Pretty soon, Petunia will have to cut everything that came before and pretend as if this were where life started, the time things began counting. But that time is not yet, because right now she’s doing nothing she knows counts. Right now, we watch over her shoulder as she looks across a man-made pond stocked with fish for fishing, and she can only barely see in the distance the town where the rest of her life can be found. The wind comes cold from across the water and makes her damp-jeaned knees come together. The pond attendant does summersaults by his ticket shack, over where the wind comes from. His pin-on animal tail flies behind him and makes a full circle with his body when it meets his head. Above, honking fowl disagree on which direction is south. In front of Petunia, a boy she doesn’t like is untangling the line she tangled when she let her abandoned cast curl in on itself.
“It’s okay,” he keeps telling her, although she hasn’t apologized.
The boy might be less of a boy than an adult. Old enough that her mother, who approves of a great deal by not disapproving, would still not approve of him. Not that Petunia would ever bring him around her house anyway. Not right now, what with all the pain and misery. Someone outside the family said they needed to talk to one another more about what happened, and now they mostly avoid one another.
She can’t drink legally, and the boy’s awful personality and the awful way he looks mean he’s not a suitable plus-one for any of her friends’ parties, or most public places. So, fishing here is one of the few kinds of things they can do together. Today, they are the only two people doing this one activity.
“I still don’t know why you brought me here if I don’t know how to swim,” she says.
“You don’t need to swim in order to fish,” he says.
“But I fell in before, when I cast.”
“It was so shallow, though. And you don’t own a cellphone. And I’m carrying all of the cash. You’ve got nothing to get wet. It doesn’t make sense for you to be scared.”
“Nothing has made sense since my dad died. It still makes me nervous.”
“Don’t they say people are more likely to say yes to dates and marriage proposals and adventurous sexual activities after they’ve done something scary, like walked across a high bridge or gone skydiving or seen a monster? I just want you to like me.”
Petunia says nothing. She recites the Serenity Prayer in her head and imagines living in a lighthouse with her mother. The boy uses his bread knife to cut the glassy snarl from the rest of the line and drops it into the water.
“Hey, don’t litter!” she says.
The boy rises from his squat, wipes his hands on his cargo pants, and flicks his scarf end over his shoulder.
“Petunia,” he says. “We’re on top of a landfill. This whole place is trash. The whole world is a pile of trash we’ve made.”
“The pond isn’t all trash yet to the fish,” she says. “And the pond is their whole world.”
The boy closes his eyes slowly and puts a finger in his ear.
“Petunia,” he says again. “We’re actively trying to kill the fish anyway. That’s what fishing is. We’re trying to catch and kill them before the seepage from the landfill kills them.”
“It’s not going to be safe to eat these things if we ever even catch any,” she says. “We should just leave them alone.”
The boy sighs and swallows his chewing tobacco. An unsettling and impossible thing to do instead of spitting.
“I’m going to leave you alone for a while,” he says. He tosses the rod onto the bank behind Petunia, and she watches him walk away. Wet handprints streak across his back pockets. His jacket flutters in the wind. Petunia’s internal organs unclench, and she feels released, free to attend to the world beyond the boy and the water. A friend told her offhand that she probably has a certain disorder, which Petunia knew required at least a thirty-item questionnaire to diagnose. This friend, who didn’t have a medical degree, encouraged her to name things around her that she could see, hear, smell, and feel when she got anxious. She smells the smell of fermented mud. The highway they came in on is a gray river that never meets the pond. On the side of a hill across the highway, tattered plastic flaps from the framing hoops of an unused greenhouse, and a disembodied yellow snowplow, spotted brown with rust, rots like a banana. Whorled and weeviled pines twist over blonde corn stubble sticking from dark clotted soil. The corn shares its scorched color with the autumn grass, and the sky’s battleship gray hides the sun, and she doesn’t know what time it is. The cold could be the cold of early morning or of late evening. She came here in the boy’s car, and only in the boy’s car can she leave.
All at once, the pond attendant is beside her. He looks like everything yet to come for her in her life. He doesn’t even say hello.
“Behold,” he tells her, not out of breath. “No more trash could fit in the ground, and nothing grows here anymore. So we tried to exploit the place in another way, with the pond and the fish.”
