Great Bones in Highland Little Pentagon The Pre-Raphaelites: A Series of Encounters As Many Hats As Pleases The Maker Giving Grace to the Fry Cook Red Meat That Bird is Dead Ran Through
Nonfiction
Great Bones in Highland Will Leggat 1st prize
Little Pentagon
Diego Del Aguila 2nd prize
The Pre-Raphaelites: A Series of Encounters
Allie Gruber 3rd prize
As Many Hats as Pleases the Maker
Etai Smotrich-Barr
Honorable mention
Giving Grace to the Fry Cook
Cameron Nye
Honorable mention
Fiction
Red Meat
Everett Yum 1st prize joint winner
That Bird is Dead
Bluebelle Carroll 1st prize joint winner
Ran Through Eli Osei
Runner up
In memory of Peter J. Wallace ’64, a former member of the Yale Daily News editorial board, the Wallace Prize recognizes exceptional works of fiction and nonfiction written by Yale University undergraduates. It is the most prestigious independently awarded undergraduate writing prize at Yale.
This past spring, the Yale Daily News Magazine’s previous Editors in Chief, Kinnia Cheuk and Harper Love, assembled an independent jury of judges, which consisted of professionals from academia, journalism, and fiction. By April, the jury selected eight winning pieces, which are published in the following pages.
As the Magazine’s new Editors in Chief, we are thrilled to begin this academic year with the release of the 2025 Wallace Prize Issue. Our predecessors, Kinnia and Harper, have blessed us by setting Mag on a meteoric path and cursed us by setting such a high bar. We’re honored to undertake this incredible journalistic and literary project.
In this issue, Will Leggat recounts the two years he lived in “The Barn,” a house in constant repair and disrepair, as well as the animals he lived alongside. Bluebelle Carroll writes a story about two sisters who chase a fox and face the end of the world. Diego Del Aguila reflects on “El Pentagonito,” a lively public park in Lima with a brutalist military complex at its center. Allie Gruber imagines the reality of a Pre-Raphaelite model across several of her paintings.
Mag is just getting started. While you enjoy these Wallace Prize winners, stay tuned for more.
Blessed reading, Ashley and Everett
I am nine years old walking across the living room with the patience and care of a monk stepping over hot coals. My concentration is unbreakable. The floor is my enemy. The floor is defeat. The floor is, well, unfinished. A sharp mess of nails bleeds through the plywood outline of what is to remain, over the two years that I will live at The Barn, just that: an outline. Like the rest of the house, the living in it is beside the point.
My stepdad William is a carpenter. He grew up bouncing around the extra beds his family in Georgia could o!er to give him space from a mother too busy with her own problems to look after his. When he was old enough, he moved to upstate New York with his girlfriend at the time and took up the kind of construction work that paid well—the jobs with foremen who didn’t mind much if you couldn’t read a blueprint if you were willing to put
your fingers, instead of theirs, on the rip saw line. By the time they split up, he had just about enough saved to buy the bones of a house in the farmland on the outer exurbs of Poughkeepsie. Above a tattoo of an ouroboros, the remaining half of his left thumb is a scarred stump: a down payment and, in his mind, a small price to pay for the first place that was ever truly his own.
Every minute he had o! work he put into the place, siphoning from his sites the misfit planks and surplus fasteners that his clients wouldn’t miss. When he had money, it went into The Barn. When he didn’t, he borrowed it. Loan after loan gave the place a foundation, a floor, a roof, the ceilings growing taller and taller as the hole his debt was drilling threatened to swallow the place up from under him. None of this, of course, he mentioned to my mother, who only learned what the place was costing after he declared bankruptcy in their name. And none of this, of course, mattered to William. The day she got the letter from the bank, he came in the front door with his boxer-mutt Red carrying a ladder and walked right past her outstretched arms. With a carpenter’s pencil, he started marking up the dimensions of a spiral staircase he wanted to put straight in the middle of the un-paneled living room floor.
§The first time I saw the place, I didn’t. Without streetlights, it was dark enough out that I couldn’t tell at first what it was I was looking at. I rubbed my eyes, shaking o! the two-hour drive from the city. Mom put her hands on my shoulders, saying that I don’t have to call it home, but I do have to get used to it.
Two sheets of corrugated aluminum roll along a sliding rail on the side of the house to form the door that faces the highway. In the wind, they whack against each other, letting out a sound like cowbell windchimes. On either side, the wood is rotting, brown planks peeling away like they’re trying to run somewhere. Exposed drywall on
the second floor bears the marks of the wet and humid summers; the mold growing just below the surface forms deep grey veins that you can trace along from one side to the other. The façade is cramped by the surrounding foliage, which is so overgrown that it seems to be swelling out from under the roof. Roots and shoots poke out from the cracks in the foundation. Moss grows so thick over the wall of timber stacked in the driveway that drivers might think from a glance that we have a hedge. Everything here looks like it’s in the process of being reclaimed, of being drawn back down into the earth. The walls give slightly, inching back and forth in heavy winds.
It’s cold in the country, and the nights get darker than I’m used to. I’m thankful for the stars, at first, but eventually it’s clear how little of the sky they take up, how huge the rest of the blackness is. The place is right o! I-87, and my bedroom window is close enough to the road that headlights dance across my ceiling as I fall asleep, enough to make me feel—for a second—that I haven’t left Brooklyn.
The Barn is always aspiring, it seems, to be something more. When William wakes up, he grabs his pencil and his tool belt, and by the time he goes to sleep the place is as likely to have lost a wall as it is to have one finished. I never feel quite sure that I could picture the whole building, if I tried. All around is sawdust and the clang of hammers pushing uncertain nails into the surfaces they will just as soon be pulled from. Rooms come and go; corridors emerge or disappear or expand into so many turns you’d need a compass to make it through them. Everywhere there are the marks of his first, second, third drafts: a phantom joist runs across the ceiling of a dead-end hallway in the basement where a door frame used to be. The walls are all half-repainted or covered with small square samples of the next color—the one that, surely, finally, will make the room.
It became clear to William, shortly after he moved in, that he was the only person for miles without a farm to keep or animals to tend. In the backyard, past the plastic-lined hole we call a pool, past the wild grass left untrimmed for years, and just before the decaying cobble wall that divides us from the swamp—whose existence neither I nor he ever venture far enough to confirm, made certain enough by the necessity of the mosquito nets around our beds—stands the small chain-link enclosure that was his answer to the implicit challenge he seemed to read in that fact.
Inside lives a goat just about hungry enough to eat your clothes o! you, a pig—“Sweet Pea”—too fat to walk without leaving a wake in the dirt, and a horde of chickens so desperate for a fight they’ll peck the eyes out of your shoelaces. William continually adds to this collection: a peacock named Vishnu; an exotic Japanese rooster with long black and white feathers. Like those in the house, this expense is always justified the same way. My mother holds a receipt for feed in her hand and shouts at him across the living room, kept at a distance by the no-man’s land of the nails between them. He is standing by the window—etches of inches for its next iteration already sprawling across the pale spruce frame—and staring out at the guinea hens. Over and over, he holds two fingers to his left thumb, tracing laps around his tattoo and saying nothing. This is his home. These are his animals.
It doesn’t take long to notice, however, that despite his best e!orts, the menagerie is dwindling. Claw marks carve around the perimeter of the fence, and blood and feathers are smeared on the henhouse door like some gruesome kindergarten collage. I wake up one day to find William standing over me, shouting at me to get my boots on. He hasn’t seen Red all morning and wants me to go check on the chickens. The rain is coming down so hard it seems to be threatening to burst through the window, but I drag myself out of bed and grab my coat. As I walk through the gate to the enclosure, I pass the guinea hens cowering in the corner. Their heads follow me towards the
henhouse, the normal vigor in their chirping dampened by the rain. Before I make it there, I hear branches cracking behind me and look to the bushes just beyond the chain-link. Red looks back at me, his glazed eyes staring right through me. The chicken is limp between his jaws, swaying more like a doll than like something that once had life in it. He is wringing the neck so hard I think he might shake his own head o!. Blood drips down his chin. His tail is wagging.
I glance back up towards The Barn, where sheets of rain are falling without a rhythm from the mismatched tiles that spread like a patchwork quilt across the roof. The gutters are running over, under the stretches of tin where there are gutters to fill. In the window below stands a silhouette, and I cannot tell if it is staring back at me, or if I am simply part of its survey, or if it is just waiting, waiting for the rain to break.
Then, suddenly, he stops and turns back towards me. He takes a step forward, the body rolling back and forth as his jaws tighten. The rain is coming down hard, beating against the sheet metal roof of the henhouse. Sludge rivers pool and ooze around my feet. Through the clattering torrent, I hear him whimper. He waits there, looking at me, fur soaked through and matted with rain and mulch and blood, deep claw marks scattered across his face and chest. I don’t know whether I should be afraid of him, or for him, or both. He lets out another whimper, and suddenly it looks to me like he had just caught hold of something he didn’t know how to let go of.
You are a child in Lima, Peru, and like any child, your attention is drawn to peculiar sounds. One of them is a word, “Pentagonito,” and you attend to it not just because it sounds funny but because you’ve heard it repeatedly—mom, dad, grandma, and everyone you know pronounces its rhythmic five-syllable sound. You don’t know exactly what it is, but you know it’s important—part of the yet inaccessible world of adulthood—and so, perhaps unintendedly, you decide to store it in your memory.
One Saturday morning, a few years later, when you are perhaps eight years old or seven or maybe even only six, your mother wakes you early enough for you to hear the mourning doves: we have to go; your father is running a marathon, and we must cheer him at the finish line. You hear that word again, “Pentagonito,” and you remember it. You understand now, without hesitation, that it refers
to a place—El Pentagonito is our destination. And so, invaded by curiosity and love, perhaps unaware of the distinction between the two, you hop into the backseat of the car. Through the car window, you observe the familiar streets and houses slowly turn into something yet unknown. Suddenly, you find yourself under the shadows cast by an endless landscape of trees. You notice all the di!erent sizes and shades of green, all the species you cannot yet name—eucalyptus, ficus, guayabo—and when you step out of the car, you witness something unlike anything you’ve seen. The immensity of the park, which you can see extending towards the horizon, has been taken over by a sea of people gathering around what seems to be a running course. Many of them cheer and jump in excitement when moving bodies approach the finish line, and so when you realize your father is one of those bodies, you also cheer and jump and roar under the sun. Invaded by joy, you think to yourself: this is a nice place; this is where people come to run.
In the years that follow, already familiar with this landscape of trees and river of runners, through the car window on your way to school, new sounds and shapes refine your impression of El Pentagonito. You start noticing bikes, scooters, skateboards, and neighbors enjoying morning walks. You see a playground, an activities center—which plays the role of a pilates club, a dance club, and a hub for martial arts—and an outdoor gym. You see a pond with a small bridge crossing through it, the perfect place for newlyweds and quinceañeras to encapsulate their memories with a photograph. There is a di!erent couple and a di!erent quinceañera every time; the photographers, however, are often the same.
Some days, you see your father running on your way to school. Neither you, nor him, nor your sister, nor your mother care about how much attention you’re drawing from other runners as you wave at him and scream “Papááá Papááá” in that high-pitched childish voice. Shame is not yet a thing.
One Sunday, your family decides to spend the day
at El Pentagonito— “We’re going to take rollerblading classes!”—and you finally get to walk around the place. The landscape of trees, the scent of eucalyptus, the playground, the pond, and the newlyweds—they’re all still there. There is, however, something new. Something you haven’t noticed before but had been there all along, in the background of your field of perception, yet at the core of the place.
In the distance, looming over the park, a tall and wide brutalist building. Its sharp angles and gray facade grant it an eerie, mysterious aura. You can see it from everywhere in the park, towering over the trees and the pond, watching over the space like a silent sentinel. As you walk around the park, you become aware of a fence separating you from the building. You had noticed it before—thick concrete slabs with openings in between, wide enough for a small dog to go through. But you couldn’t think of it as a fence. Why would there be one? Why would something need to be protected or set apart from this peaceful, lively, and familiar atmosphere?
Your curiosity brings you to peek through the fence, and you catch glimpses of a vast green lawn, small administrative buildings, parked cars, and the imposing tower at the center of it all. And then you see them: men in camouflage suits, carrying shotguns, patrolling the grounds. They stand like statues, unmoving and watchful, guarding the space. You now understand—El Pentagonito, the place where people come to run, is also a military headquarters. But perhaps you’re too young for this to be a surprise. It seems like another part of the landscape, another layer of the place you’re coming to know. Every country needs a military, you think, and this is simply where ours happens to be. And that is exactly where it has been all along, way before you even existed.
It was January 1971 when, under the military dictatorship of Juan Velasco Alvarado, Major Ernesto Montagne, the Commander General of the Army and Minister of War, announced the decision to build new premises for the Peruvian Military Headquarters. The premises, to
be erected in an unpopulated 95-hectare area located in what back then was the Santiago de Surco district, would respond to the need to centralize all organizations of the War Sector, which at the time found themselves dispersed. Architects Juan Gunther and Martin Tanaka were selected to create a building complex that corresponded with the institutional, monumental, and formalist image, as well as the sense of hierarchy and authority that the military government was attempting to establish. They couldn’t anticipate, however, when the project was initially sketched out, that the place would someday turn into what it is today. The area, now belonging to the district of San Borja, went through a period of radical urbanization, as well as through multiple projects of reforestation, which have all resulted in the place where you now stand—the coexistence of military life with the epitome of familial and healthful civilian living. The forest-like atmosphere, the little pond, the running course, and the amenities center were not part of the initial plan. It all gradually came to be, more out of municipal initiatives than by military design.
Originally intended as a symbol of military strength, the sense of hierarchy and authority has now been neutralized, and the original symbolic meaning of the place has been superseded. You witness this as you grow older and get permission to bike around the city on your own. Your friends message you saying, “Vamos al Pentagonito! Vamos al Penta!” and you know that neither you nor them have in mind the military headquarters. Instead, you think of the running course, the pond, and the endless landscape of trees—instead, you think of the thrill of youth and the comfort of friendship. §
To get to El Pentagonito from home, you exit your neighborhood and turn right, into Caminos del Inca Ave. You then get to Angamos Ave., which separates the residential district of Santiago de Surco from the district of
San Borja, a few blocks away from El Pentagonito. Despite the closeness, you can barely see any runners or bikers. Instead, you see chaos: unregulated combi vans, children selling frugelés, jugglers asking for money after putting on a show, unworking tra c lights, and people violently pacing the streets, going where they have to be. You are also going where you have to be: El Pentagonito.
Once you cross the avenue, you are back to the calmness, to the stillness of being in a park, with the brutalist tower always watching over you. You think of how strange the place is and how it has attained some form of a symbiotic relationship. The location of the Military Headquarters in the middle of the district of San Borja has given place to one of the safest and calmest areas in the entire city; however—and you begin to understand this as you move past the bliss of youth—it is also through the image of familial living propitiated by the surrounding parks that the violence and brutality of military life gets to be concealed.
