OVER THERE by Debbie Urbanski

for S.

Here’s some advice. If you’re going to tell a story about a journey, which you are, and you want the story to be an interesting one, which you do, then somebody in it should turn out to be a monster. There are many kinds of monsters in this world, some real, some not, but we are talking presently about one particular type, the kind that allows the hero of the story (hopefully you) to save the world, which would be exciting for us to watch. This kind of monster is wicked but can also be tricky, so if you are the hero, you will have to be careful when identifying who are the monsters of your story, as such monsters may want to play mind games with you. One of their games is changing how they look since they can do that. In certain moments they can look like an ordinary person or they can put on a uniform and look like you.
One option to identifying these particular monsters is to assume everyone held in a certain place, like a room, or a block of rooms, is actually a monster. This is a convenient way to make sure you won’t be tricked.
There are certain environments such monsters tend to frequent, for example the dark, or caves, or cave-like dwellings with locks on the doors and bars across the windows, the last of which is very similar to the place where you will soon be shipped off.
One way of identifying a monster is seeing who is kept in such places.

June, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
I know you can’t read this, but maybe Grandma Barb can read it to you pretending to be me (OK Mom?), then I bet you’ll understand plenty of what I’m trying to say. I’m doing just fine so nobody lose any sleep. They feed us here and there are showers where I work but cold but nobody is starving either. Breakfast today was granola bars (honey oat) then for lunch was beef ravioli then dinner was, guess what, more beef ravioli. Yum :) Ha ha not really. What I want to know is where are all the camels!??! You definitely need a picture of a camel, Zoe, but none of us have seen any out here. Maybe they are caged up at the zoo, if people like this even know enough to build a zoo. I bet you are too young to worry about me which is good. You have enough to worry about, like your numbers and your colors (Grandma told me, keep up the great work!). I keep that photo of you in my pocket so you are with me every minute. The photo at the river park where you wore the green dress. Remember to listen to Nana, and go to sleep when she tells you, and don’t forget to dream about me. You are beautiful. These days I don’t think I can make anything as beautiful.
All love, MOM (Rachel)
P.S. Mom (Barb), please send more barbeque Pringles, the ones in the orange container.
P.P.S. Zoe’s Very Special Present is on the way! I hope there’s room in the house, as it is pretty big! It was supposed to come after I left but it didn’t.

Your mom thought you were joking when you said, despite your situation, you were joining the army. You told her in the fall after the leaves all browned then dropped due to a lack of ideal conditions, not the most optimistic setting but it had to do. Barb reminded you, her voice threatening, there was a war going on – “You will be in a war!” – not understanding this war might be the journey you’d been looking for all your life. An opportunity for heroism and transformation, who among us hasn’t longed for that? You would enter as a weak and nervous dimwit, barely able to make your own bed or twist a bun in your hair, and they promised you would emerge some time later, by the end of this story, with a strong yet secretive look on your face, surfacing into the weeping arms of your mother, or your boyfriend, if you still had a boyfriend, which you do not, or your child, if you had a child, which you do, but who will cling to your mother’s legs, pretending not to know you.
Or is it not pretending.
Oh. You almost forgot. Your child: the situation. “Like white trash,” your mom has been known to say at certain neighborhood gatherings. As if she, with her history, should talk. You met the father at a party when he set down his drink and leaned across the battered couch, where you also sat, and said, in all seriousness, “Call me Beauty.” Like the horse in that children’s book, you thought. The horse who dies or was he merely sent abroad. Beauty’s eyes were filled with pain. How is that even possible. What does pain even look like? “You do know he’s damaged goods, right,” your friend advised as you pocketed his number. You felt you could take his pain and put it – where? In your skirt pocket. Where it pulsed red and warm for a time. “Tell me what happened to you over there,” you said. He never told you. Eventually he was nowhere to be found. It’s like you made him up. Except months later, there is your daughter.
Your decision to enlist will begin to make more sense if you recall your family’s devotion to this country. On every Fourth of July for which you have existed, remember how you gorged yourself sick on tricolor desserts while the uncles set off illegal fireworks on the patio, the end of at least one cousin’s braid usually catching on fire, and in the sparkler light, the grown‑ups of your life – grown‑ups! – started bawling as your grandmother crooned patriotic songs in her emotional voice. The suggested subtext: you owed this country. Where else could your family have become anybody. Where else could each generation of you become better and better.
So when America, in the form of army recruitment commercials, sent out its cry for help, what were you supposed to do. Start dreaming, as your myopic friends did, of becoming paralegals to a cute lawyer? The army recruiters made it sound fun, being a hero, in the videos they played for you, your favorite one being where the helicopters were lowering their rescue litters to rock music in front of a flaming sunset, and not without a sense of grace either. It was made clear, through multiple camera close‑ups, that the setting sun over there would be other-worldly, and they assured you the beginning of your journey would be filled with wonder as well, in your case a dramatic night landing under an unfamiliar sky cramped with more stars than you ever thought possible. Your old life, as you land, was already becoming a story you might tell truthfully or not, so you loosened your grip and let it drift out of reach, as the M.P. beside you got on her knees, and tilting her head back to stare at all those points of light, for remember there was light over there, at least at first, she asked God or whoever to deliver us from evil men and guard us from wicked hands. And you thought, there is evil in such a place? There is a war in such a place?

