t know her. I said I’d just met her. I said I thought she was asleep. I gave a name that wasn't mine. I walked out the back before they could keep questioning me. On the walk home, I didn’t cry or stop or call anyone. I got in the shower and let the water hit me as cold and harsh as possible. I thought if I shivered long enough, I could shake her name out of my mouth. But it stained me all the way down to my chest. And look, I am in no way a reliable narrator. But I am the only one left who hasn’t made money off her. So if you want the story, this is it. Luz died wearing a silver dress she couldn’t afford. In a house that belonged to her professor. A professor with a seemingly airtight alibi. --- I met Hailey again two weeks later at Prospect, which funny enough they renamed to The Grind. Only other change was that they now sold paperback reissues of Anaïs Nin. Anyway, Hailey ordered a matcha with oat milk, no ice. I remember because I was staring right at it as she told me that her company had a streaming partner lined up and they’d found a director who “really gets Luz’s trauma.” Also, no more voiceover from me. Luz would open the pilot with a monologue “generated” by an AI version of her voice. She asked if I had thoughts. I laughed, wondering how to communicate how evil my thoughts truly were. I decided to hold back my own murderous intent as I told her Luz *never* monologued. Luz was the type to get other people talking. To make you feel like a goddamn cathedral. And the idea of a f\*\*\*ing robot talking in some bullshit version of her voice would make her want to come back to life just so she could die all over again. “So, then, that makes it even more poetic!” Hailey countered. “No,” I bit back. I told Hailey the story didn’t need a rewrite. It needed an ending or something close to it. Apparently, my usual cynicism had taken the day off. Or maybe I’d used it all up with that AI comment. “And what kind of ending do you think Luz would want?” she asked, folding her hands. As if I was suddenly the screenwriter and she needed me to turn in my pages. I obliged. I slid a USB drive across the table. On it: the Dropbox. The passport photos. The mp3\. The note. I said, “Play the audio.” Her face became Christmas morning. She immediately plugged it into her laptop and hit play. Luz’s voice came through: humming off-key, a little breathy, like she was singing just for me, or maybe for herself. Hailey looked up. Confused. “That’s…it?” “No,” I said. “That’s just part of it.” She didn’t get it. Of course she didn’t. So I stood, zipped my coat, and left her with the only thing Luz ever actually wanted. Not the myth. Not the martyrdom. Just the sound of a girl who never got the ending she deserved. “Luz Ferrera wasn’t a saint,” I offer as my final words on the matter. “And no one will ever know the real her.” Not even me. --- ## Author’s Notes This story actually got away from me, and I’m pretty glad it did. After all, I didn’t even set out to write about grief or media with this. But when a girl dies and someone with connections wants to sell her life, these subjects tend to intertwine. This piece began, as many things do now, with a pitch deck I didn’t ask to see. It was lavender, Helvetica-heavy, and deeply concerned with what made a tragedy “compelling.” I couldn’t stop thinking about that word. How often it serves as shorthand for “palatable enough to sell.” I started writing this as a kind of personal rebellion when it comes to mourning “correctly.” Or politely, I suppose. I thought a lot about the people who watch people they love turn into plot points after death. Luz, like too many others, becomes an aesthetic literally during eulogy. And Renata—if you insist that’s her real name—stayed behind to sort through what was salvageable. To be clear, this is fiction. I don’t want anyone to take it too literally or assume I’ve lived this experience. I’m merely a passive observer of what I think is a truth (to softly quote a certain Rian Johnson movie). And to me, such truth can be found in someone humming a song off-key. That tells me more about a person than whatever gets filtered through the 2025 content machine. ### Songs for the Dead and Drowning URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/songs-for-the-dead-and-drowning/ Last updated: 2025-09-22T16:19:08.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/songs_adfree_thumb.png) Songs for the Dead and Drowning 0:00 /1205.6763718820862 1× They’re tying the nets wrong. Again. Sloppy work, all float and no weight. I watch from the reef, teeth bared in the foam, as their hooks snagg coral and nothing else. Their boat rocks with matched arrogance, too shallow for fish, too loud for ghosts. Men like that don’t really fish. They take. The tall one spits a guava seed into the sea. I catch it on my tongue. They don’t see me. They never do, not until the red starts blooming. Not until the smile, wide as a sandbar, comes crawling up out the waves with the body it belongs to. Not until the net pulls back empty, and they hear the first scream from the hull and know it was never theirs to cast. Men used to ask for our siren songs. Now they ask if we’re real. Real enough to kill them. --- I was born in the trench they call La Boca de Yára, where the water is blacker than pitch and warmer than blood. My mother sang in the old words, the kind that could make ships crack open with fear. My father—if I had one—was probably a drowned god or worse, a jellyfish. I have *her* face, *her* knives, *her* fondness for necks. I don’t keep a name. Names are for people who plan to be remembered. But the sailors who last long enough to gurgle something before they go under like to call me *sirena*. That’s cute. Sirena, like I might hum and blush and marry a gutted prince someday. *Call me that again and I’ll wear your jawbone like an anklet,* I once told a sailor who meant me for purchase. This part of the world, this bay choked with sun-bleached trade posts and rusted idols, they forget too quickly. They forget we tailed ones used to rule the tides with teeth sharper than storms. That we carved our homes from drowned cities before anyone could bother to notice them gone. Now they set traps. Now they think themselves the hunters. How delicious. Last season, one of theirs caught my songsister with a sugarcane spear. They strung her gills on a necklace and bragged about it in a tavern two harbors west if the gulls speak true. Said my sis was heavy as a manatee and twice as ugly. Said the meat was oily but good enough for dogs. Well, after four tides, I’ve finally found the smelling man who told the story. Safe to say, he won’t be telling them stories long. --- Tonight I smell rum on the air, but also piss and pissing gunpowder. A new crew’s made berth in the mangrove shallows down-tide from our monastery. I see them polishing harpoons. Not the kind for whales, mind you, but the kind for us tailed folk. One of them wears my songsister’s voice on his belt. The sight makes me deathly hungry. The time for singing old words has passed into a time for hunting. The moon sits fat as a stolen pearl in the sky. I surface beneath it as a wound splits open, slick with anticipation. Their boat—a low-slung sloop with patched sails and piss-yellow lanterns—stinks of sweat and oil. Too many men for a hunt, too few for a war. Good. I don’t mean to rush dinner. From the mangroves, I watch their laughter hack through the stillness. Boots clomp across planks. A machete scrapes sparks off an iron pot. One man pisses off the side to mark territory. I would laugh, but I need my lungs at their fullest. Instead, I pull the bone hook from my belt and bite down. An instrument shaped from a thighbone. The owner of which is no longer able to protest its new purpose. The tide obeys my request for stirring. It always does. I hiss to it softly and it rises with a curl and a shiver. The ropes tied to the dock go slack. The boat tilts a little too far starboard. That’s when they start cursing. --- The first man dies with a curdling whisper, which disappoints me. He was young, all sunburn and peach fuzz, still drunk on the lie that the sea can be his. I split his neck from the shallows, drag him under before he can finish blinking. His blood unravels, turning violet in the moonlight. The second man makes it to his feet before I drag him by the heel. His boot flips off in my hand. He hits the water face-first and surfaces screaming, so I crush his nose with the butt of my hook and feed him to the reef. Three more. Then six. Then the deck goes full red with panic, and the gulls begin circling low, collecting information. They fight back. Men always do. One manages to nick my arm with a harpoonhead and looks proud for half a heartbeat. I tear out his throat with a shark smile and let his pride gurgle on the planks. They scream “witch,” “demon,” “sirena,” “puta.” I’ve been all four and worse. Words don’t stop these tides from bleeding. I search for the last one, the one with the shell belt—her shells, my sister’s, split down the middle to fit his filth-rimmed hips—when I feel it. A sting at my ribs. Then total black. --- I wake to fire. No, not fire. The harsh light of a lantern too close to my face. My wrists ache from coarse rope. Trawler gear, I think. My head lolls, wet hair slapping the deck. I try to move but fail. Legs bound. Tail dry. Skin cracking. The pain comes in layers of peeling fruit. I see him before long. The man who killed my songsister. He squats a few feet off, wiping blood from a long, curved blade. Not a machete but a gutting hook. Serrated like reefstone. The kind used for slicing out innards without damaging the pelt. He looks about ninety, though legged ones age poorly, so who knows. Skin the color of churned clay, hair tied back with an old ribbon, shoulders heavy as ship rigging. He wears no shirt. Scars web across his chest. One eye milk-blind and the other a burning, bitter brown. He glances at me with perverse interest. “Well now,” he says, voice like an anchor being dragged across gravel. “Aren’t you something.” His teeth are far too clean for his face. “Let me guess,” he continues. “You’re of relation to the one I gutted near Dos Caimanes. Aye, you’ve her same eyes.” I hiss as sour blood bubbles in my throat. “Don’t waste the air,” he says. “You’ll need it. I don’t plan to kill you.” He leans closer, breath warm with spiced rum. “Matter fact, I plan to keep you.” It takes all of me to pretend fear. Because this fool thinks he’s won. That he’s netted something rare. That he can tame Sirena with firelight and cages. That I’ll curl up like a pretty shell and sing for him. But I’m a predator with patience. I know how to play with my food. So I smile, cracked-lipped and bleeding, and let the hunger linger in my eyes. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s already dying. --- He drags me above deck when the sun dies. No fanfare or audience, as he doesn’t need one apparently. Strange, as most men do. He loops a cord around my neck—not tight, not gentle—and pulls me like his prize pig, my tail scraping hard wood. The barnacles chew at my scales. I give him nothing. *Let him think me broken. Let him think wrong.* He drops me near the helm, coils the leash once around a cleat, and kneels like he’s done this thousands of times before. He has if the rope is honest. Knotted close, not clean. Done in a hurry. He wasn’t planning to bring me up tonight. Something changed. In him. Maybe he dreamt of me. Maybe he woke sweating, something twitching between his legs under some piss-damp blanket and he thought, *why not now?* “I fed you,” he says, like that’s worth gratitude. “I cleaned your wounds.” I look up to his eyes, the clouded pearl and the smoked brown. I spit in the middle of them. He brushes his palm against my cheek and coils the fingers as if to mimic a fist. Like he’s testing meat for tenderness. “You bite?” he asks. *Only when I’m not chewing.* He smiles. His teeth are straight. I wonder who he stole them from. “You killed my entire crew,” he says. “Two were mine own cousins.” *You wear my sister on your belt*, I sing in my head. He notices I’m eyeing the shells, so he fingers them. One cracks slightly between thumb and nail. “I heard your kind don’t weep,” he says. *We do. Just not for men.* He chuckles in the silence and sits back, resting his arms on knees. The rope tugs my neck when I shift. I don’t wince. He’s watching for that. His eyes drag across me. Down the shoulders, across the chest, past the gills. He stops at the scar on my flank, the one where his harpoon kissed bone. “She begged,” he says. “The other one. When I opened her up. Not in words, since you animals can’t seem to use them mouths of yours. But her eyes did enough talking.” I nod slowly. He doesn’t understand my meaning nor does he care to. His eyes linger longer now with vain possession. Men like him want to own what they fear. Pin it, name it, tell stories over it. They don’t conquer for coin or freedom. They conquer so someone will say their name in the same breath as death. Yet he thinks himself someone special. “You really do have her same eyes,” he says. I don’t. “But not her tongue.” I let my mouth part. Just a little. Just enough for him to wonder what it might taste like. “You’re not like the others,” he says. I give him a questioning look meant only for him. He stands. The rope tightens. His boot is near my tail. I could snap his knee backward. Drag him overboard. Tear the soft bits before he yells. But he’s smart enough to carry the blade even now. The reef-hook sways at his hip, kissing his thigh. One mistake and he’ll carve me like he did her. *No. Not yet.* I shift my weight. Let the tail ripple in a tired way, nothing graceful or coy. He’s watching it. The way a butcher watches ribs to guess the fat. “You’re cold,” he says. “I could bring a blanket.” I eye the rope. He grins. “Ah, you want me to loosen the rope so you can tear to my throat, is that it?” I smile back. He squats again, close this time. His breath is warm and rotten. His fingers brush the bone of my jaw, rough and slow. “Maybe you’re smarter than she was,” he says. “Almost smart enough to talk.” I flutter my eyes. He grins again. “I do like you.” Then he stands and turns away. Doesn’t even bother to lock the line. Doesn’t notice the slack in the knot. He thinks I’m too weak to swim, too smart to try. He’s right. For the moment. I tuck the rope beneath my side, curl against the salt-stiff deck, and close my eyes. It won’t be long now. Every man breaks. Some with steel. Some with softness or the stiffness of old sleep. And some with a hand in the dark where they thought they were safe. He’ll find that hand soon. And when he does, I’ll make sure he remembers my name. Even if I never had one. --- The hatch squeals open at the death of dusk. He comes alone, lantern in one fist, a small cedar chest in the other. No sword, no gut-hook, not even a healthy fear. The fool tastes victory on his tongue and thinks it honey. He kicks aside my rope without sparing them a glance. “Got you a gift,” he says, voice thick with lack of sleep. He sets the chest between us, eases up the lid. Salt gleams inside. Coarse, red-tinged, and nestled in the brine rests a severed tongue, forked and pale, the edges curled like petals left too long in the sun. My songsister’s last note. “Pretty, isn’t it?” His good eye gleams. “Almost didn’t think to keep it. Makes for a better story than gills.” Words clog my throat. Rage wants out—claws, fangs, everything. I swallow it down. Rage is for children. I need ice. He rises, wipes sweat on his trousers, turns to fetch the lantern hook. That turn is all I require. I slip the loosened rope, coil, and spring. My tail slams his knees; bone pops like green wood in a fire. He howls, topples, lantern clattering across the deck, coughing sparks. I land atop him—forearm across his windpipe, claws digging for pulse. The ship tilts. Tar-soaked boards groan. A spark catches dried hemp. Flame crawls hungry along a pile of rope, licking toward the mast. *Let it burn.* He thrashes, grabs my gills. I rake his blind eye—flesh peels, white jelly spilling. He screams, wet and high, more pig than man. The sound feeds me. *You wanted a story*, I sing. *Here’s the ending*. I wrench the broken lantern free, shatter the glass, pour hot oil over his chest. He wails his salt as his own tongue curls, smoke blooming black from his blood. His hands reach for purchase but find none. I drag his steaming bones to the rail, every inch an aria of pain. The sea below yawns wide and dark for him, hungrier than me. *Tell the trench who sent you*, I whisper. He spits blood, as if understanding me. “S-sirena.” *Aye.* I shove him over. He falls crooked, one arm pin-wheeling, the other hugging what’s left of his cooked ribs as if that will hold the life in. Water swallows his sound. A single bubble breaks, then nothing returns . I watch until the ripples flatten. The fire behind me catches the mainsail; heat prickles my back. Timbers crack. The ship will not see dawn. I tip the cedar chest overboard, my sister’s tongue still inside. The sea accepts her final song. --- Name? I still keep none. But the waves know me now. Know the sound of what they call me. The trench sings it in currents, the mangroves twist it through their roots, and every gull caws it in screams over the wreck that will carry the tale inland. *The sea remembers its own.* I slip over the rail, blades of flame dancing on the water’s skin, and dive for home while the ship burns to driftwood behind me. --- ## **Author’s Notes** Mermaids are a lie. Not the creatures themselves, as those exist. You’ve met them, probably. In the dark, in the surf, at the edge of someone’s bed. Hungry, spectral, unbothered by your notions of the world. No, the lie is how we’ve dressed them. We made them pretty. We made them sing. We made them long for love, for land, for legs. We flattened their teeth into pearls and gave them royalty arcs about sacrifice and young longing. What we did to mermaids is what we do to most wild things: we softened them until they sold well. This story came from a refusal to keep softening. From a need to write a version of the sea that doesn’t always feel comfortable. A tale where the predator isn’t misunderstood, she’s correct. Where the monster doesn’t fall in love or feel bad for vengeance. *Songs for the Dead and Drowning* is set in a world that borrows much from Taíno folklore, Caribbean waters, and all the anger that never fits neatly in a typically Western frame. A world that never once pretends the ocean is kind, because it isn’t. It’s as lethal as it is lush. Sirena, the protagonist you just met, isn’t nice. She isn’t here to forgive or be told by some mentor “killing him will make you just as bad as him!” No, no, she’s here because someone hung her sister’s gills on a belt. She’s here to remind you that the sea, the environment itself, demands a price from those who try to own it. This story is not subtle, I get it. It has some nasty claws and it knows where you sleep all that. But I hope, when you hear about mermaids again or see them on postcards and cereal ads and coffee cups, that you remember this version too. The one who bit back. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2025/09/JonNegroni-1.jpg)](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more. [Read more of Jon's work ](https://jonnegroni.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost) [Leave a one-time tip for this story](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-archivist/#/portal/support) ### A Butcher's Fable URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/a-butchers-fable/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:16:01.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/A-Butcher-s-Fable_thumb.png) A Butchers Fable 0:00 /1169.3714285714286 1× Juan Albizú had always been an industrious man. His shop, a narrow sliver of whitewashed stone wedged between the haberdasher and the baker’s wife’s miserable excuse for a confectionary, was a place of unimpeachable respectability. There was no blood in the street outside, no rancid smell of old flesh to taint the salt-bright air that drifted in from the island’s largest bay. The floor, scrubbed nightly with a solution of vinegar and lime, had never known the sticky impertinence of an uncleaned spill. His knives, of which there were many, gleamed with the light of fanaticism. And yet, still, the knives had the strangest ability to speak in whispers only he could hear. And he could hear them now, even as he pressed his customary geniality upon Pedrito Betances, a child of seven or eight, the son of one of the dock laborers, who had not yet been broken by the certainty of his future. The boy had been sent, evidently against his will, to retrieve a parcel of chorizo, and stood shifting his bare feet in the doorway, eyeing the cool dark of the shop’s interior with marked suspicion. Juan wrapped the links in paper and tied them with a crisp knot. *A tidy shop is a trusted shop*, his mother liked to say, before she’d gone blind. And so it was. The women of Bahía Roja bought from Juan because his apron was always white, because the weight of the meat was always fair, because he spoke kindly to their children. “Here, *nene*,” he said, dropping the bundle into the boy’s reluctant hands. “Tell your mother I set aside *un* *hueso* for her broth.” Pedrito did not reply. He stared with his small face, round as baked bread, unblinking. Juan was about to prompt the boy when he tilted his head and asked, in the light, indifferent tone of a child who had no interest in whether the answer frightened him:“Señor, why does the meat talk to you?” Something