A few years later, you finally understand where the name of the place comes from. El Pentagonito translates to Little Pentagon, alluding, without any logical reason beyond mere fanatism, to the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense. You tell your friends about this on your way there, and they all seem surprised. “That is so obvious,” they claim, and yet none of them had ever realized. It was right there, in front of us, all along. Once there, you see the newlyweds, the quinceañeras, and the kids approaching the thick concrete slabs. You spend the afternoon biking in circles around El Pentagonito, and you laugh at the irony: the park named after a pentagon has no corners at all.
The Pre-Raphaelites: A Series of Encounters
When I was nineteen it was my simple pleasure to walk every morning from class on York Street to my small room overlooking the oak tree in Pierson College. There wasn’t much of interest on those walks: just the usual array of backpacks to admire and sneakers to covet. On days when I felt especially glorious I wore my mother’s brown-leather ankle boots which made a confident click-clack click-clack on the stone slabs. My mood was always joyful on these mornings, and it was then, while the hot sun shone and the trees were in full bloom, that I first saw her.
The first thing I noticed was her orange-red hair. It seemed like hair from a di!erent century. It wasn’t an artificial red, although you’d be hard-pressed to find another person whose locks were as rich in color without synthetic assistance. I say ‘rich’ because the red in her hair was darker than the hair on most redheads. It was at
once glaring and matte, wild and restrained. She looked as though she’d endured much pain, like the tragic heroines I read about as a child. Phaedra. Ophelia. Tess. And now here she was, gliding through the hustle and throb of New Haven streets and then fading into a vision in the distance, a red glint, a ghostly fancy.
I passed her every morning. I came to recognize the way she walked, the way she pushed the red strands of hair from her face on windy days. She seemed to be gazing unconsciously beyond things—beyond the New Haven streets and the rush of cars, beyond the real, even, into some distant abyss. I became so accustomed to our brief encounters that I began to look up when I heard her boots and felt her presence, felt the cloud of pervasive melancholy that seemed to surround her. Sometimes I fancied that we knew one another, and that in our brief intimate instances of crossing, obscure messages were exchanged and cryptic signals acknowledged.
She looked out of place on the streets of New Haven. There was something so ghostly about her, so reminiscent of a bygone era. I began to doubt my senses. Did I really see her, or was she a figment of my imagination? A recurring dream? A nightmare? And then one day I realized I’d seen her before, many times, in the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. This mysterious woman looked exactly like the Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal. The same thick red hair, the same pale complexion. But it was the forlorn eyes that struck me. There was something timeless about her, as there also was about Siddal. And yet she seemed trapped in time, a phantom of the 1850s. She had the kind of beauty one associates with poetry. §
In Room 7 of the Tate Britain hangs a marvelous painting by William Holman Hunt. It’s called The Awakening Conscience. A woman looks out the window at the trees beyond. Rising from the arms of her lover, she
experiences a moral revelation. Light filtering through the window suggests the possibility of transcendence. The woman is striking because of the fervor in her eyes. Her eyes blaze with emotional intensity—so inspired, so elevated, so flushed with hope, so keenly striving. Hunt captures her in the most important moment of her life. She looks as though she’s about to cross some crucial boundary, from oppression to freedom, from the earthly to the unearthly. Hunt’s painting reminds me of a passage in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake resists the widely-held belief that body and soul are separate entities. “Man has no body distinct from his soul,” he writes. “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Blake’s words point to something essential within Hunt’s painting. As we gaze into the woman’s blazing eyes, we feel as though we’re rising beyond the limits of her body into a higher, transcendental realm. At once we seem to be gazing at and beyond this extravagant beauty. The models in Pre-Raphaelite paintings are often placed on a pedestal. But not in Hunt’s painting. We seem to look directly into the model’s inner life. We peer through her—past the beauty, past the body, past the material—into the all-consuming brightness of her soul.
What was it about the woman’s eyes that so arrested me? What caused me to stare at the painting for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes? The mahogany piano, the gilded frame, the sumptuous red rug, the ornate wallpaper—every detail evokes a distant era, an age far removed from the present day. It’s almost impossible to imagine how di!erent customs were in 1850s England. But as I stared at the woman in the painting, I wondered—aren’t there deeper di!erences between our worlds, ones that don’t depend on changing laws or moral codes or aesthetic preferences? What would it take to transform me into a product of a di!erent historical era? If you dressed me in 19th-century garb and told me what to say and how to say it, would I be convincing?
Come with me, reader, to the 1850s. Here we are— Piccadilly Circus. I’m wearing a blue skirt and bodice, and
a red shawl is swathed tightly around my shoulders. It’s November. London at this time of year is full of life and energy. Horses and carts bustle in every direction; flower ladies sell violets to young women calling on elderly relatives in Mayfair; workmen load boxes into carts and shout gru!, unintelligible orders. Everywhere the clatter of hooves, everywhere the din of voices and wheels and bells. Newsboys hand out printed copies of The Times and Lloyd’s Weekly News. Streetlights cast an artificial glow over the street. A little beggar boy with wide eyes and a snub nose gapes pleadingly at people passing by. In the center of the roundabout, delicately poised in an arabesque, is the statue of Eros. I can’t help noticing his stillness. He alone is steady; he alone is calm. I step forward and join the throng. Now I too am part of the community, part of the flurry and bustle.
I make my way to Mrs. Tozer’s hat shop on Cranbourne Street. I’ve never seen so many bonnets: brown bonnets and white bonnets, bonnets with pink ribbons and bonnets with blue ribbons, cover-the-ear bonnets and expose-the-ear bonnets. The mannequin beside me is flaunting the most stylish headdress of the season: the leghorn straw hat. It’s all the hats in one, decked with lace and ribbons and flowers. In the back of the shop a group of assistants huddle around a sewing machine. They’re animated in conversation, too absorbed to notice me. “But surely the ribbon ought to be green!” one says. “What about making it longer in the back?” asks another. “The longer the hat, the longer the face,” a third declares with an air of finality. One of these women catches my eye. She has rich coppery-gold hair, but it’s the texture I find outrageous. Her hair billows. It curves and curves again in layered waves of red and gold. Like me, she wears a shawl. Hers is delicate and sheer, but mine feels thick and unseemly. With a pang of recognition I realize: that woman is Elizabeth Siddal.
Here she is, before me. There she was, too, when the pre-Raphaelite painter Walter Deverell discovered her in this very shop. In his restless, boyish mood his eyes fixed
upon one woman who looked di!erent from the other assistants. Her hair was flaming red, her eyes alight with passion. It was something in her air, in the way her thick head of hair rested so delicately on her neck. “A neck like a tower,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti would later write. Deverell instantly wanted to paint her. He wanted to allegorize her, to relocate her in a world of mythological fantasies. And he did. Siddal appears as Viola (or Cesario) in his 1850 painting Twelfth Night. She looks into the world beyond the frame, pensive.
As I gaze at Elizabeth Siddal by the sewing machine, I begin to wonder. Why was Deverall so drawn to her? Was it just the fullness of her hair, the slender neck that rose so delicately? Why was she so easy to idealize? I squint again at the figure by the sewing machine. In paintings she’s always at some sort of threshold: between the sexual and the spiritual, the earthly and the transcendental, the true and the false. But as I watch her holding a ribbon to the light, I feel startled. She looks so human. Striking, yes, but human. Suddenly a bell rings; another customer enters the shop. Siddal looks up. We exchange glances. For a single moment, a single blink of time, she sees me. No longer the tragic heroine, no longer the divine Beata Beatrice. A woman as real as any other.
The moment passes. Elizabeth walks over to the customer and clears her throat. Suddenly I realize: I have no idea how she will sound. What does someone from the 1850s sound like? Is her voice high or low? The earliest voices I’ve heard belong to old Hollywood stars, like Helene Costello and May McAvoy. How would someone who lived eighty years before them speak? Would her voice fit or clash with her appearance? The 1920s actress Norma Talmadge was beloved for her silent films, but her popularity plummeted when her first “talkie” was released. Her accent was too “Brooklyn,” her diction too déclassé. As I watch Siddal handing ribbons to a customer, I wonder— would Siddal have su!ered the same fate? Like Talmadge, Siddal comes from a working-class background. Her father sells silverware. She lives with her family in Southwark, a
neighborhood known for its pickpockets, prostitutes and prisons. Surely, this working-class milieu influences the way she talks. Once the question arises, I can’t unthink it: Does Siddal have a cockney accent?
I watch her helping an old lady try on straw bonnets. From this angle I see that she has a large overbite, and her upper lip protrudes over the bottom lip. As I stare at her, the ethereal beauty begins to slip away. On her cheeks there are several patchy blotches that suggest past encounters with smallpox. She’s not as tall as I expected. When Deverell met her, he told Dante Gabriel Rossetti she was “like a queen, magnificently tall.” I pictured a steeple-like woman gliding majestically like a phantom on water. But the average height in the 1850s is 5’2”. Siddal’s only about my height, 5’5”. Her weight is concentrated unevenly on her right hip. When she walks the weight is redistributed, and she rises like a marionette pulled by an invisible string on her head. I picture myself sitting with her over a glass of whiskey or a game of checkers. When a large bonnet falls o! the lady’s head, she laughs. Her laugh is loud and high-pitched. It rattles like a loose screw. We tend to admire Pre-Raphaelite paintings for the beauty of the models, their distinctiveness, for the purity of their image and the remoteness of the model’s expression. I’ve never stopped to think about Siddal’s voice, or her scent, or any quality other than her appearance. I don’t know how long her steps are, how loudly she speaks, how quickly she walks. I don’t know if she has a sweet tooth, if she likes fish, if she’s ever eaten pork chops. How does she smell? In 1850s England water had to be heated manually, and even the wealthy only bathed once a week. Does Siddal smell of sweat and body odor? Or does she compensate for the smell with strong-scented perfume? And how does she drink her tea? Do her gulps resound through the room—or does she take quiet, dainty sips while her pinky points to the sky? As I watch Siddal wrapping the bonnet in brown paper and tinsel, I realize just how much I don’t know about her. By focusing on her red hair and wistful eyes, I’ve neglected to think about
all the tiny, commonplace habits that make her—and every one of us—human.
My next encounter with Siddal is in the Surrey countryside. It’s a crisp autumn day, one of those delightful few when the leaves crunch underfoot and the sun casts spidery shadows on the woodland floor. The woods are vibrant, full of red and brown and gold. The sky is scarcely visible between the leaves, but it’s as vivid as the bright foliage below: a bold, assertive blue. Here is where William Holman Hunt will paint Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus. In an opening between the trees, the models cluster together in medieval garb. Three men and Lizzie. I watch them from behind a group of Hunt’s assistants. The fabrics are brightly-colored and expensive: rich velvets, sumptuous silks, plush satin. Siddal’s hair seems one with the autumn leaves and the red velvet of the costumes. She stands as she did in the milliner’s shop: slumped shoulders, weight resting on her right hip. One of the men mutters something, and she laughs. It’s that same rickety laugh— high-pitched, nasal, nervous.
All at once, a man with a long brown beard approaches me. “Who are you?” he asks. His beard hangs down to his belly, which bulges over his belt. His beard is like Siddal’s hair: bushy and billowing, thick like wool. A few gray hairs make him seem older than he is. “Observing,” I say, feigning nonchalance. It’s not a direct answer, but the man doesn’t seem to notice. “Hmph”—he snorts like a boar struggling to heave itself onto its feet—“Well, make yourself useful.” The man’s voice is hoarse, husky, like the crunch of shoes on gravel. As he speaks, several specks of saliva spray from his lips and land on my chin. He’s about my height, but he has an air of authority that makes him seem taller. He leans over me like a cli!. “Thank you, sir. I will.” Another snort, and o! he walks toward the models. But as he draws near, the general murmur of voices subsides. An assistant brings him an easel. Another carries a stool, and several more set paint and brushes on the table beside him. He runs his hand through his beard and clears his throat. He dips his paintbrush into red paint and makes
several broad brush strokes on the side of his canvas. And only then do I realize: that man is William Holman Hunt. When I think of Hunt, I think of his artwork: vibrant colors, biblical symbolism, rustic countryside. His paintings are cheerful and bright, lively and emotional. I’ve never thought about the man behind the paintings. I’ve never separated the art from the creator, the output from the input. The art spoke for him. But the Hunt before me is nothing like what I expected. He’s almost cartoonish: Karl Marx meets Santa Claus. He spits when he talks; his belt doesn’t fit; he walks as though moving requires great e!ort. It’s extraordinary how ordinary he is.
“Painting shall begin!” Hunt cries, and the models scurry into position. Siddal stands in the center, flanked by men on either side. The painting depicts one of the most dramatic scenes in Shakespeare’s play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Just before Proteus rapes Sylvia, (“I’ll force thee yield to my desire,”) he’s interrupted by his best friend, Valentine. It’s the usual trope: the damsel in distress is saved by the gentleman she loves, and Proteus is punished. Siddal models for Sylvia. She stares blankly into the distance, her weight concentrated at her hip. Hunt clears his throat. “Miss Siddal,” he says, his voice grating like sandpaper. “You’re too tall. You mustn’t be taller than Valentine.” Veins bulge in his temples as he squints at Siddal. She stands slanted like a dandelion. “On your knees.” She kneels, slouching into herself.
Hunt strokes his beard, squinting. “No, Miss Siddal, you must be closer to Proteus. Lean into him.” Siddal looks weary as she shu#es closer to the man in the center. “Now clasp his hand.” She clasps his hand. “Lower your gaze.” She lowers her gaze. More orders follow. Order; assent. Order; assent. With every command Hunt gives, Siddal’s eyes become more and more blank. She seems disconnected from the world, removed from the forms before her. John Ruskin would later criticize Hunt’s painting for the “commonness” of the faces. In his letter to The Times, Ruskin deplores “the unfortunate type chosen for the face of Sylvia. Certainly this cannot be she whose lover was ‘As
rich in having such a jewel, / As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl.’” Yet perhaps there’s a reason for this “commonness.” As I watch Siddal kneeling on the woodland floor, I feel a sting of discomfort. She looks lifeless, worn down by the constant scrutiny of painters and critics. After a few minutes my unease subsides: all that remains is an overwhelming feeling of pity, deep and fierce, for this fellow human.