She stares at him all neutral. His face has furrows like the fallow land across the way, and his eyes have gone as wet as hers in the wind. Mud from summersaulting makes the top and back of his hair slick and his brown corduroy jacket browner. His pin-on animal tail dangles between his legs, the tuft of synthetic fur on its end tickling the ground. Nothing can surprise Petunia anymore.
“I thought this pond was always here,” she says. “I remember it always having been here, from when I was a child.”
“You thought wrong,” he says. “Keep talking, and I’ll tell you what else of what you think is wrong. I’m the only thing that’s always ever been here. I’ve seen everything.”
“Has this place been in your family for generations?” she asks. She takes a step closer to him, and her socks squish in her boots. He looks so ancient that she feels older just by looking at him.
“I am not of this land,” he says. “I don’t even work here.”
“But we gave you money when we came in,” she says.
“Your boyfriend gave me money, yes, and I took it. I take anything freely given.”
Petunia nods and stops thinking of things to say. Her mother wouldn’t like this circumstance at all.
Acorns falling from an oak behind them hit the water and make ripples that criss-cross with those now licking the lip of the shore at their feet—the ripples from the boy wading among the dry reeds across the pond. The acorns are followed by entire branches. The branches are followed by the entire tree.
A feeling comes up through Petunia. The uncapped quality of loss in the now-birdless sky. The immensity of time beneath the water table beneath the trash beneath the dirt beneath the grass beneath her feet. She quakes and hugs herself.
“The pond will freeze soon, won’t it,” she says.
“Yes,” says the not-pond-attendant. “And the fish will burrow down into the mud to sleep through the winter.”
“The pond freezing makes me think about bedtime, too,” she says. “I made my bed this morning, to prevent myself from getting back into it. But now I know that it’s back there at home for me, all inviting. That I won’t have to flop around in the tangle until I’m comfortable enough to get to sleep. That I can just slip right in without elevating my heart rate. I’m excited to go to bed. I’m excited to go to bed like when I’m excited to go to bed because I’m excited to wake up, because I know we have cold milk in the fridge, a box of doughnuts on the counter, the coffee maker set. Except maybe not in such a happy way. Maybe in the exact opposite way.”
“We can go to bed right here,” the not-pond-attendant says. “We can go to sleep right here in the grass like a couple of deer.”
“I’d prefer to wait for my boyfriend,” Petunia says, and it is the first time she has called him her boyfriend.
“Very well,” the not-pond-attendant says. “Here he comes.”
Stomping proudly along the shore comes the boyfriend, arms around a cocker-spaniel-sized catfish. Whiskers atwitch, skin like an oily balloon.
“Look!” the boyfriend yells to Petunia. “I can provide for you!”
“I expect it to talk,” says Petunia as he plops the fish down on the grass beside her and the not-pond-attendant. It jiggles once from the impact and goes still.
“It wouldn’t talk, even if it could,” says the boyfriend. “I shoved my fist down its throat. That, and it’s dead.”
“It’s illegal to noodle around here,” says the not-pond-attendant. “That’s what it’s called—fisting the fish like that. I’m telling on you.”
“You’ve always been a tattletale,” says the boyfriend, and it does not surprise Petunia that these two know one another.
The not-pond-attendant sticks his tongue out.
The boyfriend takes his bread knife out. His eyes brim with pleasure, and the wind whistles through the akimbo roots of the downed oak. The boyfriend has often implied that he has parts of his past he can’t share with Petunia. “What these eyes have seen,” he would say. “What these hands have done, what these feet have stepped in.” But Petunia doesn’t want him to share, because she doesn’t want to know. Not because she is afraid but because she doesn’t care about the past in general. She doesn’t care about other people’s pasts in the way she doesn’t care about other people’s dreams. The only thing she likes about dreams is that in dreams we have no pasts.
The not-pond-attendant looks between the boyfriend’s weapon and his face, and decides to summersault away. He gores the wet ground with the crown of his head and flattens it back out with his back.
“You know, we’re not the same, he and I,” the boyfriend tells Petunia. “You’ve seen us both at the same time twice now.”
“I think whatever mutated you two guys also mutated this fish,” says Petunia.
