Miles Greaves

I was sitting at my diningroom table consuming cereal, Cheerio by Cheerio, pinching and perching each O onto the crown of my tongue and then swallowing and then repeating, when I peeked over my knuckles and noticed that my wife Amy was gone, replaced where she had just been standing by a different yet seemingly equivalent Amy, and I erupted into gooseflesh, mountain range after mountain range. This new woman must have, I reasoned, been plucked from some repeating farm of Amys hiving in some endless aisle of apartments stretching, perspective point to perspective point, on either side of my own, strung taut across gray space, like a beam of cubicles; plucked up like a kitten from a box and breathed on like a lens and dropped into my wife’s blouse and skin, like a pearl of chlorine onto the eye of the world, to stand before me, now, like a triangle among circles. This new woman was laminated freshly over the radiator and couch and her fetal, squeaky molecules hummed in place, like a weather map in a room full of weathermen, but other than that she stood like the old Amy used to stand, exuding the same colors and heat, bobbing on the same toes, in the same socks, on bones of the same length and bend, in flesh of the same heft and density. She circled my welcome mat, looking for shoes, and announced, still looking, that she was getting beer, and would return. Then she stepped into the original Amy’s sneakers and left, and I slumped over my cereal, protectively gripping my scalp, as if beset by owls.

I had loved my wife. We had been to Portugal together. And Costa Rica. And we’d record and then watch Top Chef every Friday, after work, and our families met for Thanksgiving, and she’d buy me Cadbury Creme Eggs, et cetera, et cetera. But now where had she been displaced to? What world? Was she sad? Were the trees there made of teeth? Would she try to return, but fail and fail and fail? Would she acclimate, in time? Where would she be buried? I saw, then, in a vision, my wife, wading alone across an endless field of vertical worms, and I thought about weeping, but my grief was so sudden and expansive that it precluded any actual weeping before that weeping could occur, like a sudden ouroboros, blinked into and out of being, so I just sat there, instead, with the tears gestating behind my eyes, without undamming, like a moon behind a keyhole. But then another horrific, more selfish thought occurred to me, which supplanted that original horror, despite myself.

What, I wondered, if this new Amy nibbles my neck off as we make love, expecting my hips to continue on and on instructionlessly? Or what if she bears me into the ocean one day, like a selkie? Or what if she leaches onto my belly and remains there, like a remora? Or worse: what if she differs from the old Amy, but so subtly that I’d never be able to definitively prove those foul differences? At this thought I almost screamed, in part because I could already half-see the follow-up question standing behind it, pacing, and I tried not to consider it, but I had to, it insisted upon itself, it insisted upon itself: what, I wondered, if this new wife was a teetering heap of spiders, wadded into a tender, elastic Amy-suit, that would torture me, daily, by behaving exactly like my actual wife—by forming the same sentences that she would have formed, and by scratching her elbow at the same time of day that she would have scratched her elbow? What if the spiders tortured me, daily, by counting to ten? The spiders would count successfully every time I asked them to, enunciating each accurate numeral, but they didn’t mean to, they didn’t mean to, they arrived at ten only due to some offensive, preposterous chance, conceiving of the actual numbers only in shadowy spidernumbers, like “pupa” and “thorax,” that tumbled in hairy waves up and down the inside of Amy’s bustling body, but still they would accidentally finish with “eight, nine, ten,” every time, every time, every time I asked them to, like the one chimpanzee that finally types King Lear, but again and again and again, never on purpose, until finally dying, finally. At that I almost screamed again, or thought about almost screaming again, as I contemplated the unscratchable suspense that would dog me, day in and out, as the spiders hinted at hinting at hinting at themselves, every morning at breakfast, but demurred every time, on the cusp of revelation, like an orgasm that would never arrive, leaving me certain but uncertain, flickering between knowing and not knowing, the rest of my life, like Schrodinger’s cat, translucent and forlorn and haunted, from now until my death.