As Many Hats as Pleases the Maker
On a Saturday this fall, Catherine Cazes-Wiley took the train south to Manhattan to check on the status of her proposal to become resident artisan at Angelina Jolie’s NoHo fashion house, Atelier Jolie. As evidence of her talents, she brought with her two handmade hats. The first was a low, flat, radially-symmetrical bolero, made of buckram wrapped in gray fabric, and adorned with a cut of bright yellow mesh from a bag of garlic. The second hat was a yellow cap which also used the garlic-bag mesh as well as some lemon-bag mesh and a tiny plastic lemon. Catherine created both in her New Haven studio, Tinaliah Designs, where she also repairs hats, teaches hatmaking, teaches sewing, tailors suits, alters dresses, and restores and resells vintage handbags.
Catherine is small and broad-shouldered. She wears her gray hair in a bob with curtain bangs, and her large
pink cat-eye glasses are always threatening to slip o! the edge of her nose. She is warm, soft-spoken, prone to making sound e!ects, and unafraid to tell someone that she has forgotten their name or to describe a fashion trend as “fetishist.” Forty years in the United States have neither dulled her French accent, nor tempered her delightfully unusual diction. She is rarely wearing something that she herself has not patched, adorned, or sewn from scratch.
On her visit to Atelier Jolie, Catherine wore a patterned, red and tan floor-length overcoat, which she had sewn from a blanket. This was her third visit. It did not go as planned. Her usual contact was absent and the man, wearing all black, with whom she spoke told her briskly that they were not accepting new designers. She waited patiently for a fuller explanation, which did not come. Eventually, she left. She bought a book on the fallacy of capitalism, and was settling herself on a bench outside a boxing gym when a young couple complimented her coat. They were part-time fashion models, recently on a runway wearing vegan stylings. (They were also part-time musicians and the woman was at the gym to apply for a parttime job.) They agreed to stay in touch. Catherine told me this story because she was certain something would come of the encounter.
§
Tinaliah Designs, on Chapel Street across from the New Haven Green, is a mid-sized room on the second floor of a small commercial building, advertised on the street level via a dry-erase easel with the instructions “Buzz #205.” The front half of the room is composed of a mirrored fitting salon and a crowded, jubilant corner where Catherine displays her hats and handbags, made in every material and color. The back half of the room begins at a small register and contains two long gray tables; three wall-mounted thread racks for spools of every shade; a collection of machines for sewing, steaming, and stretching; a work lamp with an attached bendy-arm magnifying
glass; a wicker basket with formal and improvised hat-making tools; a plastic bin for cloth scraps; more bins with more things; an old-fashioned sewing table; three glorious floor-to-ceiling windows; a chain hanging from the ceiling to which Catherine has attached a fake bird, sideways; and a shelf, stretching from register to windows, atop which sits Catherine’s extensive collection of wooden hat blocks, each one unique, carved into the interior shape of a bolero or bowler or cowboy or pillbox or some dozen other styles that I cannot name, each one waiting patiently for Catherine to take it down and press warm felt overtop its curves and contours. Above the neat hodgepodge hangs a wordart canvas: “JESUS let me count the ways I love you.”
Catherine opened Tinaliah Designs in 2021. Previously, she operated the nonprofit Tinaliah Co-op with her husband John, teaching sewing skills to vulnerable New Haveners and helping them sell their wares. The nonprofit is now on hiatus due to lack of grant funding. (Catherine received the name Tinaliah from God, with whom she has a close, spiritual connection. Tinaliah, she told me, means “to persevere.”)
When she has time and inspiration, Catherine designs a new hat. Her latest set of creations are molded on a hat block she calls “the Ei!el.” The Ei!el is a tapered cylinder, disrupted by the occasional sharp twisting ridge, and absurdly tall—nearly a foot from brim to crown. It is also surprisingly robust, as heroic as its namesake, and more than a little elfin. On my first visit to the studio, three Ei!els in blue, red, and green were arranged on the sales rack. Catherine had priced the green one—adorned with curly-fry- shaped spirals in striped multicolor fabric—at $385. My personal hat collection consists of a gray beanie and five baseball caps. As Catherine talked me through hers, noting when a hat included artificial horsehair or banana byproduct, I tried to decide what my beanie was made of. Cotton?
Catherine had recently been commissioned to create a custom hat, a navy blue fedora. It was a project of about twenty hours, for which Catherine was to receive $350.
Before my arrival, she had already “blocked” the wool felt into form, constructed an intricate golden laurel to encircle the crown in lieu of a hat band, and sewed cotton millinery wire around the circumference of the brim to keep it from flipping upward. The next step was to cover the wire with a thin strip of fabric, like an edge protector.
From tiptoes on a wooden stool, Catherine stretched for a plastic drawer on the shelf. (Later, when the stool was elsewhere, I would see her accomplish this same task by balancing her right foot on the radiator and her left foot on a side table.) The drawer was filled with rolls of what I would call ribbon. “No, ribbon is di!erent,” Catherine explained, and pointed out the woven ribs running perpendicular to the length. “Ribbon is slick and has no ridges. This is grosgrain.” I practiced the new word: “Groh-graw.”
“Groh-greh,” Catherine corrected.
Most modern grosgrain is made of polyester, “useless for millinery,” Catherine said, because it cannot be curved into shape by heat. Her box contained only vintage grosgrain, made of rayon or acetate or rayon-acetate blend or occasionally cotton, and purchased from specialty stores in New York or salvaged from old hats. After some digging, she retrieved the only potential contender for this project, a roll of medium blue, and displayed it, displeased, against the fedora.
Catherine picked up her phone. “Hi Ben, are you at the store? Ben it’s 2:30, are you there? This is Catherine. I was going to stop by. I need a narrow navy blue grosgrain. Okay, give me a call. Thanks!”
Then, without waiting for Ben to give her a call, Catherine said “Well why don’t we go anyway, no?” She pulled on her red and tan overcoat, patterned with geometric trees and flowers and horn-like symbols and multicolor zigzags. I put on my black jacket. We walked seven minutes east to DelMonico Hatter, made sincere, if disjointed, small talk with third-generation hat salesman Ben DelMonico, and then pushed through the sales floor into the musty backroom to rifle through boxes of grosgrain.
Catherine freelances as DelMonico’s hat repairwoman, a role she earned in 2018 by wandering into DelMonico, learning that their longtime repairman had died, and o!ering herself as his replacement. She was new to hat-making then, having just completed a year and a half of training at the Australian Hat Academy, which she attended asynchronously online.
In the backroom with me, Catherine located a bin, dug around for a second, and then let out a vibrato, UFO-abduction-style “AaAaAaAaAaAaAaAaA.” Her hand emerged with a roll of navy grosgrain. After a few more minutes of digging, she brought three contenders into the sunlight to examine their undertones and eliminated a roll that suddenly appeared startlingly green. The other two seemed more suitable. “I have to borrow these two?” she said to Ben. “Whatever you need,” he responded, and the two struck up conversation again about Ben’s recent birthday, the high stress of managing the store, and his recently hired assistant.
“I had a dream that somebody was coming to help me too,” Catherine said.
“I’m still sending people over your way.”
“Thank you.”
“You accepting the work?”
“Yeah.”
“You accept everything, yeah?”
“Yeah, I take everything. We need everything. And we still do alteration. We have to. And we’re still holding on to the nonprofit, because we believe, we believe...”
Catherine glanced at the table behind him. “You know what, I need a foam ring too,” she said, and she took one.
“Happy Birthday!” Catherine called as we made our way out of the store. “Jubilé, Jubilé! It’s your year!” she sang. “Believe, believe! You’ll see.”
§
John Thomson’s 1868 A Treatise on Hat-Making attributes the invention of felt to the monk Saint Clem-
ent, who, on a pilgrimage sometime in the first centuries, stu!ed wool between his sores and his sandals. Felt, I learned, is the catch-all word for the divine material that emerges from compressing fibers: sheep’s wool, but also rabbit hair, beaver fur, synthetics, anything. It is malleable when heated and then holds its new form when cool. A hat can be made from a new piece of felt, sure, but with a bit of steam, a hatmaker can melt down an old hat and rechristen it. The same piece of felt, over a lifetime, can become as many hats as pleases the maker.
Thomson finds the first solid evidence of felted wool hatmakers in France and Germany in the late 14th century, in London by 1510, and in the American colonies by 1732 when the British Crown passed the Hat Act, which limited colonial hat-making apprenticeships. Revolution followed, eventually. That hat-making was the subject of trade protections is a reflection of the booming value of the industry in that era, primarily as a wartime economy. The leading hats of the day were the “cocked hats”: the bicorne (think Napoleon Crossing the Alps) and the tricorne (think Washington Crossing the Delaware).
Over the 19th century, hats civilianized but the habit of wearing them stuck. By the turn of the 20th century, according to Esquire’s Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men’s Fashions, “only a man very low on the social ladder would appear in public hatless.” Menswear trends rotated through the bowler, the fedora, the porkpie (low and flat topped), and the homburg (high with a central gutter), but in some style or another, the felt hat remained a staple until the mid-century, when it promptly disappeared. A variety of theories explain the extinction: post-war malaise, counter-culture, chic hairstyles, the automobile, the trendsetting President Kennedy. Regardless, hat-wearing went from a routine to a statement, and hat-making from an industry to a rarity.
The process of blocking a felt hat, however, has not changed since its invention, a fact that Catherine told me repeatedly and with delight. The hat block illustrated in Thomson’s 1868 treatise looks identical to the blocks on
Catherine’s shelf. There are very few block-makers these days, and most of Catherine’s blocks came vintage from flea markets, eBay, or DelMonico.
A hatmaker’s block collection determines their range of products: each block dictates not just style but size. For the custom fedora, Catherine did not have a block large enough for the client’s head. She had to adapt one with an undisclosed DIY technique (“trade secret”). His head wasn’t unusually large, she explained, but her fedora block was from the ’50s and heads have gotten bigger since then. I asked how that could possibly be true. “Maybe because of the hormones?” she o!ered. §
“Sometime I think people run from their call, you know?” Catherine said, unprompted, as I watched her cut and sew a piece of iridescent lilac satin for the fedora’s interior liner.
Catherine was called to hats late. She was raised in Cameroon and New Hebrides, before her family returned to France. Her father was an administrator in the Gendarmerie Nationale. Her mother painted, sewed, knit, embroidered, cooked, canned, gardened, and drew up the architectural plans for the family home, but she did not make hats. Catherine wanted to go to art school, but alas. “My father told me I can’t be an artist, I’d be starving,” she said. “So he sent me to become aviation. Pilot.”
Catherine pulled the satin lining o! her sewing machine and examined it.
“When did you start learning to be a pilot?” I asked, bewildered.
“I was in a car accident. And then I went to heaven,” she said by way of response, and we did not return to the flying for some while.
A friend had been driving her and some others to a party, too fast. They hit a telephone pole. One passenger died. The driver went into a coma. Catherine fractured her spine.
“I went to heaven,” she said. “And then I met Jesus, and he said, ‘you have to go back.’ And between the time I started in the tunnel of light to the time I met him, I had all these experiences with light... It took me twenty years... to figure out the whole experience, and understand my call in regards to what he wanted me to do.”
She restarted the sewing machine. “And so the money from the car accident sent me to America,” she said. She finished the edge of the liner with a zigzag stitch, and carefully tucked it underneath the leather sweat band.
Catherine earned her commercial pilot’s license from a program in South Carolina, moved to Florida to pursue a certificate in flight instruction, got hit by a truck and missed her instuctor’s exam, “got a job in Africa, in Chad, during the war,” moved to California, got certified as an airplane mechanic, had a son, prototyped leather bags until an earthquake knocked the ceiling of her studio in, and, moved by God’s spirit, became a nomad, wandering from state to state for five years. Eventually, she ended up in New York. Then she got another message from God.
“He said, ‘Get up the map.’ And I lay my hand on it. And, ‘you go there.’ So I went there. And it was Greenwich.”
“After I spent an hour or so I was going back to the Bronx. But then I stopped for a cup of tea, because I’m an addict. So then I got there, and this man was sitting there. He said, ‘Where have you been? You’re late.’ Just like that. Said ‘You’re late. I’ve been waiting two hours for you.’ I said, ‘I was walking around.’”
The man, Catherine says, connected her to a local church, which found her housing first in Bridgeport and then in New Haven. She became a sewing instructor at Village of Power, a social support organization, and began making bags again. She met John, founded the Co-op, attended the Hat Academy, and joined DelMonico. When a longtime seamstress closed down her Chapel Street studio, Catherine bought her equipment and took over the lease. “She left everything,” Catherine said. “Every needle, every thread, everything. She took a pair of scissors and a radio.
That’s it.”
“Everybody has a di!erent plan for their life,” she told me a few days later. “This is my plan. But first, you have to know what it is. If you don’t know God, and if you don’t get close to God, you miss your mission. You miss your destiny because you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, which is what a lot of what people are doing right now. They’re just afraid. So they sit on their talent and they become computer engineer. Or landscaper. Dentist. But they don’t like it. But they don’t consult in their soul, in the spirit: what is it that they supposed to be or do?”
“So it took me a long time to be fine and not be afraid... God is with you, and he’s going to come through no matter what it is. He restore. He repair. He does what I do.”
On one of my last visits to the studio, Catherine o!ered to block a hat with me. She was wearing an Ei!el I had not seen before, black and covered in dark feathers, and she told me that a man who plays bucket drums at Trinity’s service for the disadvantaged had asked her for a cream-colored cap. She did not know his name; she called him “Little Big Man.”
We perused the hat blocks on the shelf and selected a smooth cylinder with a flat crown. It was an odd one, Catherine explained, a “puzzle block”; because our cap had a slight taper from the crown to the rim, we needed the ability to disassemble the block, like a puzzle, so as not to stretch the felt. She pointed to a hook in the corner where our raw material hung—a dainty, floppy beret with an elastic chin-strap attached to a grosgrain sweat band— and handed me a seam ripper.
My mother trained me to be a competent hand-sewer and anyone who has learned to sew has, dissatisfied with his first attempt, learned to seam-rip. Or so I thought. Catherine set me on removing the sweat band and I started picking at the thread, diving in and out like an épée.
Gently, she took the seam-ripper, turned it parallel to the stitch line, and with one smooth motion carved the band away from the felt. She rubbed the grosgrain to confirm that it was the good kind, and tucked it away.
To block a piece of wool felt, you must first get it hot. A Treatise on Hat-Making recommends immersing the felt in boiling water, which Catherine did when she was just getting started. Now, she has two machines for the job. The first, the steamer, is essentially an electric kettle, the size and general shape of a classroom microscope. When Catherine switched it on, a musty bubbling fog formed quickly above the nozzle. The second machine, the boiler, is the heavy-duty older brother. It is a shiny metal cube, the size of a large toaster oven; from its side emerges two insulated tubes, which are braided together and suspended a foot above the machine by a fishing-rod-like apparatus before descending to meet a hand iron.
