READ US – THE NAMES OF THE DEAD by Adam Dunham
Sometimes when Gregory Baeyer bathes Lucy Amalthea he looks at her skin. Every inch is a network of lines. Crumpled up, then unfolded and flattened out, like a sheet of notebook paper. It’s a rare form of catalepsy she suffers: Lucy will hold any position she is put in to, indefinitely it would seem, seated, standing, it doesn’t matter, but she will not or cannot walk, and she never moves on her own. She never speaks.
Gregory Baeyer carries Lucy into the bathroom, stands her beside the sink, and removes her nightgown. Her body sags, hangs away from itself. The elderly have been known to shrink. But the skin, more plastic and malleable than bone, cartilage, does not. It grows and grows and grows.
Open the phone book and sample the listings: Nettle, Scot. Flip the pages. Gault, Connie. Again. Ramon, Victoria. Some of these people are dead, their names still in print. You can collate the daily obituaries with these pages of names. If a phone book is old enough, Gregory tells Lucy, it becomes a book of the dead, a map of mortality. Fifty or seventy-five years from now, these names could be recited as a canticle, a prayer. Lucy is seated on a brass-legged, red-cushioned stool. Gregory positioned her legs, draped her arms around her cello. He has never heard her play, but assumes she was quite good. The instrument is a deep glowing red, fire trapped in ice. He turns the pages of the phone book; he raises a finger to his lips. Quiet, honey, he says, I need to make a call. Lucy is very quiet indeed.
Considering the requirement of twenty-four hour care, Lucy’s needs are really quite few. In the grocery store Gregory fills a basket for Lucy and himself: oranges, bar soap, bread, bananas, disposable razors, lunch meat, the new issue of Skeptical Inquirer, instant rice, hot sauce, eye drops for her unblinking eyes, liquid soap in a purple squeeze bottle, sponges, Bactine Original First Aid Liquid, cotton balls, surgical tape, and today, a tube of lipstick, copper in color, Egyptian Fire by name. Lucy’s food is gray-green mush delivered to the house, along with an assortment of IV tubes, syringes, colostomy bags, etc., via UPS, usually on Thursdays, but sometimes on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and every once in a while as late as Friday. Gregory signs for the package; all payments are handled by Lucy’s son, Linus Amalthea, who is Gregory’s employer.
Gregory sits Lucy in a straight back chair in front of the window. The light is patterned by the window frame and by the waving arms of a Russian olive tree just beyond the glass. This window is the size of a door, but only the two tall panes on either side open. They open outwards instead of sliding up. To accomplish this, Gregory pops the latch with his thumb, pushes directly on the window frame until it just starts to offer resistance, then turns the little, tarnished, swiveling crank handle, which works the mechanism hidden in the window sill. The air is sweet, and through the opened window he can hear Ron White’s lawn mower in the distance.
Today he arranges her hair in a tight little bun, right on top. It suggests the East; her stillness impersonates spiritual stillness. The severe shadow lines from the window light recalls the ornamental dressing screen in Lucy’s bedroom, adorned with a Shinto goddess. Her silence is the control of the Noh theater actress. He applies her mascara carefully, lightly. After, Gregory reads to Lucy, a popular physics (300 pages or better describing the first torrential moments of the universe). At some point he realizes his own silence. For several minutes – he’s not sure how many – he has been watching the light on her face. The sun brightens, then dims, over and over, slowly, without rhythm, and the change is accompanied each time by a silence Gregory finds somehow inexplicable, a little unnerving. They listen to Haydn because it is spring.
In the checkout line Gregory looks at superstars on the covers of magazines. Magazines he will never read, and most of the celebrities he hasn’t heard of. The blond with hips and big round eyes – Gregory wonders how long until her skin drips away from her bones, how long until the eyes bruise? He tries but cannot imagine her that way. In glossy print, surrounded by the bustle of middle class, supermarket desires, this visage is fixed, unyielding as it is unmoving. Waiting to pay for his and Lucy Amalthea’s groceries, Gregory looks for pictures of the unhealthy, of the ailing, the aged. There are a couple of fat stars (and, judging by the blurbs on the magazine covers, articles ridiculing their obesities), but he doesn’t spot any elderly. The blond, the brunette, the other blond. He thinks of a thigh, what she would look like from another angle, what’s beneath the smooth fabric of the skirt, what she would look like standing in Lucy’s kitchen, buttering a piece of toast. Is there a real girl somewhere behind the ink? Gregory nods at the newsstand, the flesh and blood and time and sex is there, real, almost begging to be inferred. Her white smile is actually an anguished grimace. Make me real, the impossibly blue eyes say. Make me real with morning breath and hangnails and a listing in the phone book. As soon as his turn at the register comes, he forgets this catalog of ideas and images. The blond’s voice rings in Gregory’s head once as he pays the bill. By the time he’s walking through the automatic doors to the parking lot, he has forgotten the magazines altogether.