“Hey,” says the boyfriend, and puts a hand gingerly to his cheek. “You can’t use what happened as an excuse for cruelty. To anyone but especially not to me. Both my parents are dead, too, don’t you know.”
“You’re old,” she says. “Your parents are supposed to be dead.”
“Not that much older than you,” he says.
“Still old. You’re like a babysitter or an elementary-school assistant teacher. You could seem to me like you’re in your thirties or forties, even if you’re only in your twenties.”
“My parents died when I was young. Younger than you are.”
“But now you’re old. And they’d be dead by now even if they hadn’t died.” She toes the catfish’s belly with her boot. It is definitely, definitely dead, she thinks. “I’m wasting my life,” she says. “I don’t want to waste any more of it with you. Please take me home.”
“I’d like to take you home,” he says. “There’s a highway cut on the way to your house with a rock face upslope that produces formidable icicles. My roguish friends and I—it doesn’t seem so long ago!—we used to break them off when we were bored and heave them into the winter sky and watch them smash on the asphalt and their bejeweled pieces scatter. And those houses in your neighborhood by the train tracks get just the nicest light this time of day. I’d love to see it all, but we can’t leave. We haven’t even had our snack yet.” He begins to take his bread knife to the fish, and a lull in the wind lets her smell both of their bodies. “I’m going to start a fire to cook,” he says. “It’ll also help you dry those clothes out.”
“How do you know I eat fish?” she asks.
“You don’t eat fish?”
“I do eat fish, but how would you know?”
“I just asked you! Please go find some wood while I do the filleting.”
Petunia lets her breath out through her nose, turns around, and tumbles down the hill toward a woodland patch. The brush is thick at the edge of the grove, and she must kick her way through. It is darker and cooler under the canopy, even if the branches have gone leafless. It is the crows—statue-still and -silent black crows. They replace the leaves and shade the forest floor. Trees fallen earlier than the oak by the pond offer themselves to Petunia. She overturns logs, and no creepy-crawlies scurry away from the light as she expects. The light is dead and the ground is dead, too. Soon the planet will be a place fit only for mushrooms. Petunia collects pieces of woody detritus in decreasing circumference in the crook of her left arm until she cannot bend over again without spilling them. A song from her childhood comes to her, and she hums it as if she were happy and vibrating with energy. She remembers how her choral instructor, who was also her father, until he lost the job, used to yell until he got hoarse about how the group should not hum with their mouths closed and damage their tender young vocal cords. Humming with her mouth open makes Petunia’s tongue cold and her teeth hurt, so she continues to hum with it closed, like a normal person. Vocal health be damned.
“Tuvan throat singing,” says the not-pond-attendant. He is there, among the trees ten meters away. Of course he is there.
“What about it?” asks Petunia.
“The music is mostly pentatonic,” he says. “But never mind. I come from a long line of window-washers. I like looking in other people’s windows, windows like yours, but not cleaning them. Appearing to clean provides a good excuse for looking.”
“If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to help.” She bobs her head at the ground.
The not-pond-attendant begins picking up sticks and putting them into Petunia’s waiting arms. They come face to face as he does so, and she looks down to avoid his gaze and sees that his fingernails are long and brittle. “For measuring powders and for finger-picking,” he notes, noticing her stare. “They tried to teach me how to play the saw with a bow, but I could only ever play the banjo. What do you know how to write on a calculator?”
“Only a few things,” says Petunia, thinking. She recites as the not-pond-attendant forages and brings wood back to her, the stack growing higher and higher, toward her face. Something new with each piece: “ ‘Boobless.’ ‘Eels.’ ‘Beige.’ ‘Geologies.’ ‘Hobbes.’ ‘Goebbels gobbles.’ ‘Hellhole.’ ‘Sheol.’ ‘Helios.’ ‘I sell shells.’ ‘I see legs.’ ‘I ooze oil.’ ‘I sizzle sillies.’ ‘Hillbillies libel Bible.’ ‘Illegible soils slosh.’ But infinite things, I suppose, if I’m using a graphing calculator.” She secures the last of the pile under her chin, and speaks with a clenched jaw. “That’s enough, thank you. I can’t carry any more.”