Catherine dropped the disassembled beret onto the nozzle of the steamer. “So now we’re really going for it,” she warned me. With one hand, she spun the hat around the nozzle like a pizza boy throwing dough. Then she whisked the hat o! the steamer, placed it overtop the block, and began stretching the edges down toward a thin cut-in channel marking the bottom of the hat. “Evenly,” she said. Miraculously, the felt grew. In total, maybe a centimeter.
She lifted the whole block up to the steamer, steamed patiently, and this time, pushed felt out from the middle of the crown, where it was still gathered in a beret-like pu!. When she got one particularly droopy segment down near the perimeter, she picked up her hammer, took a T-pin from the pile in front of us, and hammered the felt into place.
Then it was my turn. “Evenly, evenly,” she cautioned. The felt was less supple than I expected. I pinched it tight and leaned in with my body weight. Everything shifted toward me. Not even. “You’re doing good. You’re doing good,” Catherine reassured.
We switched to the boiler, then back to the steamer,
then to the boiler again. We pushed from the top and pulled from the bottom. We frowned at the result, disassembled the puzzle block, repositioned the felt, and tried again. Steam, pull, hammer. Steam, pull, hammer. Slowly, unevenly, we willed the felt into the neat cylindrical shape of the block. Catherine got out a thin rope and tightened it around the the channel. She tugged at a naughty edge that had risen up, and tightened some more.
“Ok,” Catherine said. “I think we’re done.” In front of us, where twenty minutes earlier lay a floppy mess of wool, was a hat. A sharp, gallant kufi.
Whenever anyone gets hired at McDonald’s, they’re usually told that “1 in every 8 Americans are employed by McDonald’s at some point in their life.” It feels oddly plausible. After all, no matter where you live, you’re likely within a fifteen-minute drive from your very own fluorescent-lit greasy haven. Working for the golden arches isn’t a bad gig. Plenty of celebrities and Fortune 500 magnates once donned the ketchup-stained uniform and attempted to fix the perpetually broken ice cream machine. Rachel McAdams, before becoming the quintessential mean girl, took orders for three years. Je! Bezos was put on Saturday morning egg duty before becoming one of the richest men on Earth. Even Luke Skywalker was known to flip a few burgers before wielding a lightsaber. As for me, I consider myself lucky to be among the select few who have had the pleasure of dealing with boiling grease splatters, exploding
ketchup bags, and the occasional health-code violation. My nearly four-year “McCareer” began in the winter of 2021.
I was sixteen and had finally passed my driver’s test. I had been dreaming of the escapades my hand-me-down BMW would take me on for months now. I was quick to learn a hard lesson that most American teens do: gas is expensive. With my savings account dwindling, I began the job search. My options were limited. Small towns in Pennsylvania aren’t known for their diverse job markets. I already had to drive fifteen minutes to find any viable options. I began searching in the nearby town of Ephrata, a borough in Lancaster County known for rolling farmland and Amish horse-and-buggies. After rejections from Goodwills and Walmarts, McDonald’s seemed to be my last hope. I was not a chef by any means. My culinary expertise did not extend past toast with the occasional scrambled egg. Luckily, McDonald’s is not known for requiring Michelin-star talent, so I was in the clear. Besides, this particular McDonald’s had already burned down once before, so the chances of a second blaze were statistically low.
The restaurant was located within the historic Ephrata Cloister, a small plot of land where the Seventh Day Dunkers had set up shop sometime in the 1780s. The German sect was known for their pious and rigid lifestyle, keeping watch every night from midnight to 2am for the second coming of Christ. Nowadays, the remains of their settlement mainly serve as Instagram backdrops for local highschoolers’ prom photos. Set atop the hill, the McDonald’s overlooked the preserved stone barracks and beautiful greenery. I rolled into the parking lot ready to embrace my destiny. After handing in my application and doing a swift five-minute interview, I was hired on the spot. I like to think it was my confident stature and the smile that said, “I will dedicate my life to this restaurant,” but I think it was more so the fact that they were desperately understa!ed.
I started out working the grill, dropping patties like a
madman during the rushes and making sure all the fridges were stocked. I ran quality controls on the chicken McNuggets and cradled McRibs in a pit of coagulated barbeque sauce. I slowly worked my way up to “table person” which meant I made all the sandwiches. Not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty damn good at it. I could make and wrap a cheeseburger in under 12 seconds. Yet even as I mastered the art of assembly-line sandwich creation, I dreaded my least favorite assignment: the front counter. Here, the worst of humanity often reared its ugly, entitled head.
The McDonald’s uniform, although rather unassuming, seems to function as an invitation to hostility. To a disgruntled customer, the tattered red apron and mustard colored-shirt morphs employees into targets that are just begging to be verbally accosted. Every shift would have at least one scorned patron who would scream at us like we had set their house ablaze simply because there was too much lettuce on their McChicken. My coworkers have been told to kill themselves over a misplaced pickle. I’ve seen parents launch into full-fledged tantrums over flat sodas, their children oblivious behind the glow of their iPads.
Among these moments of madness, one interaction sticks with me to this day. I was a senior in high school, riding high after my college acceptance was finalized and rejoicing that my days at this establishment were numbered. It was a typical, busy afternoon when she arrived. She was your textbook “Karen,” the queen of entitlement who was never happy but always ready to tell you why. Clutching a crumpled bag and visibly shaking, she unleashed a verbal onslaught that would only be allowed to be replicated in an NC-17 movie. She roared how she had wasted her entire day waiting on a Big Mac that had turned out ice cold. I was confused. She had only placed her order six minutes ago (I checked) and I had watched them make it with a fresh tray of patties. I apologized and asked if it was the meat or the bun that was the problem. She spat back that the bottom of the bag wasn’t hot,
which meant that her food was ruined. It turned out that she hadn’t even taken a bite of the sandwich. For those of you who don’t know, the transfer of heat between two objects by direct contact is called conduction. Even at its freshest, a Big Mac will not retain enough heat to pass through the cardboard box to warm the bottom of the bag. I assured her that if she checked the sandwich itself, she would see it was hot. She stared in disbelief as she accused me of disrespecting her intelligence and how corporate would be hearing about this unacceptable behavior.
By this point, the entire restaurant had grinded to a halt to watch this show. Families stopped eating, teenagers put down their phones, and the world stood still as this volcano of a woman continued to erupt, spewing molten insults at the workers who tried to intervene. My manager made her way to the counter and took over, assuring her that we would make this right and that there is no need to call corporate (besides, we are a franchise store so calling corporate is essentially useless). We remade her Big Mac and, through clenched teeth, apologized for such an egregious error. She grabbed the new sandwich and felt the bag to make sure it was hot (my manager had thrown the new bag into the microwave for a few seconds to ensure this). She left, leaving behind an audience of bewildered onlookers and exhausted crew members who were just happy it was over.
I collected myself and began to resume my position of taking orders, praying to God that there weren’t any more crazy people on the way to the restaurant. 15 minutes went by, and a woman with two young kids came up to the counter. I started the whole “Welcome to McDonald’s” script when she interrupted me with an “I’m sorry.” She explained that she had seen the whole debacle unfold and she couldn’t fathom how grown adults could act so ridiculous. She recounted her own tales of customer vulgarity, the countless “Karens” she had dealt with during her stint as a Wendy’s employee back in the 90s. She told me that if people gave each other more “grace” then everyone would be nicer to each other and the world would be a
better place.
Her words lingered. What does it mean to give someone grace? Is it forgiveness and empathy? Or, is it simply pausing before reacting. I’ve come to see grace as something quiet but radical — a refusal to dehumanize, even when it’s easy. It’s the pause before the eye-roll, the softening of your voice when you could raise it. It’s choosing to see the person behind the uniform, behind the mistake, behind the moment.
Grace is a misleadingly simple concept. I struggle with it to this day. I still feel a twinge of rage every time I get stuck behind a slow driver or must endure being placed on hold with my bank. In moments like these, grace is a deep breath or a kind word. It’s not always about excusing mistakes, but rather recognizing the person on the other side is trying. Give grace to the fry cook who has been on their feet all day. Give grace to the cashier struggling to keep up during a rush. Give grace to the frantic teenager fumbling your order. Grace is not just a gift for them, it’s a gift for us, a reminder to act with kindness even when rage begins to fester. And in this day and age, grace isn’t just important. It’s essential.
We live in a time of constant friction. It’s easier than ever to be cruel from a distance. Behind a screen, one can get away with intense cruelty behind the shroud of anonymity. Outrage spreads faster than understanding. Everyone’s on edge. Everyone’s tired. Everyone feels as if they’d just worked the dinner rush. Misinformation, polarization, economic pressure — it all adds up to a world where empathy feels in short supply. But grace interrupts that cycle. It’s a choice to de-escalate. To connect. To remind someone, “I see you. I know this is hard.”
Grace doesn’t solve everything. It won’t stop injustice or fix a broken system. But it can build a bridge, however small, between two people who might otherwise only see each other as obstacles. It’s a seed you plant, in a restaurant, in a conversation, in a moment of tension, and hope it grows into something kinder.
I clocked out of the Ephrata McDonald’s for the last
time on March 21st, 2024. Like a soldier going home from war, I took o! my apron, scrubbed the grease from my hands, and put in my customary post-shift order: a chocolate shake and an order of small fries. As if on cue, the ice cream machine broke (like it always does), and my lactose dreams melted away in front of me. I took a deep breath, smiled, and walked out of the lobby with fries in hand.
Pale steam floated up through the grate onto the sidewalk. Peter, clad in carefully tailored white tie, vaulted down from a black SUV and took a few steps towards the Metropolitan Club’s iron gate, its curved spears gilded at the tips. Grace Murphy, following Peter, lifted the skirt of her snow-white dress, almost tripping on her way down. Mr. and Mrs. Murphy came out after her. Grace flashed Peter a dopey look, smiling at him with slightly crooked teeth. He was to escort her into womanhood.
“By the way, a bunch of us are hosting an afterparty.”
Grace was referring to herself and some of her friends from high school, who were also debutantes. “You should come. We rented out a bar a few blocks away.”
The two were only vaguely friends, and Peter had been surprised when Grace invited him a few months ago. At first, he had wanted to refuse. Grace wasn’t all that pretty,
and he couldn’t imagine making conversation with her for an entire night. But, after a girl and three frats rejected him in late October, he reconsidered it. Grace deserves a chance, he thought, and he didn’t have anything else planned for winter break. He texted her back: “So sorry I didn’t see this / I would love to come.”
He resented the hassle the whole a!air had turned out to be. Only a week before, he had learned that his prom tuxedo wasn’t appropriate for the debutante ball; he needed white tie, not black tie. He sheepishly asked his parents to buy him a set, and they shamed him into thinking that shelling out $1,500 at a moment’s notice was a burden for them. (It was not.) There was a practice reception, practice dinner, and information session all the night before, and then, the next day, drinks with Grace’s family, a photo session, and then, finally, the ball.
They passed through the gate and into the courtyard, where parents, debutantes, and escorts were gathering in a throng. The club’s pallid marble facade framed a pair of dark mahogany doors. Inside, a staircase rolled down like a tongue, flanked by red-velvet wallpaper, artificial shrubs, and metal handrails. Grace exchanged hellos with former classmates, reciting obscenely cheery “How are you settling in”s and “You look so gorgeous”s and “I’m unbelievably thrilled to see you”s. Watching her, Peter writhed in contempt at her high-pitched voice and flattering gesticulations. Could anyone actually be this excited to see someone else? He glanced around at unfamiliar faces with pasty, sunken cheeks, laughing and babbling, and a heat wave radiated along his skin. His shoulders tensed. Even though nobody was bothering to look at him, he still felt foreign eyes all over his body.
“What’s the bar?” asked Peter, just to stave o! their silence.
“It’s called Joe’s,” Grace answered. Peter didn’t have a follow-up. Grace glanced at her “Mother and Father,” as she sarcastically referred to her parents. “I’m not into this ritual,” she admitted. “Don’t you think it’s so sexist? My parents said if I didn’t debut, they wouldn’t take me to
Paris.”
“Poor you.”
“You’re right. I want to go to Paris,” Grace conceded. “But I could do chores or babysit. I cannot imagine why they care about this so much.”
“I’m getting hungry.”
“Dinner’s in an hour.”
“Do you know everybody here?” Peter asked.
“Most of them. I’m not friends with everyone.” Grace spoke casually, not at all comforting Peter.
The two made it to the staircase, and Peter extended his hand, palm up. He trembled, just a little. She took his hand, grasped his white cotton glove with hers, and they climbed the steps together.
The Great Hall was a square. Sloping down on opposite sides, marble staircases lined the walls and converged at a landing near the bottom. Sapphire stained-glass windows loomed above, backlit and coating the room in royal blue light. A solitary lantern, brilliant and caged in gold ribs, was suspended from an ornately carved dark-wood ceiling. A live band drummed out jazz. A scent of whiskey and lavender wafted through the air.
Grace bolted in pursuit of a gin and tonic, and Peter lost her in the crowd. As he searched for Grace, someone else caught his eye. He stared at another debutante, clad in frosting-white silk, her eyes flitting like a doe’s. Her figure was thin, a matchstick dipped in milk, and her neck, long and smooth, curved up like a swan’s. Her golden hair was tied up into what looked like a choux-pastry pu!, perched on the top of her head. Standing still, he tracked her around the room with his eyes for a few minutes, having forgotten about Grace. The chattering of the crowd had faded out of his ears. These girls really are getting debuted into womanhood, aren’t they? Peter thought. How perfect. As if drawn by the gravitational pull of a celestial body, he sauntered in her direction.
“I got you champagne.” Grace stopped him and held out a bubbling flute while clutching a stubbier glass in her own hand. Peter kept staring at the girl with the swan
neck until Grace nudged him with the flute. “I think you look very cute in your garb.”
“Who’s that?” Peter gestured across the room.
“Priss Carrington. A WASP straight from the nest. Her ancestors are dukes. Her dad’s a big private equity guy. Mom graduated from Harvard and now runs Spence’s parent’s association.” Grace sco!ed.
Peter didn’t absorb what she was trying to convey, and the image of Priss only became holier.
“Thanks.” Peter grabbed the flute.
“I just saw my middle school enemy. I heard she was in rehab.”
“Okay.”
“I said hi to her. I felt bad. Her parents were never around.”
“Sure.”
“I felt bad. Are you enjoying yourself?”
Peter was burning. Every moment spent with Grace was one not spent with Priss—one where Priss spoke with another man. His fingers spasmed, and he was bulging out of his white-tie tails, which were crimping his neck and binding his wrists. A drop of sweat dripped into his champagne.
“Yeah. Hey, I see someone I recognize. Be right back.”
“Who is it—”
But Peter was gone. Finally escaping Grace, he locked in on Priss like a missile, barreling through the crowd between them. But, just twenty feet shy of his goal, he felt a hearty blow to his right shoulder. Peter stumbled a little, turned, and recognized the person who had punched him: Daniel. He stood about half a foot taller than Peter, the same as in high school.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” said Daniel, bringing Peter in for a brief bear hug. “I’m with Grace.”