cold and thin unfurled itself at the base of Juan’s skull. He had, for years, honed the art of steady hands. His knife did not falter, nor did the well-practiced mechanism of his smile. He laughed, feigning the sound of a man unbothered by childish nonsense. “*Ay*, *nene*,” he said, taking Pedrito by the shoulder and turning him gently toward the sunlit street. “What a lively imagination you have. Next, you’ll tell me the fish complain before the net closes in.” The boy hesitated a moment longer, then, as if deciding he had spent long enough inside, bolted, his feet striking hard against the dusty cobblestones. Juan waited until the last of the child’s echo had vanished before he turned back toward the counter. His eyes fell upon the slab of flank steak waiting to be portioned. The cut was fresh. Taken that morning from a cow he had seen walking the previous afternoon, snuffling at the sparse grass outside the slaughterhouse. It had been a good, solid animal, thick about the neck, heavy in the ribs. It had not deserved an easy death, but neither had it suffered an unkind one. And yet. In the hush that settled after Pedrito’s departure, there was a noise, a sound so low and close that it might have been mistaken for a sigh. It did not come from outside, nor did it come from Juan. For a long moment, he stayed perfectly still. He listened. The sound did not repeat itself. The only thing that moved was the lazy stirring of a fly somewhere near the door. The meat, of course, was meat. No more, no less. Still. He would trim the fat carefully, all the same. --- After dinner with his wife, Juan returned to the shop under the indifferent gaze of the moon. The streets of Bahía Roja were empty, save for the occasional muttering of the sea, which always had more to say than strictly necessary. The door swung open at his touch, the scent of cold fat and smoked blood rising to meet him like a faithful dog. A foolish errand, this. He knew it. The boy had been mistaken, or lying, or…*or nothing at all*, he told himself, striking a match and watching the flame sputter in the dim. Still, the flank steak waited where he had left it. A long, pale thing upon the counter, lined with threads of glistening yellow fat. He stepped toward it, knife in hand. And then… Soft as breath, unhurried, utterly familiar. His own voice, thick with sleep, murmured from the raw sinew: “Not this one.” The knife fell from Juan’s hand, landing flat upon the counter with an unceremonious clatter. A lesser man might have fled. But Juan—steady, careful Juan—only pressed a hand to the sudden tightness in his chest. A trick of the wind, perhaps. Or the hour. *Yes.* Slowly, without taking his eyes from the meat, he reached for the lamp, extinguishing the flame. The darkness that followed was a comfort. For in the dark, at least, there was nothing to hear. Nothing at all. --- The sea had been restless all morning. From the shop’s open doorway, Juan watched the waves turn sluggish and thick, rolling toward shore with the reluctant air of an animal dragging itself home to die. The fishermen muttered of bad currents, of things surfacing that had no business leaving the depths. But it was not the sea that unsettled Juan. It was the woman standing in his shop, her lips pinched into a line as she placed a bundle of waxed paper upon the counter. “This,” said Dolores Barceló, the baker’s wife, “is *talking meat*.” Juan glanced at the package. “So it complains now?” He laughed. A butcher’s laugh. Warm, solid, as reassuring as the careful fold of a clean apron. Dolores did not smile. “It *moaned* in the pot. And it sounded like you.” Silence, save for the nearby tide pulling itself over the sand in long, gasping strokes. Finally, Juan exhaled. “Salt does strange things to the ear. The wind as well.” Dolores hesitated, uncertain, as Juan unwrapped the bundle, fingers steady. The cut lay there, inert. It was a fine piece, well-marbled, fresh. Meat, and nothing more. Still, he would burn it. He wrapped it again with slow precision, offered Dolores a new cut, one hand resting lightly on the cleaver. “*Aquí no hay misterios*,” he said gently. And perhaps he meant it. But when she left, he placed the paper-wrapped parcel in the stove, and for a moment—only a moment—the fat sizzled like laughter. --- Juan had seen storms rise from nothing before, had watched the sky blacken and roil like something alive and furious. But tonight the sea pressed itself against the shore in slow, heavy breaths, as if unwilling to disturb the hush that had settled over Bahía Roja. The town gathered by the docks, voices low and needling. Pedrito had not been seen since yesterday. His mother’s face was drawn, her hands knotted in her apron as she spoke to Juan’s wife, Isabelina. Juan watched from his shop, sleeves rolled high against the humidity, a careful frown arranged upon his face. A missing child was a tragedy, yes. But it was not his tragedy. Isabelina looked at him. Across the sun-streaked street, through the muddle of villagers and their murmurs, she looked at him. A slow thing, that gaze, if it could be called that, for there was no accusation in it, no wild grief or violent words. Only the delicate, precise horror of recognition. She turned from Pedrito’s mother and walked toward him, stepping lightly over the tide-slicked cobblestones, past the net-menders and fishmongers, past the neighbors who had once whispered of him, but never to her. Inside the shop, Juan reached for his knife to look busy. A useless gesture. Because when she stepped through the door, she did not speak of where the child had gone. She only said, very quietly, “Tell me he never had your eyes.” --- The night fog came in thick, curling under the door in slow, creeping fingers. Juan sat at the counter, the lamp burning low, the scent of tallow thick in the air. He had not spoken to Isabelina since the afternoon. Not properly. She had stood at the kitchen table, watching him with that unbearable stillness, that awful, knowing quiet. And then, as if something in her had made a final decision, she had left. Now, outside, voices tangled in the night air. They were calling for someone. Juan set down the whetstone, his hands bloodless from how tightly he had been gripping the blade. The voices swelled into name. Isabelina’s name. A man’s voice tore through the crowd, the drunk from the café. “The meat’s been speaking! You think we don’t hear it? It repeats her name! It says *she* knows!” Juan reached the door just as the shouting peaked, just as footsteps rang sharp against the cobbles, just as the town dragged his wife toward the docks, their hands a hundred vices around her arms. She did not struggle. She did not even look at him. A single voice, high and sharp, cut through the din: “She knows what happened to the boy! She knows!” The heat of the shop, of the lamps, of his own skin, slammed against him like a scalding hand. He could stop this. He could tell them. His fingers dug into the doorframe. Nails bit into the wood, deep enough to splinter. He could move. The whispers curled close against his ear, breathless and laughing. “Or you could let them carve.” His hands did not move. His mouth did not open. --- The sea was calm in the morning. The tide slid over the sand in slow, unhurried strokes, smoothing over something unsightly. The town was much the same. A few whispers, a few lowered voices, then the business of life resumed. Bread to bake, nets to mend, fish to gut. Juan sat alone in the shop, hands steady, knife keen. The slab of meat before him was firm, red, beautiful in the way all things were when they did not flinch. No one had spoken to him directly. Not yet. But they had looked. And in their looking, there had been something new. An absence, a space where his wife had once stood beside him. She had not come home. Could not. There were only fresh footprints leading toward the cliffs beyond the docks. No one spoke of them. No one followed to their conclusion. These footsteps, too, were a carving. A neat, irreversible cut. Juan pressed the blade into the flesh. The steel slid through effortlessly. The pieces fell away, clean and soundless without protest. And for a moment, he almost believed the quiet would last. But before long, deep in the marrow, a word bloomed. A single, thin syllable, up from the bone. “More.” His fingers tightened around the handle. He exhaled, slow and measured. His fate was written in tendon and gristle, in the long, shivering stretch of a knife’s edge. And so he did the only thing he could do. He kept cutting. He kept lying. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Notes I’ve always been fascinated by the quiet rituals of everyday horror. How we cope with the unspeakable, not by confronting it but by developing habits. This story began, oddly enough, with a smell I remember from the markets in Puerto Rico, back when I was Pedrito’s age. The butcher was slicing through a flank steak so expertly, so cleanly, that I imagined he’d done it a thousand times without blinking. It made me wonder: what happens when someone so meticulous, so good at their work, starts hearing the product of their labor speak? Well, I never let go of that thought. “A Butcher’s Fable” is folk horror not in the conventional sense of cults or paganism, but in the older, quieter tradition of communal silence and individual denial, specifically when it comes to moral failings. Bahía Roja, like so many coastal towns in Latin America and the Caribbean, is a place where gossip moves faster than the tide, where morality changes with the generation. I wanted the horror here to bloom not from explicit violence, but from the toxic side of restraint. Inaction. What’s *not* said, what’s *not* seen, what’s never truly admitted. Juan Albizú is a man who has built his life around a tidy shop. Control. His knives are sharp, his floors are clean, his hands never tremble. And yet, despite that discipline, he cannot prevent the slow leak of rot within himself. His world isn’t haunted by ghosts so much as the slow boil of guilt. “Tell me you never had his eyes.” At this point, it’s possible Juan doesn’t even remember that he fathered a child with another woman, seemingly unbeknownst to his wife. But the meat he carves is where the truth comes out. There’s also something deeply cultural in this idea of talking meat, an echo of ancestral beliefs where everything, even the inanimate, has a soul. In Afro-Caribbean and Latine traditions, food is often spiritual currency. It feeds gods, binds families, memorializes the dead, etc. But what happens when the meat answers back? When the offering refuses its role as sacrifice? At its heart, this story is about complicity and the ways we cut around truth, how we let others suffer in our silence, how we convince ourselves that cleanliness is morality. I wanted to write a horror story where the monster never needs to bare its teeth, because we’re already so deeply afraid of what we already know about ourselves. And how sometimes the knife doesn’t slip. Sometimes it lands exactly where you meant it to. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### Magical Pork URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/magical-pork/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:17:39.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/Magical-Pork_thumb.png) Magical Pork 0:00 /1261.244081632653 1× Quick question. You ever wonder what it feels like to see a miracle happen in real-time? I’m not talking about a weeping statue or a winning lottery ticket. I mean a proper, life-altering, tear-down-the-walls-of-your-reality kind of miracle. The kind that smells like roasted garlic and tastes like crispy pork skin. No? That’s all right. Let me tell you a story, then. Careful though, it might make you hungry. The name’s Ruben, and I run “Borinquen Bites,” the finest Puerto Rican food truck this side of the Bay Area. And by finest, I mean it’s mine, and I love it more than I love breathing. Maybe even eating. Not to be dramatic but running a food truck is like falling in love with someone who constantly forgets your birthday. It’s joy and frustration, all wrapped up in aluminum foil and handed out the window for 12 bucks a pop. Except lately, it’s been more frustration than joy. See, the thing about the food truck business is that more often than not, you’re maybe one bad weekend from going out of business. Kaput. Borinquen Bites would take its last breath on the wrong kind of day. At one point, the bank gave me a not-so-complicated ultimatum: come up with the payments, or the truck would be theirs. The worst part? *They didn’t even want the truck.* They were gonna sell it for scraps. And don’t even get me started on food truck theft. My buddy Martín—you know, the guy with the nachos truck in San Jose—he had his truck stolen last week. San Jose is over an hour drive from here in Oakland, but that’s close enough to keep me up at night. This thing’s my baby. I even sleep in the truck sometimes just to make sure it’s safe. Losing it isn’t an option. Anyway, so this story really begins on a Thursday, which is prime prep day for the Friday lunch rush. The most important two hours of the week, at least for us. Thursdays are when my tiny kitchen—no bigger than the inside of a walk-in closet—turns into a battlefield. It’s me, my cousin Gabi, who’s got the best knife skills in the business, and Hector, our grill guy, who swears he once flipped burgers for Bad Bunny. Sure, pendejo. But this Thursday wasn’t ordinary. Nah, this was *pernil* day. If you don’t know pernil, no problem, let me enlighten you. It’s slow-roasted pork shoulder, marinated in a blend of garlic, oregano, vinegar, and love. The oregano and vinegar are optional, in my opinion, but taking out the garlic and love is an offense punishable by…having to eat that particular pernil. The crispy, golden skin? That’s called cuerito, and it’s what angels snack on. I swear, if you look close enough, you can see your future in that glistening fat. It’s tradition, celebration, and cholesterol all in one. We started early, and by early, I mean pretty late at night. “Ruben,” Gabi said, grumbling, “I’m pretty sure this is a human rights violation, huh? You want crispy pork skin, but what about *my* skin? I need sleep if we’re working through lunch and dinner tomorrow!” “Quit whining and peel the garlic,” I shot back, tossing her a massive bundle of cloves. “Pernil takes time, so that’s what we’re giving it! YA TÚ SABES.” Now, marinating pernil is an art. First, you make the adobo, a blend of garlic, salt, black pepper, oregano, and olive oil. It’s not just seasoning; it’s a declaration. And you gotta make that thing salty like the sea. I smashed the garlic cloves with a mortar and pestle, the sharp, pungent aroma filling the air and then some. I could already taste the finished product in my head. When the garlic was a paste, I mixed in the rest, watching it swirl together into a rich, earthy blend. This wasn’t just cooking, this was communion. Next up, I made slits in the pork with my knife, careful and precise, each cut ready to hold a pocket of that garlicky magic. The fat cap on this particular shoulder was thin but pristine, the kind that promised golden, crackling perfection. When I pressed the adobo into the meat, it felt…different. The texture, the way it absorbed the marinade—it was like the pernil was talking to me, soaking it all in like a sponge and thanking me for it. Now, I’d done pernil a hundred times, but something about this one…again, it was *different*. I felt it when I was massaging the adobo into the meat and wrapping the fat back over the top. Side note: you gotta get personal with your pernil, you know? There’s no room for shyness in boricua cooking. Or eating. You put food in front of me, I’m gonna eat it, no question. Anyway, the garlic didn’t run out like I thought it would halfway. Each clove seemed to multiply in my hands, plump and fragrant. And when I scored the fat cap, the knife moved like it had a mind of its own, carving perfect diamonds into the skin. My old geometry teacher would flip their lid if they saw this. “You’re getting weirdly intense about that pig, Ruben,” Gabi said, side-eyeing me as she chopped cilantro for the tostones batter. “Eh, maybe it’s because this pig’s gonna save us,” I replied, without a hint of sarcasm. Hector was in the corner, prepping a batch of alcapurrias. “It better. I told my girl I’d have her car fixed next month. If this weekend’s a bust, we’re all screwed.” We prepped late into the night, the air in the truck thick with the smell of garlic, spices, and sizzling oil. I basted the pernil every hour, the juices pooling at the bottom of the pan like liquid gold. And every time I turned it around in the oven? Hot damn, I swear it glowed. Not like a weird, radioactive glow—more like it had been kissed by the sun itself. The skin was crackling perfection, the meat tender and juicy. I could’ve cried, but Hector would’ve roasted me worse than the pork. Friday morning, I parked the truck on our usual corner for final prep. And my heart *stopped*. When I checked the oven, I swore I’d messed something up. The temperature gauge was way higher than it should’ve been, but for some impossible reason the pernil wasn’t burnt. Not even close. Instead, the skin was crisping up perfectly, little pockets of golden fat bubbling at the edges. I wiped my forehead, confused but not about to complain. I just had to focus on getting ready for the lunch rush. Except, it wasn’t just a rush—it was a stampede. Word had gotten out about the pernil, apparently. Maybe it was the Instagram post I’d put up with a slow-mo video of me carving the cuerito, or maybe the smell had drifted on the wind like a siren song, all the way down to Jack London Square. Either way, people showed up in droves. Only problem? We for *sure* didn’t have enough for everybody. By noon, the line stretched down the block. I was slicing pernil as fast as my wrist would let me, piling it onto plates of arroz con gandules and garnishing with a dollop of pink pickled onions. Gabi was on the fryer, cranking out tostones, while Hector kept the coquito flowing. We’d bottled the coconut-rum magic the night before, and it was selling like agua fría on a hot day. “Ruben! You gonna feed me or what?” Mrs. Romero, one of our regulars, called out as she adjusted her massive sun hat. She had her grandkids with her, two hyperactive twins chasing each other in circles. “You know I got you, Carmen!” I called back, grinning as I handed over a plate piled high and steaming perfection. She took one bite and closed her eyes like she’d just seen heaven. “Dios mío, this is better than my own cooking.” “That’s the goal!” I teased, getting back to the tray. The line wasn’t getting any shorter. In fact, it was getting bigger. A guy in a suit stepped up next, looking entirely out of place. “I heard about this place on TikTok,” he said, glancing nervously at his phone. “Is it really as good as the hype?” “Only one way to find out.” I handed him a plate, watching as he took a bite. His eyes widened. “Holy—this is amazing.” He was already posting it to his Instagram before I could respond. Gabi leaned over and whispered, “We’re gonna run out, aren’t we?” Here’s the thing, though: no matter how much pernil I served, the tray never emptied. I’d look down, expecting to see nothing but scraps, and there it was—still full, still steaming, still perfect. At first, I thought I was losing it. “Gabi,” I hissed, pulling her aside. “Have you been sneaking more pernil into the tray?” She gave me a look like I’d just insulted her abuela. “¿Estás loco? I’ve been stuck at the fryer all day!” I checked with Hector, but he just laughed. “What, you think I got a secret stash of pork shoulders in my back pocket? Don’t question it, cuz, just go with it!” By the time the sun dipped below the horizon, we’d fed half the neighborhood. And still, the pernil didn’t run out. It didn’t even look like it had been touched. The cuerito was just as crispy as when I’d pulled it out of the oven, too. The meat was somehow juicier, the flavor more intense, like every person I served gave it more and more life. And people weren’t just eating—they were connecting with each other. Strangers were swapping stories over plates, their laughter spilling out into the street. Kids who didn’t even speak the same language were sharing bites of arroz con gandules like it was candy. I swear one dude talked about turning his into a taco. “¡Ruben, mijo!” Mrs. Santiago waved at me from the middle of the line. She was one of my day-ones, back when I could barely afford fresh ingredients. “You better save me some of that pernil, or I’m sending my nietos to raid your truck!” I laughed, slicing another chunk of pork. “Mrs. Santiago, I got you covered! You think I’d let you walk away hungry? Y TÚ SABES.” When she got to the front, she took one look at the steaming plate and let out a low whistle. “Smells like my abuela’s kitchen in Ponce.” She pointed at me with her fork. “You better not tell me you stole her recipe!” “Swear I didn’t,” I said, grinning. “But if it’s that good, maybe I should.” Post-dinner was normally our downtime, but at 8pm, the truck was *still* chaos. Orders flew in so fast I stopped trying to memorize faces and just focused on plates. My knife moved on instinct, slicing tender pieces of pernil that fell apart before the blade even hit the cutting board. Hector was yelling out drink orders, Gabi’s fryer was hissing and spitting oil like it was possessed, and the crowd was loud. Someone was playing music from their phone, and every few seconds, I caught snippets of laughter and conversation from people who didn’t seem to care about the wait. The line was wrapping around the block, and I didn’t even have time to feel overwhelmed. All I knew was: *slice, plate, repeat.