In the dining room hangs a portrait of Lucy’s parents. The paper is dirty yellow, burning in the slow fire of time. Entropy, Gregory tells Lucy. A measure of the energy no longer available to a system. It is not lost, energy is never destroyed. It just gets thin and spread out. Gregory thinks of Lucy’s skin as suitable metaphor, but he doesn’t say it. The black and white figures are sleek and upright, and though the details are difficult to surmise, their dress and bearing suggest very old money. Her mother looks like a canny woman; her father is square-faced and stolid and slit-eyed and horrible.
Lucy lives in her own house. Her servants include Gregory, who provides for her bodily needs, comforting her as best as he knows how; Mrs. Lindall, the respite aid who comes once a week to dust and clean floors and windows and to relieve Gregory on his days off or when he needs to do shopping; and Ron White, gardener, groundsman and landscaper. Sometimes Gregory glimpses the aging Mr. White working outside, through a window, his back bent over a freshly turned plot in a flowerbed. Whenever Mr. White sees Gregory, he says hello with a large wave of a liver-spotted hand. Sometimes Gregory watches Mr. White without Mr. White knowing. He doesn’t like being in a quiet house with someone working outside, so close to the walls. It is like being snuck up on, somehow taken advantage of. It makes his brain itch. Lucy lives in her own house, but Gregory doesn’t know what that means.
In the sitting room is a photo of Lucy as a younger woman. In the picture, her head is turned forty-five degrees to the left, and she is shaking hands with a round man in a tuxedo who Linus explained is a famous opera singer. Lucy must be about thirty here. Her hair is a warm, natural brown and her eyes have light in them. Gregory cannot recall the opera singer’s name.
At first, Gregory did not appreciate Lucy’s company. He would go to her room, take her limbs and joints through a series of range-of-motion exercises. Move each arm in twenty circles clockwise, then reverse. Lift the leg, push the foot, straighten the leg, repeat. When he was done he would adjust her motorized bed to a seated position, turn on the TV or the radio, and do other things. He did not like the way Lucy’s eyes stared, the emptiness in them, how the world tumbled past and she registered nothing. With Lucy on her back on the bed, Gregory would take one of her feet and roll the ankle joint smoothly. He would look down at her, into empty eyes. Sometimes during these exercises he felt his balance go, felt himself somersaulting. Nature abhors a vacuum, but some spaces it must wait to fill. The emptiness would leak from her eyes, seep out until it swallowed the room. Sometimes it spread to his eyes. He felt them drain of life as they fixed on something, some crook of Lucy’s neck, a section of the pattern on her comforter, and his breathing would slow, until finally he would shake himself free and growl or grumble and leave the room.
One morning Gregory came into Lucy’s room and saw movement in her face, just in her eyes. Looking more closely he realized it was the reflection of the television screen, the characters of a hospital drama arguing on the surface of her eyes. He looked more closely, at the fibrous, radiating lines in her irises, how there were so many shades of color therein, explosions of green and yellow and brown and gold. He looked more closely and saw himself reflected there, at first in silhouette – the shape of his shoulders and head; but then, more closely still, and Gregory could see his own eyes in the vast and minuscule glassy blackness of Lucy’s pupil. After, he learned that if he faced her towards the window, images of fat clouds or waving tree branches moved across her unblinking eyes. He said, You are a mirror of nature, Lucy Amalthea, and he never made her watch TV again.