“I’m escorting Emily.”
How’d Daniel swing that? Peter wondered.
“Dude, we look so gay,” he remarked. He glanced over Daniel’s shoulder and spotted Priss walking away
from where she had been standing. Who was that guy she was just talking to?
“It’s so nice to see everyone back,” Daniel said.
“I love it when people dress up.”
“I know nobody,” Peter replied.
He had felt an initial relief that Daniel was here, someone he knew. His lie to Grace ended up partially true. But that relief had quickly dissipated. He was worried that Priss would suddenly see him, approach him, talk to him, and for some reason he couldn’t muster that kind of strength right now. Thinking for a moment, Peter figured that Daniel was making him nervous. He always seemed small next to Daniel, physically speaking, and it didn’t help that Daniel’s facade always looked so placid and confident.
“D’you rush a frat?” Daniel asked.
“Nah. I wasn’t into it. Did you?”
“K-Sig. I love it, man. Great group of guys, super fun parties. Feel like I’m at home there.”
Peter swallowed a thick glob of spit. There was no way Daniel could be enjoying college this much, he thought. Who could find “home” in a semester?
“Hey, I’m not sure if you know about, um…”
“About what?”
“Uhh—well, I’m sure it’s fine that I’m telling you this.” Peter took a long sip of champagne, drawing out the pause. “There’s an afterparty, if you didn’t know. Everyone’s coming. I’m sure you can sneak in.”
“Really? I’ll ask Emily about it.”
Peter smirked. He thought Daniel looked like an ox. Disgusting and uncouth. His white tie was clearly rented.
“Take a look at that girl. To your left.” Peter pointed to the corner of the hall where Priss was standing.
“Yeah?”
“Isn’t she hot?” asked Peter.
“She’s pretty.”
“A fine, fine thing.”
Daniel didn’t respond.
“How’s Emily?” Peter added, eager to revive the conversation.
“Good. Sorry, I see someone I know o! there. It’s good seeing you, man.” Daniel delivered a parting pat on the shoulder and walked o!. Finally, the path to Priss was clear. Knowing people was such a burden, Peter thought. It was labor. He remembered the first time he met Daniel, the first day of high school. For what felt like minutes, they played one-on-one basketball for an uninterrupted hour. Their friendship formed so naturally. They spent every minute of freshman year together.
What happened to them two? Daniel made varsity basketball, while Peter didn’t and ended up dropping the sport—in Peter’s mind, that definitely changed things. But, most of all, Daniel ultimately resented Peter for being rich. He never said that, but Peter knew it. What control did he have over his wealth? Or Daniel’s lack thereof? In fact, he felt poor among their peers at Riverdale, whose families had second and third houses in the Hamptons and Aspen and “summered” in Europe. There existed far better targets for Daniel’s communist antipathy than him. Peter believed that the specific circumstances of his own birth caused him great misfortune.
Darting towards Priss, her back facing him, Peter began scheming what he’d say to her. “Do we know each other?” or maybe “Have we met?” Something to set the stage. “Are you Priss Carrington by chance?” No, too bold. The approach was to be delicate. “What’s your name?” Something as simple as that? “You beautiful goddess, how might I brighten your night?” Probably not.
“Excuse me, all debutantes and fathers, please come to the back,” said a matronly voice over the speakers. The music had stopped. The debutantes and their fathers started scrambling. Priss ended the conversation she was having and went o! with a few girls. She passed right by Peter, her dress grazing his shin. She didn’t look at him. Peter’s chest pounded like a bell.
The mothers, escorts, and guests all faced the stairs in anticipation. About fifteen minutes after the announcement, the lights dimmed, and the same matronly voice introduced the ceremony, gave thanks to sponsors, and
finally started the debuts. Girls and fathers, arm in arm, began descending the stairs. At the landing where the staircases converged, each girl-father pair paused, illuminated by a bright spotlight, and waited for the voice to announce their names. Then, the girls parted from their fathers and lined up on the left-hand side of the staircase. Grace and her father descended in the middle of the order. Her father, who looked like a melting marshmallow, smiled ear to ear. While they were in the spotlight, he whispered something to Grace, and she chuckled. She didn’t look bad, Peter thought. Her charcoal hair sat neatly on her shoulders. Her smile was nice.
Priss walked down the stairs with her father, a gaunt, placid man. They didn’t look at each other. Only at that moment did Peter get an unobstructed view of Priss. Large and buggy, her eyes motionlessly gazed into some vanishing point. Her cheekbones, jutting out, cast shadows on her emaciated face. Her skin was so smooth that Peter imagined if he poked a needle into it, it would crinkle like taut saran wrap.
The ceremony lasted ten minutes. There: these nineteen-year-old girls were now society women on the marriage market. Dinner was called.
Peter found Grace and her family in the dining room, already sitting down. A row of thin arched windows, draped with blood-red curtains, looked out onto the street. Above, the ceiling featured three neoclassical frescoes painted in long ovals, heavenly depictions of white angels, flu!y clouds, and bronze harps.
“So, Peter, where are you from?” Grace’s mother asked. They were making their way through the appetizer: a luscious tru#e risotto, sprinkled with verdant parsley and creamy to the fork touch.
“I grew up here in New York.”
“I mean your parents.”
“They immigrated when they were young.” Peter was used to these questions.
“Inspiring! It seems they did well for themselves. Raised an excellent son. You know, our family isn’t so
far removed, either. Maybe two generations from Derry. Scott?”
“Yes, I think that’s right—two,” Grace’s dad confirmed. The conversation wandered to another topic.
“I’m sorry,” Grace whispered to Peter.
“I don’t mind.”
The risotto was taken away; cuts of seared filet mignon on a buttery pomme-purée mound were delivered shortly after.
“Just wondering, do you know if Priss is coming to the afterparty?” asked Peter.
“I’m sure we invited her. Why?”
“I’m just wondering.”
“Okay,” Grace replied, in a tone that indicated she knew Peter wasn’t just wondering. She slumped back into her chair and sipped her Negroni, which was her fifth drink of the night. They continued eating.
“I’m not going to finish my filet, if you want it,” Grace o!ered. Peter gladly took the plate with two-thirds of the meal left and stacked it on top of his own finished plate. “I love men,” said Grace. “Their stomachs are black holes.”
“You’re the hungriest after you’ve just eaten.” Peter also had the magical sense that if he ate quickly enough, they all would go to the afterparty faster, and he could access Priss sooner.
As he was forking up his second helping of red meat, Peter peered through a rift in the curtain, which exposed a slim rectangle of the darkened sidewalk. A man, wearing a beanie and smothered in old, stained coats, walked by in a shiver. He descended into a subway stop, entering the pool of decrepit yellow light emanating from underground. Peter watched the man until he went out of view. He turned away from the window, eating the filet even faster than before.
Dinner ended in relative silence. Grace picked up a Manhattan to top o! her drinking at the Metropolitan Club—there would be more at Joe’s, she assured everyone—and had to use the bathroom before they left. Peter
waited by the coat check, where people were wrapping themselves in checkered cashmere scarves and buttoning on tawny wool coats. He spotted Daniel by the door and Priss back by the threshold leading into the Great Hall. In his mind, they were the two moons of his night, orbiting around him.
“I’m ready.” Grace had come out of the bathroom. They left together.
Joe’s Bar sported an orange neon sign above its doors. Inside, the decor was going for a Western saloon-chic and had cheap wooden tables scattered throughout. Even though the bar was only a few blocks away, Grace and Peter arrived in an Uber to avoid the cold. After flashing their fake IDs to the bouncer, they descended into the shadowy, damp basement that was rented out. Only a few cove lights lit the hazy space. Debutantes and escorts began filling in, re-exchanging hellos and loosening buttons.
It wasn’t long before Peter noticed Daniel climbing down the stairs into the afterparty. He was chatting with some guy Peter didn’t recognize. Peter rolled his eyes. Why would Daniel have actually taken up the o!er?
“You made it,” Peter said to Daniel, having approached him despite his disappointment. He could a!ord to be friendly, just for a bit.
“It’s getting packed,” replied Daniel.
“Dude, I think I’m scoring tonight.”
“That girl? Prue?”
“Priss, yeah. I don’t think she’s here yet. We hit it o!.”
“Do what you want,” said Daniel dismissively, glancing around the crowd. For some reason, Peter was instantly transported back to high school. How many times had he talked to Daniel looking o! somewhere else?
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Peter shouted. Even though he spoke spontaneously, out of a rageful instinct, he didn’t regret it. He couldn’t actually a!ord to be friendly for that long. “What the fuck are you doing here? Nobody wants you here.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why’d you stop being friends with me?”
“No way you’re asking me that right now.”
“You’re such a prick,” said Peter. Daniel stared at him with genuine incredulity. “You’re not actually mad about this,” he replied.
“Yes, I am!” Peter couldn’t imagine why Daniel was being so di cult. Couldn’t he just curse him out? That would be preferable.
“I think you’re jealous and insecure and whatever,” said Daniel, “and you can’t express it, and you’re pinning it on me.”
“What?”
“But I don’t get it,” Daniel continued. “You’ve lived with a silver spoon up your ass your whole life. The world could be set on fire, and you’d be fine.”
Peter gritted his teeth, and his nostrils flared like a bull’s.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Peter blurted.
“Did you think we were that close?”
As soon as Peter heard that, he thrust his right fist at Daniel’s face, aiming for his cheek. His suit was constraining his torso, so his first attempted hit didn’t touch Daniel at all. He shu#ed around in his white tie for a moment. Daniel wasn’t reacting, only confused at Peter’s movement. When he finally freed himself, Peter launched a lousy swing at Daniel, who easily blocked it with his forearm. Peter desperately grasped at Daniel again, but Daniel stopped him by holding his shoulders and easily shoved him aside. He turned away and walked o!, not o!ering a parting word. The fight was so meager that nobody really noticed; perhaps that was the most disappointing part for Peter.
Collecting himself, Peter found Grace sitting alone in a booth and joined her. Joe’s had become crowded, loud, and steamy. Priss hadn’t come yet, as Peter was keeping track.
“What did you talk to Daniel about?” Grace asked. “Nothing.”
“Are you okay?”
“I was never really friends with him.” Peter didn’t want to ask Grace if she saw their fight, and he certainly didn’t want to explain any of it. He stared o! blankly, feeling Grace’s gaze still on him. On the one hand, the situation deeply embarrassed him, but on the other, he had always wanted to say those things to Daniel. A scenario that he had been constructing in his mind for years was realized just now— even his failure to land a hit on Daniel, his physical inferiority, had been envisioned. He knew that he would explode, then lose, and then wallow.
“You’re in love with Priss,” Grace said.
“What?” Peter whipped around, feigning ignorance and surprise.
She didn’t buy it at all. “You couldn’t stop watching her all night.”
“So you’ve been watching me watch her?”
“Please stop.”
“Nobody has said anything about it.”
“Don’t act like you aren’t brazen.”
“You’re wrong,” said Peter.
Grace’s eyes drooped exhaustedly, and her words were spilling out like gasoline. She couldn’t control herself, Peter judged.
While slipping in her seat, Grace grabbed Peter’s shoulder and crawled up onto him. She grasped his hand with hers and leaned close. Peter shot her a confused expression. Past her shoulder, he could make out other escorts and debutantes drawing closer to one another, dancing intimately and caressing each other. He saw Priss walk in.
“Kiss me,” said Grace.
“What the fuck?” Peter stared at her crooked teeth.
“I’m taking a big risk here. You and all.” Still glancing over Grace’s shoulder, Peter saw Priss by the bar ordering a drink. “You’re staring at that bitch right now,” continued Grace. “I’m sorry. She’s lovely. Not a bitch.”
“Grace.”
“You don’t want to kiss me, do you?”
“No,” Peter replied.
“Nobody likes you. I took a big risk just inviting you. I always imagined you had a soft side somewhere. Some chivalry.”
“You’re very drunk.”
“I just realized something. I should have never felt bad for you.” She patted Peter on the cheek, held his gaze for a second, caught her breath, and then stumbled o!. Peter watched as she shoved her way through the crowd. While touching the spot on his cheek where Grace had touched, he saw her join a group of her high-school friends, who hugged her and took her in. What would they say about him? He recalled high school: Grace had always treated him kindly, but Peter had always figured that she was a kind person in general. Had she felt that way towards him for a long time? How long? Since when? Was that what her invitation to this debutante ball was all about? Was she thinking of him while she was at college? Not anger, but an uncomfortable tenderness radiated along this skin.
Priss was still at the bar. Did she see them? Surely not. Well, hopefully not. At least she didn’t see his and Daniel’s “fight.” Still thinking about Grace, Peter bolted across the room, focusing his eyes on Priss’s swan neck. Grace’s advance had made him nauseated and paranoid.
“Hey. Hey!” Peter began shouting as he got closer. Priss turned around, confused. She made eye contact with him, for no other reason than that his voice was the loudest. Tripping a little bit, Peter grabbed the surface of the bar and stabilized himself. He caught his breath and looked at Priss, who seemed concerned.
“Are you all right?” Priss asked. Her voice was light like a bird’s chirp, just how he imagined it.
“Yes, thank you.” He shook himself a bit and smiled. “I don’t think we’ve met?”
“I’m Priss.” She looked away towards the bartender, seeing if her drink was ready. Peter couldn’t believe he was already losing her attention. He needed to lock it down.
“I’m Peter.”
“Nice to meet you. I hope you have a nice Christmas.” She picked up her drink and walked away, not bothering
to look back.
Bitter saliva flooded Peter’s mouth. He felt like a fifty-ton meteor had hit his chest. As he watched Priss leave him, his vision swirled. His stomach churned. And then, like a crashing wave, he vomited all over the floor. He looked at the green-brown puddle of masticated risotto and filet mignon that he had spewed out. For a moment, everyone in the room shut up and stared at him. His vision went black.
When he came to, Peter found himself in a booth, some vomit still coating his lips. His vision began unblurring, and he glanced around the room. By the jukebox, Priss was talking with Daniel, leaning over him, massaging his muscular shoulder with her hand. Daniel’s arm arched around Priss’s waist. On the opposite side of the room, Grace was still talking with her friends, laughing and smiling. He felt poor.
The girls had a garden, but they preferred the woods. They belonged to Old Farmer McGrath, who used it for firewood and illegal fox hunting. A rusted sign nailed to an oak declared the area “Private Property.” Amren liked to imagine the farmer cared that they were trespassing. The fear of being caught added a certain thrill to her games. She didn’t tell Efa, though, because Efa was the sort of little sister who cried. They discovered the fox hunting while wading through bog. Amren had been imagining bog mummies in quick pursuit. Efa had been singing about cyborg bears. They’d never ventured so far in before, and couldn’t think of another reason why barbed wire would be strung up to block their path. Then they discovered the small-animal sized hole towards the base of the fence, and that settled the matter. There were foxes here, and one had escaped.