I stood from my cereal, as if from the possibility of the spiders, but the thought followed me up off the table, I could see it, like a sunspot on my pupil, so I fled to the living room, but the thought followed, so I fled to the kitchen, but the thought followed again, so I stopped in front of the microwave, and stood there, as my panic matured toward its zenith, and I gripped the microwave with both hands, as if holding a face, and I stood there, now at the airless peak of my horror, opening and closing my hands, until, miraculously, out of nothing, I remembered something, and my eyes widened briefly, as if having seen some hopeful form in the distance.

I had read once that there was no such thing as pure identity; that there was no property equal to being me, or being this, or being that; that there was no black cue ball lolling in my stomach, with my name tattooed across its equator, that could be used to pick me out of a parade of all things, like toasters and lollipops, when all else failed—instead we were just the sum of the descriptions we could pin to each other, like donkeys made entirely from tails, or pompoms without cores. I could have, for example, stripped my actual wife of every description that clung to her, and flattened them out and laid them on our bed to dry—in one column, the roll of her skull; in another, her love of Arrested Development—and I could have peeled and peeled but days later, when I was out of things to say about her, there would have been nothing at the bottom of those qualifiers, no hook to hang them on, no bone, just a blank circle of air, like a barber shaving a head into nothingness. And the same was true of the spiders: I could flay them of their descriptions, like pulling petals from a weed, and lay them next to my real wife’s descriptions, to index, but when I was done I’d find just another hollow eye, there’d be nothing to grip, and squint at, and compare to my wife, it would just be void versus void. And because of this, if the spiders’ descriptions on the bed were the same as my wife’s—if I could go the rest of my life without seeing, say, a single spider scamper from the new Amy’s nostril into the new Amy’s ear—and there was no one thing I could definitively say about the new Amy that I couldn’t say about the old Amy, then they were in fact the same Amy, even if I knew they were not, even if I knew it in the nucleus of my heart, and wept nightly over it, I had no right to complain, or mourn my real wife’s abduction, or the spiders that replaced her, because it had not happened, or because I could not say it had happened, which was the same thing.

It’s the same thing! I thought, and my lips tensed, as if to smile, but before they could I remembered something, and sobered.

You’ll still have to confirm the Amys’ sameness, I reminded myself. My god that’s right, I thought, and sat at the dining-room table again and gripped my scalp again, as if beset by owls again, as I waited for the new Amy to return, to officially determine if she was in fact identical to my wife, and as I waited I visualized the various forms that her deviations might take, and as I visualized these deviations my stomach rolled in me like a crocodile, and I began sweating in my seat, like a man holding his hand in front of a hole in the earth, waiting, waiting, waiting. I tried reading a newspaper, but couldn’t; I tried reading the Cheerio box, but couldn’t; I tried thinking of any other subject available to me, but couldn’t. Eventually I either slept or ceased thinking, defensively, and I was only aware of myself again when the Amy entered the apartment. I exploded upright and centered the woman in my vision and immediately began charting each nook of her visible cells, as if memorizing a necessary code, with my heart echoing out of my mouth. She was holding a grocery bag and wearing a maroon shirt with doily-like sleeves, and jeans, and her hair, which was a little darker than her blouse, was tied in a low ponytail. She stood on the shoe mat, seeming to think about something for two seconds, three seconds, and then looked across the apartment at me and said, “I got Blue Moon,” and moved into the kitchen. There she set the grocery bag on the counter, next to the cutting board, and extracted the beer, with her right hand, and tried fitting it into the refrigerator, but spilled something, and cursed. Then she put the rest of the groceries away in the cupboard above the sink and threw the grocery bag into the garbage. Then she continued passed me, into the bedroom, and disappeared, and called, “I’m getting in the shower,” and then reappeared, crossing the hall with a towel, and disappeared again into the bathroom. There was a pause, and then I heard the shower-water start, and the Amy begin to la-la-la inanely, and I lowered my forehead onto the tablecloth again and began thinking, and thinking, and thinking. Then I raised my head, and my face gravitated toward the ceiling, like an elated sunflower, and I announced, to myself: 

The spiders are indistinguishable from my wife!