* Then, as if drawn by some invisible force, maybe the god of the bay itself or something, a bunch of other food trucks began to show up. A taco truck with salsas so vibrant they looked painted. A Korean barbecue stand that smelled like heaven on a skewer. A cart selling Ethiopian injera with lentils so spiced they made your tongue dance. What? I had a minute to check it out! Each truck added to the symphony, their owners pulled in by the same magnetic energy that had kept my pernil going all day. By midnight, the street was alive with music, laughter, and the clatter of forks and bottles. A full-on food truck festival, and it just came outta nowhere. A few old guys I recognized from the local coffee shop showed up with some string lights, and a group of teens helped them set it all up. I even saw that one dude with the suit come back and help them find a way to power the whole thing. And funny enough, somebody else showed up with a speaker playing salsa music loud enough to make your ribs vibrate. Kids were running around with plates of food too big for their hands, and a couple was dancing on the sidewalk like nobody was watching. Smoke from the grills mixed with the scent of spices, and the whole block just felt *alive*, like it was breathing in time with the beat of the music. Trucks from every corner of the world had joined in, their signs bright and colorful, offering everything from spicy birria to buttery naan. It wasn’t just a meal—it was a party. A reminder that food has the power to heal, to unite, to bring joy in the face of struggle. My heart swelled just looking over the crowd, a revolution of good times. Once things finally started to slow down, I spotted two older women sitting at one of the folding tables someone had set up. They were swapping bites off each other’s plates, laughing like old friends. When I stopped by to check on them, one pointed at the other with a fork and said, “Turns out, we grew up in the same barrio in Puerto Rico! Can you believe that?” The other woman nodded, still chewing her arroz con gandules. “I haven’t tasted food like this since I left home. It’s like…I don’t even know. Like it was meant to happen.” All I could do was laugh. “Maybe a sign to go visit the island again, eh?” She nodded, mouth full. As for the pernil? It stayed full until the very last plate was served. When the crowd finally thinned and I closed up the truck, I found the roasting tray empty, save for a single piece of cuerito. I popped it into my mouth, savoring the crunch. It was quiet now, the kind of quiet that feels full instead of empty. My body ached, my arms were so sore, but I could *not* stop smiling. The pernil saved more than just my truck that day. I fed the block, but it’s not like I didn’t get anything back for it. And I’ll admit, I didn’t question how the pernil really lasted that long. Some things you just have to take on faith. Only way to make it through, you know? So, yeah, I’ve seen a miracle. It smelled like garlic, tasted like home, and changed a whole neighborhood. ‘Cause after that Friday, the trucks started coming back like they never left. --- *Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.* --- # Author’s Note This story came out of a craving. Not for food, though pernil was definitely on my mind. It came from a hunger for something harder to define: the feeling of being seen, fed, and lifted by a moment that shouldn’t be possible, but guess what it is. A miracle that’s not divine in the religious sense, of course, but communal. And rooted in sweat, seasoning, shared joy, and other secret ingredients. I wrote this back in January (2025) and wanted to write about *hope* in a time of near-collapse. About someone doing their best with what they have (garlic, a truck, a cousin with knife skills) and getting more than they bargained for. Not from luck or magic, exactly, but from the way community rises when you nourish it with something that looks and smells like magic. Sometimes, that looks like a neighborhood gathering around a food truck. Sometimes, it’s one perfect bite reminding you where you come from. For me, I grew up in the states. My parents and most of my siblings were born on the island, though, and we’d visit Puerto Rico pretty much every summer while growing up, months at a time. The benefits of having a mom who’s a teacher. I’d eat some dang good Caribbean food while I was there, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until the day I moved to California, where that kind of cuisine is sparse at best. Eventually, though, some good friends let me know about a food truck in Oakland called [Boriqua Kitchen](https://www.boriquakitchen.com/?ref=ceteramagazine.com) and it was like being in my *mom’s* kitchen again. So I wanted to write this story for those fine folks, and also my mom, of course, who taught me how to make pernil with the hope that it might *also* maybe *almost* be *somewhat* close to as good as my Abuela Juanita’s. Ruben (named after my cousin and uncle) is the kind of character I love most: stubborn, overwhelmed, occasionally ridiculous, and deeply loyal. He doesn’t call himself a miracle worker, but that’s what he becomes. And I think we need stories like his all the time. Not because they make us forget the hard stuff, but because they show us how to survive it. With flavor, with love, with music bumping from someone’s phone at midnight, with some good old fashioned good food. If this story made you hungry, good. If it made you feel something deeper than that, even better. Y tú sabes. --- Thank you for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### The Moon Dancer’s Bargain URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/the-moon-dancers-bargain/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:19:21.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/The-Moon-Dancer-s-Bargain_thumb.jpg) The Moon Dancers Bargain 0:00 /1931.6244897959184 1× Long before the sea forgot its song, Anakaona walked the shore where painted waves never failed to greet her. Ana’s feet pressed shapes into the wet sand—circles, lines, zigzags—marks no tide could steal fast enough. “Ana, Ana,” the wind would hum in spirit, tugging at her braids, twisting salt into her skin. She ignored it. The wind spoke often, usually nonsense, but tonight even the gusts lacked feeling. They were far too eager and loud. And cloying. Behind her, the village crouched in the moonlight, a cluster of straw-roofed homes huddled like children clinging to one another. Smoke escaped a single chimney; someone boiling cassava no doubt. Everyone else had gone to sleep early, as if they believed darkness would make them invisible to the *thing* beyond the reef. The Moon Dancer. Ana had no patience for hiding. She would never let herself be invisible. Her sister whispered earlier—tears staining her face, fear in every breath—that the elder had made the announcement. A child for the Moon Dancer. Not a goat, not a jewel, not even a string dozen of pearls, but a child. A life. Her sister’s unborn baby, still cradled in her belly. The elder’s voice still rang in Ana’s ears, deep and chilling to her bones. “The Dancer’s price cannot be refused,” the elder said. “Without the tides, the fish will leave us. Without the fish, we will starve.” “Then you are cowards and slaves,” Ana cursed when the meeting ended. She stormed the beach to chase the tight knot of rage building in her gut. She didn’t believe in monsters, not the way the others did. The stories about the Moon Dancer—those spare, cautionary tales—belonged to children too young to know what true fear tasted like. The villagers were fools to treat them as sacred. Ana believed in the totems, in the stories her ancestors left for them, unscripted. At the edge of the waves, not far from where Ana stood, a shadow moved with purpose. Ana couldn’t move, nor could she respond. Her breath caught somewhere between her throat and her chest. The moon hovered the sky, coloring the horizon in silver fire, and for one terrible moment, the shape at the water’s end appeared human. A figure dancing, hips swaying to music only the ocean could hear. “Not a person, a crab,” Ana speculated, forcing herself to move closer. “Or a trick of the light.” Her voice broke the quiet, brittle as a dried leaf, but her legs refused to stop their mindless approach. One step, then another. The shadow halted. Then turned to face her. A crab, this was not. The Moon Dancer smiled at her, brilliant teeth like sun-lit coral, yet eyes deeper than the darkest sea trench. The smile stretched wide, neither kind nor cruel, but more resembling the curve of a conch shell split clean in two. Its movements glistened, shifting faster than a blink. One moment, it mimicked the swaying to a tanbou drum, hips rolling as if the waves themselves had taught it the dance. The next, it stretched impossibly tall, arms reaching like mangrove roots climbing toward some unseen light. Ana’s chest stiffened, her breath light beneath ribs strong from years of hauling nets and rowing canoes. The salt air stung her nose sharper now, thick with the smell of rotting seaweed and coppery brine. The totems her ancestors left behind told much of spirits connected to the tides, but none spoke of how they gazed…deep, like storm clouds gathering behind the moon’s watchful, mournful eyes. “Ah, you walk alone at night,” the Moon Dancer chirped. Its voice sung, heavy as wet burlap dragged through sand, yet smooth like the first sip of aged rum. “Bold or foolish or maybe something else, I do not know. Tell me, tell me, little one, which are you?” Ana planted her feet into the soft shoreline as if daring the waves to wash her away. “I am neither bold nor foolish. I am a woman with questions.” The Dancer tilted its head, the movement birdlike, and the moonlight revealed skin both dark and iridescent, glinting like the scales of a lionfish. “Questions,” it repeated, tasting the word like sweet coconut milk. “Ah, you are one of the curious ones. They walk the quickest into the jaws they do not see.” “Or they find answers,” Ana countered. Her voice held firm, though her fingers trembled, nails digging into her palms. She would not flinch; she’d learned to face the sea’s fury before she could braid her own hair. “Moon Dancer, I humbly ask you, why does the village owe you a *child*?” The Dancer chuckled, soft at first, then growing like thunder rolling across a distant sky. It bent low, its face inches from hers now. The scent of salt and decay filled her nose. “Owe?” it asked, the word soaked in amusement. “The village owes nothing, little one. They offer willingly, year after year. That is the deal struck long before your bones carried mirth and your lungs spewed