“An okay list,” says the not-pond-attendant, brushing himself off. “And yes, please run along now. This happens to be one of my mushroom-hunting spots, and I’m very protective of my mushrooming-hunting spots.”
As Petunia turns, a crow drops from a tree above her and swoops by. Its talons come inches from her face, and she whimpers and jerks away. The crows still in the canopy caw approvingly as their companion flaps from the grove.
“Don’t fear the crows,” the not-pond-attendant tells Petunia, walking back up to her. She fears that the rest will fly down in her face. “Only look out for the bats,” he says. “Especially as night approaches. Bats are the only birds with teeth.” He bends to pick up the twigs that have fallen from Petunia’s arms in her fright and places them back atop her pile. “Please, run along,” he says as she stares down at his pin-on animal tail. “It’s awkward to summersault in the woods. Even with all the sticks picked up off the ground. I don’t want you to see.”
Petunia examines the muddy slope she slips across for places to bury the ashes the sticks she carries will turn into later. Her municipal garbage bin at home has arrows on its lid showing which of its sides should face the street and an inscription reading “NO HOT ASHES.” Her father’s ashes have never cooled off, burning a hole in the purse in her room she left them in. After she received them (“Here, your inheritance,” her mother had said), she had the repeated inclination to override the bin’s warning and dump them in the trash along with the kitty litter they so resemble. If she had done so, they would have ended up at a landfill like this one. The kind of place you end up, she thinks. Or at least where you go right before you go where you end up.
Once she reaches the boyfriend at the crest of the hill, the blobs of fish organ lay on the grass next to the catfish’s body, which has been run through mouth-to-ass with a straight oak stick into the ground. The organs glisten, and the fish’s eyes stare, their mucus film going dry.
“This is all so wet,” the boyfriend says, pawing through the pile Petunia has brought. “I’m adding this to my running list of grievances against you.”
“It rained earlier today.”
In the distance, they can still see the curtain of rain graying the band of blue sky between the clouds and ground. It plunges to earth at ten meters per second but looks as if it just hangs there.
“I’ll go syphon some gasoline from the car,” says the boyfriend. “That’ll get this thing going.”
“Wait,” she says. “You were already low on gas when we got here. I want to be able to get home. Why don’t we just leave?”
“Let me demonstrate my competence,” he says. “Let me do nice things for you.”
“The nice thing,” she says, “would be to let me get home.”
The boyfriend stares at her with eyes wide enough that she can see his entire irises. “I’ll be back in a moment,” he says and turns to go down the hill toward the car. Water should run down the hill after the boyfriend, not stay and collect atop it. But the bowl of water that is the pond perches there improbably, as in the indentation on the head of a kappa.
As Petunia waits, the far-off hills go purple, and sunbeams slant in front of them. The light hasn’t straightened out overhead all day, and she feels like she’d prefer being dead to being here. She hears a humming sound and sees that it is the not-pond-attendant mowing the ungrowing grass on a riding mower. While she watches, he approaches the fire site in smaller and smaller concentric circles. On the hill’s drab expanse, the mower is the bright-orange mark that the fire cannot yet be.
The not-pond-attendant brakes the mower beside her but lets it continue to run. His pin-on animal tail drapes over the back of the seat. “I can take you away from here,” he says. The machine purrs beneath him and makes her feel ill at ease. “I can make this all much less boring.”
“We’ll never make it to my house on that,” she says. “It’ll run out of gas well before we get there, and my boyfriend is getting the gas canister, so we can’t take it for ourselves.”
“Who said we’d be going to your house?” he asks. “I thought maybe my house. That is, my home. It’s not a house, per se. Do you feel threatened by me?”
“No,” she says. “I feel more threatened by my boyfriend. Mostly I feel very cold and tired.” The mower has chewed through the grass it sits upon and has begun spitting clumps of dirt toward the unlit fire. “You’ve stayed too long,” she says. “You need to leave me alone.”
“I understand,” the not-pond-attendant says. “If I had a cap, I’d tip it to you. We could have made a life together.”
“So long, flyboy,” she says.
“Not so long,” he says. “I hope. I trust.”
