David Lee Holcomb's Blog

Proof of life…

Sales on my first fantasy novel, Strange News, are going reasonably well — knock wood! In terms of costs, I may be on track to break even on this one by this time next year, at which point I hope to have a new book ready to hit the streets.

As for that work-in-progress, I’m halfway through the first draft, coming up on what the writing expert YouTubers call the “midpoint reversal.” The middle of every book is a bloody mess to write, and this one is no exception, but I think (I hope!) I’ve learned a few things by now. I’m moving a little more smoothly than usual through this difficult stretch. Thoughts and prayers, everybody.

The upcoming book will be titled Apocryphon, and it dips into the fantasy genre a little more deeply than Strange News. Still no dragons or swords or incestuous royal families slaughtering each other at weddings, but most of the story takes place on an alternate Earth where something that might be called magic is common. Get ready to pay a visit to Palliset, the City at the Center of Time:

As long as you have the necessary time banked up, any westbound train will take you from Boston or Bengaluru or Beijing to the Grand Plaza Station, but no earthly airship has ever looked down on Palliset’s dusty sprawl, and no Pallisene explorer has ever found the slightest trace of a superhighway or a McDonald’s, no matter how far from the plateau they’ve traveled. Palliset is an island of civilization in an otherwise empty world of endless scrub desert and shortgrass prairie at the other end of a train ride from anywhere on Earth.

A paradox. A whole city of paradoxes. The center of all things, the Book of Secrets called it. Is this magic? It’s certainly not logical, not reasonable. It’s a place Mac might have invented just to fluster me, to make me laugh. Maybe that’s all magic ever is.

In Palliset, nobody cares about the contradictions. They’ve always been here. They’ve always been who they are. They expect to be here until the end of time.

But then, don’t we all?

— From Apocryphon: Bishop Berkeley’s Book of Secrets, by David Lee Holcomb. Coming in 2026.

“Strange News” in-person events

I have three in-person events scheduled for this summer, related to my new novel Strange News. I may add more later, but for now this is the schedule. Come out and say hello!

Saturday, June 14, 6:00 pm, Ozark Folkways, 22733 N Hwy 71, Winslow, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A, snacks. Books for sale.Thursday, June 19, 6:30 pm, Pearl’s Books, 28 E Center St, Fayetteville, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A. Books for sale.Wednesday, July 9, 2:00 pm, West Fork Public Library, 198 W Main St, West Fork, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A, snacks. Books for sale.

Strange News in-person events

I have three in-person events scheduled for this summer, related to my new novel Strange News. I may add more later, but for now this is the schedule. Come out and say hello!

Saturday, June 14, 6:00 pm, Ozark Folkways, 22733 N Hwy 71, Winslow, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A, snacks. Books for sale.Thursday, June 19, 6:30 pm, Pearl’s Books, 28 E Center St, Fayetteville, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A. Books for sale.Wednesday, July 9, 2:00 pm, West Fork Public Library, 198 W Main St, West Fork, AR – Reading, book signing, informal Q&A, snacks. Books for sale.

Strange News!

As everyone is no doubt aware, I have another novel coming out on May 3, called Strange News. The hardback is available for preorder from a number of retailers; the ebook is just starting to pop up. The paperback will start appearing in a couple of weeks.

Since I never seem to be able to do the same thing twice, this one is in a genre that I haven’t attempted before (except in short stories): Fantasy.

Strange News is not what the publishers call “High” fantasy. Nobody has a sword, or rides a horse to work. They have cellphones and they take the bus. People have jobs, they have pets, they live in houses and apartments, not Hobbit-holes or castles. There are no elves, no orcs, no wizards with long beards and posh British accents. There’s just an ordinary guy with bad knees and a weakness for sweets who stumbles into something wild.

Something that changes his world forever.

Click here to see a list of available retailers, and a schedule of in-person events!

“The Woman At Front Two”

The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

“More coffee?”

“Please.”

I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

“I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

I make a stupid sort of bow/nod gesture and move away. The man at Back Three is trying to get my attention, holding up his coffee cup like he’s the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for the huddled masses to get their morning dose of Java—but I’m not in the mood for his shit right now.

“Dr. Kimmelman is waving at you,” Katie says. I join her behind the counter, putting thirty inches of Formica between me and the unhappy woman in the thousand-dollar suit.

“I know. Can you take care of him for me? I need a moment.”

Katie huffs and shakes her head, but she takes the coffeepot from my hand and strolls out to do my job for me with a smile.

Table Front Two is in the bay window next to the front door, overlooking the southbound traffic rushing from downtown to the almost-ritzy residential neighborhoods just over the hill. The unhappy woman sits there with her elbows on the faux-marble tabletop, staring out at the view with those smudgy, bruise-blue eyes. I wonder what she’s seeing. Probably not the cars or the tire company across the road.

“Is this going to be one of your loopy days?” Katie asks me as she puts the coffeepot back on the warmer.

The boys at Goodyear roll tires across the parking lot or stand around chatting while other people’s cars ride up and down on the racks. Occasionally, a mechanic does something that makes a clang we can hear all the way over to our side of the road.

“I’m fine,” I say. I may be lying. I’m not sure.

The woman at Front Two stands up and brushes down her skirt and adjusts the cuffs of her jacket. She pokes around inside her handbag, a little boxy thing the same color as her jacket and skirt, finally extracting a couple of crumpled bills and some change. She drops everything on the table without even looking at it, then walks out the door and disappears up the sidewalk.

“I’m fine,” I say again. If I say it a third time, will that make it true?

The money the woman left on the table comes to just enough to pay for her coffee and provide an adequate, although less than generous, tip.

Among the nickels and dimes, I find an old-fashioned matchbook. I pick it up and look at it. You never see matchbooks anymore. After the Collapse, smoking enjoyed a brief resurgence, but supply-chain and distribution problems hit what my one-time macroeconomics professor liked to call “sin-dustries” particularly hard. These days, nobody under the age of sixty smokes in any serious way, and matchbooks are collector’s items.

Dr. Kimmelman taps his cup on Table Back Three, away there in the shadows, and I pocket the change and the matchbook and hurry off to feed his insatiable need for attention.

•

The rest of the shift is uneventful, aside from old Mx. Brahms putting her hand in my pocket as I’m helping her out of her chair. She tries this every chance she gets, so it’s not really an event, but another customer happens to see her and lets out a guffaw that rattles coffee mugs all over the diner. Mx. Brahms is an ancient widow in perpetual black—her husband died thirty years ago—and she drives a rebuilt pre-Collapse sedan with a dried funeral wreath in the back window. She acts demented, but she’s really sharp as a tack, just bored. She grins at the guy who is laughing and gives my parts a squeeze before she takes her hand back out of my pocket.

At three-thirty, I put on my jacket, make a joke about Katie’s puffy coat—something about blue marshmallows—and clock out.

Katie Mayo is a single mom who lives in a Nazarene enclave out in the suburbs somewhere, huddled with her three-year-old daughter in an unheated two-room apartment over her mother’s garage. Said mother, Violet, believes that only a whore walks out on a husband, no matter who or what he turns out to be, and she treats Katie accordingly. She also blames Katie for the breakup of her own marriage, twenty years ago, when her husband took off one weekend and never came back. Katie gets up every morning, delivers her daughter to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping, and then rides the bus for an hour to dispense coffee and corned beef to businessmen at Gabetta’s Diner. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a well-to-do father out in Bluff Park or an expensive MBA from a respectable university. Life stomps on Katie Mayo again and again, not out of malice but merely from habit, like a bored child kicking the back of the car seat. Also unlike me, when the going gets tough, Katie smiles and dusts herself off and does her job and lives her life, unfailingly competent, pleasant, and uncomplaining.

We get along well at work, but we aren’t really close. Her goodness befuddles me.

I walk up the hill, admiring the way the pigeons navigate the awkward little gusts of wind bouncing around the landscape. They’re not graceful or beautiful, but they always end up exactly where they want to be, in spite of the turbulence between here and there.

I’m still young—well, youngish, if you figure the average life expectancy is about seventy. I still have time to fix things. To grow up. My father has a dry-erase board on the refrigerator at his place that tracks my “Total Days of Being a Sensible Adult.” The number hasn’t moved since I finished college. Pouring coffee at a diner does not qualify as adulting in my father’s view of things. Somebody has to pour the coffee, he’s willing to concede; he just doesn’t think it should be me.

I’ll grow up tomorrow, Dad. Promise.

There’s a bus stop at the top of the hill. I don’t plan to catch the bus, but the bench is a convenient place to sit for a moment under the cold, milk-white sky and think about the unhappy woman.

I dig the matchbook out of my pocket and look at it. Inside, five matches are just stumps and five remain. The cover is dark gray, matte-textured. On the front, a design consisting of two overlapping circles fills the space; the circles are colored a pale blue except at the overlap, which is white. On the back, the letters OT are embossed in silver, set in a conservative, old-fashioned serif typeface. I bring the matchbook up to my nose and sniff it. In addition to the sulfur of the match heads, there’s a hint of jasmine or gardenia—some tropical flower that probably only blooms in moonlight, within the sound of the surf.

If this were a work of fiction, the unhappy woman would have written her phone number inside the matchbook, but it isn’t—as far as I know, anyway—and she didn’t. I wonder about the logo. What does OT stand for? OrganicTurnips? OperationalTrauma? OvereagerTelekinetics?

I tear off one of the matches and light it, and I guess a spark flies off and hits my wrist because I feel a kind of electric sting, like someone touching me after scuffing their shoes on the carpet.

An old man is sitting at the other end of the bench. He wasn’t there when I sat down. He isn’t paying any attention to me; he’s just sitting, staring off into space, maybe reading the sale prices posted in the plate glass windows of the Piggly Wiggly across the street. (Chicken thighs are cheap this week, and red onions are an absolute steal.)

The breeze blows out the match, and I drop it.

The old man sits with his hands cupped over the head of a cane, a polished black one with a steel cap on the end and a silver knob on top. He looks like someone who was important once but got over it. His hands are bony and strong-looking. He has a neat white beard, and his clothes have that plain, spartan look you only see in really high-class men’s haberdashery. His profile is jagged and hard, a rock formation that has collapsed, leaving sharp edges and raw textures exposed to the sun and air.

The bus pulls in, and the old man climbs to his feet, pushing down against the top of his cane for leverage. He gets to the top step and pauses, turning back to look right at me.

“Orbis Tertius,” he says, speaking slowly and clearly. His eyes are set so deep into his skull that I can’t make out what color they are.

The door folds shut, and I see him work his way back to a seat and drop into it. The bus pulls away with a grumble and a snort.

Orbis Tertius.

•

If I need to know something, I go downtown.

My father hearkens back to a day when all of human knowledge could be accessed with a few keystrokes, back before the Collapse turned cyberspace into a suppurating wound. I never knew that time. I was born just as civilization was coming out of its once-in-a-millennium grand mal seizure, still changing its underwear and wiping off its chin. Cell phones and the World Wide Web are interesting stories to me, nothing more, like sabre-toothed tigers, or Superman, or Florida. Things that may or may not have actually existed Once Upon a Time.

“Really, Dad? You carried a phone around with you? In your pocket? What a life that must have been.”

My world is a simpler place. If you want to find out about something, you go to your local branch of the Library. If you want to know something really obscure, possibly dangerous, you go all the way to the Main Library downtown. Orbis Tertius sounds like something you don’t want your parents or your therapist to know you’re interested in. My Eve was wearing a tailored suit instead of a fig leaf, but the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is just as tempting for all that.

The library welcomes me with warm air and a smell of dry rot and inadequate plumbing. It’s like being hugged by your great-grandmother, comforting and a little disgusting at the same time.

Orbis Tertius, “Third Sphere.” Every reference leads back to the same place: a work of fiction from more than a century ago. The logo, at least, checks out: the description of the symbol in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” sounds a lot like what I’ve got on my matchbook.

Meaning what? Was the woman at Front Two familiar with mid-twentieth-century Argentine short-story writers? Her sorrow didn’t seem existential. If I had to guess, I’d say she had found out that her husband was cheating on her or that her Borzoi had heartworm. Something personal, visceral. Was the logo just a coincidence? Was the old man at the bus stop really talking to me? Am I weaving a big crazy blanket out of moonbeams and mistaken impressions?

Maybe. Probably. Yes, no, but what if?

I have the matchbook in my hand, and I’m tapping it on the massive wooden reading room table, turning it forty-five degrees, tapping it again. Corner. Flat side. Corner. Flat side.

Turn and tap.

There are a few people at the other tables, but my notebook and my little pile of books have one big table all to themselves, with only me to disturb their repose. My chair is one of four at the table. Three are empty, purposeless; one has my ass in it. There’s a meaningful occupation for you: keeping my butt off the floor. Somebody has to do it, Dad.

Turn and tap. Turn and tap.

Fiction about another world, where the universe operates according to different principles. Another world so close to ours that the only thing separating the two is a trick of perception.

I’m losing myself in all this nonsense. I like the feeling. I climb out of my chair, excusing myself. The books wave me away, all benevolence.

I go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror. I light another match.

Zing. The shock again.

Should I make a wish?

“Astonish me,” the person in the mirror says. I run water over the match and throw it into the wastebasket.

When I get back out to the reading room, there’s a man standing at my table. He is looking down at the assortment of books I’ve taken from the shelves. He’s younger than I am, absurdly pretty, with curly blond hair and a wide mouth with sculpted lips. His clingy gray pullover displays his chest to advantage. He raises his eyes and sees me coming out of the corridor where the bathrooms are, and he nods once. By the time I get to the table, he’s gone. Somebody beautiful and mysterious was standing right here a moment ago. Now, there’s just me. The chairs are deeply disappointed.

I collect my things and go to the desk.

“This one’s yours, Mx. Merritt.” The librarian stacks most of the books on a cart to be re-shelved, but she pushes one across the counter toward me. “It’s not a library book.”

“Oh. How odd.”

The librarian is a woman of about fifty-five, the age my mother would have been had she survived the bad years immediately after the Collapse. Like Katie, she seems terribly good, too good for me to argue with. Her calm kindness would crush me like a bug if I pushed her too far. She’s the librarian, and I’m somebody who works five days a week at Gabetta’s, pouring coffee and smiling without wanting to.

“I must have brought it from home without noticing,”

The librarian nods politely. “I’m sure that’s what happened,” she says, and her saying it like that makes it the truth.

•

The book has four hundred and ten pages. How do I know this? Because I spent over an hour after supper sitting at my kitchen table counting them, starting over when I zoned out somewhere in the upper two hundreds. The paper is creamy, smooth. Every page is completely blank.

The cover of the book is charcoal-gray fabric glued over boards. The fabric is pale at the corners and along the edges, where it has roughened and frayed with use. The double circle occupies the exact center of the front cover, blue and white. At the top of the spine, the letters XI have been embossed in silver. I assume this is the Roman numeral eleven, although I could be wrong. At the bottom of the spine, small and dignified, are the letters OT.