breath.” “You *take* because they’re afraid,” Ana said, her voice louder now. “Afraid of losing fish. Afraid of the tide turning against them.” “And their fear feeds the very same tide,” the Dancer replied. “Fear keeps nets heavy and bellies full. Would you rather their rivers run dry? Let storms shred their crops?” Its gaze flicked to her hands, rough and calloused from a lifetime of bitter work. “Or would you give them something better? I wonder what such a thing might be.” Ana thought of the village. The children with laughter as bright as the sunrise. Her sister, clutching her belly as if holding both life and despair in her hands. Her anger churned, but beneath it lay something even hotter. “They give because they don’t know any better,” Ana said. “But I do.” The Dancer’s face crinkled, something wicked lurking beneath its smile. “And what would *you* give me, brave and curious woman, to set them free? To gift them all they want and more?” The words broke the storm in her pounding heart, her blood roaring in her ears. Her ancestors had always warned against bargains with the undying. Give them too little, and they would devour you whole. Give them too much, and you’d have nothing left to call your own. But Ana refused to back down. Not now. She drew in a slow breath, her mind racing like an outrigger slicing through choppy waters. “I’ll offer you something no one else has dared,” she said, her voice as calm as the morning mists. “I come not with fear or a life of a child, but I will gift you *knowledge*.” The Moon Dancer leaned closer, curious now, its shimmering body coiling like sea vines around a coral reef. “Knowledge,” it echoed, the word tasting foreign on its shadowed lips. “And tell me, tell me, what would you know that I do not already hold, brave woman of salt and wind?” Ana’s chest rose, breath held tight like the swell of the ocean before a hurricane’s roar. “You think the people here need you. That without you, they’d crumble and starve. But they don’t need fear of you to survive. They don’t need *you*.” The Moon Dancer straightened, its silhouette stretching until it towered over her, its radiance spilling into the sea. The waves responded with a gurgling gasp, as if the ocean itself hungered for more of her words. “Bold claims,” it said, its voice carrying a jagged rasp now, a hint of something old and untamed. As if it remembered being in this moment before. “Your courage amuses me, but courage does not fill nets and bellies, nor does it turn the tides that bring men their fish.” Ana stepped closer, her toes brushing the froth of sea-foam. “You’ve chained the village to your games for so long, they’ve forgotten how to stand without leaning on your bargains. You keep their stomachs full, but their hearts hollow.” Her gaze didn’t waver, though her pulse thudded like a drum in her ears. “Let me face you on their behalf. A single challenge. If I win, you leave this island forever. No more demands. No more fear. In such, the knowledge you gain will be twofold. A village can rise against you. And a brave and curious woman can best you.” The Dancer laughed again, but this time the sound carried dark scrapes of stone against stone. “And tell me, tell me, what if you lose, brave woman? What will I take from you?” Ana could feel the humid air preceding a downpour. Threatening to flood her thoughts and soul. What *could* she offer? What did she have that the Moon Dancer could possibly want? *Knowledge* would not work twice. The answer came to her, as clear and palpable as the call of coquí frogs at dusk. She straightened her spine, let her voice ring out with measured purpose. “If I lose, I’ll give you what you can never have. My memory. Every trace of me, gone. My sister will never speak my name. My people will forget my face. Not a whisper of Anakaona will remain. I will be a ghost with no past.” The Dancer tilted its head, the wisp in its eyes harsher now. “Clever, clever. You tempt me with something rare, yes, a nothingness so complete it could make even the gods you do not believe in weep.” Its form swelled again, smaller now, more human in shape, though its glow never dimmed. It stepped closer, the sand beneath its feet undisturbed. “I accept your wager. Our dueling dance begins with the tide.” The ocean stilled, the restless waves drawing back as if the sea itself only had time to watch and observe. Ana’s breath went shallow. The Moon Dancer raised one hand, a shape half-seen in the moonlight, and the rhythm began. Slow at first, persistently precise as a resting heartbeat. “Dance with me, brave and curious woman of salt and wind,” it said, its voice soft but eager. “And we’ll see if your defiance can outlast the moon’s dominion.” The Moon Dancer’s swinging lilt began low, as if matching the sturdy hums of the earth beneath the island. A hum Ana could feel in her thoughts and out to her chest and down to her toes. The sound grew and grew, layered now with the gentle hint of wind threading through palms, the hiss of waves returning to shore. Ana recognized this sensation, this dance. The opening steps of bélé, of which the elders taught children to mark celebrations and endings. Feet that stomped out stories, hands that curved the air into prayers. Ana thought long and hard. Her own body knew the steps like the tide knew its pull, but this dance bore no ecstasy. It unleashed ferocity, its shadows uncontrollabe. Her feet moved anyway, heels digging into the sand, carving shapes into the shifting earth. Even if she may vanish past the night, her prints in the sediment would remain. “You begin like the old ones taught you,” the Moon Dancer murmured, gliding across the sand with a grace that defied human limits. Its movements stretched like the arc of a fishing net, fluid and certain. “A brave and curious woman of salt and wind who knows some of what came before her. Who knows her ancestors by their remains. But can you keep their beat? Can you endure when rhythms change?” It did change. The tempo quickened, syncopated now, forcing her body to adjust, to anticipate. Each step required perfection, each sway demanded utmost control. Sweat beaded her forehead as her arms lifted, tuning her body to the drum’s voice. She stomped, she twisted, she spun. None of it enough to outlast the Moon Dancer, but she would not stop trying. Ana’s gaze drifted to the moon hanging ponderous in the sky, then back to the Dancer who bared its power. Its form swirled, liquid light coalescing into something both ancient and eerily childlike. It moved with flawless precision, its feet never faltering, its limbs bending as if weightless and on strings pulled by gods. Even the tide responded, surging forward to the beat and soaking her ankles before receding into the void harmony. Ana stumbled, nearly losing her balance as the water dragged at her footing. She clenched her fists, planting her feet firmly once more. This wasn’t just about steps or pace. The Dancer had praised her, yes, but it had also underestimated her. She had more than a dance to bargain. She had a village. The village who raised her. She closed her eyes and drew on the image of her sister to inform her sway. The baby in her belly, the soft kick Ana had felt beneath her palm mere days before. In her mind, the child had danced, tiny feet tapping against its mother’s ribcage, a beat of its own making. Not bélé, not the Moon Dancer’s conjured steps, but something…new. A future no one else could possibly know or anticipate or bemoan as inevitable. Ana's movements gentled, her hips flowing with the waves of the sea, her arms swaying to the grace of the breeze. She didn’t try to match the Dancer’s pace, she let herself slip into the cadence and tune of the unborn child, the pulse of life yet to be. The Moon Dancer paused mid-step, its crooked form wavering, the flawless symphony of its movements unraveling. Its eyes narrowed, watching Ana closely now. “You change the beat,” it said between short, roughened breaths. “Why would you do something such as this?” Ana spun, arms wide, her bare feet slapping the sand as if claiming it. “Because not every dance belongs to you,” she said, her voice loud enough to reach the sky. “This one belongs to *her*.” She pointed to the village behind her, to the child waiting to be born. “She deserves a time borne of joy and possibility for what’s to come, not fear of what’s already due.” The Dancer lunged forward, its form blurring, but Ana didn’t feel the pressure, the intimidation. She moved faster, her steps unpredictable now. Sharp turns, sudden pauses, her arms and legs twisting in ways no tradition dictated. The tempo she followed had no rules to it. No marking of something tested and observed. Only expression and melody, a performance with an audience of one. The Dancer stopped. Its lit body creased, the edges breaking apart like foam on the tide. “You dance with more than feet,” it said, its voice quieter now, almost mystified. “Your heart moves with you.” Ana didn’t stop. She spun faster, her arms outstretched like the wings of a frigatebird piercing the sky. She danced until the ocean itself slowed, the waves no longer crashing to meet her. The tide, so begotten to the Moon Dancer, eased back as if in surrender. When she finally stopped, the moonlight on the sand grew dim. The Moon Dancer stood still, smaller now, no longer a lofty force. Its shine flickered into the embers of a dying fire. “You win,” it said simply, its voice tired and creaking. “What’s yours is yours, and no longer mine.” Ana stood tall, though her legs quivered, her chest heaving with exertion. “Then leave this place,” she said, her voice resolute. “Let my village be.” The Moon Dancer’s form dissolved, its light sinking into the waves. But the tide did not retreat as before; instead, it lingered at the shore, as if waiting. The Dancer’s voice, faint as a whisper carried by the trade winds, drifted through the air one last time. “You have unbound the bargain, Anakaona. But the sea will give only what is respected unto it. Tell your village what I know: *take no more than they need, or the ocean will answer in kind*.” The waves powered forth, briefly, covering Ana’s feet, then pulled back, leaving the sand smooth and untouched and the Moon Dancer fully gone. Where the water receded, small fish darted in the shallows, their silver bodies catching the early morning light. Ana dropped to her knees, the consequences of the night’s long battle finally settling over her. Her sister rushed to her side, kneeling and wrapping her arms tightly around her. “You did it,” she murmured, her voice trembling. “We all saw it. The Moon Dancer is gone.” Indeed, what felt like minutes had likely been hours. And much of the village stood there now, gazing at Ana as she shook her head, though her exhaustion pressed hard against her. “Not completely,” she said. Her gaze fell to the