“We should find it.” Amren suggested.
“Then what?” Efa asked.
“Then we catch it.” Amren was planning it out already. “We’ll dig a pit, or use a net maybe.”
“But—” Efa had the sort of face that looked nervous even when she wasn’t. It tended to make other people nervous, too. “It escaped. Would it want to be caught again?”
Amren thought that was a very seven-year-old view of the world. She’d been like that, once, but three years does a lot to a person and she knew better now.
“Better we find it than someone else. We’d treat it right. And a fox would be an even better pet than a dog.” They’d had three dogs over the years—Archie, Winnipeg, and Dog The Third—but each of them had run away.
“Oh, okay then.” Efa agreed, and they set o! on their mission. It had rained the night before, so everything was darker and smelled of the same damp earth. They were both caked in mud, but not enough to mask the bright yellow of Efa’s button-adorned raincoat. It distracted Amren as she scanned the trees and bushes for hints of orange fur. At her sister’s request, their father had sewed all of Efa’s springtime clothes in bright colours with lots of decorations. Amren would have to tell him to tone it down. The plan was to find where the fox was sheltering, build the traps overnight, then do the actual act the next day. That wouldn’t work if they weren’t properly disguised.
Amren had the dedication to hunt all day, but all too soon Efa tugged at her sleeves and reminded her about her playdate booked for the afternoon. Amren didn’t like Kelsey, who only spoke in whispers and was too scared of everything to play real games, but Efa was excited to have any friend at all. She hadn’t developed standards yet.
“We’ll be behind schedule if we don’t find the fox today.” Amren tried to argue.
“We’ve got a week’s more holiday,” Efa pouted. “And I’m too tired to keep searching. I could ask Kelsey to help tomorrow, if you like.”
“No.” Amren was firm. “This is our fox. It’s for us to
find.”
“But not today. Today I’m seeing Kelsey.” Amren considered getting them lost, but she didn’t like it when Efa cried. She let her sister hold her hand as she led them home.
§The sisters’ house was large enough that the girls could have each had their own bedroom, had they wanted. They’d moved four years before for that very purpose, but their parents had never finished unpacking the extra room, and Efa and Amren didn’t much mind sharing. Efa was too young to remember what the old house had been like. Amren wasn’t, and when her memory started to fade she snuck into the dark, cold room that could have been hers, and went through the boxes to help her remember. At the front were her old clothes and the clock she’d been given for her fifth birthday to help her learn to tell the time. Then there were the toys she hadn’t been ready to let go of but was too old to play with, and a small, locked box she’d rattled enough to realise contained her baby teeth. At the back there was the furniture they hadn’t found a place for but was really too good to be thrown away. Each time Amren entered the room, the chairs looked smaller. They found their father, as they almost always did, in his studio. It was attached to the house, but only just. They hadn’t got the dimensions quite right, so there was a short tarpaulin tunnel strung up between his shed and the living room door. In any season but summer there was too much of a draft for the living room to be worth living in, but the studio had a fireplace that kept it warm. When Amren sneaked out at night and ventured away from the house, she always knew her way back by the flickering orange glow of that room.
The only downside to this was that their clothes always smelled faintly of smoke. Scott kept all his fabrics stacked on shelves around the small room, and they absorbed the fire’s soot in the months it took him to find the perfect
project for the print. He took his sewing seriously. Their mother had tried introducing him to some friends as a tailor, once, but he’d gone all quiet and fiddly until she corrected herself. He wasn’t a tailor, or a seamstress, but a seamster. There was a subtle but important di!erence— one that Amren could never quite remember. The only thing she was sure it meant was that she’d never worn anything that her father hadn’t made her, and that wasn’t about to change.
“Oh goodness, look at that mud,” Scott mumbled by way of greeting. He wasn’t the sort of man who liked to raise his voice. “Not to worry. Try these on for size.”
He handed them each a bundle tied with string, like a gift. Amren untied hers and saw dark green trousers and a shirt that fit together to show a stitched maze. Efa still liked dresses, and was holding one that would no doubt make her look like a jellyfish.
“Dad, can you make something darker for Efa tomorrow? We need to camouflage.” Amren asked by way of thanks. Actual gratitude, she had learned, made him embarrassed.
“Oh, of course,” he obliged, his gaze already drifting back to his machine and his halfway-finished red ru#es. It would be best not to overstay their welcome. Efa looked like she might complain, but after a moment relented.
“Dad, I’m meant to be seeing Kelsey today.” Efa changed the subject.
“Oh, really? Here?” He looked surprised, but not unhappy. They rarely had visitors.
“No, at her house.” Efa sounded as patient as ever. Amren tried to decide if it was genuine.
“Ah, okay then. And you’ll be okay getting there?” There was a distinct note in his voice now. They had to speed things up.
“No dad,” Amren interrupted, “she needs you to drive her.”
“Oh, I see. When?”
“After lunch?” Now Amren could tell Efa was trying not to sound desperate. It came down to how quickly she
replied, and how long she resisted looking back down at her shoes.
“Sure,” their father replied with a relenting shrug. “Your mum had to go back to work, but she left lunch on the table. Something with cheese, I think. Help yourselves, then we’ll be o!.”
They got changed in the living room and left their muddy clothes on the floor. Their dad would want to check for tears and make adjustments. In the kitchen, Amren was the only one tall enough to reach the plates, even on a step-stool, so that was her job. Efa grabbed the forks, then they brought the casserole dish over together. Stuck to the top was a note in their mothers cramped capitals: Cheese rind baked with mushrooms and thyme. Tobin (new fishmonger, came in for lunch) said too salty.
Thoughts?
Amren served each of them as evenly as possible. Efa swapped the plates to get the slightly bigger slice. They agreed there wasn’t too much salt at all, and wrote as much on the flip side of the note. Their mother was sensitive about such things, which was of course only right for a chef. She ran the local bakery at breakfast, the cafe at lunch, and the restaurant at dinner. They were the most popular places in the village, but such a reputation took work to maintain. Every customer complaint was passed on to the girls, who were as honest as seemed fair. They’d once complained about not liking asparagus, and the whole shipment had been cancelled. They’d worked to develop better tastebuds after that.
After they’d finished their portions and cut an extra slice for their father, Efa left Amren the dishes and skipped away. Her jellyfish dress made the movement look more graceful than it was. She yelled out goodbye as she left the house, but slammed the front door before Amren could reply. Amren went to the window and watched her family drive away. Then she found a pile of pattern-paper pieces and began to draw traps. Her pencil scratchings were the loudest noise in the house. It was di cult to come up with ideas that wouldn’t risk harming the fox, but a few minor
scrapes wouldn’t matter. Treating its wounds would probably make the animal like them more, if anything.
Amren was more of a planner than a builder. A plan was like a story. Building was work. When she at last settled on an idea, she went to her bedroom and climbed into her sister’s top bunk. It smelled faintly of bed-wetting and was stacked with stu!ed toys. Amren took one from the back—a sock-rabbit that Efa wouldn’t miss for a long while—and shoved it under the mattress. Only a squashed bundle of fur and maybe an eye would be visible between the wooden bed slats from her lower bunk. Amren imagined it looking down on her as she slept. It was a little scary, but she didn’t mind. Anyway, she’d only wait a week or so to tell Efa what had happened to her toy.
Amren was hungry again by the time Efa returned with stories about Kelsey and a box from their mother— pumpkin gnocchi fried in balsamic vinegar and sage, then flowerpot tiramisu for afters. Both had been accused of being too sweet, but Amren liked sugar. She started with dessert and worked backwards. Her sister sat opposite her, swinging her legs and almost sticking her elbow into their dad’s untouched lunch. He’d gone to his studio to make their darker clothes. Efa was talking like time might run out.
“I already ate at Kelsey’s. We had pizza with only cheese and tomato sauce and you can’t tell anyone but I liked it more than any other type and then we had chocolate ice cream and then we were allowed to watch TV and Kelsey’s mum had to take a call so we got to switch to whatever channel we liked and I learnt three new words and—”
“And you got back too late to help me with the plans for the fox.” Amren finished her mouthful and attempted to redirect the conversation. Efa rarely talked this much, but then again, they rarely spent enough time apart to have events to recount to each other. Even at school there were few enough students that their years were crammed into the same class.
“Oh,” Efa almost took the bait. “I told Kelsey about
that and she says that I’m right and it’s mean to try to catch it.”
“You told Kelsey?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t a secret, was it? You only said she couldn’t help.” Efa looked oblivious and innocent. It didn’t suit her. Amren didn’t know how to answer. Of course it had been a secret, the sort that shouldn’t even have to be explained. That’s how they’d always done things. They told each other before anyone else, and then that was enough.
“Well, don’t tell her any more.” She at last scowled, then she left her bowl on the table. It was Efa’s turn to wash up. §
One of the sisters’ nighttime rituals was fighting over whether their bedroom door should be open or closed. Efa liked the light, even though it made strange shadows. Amren liked the security of knowing that no one could sneak inside without at least rattling the handle first. Their dad, when they’d first brought the complaint to him, made a compromise by leaving the door open only a little way. Amren wanted to argue that this wasn’t a compromise, that a door was either open or closed and there wasn’t any in-between. But arguments like that never worked. Scott had said it was too silly a thing to keep being disturbed over. Instead, she’d learned to wait until Efa was asleep, then shut it herself. That way they both got what they wanted.
But there were hours between bedtime and sleep, especially during summer when the light shone through curtain-cracks and life outside carried on without them. When they’d been small enough that Efa still took naps, Amren would pretend to need them too so she could climb into bed beside her sister and tell stories until they were both allowed to get up again. Back then an open door made it harder to get away with noise, but their home was bigger now. Only real screams would make it all the way down to
their father’s studio, and even then he’d only come if he thought they sounded afraid. That left a lot of leeway.
“Shall we play guess the sound?” Efa asked once Amren had pulled the curtains and tucked them both into bed. It was one of Amren’s favourite nighttime games, and was no doubt an attempt at an apology.
“No.” Amren replied. She made sure to keep her voice somber.
“Oh. Okay then.” Efa’s voice was a whisper, even though it didn’t have to be. Amren counted to twelve before speaking again.
“We can’t play because I have something important to tell you.”
“What?” Efa immediately asked, caught between curiosity and concern.
“You have to promise you’re ready to hear it. And to not tell anyone.”
“Why?”
“Promise first. Then I’ll tell you.” Amren whispered even though she didn’t have to.
“I promise.” Concern was winning the battle. Amren steadied herself. “It’s about the fox—”
“Oh, please, Amren. I don’t want to—”
“It’s about the fox,” she had to keep the suspense just right. “And why it escaped. It was giving us a warning.”
“A warning about what?” Efa didn’t sound convinced just yet, but it wouldn’t take much.
“A warning about the world. It’s going to end, but mum and dad don’t know it. The fox was telling us so we could save ourselves in time.”
This time it was Efa’s turn to pause before she spoke. “Bullshit.” She said at last, which was not what Amren had expected. “That’s one of the words I learnt on the TV at Kelsey’s. It means I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe me or not,”
Amren replied, recovering. “It’s going to happen. And the only safe place is the woods, behind that fence. That’s why the fox made the hole, so we could get in.” The words felt easy, almost true, on her tongue.
“Why would it do that? And how would you know, anyway?” Amren didn’t usually question her like this. Kelsey must be even more of a bad influence than she thought.
“I know because I’m ten. They tell more things to ten-year-olds. And it did that to save us, because it knows we deserve it. They’ll be more signs, just wait and see.”
“Signs like what?” Amren could tell from the clarity of Efa’s voice that she was sitting up in bed now.
“Wait and see. I’m going to sleep now so don’t talk to me anymore.”
“Amren—” Efa tried to argue, but Amren didn’t reply. She saw one of Efa’s feet grapple for the ladder, and closed her eyes. She kept her breathing deep and even as her sister stood over her, then shook her, then got back into bed and kept saying her name, slower and slower, until they both fell asleep. It was important to take the chance to rest properly in the nights they had left. §
Amren remembered when her sister had been fearless. She didn’t know whether Efa still could. A year was a long time when you were seven. She had been the sort of kid who ran leaning so far forward that the weight of her head always looked ready to topple her. She had been the sort who ran even when there had been nothing to run either from or to. She had climbed trees, and liked to make things, and played with scissors, and she had wanted to cut Amren’s hair. Amren let her. Each snip made the world seem lighter. The hair was o! her back and out of her eyes, but then Efa had to make adjustments. They weren’t the pretty sort. Even then Amren didn’t really mind. She knew lots of people cared about their hair but, just as clearly, she knew that she didn’t want anyone to think she was one of them. She had only wanted to be angry for a little bit.
Efa cried, of course. Even when she was fearless, she had been that sort of kid. The trick was in forgetting
about it afterwards. She said sorry, and Amren knew she was, but accepting a sorry meant pretending everything was okay. She wanted a day—just one day—where things didn’t have to be. So, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at her sister. She ignored the shadow following her around the house, and all the times her name was called. She kept touching the back of her head, enjoying the uneven baldness of it against her fingers.
Forgiveness was given the next morning, but by then Efa had started looking worried and that look had never quite gone away. Even after Amren’s hair grew back—uneven, still, but long enough to just look wild—her sister looked at her like she had something to make up for. Most of the time Amren wanted them both to just forget it, but on occasion she found it was useful.
Their breakfast table had two bowls of porridge with pears baked in star anise and cinnamon, and two packages of matching green and brown uniforms. They looked like Robin Hood wannabes.
“We’ve got a lot to do today.” Amren declared.
“Please let’s not.” Efa asked, looking down at her bowl.
“Don’t be silly, I’m not leaving you behind. If I’m getting saved, then you are too.”
“I don’t like this game.”
“It’s not a game. It’s life and death. You find what mum’s left for lunch and pack a picnic. I’ll find the bags.”
They met at the front door and waved in the direction of the studio as they headed towards the woods. Efa glanced up at the “Private Property” sign as they walked past. The forest was damp with morning and the beginnings of rot. It was almost cold, and almost wild, and almost scary, but nothing they couldn’t handle. Amren handed her sister a cloth bag with their mother’s bakery’s logo on it.
“We’ve got to look for signs.” She instructed. “Things that are out of place.”
“Like what?” Efa sounded resigned.
“Like, bottles or strange coloured leaves or things that
shouldn’t be here. If we each fill our bags, then we’ll have enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough for the initiation.” Amren smiled down at her sister. Efa frowned back.
“I don’t understand.”
“Initiation means welcome. And you don’t have to yet. Now get going. Just make sure you can always see me so you don’t get lost.”