Orbis Tertius? Why not. Let’s go with that.

•

In the morning, I leave the book where it is and head for the diner half an hour early. I stop in at the bank to deposit the last few days’ tips. The teller is only half awake. He pushes a few coins back through the little window.

“Can’t take these. They’re Old Euros.”

He picks up one coin, something I had assumed was a quarter.

“I can’t take this either,” he says, handing it to me. When his fingertip touches my palm, I receive a faint electric shock. “I have no idea what it is. Maybe it’s not even money at all. Might be a transit token from somewhere. Good for a subway ride in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur.” Taking a closer look, I can see that the coin is bluer, shinier than a quarter, and it has a narrow bronze rim. Instead of George Washington’s noble jowl, there’s a map, just borders and seacoasts, no text. The back displays an old-fashioned compass rose: North, South, East, and West. A four-pointed star superimposed on a circle marked off in degrees.

I thank the teller and pocket the rejects.

•

Dr. Kimmelman is settling in just as I arrive at the diner. Scuttlebutt tells me that Kimmelman is chairman of the psychology department at the University; personal experience tells me that he doesn’t do fuck all at the University. He spends five hours a day sitting at one of our back tables reading magazines and guzzling endless refills of coffee. He never tips.

Katie hasn’t appeared yet when I clock in, but I see her puffy coat up the street, headed this way, so I clock her in, too. It’s very much against the rules, but I’m feeling adventurous.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she shucks her coat and pulls on the short white jacket that we all have to wear. “Mandy was crabby as all get-out this morning. I almost missed the bus, then there was a traffic problem over on Telegraph.”

She’s flustered, which is unusual for her, and I am angry, angry at her daughter for being difficult, angry at the traffic on Telegraph. I’m angry that Katie, who deserves to have things go right at least sometimes, has to put up with all these aggravations.

“I’ve got it under control. Take a few minutes to catch your breath.”

Katie looks startled, and I realize that my being decent and helpful comes as a surprise to her. Upon consideration, it surprises me, too.

A quartet of doctors arrives, attached to the hospital’s prestigious cancer research institute. All four are newly minted, still awed by their professional success. Occasionally, they forget that they are who they are and that I am who I am, and on those occasions, they smile and ask how my day is going as I pour coffee and hand out cinnamon buns.

The morning passes smoothly. The lunch rush is hectic but painless. The people who come in for lunch want to get in, get fed, and get out, with a minimum of fuss. Since that’s what we want, too, everybody gets along.

After lunch is over, I clock out for half an hour to grab something to eat. The kitchen makes me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, and I take it out onto the loading dock.

Amin is there, on a smoke break. Amin is seventy or thereabouts, constructed entirely out of driftwood, all traces of flesh and blood long since eroded away in the currents of time. He was born in a country that no longer exists, a member of a culture whose thousands of years of history ended in a single week thirty years ago. Once Upon a Time, he was a copyright attorney, living in a small but pleasant apartment overlooking a park where his three kids played soccer with other kids from the neighborhood on the weekends. Now, the apartment is rubble, the park is a crater, and his wife and two of his children sleep in the ground in a place he is not permitted ever to visit. His third child, the youngest, was in the park when the bombs fell. All that remains of her is a photograph Amin carries in his wallet, wrapped in plastic, faded to the point that it might as well be a picture of Abraham Lincoln or maybe a loaf of bread. This man has washed dishes at Gabatta’s for almost twenty years.

Amin can converse fluently in any of five languages but chooses not to. He pats his pockets, an unlit cigarette bouncing on his lip.

“I have matches,” I say.

He grunts and turns to face me, his cigarette accusing me of something. I take out my matchbook and light a match. Amin and I both reach to shield the flame, and our hands connect, his hand cupped for a heartbeat within mine, like lovers sleeping spoons. I feel an electric shock in my palm, where his knuckles press against my flesh for that one instant.

Amin nods his thanks, and I shake out the match and toss it away.

“All this,” he says, blowing smoke off to the side. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

That sentence is probably the most I’ve ever heard Amin say in all the years we’ve worked together. I feel off-balance, almost frightened.

“All what?” I ask.

He thrusts out his chin and waves his cigarette to indicate the little courtyard, the dumpster, the mop bucket and mop at the foot of the loading dock steps, the fence, the funeral home on the other side of the fence, the plains on the other side of the funeral home, the ocean beyond the plains, the desert, the olive trees, the place where his children used to play, the place where two of them lie sleeping next to their mother; all that, away, away, gone, gone, gone. The smoke of his gesture hangs for a moment, then dissipates.

“We live in the world we choose,” he says. He speaks a cultivated British English with an accent full of sandpaper consonants and vowels that bubble out from deep in his throat. “Our perceptions shape the universe, just as the universe shapes our perceptions,” he says.

He takes a drag off his cigarette, exhales the smoke slowly, a reverse waterfall coming out of his mouth and rising past his eyes.

“We humans, together, have created all this. There is no God, no Demiurge that we can blame. We live in a world built on fear, on terror, because that is what we want. When we inflict terror on others, we feel strong. When our neighbor suffers terror, we feel virtuous because he is the one suffering, not us. We believe in our hearts that we are spared because we are better than he is. It is a seductive philosophy.”

He smokes, and I stare, my sandwich forgotten.

“We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid. We are afraid to live without the fear. The bloody, clinging embrace of our foul offspring.”

Amin finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt out into the courtyard. He spits onto the pavement at my feet, not a gesture of disrespect but merely something unpleasant caught on his tongue. He nods in my direction and goes back inside.

•

On Friday, I meet someone in a bar after work, and we come back to my place and have sex. The sex is exciting only because it is something rare in my life, something I’ve given up without realizing it, like eating in nice restaurants or separating the lights from the darks at the laundry. Afterward, we agree to do it again in a few days, knowing that we won’t.

I sit at the kitchen table, naked and empty, and look at the mysterious book. Orbis Tertius, Number Eleven. I leaf through it idly, reading my life story in its 410 blank pages, then I open it to the center and let it lie that way while I light a match. I hold up one page and bring the flame to the corner. The paper shrinks, trying to escape, but I hold it in place. It catches fire and burns with a smoky blue flame that smells of my father’s hair after he has been burning sycamore leaves at the end of the driveway.

The flame incinerates only a small section of the page, and then it burns out.

I begin to cry.

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t shed a tear since I was very small. Now, I discover that the tears have been accumulating all this time, fermenting, crystallizing. Oil becomes asphalt, seawater becomes coral, rain becomes trees. My tears have become glass. I’m weeping broken glass, and my belly clenches and heaves as though I were about to give birth to something monstrous. I slowly collapse out of my chair and onto the cold linoleum, clutching at myself, my knees to my chest, the sobs stretching my face into bizarre shapes as they force their way out.

•

A few hours later, I wake up cold and bruised. According to the clock over the stove, it’s four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, that clock is slow. It’s four-ten.

I have one match left.

•

Katie is neither attractive nor unattractive. She’s just Katie. She could be pretty with some effort, or she could be ugly with the same amount of effort. Katie Mayo chooses to do neither. She has more important things to think about.

“I’ve given my two weeks’ notice,” she tells me one morning during a lull.

“You’re kidding.” My face feels as if I’ve just bent down to get something out of the chest freezer in the back.

“Nope.” Katie’s excited, but she’s trying to be nonchalant. I admire both her excitement and her efforts to hide it. “That agency I applied with. They found me a job. The Berkeley Institute.”

“What’s the Barkley Institute?”

“Berkeley.” She spells it. “It’s like the Christian Science Reading Room. They have a library and a meeting hall. Members give lectures.”

“It’s religious?” Katie was born and raised among the Nazarenes, which I believe is something to do with religion, but she and I have never talked about that.

“Not so much religious as philosophical, as I understand it,” she says. We wash the coffeepots, then we set up filters and grounds. I press the red switch, and we stand back, side by side. When the coffee starts to flow, we watch the carafes fill as though it were something new, spellbinding.

“Is it a good job?”

“A little more money, regular hours, some health benefits. The Institute is closer to my apartment, too. Less of a commute.”

The Institute. Katie will be working at a place that calls itself The Institute in a couple of weeks, while I’ll still be pouring coffee all day for Dr. Kimmelman.

“What will you do there?”

“Receptionist, mostly, but also some office work. Typing and filing and some bookkeeping. Stuff like that.”

Katie is a stranger to me. A person with skills. A person with choices. She has, with this one step, traveled to a different place, a new world, a place that doesn’t have me in it.

We live in the world we choose, Amin said.

“I’m glad,” I say. I mean that, and I don’t, at the same time. I’m glad something is going right for Katie, but I’m also unhappy that a change is looming. My inertia is easier to overlook when it’s shared by the people around me.

A young woman comes in and sits at one of the two-tops. She runs her hand over the table and places a stack of typewritten pages squarely in the middle.

“Good morning. Would you like to see a menu?”

She’s about my age, freckled, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair cut in bangs across her forehead. She smiles up at me.

“Not just yet, thank you. Some tea?”

Her voice is crisp and new. She might have only taken it out of the packaging yesterday, and it still has bits of tape stuck to it. I’m sure that if I got close enough to her mouth while she’s speaking, I would be able to detect the bright, plasticky, new-thing smell. I bring her a pot of hot water and a cup and a little ceramic tray containing a selection of teabags.

“The pot is hot,” I warn her, smiling.

She smiles back, and I’m fairly certain I’m in love.

Dr. Kimmelman makes a rude noise back there in his corner, and I bring him the coffeepot, thinking how pleasant it would be to stab him in the eye with a fork.

•

After work, I walk up the hill and sit down at the bus stop. There’s no one else there. I’ve ridden the bus a few times. I own a car, but I rarely drive it. Where would I go? What would I do when I got there? I have my book of blank pages in my lap. I took it to the diner this morning, intending to show it to Katie, but her news flustered me, and I forgot.

I sit upright on the metal bench, looking alert, as if I had somewhere important to be, friends to meet, lovers to embrace. My deception is successful: a blue and white city bus is lured in, and the door pops open. The driver waits exactly 4.10 seconds, then he closes the door, and the bus rolls away.

We live in the world we choose.

I have one match left.

We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid.

I have one match left.

We are afraid to live without the fear.

I have one match left, and I light it carefully, feeling the spark in my fingertips. I hold the corner of the matchbook in the flame, and it burns cheerfully. When I drop it at my feet, the last embers quickly become ash and vanish on the breeze. My fear clutches at me like a desperate child. No, please! Please don’t leave me!

A bus pulls in, and the door opens. This is not a blue and white city bus, but a sleeker, more austere bus, charcoal-gray and sage-green. The driver looks at me. I climb the three steps and the coin box confuses me for a moment.

“Do you have a token?” the driver asks. He’s used to confused people and isn’t terribly interested in why they’re confused.

I fish around in my pocket and bring out the strange coin. I drop it in the slot, and the turnstile clicks.

“Where are you headed?” the driver asks.

“I don’t know.”

He nods. I guess this is a popular destination. Over the windshield, a display alternates between “Terminal” and “OT.”

I pass through the turnstile and take a seat.

There are half a dozen other passengers, reading the newspaper, dozing, looking out the window.

The door closes, and the bus moves smoothly out into traffic.

# # #

Fiction: “The Woman At Front Two”

The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

“More coffee?”

“Please.”

I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

“I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

I make a stupid sort of bow/nod gesture and move away. The man at Back Three is trying to get my attention, holding up his coffee cup like he’s the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for the huddled masses to get their morning dose of Java—but I’m not in the mood for his shit right now.

“Dr. Kimmelman is waving at you,” Katie says. I join her behind the counter, putting thirty inches of Formica between me and the unhappy woman in the thousand-dollar suit.

“I know. Can you take care of him for me? I need a moment.”

Katie huffs and shakes her head, but she takes the coffeepot from my hand and strolls out to do my job for me with a smile.

Table Front Two is in the bay window next to the front door, overlooking the southbound traffic rushing from downtown to the almost-ritzy residential neighborhoods just over the hill. The unhappy woman sits there with her elbows on the faux-marble tabletop, staring out at the view with those smudgy, bruise-blue eyes. I wonder what she’s seeing. Probably not the cars or the tire company across the road.

“Is this going to be one of your loopy days?” Katie asks me as she puts the coffeepot back on the warmer.

The boys at Goodyear roll tires across the parking lot or stand around chatting while other people’s cars ride up and down on the racks. Occasionally, a mechanic does something that makes a clang we can hear all the way over to our side of the road.

“I’m fine,” I say. I may be lying. I’m not sure.

The woman at Front Two stands up and brushes down her skirt and adjusts the cuffs of her jacket. She pokes around inside her handbag, a little boxy thing the same color as her jacket and skirt, finally extracting a couple of crumpled bills and some change. She drops everything on the table without even looking at it, then walks out the door and disappears up the sidewalk.

“I’m fine,” I say again. If I say it a third time, will that make it true?

The money the woman left on the table comes to just enough to pay for her coffee and provide an adequate, although less than generous, tip.

Among the nickels and dimes, I find an old-fashioned matchbook. I pick it up and look at it. You never see matchbooks anymore. After the Collapse, smoking enjoyed a brief resurgence, but supply-chain and distribution problems hit what my one-time macroeconomics professor liked to call “sin-dustries” particularly hard. These days, nobody under the age of sixty smokes in any serious way, and matchbooks are collector’s items.

Dr. Kimmelman taps his cup on Table Back Three, away there in the shadows, and I pocket the change and the matchbook and hurry off to feed his insatiable need for attention.

•

The rest of the shift is uneventful, aside from old Mx. Brahms putting her hand in my pocket as I’m helping her out of her chair. She tries this every chance she gets, so it’s not really an event, but another customer happens to see her and lets out a guffaw that rattles coffee mugs all over the diner. Mx. Brahms is an ancient widow in perpetual black—her husband died thirty years ago—and she drives a rebuilt pre-Collapse sedan with a dried funeral wreath in the back window. She acts demented, but she’s really sharp as a tack, just bored. She grins at the guy who is laughing and gives my parts a squeeze before she takes her hand back out of my pocket.

At three-thirty, I put on my jacket, make a joke about Katie’s puffy coat—something about blue marshmallows—and clock out.

Katie Mayo is a single mom who lives in a Nazarene enclave out in the suburbs somewhere, huddled with her three-year-old daughter in an unheated two-room apartment over her mother’s garage. Said mother, Violet, believes that only a whore walks out on a husband, no matter who or what he turns out to be, and she treats Katie accordingly. She also blames Katie for the breakup of her own marriage, twenty years ago, when her husband took off one weekend and never came back. Katie gets up every morning, delivers her daughter to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping, and then rides the bus for an hour to dispense coffee and corned beef to businessmen at Gabetta’s Diner. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a well-to-do father out in Bluff Park or an expensive MBA from a respectable university. Life stomps on Katie Mayo again and again, not out of malice but merely from habit, like a bored child kicking the back of the car seat. Also unlike me, when the going gets tough, Katie smiles and dusts herself off and does her job and lives her life, unfailingly competent, pleasant, and uncomplaining.