They were! The spiders had pronounced each of the ten words they’d spoken in the same faint California accent as my actual wife; and the sentences they formed with those words were ones my wife would have formed; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera—identical! Identical! Identical! I began vibrating with glee, and then I grinned dramatically, until my molars were exposed to the apartment-air: nothing had happened to me! Nothing! And while sure, yes, I would miss my wife; and while sure, yes, the spiders were probably mocking me under Amy’s back-skin, like a six-fingered hand under a puppet, they were nevertheless maintaining their external poise, and expertly feigning their similarity to my wife, like an unblinking eye opposing the sun, in an act of profound professionalism, my god, my god, life can and does occasionally bloom into ringing, resplendent gardens.

 

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MILES GREAVES lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his fiancée and their two small boys. One of his stories won first place in Zoetrope: All-Story’s2018/2019 short-fiction contest, and another appeared in Tin House. 

Hamdy Elgammal

I was alone at the warehouse that Sunday morning when all this, for lack of a better word, started. 

After college I careened from one dead-end job to the next, avoided people, drove long trips on my own where I drank boxed wine and listened to the classical music station on the radio. Years passed. Soon enough, too soon, I found myself in the studio apartment I now call home. My hair greyed behind my ears, my toenails turned the color of dead leaves. 

These days it seems as if all my memories are stuck in a file cabinet that’s being consumed by a slow, persistent fire. Sometimes I don’t know if the moment I’m in is now or ten years ago. 

That Sunday morning I woke up, darted out of bed, brushed my teeth, ate some dry Cheerios straight from the box, washed them down with a glass of milk. I left for the warehouse.

As I exited my building, I saw Mrs. Green, the octogenarian who lives in 2B walking her brown cat near the building entrance. Mrs. Green’s bathrobe was wide open, exposing her t-shirt with a large print of a cat’s face. Her grey curly hair had streaks of deep blue dye where it sprouted from her forehead. 

“Good day to you, Mrs. Green,” I said. 

“And to you!” Mrs. Green said, beaming a smile at me. She let go of the cat’s leash, walked towards me and linked my arm in hers. 

“Rick,” she started. She smelled like cat food and burnt olive oil. 

“It’s Paul.”

She paused, blinking twice at me. “Okay Paul,” she said. “Do you know what happened in 4A?”

“4A? You must be talking about another apartment.”

“No, 4A.” 

“4A is where I live,” I said. 

Her face took on a serious expression and she let go of my arm. “A man,” she continued, her eyes widening, “a man lost something in 4A. Something very important.” 

“What did he lose?”

“I just told you. Something very important.”

“Well, I don’t lose stuff. And I haven’t lost anything recently.”

“Sure, Paul,” Mrs. Green said, rolling her eyes at me. 

“Where’s this coming from? Who told you this?” 

She waved her hand at me, dismissing the question. Her cat sniffed at a parked car’s back tire. I knew Mrs. Green was a little strange but this was over the top. 

“Mrs. Green, did you miss your meds again?” 

“Very important,” she repeated, nodding. “Something very important.” 

I walked away from her and got into my car. As I drove, I talked to calm myself. “Mrs. Green is insane,” I told the empty car. “She’s on a cocktail of antipsychotics. She’s insane. Insane. Remember. Insane.” 

I turned on the radio. The host was finishing a sentence, “As in all the whispers of dreams. The third suite.” The music began. I listened to the violins, rising then falling, the cellos muttering ominous things, the horns like an afterthought. I imagined the instruments playing themselves, disembodied from their instrumentalists. 

“Could bodies operate in the same way?” I asked the empty backseat through my rearview mirror. I liked mental conundrums to warm up my mind in the morning. 

I turned the radio off then continued, “As in, could bodies one day be just like radios, receiving waves at the right frequency? Could one’s frequency be possibly received from any other radio, that is body, if only said radio had the right tuning?” 