The not-pond-attendant exits on a straighter line than the one he entered on, and the boyfriend returns weighed down with the red gas canister and goes to work on the fire. As the kindling smokes, Petunia stands with her arms crossed across her breasts and rolls her eyes. The clouds have lifted, and a plane—white and lonely, so high it hardly seems to move—leaves a trail that expands behind it and unzips the blue, blank, cold sky into two. Petunia wants to stay away from the boyfriend but close to the fire’s impending heat.
“We’re such cold prairie people,” he says. “This is nice for us.”
“Keep insisting,” she says, and sneezes into her open palms. She is mud-wet from the spray of the mower. Grief is in the present, she thinks. Grief is now.
“I have a very good travel mug,” the boyfriend explains. “One so good that if I had brought it, it would have kept water hot from this morning’s time in civilization. We could have possessed that heat even now, hours later. We could have wrapped our hands around it.”
“It doesn’t matter to me unless you’ve got it here,” says Petunia. “It doesn’t mean anything at all for you just to tell me about it.”
Thirty minutes later, the sun is down and the fish consumed. The sunset was a snuffing—nothing dramatic. They sit on their scarves next to the modestly burning fire. While they ate, the food had filled their mouths instead of words, but now the boyfriend is talking about something or other.
“The weather.” He points toward the now-cloudless sky. “The weather feels important, because we can’t do anything to change it.”
“Okay,” says Petunia. “Alright. Very well.”
The boyfriend continues, and she looks at him and still wants to go home. Flecks of fish decorate the boyfriend’s face, discrediting everything he has to say. She thinks about the fish now moving through the tangle of her intestines. Couldn’t a human intestine, stretched out, wrap around the equator three times? No, that must be neurons or blood vessels in the brain put end to end. Otherwise, we would digest food at thousands of miles per hour. Is there a speed of thought, Petunia asks herself, and what is it? At what speed can the boyfriend run, and can she run faster?
“It sure is cold out here,” the boyfriend has been saying. “So cold it feels like it might always be this cold. Even in my fancy, stylish, contemporary jacket, I feel like Early Man, not knowing for sure whether the sun will ever come up again.”
Petunia knows what he means, although she doesn’t like to agree with him, even on the most basic of matters. Petunia knows that her mind takes on a different quality in the dark than it does during the light of day. Retreated into itself. She feels primeval and unknown to herself next to the fire and the boyfriend. Violence feels natural, and nature feels mysterious.
“But then why don’t we go?” she asks. “Why don’t we go to where it is warm and we can have real soft furniture to sit upon?”
“We’ll go once I feel like I’ve impressed you sufficiently or run out of things to say or could only make it worse,” he says.
“You’re only making it worse,” she says. “Listen to me. You’re only making it worse.”
Someday she might own a car and be able to move about on her own. But now she studies the boyfriend’s stupid face and thinks that if she could just get him to pull up to the house so that her mother could get a look at that same stupid, aging face, the mother would then come out and do the work of telling the boyfriend to stop being a boyfriend. Even that timid, mournful, near-mute woman could communicate something to him that Petunia could not on her own. They would become united in purpose.
“I’ll be the judge of whether I’m making it worse,” says the boyfriend, busying himself with the fire. “It’s like a sports competition. It might come down to who wants it more. Although of course we want different things. I want to be in a relationship, and you don’t want to be. You don’t even want to be here.”
“This is nothing like sports,” says Petunia. “And I think you know nothing about sports anyway. I don’t know why I call you my boyfriend. We have no history together, and hardly anything in common. That’s why we need to do things together, why we can’t just sit and talk in this barren place. I’m not old enough to have ‘history.’ Not like you. Childhood still feels recent. I want to convince myself the past doesn’t mean anything because I know I won’t remember anything important in the future. I worry I have no memory.”
“We forget everything because nothing matters,” says the boyfriend, trying with his voice to hold onto his label. Petunia knows that he has only now learned what he is called, and in learning his name he is losing it.
“Things matter,” she says. “Not everything, but things. I feel they matter because otherwise we would have no concept of ‘waste.’ How could something be wasted if we had no sense of its proper use? Unless every use is waste, and things should just be left as they are—untouched, unsullied, unhurt. But I should be wasting my youth on fun, reckless things, not aimless things like whatever this is with you.”