We get along well at work, but we aren’t really close. Her goodness befuddles me.

I walk up the hill, admiring the way the pigeons navigate the awkward little gusts of wind bouncing around the landscape. They’re not graceful or beautiful, but they always end up exactly where they want to be, in spite of the turbulence between here and there.

I’m still young—well, youngish, if you figure the average life expectancy is about seventy. I still have time to fix things. To grow up. My father has a dry-erase board on the refrigerator at his place that tracks my “Total Days of Being a Sensible Adult.” The number hasn’t moved since I finished college. Pouring coffee at a diner does not qualify as adulting in my father’s view of things. Somebody has to pour the coffee, he’s willing to concede; he just doesn’t think it should be me.

I’ll grow up tomorrow, Dad. Promise.

There’s a bus stop at the top of the hill. I don’t plan to catch the bus, but the bench is a convenient place to sit for a moment under the cold, milk-white sky and think about the unhappy woman.

I dig the matchbook out of my pocket and look at it. Inside, five matches are just stumps and five remain. The cover is dark gray, matte-textured. On the front, a design consisting of two overlapping circles fills the space; the circles are colored a pale blue except at the overlap, which is white. On the back, the letters OT are embossed in silver, set in a conservative, old-fashioned serif typeface. I bring the matchbook up to my nose and sniff it. In addition to the sulfur of the match heads, there’s a hint of jasmine or gardenia—some tropical flower that probably only blooms in moonlight, within the sound of the surf.

If this were a work of fiction, the unhappy woman would have written her phone number inside the matchbook, but it isn’t—as far as I know, anyway—and she didn’t. I wonder about the logo. What does OT stand for? OrganicTurnips? OperationalTrauma? OvereagerTelekinetics?

I tear off one of the matches and light it, and I guess a spark flies off and hits my wrist because I feel a kind of electric sting, like someone touching me after scuffing their shoes on the carpet.

An old man is sitting at the other end of the bench. He wasn’t there when I sat down. He isn’t paying any attention to me; he’s just sitting, staring off into space, maybe reading the sale prices posted in the plate glass windows of the Piggly Wiggly across the street. (Chicken thighs are cheap this week, and red onions are an absolute steal.)

The breeze blows out the match, and I drop it.

The old man sits with his hands cupped over the head of a cane, a polished black one with a steel cap on the end and a silver knob on top. He looks like someone who was important once but got over it. His hands are bony and strong-looking. He has a neat white beard, and his clothes have that plain, spartan look you only see in really high-class men’s haberdashery. His profile is jagged and hard, a rock formation that has collapsed, leaving sharp edges and raw textures exposed to the sun and air.

The bus pulls in, and the old man climbs to his feet, pushing down against the top of his cane for leverage. He gets to the top step and pauses, turning back to look right at me.

“Orbis Tertius,” he says, speaking slowly and clearly. His eyes are set so deep into his skull that I can’t make out what color they are.

The door folds shut, and I see him work his way back to a seat and drop into it. The bus pulls away with a grumble and a snort.

Orbis Tertius.

•

If I need to know something, I go downtown.

My father hearkens back to a day when all of human knowledge could be accessed with a few keystrokes, back before the Collapse turned cyberspace into a suppurating wound. I never knew that time. I was born just as civilization was coming out of its once-in-a-millennium grand mal seizure, still changing its underwear and wiping off its chin. Cell phones and the World Wide Web are interesting stories to me, nothing more, like sabre-toothed tigers, or Superman, or Florida. Things that may or may not have actually existed Once Upon a Time.

“Really, Dad? You carried a phone around with you? In your pocket? What a life that must have been.”

My world is a simpler place. If you want to find out about something, you go to your local branch of the Library. If you want to know something really obscure, possibly dangerous, you go all the way to the Main Library downtown. Orbis Tertius sounds like something you don’t want your parents or your therapist to know you’re interested in. My Eve was wearing a tailored suit instead of a fig leaf, but the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is just as tempting for all that.

The library welcomes me with warm air and a smell of dry rot and inadequate plumbing. It’s like being hugged by your great-grandmother, comforting and a little disgusting at the same time.

Orbis Tertius, “Third Sphere.” Every reference leads back to the same place: a work of fiction from more than a century ago. The logo, at least, checks out: the description of the symbol in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” sounds a lot like what I’ve got on my matchbook.

Meaning what? Was the woman at Front Two familiar with mid-twentieth-century Argentine short-story writers? Her sorrow didn’t seem existential. If I had to guess, I’d say she had found out that her husband was cheating on her or that her Borzoi had heartworm. Something personal, visceral. Was the logo just a coincidence? Was the old man at the bus stop really talking to me? Am I weaving a big crazy blanket out of moonbeams and mistaken impressions?

Maybe. Probably. Yes, no, but what if?

I have the matchbook in my hand, and I’m tapping it on the massive wooden reading room table, turning it forty-five degrees, tapping it again. Corner. Flat side. Corner. Flat side.

Turn and tap.

There are a few people at the other tables, but my notebook and my little pile of books have one big table all to themselves, with only me to disturb their repose. My chair is one of four at the table. Three are empty, purposeless; one has my ass in it. There’s a meaningful occupation for you: keeping my butt off the floor. Somebody has to do it, Dad.

Turn and tap. Turn and tap.

Fiction about another world, where the universe operates according to different principles. Another world so close to ours that the only thing separating the two is a trick of perception.

I’m losing myself in all this nonsense. I like the feeling. I climb out of my chair, excusing myself. The books wave me away, all benevolence.

I go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror. I light another match.

Zing. The shock again.

Should I make a wish?

“Astonish me,” the person in the mirror says. I run water over the match and throw it into the wastebasket.

When I get back out to the reading room, there’s a man standing at my table. He is looking down at the assortment of books I’ve taken from the shelves. He’s younger than I am, absurdly pretty, with curly blond hair and a wide mouth with sculpted lips. His clingy gray pullover displays his chest to advantage. He raises his eyes and sees me coming out of the corridor where the bathrooms are, and he nods once. By the time I get to the table, he’s gone. Somebody beautiful and mysterious was standing right here a moment ago. Now, there’s just me. The chairs are deeply disappointed.

I collect my things and go to the desk.

“This one’s yours, Mx. Merritt.” The librarian stacks most of the books on a cart to be re-shelved, but she pushes one across the counter toward me. “It’s not a library book.”

“Oh. How odd.”

The librarian is a woman of about fifty-five, the age my mother would have been had she survived the bad years immediately after the Collapse. Like Katie, she seems terribly good, too good for me to argue with. Her calm kindness would crush me like a bug if I pushed her too far. She’s the librarian, and I’m somebody who works five days a week at Gabetta’s, pouring coffee and smiling without wanting to.

“I must have brought it from home without noticing,”

The librarian nods politely. “I’m sure that’s what happened,” she says, and her saying it like that makes it the truth.

•

The book has four hundred and ten pages. How do I know this? Because I spent over an hour after supper sitting at my kitchen table counting them, starting over when I zoned out somewhere in the upper two hundreds. The paper is creamy, smooth. Every page is completely blank.

The cover of the book is charcoal-gray fabric glued over boards. The fabric is pale at the corners and along the edges, where it has roughened and frayed with use. The double circle occupies the exact center of the front cover, blue and white. At the top of the spine, the letters XI have been embossed in silver. I assume this is the Roman numeral eleven, although I could be wrong. At the bottom of the spine, small and dignified, are the letters OT.

Orbis Tertius? Why not. Let’s go with that.

•

In the morning, I leave the book where it is and head for the diner half an hour early. I stop in at the bank to deposit the last few days’ tips. The teller is only half awake. He pushes a few coins back through the little window.

“Can’t take these. They’re Old Euros.”

He picks up one coin, something I had assumed was a quarter.

“I can’t take this either,” he says, handing it to me. When his fingertip touches my palm, I receive a faint electric shock. “I have no idea what it is. Maybe it’s not even money at all. Might be a transit token from somewhere. Good for a subway ride in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur.” Taking a closer look, I can see that the coin is bluer, shinier than a quarter, and it has a narrow bronze rim. Instead of George Washington’s noble jowl, there’s a map, just borders and seacoasts, no text. The back displays an old-fashioned compass rose: North, South, East, and West. A four-pointed star superimposed on a circle marked off in degrees.

I thank the teller and pocket the rejects.

•

Dr. Kimmelman is settling in just as I arrive at the diner. Scuttlebutt tells me that Kimmelman is chairman of the psychology department at the University; personal experience tells me that he doesn’t do fuck all at the University. He spends five hours a day sitting at one of our back tables reading magazines and guzzling endless refills of coffee. He never tips.

Katie hasn’t appeared yet when I clock in, but I see her puffy coat up the street, headed this way, so I clock her in, too. It’s very much against the rules, but I’m feeling adventurous.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she shucks her coat and pulls on the short white jacket that we all have to wear. “Mandy was crabby as all get-out this morning. I almost missed the bus, then there was a traffic problem over on Telegraph.”

She’s flustered, which is unusual for her, and I am angry, angry at her daughter for being difficult, angry at the traffic on Telegraph. I’m angry that Katie, who deserves to have things go right at least sometimes, has to put up with all these aggravations.

“I’ve got it under control. Take a few minutes to catch your breath.”

Katie looks startled, and I realize that my being decent and helpful comes as a surprise to her. Upon consideration, it surprises me, too.

A quartet of doctors arrives, attached to the hospital’s prestigious cancer research institute. All four are newly minted, still awed by their professional success. Occasionally, they forget that they are who they are and that I am who I am, and on those occasions, they smile and ask how my day is going as I pour coffee and hand out cinnamon buns.

The morning passes smoothly. The lunch rush is hectic but painless. The people who come in for lunch want to get in, get fed, and get out, with a minimum of fuss. Since that’s what we want, too, everybody gets along.

After lunch is over, I clock out for half an hour to grab something to eat. The kitchen makes me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, and I take it out onto the loading dock.

Amin is there, on a smoke break. Amin is seventy or thereabouts, constructed entirely out of driftwood, all traces of flesh and blood long since eroded away in the currents of time. He was born in a country that no longer exists, a member of a culture whose thousands of years of history ended in a single week thirty years ago. Once Upon a Time, he was a copyright attorney, living in a small but pleasant apartment overlooking a park where his three kids played soccer with other kids from the neighborhood on the weekends. Now, the apartment is rubble, the park is a crater, and his wife and two of his children sleep in the ground in a place he is not permitted ever to visit. His third child, the youngest, was in the park when the bombs fell. All that remains of her is a photograph Amin carries in his wallet, wrapped in plastic, faded to the point that it might as well be a picture of Abraham Lincoln or maybe a loaf of bread. This man has washed dishes at Gabatta’s for almost twenty years.

Amin can converse fluently in any of five languages but chooses not to. He pats his pockets, an unlit cigarette bouncing on his lip.

“I have matches,” I say.

He grunts and turns to face me, his cigarette accusing me of something. I take out my matchbook and light a match. Amin and I both reach to shield the flame, and our hands connect, his hand cupped for a heartbeat within mine, like lovers sleeping spoons. I feel an electric shock in my palm, where his knuckles press against my flesh for that one instant.

Amin nods his thanks, and I shake out the match and toss it away.

“All this,” he says, blowing smoke off to the side. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

That sentence is probably the most I’ve ever heard Amin say in all the years we’ve worked together. I feel off-balance, almost frightened.

“All what?” I ask.

He thrusts out his chin and waves his cigarette to indicate the little courtyard, the dumpster, the mop bucket and mop at the foot of the loading dock steps, the fence, the funeral home on the other side of the fence, the plains on the other side of the funeral home, the ocean beyond the plains, the desert, the olive trees, the place where his children used to play, the place where two of them lie sleeping next to their mother; all that, away, away, gone, gone, gone. The smoke of his gesture hangs for a moment, then dissipates.

“We live in the world we choose,” he says. He speaks a cultivated British English with an accent full of sandpaper consonants and vowels that bubble out from deep in his throat. “Our perceptions shape the universe, just as the universe shapes our perceptions,” he says.

He takes a drag off his cigarette, exhales the smoke slowly, a reverse waterfall coming out of his mouth and rising past his eyes.

“We humans, together, have created all this. There is no God, no Demiurge that we can blame. We live in a world built on fear, on terror, because that is what we want. When we inflict terror on others, we feel strong. When our neighbor suffers terror, we feel virtuous because he is the one suffering, not us. We believe in our hearts that we are spared because we are better than he is. It is a seductive philosophy.”

He smokes, and I stare, my sandwich forgotten.

“We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid. We are afraid to live without the fear. The bloody, clinging embrace of our foul offspring.”

Amin finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt out into the courtyard. He spits onto the pavement at my feet, not a gesture of disrespect but merely something unpleasant caught on his tongue. He nods in my direction and goes back inside.

•

On Friday, I meet someone in a bar after work, and we come back to my place and have sex. The sex is exciting only because it is something rare in my life, something I’ve given up without realizing it, like eating in nice restaurants or separating the lights from the darks at the laundry. Afterward, we agree to do it again in a few days, knowing that we won’t.

I sit at the kitchen table, naked and empty, and look at the mysterious book. Orbis Tertius, Number Eleven. I leaf through it idly, reading my life story in its 410 blank pages, then I open it to the center and let it lie that way while I light a match. I hold up one page and bring the flame to the corner. The paper shrinks, trying to escape, but I hold it in place. It catches fire and burns with a smoky blue flame that smells of my father’s hair after he has been burning sycamore leaves at the end of the driveway.

The flame incinerates only a small section of the page, and then it burns out.

I begin to cry.

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t shed a tear since I was very small. Now, I discover that the tears have been accumulating all this time, fermenting, crystallizing. Oil becomes asphalt, seawater becomes coral, rain becomes trees. My tears have become glass. I’m weeping broken glass, and my belly clenches and heaves as though I were about to give birth to something monstrous. I slowly collapse out of my chair and onto the cold linoleum, clutching at myself, my knees to my chest, the sobs stretching my face into bizarre shapes as they force their way out.

•

A few hours later, I wake up cold and bruised. According to the clock over the stove, it’s four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, that clock is slow. It’s four-ten.

I have one match left.

•

Katie is neither attractive nor unattractive. She’s just Katie. She could be pretty with some effort, or she could be ugly with the same amount of effort. Katie Mayo chooses to do neither. She has more important things to think about.

“I’ve given my two weeks’ notice,” she tells me one morning during a lull.

“You’re kidding.” My face feels as if I’ve just bent down to get something out of the chest freezer in the back.

