The boy reads a highly sexualized piece that isn’t shocking so much as it is awkward and I wonder if he’s chosen this particular piece for me. I look at the carpet as if I’m concentrating very hard and think about my own early writing, how I wrote things that shouldn’t have been written and how it had taken me years to figure out the difference between writing the truth and writing something explicit and ugly that only looked like the truth. But these things are so hard to explain. Often, in class, I find myself talking about the mystery of writing. I find myself relying on rules, which I never thought I’d have to rely on. Write and read: these are the only rules, but they are unhappy when you tell them this; it’s too difficult and they don’t really like reading all that much. And half the class writes about mermaids and aliens and strange apocalyptic worlds, which are all so similar, and I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. How I could possibly teach anyone anything.
It goes on and on. Deirdre and the emaciated girl and the Chinese guy and my TSA friend and their stories must be seven, eight pages long. Every time someone begins to read I try to determine how many pages they’re working with, the thickness of the stack.
When it’s finally over, I’ve had nothing to eat and five or six beers.
I send the students home with leftover pizza. I even bag up the nuts and pretzels. While I say goodbye to everyone, the boy stays in the bathroom and then emerges, the light behind him, smiling triumphantly. His skin perfectly normal.
“I thought you carpooled.”
“I drove myself,” he says.
There are only a couple of beers left so I make him drive me to the gas station where it is embarrassing how well they know me. They know what I eat and drink and give me coupons, their cards, because it’s a college town and they are trying to improve themselves. I wonder if they think of me when men come into the store late at night to buy condoms, though I haven’t sent anyone over in a month, at least.
“It’s gotten weirdly foggy out,” I say to the girl, and she says she’s glad she’s inside because it’s spooky as hell out, and then she goes into a story about how she saw an owl for the first time in her life, how it turned its whole neck around to look at her.
“Owls are predators. They could take off with a small dog, easy.” I glance at her name tag, tell myself to remember it this time.
“You be careful out there,” she says.
Back at the house, the boy and I sit on the porch. It’s the end of October but it’s still warm and bullfroggy. My dog licks my leg and I want to pick her up and carry her upstairs to my bedroom where she’d be uncomfortable but I’d shut her in and make her stay with me anyway. She doesn’t like stairs. Occasionally, I carry her up them, though she’s thirty pounds and acts like I’m torturing her the whole time.
“What’s wrong with her eye?” the boy asks.
“Nothing. She’s an Australian shepherd mix.”
“Is she blind?”
“No—she can see just fine.”
The bottom half of her left eye is blue-gray and craggy; it looks like a mountain range. This is what I tell him. He doesn’t say anything. “Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the mountain in her eye?” I want to touch his leg, most of all, which is so thick with muscle it is nearly fat. I want to grab his arm, so near me I could rub my own against it. I’ve heard he’s in love with another of my students, a talented girl from Georgia with very short hair. She told me she writes at least 1,500 words a day, every day, which depressed me. I hate to hear how hard people are working.
“Why are you still here?” I ask, but this only makes him ask if he should leave and that’s not what I was getting at; it’s also the only response to my question. Soon he will be with this other girl, this young girl he loves, and they’ll get engaged and live in a small apartment where they’ll write their stories and drink their Starbucks, dream their big dreams. They will do things in the proper order and they’ll be happy. I can see it all so clearly. Don’t mess it up, I want to tell him. Don’t fuck things up because once you start fucking up it’s so hard to stop and there comes a point at which you simply don’t know how to do anything else anymore.
AT ONE TIME THIS WAS THE LONGEST COVERED WALKWAY IN THE WORLD
“I’m dead,” the boy says.
“You’re not dead,” his father says.
“I’m dead,” the boy insists, draping his body over the arm of his chair. The people at the next table look at him, at me, and smile.
“Don’t be weird, son,” his father says, opening the boy’s shark book. “Look at this one—what kind is this?”
The boy looks at it. “Hammerhead,” he says. His father turns the pages, and he says: “cow shark, prickly shark, zebra.” He takes a swig of his root beer, which is in a brown bottle like our beers.
“Did you know that you shouldn’t wear a watch or other shiny things in the ocean?” I ask the boy. “A shark will think you’re a fish and try to eat you.” He shakes his head. “It’s the glint,” I say, “like fish scales,” tipping my bare wrist back and forth, but he doesn’t know what a glint is. He’s only four. I look at his father, my boyfriend, who is texting someone, probably his ex-wife.
The boy’s burger comes and his father cuts it in half and the boy takes a bite out of one half and puts it down and then picks up the other half and takes a bite. My boyfriend waves the waitress over and asks for ketchup. I order another beer. There is something wrong with my stomach, an ulcer maybe, and I know I shouldn’t be drinking but I seem to be incapable of living the kind of life where I eat nutritious meals and exercise and go to bed at a decent hour, or I can only live like this for a short period of time before fucking it all up again.
Flies circle the boy’s burger. One lands on the edge of the basket and makes its way along the rim. The boy and I watch it while my boyfriend stares at his phone. The fly moves so fast I can’t see its individual legs and then it stops abruptly and crosses one leg over another and scrubs them together. I wave my hand around. My boyfriend sets his phone down and unfolds a napkin, lays it over his son’s food.
It is August, too hot to be sitting outside. I look at the kid, who would never pass for mine, and hate him a little. He has a white scar that snakes up the middle finger of his left hand (from a skateboarding accident when he was two, he tells me), blond hair, and brown eyes. My boyfriend’s eyes are blue. I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex-wife’s eyes are because if they’re blue then the boy isn’t his and we could be spending our nights alone.
On Saturday afternoon, I go over to my boyfriend’s house to swim. He lives with his mother because his ex-wife got the house and everything in it. He talks about his circumstances constantly—the things he used to have, how he owned his own home at twenty, how badly he wants to get out of this town but can’t.
He and his wife grew apart, he says, which could mean anything, but more than likely it means she found him intolerable or fell in love with someone else.
On the kitchen counter, there’s a paper bag containing beer and vodka and mixers and I know I won’t be going home tonight, that I’ll end up staying in the guest bedroom, wishing his body was pressed against mine. And in the morning, I’ll wake up and tiptoe into the room where he and his son will be passed out on top of the covers with their hands in their pants. I like the idea of the boy, how much a father can love his son, but I don’t like the actual son, who is screaming because he can’t find his swim trunks.
“Where did you last see them?” I ask, bending down so I’m eye level, my voice high and false. I don’t even speak this way to dogs.