shimmering fish flopping the beach, the water suddenly alive with life where it had been barren for months. “It left us a lesson.” The villagers approached cautiously, their footsteps hesitant on the damp sand. One of the elders stepped forward, his face wrinkled with both fear and hope. “What does this mean?” he asked, staring at the fish-filled waters. “It cannot have been so easy.” Ana rose slowly, her legs barely strong enough to hold her. She faced the villagers, her voice strong despite the exhaustion wearing her bones. “The Moon Dancer once kept the tides and the fish in balance, but only because we gave it everything it wanted. We gave it our fear, we gave it sacrifice, we offered it a strained dependence. And now…” She gestured to the ocean, still teeming with small fish, the water clearer than it had been in years. “Now, the balance is in our hands. The sea will provide if we *take only what we need*. If we honor it, it will honor us.” One of the fishermen stepped forward, his hands calloused from years of hauling empty nets. “And if we don’t?” The villagers watched in stunned silence as the sea grew unnaturally calm. The moon’s light, brighter than before, reflected on the waves, kissed by silver. Ana stood still, her breath losing purchase once again. Her feet, rooted in the sand, heavy yet alive, as if the earth beneath her had begun to drink in her strength. The air spoke with an unearthly voice. Wind without words. The sea stretched toward her, small rivulets of water curling her ankles, her calves, her knees. The tide lifted her gently, as if she weighed no more than a shell, carrying her toward the horizon. She didn’t resist. Her body moved easily, instinctively, as though she belonged to the water, to the moon, to something greater than herself and even her people. Her sister screamed, breaking the unnatural calm. “Ana!” She waded into the waves, the water soaking her skirt, but a strong current held her back. Ana turned, her eyes meeting her sister’s. There were tears, but also a hesitant peace. “The child is safe,” she said tenderly. Her voice carried, though no one could say how. “The village has its chance once again. This is what I have given.” “No!” her sister cried, her hands pressed against the tide that refused to allow her closer. “You don’t have to go! You have to stay with us!” Ana’s lips formed a small, haunting smile. “This is where I belong now. The Moon Dancer doesn’t disappear. It changes, like the sea’s pull. Someone always stays behind to remind the village of its promises.” Her eyes glimmered, catching the moonlight. “And so, it is my turn.” The villagers stood placid on the shore, their faces filled with awe and wrinkled grief. The elder stepped forward, his voice breaking. “It happened before,” he whispered. “Long ago. The first Moon Dancer…she was a brave woman, just like her. She gave herself so the village could learn.” His face dropped to the sand, ashamed. “But we forgot.” Ana’s sister shook her head, hot tears streaking her face. “And we’ll forget again. Ana, please! Don’t leave us, you mustn’t!” The tide grabbed her further, water now lapping at her waist, then shoulders. “Teach the lesson this time,” Ana said, her voice growing distant, her outline joining the softest light. “And teach it well.” The sea rose higher, enveloping her in glittering light. Her skin caught the moon’s fire, her edges blurring, her form shifting. Her hair streamed behind her like dark seaweed, her arms flowing like the currents themselves. She stretched, growing taller, brighter, until she no longer looked human at all. Her body reflected the ocean’s depths, her gaze filled with the polish of the moon and the green of the mangroves. Her feet no longer touched the sand; she hovered above the surf, a figure of salt, wind, and water. The new Moon Dancer smiled a knowing, sorrowful smile as it turned toward the horizon. With a sweep of its arms, the waves crested around her. The ocean now brimming with life and promise. The figure began to dance, its steps carving patterns into the water’s surface, each one a silent warning. A gift. A *chance*. The villagers watched as the Moon Dancer disappeared where the light met the blue, its rays mingling with the moon’s reflection. The tide receded, leaving the sand smooth and untouched, save for a single pair of footprints that stopped abruptly where the sea had claimed her. Ana’s sister fell to her knees, clutching her belly, the child within stirring as if in answer. The elder placed a hand on her shoulder, his voice hoarse but steady. “We won’t forget this time. We’ll teach the children. The children will teach theirs. And we’ll honor her dance.” The ocean whispered its reluctant agreement, the waves lapping gently at the shore, their song no longer mournful but quiet and reflective. Far out at sea, the Moon Dancer twirled beneath the light of the full celestials, its movements steadily eternal. Anakaona—now something more, something vast—watched over the waters, her heart full with the knowledge that the child would live, the village had its next chance, and the sea would remain in its unending bend. For now. Because the tide, much like all things, will always return. --- # **Author’s Note** *The Moon Dancer’s Bargain* is one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, though it took some time to find the right home for it. I originally crafted this tale (and another inspired by Caribbean mythology) for a submission call from *The Fairy Tale Magazine*. The other story ended up getting published under their *Sleeping Beauty* issue, but this one never quite matched the themes they had coming up next. So I decided to share it on *Cetera* earlier this year, back in January. This story comes from years of research into Taíno and broader Caribbean folklore, a personal passion of mine that has always felt like both a reclamation and an invitation to my own heritage. While *The Moon Dancer’s Bargain* is an original fairy tale, not a retelling, it’s rooted in real mythological textures from the Caribbean, especially the reverence for the sea, ancestral memory, and the powerful role women often play in oral traditions across the region. Ana’s story is fictional, but her spirit echoes real women in my lineage and beyond: those who resist dogma, who question foreboding assumptions, who protect the next generation even when no one else will. Writing this was my way of asking what it means to break a cycle and redefine sacrifice, and to create new stories from the salt and wind of the ones we’ve inherited. This was also a fun exercise in me being able to use a literal dance-off as the climax of a story. But even disregarding the cheekiness of that concept, I wanted the dance itself to feel alive and bucking of choreography. Personally, I love to dance but I hate the rigidity of certain approaches to it, or when people declare there’s a “right” way to it, and all that. I love when dance can be jazz, when it can be improvised and defiant. And on that note, Ana’s defiance isn’t loud for its own sake, of course. It’s purposeful. She doesn’t destroy tradition like we see in so many of these types of stories, but rather, she reshapes it. And I think there’s something deeply islander in that impulse. To honor memory as readily as we reconstruct it. --- Thanks for reading Cetera. Subscribe for free to receive new stories every week, right in your inbox. And if you have a few extra seconds, please consider sharing this story with a friend who might like it. ### To Feel Like a Person Again URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/to-feel-like-a-person-again-2/ Last updated: 2025-09-08T22:20:44.000Z ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2025/09/To-Feel-Like-a-Person-Again_thumb.jpg) To Feel Like a Person Again 0:00 /1175.9542857142858 1× I wasn’t a ghost when Luce and I first started dating. That came a little while after. But honestly? The thought of losing him makes me want to die all over again. Luce is holding my hand as we walk into the brick house on Onyeabor street. Too dark to really see the house besides those gaudy red bricks that *scream* fraternity. It’s one thing to go to a college party full of witches when you’re still in high school. It’s another thing to go knowing you’ll stop aging at 18 and will never, ever go to a college party for *real*. The whole ghost thing can be pretty annoying. Luce wouldn’t know, since he’s still a living, breathing person. He looks at me with a dumb, nervous smile. He’s not the kind of witch that can read minds, but he can still read mine for some reason. “It’s not a fraternity,” he says. Hilariously. “Sorry, do you *see* that building? Who did you say invited you again? Besides Ferris Bueller.” He cracks a weird smile. “Witches from the drama club. They’re pretty nice, actually.” They better not be. He rubs his neck and sighs. “We don’t have to go in, you know. We only have a few days left, and they’re important.” Yeah, so important you want to spend them rubbing your future in my face? “It’s fine,” I say instead. I know he’s just trying to have fun without leaving me out of it. We walk in, and our hands are touching slightly less. But I can maybe blame that on my body becoming more ethereal. After graduation, that’s it for me and my old friend, tangibility. I’ll be in full-on ghost mode. Luce won’t even be able to see me without lighting candles or getting friends together for a seance. Everyone in the house is red in the face and excited to see Luce. A little confused to see *me*, clearly, because they can tell right away that I’m a ghost. A lot of them have probably never seen one outside of a textbook, I’d bet. “Ey Luce! This the girlfriend?” Yes, that is my name. The Girlfriend. My parents were born ten centuries ago, as it turns out. “Oh wow, I didn’t know she’s a...uh...” A ghost? They can just say it. We live in a town full of witches, it shouldn’t be that mind-blowing. One girl pulls me aside, all smiles. “Mind if I borrow her, Luce?” He shrugs with a big grin as two soon-to-be-on-Dateline guys take him to the punch table. The music is so loud I can’t even hear what Luce says as I’m moving farther away. “Luce never shuts up about you,” the girl says as she hands me a red solo cup decorated to look like a goblet. It’s full of some fruity seltzer, I think. “I’m Kirnen, by the way,” she says, patting my arm. “Hollie.” “Hollie! It’s so, so nice to finally meet you. I’ve never met a ghost before. Although, I *have* come pretty close.” We chat a little longer. She wants to know all about how I died during my sophomore year of high school. What it was like becoming a ghost, what other ghosts are like at Starling Academy, blah blah blah. She’s obsessed. It must be so weird to know there’s a school in town where students who die turn into half-ghosts until they graduate. Kirnen leans against the