“Nope.” Katie’s excited, but she’s trying to be nonchalant. I admire both her excitement and her efforts to hide it. “That agency I applied with. They found me a job. The Berkeley Institute.”

“What’s the Barkley Institute?”

“Berkeley.” She spells it. “It’s like the Christian Science Reading Room. They have a library and a meeting hall. Members give lectures.”

“It’s religious?” Katie was born and raised among the Nazarenes, which I believe is something to do with religion, but she and I have never talked about that.

“Not so much religious as philosophical, as I understand it,” she says. We wash the coffeepots, then we set up filters and grounds. I press the red switch, and we stand back, side by side. When the coffee starts to flow, we watch the carafes fill as though it were something new, spellbinding.

“Is it a good job?”

“A little more money, regular hours, some health benefits. The Institute is closer to my apartment, too. Less of a commute.”

The Institute. Katie will be working at a place that calls itself The Institute in a couple of weeks, while I’ll still be pouring coffee all day for Dr. Kimmelman.

“What will you do there?”

“Receptionist, mostly, but also some office work. Typing and filing and some bookkeeping. Stuff like that.”

Katie is a stranger to me. A person with skills. A person with choices. She has, with this one step, traveled to a different place, a new world, a place that doesn’t have me in it.

We live in the world we choose, Amin said.

“I’m glad,” I say. I mean that, and I don’t, at the same time. I’m glad something is going right for Katie, but I’m also unhappy that a change is looming. My inertia is easier to overlook when it’s shared by the people around me.

A young woman comes in and sits at one of the two-tops. She runs her hand over the table and places a stack of typewritten pages squarely in the middle.

“Good morning. Would you like to see a menu?”

She’s about my age, freckled, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair cut in bangs across her forehead. She smiles up at me.

“Not just yet, thank you. Some tea?”

Her voice is crisp and new. She might have only taken it out of the packaging yesterday, and it still has bits of tape stuck to it. I’m sure that if I got close enough to her mouth while she’s speaking, I would be able to detect the bright, plasticky, new-thing smell. I bring her a pot of hot water and a cup and a little ceramic tray containing a selection of teabags.

“The pot is hot,” I warn her, smiling.

She smiles back, and I’m fairly certain I’m in love.

Dr. Kimmelman makes a rude noise back there in his corner, and I bring him the coffeepot, thinking how pleasant it would be to stab him in the eye with a fork.

•

After work, I walk up the hill and sit down at the bus stop. There’s no one else there. I’ve ridden the bus a few times. I own a car, but I rarely drive it. Where would I go? What would I do when I got there? I have my book of blank pages in my lap. I took it to the diner this morning, intending to show it to Katie, but her news flustered me, and I forgot.

I sit upright on the metal bench, looking alert, as if I had somewhere important to be, friends to meet, lovers to embrace. My deception is successful: a blue and white city bus is lured in, and the door pops open. The driver waits exactly 4.10 seconds, then he closes the door, and the bus rolls away.

We live in the world we choose.

I have one match left.

We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid.

I have one match left.

We are afraid to live without the fear.

I have one match left, and I light it carefully, feeling the spark in my fingertips. I hold the corner of the matchbook in the flame, and it burns cheerfully. When I drop it at my feet, the last embers quickly become ash and vanish on the breeze. My fear clutches at me like a desperate child. No, please! Please don’t leave me!

A bus pulls in, and the door opens. This is not a blue and white city bus, but a sleeker, more austere bus, charcoal-gray and sage-green. The driver looks at me. I climb the three steps and the coin box confuses me for a moment.

“Do you have a token?” the driver asks. He’s used to confused people and isn’t terribly interested in why they’re confused.

I fish around in my pocket and bring out the strange coin. I drop it in the slot, and the turnstile clicks.

“Where are you headed?” the driver asks.

“I don’t know.”

He nods. I guess this is a popular destination. Over the windshield, a display alternates between “Terminal” and “OT.”

I pass through the turnstile and take a seat.

There are half a dozen other passengers, reading the newspaper, dozing, looking out the window.

The door closes, and the bus moves smoothly out into traffic.

# # #

The Woman At Front Two

The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

“More coffee?”

“Please.”

I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

“I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

I make a stupid sort of bow/nod gesture and move away. The man at Back Three is trying to get my attention, holding up his coffee cup like he’s the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for the huddled masses to get their morning dose of Java—but I’m not in the mood for his shit right now.

“Dr. Kimmelman is waving at you,” Katie says. I join her behind the counter, putting thirty inches of Formica between me and the unhappy woman in the thousand-dollar suit.

“I know. Can you take care of him for me? I need a moment.”

Katie huffs and shakes her head, but she takes the coffeepot from my hand and strolls out to do my job for me with a smile.

Table Front Two is in the bay window next to the front door, overlooking the southbound traffic rushing from downtown to the almost-ritzy residential neighborhoods just over the hill. The unhappy woman sits there with her elbows on the faux-marble tabletop, staring out at the view with those smudgy, bruise-blue eyes. I wonder what she’s seeing. Probably not the cars or the tire company across the road.

“Is this going to be one of your loopy days?” Katie asks me as she puts the coffeepot back on the warmer.

The boys at Goodyear roll tires across the parking lot or stand around chatting while other people’s cars ride up and down on the racks. Occasionally, a mechanic does something that makes a clang we can hear all the way over to our side of the road.

“I’m fine,” I say. I may be lying. I’m not sure.

The woman at Front Two stands up and brushes down her skirt and adjusts the cuffs of her jacket. She pokes around inside her handbag, a little boxy thing the same color as her jacket and skirt, finally extracting a couple of crumpled bills and some change. She drops everything on the table without even looking at it, then walks out the door and disappears up the sidewalk.

“I’m fine,” I say again. If I say it a third time, will that make it true?

The money the woman left on the table comes to just enough to pay for her coffee and provide an adequate, although less than generous, tip.

Among the nickels and dimes, I find an old-fashioned matchbook. I pick it up and look at it. You never see matchbooks anymore. After the Collapse, smoking enjoyed a brief resurgence, but supply-chain and distribution problems hit what my one-time macroeconomics professor liked to call “sin-dustries” particularly hard. These days, nobody under the age of sixty smokes in any serious way, and matchbooks are collector’s items.

Dr. Kimmelman taps his cup on Table Back Three, away there in the shadows, and I pocket the change and the matchbook and hurry off to feed his insatiable need for attention.

•

The rest of the shift is uneventful, aside from old Mx. Brahms putting her hand in my pocket as I’m helping her out of her chair. She tries this every chance she gets, so it’s not really an event, but another customer happens to see her and lets out a guffaw that rattles coffee mugs all over the diner. Mx. Brahms is an ancient widow in perpetual black—her husband died thirty years ago—and she drives a rebuilt pre-Collapse sedan with a dried funeral wreath in the back window. She acts demented, but she’s really sharp as a tack, just bored. She grins at the guy who is laughing and gives my parts a squeeze before she takes her hand back out of my pocket.

At three-thirty, I put on my jacket, make a joke about Katie’s puffy coat—something about blue marshmallows—and clock out.

Katie Mayo is a single mom who lives in a Nazarene enclave out in the suburbs somewhere, huddled with her three-year-old daughter in an unheated two-room apartment over her mother’s garage. Said mother, Violet, believes that only a whore walks out on a husband, no matter who or what he turns out to be, and she treats Katie accordingly. She also blames Katie for the breakup of her own marriage, twenty years ago, when her husband took off one weekend and never came back. Katie gets up every morning, delivers her daughter to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping, and then rides the bus for an hour to dispense coffee and corned beef to businessmen at Gabetta’s Diner. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a well-to-do father out in Bluff Park or an expensive MBA from a respectable university. Life stomps on Katie Mayo again and again, not out of malice but merely from habit, like a bored child kicking the back of the car seat. Also unlike me, when the going gets tough, Katie smiles and dusts herself off and does her job and lives her life, unfailingly competent, pleasant, and uncomplaining.

We get along well at work, but we aren’t really close. Her goodness befuddles me.

I walk up the hill, admiring the way the pigeons navigate the awkward little gusts of wind bouncing around the landscape. They’re not graceful or beautiful, but they always end up exactly where they want to be, in spite of the turbulence between here and there.

I’m still young—well, youngish, if you figure the average life expectancy is about seventy. I still have time to fix things. To grow up. My father has a dry-erase board on the refrigerator at his place that tracks my “Total Days of Being a Sensible Adult.” The number hasn’t moved since I finished college. Pouring coffee at a diner does not qualify as adulting in my father’s view of things. Somebody has to pour the coffee, he’s willing to concede; he just doesn’t think it should be me.

I’ll grow up tomorrow, Dad. Promise.

There’s a bus stop at the top of the hill. I don’t plan to catch the bus, but the bench is a convenient place to sit for a moment under the cold, milk-white sky and think about the unhappy woman.

I dig the matchbook out of my pocket and look at it. Inside, five matches are just stumps and five remain. The cover is dark gray, matte-textured. On the front, a design consisting of two overlapping circles fills the space; the circles are colored a pale blue except at the overlap, which is white. On the back, the letters OT are embossed in silver, set in a conservative, old-fashioned serif typeface. I bring the matchbook up to my nose and sniff it. In addition to the sulfur of the match heads, there’s a hint of jasmine or gardenia—some tropical flower that probably only blooms in moonlight, within the sound of the surf.

If this were a work of fiction, the unhappy woman would have written her phone number inside the matchbook, but it isn’t—as far as I know, anyway—and she didn’t. I wonder about the logo. What does OT stand for? OrganicTurnips? OperationalTrauma? OvereagerTelekinetics?

I tear off one of the matches and light it, and I guess a spark flies off and hits my wrist because I feel a kind of electric sting, like someone touching me after scuffing their shoes on the carpet.

An old man is sitting at the other end of the bench. He wasn’t there when I sat down. He isn’t paying any attention to me; he’s just sitting, staring off into space, maybe reading the sale prices posted in the plate glass windows of the Piggly Wiggly across the street. (Chicken thighs are cheap this week, and red onions are an absolute steal.)

The breeze blows out the match, and I drop it.

The old man sits with his hands cupped over the head of a cane, a polished black one with a steel cap on the end and a silver knob on top. He looks like someone who was important once but got over it. His hands are bony and strong-looking. He has a neat white beard, and his clothes have that plain, spartan look you only see in really high-class men’s haberdashery. His profile is jagged and hard, a rock formation that has collapsed, leaving sharp edges and raw textures exposed to the sun and air.

The bus pulls in, and the old man climbs to his feet, pushing down against the top of his cane for leverage. He gets to the top step and pauses, turning back to look right at me.

“Orbis Tertius,” he says, speaking slowly and clearly. His eyes are set so deep into his skull that I can’t make out what color they are.

The door folds shut, and I see him work his way back to a seat and drop into it. The bus pulls away with a grumble and a snort.

Orbis Tertius.

•

If I need to know something, I go downtown.

My father hearkens back to a day when all of human knowledge could be accessed with a few keystrokes, back before the Collapse turned cyberspace into a suppurating wound. I never knew that time. I was born just as civilization was coming out of its once-in-a-millennium grand mal seizure, still changing its underwear and wiping off its chin. Cell phones and the World Wide Web are interesting stories to me, nothing more, like sabre-toothed tigers, or Superman, or Florida. Things that may or may not have actually existed Once Upon a Time.

“Really, Dad? You carried a phone around with you? In your pocket? What a life that must have been.”

My world is a simpler place. If you want to find out about something, you go to your local branch of the Library. If you want to know something really obscure, possibly dangerous, you go all the way to the Main Library downtown. Orbis Tertius sounds like something you don’t want your parents or your therapist to know you’re interested in. My Eve was wearing a tailored suit instead of a fig leaf, but the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is just as tempting for all that.

The library welcomes me with warm air and a smell of dry rot and inadequate plumbing. It’s like being hugged by your great-grandmother, comforting and a little disgusting at the same time.

Orbis Tertius, “Third Sphere.” Every reference leads back to the same place: a work of fiction from more than a century ago. The logo, at least, checks out: the description of the symbol in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” sounds a lot like what I’ve got on my matchbook.

Meaning what? Was the woman at Front Two familiar with mid-twentieth-century Argentine short-story writers? Her sorrow didn’t seem existential. If I had to guess, I’d say she had found out that her husband was cheating on her or that her Borzoi had heartworm. Something personal, visceral. Was the logo just a coincidence? Was the old man at the bus stop really talking to me? Am I weaving a big crazy blanket out of moonbeams and mistaken impressions?

Maybe. Probably. Yes, no, but what if?

I have the matchbook in my hand, and I’m tapping it on the massive wooden reading room table, turning it forty-five degrees, tapping it again. Corner. Flat side. Corner. Flat side.

Turn and tap.

There are a few people at the other tables, but my notebook and my little pile of books have one big table all to themselves, with only me to disturb their repose. My chair is one of four at the table. Three are empty, purposeless; one has my ass in it. There’s a meaningful occupation for you: keeping my butt off the floor. Somebody has to do it, Dad.

Turn and tap. Turn and tap.

Fiction about another world, where the universe operates according to different principles. Another world so close to ours that the only thing separating the two is a trick of perception.

I’m losing myself in all this nonsense. I like the feeling. I climb out of my chair, excusing myself. The books wave me away, all benevolence.

I go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror. I light another match.

Zing. The shock again.

Should I make a wish?

“Astonish me,” the person in the mirror says. I run water over the match and throw it into the wastebasket.

When I get back out to the reading room, there’s a man standing at my table. He is looking down at the assortment of books I’ve taken from the shelves. He’s younger than I am, absurdly pretty, with curly blond hair and a wide mouth with sculpted lips. His clingy gray pullover displays his chest to advantage. He raises his eyes and sees me coming out of the corridor where the bathrooms are, and he nods once. By the time I get to the table, he’s gone. Somebody beautiful and mysterious was standing right here a moment ago. Now, there’s just me. The chairs are deeply disappointed.

I collect my things and go to the desk.

“This one’s yours, Mx. Merritt.” The librarian stacks most of the books on a cart to be re-shelved, but she pushes one across the counter toward me. “It’s not a library book.”

“Oh. How odd.”

The librarian is a woman of about fifty-five, the age my mother would have been had she survived the bad years immediately after the Collapse. Like Katie, she seems terribly good, too good for me to argue with. Her calm kindness would crush me like a bug if I pushed her too far. She’s the librarian, and I’m somebody who works five days a week at Gabetta’s, pouring coffee and smiling without wanting to.

“I must have brought it from home without noticing,”

The librarian nods politely. “I’m sure that’s what happened,” she says, and her saying it like that makes it the truth.

•

The book has four hundred and ten pages. How do I know this? Because I spent over an hour after supper sitting at my kitchen table counting them, starting over when I zoned out somewhere in the upper two hundreds. The paper is creamy, smooth. Every page is completely blank.