Gregory places Lucy on her bath chair and gently sponges her. Burgundy shows through the white skin. Today, burgundy is the color beneath Gregory’s eyes as well. He spent the previous night reading and looking out of windows. Astronomy, he tells his charge, is the cruelest science. For the fate of the universe there are only two options. His hand in front of her face to illustrate: open or closed. In the closed universe, there is enough gravity to pull everything back in. A reversal of entropy. Gregory makes his hand a fist. Energy will concentrate and all the planets and suns, the space dust and all of space will collapse into a heap. This will be a Big Crunch. Probably, it won’t be pretty. Gregory opens his hand, then lets it drop. The open universe, they think, Lucy, is more likely. Not enough stuff floating out there, not enough gravity. The space rocks so cold, the planets and suns that have burnt into nothing, it will all spread out and out and out until the universe is a calm pool, dissipated, and it will grow silent, and dark, and cold, absolutely cold. Gregory balances the sponge on the edge of the bathtub, wipes shower spray from his face with his forearm. He looks past her, into the mirror. He places his hand on Lucy’s arm, saying, But don’t worry about that stuff, honey. It’s billions of years away, and beyond our control, Lucy. Completely beyond our control.
Gregory’s first job as an orderly was in the criminal ward of the Rosemont Court Mental Hospital, graveyard shift. Most nights he worked the retard wing – what the graveyard shift attendants called it. The policy books and memos referred to them as tenants, which, admittedly, sounded nicer, but it also sounded false. These were infantile giants, whose bodies were developed, but whose minds were stunted. Often, to himself or his girlfriend, Gregory wanted to excuse the parallels he’d drawn between these criminals and children, but he could only think about it in two ways: These were either overgrown kids, terrible as kids can be terrible, or they were animals, angry mutts that may have been trained to domestication but were most likely condemned to crude atavism, with only those comforts their caretakers were willing to administer. Gregory thought this on a Thursday of mid November while he bandaged a hole freshly chewed into his forearm. Maybe he tried to rethink it as he drove to work Friday night, the stick at his side on the passenger seat.
The orderlies at the Rosemont Court, although working with a violent criminal population, were not allowed weapons of any sort. But Friday morning he pulled the car into the garage and, before going in to his girlfriend still asleep in their queen-sized bed, he took a hacksaw and cut a two-foot length section from the handle of an old garden rake.
That night he ran his thumb over the sawed end of the crude billy club, and as he turned into the parking lot of the hospital, Gregory caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror: A confused grin, the meaning of which was complicated by the wideness of the eyes.
The other orderlies warned him when he was hired. This one scratches, they said. Watch your eyes. He spits. Joe Levi stinks. This one’s a thrasher. And don’t let his size fool you: Billy Spong is a biter. Gregory stuffed the club in the back of his belt and pulled on his coat. Billy Spong liked to bite all right. Gregory went inside to check in for his shift.
To be hired as Lucy’s caregiver, Gregory submitted to local and federal background checks and only after the initial screening allowed Linus Amalthea to look at his credit report. Whatever Linus does for a living, Gregory has made up his mind that the man’s success is dependent almost solely on Lucy Amalthea’s money. Linus does not look so much like a businessman as he does a Hollywood producer or mafia don, pompous in imported shoes, overcoat, and big gold rings. Linus came by this afternoon, the sixth or seventh visit Gregory is aware of since Lucy’s been in his charge.
Mr. Almathea said, I like how you make Mother look nice. She always looks nice when I see her. His voice was flat.
Gregory said, I do it for her.
How is my mother? Linus always enters the house unannounced.
Comatose, Gregory almost said, even though it is not quite the proper term.
Gregory lies in bed and imagines the sky deep and endlessly indigo. Space to extend into, stretch out an arm and hand. Sometimes he thinks so much that his head fills up with helium. His face and skull inflate like a balloon, until he must look like a flesh-tone Pac-Man – evil smiley face, chomping the void – until his head is bigger than the earth. He’d like to eat everything, devour the sky, whole worlds floating in the emptiness of his mouth.
Pushing and pulling on Lucy’s legs, Gregory sees that her toes are curling up, hardening into place like globs of wood glue. Don’t do that, sweetie, Gregory says, working his fingers between them, you can’t stand on your own if your feet become fists. He stretches the digits individually, then all of them together. The toes creak as he plies. One snaps loud enough to startle his hands away. For a moment Gregory suspects he’s broken something. But he watches the foot. For several minutes, half an hour, more. He sits with her foot in his lap. No swelling, no discoloration. When he is done he puts her in her black dress patterned with white vines and little red strawberries. He puts his hands on her shoulders, his lips on her cheek.