“Dinner time!” Barb says. “Pork chops and scalloped potatoes, still your favorite, or so a little birdie told me. I don’t want to see more pictures of burning vehicles. Will you put those away please.”

June, 20xx. Home.
Dear Rachel,
Can you write more about your day to day there, as I would like to know everything. Are you finding it easy to make friends? What do you do in your free time, is there a recreation room with a TV? How early do you wake up in the morning, and do you go to sleep the same time every day or is each day different? What do you think of the weather? Do they have umbrellas over there in any case? Why did you say you are so tired, are you not getting the breaks you deserve, or are the hours longer than you expected?
Here are some stories Zoe wrote for you. Where she gets this from I have no idea. Looks like she has your taste more than my mine! She made me promise I’d send them and also the pictures she drew so here, I am sending them. Now it is 9:42 p.m. meaning it is already Thursday morning where you are. Where does the time between us go? Zoe has been asleep for an hour and I am hoping you are sleeping too and staying out of harm’s way.
In the paper, I read about some United States soldiers who brought a clean water machine to one of the rural villages. Where before the children had to drink toilet water. Do you have opportunities to help like that? If not, try and volunteer, either at a local school or hospital. What an experience that would be for you.
Remember even if you do not see combat this tour, you are sacrificing as much as anyone – i.e. away from family, living in that strange country, so stand tall and treat yourself well! If you need small luxuries to make yourself comfortable, go ahead and buy them. Now is not the time to worry about cost. I will do what I can to help you when you come home.
As for here. You must have heard about the tragic shooting in that school out east. All this week TV stations will air the sad memorial services, even a Catholic mass. People are starting to think, well perhaps we need God. Perhaps God can lead us out of our violence. So lots of religion on TV at this moment which is good. The crows came back yesterday. Mr. Nelson’s dog got run over. That’s about it. Remember, if given the option of fresh vegetables and fruit, make sure to take advantage. Eating the same food day after day is not healthy for your body.
Be good and say your prayers. I will too,
Mom
P.S. Are you finding your experience what you hoped it would be?
P.P.S. Enclosed are Zoe’s stories.

Your homecoming balloons, for eventually you do return home, you know the ones filling up your mother’s front room which is now decorated for a party, streamers twisted up the banister and Zoe’s handmade signs taped in the window probably forever – we should prepare you that these balloons will all be heart-shaped, shiny, and enormous, like what you would give to a lover who really likes balloons. For days the hearts lurch drunkenly around the house, banging themselves against the ceiling or the windows, like they are trying to get out of here, not that you could blame them. After days of this, it’s not difficult to start imagining them as real, a dozen actual organs, pulsating and vulgar above you, dribbling vitals onto the carpet in the afternoon.
“Oh. Those,” Barb says, admitting their strangeness.
Apparently there was a sale at the florist’s.
She offers to get rid of them until Zoe sobs at the idea.
At night it’s worse because, at night, they project their shadows onto the walls, and you can bet the shadows are up to no good, creeping along the hallway while you are asleep, or at least while your mother and Zoe are asleep. Sometimes the shadows look like the shadows of a dozen inflated hearts but other times they coalesce into the shape of a person or two people. You may pretend, for now, not to know who the people are. One shadow in particular appears recognizable, and when he looks at you, you notice the familiarity of his eyes which he repeatedly gestures toward, as in, Look at my eyes. Can’t you see my eyes? The choice you are facing here: either believe you’ve gone a little crazy, or believe the dead can reach across great distances to touch you. You try numerous approaches and discover if you jerk your head like this, back and forth, sharply, the shadow pointing at his eyes will leave you alone for now. Barb asks why are you shaking your head like that. Consider this the first clue that your nights at home will be sleepless.