The cover of the book is charcoal-gray fabric glued over boards. The fabric is pale at the corners and along the edges, where it has roughened and frayed with use. The double circle occupies the exact center of the front cover, blue and white. At the top of the spine, the letters XI have been embossed in silver. I assume this is the Roman numeral eleven, although I could be wrong. At the bottom of the spine, small and dignified, are the letters OT.

Orbis Tertius? Why not. Let’s go with that.

•

In the morning, I leave the book where it is and head for the diner half an hour early. I stop in at the bank to deposit the last few days’ tips. The teller is only half awake. He pushes a few coins back through the little window.

“Can’t take these. They’re Old Euros.”

He picks up one coin, something I had assumed was a quarter.

“I can’t take this either,” he says, handing it to me. When his fingertip touches my palm, I receive a faint electric shock. “I have no idea what it is. Maybe it’s not even money at all. Might be a transit token from somewhere. Good for a subway ride in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur.” Taking a closer look, I can see that the coin is bluer, shinier than a quarter, and it has a narrow bronze rim. Instead of George Washington’s noble jowl, there’s a map, just borders and seacoasts, no text. The back displays an old-fashioned compass rose: North, South, East, and West. A four-pointed star superimposed on a circle marked off in degrees.

I thank the teller and pocket the rejects.

•

Dr. Kimmelman is settling in just as I arrive at the diner. Scuttlebutt tells me that Kimmelman is chairman of the psychology department at the University; personal experience tells me that he doesn’t do fuck all at the University. He spends five hours a day sitting at one of our back tables reading magazines and guzzling endless refills of coffee. He never tips.

Katie hasn’t appeared yet when I clock in, but I see her puffy coat up the street, headed this way, so I clock her in, too. It’s very much against the rules, but I’m feeling adventurous.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she shucks her coat and pulls on the short white jacket that we all have to wear. “Mandy was crabby as all get-out this morning. I almost missed the bus, then there was a traffic problem over on Telegraph.”

She’s flustered, which is unusual for her, and I am angry, angry at her daughter for being difficult, angry at the traffic on Telegraph. I’m angry that Katie, who deserves to have things go right at least sometimes, has to put up with all these aggravations.

“I’ve got it under control. Take a few minutes to catch your breath.”

Katie looks startled, and I realize that my being decent and helpful comes as a surprise to her. Upon consideration, it surprises me, too.

A quartet of doctors arrives, attached to the hospital’s prestigious cancer research institute. All four are newly minted, still awed by their professional success. Occasionally, they forget that they are who they are and that I am who I am, and on those occasions, they smile and ask how my day is going as I pour coffee and hand out cinnamon buns.

The morning passes smoothly. The lunch rush is hectic but painless. The people who come in for lunch want to get in, get fed, and get out, with a minimum of fuss. Since that’s what we want, too, everybody gets along.

After lunch is over, I clock out for half an hour to grab something to eat. The kitchen makes me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, and I take it out onto the loading dock.

Amin is there, on a smoke break. Amin is seventy or thereabouts, constructed entirely out of driftwood, all traces of flesh and blood long since eroded away in the currents of time. He was born in a country that no longer exists, a member of a culture whose thousands of years of history ended in a single week thirty years ago. Once Upon a Time, he was a copyright attorney, living in a small but pleasant apartment overlooking a park where his three kids played soccer with other kids from the neighborhood on the weekends. Now, the apartment is rubble, the park is a crater, and his wife and two of his children sleep in the ground in a place he is not permitted ever to visit. His third child, the youngest, was in the park when the bombs fell. All that remains of her is a photograph Amin carries in his wallet, wrapped in plastic, faded to the point that it might as well be a picture of Abraham Lincoln or maybe a loaf of bread. This man has washed dishes at Gabatta’s for almost twenty years.

Amin can converse fluently in any of five languages but chooses not to. He pats his pockets, an unlit cigarette bouncing on his lip.

“I have matches,” I say.

He grunts and turns to face me, his cigarette accusing me of something. I take out my matchbook and light a match. Amin and I both reach to shield the flame, and our hands connect, his hand cupped for a heartbeat within mine, like lovers sleeping spoons. I feel an electric shock in my palm, where his knuckles press against my flesh for that one instant.

Amin nods his thanks, and I shake out the match and toss it away.

“All this,” he says, blowing smoke off to the side. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

That sentence is probably the most I’ve ever heard Amin say in all the years we’ve worked together. I feel off-balance, almost frightened.

“All what?” I ask.

He thrusts out his chin and waves his cigarette to indicate the little courtyard, the dumpster, the mop bucket and mop at the foot of the loading dock steps, the fence, the funeral home on the other side of the fence, the plains on the other side of the funeral home, the ocean beyond the plains, the desert, the olive trees, the place where his children used to play, the place where two of them lie sleeping next to their mother; all that, away, away, gone, gone, gone. The smoke of his gesture hangs for a moment, then dissipates.

“We live in the world we choose,” he says. He speaks a cultivated British English with an accent full of sandpaper consonants and vowels that bubble out from deep in his throat. “Our perceptions shape the universe, just as the universe shapes our perceptions,” he says.

He takes a drag off his cigarette, exhales the smoke slowly, a reverse waterfall coming out of his mouth and rising past his eyes.

“We humans, together, have created all this. There is no God, no Demiurge that we can blame. We live in a world built on fear, on terror, because that is what we want. When we inflict terror on others, we feel strong. When our neighbor suffers terror, we feel virtuous because he is the one suffering, not us. We believe in our hearts that we are spared because we are better than he is. It is a seductive philosophy.”

He smokes, and I stare, my sandwich forgotten.

“We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid. We are afraid to live without the fear. The bloody, clinging embrace of our foul offspring.”

Amin finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt out into the courtyard. He spits onto the pavement at my feet, not a gesture of disrespect but merely something unpleasant caught on his tongue. He nods in my direction and goes back inside.

•

On Friday, I meet someone in a bar after work, and we come back to my place and have sex. The sex is exciting only because it is something rare in my life, something I’ve given up without realizing it, like eating in nice restaurants or separating the lights from the darks at the laundry. Afterward, we agree to do it again in a few days, knowing that we won’t.

I sit at the kitchen table, naked and empty, and look at the mysterious book. Orbis Tertius, Number Eleven. I leaf through it idly, reading my life story in its 410 blank pages, then I open it to the center and let it lie that way while I light a match. I hold up one page and bring the flame to the corner. The paper shrinks, trying to escape, but I hold it in place. It catches fire and burns with a smoky blue flame that smells of my father’s hair after he has been burning sycamore leaves at the end of the driveway.

The flame incinerates only a small section of the page, and then it burns out.

I begin to cry.

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t shed a tear since I was very small. Now, I discover that the tears have been accumulating all this time, fermenting, crystallizing. Oil becomes asphalt, seawater becomes coral, rain becomes trees. My tears have become glass. I’m weeping broken glass, and my belly clenches and heaves as though I were about to give birth to something monstrous. I slowly collapse out of my chair and onto the cold linoleum, clutching at myself, my knees to my chest, the sobs stretching my face into bizarre shapes as they force their way out.

•

A few hours later, I wake up cold and bruised. According to the clock over the stove, it’s four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, that clock is slow. It’s four-ten.

I have one match left.

•

Katie is neither attractive nor unattractive. She’s just Katie. She could be pretty with some effort, or she could be ugly with the same amount of effort. Katie Mayo chooses to do neither. She has more important things to think about.

“I’ve given my two weeks’ notice,” she tells me one morning during a lull.

“You’re kidding.” My face feels as if I’ve just bent down to get something out of the chest freezer in the back.

“Nope.” Katie’s excited, but she’s trying to be nonchalant. I admire both her excitement and her efforts to hide it. “That agency I applied with. They found me a job. The Berkeley Institute.”

“What’s the Barkley Institute?”

“Berkeley.” She spells it. “It’s like the Christian Science Reading Room. They have a library and a meeting hall. Members give lectures.”

“It’s religious?” Katie was born and raised among the Nazarenes, which I believe is something to do with religion, but she and I have never talked about that.

“Not so much religious as philosophical, as I understand it,” she says. We wash the coffeepots, then we set up filters and grounds. I press the red switch, and we stand back, side by side. When the coffee starts to flow, we watch the carafes fill as though it were something new, spellbinding.

“Is it a good job?”

“A little more money, regular hours, some health benefits. The Institute is closer to my apartment, too. Less of a commute.”

The Institute. Katie will be working at a place that calls itself The Institute in a couple of weeks, while I’ll still be pouring coffee all day for Dr. Kimmelman.

“What will you do there?”

“Receptionist, mostly, but also some office work. Typing and filing and some bookkeeping. Stuff like that.”

Katie is a stranger to me. A person with skills. A person with choices. She has, with this one step, traveled to a different place, a new world, a place that doesn’t have me in it.

We live in the world we choose, Amin said.

“I’m glad,” I say. I mean that, and I don’t, at the same time. I’m glad something is going right for Katie, but I’m also unhappy that a change is looming. My inertia is easier to overlook when it’s shared by the people around me.

A young woman comes in and sits at one of the two-tops. She runs her hand over the table and places a stack of typewritten pages squarely in the middle.

“Good morning. Would you like to see a menu?”

She’s about my age, freckled, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair cut in bangs across her forehead. She smiles up at me.

“Not just yet, thank you. Some tea?”

Her voice is crisp and new. She might have only taken it out of the packaging yesterday, and it still has bits of tape stuck to it. I’m sure that if I got close enough to her mouth while she’s speaking, I would be able to detect the bright, plasticky, new-thing smell. I bring her a pot of hot water and a cup and a little ceramic tray containing a selection of teabags.

“The pot is hot,” I warn her, smiling.

She smiles back, and I’m fairly certain I’m in love.

Dr. Kimmelman makes a rude noise back there in his corner, and I bring him the coffeepot, thinking how pleasant it would be to stab him in the eye with a fork.

•

After work, I walk up the hill and sit down at the bus stop. There’s no one else there. I’ve ridden the bus a few times. I own a car, but I rarely drive it. Where would I go? What would I do when I got there? I have my book of blank pages in my lap. I took it to the diner this morning, intending to show it to Katie, but her news flustered me, and I forgot.

I sit upright on the metal bench, looking alert, as if I had somewhere important to be, friends to meet, lovers to embrace. My deception is successful: a blue and white city bus is lured in, and the door pops open. The driver waits exactly 4.10 seconds, then he closes the door, and the bus rolls away.

We live in the world we choose.

I have one match left.

We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid.

I have one match left.

We are afraid to live without the fear.

I have one match left, and I light it carefully, feeling the spark in my fingertips. I hold the corner of the matchbook in the flame, and it burns cheerfully. When I drop it at my feet, the last embers quickly become ash and vanish on the breeze. My fear clutches at me like a desperate child. No, please! Please don’t leave me!

A bus pulls in, and the door opens. This is not a blue and white city bus, but a sleeker, more austere bus, charcoal-gray and sage-green. The driver looks at me. I climb the three steps and the coin box confuses me for a moment.

“Do you have a token?” the driver asks. He’s used to confused people and isn’t terribly interested in why they’re confused.

I fish around in my pocket and bring out the strange coin. I drop it in the slot, and the turnstile clicks.

“Where are you headed?” the driver asks.

“I don’t know.”

He nods. I guess this is a popular destination. Over the windshield, a display alternates between “Terminal” and “OT.”

I pass through the turnstile and take a seat.

There are half a dozen other passengers, reading the newspaper, dozing, looking out the window.

The door closes, and the bus moves smoothly out into traffic.

# # #

Please note that all the short stories posted here also h...

Please note that all the short stories posted here also have audio versions available. You’ll find them on my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@DavidLeeHolcomb.

“Pirates”

The visitor wore cargo shorts two sizes too big, a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, grimy canvas deck shoes, and a blond ponytail.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t have a library card. I’m a pirate.”

Kellie Lovell didn’t bat an eyelash. Situations like this came with her job.

“In that case, you won’t be able to take any materials out of the building.”

The man smiled. He was missing a tooth on the left side, lower jaw.

“Yes, ma’am. I understand. Where I’m staying, I don’t have much room for books.”

The librarian nodded. She assumed that the visitor was living in one of two nearby facilities, a homeless shelter and an assisted-living center, which together provided a number of unusual library visitors every week.

“Tell me again the name of the ship?”

“It’s the Bountiful Bess,” the visitor said. “She was the Battling Bess, but me and my friends, we changed the name. We didn’t want to give the wrong impression.”

“And you want to know where the Bountiful Bess is at the moment?”

“Yes, ma’am. People I talked to, they all said that if you wanted to know something, this was the place to go.”

Kellie did a quick search for internet references to a seagoing vessel called Bountiful Bess but came up empty. Battling Bess yielded the same lack of results.

The visitor had given his name as Ezra Semple. He said he was a sailor—a ship’s captain, in fact—and that he had, due to circumstances beyond his control, become separated from his ship and crew. On impulse, Kellie searched for Ezra Semple.

Here, she had better luck. There was one Ezra Semple listed on an obscure history site. That Ezra Semple was, indeed, a pirate, sought by the UK authorities for having intercepted and appropriated a shipment of textiles headed for Jamaica. The warrant for his arrest was dated to 1807.

“I’m not seeing anything useful, Mr. Semple,” Kellie said.

Semple nodded, looking down at her fingers dancing on the keyboard.

“I don’t altogether understand what you’re doing,” he said, “but if you say you don’t have anything for me, then you don’t.”

Kellie looked up at him. He might have been handsome before life started kicking him around, a stocky little Viking with blue eyes and a gap-toothed charm. She guessed his age at about thirty-five, but the map of wrinkles drawn around his eyes added ten years to that, while his smile took away twenty.

“Wait right here a moment, Mr. Semple.”

Kellie got up and walked back to the “bullpen,” where the IT department explored mysteries beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

“Willis?” A young-old man with heavy glasses and a haircut that could only have been self-inflicted looked up.

“S’up?”

“Do you still belong to that group that tracks celebrities’ private air travel?”

“Yup.”

“What about ships?”

Willis pushed his glasses up and frowned at her. “Ships?”

“Do you track ocean-going vessels?”

He looked surprised, then intrigued.

“Actually, we don’t, but I know somebody who does. Are you planning a cruise?”

“I’m looking for a ship. A specific ship. The ship’s captain is at the desk as we speak.”

Willis unfolded his praying mantis limbs from the chair. “Let’s get some more info.”

When the two librarians returned to the desk, Ezra Semple was gone.

“Damn,” Kellie said. “I really wanted to turn you two loose on each other. A man looking for a ship that probably doesn’t exist, and a man who delights in looking for information that may or may not be out there.”

“Maybe he’ll be back,” Willis offered. “You say he’s a ship’s captain?”

Kellie grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”

·

Kellie could hear the television from the driveway. She could also smell smoke. She rushed through the back door and into the kitchen.