Gregory stood over the sleeping Billy Spong. Billy was on his side, one arm trapped beneath him, almost like a fetus. Billy’s mouth hung open – dry in there, and stinking. The lower lip was a mess of scar tissue and fresh wounds from incessant chewing. Gregory was on his rounds, and on the pretext of the weather outside and mild chill in the hospital, he wore his ID badge clipped to the neckband of a green sweater. The length of rake handle at the small of his back was easily hidden beneath the extra bulk. Through the thick sleeve Gregory felt the outline of the bandage on his forearm. He poked at it with his fingertips. He squeezed the wound until pain rose to his neck. His hands did not shake when he took the billy club from his belt, but all over he felt suddenly weak, power draining from his limbs, gravity loosening its grip upon him. He needed the world’s resistance in order to be strong.
He came forward, the rake handle in both hands a few inches over Billy Spong’s neck, crawled softly onto the bed, a knee on Billy’s free arm. Still the sleeping man did not wake. Gregory knew he could stand up, it was not too late, return the stick to his belt, walk out of the room, and risk nothing.
He looked into Billy’s gnarled mouth, the layers of flaking skin, the wretched tongue. The pasty stench of it. He shifted forward, dropping the stick into place across Billy’s throat. The retarded man came awake, trying to raise his arms, to kick with his legs. He was stronger than Gregory expected, and almost, for a second, managed to push Gregory off. But the more Billy fought, the harder Gregory pushed, the harder Gregory wanted to. The man beneath him screamed inarticulately. Gregory pushed, harder. Sweat in his eyes, burning there, mixed with the stench of Billy’s mouth. Then they both were still except for the occasional shrug or twitch from Billy. Gregory brought his face close to Billy’s, cheek touching cheek, and quietly, his voice shaky but clear, called Billy Spong a son of a bitch, a stupid animal, a stupid retard. And if you put your filthy mouth on me again, Billy, I’ll kill you, Gregory said. I will fucking kill you. But when Gregory raised his head to look into Billy’s face, Billy’s eyes were rolling back. He went unconscious for want of oxygen.
Gregory put in his two weeks notice the following Monday. No one mentioned the bruises on Billy Spong’s neck, and Billy Spong, so far as Gregory knew, never bit an orderly again.
Shopping, Gregory finds a pair of furry gray socks with poodle heads on the ankles. Lucy will like these, he thinks, and looks for a new kind of perfume. He picks Chanel No. 5, because it is the only name he knows, and anyway, he remembers this one being subtle. After the mall Gregory passes a pawn shop. He thinks he’d like a treadmill, maybe some free weights, so he stops. The shop has neither, but standing at the counter talking with the clerk, he is drawn to the black gravity of the many firearms beneath the glass. This one with the awkward geometry and the funny ring on the handle’s end, as if to hang it from a cord. Gregory thinks of jackboots. On the drive home the sun sets diligently. Everywhere he looks Gregory sees an invisible accumulation, a ragged piling up of matter and time.
He takes each of Lucy’s fingers one by one and cuts back the fingernails, which are thin and very flexible, and have a half moon of white at both their tips and bases. Prior to caring for Lucy, Gregory had a position at a newly built suburban children’s hospital. Orderly on the ICU. That was his second job in the medical field. Where he killed the girl. They were having a party, something the nurses tried to do whenever a child got to go home well. Gregory brought a plate of hotdogs and bits of cheese on toothpicks into the kids’ play area. He wasn’t looking and by the time he knew what was happening it was too late. The girl stuffed handfuls of hotdogs, cheese, and toothpicks into her mouth, three or four at a time. She screamed, blood dripping through pinned-shut lips. One man lifted the girl around the waist, held her face down so the blood would run out of her mouth instead of down her throat. Gregory fought with the girl’s jaws, fought her fingers out of the way, and tried to pry his fingers between her teeth. Gregory yelled, Hold her arms. Get her arms. But she died with her face in his hands. The girl drowned in her blood and cheese bits and hotdog chunks, and Gregory became calm. The color went from him as it leaves the landscape at twilight. Until he looked like a grub, rubbery and cold and moist to touch. He put in his resignation.
When he was getting his lunch box and coat from the nurses’ lounge, a curly-headed woman who was smacking Nicorette gum and who looked more tired than Gregory could remember ever feeling said, Anyway, that girl saved herself years of suffering – her family too. The girl, he learned, was an early onset schizophrenic, with all the big descriptors: paranoia, violent outbursts, suicidal inclinations, voices. She was in the hospital because she stabbed herself in the stomach four times, trying to get the fairies off her belly. Her condition, it was suspected, would have only worsened with time.