“Reckless or aimless—it’s all dumb stuff,” says the boyfriend.
“This feeling might just be a physiological thing,” says Petunia. “Wouldn’t that be nice? If these feelings were merely physiological in origin? Rather than having an origin in the outside socio-emotional world? Or maybe I’m not sure why it’d be nicer, one origin or another. The origins of something hardly matter for the thing itself. Maybe I just need more vitamin D. Does fire give vitamin D? Are we remaking the vitamin-D-giving sun that has set? Are we remaking it on the ground?”
The boyfriend says, “I hate the sound of your voice when you talk like that. Like you might know something. Like you have questions worth asking. Think about the fish if you want to think about bodies. Think about its body within your body and within mine, nourishing our bodies, becoming parts of our bodies, uniting our bodies in that way, even as it itself is divided.”
“I’ve already thought of that,” says Petunia. “Anything you’ve thought of, I’ve thought of long before. I’ve thought of bodies preserved in lava at Pompeii since the time I started talking just now. There’s not a concept in the world you could illuminate for me.”
“I’ve literally illuminated this dark patch of earth for you with fire,” he says, looking taken aback. “I’m offended. I want to go pout, but I can’t leave the nice fire.”
“No one asked you to light a fire,” says Petunia. “Only I could have asked you, and I did not ask you to light the fire. I’ve asked you only to take me home.”
Petunia does an accounting of material, of matter around her. Doing so helps her focus on the present. She looks at her boots standing far enough from the fire that they won’t catch. The fishing rods cross one another behind the boyfriend, and his bread knife catches the firelight in his lap. The catfish in the grass is all bone from the gills downward, and it makes her sick to see. Petunia uses one of her socks to pick the carcass up by its tail and toss it to where the crows can peck out its eyes.
“I am reminding myself, with what I’ve been saying,” says the boyfriend. “I need you to leave and go off on your own for a bit.” With his fingers, he imitates the motion of walking legs. “So that I can take this wetsuit off.”
“You’ve been wearing a wetsuit this whole time?” asks Petunia.
“Yes, under my clothes,” says the boyfriend. He hooks his shirt collar back with a finger to expose another black collar beneath. “In case I had to go in the water. It’s also kind of like a full-body chastity belt.”
“Do you remember when I fell in the water earlier?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay, and why do you have to take it off?”
“The neoprene could melt from the heat of the fire and fuse to my skin and kill me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes, I’m kidding,” says the boyfriend. “I’ll never die.”
“But why do I have to leave?” asks Petunia. “Why don’t you just go off into the night yourself and change?”
“I’ll never change either,” says the boyfriend. “But no, there’s something…” He pauses. “I can’t leave the fire. I just can’t.”
“How about I close my eyes,” says Petunia. “I won’t open them, because I don’t want to see. Your face gives me enough of an idea of what your body will look like.”
Petunia puts her hands up and enjoys the play of color behind her lids and remembers how good it feels to grind her palms into her eyes. The eyeballs, she remembers someone saying, are the clitoris of the face. When the boyfriend tells her she can open up again, the black skin of the wetsuit lies crumpled next to the fire like a clubbed baby seal, and the boyfriend seems to have shed a layer of blubber, not that he has much to shed. He looks even more weak and hapless, and Petunia knows she could overpower him with little difficulty and take his keys. But she hasn’t been able to get behind a wheel since the accident.
“Time to take me home,” she says. “And to drive very carefully.”
“But I haven’t yet pointed to everything I can point to from this vantage point,” says the boyfriend. “Give me but a second.”
The landscape might as well be gone. Petunia can’t see it, and she can smell only the fire, elemental and dangerous. It is tongues licking, licking grossly at the black air. Right in front of her, it overwhelms her senses and desensitizes her eyes to the finer shades in the ground around her and the boyfriend. She knows the not-pond-attendant might be somewhere out there, in the void the boyfriend squints into. The not-pond-attendant seems only to come to her when she is alone, and she feels alone now.
“You know why we’re here?” the boyfriend asks. “Over this hill is where my parents were killed…”
“Stalled car,” Petunia intones. “Railroad crossing.” She wants to show that she knows, that she has always paid attention, but also that this bores her, that she has heard it all before.