The room reeked of burned food. On the stove, a two-quart copper-bottom Revere Ware saucepan, one that her mother had bought when Kellie was a child, was half-full of solid black char, and the outside of the pan was scorched. The handle had cracked where it attached to the body of the pan. On the floor in front of the stove were the shattered remains of a plate, a coffee cup, and a drinking glass.

Kellie stood in front of the stove without speaking, without tears. All the tears had long since been used up. She pulled a trash bag off the roll under the sink and collected the debris from the floor, then dropped the saucepan on top of it and tied off the bag. She carried the bag out to the trash can and stuffed it inside.

The sounds of Law & Order reruns reverberated off the privacy fencing, coming right through the walls of the house. She returned inside and looked into the living room where her father sat slumped in his chair, rage rippling off him like the heat from a burning coal mine. Old rage. Deep-rooted rage. Rage carved out of ancient strata of spite. She looked at the back of his head and sighed. He wanted her to confront him about the mess in the kitchen so he could bellow and curse at her about cheap stoves made in Communist hellholes, about her not being there to make his lunch, or about the pitiful excuse for a wife and mother who had the gall to drop dead just when he needed her most.

Kellie retreated to her bedroom and locked the door.

She wanted her father to hurry up and die, and she hated herself for feeling that way, which made her hate him even more for being the kind of person who could only improve the world by departing from it.

She took a Xanax and lay down on the bed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, she thought.

·

A week and a half after his first visit, Ezra Semple returned to the library’s information desk. He was wearing the same shirt and shorts, but his shoes had been replaced by a pair of flip-flops that were a size too large. His feet were dirty, but his toenails were neatly trimmed.

“What happened to your shoes, Mr. Semple?”

He glanced down with a sheepish grin. “Somebody took ‘em,” he said.

“Did you tell someone on staff? They could probably track down who did it and get them back for you.”

“‘Staff’?”

“The people who work in the place where you’re staying.”

Semple laughed. “You mean like a butler and a cook and a maid and all o’ them? I ain’t nearly that fancy. I just got a little hut down on the beach.”

The nearest beach was …What? Five hundred miles away? There was something so plausible and guileless about Ezra Semple that Kellie was pulled up short when he hit her with nonsense like that.

“I’m sorry someone stole from you, Mr. Semple,” she said primly.

He shrugged. “I took enough of other people’s stuff when I had my ship under me,” he said. “It’d be foolish to complain.”

Kellie picked up the desk phone and called Willis.

“Our friend is here,” she said. “Yes, that friend.”

She hung up and smiled at Semple. “One of my co-workers knows someone who is an expert on finding ships,” she told him. “Maybe he’ll be able to help you.”

When Willis approached the desk, Semple extended a hand. “Captain Ezra Semple, at your service.”

“Willis Byrd, at yours.”

Willis looked at Kellie, and she smiled. “Captain Semple is looking for a ship.”

“I hope I can help,” Willis said. “Can you describe the ship to me, Captain?”

“I could just about paint you a picture,” he said.

“Let’s start with a verbal description.”

Semple smiled and nodded. Kellie was struck again by how strangely charming the man was, despite the smell of urine and sweat that clung to his clothes, the grime on his hands and feet, and his general air of someone who had been left out in the weather too long.

“She’s a sloop, not so big, but oh, so quick!”

Willis grabbed a scratch pad and started scribbling.

“Two-masted, Seventy foot keel, twenty foot beam, rigged fore-and-aft, Bermuda style. Twelve-foot bowsprit. Her hull’s painted black with two neat blue stripes. Twenty crew. Four guns—barely big enough to call ‘em guns—twelve-pounder carronades we took from a French merchantman off Marie-Galante. Almost more trouble than they’re worth on a little ship like the Bess, but one or two shots from a cannon—even a toy like ours—does a lot to let the other man know you mean business, so we keep the guns and use ‘em when we have to. We prefer—” He produced the word as though it were a prize of great value. “—to rely on speed and skill rather than guns to do our job.”

“What job is that, Captain Semple?”

“Privateering,” Semple replied.

Willis didn’t miss a beat. “What’s the name of the ship?”

“She’s Bountiful Bess. Used to be Battling Bess.”

Willis looked at his notes. “Where did you last see the ship?”

Semple smiled, his expression thoughtful. “Off the coast of Hispaniola, that was. About fifty miles north of Cap Haitien. We was on our way to the Caicos, to put in at the lagoon at Balfour Town. A storm came up, and everything went to the devil. I got knocked overboard, and I been looking for the Bess ever since.”

“Cap Haitien is just about a thousand miles from here, Captain Semple.”

Semple nodded. “I been at this a while,” he said.

Willis looked at Kellie, then extended his hand to Semple.

“Okay, Captain Semple. I’ll take this information and see what I can find out. Why don’t you check back with us in a day or two?”

The pirate shook Willis’s hand. Rather than a handshake, he offered Kellie a courtly bow.

“I’m sorry, ma’am; I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Kellie Lovell,” she said, tapping the ID card that hung on a lanyard around her neck.

“Mr. Byrd, Miz Lovell, I’m more obliged to you both than I can truly say. I’ve been trying to get back to my sweet lady for so long.”

·

Three days after Willis Byrd met Ezra Semple, Kellie came home to find her father lying on the floor outside her bedroom door in a daze, cursing and flailing but unable to pull himself up. Kellie rushed over to see to him, but when she bent down, he grabbed a handful of her hair, and she had to fight her way free.

“Bitch,” he hissed. “Locked me out! My house!”

“Dad, that’s my bedroom, not yours.” And strictly speaking, it wasn’t his house anymore, either, since he mortgaged it and gave all the money to a televangelist, leaving Kellie to take on the responsibility for sorting things out. Now, at forty-two, she was making mortgage payments on a house that had been paid off in full a decade ago.

“My house! All of it! Every fucking inch!” her father snarled.

While she waited for the ambulance to arrive, Kellie ascertained that her father had fallen while trying to bash down the door to her bedroom. He accused her of locking the remote for the television in her room. Kellie looked into the living room and saw that the remote was on the floor next to the entertainment center, where it always landed when he threw it at the television.

Three hours later, she was sitting on a bench in a remarkably depressing hallway, talking to an ER doctor whose stomach kept growling throughout the conversation.

“We have to do some tests, and the neurologist will need to see him, but my guess is that he has had either a TIA or a small stroke. Do you know what a TIA is?”

Kellie nodded. “Transient ischemic accident.” When the doctor looked surprised, she added, “I work in a library. You pick up all sorts of things.”

“I’m sure. Well, he may be back to normal in a day, or it could be longer. I have to tell you that there is also the risk of a more significant event in the future.”

“What kind of event?”

“A stroke. Is your father always so …?”

Mean? Hateful? Vicious? she thought. “Opinionated?” she said aloud. “Yes. He’s been like that ever since my mother died.”

“His general physical condition is good, but he has some circulatory issues—probably due to a sedentary lifestyle—and that very high-stress personality … There is a risk.”

Kellie nodded again. None of this was news to her.

“What do I do?”

“Are you the only caregiver?”

“Yes. My mother died eight years ago, and I’m an only child. He has a brother, but they haven’t spoken to each other in fifty years.”

“I’m sure that’s very difficult for you.” The doctor’s stomach made a noise, and he grimaced. “I’m sorry. Double shift. I missed lunch.”

“I understand. So what happens next?”

“We’d like to keep him overnight and let the neurologist look in on him in the morning. He may prescribe more tests, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Can I see him?”

The doctor stood. “Of course. We gave him something to calm him down, so he might seem a bit woozy, but that’s natural.”

“I understand.”

The man in the bed looked up at her, and his face darkened. “Get me out of here.”

“Not until tomorrow,” she said. “They think you might have had a small stroke or something, and they want to be sure you’re going to be all right.”

“You ungrateful bitch.”

Even drugged and disoriented, his rage glowed like a beacon, burning Kellie’s face. She tried to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Words, like tears, had long been exhausted. She turned and walked out the door.

·

Kellie’s father ended up spending two more days in the hospital, after which the special-needs transit service brought him home while Kellie hurried ahead to make sure the television remote was where he would be expecting it to be.

A week later, Kellie came home from the library to find her father stiff and cold in his chair, his face more peaceful than she had ever seen it, his hand clenched so tightly on the remote control that the battery cover had popped off.

·

Kellie went back to work two weeks after her father’s death. She was, to all intents and purposes, her normal self. She had not so much processed her loss as simply set it aside, a box of awfulness that she would open and sort through when she felt the time was right. The people and habits and quiet, calm routines of her job gave her a sense of gravity, of orientation, and helped her keep the lid of that box securely fastened.

Willis Byrd came loping out to the information desk on a gray, wet, miserable Tuesday, grinning.

“What’s got you so effervescent on this crappy day?” Kellie asked.

“The Bountiful Bess—née Battling Bess—was a British sloop that began life as a military vessel but was taken by pirates off the Bahamas in 1798. It vanished in a storm in 1811.”

“Off the coast of Hispaniola, I presume.”

“You presume correctly.”

“Go on.”

“Ezra Semple was, at one time, mate on a completely different British sloop, until 1798, when he jumped ship.”

“In the Bahamas?”

“In the Bahamas. Next time we hear about him is 1807, when British authorities issue arrest warrants for one Ezra Hogue Semple, formerly of the Royal Navy, on charges of piracy. According to the warrants, Semple is the current master of the Battling Bess, which had—as we’ve just heard—been hijacked by pirates nine years previously.”

Kellie sat back in her chair, letting her head roll against the headrest.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m fine. Our Ezra Semple seems to have researched his role very thoroughly.”

Willis pulled up another chair and folded himself into it.

“I got the info on the ship from an online friend in London who specializes in the histories of British ships from the age of sail. Does your pirate strike you as the sort of person who would have access to sources like that?”

“Obviously he is, because his story has been consistent with what you’ve learned all down the line.”

Willis grinned. “Or … ”

“Or what? Oh, no, you don’t! He’s not some two-hundred-year-old Flying Dutchman. Don’t even start.”

Willis slid a page of carefully organized notes along the desk and climbed out of the chair. “Keep me posted on what happens next,” he said. “I’m really digging your pirate.”

“He’s not my pirate,” Kellie snapped, but Willis had already gone back to his lair.

·

Kellie had always assumed that once her father was gone, she would be able to craft a life for herself based on her tastes, her comfort, her wishes. She called Central Thrift, and they came and took away the recliner and the television. She cleaned the house, top to bottom, and delivered a load to Goodwill: bags of clothes, bedding, an electric razor, a walker. Like turning a ship at sea, she slowly drew the house off her father’s course and onto one of her own choosing.

But she still couldn’t rest.

What should I have done differently? Was he right? Was it my fault he was such a terrible person? What does that make me? The questions came rushing at her every morning when she woke up and were waiting to greet her every evening when she came home.

Eight years ago, Kellie’s mother ate two bottles of hoarded painkillers and washed them down with tequila from a bottle shaped like a prickly-pear cactus. Kellie had been given no opportunity to grieve because her father immediately demanded that she give up her apartment and move back into her parents’ house to take care of him.

“I’m your goddamn father!” he told her. “You belong here!”

In a decision she questioned every day thereafter, Kellie did what he wanted—what she believed was the right thing to do.

·

A week before Thanksgiving, Kellie sat down to eat her lunch on the edge of one of the planters in front of the library doors. The air was chilly but not unbearable, and a thin, watery sunlight came and went with every breeze. From where she was sitting, she could see past the building across the street, all the way down the hill, the gentle slope marked off by four traffic lights playing through their cycles. Beyond the fourth intersection, the road curved away out of sight to merge with a bigger highway, after which it continued, now a mere tributary of a larger flow, into the east.

Across the street, she spotted a man in shorts, barefoot, strolling down the sidewalk. The weather wasn’t wintry, but it was far too cold for bare feet.

He stopped at the corner to look up and down the street, and Kellie saw that the barefoot man was, predictably, Ezra Semple.

“Mr. Semple! Where are your shoes?”

He looked up, surprised, then smiled and trotted across the street.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. Those little things I had just wore out, I’m afraid.”

Kellie stared at him. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kellie thought for a moment, and then she handed her lunchbox to the pirate. “Will you be so kind as to watch this for me? I have to run inside for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Of course.”

Kellie had filled up a couple of bags with items that had belonged to her father: new clothes that he hadn’t worn, shoes he hadn’t liked, a quilt that was too small for his bed. She had distributed some of the contents to various co-workers who had use for the castoffs, leaving her with one bag. She pulled the bag out from under the desk and brought it outside.

She had half-expected Semple to have vanished again, but there he sat, holding her lunchbox as though it contained pirate treasure.

“Thank you, Mr. Semple.” She took the lunchbox from him and set it aside, then set the bag down next to his feet. “These are some things that belonged to my father. They’re new, or like new, and I have no use for any of this stuff. If you don’t mind wearing the clothes of a dead man, I would be grateful if you would take it off my hands.”

“Don’t you have sons or brothers or anyone who has a better claim than a stranger?”

“No, I don’t. Please accept it.”

Semple bent down and picked up the big brown bag, setting it on the wall next to him.

“Thank you, ma’am. It’ll be an honor to wear your father’s things.”

The giving of charity and the accepting of it created an awkwardness. Kellie chewed her sandwich as Semple sat gazing down the hill, his expression quiet, even serene.

“What made you decide to come here?” the librarian asked.

“Here, ma’am?”

“To this town.”

Semple narrowed his eyes, looking away into the distance. “Truth be told, ma’am, I don’t know. I just had a feelin’, I guess.”

A young woman with two small children in tow walked past, headed for the entrance. The younger of the children, a girl, waved and smiled at Kellie and Semple as she passed. Semple smiled back at her, and she giggled as her mother pulled her into the building.

“Sometimes,” Semple went on, “you hear a place calling out to you. It’s like the world sees you needing something, looking for something, and so it says your name, like a whisper. You have to be real quiet to hear it. I heard the whisper, so here I am.”

“Do you think you’ll find what you’re looking for?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all in the Lord’s hands.” He smiled and glanced over at her almost shyly. “But, you know, I’ve met some good people, kind and wise, that I won’t be so bold as to call my friends. I never learned to read or write more than my name, but now I’ve seen more books in one place than I ever knew were in the world. The trip is worthwhile just for those things. And who knows? My Bess is out there somewhere. Sooner or later, she an’ me will end up in the same place at the same time. Just takes a little patience.”

“A little patience.”

“Yes, ma’am. A little patience.”

·

Kellie spent the holidays quietly, staying away from crowds and festivity. She treated herself to a fancy restaurant meal on the weekend before Christmas and wondered what Ezra Semple was doing and how he was celebrating the holidays. Presumably, whatever facility he was in would provide a holiday meal.

Willis and his online friend in London were unable to gather any more information about the Bountiful Bess. They assumed it had gone to the bottom during that storm in 1811, and the story ended there. Did the man calling himself Ezra Semple know that? Or did he believe that both he and the ship had survived the storm and were now wandering the earth looking for each other more than two hundred years later?