Gregory runs his thumb over Lucy’s freshly cut nails to make sure there are no jagged spots. Hair and fingernails are made of the same stuff, only hair is tinted, and the cells are packed a little differently. The children’s hospital was a long time ago now. And here is proof that time passes: On a newborn babe and fresh-made corpse, hair and nails appear to grow just the same.
Lucy’s hair is thick and long and soft like silk. As he’s brushing it, his gaze falls on her temple. Lucy’s skin is thinner than it was when Gregory came to work for her. She is wrinkled all over in very fine lines, her cells repelling each other. Gregory has made up his mind to exercise every day. He does push-ups and sit-ups while Lucy sits with an arm on her cello, listening to Bach and the rhythmic sound of his breath. I am strong, Gregory tells himself. I am vital. Lucy’s silence says, Of course you are. Of course. Lucy’s silence is incontrovertible.
The Nazi pistol is gone, but the rest are lined up with the handles all facing him in offering. Still no treadmill. The pawnbroker asks Gregory why. Home defense, Gregory says. Gregory silently asks himself the same question but comes up with nothing. He smiles at the pawnbroker and agrees to another background check.
During his third interview with Linus Amalthea, Gregory wanted to know the cause of Lucy’s condition. Tornado, Linus said. He put his hands flat on the table. His eyebrows furrowed. A fucking tornado.
Gregory is standing at the coffee pot, his robe hanging open, when he sees the movement outside the window. He jumps back, coffee sloshing, mostly down his forearm, the cup shattering on the terra cotta floor. Ron White out there, getting ready to cut back the hedges that line that side of the house. Gregory does not pick up the broken coffee mug or wipe the coffee off his arm, his robe, or the floor. He goes upstairs, takes the gun from the dresser where it is beneath his socks. From the window in his bedroom he watches Ron White, carrying some kind of gas-powered trimming tool resembling a chain saw. Gregory watches him, stands with the gun hanging in his hand, and watches him. He raises it, imagines the sound it would make in this room, how the glass would snap into a spider web, the way Ron White would tumble, a look of dumb surprise all over his face. Gregory lets his finger curl over the trigger. He puts the gun back with the socks and goes downstairs to clean up the kitchen.
Gregory feels Lucy’s skin with his fingertips. His hands move slowly. He is tired. He feels her. Langerhans cells. The fibrous multi-ply structure of the dermis, the layered, innumerable keratinocytes that hold her all together. Melanocytes, worn out now, working erratically so her skin is colorless in some places, in others, spotted reddish-brown. Merker cells form a part of the body’s sensory structures, conduits to the sensory nerves contained in the dermis. Gregory runs his hands over Lucy’s shoulders. He rubs her back, though not too vigorously. The epidermis is held in place by papilli, millions of little fingers hooked into the epidermis above and the dermis below. Lucy’s skin feels like it has few papilli left, like those microscopic fingers are straightening, relaxing, letting go. Lightly, with only his fingertips, she feels like tissue paper found in a gift box. Lucy never reacts, not to anything Gregory has ever done or could ever possibly do. He cannot tell if she sleeps or is awake. He rubs her back and hopes that it makes her feel good, but it is impossible to feel what Lucy feels.
The sun is low in the sky when Gregory decides to mow the yard. It’s not his job, but he rides the lawn mower around and his ankles are flecked with bits of wet grass. He wants to bring Lucy outside when it is warmer, to sit in the sunlight and look at the hawthorn bushes, to see all the colors in the flowerbeds and smell the freshly mown lawn. They are her flowerbeds, but how long it has been since she has seen them?
Yesterday Gregory caught Ron White while he was trimming the shrubs along the path in the back of the house, and told him to take a few weeks off. Ron White was kneeling with one knee in the mud. He said something about talking to Mr. Amalthea, but Gregory said, Between you and me Mrs. Amalthea said she wants the quiet, and whatever needs done out here, I’ll take care of. As an afterthought Gregory added, Your pay won’t be interrupted. As long as this isn’t mentioned to Mr. Amalthea.
She’s awake? The groundskeeper asked, squinting. Gregory wasn’t sure, but he thought Ron shook his head.
Between you and me? Gregory asked. Ron White nodded. She said she isn’t ready to see her son yet. Not yet. Ron White nodded, this time more slowly. On his face, black earth mingled with sweat.