There was only silence in the car. I realized I was, as always, alone. This manifested as a feeling of both exhaustion and liberation—a constriction of my chest and a charge in my elbows. 

I pulled up to the Insure4Sure warehouse, where I worked my adjustments. When I took the key out of the ignition, I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and saw that I had a milk mustache from breakfast. I wiped it clean and ran my fingers over my coarse stubble. I stood outside my car and looked up and down the street. The wind picked up an empty Pepsi can and it rolled away from me until it was stopped by a pile of wet-looking trash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if we’re radios.” 

Inside the warehouse, I stood a few feet away from the gold Chevrolet I was there to adjust. The slanting sunlight filtered through the dusty clerestory windows. Dust particles floated in a slice of light right in front of the car. The light seemed to split the car in two: the passenger half that was still car-like and the driver half that was a mangled mess of metal, plastic and glass. 

I opened the passenger-side door and put one knee on the seat, leaning my head in. The seats were black leather and there was a hole in the passenger headrest. A McDonald’s coffee cup sat next to the handbrake and a little brown toy dog with a chipped black nose was stuck to the dashboard, its head bobbing in all directions. I took notes in my clipboard; made little check marks, scribbled lists in all the right boxes. I underlined the words: “cup,” “handbrake,” and “dog.”

I picked up the green car freshener, shaped like a miniature pine tree, between my thumb and my index finger, untangling it from a wooden prayer rosary that hung over the rearview mirror. I touched my finger to my nose—wondered how much of this faded pine smell this man had smelled before he died.

In broadside collisions like this one, T-bones, your door is your first line of defense. It occurred to me that I must have seen hundreds of these broadside aftermaths. Yet I hadn’t thought twice about any of them. For good reason, too—they were gruesome affairs.

I stood in the warehouse and thought about what it would be like to be killed by such a collision. 

“The door goes first,” I said. “It would be the only thing standing between me and the 50,000-pound freight truck going 70 miles an hour—it’d be crushed like a soda can.”

I put only my index finger to the side of my chest. “My ribs would go next,” I said, resting the rest of my palm against my chest. “One after the other.” I felt myself almost choking up. What a strange thing it was that I was here, contained, in this body! I felt like I was barely holding on to myself, that if I let go for a second I would burst out the top of my own head. 

I couldn’t articulate the rest of the consequences. I was already so emotionally distraught. But I imagined it all—my punctured gut, my intestines, my liver, my pancreas swimming in a pool of corrosive juice leaking from my stomach, my gastrointestinal perforation, my collapsed lungs, my drowning, my death. 

In car crashes, there is usually no time to feel or to see your life flashing before your eyes. Your last thought would probably be “Pain” or “Hurts.” Except it wouldn’t be words, because who thinks in words? It’d be flashes—orange lights, the whir of a car engine in its dying throes, a million little images of loss, nested one within the other, faster than even the pace of the few cubic inches inside your skull. Color and noise and pain splashing like buckets of paint on a blank canvas. 

You look at pictures of enough crash victims—the wet and bloodied hair; the cold, purple fingernails; the shirts, torn in some, carefully sliced by medical scissors in others, always too bright for a corpse; the eyes either rolled up or non-existent—you look at all this long enough and the photographs start to feel as dead as greeting cards. 

I stood beside the car and saw my face reflected in a flint of damaged window—my face older and more fractured than I knew what to do with. I thought of how things were when I was younger, of Mary Perkins. We had gone out to a burger joint together on our first date. I had worn a white bomber jacket and put Brylcreem in my hair. She had said it smelled nice.

I remembered her face not in any precise, three-dimensional way but only her still picture from our high school yearbook—the defined cheekbones, the freckled nose, her blank slate of a forehead. I did remember the way her toenails were painted in alternating shades of red. Her warm lips on mine like a slice of fleeting summer, her faint jasmine smell. 

How long ago was Mary Perkins? Why, it could have been two minutes ago for all I knew. 