Then they were o!. In their Robin Hood suits it was harder than normal to see each other, but that also meant they wouldn’t be noticed. Amren pieced her way through the forest, trying to stay quiet enough to hear her sister’s footsteps. Soon enough she saw nothing but what she was looking for. Mulch and bracken and patches of stinging nettles faded away into the background against the glaring brilliance of crumpled crisp packets and the bleached buds of berries and the small, white bones scattered alongside the sticks on the ground. There were so many, now she looked, that Amren grew sure that Efa’s footsteps were really the sound of them snapping. It was a good thing they hadn’t found anything living, yet. Efa didn’t do well with guilt.
The girls reunited to eat lunch. Their mother’s fennel-grapefruit soup with pumpkin- seed rye had grown lumpy with cold, but they were both sure it would be excellent otherwise. Efa’s bag was less full, but Amren had to admit to herself that its contents were more carefully chosen. There was a blue wellington boot filled with murky water that they agreed to carry in their hands to keep from spilling. Then there was a half-crumpled can that made a scuttling noise when you held it still. She’d even found a chestnut, months before they were meant to fall from their trees. It was almost enough, and even Amren wasn’t sure exactly what was missing until the final ingredient found them.
They took a di!erent path back towards the house. It would be boring to walk the same route every time, and would make their trespass too obvious. Efa was staring at
her shoes, so she was the first to notice the hive. It was half crushed into the ground, honey clotted with the mud around it. It was silent.
“What happened?” Efa whispered. She stayed three steps away from it.
“It’s another sign. The bees must have flown away behind that fence. They made sure the hive fell here so we’d know to follow.”
“They’re not dead?”
“No,” Amren hoped, “not most of them, at least. Some might’ve not been able to get away.”
“That’s sad,” Efa sighed like they’d been her friends. Amren tried to lift her spirits.
“No, it’s okay, because they left the honey for us. Come help me scoop it into the soup pots.”
Efa was hesitant, but obeyed. Amren prised the hive open, and kept from her sister the small, shrivelled bodies clustered inside. Some legs came away with the honeycomb, but Amren was sure they could pass as flecks of mud.
“Come on, let’s go home.” She said when they were done. Her hands were sticky, and she could have sworn she saw one of the bodies writhe, just a little. She didn’t want to get stung. They walked back quickly, watching the forest lighten as the canopy cleared, then darken again as clouds began to spill into the sky. Rain was just starting as they made it home, but the girls didn’t mind. They stood, staring up, and washed their hands free of mud before heading inside.
§
They made the potion together. Amren was sure Efa even found it fun. It was like when they were smaller and mixed toothpaste with glitter and tried to feed it to Winnipeg. They’d wanted to give her powers but couldn’t agree on exactly which. Here the goal was clear. They needed something to prove to the forest that they’d heard its message and were heeding its warning. They filled the bath-
room sink with the boot-water and some cupped handfuls of rain. Then they threw in the berries and bones and the scuttling thing inside the can. It drifted, either dead or pretending to be, on the surface of their concoction. The honeycomb came last, then they used forks to mash everything together into a steady brown sludge.
“Now we drink it.” Amren ordered when they were done.
“What?!” Efa looked in horror at the bowl. “But it’s mud, and animals. We’ll be sick.”
“Maybe,” Amren shrugged. “But it’s worth it. We need the forest to know we’re part of it, so it lets us live. Only things that are part of the forest are going to survive.”
Amren went to get cups before Efa could object. She didn’t much feel like drinking it, either, but sacrifices had to be made. She’d hold Efa down if she had to.
She didn’t have to. They wrinkled their faces and drunk it together, and both agreed it was much, much worse than the lumpy soup. They weren’t sick, though, and Amren said it was because the forest didn’t want to hurt them. Then they were sick, and Amren said it was because the forest needed them to prove themselves. They couldn’t bring themselves to eat the potato and Gorgonzola pasties that appeared on the kitchen table, or the flambéed bananas with chocolate lava that they knew were meant to be a treat. They hoped, on the o! chance she came home that night, their mother wouldn’t be too o!ended by the full plates.
“Can we tell dad?” Efa asked in a small, feverish voice.
“What would he do?” Amren replied shortly. Efa didn’t argue back.
Night took a long time to arrive, and they laid in Amren’s bed to wait for it. They were hot, huddled together like that, but they shivered anyway. Amren tried to tell stories to Efa as they fell asleep, but it was hard to tell the end from the beginning. They woke up not knowing they’d fallen asleep, or how long they’d slept for, or if the potion was finished with testing them. Their mouths were
sour and dry, but they weren’t thirsty. They were wet with cold sweat. The bedroom door was still just a crack open.
Efa was the first to point out the leaves. They were peeking out from under their shared pillow and weaved through Amren’s semi-cropped hair. Amren, in turn, pointed out the mud on Efa’s face and on the rug where she was stood.
“It worked,” Amren breathed. She wiggled her toes in her wet, muddy socks.
“What worked?” Efa asked, face pinched, but Amren had already run to their chest of drawers. She pulled them open and found matching outfits—Amren’s with trousers, Efa’s a skirt. They were the blue of the end of sunsets and covered in embroidered white moths. Twigs stuck out of the pockets, reeds through the buttonholes.
“It worked, it worked.” Amren dropped the clothes and went to hug her sister. “We’re going to live.” She wanted Efa to smile. It was good news, after all. Amren imagined a world empty but for the animals and the two of them. They’d have to grow up fast, but Amren was sure they could do it. She knew how to look after her sister.
The pair skipped breakfast, and didn’t pack lunch. None of that would matter now. The house was quiet but for the faint buzz of a sewing machine and the rain outside.
“Can we stay inside today?” Efa asked. “Maybe mum will come back and we can play a board game.”
“She won’t.” Amren answered the second question first. “And no, we can’t. We passed the test now. We have to let the forest know we accept. Come on.”
Amren led them to the front door, where their coats and boots lay in the still-damp pile they had left them in the last time it rained. They found snails in their pockets and worms crushed into the soles of their shoes.
“It’s you. It’s you who’s doing this.” Efa accused, though it sounded more like a request.
“No, it’s not. I was there the whole night. We slept in the same bed.” It wouldn’t do for Efa to start doubting properly now. If there was one thing she knew it was
that magic stopped working when you stopped thinking it would. That was why they couldn’t save the others. “Come on now.” She finished, taking o! to the words and away from her sister’s questions. Efa ran after her.
“Wait! Amren, I’m not as fast as you.” Amren stopped. Efa caught up, panting.
“I—” Efa’s breaths were louder than her words. “I think we should tell mum and dad.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“They can’t be saved.” It was better, Amren thought, to break the news directly. It wouldn’t do to get her hopes up.
“Why not?”
“They wouldn’t believe us. And they didn’t pass the test like we did. And they wouldn’t fit through the hole in the fence. That’s where we have to go.”
“What about Kelsey?”
Amren had forgotten about her. It would be for the best if Efa did, too. “She’s from the town. The woods won’t like her, either.”
“This isn’t fair.” Efa crossed her arms over her chest. She looked cold in just her skirt and tights. The rain flattened her hair against her head. She still looked slightly sick.
“No, it isn’t.” Amren agreed. Little kids were so obsessed with fairness. “But at least it’s you and me together, right?”
“I suppose.” Efa mumbled.
“Let’s go, then. I’ll bet there’s another sign to tell us how long we’ve got.”
The rain swallowed their footsteps as they walked towards the woods.
§
The bird was perfectly dead. It had a broken neck and nothing else. It wasn’t even muddy. They found it on the edge of the woods, right below the “Private Property”
sign.
“Shall we bury it?” Efa crouched down close to it and sni!ed for rot. She didn’t look as upset as Amren expected her to be.
“No.” Amren said firmly. “Birds don’t want to be in the ground, even when they’re dead. We should put it up a tree. That’s the final test, I bet.”
“Okay,” Efa agreed. She looked tired. “Do you want to climb, or shall I?”
“You climb, and I’ll catch you if you fall.”
They chose a tree a little further in, just out of view of their house. Amren had to lift Efa up to catch the lowest branches, but after that it looked easy. The canopy was thick enough to mostly shelter them from rain.
Efa placed the bird on the highest branch she could reach. Amren couldn’t even see it.
“You were a good bird,” Amren heard Efa tell it.
“Thank you for your sacrifice,” Amren added, guessing where to look. “Climb down now, Efa.”
Efa did. Or almost did. On the second to lowest branch, she slipped and plummeted, and Amren only just caught her. The older girl fell backwards and hit the ground with her back. Efa was pulled part-way with her, then rolled o! onto her knees. It was a lucky sort of fall, more of a shock than a danger. Amren would be bruised, and Efa’s knee was ripped and red, but they’d be okay. Maybe it would even convince Efa to stop wearing skirts. In Amren’s relief she took a while to notice the tears in Efa’s eyes.
“Oh,” she tried to comfort. “Don’t cry. It’s fine. We’re not badly hurt.”
“I—I want my dad.” Efa sobbed like a seven-year-old.
“No, you don’t. You’re fine. I can look after you.”
Amren went to hug her sister, but Efa shoved her away.
“I’m telling dad.” Efa stumbled up and forward. She didn’t look at Amren.
“No, you don’t have to. It’s not that bad.” Amren stood and watched her little sister limp away from her. For a moment she knew what there were so many things in the
world to be afraid of—that if she started thinking about them then she might never stop. Then she followed her sister home, not thinking about the things she shouldn’t, waiting for the thoughts to really go away.
§“Oh dear, your skirt is all torn. Here, let me fix it.” Their father gestured for Efa to climb out of her skirt, then examined the hole. Efa stood, shivering, in her ripped tights. The blood was already crusting to brown. The studio’s fire was still lit, but girls were stood in the tunnel. Amren hovered behind her sister, waiting to hear if she was in trouble. She watched their father turn to his threads, choosing which colour to darn with.
“Is mum here?” Efa whimpered, giving up on his sympathy.
“What? Oh, no, but she left lunch on the table. A type of bread, I think.” Amren watched him find the right shade of blue, then thread the needle.
“Come on, Efa. We skipped breakfast, remember. I can give you lunch in bed, if you like?” Amren had used to do this a lot, back in her pretending-to-be-a-doctor phrase. She’d fed Amren soup with a spoon and gave her so many vitamins she’d started to pee bright colours.
Efa turned around and looked up at Amren through triangle-wet lashes. She smiled a little. It was enough. “I— yeah, okay.”
“Rightio,” their father slapped his hands down on his legs like that would help him stand. He didn’t. “I’ll eat later but enjoy your food, girls. Oh, and your friend called, Efa. She asked if she could visit tomorrow.”
“Really?!” Efa smiled larger than she had for Amren. “Yeah, that would be great. Could you make us spy costumes, maybe? We were playing a game.” Her pain, it seemed, was forgotten. Amren knew it hadn’t been that bad.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure I’ll get around to it. Just let me finish this.” Scott gestured towards the skirt, a clear dismissal.
Amren led their way towards their bedroom, stopping to help Efa up the stairs. She put her sister to bed, as promised, then went to get lunch. She paused at the door.
“The bird means it’s tonight, you know. You can rest today but we’ll have to leave when it gets dark.”
Efa didn’t reply. Her eyes were closed. She was breathing deeply. Amren spent the afternoon choosing what to pack for them both. They’d need warmth, of course. And food. There was no telling how long they’d be, or exactly what they’d need. She wanted to get there quickly, but running away was a nighttime activity. With that thought, Amren went to find a torch.
Amren spent the day preparing, packing and unpacking and packing again as she tried to decide what was really the most important to bring. Her last stop was the storage room that had almost been her bedroom. The chairs looked smaller again, and more dusty. She closed the door and let her eyes adjust to the dark. Then she found the locked box of her teeth and placed them in her bag. They felt useful.
Dinner was crushed potatoes with coriander seeds and crispy onions, then candied watermelon with pistachio dust. They’d made it downstairs in time to see their mother’s car drive away, but their mother hasn’t seen Efa wave. Amren ate a little, started writing a feedback note, then scribbled it out. If she was writing anything then it should be a goodbye, but it felt silly writing a note that nobody would read.
There were hours until dark, and Amren spent them trying to resist eating again too soon. She’d have to get better at saving supplies. She paced around the house, trying to remember everything just as it was. She let Efa sleep until just after eleven, then went into the room they had always shared, even though they didn’t have to. It felt like the right hour to leave.
Efa wasn’t there. Amren called out to her, and there wasn’t a reply. She rechecked each and every room in the house, but Efa nowhere. Everything was quiet but for the sewing machine.
The walk through the tarpaulin to her father’s studio was stranger at night. She didn’t knock on the door, and her father didn’t look up when she opened it. Efa did, though. She was sat by the fire, breathing in warmth and smoke.
“What are you doing here?” Amren hissed. Scott glanced up at her and nodded a greeting.
“I don’t want to go.” Efa answered.
“Yes, you do, come on now.”
“Now now girls,” Scott intervened. “If you’re going to fight, take it outside. It’s past your bedtime, anyway.”
“Exactly.” Amren answered. “Come on, Efa.”
“Goodnight, girls. Have sweet dreams.” Scott bid them farewell. Efa hung back for a tense second, then followed.
“We have to be at the fence before midnight.” Amren told her. “Have you packed?”
“No.”
“Good job I have extras, then. This way.”
“I haven’t—” Efa started, but at an insistent tug she followed. She was still limping, slightly, but Amren thought it was probably for show. They left by the front door. No one heard them. Amren looked back, once, and saw the house dark but for the light of the studio.
The forest felt closer at night. The sisters huddled closer together, sure of each other’s sounds and unsure of the rest. The bog was as wet as ever but felt deeper. Efa complained as it dripped over the edges of her boots. Amren was relieved at how easily they found the fence, and then the hole in it. She felt sure it meant they were doing the right thing.
“You go first.” Amren told her sister. Efa didn’t move. The fence was just like they had left it. The hole was no bigger. It would be a tight squeeze, but they’d make it. A few scratches wouldn’t matter.
“I don’t want to.” Efa said at last.
“That doesn’t matter. We don’t have the time.”
“No,” Efa took a step backwards. Then another. Then the bog deepened, and she stumbled backwards. “I didn’t,
I don’t want this.”
“But the end of the world!” Amren tried to protest. “No.” Efa stood, then ran. Amren followed, pausing for flashes of moments to try and hear Efa’s footsteps crunching on bones. Amren knew these woods. Still, she’d lost her sister, and herself. Amren could be everywhere. It had started raining again by the time Amren gave up. She wandered, not sure whether she was looking for her home or her sister or the hole in the fence. It was the hole that she found. She told herself that it was possible her sister had climbed through after all, that she might be on the other side.