What did Kellie believe? She no longer knew.

Life without her father was both remarkably pleasant and remarkably empty. All the routines of life took less time than they had before, leaving empty spaces. She could clean the kitchen, and an hour later, it would still be clean. Only one bathroom had to be scrubbed. With the television and the piss-stained recliner out of the house, she had more room in the living room to spread things out, to make things nice and keep them neat. On Christmas Eve, she bought flowers and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. On Christmas morning, they were still there, not strewn across the floor, along with the shards of the vase.

Two days after Christmas, she went out to a deli for lunch, not simply ordering takeout, but sitting on a stool, being waited on, being smiled at.

Her gratitude and relief were almost as profound as the guilt she felt for having such feelings.

In the bottom drawer of her dresser, where she kept clothes that she never wore but didn’t want to get rid of, she had hidden a photograph in a silver frame. It was just a snapshot, but in it, a handsome young couple and a big-eyed little girl stood in front of a tree eating ice cream cones. The woman was reaching down with a napkin to catch a blob of ice cream that was about to slide off the child’s cone. Kellie had kept that photograph hidden away for such a long time that those three people were strangers to her. She put the picture on top of the dresser, moving other bric-a-brac out of the way to give it pride of place, and then she stepped back to look at it. After a few minutes, she picked the photo up and returned it to the drawer, pulling sweaters and never-worn lingerie over it. She closed the drawer and walked out of the room.

·

New Year’s Day dawned cold but bright, with a thin midwinter sun touching up the colors of knitted caps, leftover Christmas decorations, and the poinsettias just inside the Post Office’s plate glass windows. Kellie put on the new coat she had given herself for Christmas and went walking.

Ezra Semple had not been back since the day she gave him her father’s clothes. Some people, she knew, were offended by charity. Had she driven him away? Did she care?

She did care. Maybe Semple had been some sort of con man, perhaps merely a lunatic, but his was a noble madness. The world might be a better place, she thought, if more people were that crazy. She wondered how he had spent Christmas and with whom. Did he have friends? Fellow inmates in whatever place it was that gave him a bed?

She found herself walking down the long hill from the library, her surroundings so familiar that she no longer saw them.

Someday, he’ll find his ship, she thought as she waited for the first light to change. Someday, he and Bountiful Bess and their crew will head back out to terrorize the shipping and pillage the coastal towns. He would be a polite marauder, she knew, always thanking the people he robbed—assuming he hadn’t found it necessary to shoot them—and apologizing to the women hiding in basements and attics for any inconvenience they might be suffering. I’m sorry about all this fuss, ma’am. We’ll just take the gold and the jewels and be on our way.

The second and third lights were green when she came to them, so she sailed on without slacking her pace, lost in thought. She loved her job; she loved the people she worked with and the books that were their stock in trade. She had a comfortable home—

Here, she stumbled. Someday, her home would be comfortable, but not just yet. The walls were saturated with so much pain and anger. Only time would allow that stain to evaporate. She would have to have a little patience.

A little patience.

A car honked its horn, and she realized she was at the fourth traffic light. She stopped, her vision blurring. She stepped back away from the curb and steadied herself against the light pole.

Just have to have a little patience.

The traffic sailed by, left to right, right to left. Beside her, other cars queued up, waiting for their turn. From here, she had a view of the valley below. The hospital there, its upper floors protruding from the trees that surrounded it. Over there, the Target where she bought her new coat. Down there, the garage where she got her oil changed twice a year.

But—

The horizon was all wrong. Instead of suburbs rolling gently into the haze of distance, there was a line like the edge of a knife, slicing the world in two. Above the line was the winter sky. Below it was the subtle gray of—

No.

Where was the hospital? There was no hospital. Instead, a ramshackle clutter of docks and piers spilled out into the—

No.

To the south, a kind of slum covered the beach, makeshift huts thrown together from oddments of wood and fabric, hunkered low to the ground against the heaving gray bosom of the—

No. No. No.

Kellie wiped her eyes, only then realizing that she was crying. She took a deep breath, calming herself.

Behind her was the long slope of the hill, the main street with its shops and strip malls, and the library crowning the heights like a temple, her refuge, her home.

Before her—

Before her was the sea. One ship was out in the harbor, slowly turning into the wind, bringing its bow around to face the infinite, empty expanse that stretched to the horizon. One ship. It was a sloop; she knew that. It was a sloop because it had to be. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. Two masts. Probably rigged Bermuda-style, although she wasn’t an expert. It was hard to estimate size with nothing near it for comparison, but she figured … oh, maybe seventy feet along the keel, plus another twelve for the bowsprit, and twenty wide? She looked for guns, but the angle was wrong. Maybe they had gone overboard in the storm.

She was laughing and crying at the same time, and her vision kept doubling and redoubling: one ship, two ships, a whole fleet, then back to one.

The paint job was so dark it could only be black. Relieved by two thin stripes of heartbreaking sky blue.

The traffic light changed, and now the flow was down to the beach and up from the beach. Somehow.

The ship in the harbor finally completed its turn and began to diminish toward that terrifying horizon, a horizon so sharp and plain that it would cut your life in half if you tried to cross over it.

“Are you okay?”

Kellie started, shocked for a moment. A tiny, gray-haired woman in a Christmas sweater and a puffy pink coat touched her on the arm.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?”

“I’m fine. I must have looked like a crazy person. I was … I was thinking about someone.”

The stranger nodded, returning her smile. “It’s the season for that.” The light changed. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, thank you so much.”

The good Samaritan hurried across the street just as the light turned yellow.

Kellie looked out and saw the hospital among its trees, and the Target, and the Jiffy-Lube. She saw the road curving away into Suburbia, and the houses and shops and hotels and malls rolling away toward the far, far horizon.

Still smiling, she wiped her eyes and turned toward home.

# # #

Fiction: “Pirates”

The visitor wore cargo shorts two sizes too big, a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, grimy canvas deck shoes, and a blond ponytail.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t have a library card. I’m a pirate.”

Kellie Lovell didn’t bat an eyelash. Situations like this came with her job.

“In that case, you won’t be able to take any materials out of the building.”

The man smiled. He was missing a tooth on the left side, lower jaw.

“Yes, ma’am. I understand. Where I’m staying, I don’t have much room for books.”

The librarian nodded. She assumed that the visitor was living in one of two nearby facilities, a homeless shelter and an assisted-living center, which together provided a number of unusual library visitors every week.

“Tell me again the name of the ship?”

“It’s the Bountiful Bess,” the visitor said. “She was the Battling Bess, but me and my friends, we changed the name. We didn’t want to give the wrong impression.”

“And you want to know where the Bountiful Bess is at the moment?”

“Yes, ma’am. People I talked to, they all said that if you wanted to know something, this was the place to go.”

Kellie did a quick search for internet references to a seagoing vessel called Bountiful Bess but came up empty. Battling Bess yielded the same lack of results.

The visitor had given his name as Ezra Semple. He said he was a sailor—a ship’s captain, in fact—and that he had, due to circumstances beyond his control, become separated from his ship and crew. On impulse, Kellie searched for Ezra Semple.

Here, she had better luck. There was one Ezra Semple listed on an obscure history site. That Ezra Semple was, indeed, a pirate, sought by the UK authorities for having intercepted and appropriated a shipment of textiles headed for Jamaica. The warrant for his arrest was dated to 1807.

“I’m not seeing anything useful, Mr. Semple,” Kellie said.

Semple nodded, looking down at her fingers dancing on the keyboard.

“I don’t altogether understand what you’re doing,” he said, “but if you say you don’t have anything for me, then you don’t.”

Kellie looked up at him. He might have been handsome before life started kicking him around, a stocky little Viking with blue eyes and a gap-toothed charm. She guessed his age at about thirty-five, but the map of wrinkles drawn around his eyes added ten years to that, while his smile took away twenty.

“Wait right here a moment, Mr. Semple.”

Kellie got up and walked back to the “bullpen,” where the IT department explored mysteries beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

“Willis?” A young-old man with heavy glasses and a haircut that could only have been self-inflicted looked up.

“S’up?”

“Do you still belong to that group that tracks celebrities’ private air travel?”

“Yup.”

“What about ships?”

Willis pushed his glasses up and frowned at her. “Ships?”

“Do you track ocean-going vessels?”

He looked surprised, then intrigued.

“Actually, we don’t, but I know somebody who does. Are you planning a cruise?”

“I’m looking for a ship. A specific ship. The ship’s captain is at the desk as we speak.”

Willis unfolded his praying mantis limbs from the chair. “Let’s get some more info.”

When the two librarians returned to the desk, Ezra Semple was gone.

“Damn,” Kellie said. “I really wanted to turn you two loose on each other. A man looking for a ship that probably doesn’t exist, and a man who delights in looking for information that may or may not be out there.”

“Maybe he’ll be back,” Willis offered. “You say he’s a ship’s captain?”

Kellie grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”

·

Kellie could hear the television from the driveway. She could also smell smoke. She rushed through the back door and into the kitchen.

The room reeked of burned food. On the stove, a two-quart copper-bottom Revere Ware saucepan, one that her mother had bought when Kellie was a child, was half-full of solid black char, and the outside of the pan was scorched. The handle had cracked where it attached to the body of the pan. On the floor in front of the stove were the shattered remains of a plate, a coffee cup, and a drinking glass.

Kellie stood in front of the stove without speaking, without tears. All the tears had long since been used up. She pulled a trash bag off the roll under the sink and collected the debris from the floor, then dropped the saucepan on top of it and tied off the bag. She carried the bag out to the trash can and stuffed it inside.

The sounds of Law & Order reruns reverberated off the privacy fencing, coming right through the walls of the house. She returned inside and looked into the living room where her father sat slumped in his chair, rage rippling off him like the heat from a burning coal mine. Old rage. Deep-rooted rage. Rage carved out of ancient strata of spite. She looked at the back of his head and sighed. He wanted her to confront him about the mess in the kitchen so he could bellow and curse at her about cheap stoves made in Communist hellholes, about her not being there to make his lunch, or about the pitiful excuse for a wife and mother who had the gall to drop dead just when he needed her most.

Kellie retreated to her bedroom and locked the door.

She wanted her father to hurry up and die, and she hated herself for feeling that way, which made her hate him even more for being the kind of person who could only improve the world by departing from it.

She took a Xanax and lay down on the bed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, she thought.

·

A week and a half after his first visit, Ezra Semple returned to the library’s information desk. He was wearing the same shirt and shorts, but his shoes had been replaced by a pair of flip-flops that were a size too large. His feet were dirty, but his toenails were neatly trimmed.

“What happened to your shoes, Mr. Semple?”

He glanced down with a sheepish grin. “Somebody took ‘em,” he said.

“Did you tell someone on staff? They could probably track down who did it and get them back for you.”

“‘Staff’?”

“The people who work in the place where you’re staying.”

Semple laughed. “You mean like a butler and a cook and a maid and all o’ them? I ain’t nearly that fancy. I just got a little hut down on the beach.”

The nearest beach was …What? Five hundred miles away? There was something so plausible and guileless about Ezra Semple that Kellie was pulled up short when he hit her with nonsense like that.

“I’m sorry someone stole from you, Mr. Semple,” she said primly.

He shrugged. “I took enough of other people’s stuff when I had my ship under me,” he said. “It’d be foolish to complain.”

Kellie picked up the desk phone and called Willis.

“Our friend is here,” she said. “Yes, that friend.”

She hung up and smiled at Semple. “One of my co-workers knows someone who is an expert on finding ships,” she told him. “Maybe he’ll be able to help you.”

When Willis approached the desk, Semple extended a hand. “Captain Ezra Semple, at your service.”

“Willis Byrd, at yours.”

Willis looked at Kellie, and she smiled. “Captain Semple is looking for a ship.”

“I hope I can help,” Willis said. “Can you describe the ship to me, Captain?”

“I could just about paint you a picture,” he said.

“Let’s start with a verbal description.”

Semple smiled and nodded. Kellie was struck again by how strangely charming the man was, despite the smell of urine and sweat that clung to his clothes, the grime on his hands and feet, and his general air of someone who had been left out in the weather too long.

“She’s a sloop, not so big, but oh, so quick!”

Willis grabbed a scratch pad and started scribbling.

“Two-masted, Seventy foot keel, twenty foot beam, rigged fore-and-aft, Bermuda style. Twelve-foot bowsprit. Her hull’s painted black with two neat blue stripes. Twenty crew. Four guns—barely big enough to call ‘em guns—twelve-pounder carronades we took from a French merchantman off Marie-Galante. Almost more trouble than they’re worth on a little ship like the Bess, but one or two shots from a cannon—even a toy like ours—does a lot to let the other man know you mean business, so we keep the guns and use ‘em when we have to. We prefer—” He produced the word as though it were a prize of great value. “—to rely on speed and skill rather than guns to do our job.”

“What job is that, Captain Semple?”

“Privateering,” Semple replied.

Willis didn’t miss a beat. “What’s the name of the ship?”

“She’s Bountiful Bess. Used to be Battling Bess.”

Willis looked at his notes. “Where did you last see the ship?”

Semple smiled, his expression thoughtful. “Off the coast of Hispaniola, that was. About fifty miles north of Cap Haitien. We was on our way to the Caicos, to put in at the lagoon at Balfour Town. A storm came up, and everything went to the devil. I got knocked overboard, and I been looking for the Bess ever since.”

“Cap Haitien is just about a thousand miles from here, Captain Semple.”

Semple nodded. “I been at this a while,” he said.

Willis looked at Kellie, then extended his hand to Semple.

“Okay, Captain Semple. I’ll take this information and see what I can find out. Why don’t you check back with us in a day or two?”

The pirate shook Willis’s hand. Rather than a handshake, he offered Kellie a courtly bow.

“I’m sorry, ma’am; I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Kellie Lovell,” she said, tapping the ID card that hung on a lanyard around her neck.

“Mr. Byrd, Miz Lovell, I’m more obliged to you both than I can truly say. I’ve been trying to get back to my sweet lady for so long.”

·

Three days after Willis Byrd met Ezra Semple, Kellie came home to find her father lying on the floor outside her bedroom door in a daze, cursing and flailing but unable to pull himself up. Kellie rushed over to see to him, but when she bent down, he grabbed a handful of her hair, and she had to fight her way free.

“Bitch,” he hissed. “Locked me out! My house!”

“Dad, that’s my bedroom, not yours.” And strictly speaking, it wasn’t his house anymore, either, since he mortgaged it and gave all the money to a televangelist, leaving Kellie to take on the responsibility for sorting things out. Now, at forty-two, she was making mortgage payments on a house that had been paid off in full a decade ago.

“My house! All of it! Every fucking inch!” her father snarled.