It was always now, I realized. Always this second. And this. And this. Forgotten, remembered, forgotten again. What a bind! If I would eventually never remember anything in time past in the way that mattered— as the thing itself, not just my singed memory of it—what sense did it make doing anything as routine as insurance adjustment with time present? Especially given that all time present, all of now, was destined to be burned into time past? There would be no point in continuing this nothing of a job. 

Slowly, I unlocked the Chevrolet’s passenger door, sat inside and buckled my seatbelt. Once buckled, I felt like I should say something. Anything. 

I said, “Fine day today, don’t you think?” in conversation with the nonexistent driver. I smiled, it felt less awkward now. I looked to my left and then I pulled both hands to my face, shielding my head and neck from an imaginary oncoming truck. I glanced at the name at the very top of my clipboard: Rick. 

That was strange. Mrs. Green had said that name earlier today. If she was crazy then, what was this proof of, if anything? My eyes lingered on the all-cap letters of the name, I ran a finger across them, felt only smooth paper underneath. Then I looked at the address—a part of me expected it to be mine, but it wasn’t. 321 Folly, Apt. 6. Not me. I breathed a sigh of relief. 

I felt silly. It couldn’t have possibly been my address. This man was dead. I was, of course, alive. “Rick is dead,” I whispered, reassuringly.

After unbuckling my seatbelt, I picked up the styrofoam coffee cup from the holder and shook it against my ear. I heard coffee sloshing inside. Rick’s coffee, I thought. Rick’s toy dog, Rick’s freshener, Rick’s car mats. 

I felt claustrophobic. I stepped out of the car, slammed the passenger door shut. It had rained the night before and I could smell the damp dust in the air. I inhaled until my living, uncollapsed lungs were full.

Then I tasted bile rapidly climbing up my throat. I walked to the big trash bin in the corner and threw up Cheerios in wet yellow chunks. When I was done, I wiped my lips with my sleeve. I thought I ought to say something. “I’m not Rick,” I said. “I’m Paul. Paul is here to do his job.” 

I snapped pictures of the passenger seat, the driver’s seat, the crushed door, the front wheels, the fenders, the plates. Routine. I put the paperwork on the car’s roof for my manager to find Monday morning. I looked at that wooden rosary around the rearview mirror again. I wondered if whoever knew this man might benefit from getting it a little early. I thought of Mrs. Green’s words, “something very important.” I pictured myself sitting with Rick’s widow or mother or orphaned child, giving them the rosary and then feeling very good about myself afterward. 

It would also prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I was not nor have I ever been Rick. “Paul, Paul, Paul,” I said. “Not Rick.” I leaned into the passenger door again and carefully untangled the rosary from around the rearview mirror. 

When I stepped outside, it was cold and the clouds hung like big grey dogs in the sky. I didn’t know if anyone was going to be at Rick’s address but I felt I should try anyways. 321 Folly Street, Apt. 6. I rolled down the windows as I sped down the I-80, watched the white stripes melt into each other on the road.

321 Folly Street was an old apartment building, three floors high. There were two tall jasmine bushes on either side of the front gate. When I touched them, soft dust rubbed onto my thumb.

I took the stairs to the third floor; Rick’s apartment, number 6, was the last one on the left. The door was ajar and there was a red and yellow doormat in front of the apartment labeled, “Home.” 

I was here. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What would I say if somebody asked why I was here? I would babble about time present and time past, about rosaries and radios. I would sound insane. I shut my eyes tight, heard blood rush behind my ears. I pushed the door. 

When I stepped in, I smelled the unmistakable aroma of broiling burgers. Somebody was cooking in the house and I was scared I’d be caught trespassing. I turned to leave but felt a soft hand on my shoulder.

“You’re back,” a woman’s voice said. I turned my head and saw Mary Perkins, my first and only girlfriend, the most beautiful girl I had ever known. She looked exactly like that night we went out to the burger joint, nineteen on the nose. Her teeth were as pearly and perfect as I remembered, the smile pursed and a little secretive, her eyes June-sky blue and the toenails painted in alternating shades of bright and dark red. She wore a black cocktail dress with no shoulder straps that stopped just short of her knees. 