wall and sighs. The alcohol must be hitting her, if it hasn’t already. “You know. If I were a student at Starling, I don’t know what I’d do. Isn’t it tempting to just, I don’t know, become a ghost on purpose?” Become a ghost on purpose. *On purpose*. “Probably not,” I decide to say. Ever the diplomat. “If I’d gone to a school where I knew I couldn’t really die...I might’ve taken more risks.” She laughs. Like it’s funny. I almost want to throw my drink in her face, but the urge passes. Besides, my cup is empty, and all I can really feel at the moment is pity. Not just for her, but for myself. Luckily, Luce saves the day and reappears. “Enjoying yourself?” he asks as we break away from the crowd, alone. My ears are ringing from all the noise. I shrug. “You?” He leans over the balcony and stares ahead. We’re right outside one of the bedrooms and the moonlight is mixing with the street lamps to make him look...I don’t know, unreal. Or as unreal as me. I sigh to fill the silence. “Hey,” he finally says. Then he wraps his arms around me. The light is now reflecting off me and it’s like we’re glowing together. “I can hear enough of the music from here to dance,” he says. “Want to?” I want to say I do, but that might technically be a lie. Before I died, I wanted to be a dancer. The kind of witch who uses magic to move with impossibility in every step. I choose the uncomfortable option to say nothing, hoping that’s enough of an answer. He whispers something, but I can’t make it out fully. I’m too...in the moment. I think he says he wants to protect me. Or that he always will. Which makes me want to laugh. Or cry. Then he says something truly awful. “What if I died tomorrow?” I freeze. I can’t even look at him anymore and push him off, then send a fist into his arm. He probably can’t feel it at all. “I told you *never* to suggest that *ever* again!” His face gets serious. The calm, serene smile that made me fall for him when we were 15? Gone. Replaced with the mature, reasonable, rational face he should get to have for the rest of his life. But for some ungodly reason he wants to just throw it all away. I do know the reason, though. It’s so stupid, and I hate it. “Hollie—” “I mean it,” I say, planting my feet firm. “You’re not staying at Starling with me. You’re not becoming a ghost. Not for me, not for any reason whatsoever, *you absolute dumbass*.” He doesn’t respond, but I can read his mind, too. He wants to say that I can’t stop him from making his own decisions. But he’s wrong, I can. “Luce, if you do something stupid, I won’t forgive you. I’ll ignore you for eternity, I mean it. You’ll be all alone in that school, wandering the halls wondering why you didn’t just listen to me and do the right thing and live out your stupid, dumb life. You still get one, you know!” “Hollie, hold on.” I leave. Forget this. I should’ve walked away so much sooner. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t be acting like this. He’d have moved on by now. I knew this would happen. Everyone did. Especially his family. “Hollie, please, wait!” He tries to follow me, but I go through the walls. He can’t keep up. Luckily it’s so chaotic in the house, no one really notices what’s happening, so the embarrassment is manageable. I just want to get out of there. I just want to go home. --- I spend the night at Starling with the other ghosts who live there. Forever 17, one of them joked once. It’s a typical Friday. Everyone is in the common room, which is in a separate building from the dorms. The only way for us to sleep is by candlelight, though no one’s been sleeping lately. Everyone who died the same year as me is grieving the end of our “trial period.” Some are grieving by talking about it. Some are just being quiet. Others are dancing and letting it out through delirium, if you ask me. They say we’re lucky. So, so lucky we went to Starling, where you get a little extra time with your friends, even when the worst happens. Please. I would do anything to take it all back. I bury my face into my arms. There’s no way I just thought something like that. Taking it all back would include the time I had with Luce. Sneaking into his dorm. Laying on his bed and singing off-key with him until we’d almost get caught by the prefects. I need to stop thinking about this, it’s not helping. The weekend goes by and I spend it almost completely alone. Luce comes to look for me, but I easily avoid him. It’s the only way to send the message. I mean it. If he does the unthinkable, I’m not rewarding him or letting him think there could even *be* some kind of reward. A reason for him to do something unforgivable. I can’t. He has to move on. It’s like I’m cursing him just by existing. Come Monday, I can’t help myself. I start to spy on him. I know I shouldn’t, but being a ghost has to have at least *some* perks, right? From the ceiling of his homeroom class, I see him writing in a notebook. His best friend, Albert, keeps trying to talk to him. He’s even poking Luce with a pencil. Finally, Luce looks up at Albert and puts on a fake smile. They joke around a little while I peek at the notebook. He hasn’t been writing anything. He’s been drawing two people dancing. Luce wants to be an actor someday. He told me that a few days after I died. We had only been dating a week at that point, and he wasn’t sure how to tell his parents, since they’re never really around. They expected him to be an undercover witch in the business world, like most students at Starling who actually survive four years. To be an actor after all he had to go through, here? You’d have to really want it. Over time, we worked on his confidence in the lead up to telling his parents. We also worked on his acting skills for a similar reason. We stayed up endless nights rehearsing lines from our favorite plays and movies. We rehearsed him telling his parents what he really wants to do with his life. So when he finally told them the truth, they...well, they still reacted poorly, but it could’ve been *so much worse*. Hell, maybe *they* would’ve turned him into a ghost. Fortunately, it never came to that. After everything, he has to know he owes it to himself to go through with the thing he wants to do. He can’t just change it at the last minute to get back something he only wants because now he can’t have it. I wish he understood that better but, well, he’s stubborn as hell. --- Graduation day came quicker than I expected, and that’s saying something. I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I know I need to see Luce off. I’ve been rehearsing every moment of it, down to the syllable. I’m not a good actor, but maybe that’s OK. Maybe I truly believe what I’m about to tell him. He and Albert are goofing around in the hallway, shooting sparks from their fingers and trying not to singe their gowns. They’re in line for the ceremony to begin, so there isn’t much time. But it isn’t long before Luce spots me at the end of the hallway. It’s taking everything I have to make myself visible enough at this distance. It’s gotten so much harder. At first, Luce’s face is blank. But only for a second. He smiles. Big time. Damn, he almost looks like he’s about to cry. Maybe he thought I was a mirage at first. He runs down the hallway and practically tackles me. “Hollie!” He squeezes me tight. For a second, it’s almost like two normal people touching, but then he fades through me a little. “I was so scared.” I pull away to look him in the face. “Scared of what?” Now he *is* crying. “Scared I’d miss my last chance to see you.” There it is. He made his decision. It’s the right decision. So it’s extremely messed up that I’m not happy about it like I should be. “I had to see you off,” I finally say, holding back the tears. “See me off?” He shakes his head. “No way, this is your graduation too.” I scowl. “Uh, no. The whole point is that I *can’t* graduate. My family already said goodbye at my funeral, which was hard enough.” He rolls his eyes. “Who says that means you can’t graduate after a funeral? I mean it’s Starling, come on, already.” He grabs me by the hand and again, it’s almost like my hands are real again. At Starling, graduation is more like a giant seance than a “normal” graduation, like you see on TV. Lots of candles, chanting, and “respect for the dead.” It’s all a bit much. Per the rules, I should be up in the balcony with the other ghosts who bother to show up, but I’m the only one on the ground with the living. While I’m holding Luce’s hand, I don’t look like a ghost. I don’t even feel like one. We’re standing in the doorway, about to go in. Luce looks at me straight on, his eyes the size of plates. “Hollie, before we go in, I’ve been wondering.” He looks ahead, now, at the graduation ceremony. “What is it you want? You know, as a graduation present.” What a strange question. Luce’s favorite kind. *I don’t know.* I pause and refresh. *I don’t know.* I can’t even answer the question in my head. I grip his hand tightly. I can’t think. I just have to say something. “I don’t know. Maybe to feel like a person again.” His face relaxes into a calm smile. Like a rational adult would have. Then he turns to lead me away from the graduation. “Hey, wait, where are we going?” We’re moving down the hallway at full speed, smiling like idiots, and he doesn’t say anything. The next thing I know, we’re outside in the parking lot. *The parking lot*. What is this witch boy up to? Starling is the most beautiful campus in the entire state. Buildings that were constructed centuries ago, a courtyard with multiple marble fountains, the works. Why are we in a parking lot?! Luce walks me over to a car. His car. He explains how he got the car as his graduation present and then opens the door. He puts the keys into the ignition without going fully in, then cranks the stereo up as a song starts to play. “Hurry up and dance with me,” he says. We’re alone. It’s sunset. And he’s asking me to dance in a parking lot. I can’t believe how easy it is to fall in love with the same person over and over again. He puts one hand on my shoulder and the other on my waist. It’s irresistible. We start dancing, and I can almost feel myself floating. I’m glad my tears aren’t technically real, otherwise he’d be drenched. The song crescendos and Luce glances down at me. Determined look on his face. Those plate-sized eyes reflecting my own weirdness back at me. “Sorry I made you cry.” Without missing a beat, I bury my face into his chest. “Are you joking?” I say, muffled. Before I glance back up at him. “These are the best tears of my life.” They say dying is when life ends, but I would push back on that a little. That moment in the parking lot? Again, a *parking lot*. That was the first time my heart truly stopped. --- *Based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Jon Negroni* *is a Puerto Rican author of fantasy, fiction, and other musings.*