Even now, from the impetus of the explosion that began the universe, space is expanding. The most distant parts of the universe break away, spin into the void, and pull the whole thing out of shape. It is the way Lucy’s skin is doing with Lucy.
The day the girl died in the children’s hospital Gregory didn’t go home. He did not call his girlfriend or any of his friends. He never contacted his family. He got into his car and drove until it felt like too much work to keep driving.
The brain itches: Sometimes the vacuum abhors nature and refuses to be filled. Gregory takes Lucy’s hand. It is an accident of valence. Across a plain of deep blue glass, windblown, some chance atoms collide and between the push and pull of weak and strong forces bind, aspiring to a greater order. He holds the hand and almost marvels – it is warm yet. Your first parent was a star, he tells Lucy, our world is built from stardust. After that, there is not a thing he can think of to say.
The surface of the dining table is polished so: Below every cup and dinner plate there is a second cup, a second dinner plate. Transparent hands raise transparent food to a transparent face. Gregory sits across from Lucy and sees the reflections and the table at the same time. As he seated her for dinner, he turned her head slightly askew so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her incessant stare. His dinner is cold by the time he eats. Hers is hanging on a steel rack with wheels and through a clear tube oozes directly into her stomach.
Gregory eats then clears the table. He puts away the remainder of the dishes and as soon as he takes out the polish for the dining room table, the phone rings. The sound is disproportionately loud. It is like those ugly, unaccountable thoughts that come from nowhere, from outside the self, like when he is standing in line somewhere and imagines with spontaneous clarity what it would be like to kick the person standing in front of him in the back. He answers, only to avoid hearing the fourth ring. You dismissed my gardener? the phone says.
Who is this? Gregory’s voice is dry and hard and too big for his throat.
Your – fucking – boss, says the phone. Get out of my house. Gregory tries to say wait, but the other voice is quicker. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You better not be. And the line is dead.
Try to picture it. Several times, Gregory has. A few hundred yards off a state road is a house. From the road, there is a field of wheat, the house, and sky. The sky is blue, but will soon turn black. Lucy, younger than she is today, is seated at an oval dining table in a ranch house. Midwestern landscape – Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska. The walls are honey-colored solid wood paneling. A taxidermied deer head is mounted on one wall. In the kitchen across from her is her husband, also from old money, but with a passion for the country, open spaces, and a keen interest in the dark history of colonization, expansion, displaced native populations. This is a holiday house for these two, and tonight Lucy’s husband is cooking. They are a calm couple, happy, though neither has much to say. At first, Lucy thinks it is a train, and then, an earthquake. But then she sees the light is missing from the sky. The sound comes from deep in the earth. It grows into something more physical than auditory, felt more with the innards than heard with the ears. The house shakes. The windows fly out, too quickly to hear them break. Her husband comes into the dining room. He has a spatula in his hand and seems to gesture with it. He seems to speak. But the roof vanishes and the man is plucked from the room, sucked up into the sky and is gone. A torrent of water thrashes the room.
And it is quiet. Light returns to the sky, and there is no wind. The animals make no noise. When they find Lucy she is looking into the eyes of the deer head. Its black eyes stare into her.
Gregory sets the phone in its cradle and his eyes rest on the phone book. This he regards for a moment. The garish yellow cover. Let’s read the obsequies, Lucy. At random he opens the directory. Who is dead here, Lucy? he says, Who is alive? He reads a few names. No one is alive, he tells her. No one.
The prick, Gregory says, and nearly apologizes because it’s her son. Gregory moves the two of them into the breakfast nook. Here, they are surrounded by windows. The sun will set in minutes. He leaves and returns, the phone book in one hand, and in the other, the gun. Both are heavy, but the black metal has more gravity than something this size ought. He tries pointing it at her, to see how it feels. Gregory opens the phone book and reads a few names, Young, Bob. Flips the pages, Garvey, Cathy. McCree, Thomas. He turns the page. Baeyer, Gregory. Amalthea, Lucy. He turns a page. Amalthea, Linus. He points the gun at his faint reflection in the window. He points it at himself, at the phone book. He points it at himself, reflected in her eye. He can smell machine oil rolling off the weapon’s thoughtless weight. But the light comes and maybe he does not want to do it. The summer sunlight comes in low, parallel with the horizon, filling the room until it is a solid cube of light.
Adam Dunham’s work has appeared in the online journal Watching the Wheels: a Blackbird.