This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.

They were so quick to define you, to pin you down to something. Who didn’t like music? What dead person didn’t have a great smile? A great laugh? No one was calling you these things when you were alive. Alive, you got to be just you. Dead, they needed to encapsulate you,

They say tragedies like this bring people together. They’re right. And it’s suffocating.

you said talking with your mom was like talking to the comment thread for some article.

“Itza,” Terrence said. “What is the answer to life?” “Forty-two,” she said, in her flat tone that somehow managed to convey eagerness.

This miserable fucking couple thought they could make everyone else’s life a living hell. It was some twisted way of them getting power, you said. What they couldn’t deal with themselves, they took out on other people.

The creepy coincidences, the weird stuff, was building, gathering into itself. As long as we didn’t give it a name, it stayed amorphous. It couldn’t take shape.

He never explained why he looked back. Maybe to see if the woman was chasing him? In the police report he said he heard someone call his name.

You fell like you were standing with your back to an in-ground pool and someone pushed you in.

My wife, the only person I’d choose to sit in a car with in heavy traffic,

When you died I mourned you, but also the version of myself I was with you. So there were two deaths.

The weather was to be endured, not conquered.

because you didn’t feel like lugging a living thing in your womb just to have to care for it once it was out.

I wondered if he thought, I want to cuddle. Or if he just felt the absence of warmth and weight around him and sought to rid himself of the feeling. Like it could have been me or a heated water bag.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Dr. Jacobson said. “Every existential crisis I ever had ended with a hangover. One must imagine Brimley happy, as Camus would say.”

I told him I would, after, but he didn’t seem too convinced, and I wasn’t in the mood to strengthen my lies.

Her smile was as reassuring as a toilet bowl of bloody piss.

“Grief has inured you to dumb questions.”

“Have you ever had problems with evil spirits?” She laid the phone back down on her chest and reclined against the pillow. “I already told you, Thiago. I’m from Mexico. We’re all a little haunted.”

I wrote this book as a way of dealing with my grief, but I don’t get that idea without reading John Langan’s The Fisherman and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and rereading Sara Gran’s Come Closer for the fourth time. Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park is in there too. Reading their work helped me when writing felt frivolous.

I have to also include Stephen Graham Jones’s short story “The Dead Are Not,” for devastating me in the hospice parking lot.