“That’s right,” says the boyfriend. “And now that trainline is a bike path. Over this hill is where my parents were killed, and I like to come spend time here because I’m beside myself about not remembering what they look like or having any remains. The fire after the impact was very bad, and they had every known photo of themselves in the vehicle. This hill has become a representation of them for me. Some kind of likeness, a picture.”
“There’s nothing here for me, though,” says Petunia. “Only that vast gloomy feeling.” The wind switches direction and pushes the smoke away from her. She can smell the unpicked pumpkins rotting in a field somewhere.
“Nothing is nice,” says the boyfriend. “I mean, nothingness is nice. Fall, winter—dying and death are in these seasons. Deadness. You can’t see the whole story the land has told, what’s been here before. You have to imagine it. Something else waits beneath these seasons, and that’s the nice thing.”
“I’m so tired,” says Petunia. “I’m so tired of this dead part of the planet that I will go to sleep right over the covers when I get home. If I ever get home.”
“It’s not responsible for us to leave until the fire is fully out,” says the boyfriend, gesturing toward the unflagging coals. The fire has dwindled faster than Petunia expected, but she sees that the sky has gone black, as if having absorbed a thousand times the smoke from the small flame. “And once the fire is fully out,” the boyfriend adds, “it will be fully dark. And once it is fully dark, we can’t drive, because my headlights don’t work anymore.”
Petunia listens to the boyfriend and wants very much to stab him. She had not known about the headlights, and now she wants for an avenging demon, empowered with her righteous anger, to rise from the muck and slice his head clean off. She would bury him here on the hill, facedown in a secret grave.
“Although it is never fully dark,” the boyfriend continues, “and we’re never in complete darkness. Not ever. As long as there is an atmosphere and a civilization, with all its light pollution. Or even then, without those things, there would be light from the stars that the atmosphere would not block anymore.”
Petunia looks at the boyfriend’s blushing fire-lit face and thinks about him waking up every day (why even wake up, if you were him?), looking at himself in the mirror, and deciding, yet again, to go out into the world with mutton chops. They grow ever outward, the hair brittle and thick, but lacking Victorian density. She can’t believe she has gotten used to them. He has the long tresses of a man she wouldn’t want to have children with. Petunia can tell that his head-top hair is dyed, because it is so dark, so Elvis black, and yet also so thin.
The boyfriend asks a question: “But if galaxies exist in every direction—that is, if you could go on any given bearing from Earth and eventually hit a star—and if light doesn’t stop until it hits something, then why isn’t the night sky ablaze with light? Why is there any space at all between the stars?”
“Are you asking why the sky is dark at night?” asks Petunia.
“Yes, it’s a question like ‘Why is the sky blue?’ ”
“So, like, an obvious question.”
“No, a difficult question, one that doesn’t have a self-evident answer. And the answer,” explains the boyfriend, “is that the universe has only been expanding for thirteen billion years, not forever, and stars come into being and die at different times, and light takes time to reach us, so it reaches us in a staggered fashion. In the spaces where there is no visible star, the distance to the closest star is so great that the light from it hasn’t reached us yet, that it exists outside our observable sphere of the universe—thirteen billion light years in every direction.”
“Why are you telling me this?” asks Petunia.
“I figure if you can’t have a nice time,” says the boyfriend, “maybe you can at least learn something new.”
“Again, you can’t teach me anything,” says Petunia. “And isn’t trading information a sorry excuse for relating?”
“Well, for it to be trading, we’d both need to be providing information,” says the boyfriend.
“But I can never think of things to say,” says Petunia.
“Just make your mind blank and let it come to you,” says the boyfriend. He wipes grease from the fish onto his shirt while he waits for her. His hands have served as his plate and his clothes as his napkin.
Petunia closes her eyes like she did when he took off his wetsuit, and it comes to her. “I never want to brush my teeth again,” she says, and opens her eyes. “I want to throw away the dowel along with the used toilet-paper roll. I want to tap a stapler like I’m sending a message in Morse Code. I’m willing to lose the farm over these things.”
“What?” asks the boyfriend.
“That’s what came into my head.”
