How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

I was always so proud of you, but it took Siberia, a quarantine, and the mystery of a 30,000-year-old girl to help me realize that. Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm.

We know that if Snortorious’s brain doesn’t stop growing, complications will soon arise—headaches, seizures, and eventually death.

How do you tell a child that he’s going to die?

I lost count of the lies I told Fitch through the medicated mist of his exhales—about how we’d go camping, just the two of us, or how we’d see about space camp when he was a little older, feeling a little better.

Sometimes, long after Fitch had fallen asleep, I’d stay in his room and watch the stars from his toy planetarium shoot across the ceiling, a grown man making wishes on a sixty-watt light.

I am a pig. What job is pig?

Pig is food?

Pigs not save Fitch, he says. “No,” I say. “But pigs have saved many other people.” Pig die without heart. “Yes,” I say. “Pig die without heart.”

Dial 9 for maid service. Dial 8 for the on-call mortician.

And maybe I’d cry or break down completely, my mother and Bryan picking me up off the floor. Everything was always so goddamn dramatic and perfect in my head.

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.