While she waited for the ambulance to arrive, Kellie ascertained that her father had fallen while trying to bash down the door to her bedroom. He accused her of locking the remote for the television in her room. Kellie looked into the living room and saw that the remote was on the floor next to the entertainment center, where it always landed when he threw it at the television.

Three hours later, she was sitting on a bench in a remarkably depressing hallway, talking to an ER doctor whose stomach kept growling throughout the conversation.

“We have to do some tests, and the neurologist will need to see him, but my guess is that he has had either a TIA or a small stroke. Do you know what a TIA is?”

Kellie nodded. “Transient ischemic accident.” When the doctor looked surprised, she added, “I work in a library. You pick up all sorts of things.”

“I’m sure. Well, he may be back to normal in a day, or it could be longer. I have to tell you that there is also the risk of a more significant event in the future.”

“What kind of event?”

“A stroke. Is your father always so …?”

Mean? Hateful? Vicious? she thought. “Opinionated?” she said aloud. “Yes. He’s been like that ever since my mother died.”

“His general physical condition is good, but he has some circulatory issues—probably due to a sedentary lifestyle—and that very high-stress personality … There is a risk.”

Kellie nodded again. None of this was news to her.

“What do I do?”

“Are you the only caregiver?”

“Yes. My mother died eight years ago, and I’m an only child. He has a brother, but they haven’t spoken to each other in fifty years.”

“I’m sure that’s very difficult for you.” The doctor’s stomach made a noise, and he grimaced. “I’m sorry. Double shift. I missed lunch.”

“I understand. So what happens next?”

“We’d like to keep him overnight and let the neurologist look in on him in the morning. He may prescribe more tests, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“Can I see him?”

The doctor stood. “Of course. We gave him something to calm him down, so he might seem a bit woozy, but that’s natural.”

“I understand.”

The man in the bed looked up at her, and his face darkened. “Get me out of here.”

“Not until tomorrow,” she said. “They think you might have had a small stroke or something, and they want to be sure you’re going to be all right.”

“You ungrateful bitch.”

Even drugged and disoriented, his rage glowed like a beacon, burning Kellie’s face. She tried to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Words, like tears, had long been exhausted. She turned and walked out the door.

·

Kellie’s father ended up spending two more days in the hospital, after which the special-needs transit service brought him home while Kellie hurried ahead to make sure the television remote was where he would be expecting it to be.

A week later, Kellie came home from the library to find her father stiff and cold in his chair, his face more peaceful than she had ever seen it, his hand clenched so tightly on the remote control that the battery cover had popped off.

·

Kellie went back to work two weeks after her father’s death. She was, to all intents and purposes, her normal self. She had not so much processed her loss as simply set it aside, a box of awfulness that she would open and sort through when she felt the time was right. The people and habits and quiet, calm routines of her job gave her a sense of gravity, of orientation, and helped her keep the lid of that box securely fastened.

Willis Byrd came loping out to the information desk on a gray, wet, miserable Tuesday, grinning.

“What’s got you so effervescent on this crappy day?” Kellie asked.

“The Bountiful Bess—née Battling Bess—was a British sloop that began life as a military vessel but was taken by pirates off the Bahamas in 1798. It vanished in a storm in 1811.”

“Off the coast of Hispaniola, I presume.”

“You presume correctly.”

“Go on.”

“Ezra Semple was, at one time, mate on a completely different British sloop, until 1798, when he jumped ship.”

“In the Bahamas?”

“In the Bahamas. Next time we hear about him is 1807, when British authorities issue arrest warrants for one Ezra Hogue Semple, formerly of the Royal Navy, on charges of piracy. According to the warrants, Semple is the current master of the Battling Bess, which had—as we’ve just heard—been hijacked by pirates nine years previously.”

Kellie sat back in her chair, letting her head roll against the headrest.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m fine. Our Ezra Semple seems to have researched his role very thoroughly.”

Willis pulled up another chair and folded himself into it.

“I got the info on the ship from an online friend in London who specializes in the histories of British ships from the age of sail. Does your pirate strike you as the sort of person who would have access to sources like that?”

“Obviously he is, because his story has been consistent with what you’ve learned all down the line.”

Willis grinned. “Or … ”

“Or what? Oh, no, you don’t! He’s not some two-hundred-year-old Flying Dutchman. Don’t even start.”

Willis slid a page of carefully organized notes along the desk and climbed out of the chair. “Keep me posted on what happens next,” he said. “I’m really digging your pirate.”

“He’s not my pirate,” Kellie snapped, but Willis had already gone back to his lair.

·

Kellie had always assumed that once her father was gone, she would be able to craft a life for herself based on her tastes, her comfort, her wishes. She called Central Thrift, and they came and took away the recliner and the television. She cleaned the house, top to bottom, and delivered a load to Goodwill: bags of clothes, bedding, an electric razor, a walker. Like turning a ship at sea, she slowly drew the house off her father’s course and onto one of her own choosing.

But she still couldn’t rest.

What should I have done differently? Was he right? Was it my fault he was such a terrible person? What does that make me? The questions came rushing at her every morning when she woke up and were waiting to greet her every evening when she came home.

Eight years ago, Kellie’s mother ate two bottles of hoarded painkillers and washed them down with tequila from a bottle shaped like a prickly-pear cactus. Kellie had been given no opportunity to grieve because her father immediately demanded that she give up her apartment and move back into her parents’ house to take care of him.

“I’m your goddamn father!” he told her. “You belong here!”

In a decision she questioned every day thereafter, Kellie did what he wanted—what she believed was the right thing to do.

·

A week before Thanksgiving, Kellie sat down to eat her lunch on the edge of one of the planters in front of the library doors. The air was chilly but not unbearable, and a thin, watery sunlight came and went with every breeze. From where she was sitting, she could see past the building across the street, all the way down the hill, the gentle slope marked off by four traffic lights playing through their cycles. Beyond the fourth intersection, the road curved away out of sight to merge with a bigger highway, after which it continued, now a mere tributary of a larger flow, into the east.

Across the street, she spotted a man in shorts, barefoot, strolling down the sidewalk. The weather wasn’t wintry, but it was far too cold for bare feet.

He stopped at the corner to look up and down the street, and Kellie saw that the barefoot man was, predictably, Ezra Semple.

“Mr. Semple! Where are your shoes?”

He looked up, surprised, then smiled and trotted across the street.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. Those little things I had just wore out, I’m afraid.”

Kellie stared at him. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kellie thought for a moment, and then she handed her lunchbox to the pirate. “Will you be so kind as to watch this for me? I have to run inside for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Of course.”

Kellie had filled up a couple of bags with items that had belonged to her father: new clothes that he hadn’t worn, shoes he hadn’t liked, a quilt that was too small for his bed. She had distributed some of the contents to various co-workers who had use for the castoffs, leaving her with one bag. She pulled the bag out from under the desk and brought it outside.

She had half-expected Semple to have vanished again, but there he sat, holding her lunchbox as though it contained pirate treasure.

“Thank you, Mr. Semple.” She took the lunchbox from him and set it aside, then set the bag down next to his feet. “These are some things that belonged to my father. They’re new, or like new, and I have no use for any of this stuff. If you don’t mind wearing the clothes of a dead man, I would be grateful if you would take it off my hands.”

“Don’t you have sons or brothers or anyone who has a better claim than a stranger?”

“No, I don’t. Please accept it.”

Semple bent down and picked up the big brown bag, setting it on the wall next to him.

“Thank you, ma’am. It’ll be an honor to wear your father’s things.”

The giving of charity and the accepting of it created an awkwardness. Kellie chewed her sandwich as Semple sat gazing down the hill, his expression quiet, even serene.

“What made you decide to come here?” the librarian asked.

“Here, ma’am?”

“To this town.”

Semple narrowed his eyes, looking away into the distance. “Truth be told, ma’am, I don’t know. I just had a feelin’, I guess.”

A young woman with two small children in tow walked past, headed for the entrance. The younger of the children, a girl, waved and smiled at Kellie and Semple as she passed. Semple smiled back at her, and she giggled as her mother pulled her into the building.

“Sometimes,” Semple went on, “you hear a place calling out to you. It’s like the world sees you needing something, looking for something, and so it says your name, like a whisper. You have to be real quiet to hear it. I heard the whisper, so here I am.”

“Do you think you’ll find what you’re looking for?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s all in the Lord’s hands.” He smiled and glanced over at her almost shyly. “But, you know, I’ve met some good people, kind and wise, that I won’t be so bold as to call my friends. I never learned to read or write more than my name, but now I’ve seen more books in one place than I ever knew were in the world. The trip is worthwhile just for those things. And who knows? My Bess is out there somewhere. Sooner or later, she an’ me will end up in the same place at the same time. Just takes a little patience.”

“A little patience.”

“Yes, ma’am. A little patience.”

·

Kellie spent the holidays quietly, staying away from crowds and festivity. She treated herself to a fancy restaurant meal on the weekend before Christmas and wondered what Ezra Semple was doing and how he was celebrating the holidays. Presumably, whatever facility he was in would provide a holiday meal.

Willis and his online friend in London were unable to gather any more information about the Bountiful Bess. They assumed it had gone to the bottom during that storm in 1811, and the story ended there. Did the man calling himself Ezra Semple know that? Or did he believe that both he and the ship had survived the storm and were now wandering the earth looking for each other more than two hundred years later?

What did Kellie believe? She no longer knew.

Life without her father was both remarkably pleasant and remarkably empty. All the routines of life took less time than they had before, leaving empty spaces. She could clean the kitchen, and an hour later, it would still be clean. Only one bathroom had to be scrubbed. With the television and the piss-stained recliner out of the house, she had more room in the living room to spread things out, to make things nice and keep them neat. On Christmas Eve, she bought flowers and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. On Christmas morning, they were still there, not strewn across the floor, along with the shards of the vase.

Two days after Christmas, she went out to a deli for lunch, not simply ordering takeout, but sitting on a stool, being waited on, being smiled at.

Her gratitude and relief were almost as profound as the guilt she felt for having such feelings.

In the bottom drawer of her dresser, where she kept clothes that she never wore but didn’t want to get rid of, she had hidden a photograph in a silver frame. It was just a snapshot, but in it, a handsome young couple and a big-eyed little girl stood in front of a tree eating ice cream cones. The woman was reaching down with a napkin to catch a blob of ice cream that was about to slide off the child’s cone. Kellie had kept that photograph hidden away for such a long time that those three people were strangers to her. She put the picture on top of the dresser, moving other bric-a-brac out of the way to give it pride of place, and then she stepped back to look at it. After a few minutes, she picked the photo up and returned it to the drawer, pulling sweaters and never-worn lingerie over it. She closed the drawer and walked out of the room.

·

New Year’s Day dawned cold but bright, with a thin midwinter sun touching up the colors of knitted caps, leftover Christmas decorations, and the poinsettias just inside the Post Office’s plate glass windows. Kellie put on the new coat she had given herself for Christmas and went walking.

Ezra Semple had not been back since the day she gave him her father’s clothes. Some people, she knew, were offended by charity. Had she driven him away? Did she care?

She did care. Maybe Semple had been some sort of con man, perhaps merely a lunatic, but his was a noble madness. The world might be a better place, she thought, if more people were that crazy. She wondered how he had spent Christmas and with whom. Did he have friends? Fellow inmates in whatever place it was that gave him a bed?

She found herself walking down the long hill from the library, her surroundings so familiar that she no longer saw them.

Someday, he’ll find his ship, she thought as she waited for the first light to change. Someday, he and Bountiful Bess and their crew will head back out to terrorize the shipping and pillage the coastal towns. He would be a polite marauder, she knew, always thanking the people he robbed—assuming he hadn’t found it necessary to shoot them—and apologizing to the women hiding in basements and attics for any inconvenience they might be suffering. I’m sorry about all this fuss, ma’am. We’ll just take the gold and the jewels and be on our way.

The second and third lights were green when she came to them, so she sailed on without slacking her pace, lost in thought. She loved her job; she loved the people she worked with and the books that were their stock in trade. She had a comfortable home—

Here, she stumbled. Someday, her home would be comfortable, but not just yet. The walls were saturated with so much pain and anger. Only time would allow that stain to evaporate. She would have to have a little patience.

A little patience.

A car honked its horn, and she realized she was at the fourth traffic light. She stopped, her vision blurring. She stepped back away from the curb and steadied herself against the light pole.

Just have to have a little patience.

The traffic sailed by, left to right, right to left. Beside her, other cars queued up, waiting for their turn. From here, she had a view of the valley below. The hospital there, its upper floors protruding from the trees that surrounded it. Over there, the Target where she bought her new coat. Down there, the garage where she got her oil changed twice a year.

But—

The horizon was all wrong. Instead of suburbs rolling gently into the haze of distance, there was a line like the edge of a knife, slicing the world in two. Above the line was the winter sky. Below it was the subtle gray of—

No.

Where was the hospital? There was no hospital. Instead, a ramshackle clutter of docks and piers spilled out into the—

No.

To the south, a kind of slum covered the beach, makeshift huts thrown together from oddments of wood and fabric, hunkered low to the ground against the heaving gray bosom of the—

No. No. No.

Kellie wiped her eyes, only then realizing that she was crying. She took a deep breath, calming herself.

Behind her was the long slope of the hill, the main street with its shops and strip malls, and the library crowning the heights like a temple, her refuge, her home.

Before her—

Before her was the sea. One ship was out in the harbor, slowly turning into the wind, bringing its bow around to face the infinite, empty expanse that stretched to the horizon. One ship. It was a sloop; she knew that. It was a sloop because it had to be. It couldn’t possibly be anything else. Two masts. Probably rigged Bermuda-style, although she wasn’t an expert. It was hard to estimate size with nothing near it for comparison, but she figured … oh, maybe seventy feet along the keel, plus another twelve for the bowsprit, and twenty wide? She looked for guns, but the angle was wrong. Maybe they had gone overboard in the storm.

She was laughing and crying at the same time, and her vision kept doubling and redoubling: one ship, two ships, a whole fleet, then back to one.

The paint job was so dark it could only be black. Relieved by two thin stripes of heartbreaking sky blue.

The traffic light changed, and now the flow was down to the beach and up from the beach. Somehow.

The ship in the harbor finally completed its turn and began to diminish toward that terrifying horizon, a horizon so sharp and plain that it would cut your life in half if you tried to cross over it.

“Are you okay?”

Kellie started, shocked for a moment. A tiny, gray-haired woman in a Christmas sweater and a puffy pink coat touched her on the arm.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?”

“I’m fine. I must have looked like a crazy person. I was … I was thinking about someone.”

The stranger nodded, returning her smile. “It’s the season for that.” The light changed. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, thank you so much.”

The good Samaritan hurried across the street just as the light turned yellow.

Kellie looked out and saw the hospital among its trees, and the Target, and the Jiffy-Lube. She saw the road curving away into Suburbia, and the houses and shops and hotels and malls rolling away toward the far, far horizon.

Still smiling, she wiped her eyes and turned toward home.

# # #