“I see,” says the boyfriend. He waits, but nothing more comes into Petunia’s head. “You know, with your dad,” he says, “it’s important to remember that he had no option but to drive the wrong way down that road. The office really should have given him a proper mail truck, one with the driver’s seat on the right-hand side. It’s important to remember that he bears absolutely no responsibility whatsoever.”
“Stop telling me what’s important,” says Petunia. “The only important thing to remember about my father is that he died. You sound like someone from the support group.”
“I am someone from the support group,” he says.
Petunia feels a wetness on her cheek but knows she has not been crying. She never cries. “Oh!” she cries, and looks upward. “Snow!” The fire had prevented her from feeling the full chill come on, and now wiggling, silent flakes appear and melt in mid-air as they enter the fire’s dome of warmth.
“So it begins,” says the boyfriend. “I don’t think we can leave until it stops or we’ve thought of something good.”
“What haven’t I thought of?” asks Petunia. “How do you know what I’ve thought of? I don’t say everything I think, and I’ve thought of everything. We need to go.”
From across the pond comes the sound of the not-pond-attendant’s voice: “This time, it’s different,” he shouts. They hear a crack, and another, and it’s fireworks he’s launching. The fireworks’ red brightness competes with their fire’s, and they shoot up against the snow coming down, loud against the precipitation’s hush. Petunia and the boyfriend stand and can see strobed images of the not-pond-attendant summersaulting around the launch site. The smoke goes yellow with each explosion and drifts away. They smell sulfur. The projectiles arc from the ground, lines tracing their curving path and fading, only to explode in a bouquet of sparks before the lines can fall back down again. As she watches the fireworks, Petunia feels the weight of the boyfriend’s arm over her shoulders and feels herself centered and straight, pulled down on a plumb line toward the center of the earth.
“Firework bursts look flat from the ground,” explains the boyfriend, “but they are of course spherical, three dimensional.”
The fireworks light up the undersides of clouds that were not there when the boyfriend spoke about the stars; the stars now reside on the other side of the cloud cover, casting their light on its top.
“Whatever, I know,” says Petunia. “Take me home.”
In the morning, Petunia and the boyfriend will awake on their backs in a circle of trodden weed, not remembering having gone to sleep. The snow will have gathered itself in dustings around the hill and on the new thin ice atop the pond water—a gauzy settling in earthen pockets, in frozen footprints in mud, against sheltering tree trunks, in the folds of bark. By the ticket shack, it will barely cover the scorched circumference of the not-pond-attendant’s launching site: he will have set the fireworks off until shortly before the snow stopped.
“I’m fine,” Petunia will say, brushing off white and patting down her body for harm. “I’m maybe a little surprised about it. I thought I’d have frozen, or at least gotten a tick.”
“All the ticks have died or flown south by now,” the still-boyfriend will say. “Otherwise, they’d end up on the business end of my bread knife. And you know I can’t hurt you. It’s for religious reasons that I can’t hurt you. I can’t break the rules. Simply unable to. And I don’t even want to do the things that are breaking the rules.”
The snow will have pressed PAUSE and then REWIND on these two people. Every day, they will awake and see their shadows and put their heads back down to the ground. Petunia will want nothing more than to leave the pond behind, to make what has happened here part of her past that she can forget like everything else. She will still be willing to lose the farm over this one. She will want to run down the hill, hands flung wide, shadow racing behind her, disconnected from everything. But she cannot, not any more than the boyfriend can leave the fire after he’s lit it, again and again. Petunia’s boots will shrink from the moisture and cold, and she will have to get onto her back and tug at them with her feet in the air, as if to kick the sky. At times, they will hear the train whistle in the middle distance, mournful as a pedal steel and insistent as a parent. Bats will flit against the half-light, whether morning or evening, and Petunia will strain to see their bared teeth. Birds will light upon roofs in the town they came from, and wisps of exhaust will escape pipes. All the parts of the buildings that face the man-made pond’s direction will lack doors, and the oaks will keep falling and rot or turn to tinder, kindling, and fuel. The not-pond-attendant will circle Petunia and the sometimes-boyfriend, and when menaced by the sometimes-boyfriend or sent away by Petunia, he will retreat, dragging his pin-on animal tail behind him. And one morning, only one of them will wake up.