“Mary?” I whispered.

There was a silence. Then her face broke into a smile. She hugged me, her fingers digging pleasantly into my shoulder blades. 

“It’s been so long,” she sighed into my neck. 

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

She shrugged.

I closed my eyes tight again and stretched my neck to the right then to the left. “Okay,” I said.

I opened my eyes and Mary was still there except one half of her right eyebrow was now bright gold. I noticed, too, that right under her neck was a tattoo of the Chevrolet logo. I touched my index finger to her smooth skin, traced the corners of the tattoo. 

“Is this a dream?” I asked. “Am I dreaming right now?” 

She looked pitifully at me. “Not quite,” she said. “Walk with me.”

We walked, hand in hand, down the short hallway. There were hundreds of framed pictures of Rick hung on each wall. I saw that Rick had had sleek black hair, a double chin and bright green eyes. He was overweight, dressed in a brown tweed suit and red suspenders in every picture. The pictures seemed to have been taken everywhere—Rick holding a USA flag at a 4th of July rally, Rick standing proudly over a deer with a bullet wound in its head, Rick leaning his elbows against the hood of his gold Chevrolet, Rick flipping the pyramids off.

At the end of the hallway, we turned left into the living room. There was an apple-green couch against one wall, an open window to the right and a small walnut chair in the left corner. On top of the chair sat a blue vase of fresh jasmine. 

I turned to Mary. I cupped her face in my hands and ran my fingers between the strands of hair above her ears. I felt such longing! I was so old and alone and she’d remained so young. How? That didn’t matter. It seemed we now finally had a chance to set things right.

I leaned in and kissed her. With her lips against mine, I tasted burnt rubber and pine car freshener. She smiled at me when I pulled my head back. She touched her nose against mine; I could count the four faint freckles above her upper lip.

I let go of her head. I held my fingers to my temples, slowly kneaded the skin. I knew that, in a way, she wasthe car crash but I also knew that she was Mary Perkins, this kind, intelligent girl whom I thought I’d lost forever. 

Mary walked over to the couch and sat down. She crossed her legs and looked straight ahead at the wall next to the living room’s door. I went and sat next to her. It was soothing sitting there in Rick’s house, Mary next to me, the afternoon sunlight from the window gently warming my forearm. It was then that I was aware of the rosary in my pocket—the rosary I had come all this way to deliver. The something very important. I took it out of my pocket and held its beads between my fingers. 

“This was Rick’s,” I said.

Mary shrugged. “Thanks,” she said. “But it can’t help anyone now.” 

I paused. “I’ve missed you,” I said. “I once felt such affection for you that it seemed to wash over me like rain. And yet now…”

“Now what?” she demanded. 

I thought about it. “I can’t explain,” I said. “It’s as if I’m touching you through a layer of fog. All these years, they seem as much a dream as this.” 

“You’re not making a lot of sense.” 

She was right, I wasn’t. “I’m sorry,” I said. I put my head in my hands. I wept. For what? I didn’t know. When I turned my head up towards Mary, she had peeled her face off her head. Underneath the face, which she now held in her lap, was a mesh of arteries, blood, flesh as raw red as the paint on her toenails. 

“This is the nose,” she said, pointing to the nose on the face in her lap. Her voice was muffled now that that she had no lips. 

“This is my nose,” I said, pointing to my nose, very much intact on my face.

“This is the mouth,” she said and I repeated, pointing to my mouth. 

“Here,” she said, aligning her face with mine like a mask. “Wear my face and tell me something I don’t know about this world.” 

I considered this for a second. I could see the bloodied mess through the eye sockets, but only barely. Then, strange as it was, I did what she asked.

 

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HAMDY ELGAMMAL is an Egyptian software engineer and writer based in Oakland, CA. His prose has been published in Bourbon Penn, Origins Journal, Jersey Devil Press, Easy Street and Five on the Fifth.