Amren turned to the fence and wedged her way though, not minding that it tore her clothes. Efa would recognise the fabric and know to follow, whenever she came to her senses. Then Amren sat on the other side, back pressed against metal, ignoring her bruises and eating her food. Two thick slices of bread and cheese, the food of adventurers.
Amren didn’t arrive, but the fox did. It was just a flash of orange, at first, almost too bright to be believable in the dark. Then it came closer—close enough for Amren to see its ribs. It looked hungry. She tossed it a piece of cheese. The fox looked, but didn’t eat.
“It’s good.” Amren told it. “My mum made it. Or, well, I’m not sure if she made the cheese, but she made the sandwich.”
The fox didn’t come any closer. Amren stayed where she was, not wanting to scare it o!. Efa had always been better with animals than her. Even the dogs had always taken her side. Around Amren, shadows moved, like they did in her bedroom when the door was left open. The world didn’t need Efa. It could end on its own.
Ran Through
I saw him first on MacArthur Avenue, running with his neon-green short-shorts flapping in the wind. He was circling a streetlight, waiting for a chance to cross the road. It was evening, and I was coming home from work, and I was speeding down the road with a co!ee cup in my hand as, lit by my brights, he emerged from the dark like an angel. My light said stop. His light said go. The fabric of his shorts grazed the bonnet of my car. In advertising, we say that green means life. Green trees. Green grass. Green on the first boy you ever loved, thirty years later, as he runs himself into the night.
My apartment—if you can call it that—is often quiet. When I first got my job, I decided to move home in a rush, and it was the only place that I could get. It is the basement unit of a four-floor building, so I hear only when my neighbours decide to shout. But no one was
fighting on the evening I saw him. The night was completely still. I spent the hours before bed standing in the apartment’s rooms, thinking about nothing in particular. Weak light slipped through my above-ground windows. The space seemed larger than it had before. It felt like it took many minutes to walk from the dining table to the kitchen, and when I finally arrived I could not say why I had come. I opened the cabinets looking for co!ee and put the kettle on before I had found any. There was ginger tea under the sink, and I settled for that instead. I lifted the teabag in and out of my mug, until all the water disappeared.
This was around the time I was still up for promotion. Back then, I had the energy to work even from bed. I sat under my sheets, browsing the internet on my laptop, looking for a way to make long underwear seem cool. In advertising, we say long underwear means protection. Long underwear on a winter’s morning. Long underwear in Africa to keep you safe from bugs. Matching long underwear with the woman you love, a guarantee that a part of you will always be the same. When I turned my lamp o! I began to think about him. He ran through the darkness of my mind. He was sweating like a dog. The drops slipped down his neck and onto his muscles. His arms looked large enough to pierce through a wall. His biceps were mountains that I wanted to climb, and then, in an instant, they were gone. His arms were thin. His beard disappeared. He had shrunk a foot or two. Now he was a nine-year-old boy, standing before me, nodding his head with a shy smile. Oh God, I thought, there he is. And then with great di culty, I fell asleep.
§
I cannot imagine it is easy to be a boy who has to move. I still remember the day Mrs Bagley introduced him to our class. “This is Peter,” she said, as he paced around the room, “Yes, he’s very ill. His parents tell us that if he does not move, he’ll die, so, well…yes, you can see.” Then
Boris Wheatley blew a spitball at him and Michael Thomas threw a book, but Peter was moving too quickly to notice any of it. He waved his hands as he ran laps around our desks, shouting: “It’s wonderful to meet you all.”
Things grew easier for Peter as his freakishness grew into a gift. Because he was always moving, and because he never tired, there was nearly nothing that he could not do. In the fourth grade, he was a virtuoso on the piano. He could play symphonies from the morning into the night. At our end of year recital, he played Mozart One through Thirty and then ran out the room without taking a bow. Girls loved him even then. He would sit in class, listening to the teacher and tapping his finger against the desk to stay alive, while his admirers passed him notes. Only once did I find the strength to write him one myself. It was the weekend after the recital. The note said something stupid—I’d immediately regretted it—something like, “I wish you’d heard us applaud!” He read it for a long time, then lifted his finger, and I thought he’d hated the note so much that he tried to kill himself. But when he turned around, he had that same shy smile, and his eyebrows were dancing up and down.
At work the next day, I gave my long underwear presentation. I’d titled it “Long Underwear: the short way home.” Everyone agreed that it was my best work yet, and my boss asked what I wanted to work on next.
“Do we still work with our sportswear clients?”
“Yes, and they’re coming out with a new line of running shoes soon.”
“I’d try that on for size,” I said with a smile. And my boss repeated the line around the o ce for the rest of the day.
On my way home, there was an accident on the motorway. A cargo truck had run into the side of a car and killed both people inside. I was stuck in tra c about ten minutes back, so I put on the radio to pass the time. I
would have called my mother, but we were always having the same conversation, and I wasn’t in the mood to hear her criticise dad. I would have called a friend, but I didn’t think that anyone from the o ce would be interested in hearing about the accident.
The people on the radio were talking about what podcasts they’d been listening to recently. The host, a guy called Derek, said he’d given up on the whole form. “I just don’t like having another person in my ear,” he said. “Oh, really?” his co-host, Sandra, replied, and I could tell that they were flirting. I turned the volume up as Derek began to laugh and, saving him, Sandra said that she’d been listening to The Invisible String. “What’s that about?” Derek asked. And she explained that everything we know—people, places, and events—is connected by an invisible string. “Go on…” She went on. She said that while we think we’re in control, it’s really fate that is moving us around. And that’s what the podcast is about: taking the things that are pulled together and locating the string that does the pulling.
“Huh...” Derek said. “So everything’s a lie.” “You should listen to the podcast.” “Taste?” “Sure.” “Hobbies?” “I guess.” “Love?” “Yes, Derek. Even that.”
When I drove past the accident, I turned my head towards the sky as the radio show took a break for ads.
By the time I arrived on MacArthur avenue, even the street vendors had packed up and left. I felt a knot in my stomach as I came down the road, and it wasn’t until I saw him that I understood why. This time, he was running towards me. But he ran as though unaware of my presence. He wore a serious face and those same green shorts, and his shirt was drenched right through. I could tell he had been running for hours. I could see he felt no pain. I called out his name as we crossed paths on the roads. He turned, stopped, and then collapsed. §
As Peter and I grew older, we grew closer. As we grew
closer, I came to know about his condition. That’s what he called it: a condition. He said it wasn’t an illness because illnesses are subjective. He said it wasn’t a disease because diseases suggest harm. What he had was unmistakable, but he didn’t see it as a loss. He said it was thrilling to live life when you knew you couldn’t stop. It would have killed me to have lost him. Growing up, there was a moment where we thought we had, and even thinking about it now makes me sick. It happened the summer before high school, in the backyard of his aunt’s house. It was a three hour drive from us, and the only place out of town his parents felt comfortable taking him. Each time he went, he’d tell me about how bright the stars were, about how everything felt larger and freer out there.
He had been spinning in the garden when it happened. He would spin for as long as he could, and then look up as the sky spun for him. He would spin, and stumble, and then do it all again. When he looked up the last time, everything was wrong. The sky couldn’t decide which way to move. It spun left, then right, then he tripped underneath it. He lay still on his back as the sky moved like a vortex. And then everything went black.
Peter’s aunt said she had found him unconscious in the garden. She said, sobbing, she shook him back to life. The doctors said another day he might not have been so lucky. They said who knows what’ll happen the next time he’s still.
§
I shoved Peter’s body into passenger seat and shook his lifeless hand the whole way home, where, upon arriving, I carried him down the basement stairs, through the dark, into my room, and then lay him on my bed, where I shook him, wept for him, asked for him to come home, to come back to me, one last time, back where I could see him, and here I felt his hand shake back, so I began to shake it even harder, and I climbed onto the bed, and
as I shook, the whole bed shook under me, under Peter, who, as I looked at him up-close for the first time in years, seemed as if he had never been there, looked like a wax figure, an estimation of the boy who I had loved who had grown up to be the man that I had seen, of Peter, who was always moving, always smiling, even now, who was smiling now in front of me, opening his eyes and looking into mine, as I let go of his hand and yelled, move, Peter, move or you’ll never move again.
We spent the evening telling each other the stories of our lives, or our lives since we had last spoken. Peter had stayed at home—he never got further than his aunt’s. I had moved abroad for twenty years but now I was back. He worked odd-jobs whenever he could. I’d been in advertising since college. “Do you like it?” He asked. In advertising, we say that if it is broke, sell it. I said, “it forces me to see the up-side of the world.”
Sunlight began to pour down the walls. Peter thanked me again for saving his life. I said that I was the one who endangered it. He said that he was sorry he’d stayed so long, that he would get out of my hair now, that he was sure I had work in the morning, that I had things to sell. I said I was entering the research phase of a new project, that I conduct my research from home. “What’s the project?” he asked. And then I started to laugh.
When I told Peter that I was selling running shoes, his mouth opened very wide. He had been sitting on my couch, gently clapping his hands, when he stopped and ran into my room. Confused, I stood up and waited for him to come back, which, after a moment, he did, with his trainers in his hands. “Sit down,” he said, “please.” And, kneeling down, he slid his shoes onto my feet. “They’re massive!” I said. “They’re clown shoes, Peter!” He told me to take them for a spin. I waddled around the room, as if I was learning to walk, and then he told me to move faster. “Run,” he said. “Come on! Run like the wind.” So I picked it up. “Run like a cheetah. Run like a wolf!” “Wolves are slower than cheetahs,” I screamed, running past him. “Then run like a cheetah hunting a wolf.” I
laughed. “Grooooowl!” I yelled. “Grrrrr!” I shouted. And now I’d lost all sense of space. The room had disappeared, and Peter had too, and I saw myself as a Cheetah sprinting along the great planes. The whole world seemed to move with me. The wind beat against my back and threw me forwards. I was flying as I ran. Floating. And then I saw the wolf standing on the horizon. I leapt o! my front paws and then o! my back ones. I ripped up the earth with my steps. I grew closer and closer until I was close enough to claw at it, and then I tore the wolf down with a great scratch. Peter burst out laughing as I brought him down. He kicked his feet and rolled me o! him. “Not bad,” he said. “Thank you.” I replied. “The new Reebok Ultimates: you’ll run so fast they’ll call you a cheetah.”
Coming out of the bathroom after cleaning up in the shower, I found Peter lying down on the couch. I told him that he could sleep in the room with me, and he told me that he couldn’t sleep at all because he didn’t have his vibrating pillow. “Then don’t sleep at all next to me.”
I gave him a towel, an old oversized shirt, and my own purple short-shorts. “These are nice,” he said. I said, “In advertising, we say they’re royal.” When he came out of the shower, I was lying under the sheets, looking up at the lights. I sat up in bed, and smiled. There was something moving about seeing him in my clothes. It made me happy to know we’d shared them. I tapped the empty space next to me, and Peter came into the room.
We lay in silence for a long time. I could hear us breathing in sync. Then, slowly, I moved towards him and rested my head on his chest. His breathing grew louder, and I placed my hand in his hair. “Peter.” “Yes?” “You’re always moving.” “I know.” “No, even when you’re not. You’re always moving.” “What?” “Your heart. I can feel your heart.” He took a moment to think about this and then, with no emotion, said: “it doesn’t work that way,” as he continued to wiggle his toes.
Watching his feet move that way, I was taken back to a memory from our childhood. We were sixteen, and it was the day of Peter’s first long-distance race. He had picked
up running after piano grew tiring. He had been training for months, and I had supported him throughout. That morning, I could see that he was unusually restless. Only his furled eyebrows stayed still. I sat in the middle of his bed, watching as he ran round the room. As he made his laps, circling around me, I began to yell out encouragement. I said, “No one out there needs this as badly as you. No one else has to run.” He laughed. I said, “You make everyone you know feel so alive. People feel safe opening up to you.” He smiled. I said, “I think I’m in love with you, Peter.” And he started running faster, lifting his pace until it was di cult to see him, laughing each time he came around. Then when he had run the nerves away, he threw himself onto the bed next to me. “Well?” I said. “I need to run,” he replied, laughing very softly and tapping his finger on the sheets, moving just enough to stay alive. Upon crossing the finish line in a regional record, Peter received roses from six di!erent girls. Over the next two years, he slept with five of them and remained best friends with me. He said that if he loved me, he’d never want to move again. Of course I had to go.
As I stroked his hair, he seemed to be crying. He said that it broke his heart when I left. I said that nothing would have changed if I had stayed. Then he rolled me over and kissed me aggressively. He bit at my lip as though he had never done this before. I rolled him over and asked him to stop moving his legs, so he ran his arms along my hips and then took o! my shirt. Then he started to remove his own, but I put his hands back onto me. I placed them around my breasts, and took o! his shirt myself. Then my shorts were o! and his short-shorts were o!, too, and we lay completely naked. He lifted his back up and down, kissing my lips each time he reached them. I placed my hand onto his chest, and pushed him right back down. “I want you,” I said, “I want you as mine.” He smiled shyly and started to blink. He opened his eyes, then
closed them. He opened his eyes again. He continued like this until I fell down on top of him. Opening his eyes to watch me ride him. Closing his eyes to make me disappear.
§
When I woke up, there was an empty space beside me again. I lay very still and thought about nothing. I walked over to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I was out. I poured myself some water instead. Then as I sat on the counter, looking through the window, I saw a familiar pair of trainers blazing down the street. They stopped outside my window and began to jog on the spot. I tapped my fist against the glass, hoping that he would hear me. I laid my glass down and, in nothing but a gown, ran out to try and meet him. I slammed the door open and stepped onto the street, and it was here I learned that the owner of the trainers was a woman. She looked around ten years younger than me—with long brown hair and a body that made me glad mine was covered. She jumped when she saw me. She was drenched in sweat and she stepped back like she was scared. I wanted to say that everything would be okay. I wanted to say that I wasn’t crazy, that I lived below the ground, that I thought she was someone quite di!erent from who she was, but that was funny, wasn’t it, it was all so funny, so funny that we make mistakes. But the words were caught at the back of my throat. And it wouldn’t have mattered if they weren’t. Because that dainty woman was no longer running on the spot. She had wiped her brow and gone.
Editors in Chief
Ashley Wang
Everett Yum
Creative Director
Katya Agrawal
Managing Editor
Ethan Kan
Associate Editors
Carter Flemming
Oliver Giddings
Angel Hu
Claire Nam
Tara Singh
Illustrators
Islay Ross
Thisbe Wu
Special thanks Keya Bajaj Maria Andreu Bird Chloe Budakian Anna Chamberlin Kinnia Cheuk Sophia Chmelar Owen Curtin Oliver Giddings Addy Gorton Megha Kumar Luke Louchheim Harper Love Neve O’Brien Sukriti Ojha Malina Reber Moe Shimizu Will Sussbauer Miranda Wollen Thisbe Wu Michelle Vong Sophie Yi