“Can you tell I’m nervous?” Barb says. “Okay, I’m nervous, I admit it! The reason is that moronic list they sent me. Like you’re going to fall apart if I speak the wrong word out loud. Are you going to fall apart? I put the list up on the fridge and if I ask you any of the questions on it, like if I ask how are you doing, or if you’re glad to be home, all you need to tell me is, ‘It’s on the list, Ma,’ and I promise I’ll respect that. Zoe, I’m right here. You can let go of my leg now. You thought you could go out into the world and make it better, so you gave it your best shot. Not everybody can say that. And guess what, you must have done something right because the world’s still here! We’re all still here. Zoe, nobody is going anywhere. Let go. Because I need to help your mother. Now what are you looking for, Rachel. Well, I think you’re looking for something because of how you’re walking around the room in circles. As if you’re looking for something. Oh, is that what you’re looking for. Your ‘cutout.’ Is that what it’s called? We had to throw it away because it made Zoe cry. I thought I wrote you. I guess it looked like you but it looked like you if you were frozen. No, I don’t know how much it cost you. I think you’re getting upset because you’re exhausted. Of course you can go on up and get settled in, but before you do, why don’t you prepare yourself for a big surprise. Oh. Of course you don’t like surprises. That must be #1 on some list, right? #1. Your returning vet does not like surprises. Do not surprise them. So I’ll just tell you now: Rachel Peterson, you are about to become the lucky recipient of an entire bedroom makeover! Everything is new up there. Zoe helped. She cut out all the pictures for my inspiration folder. I thought you of all people deserve a fresh start. You know what I mean, a brand new room for your brand new life. There’s no way I’m letting go of you unless I have to. Fine. I’ll let go of you. Welcome home.”

As for over there, where you came from, it was like this dream you had.

July, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
Thanks for the surprise pictures. They are hanging on the wall above my mattress though the one of the witch with the bloody mouth is super scary! Speaking of surprises, Nana said my special present arrived. I hope it was a BIG SURPRISE to find me awake and smiling in the box!! They promised it would look exactly like me. Does it? And be my exact height (if not let me know Mom and I can get money back.) Now you have double mommies, one over here and one over there. I told Nana to stand me in your bedroom so I can watch over you every night and make sure no bad dreams come. In your last letter you asked about the toilets here. I wanted to tell you the toilets are good enough. Everything is fine. We work a lot taking care of the baddies but when we’ve finished our work, there is time for fun. For fun, I play a game called Solitaire or, with friends, I play a different game called Hearts. Do you still bring your dolls to the park in the wagon? Do you still like to swing? Zoe, I hope every day you make the time to learn a new skill or lesson that will help you reach your dreams (the good dreams). I think you are going to be that kind of person who grows up and can do anything.
Sleep tight, night night,
Mommy

At home you wake at 7 o’clock in your enormous and unfamiliar bedroom to an alarm that chirps until you fling it against the wall. This room of yours appears to have bloated up while you were away, its walls somehow warping apart, the resulting extra space now filled with beanbag chairs and various decorative accents. Above your bed is a poster of the New York skyline, a place that has had nothing to do with you. You’ve never even been there, which maybe is the point. “Come on, Rachel. You have to love it!” Barb has said previously, pointing out the new curtains and the mint paint on the walls while your new bed, unbeknownst to her, has begun sinking every night, with you in it, under the weight of all its optimistic throw pillows.
What happens next is you shower at 7:05, during which you properly align the shampoo bottle with the soap, and then you dress by 7:16 in sweats and a t‑shirt, clean or otherwise. By 7:20 your bed is properly made, the door to your bloated room is shut, and you are downstairs at the breakfast nook across from Zoe, who is eating the same breakfast as you, Cheerios and skimmed milk with raisins on top. Especially if you are running late, the dead man with injuries around his eyes – this is what you call him now – may appear beside you to run his finger along his throat. Sometimes there are the shadows of other men as well, the one occasionally standing in a trash can filled with ice for instance, but the man with injuries around his eyes is the most constant. He acts like he knows you. There are shadows trailing from his fingers like a swarm of bats. You shake your head and he may or may not depart. Zoe thinks it’s a game and shakes her head whenever you do. “It’s not a game,” you tell her.
After breakfast you pile the dirty dishes in the sink and you and Zoe sit on the couch and watch TV, the upbeat morning shows. Then Zoe takes out her box of dolls and you remind her, Zoe, it is not the time for dolls. She drops her favorite, Char, on the couch where Char doesn’t belong. That is not the right place, you remind her, so she returns Char to the toy box. Then it is time for you and Zoe to go outside and have an adventure in the woods. In the woods, despite the dead leaves buckling under your feet, the trees themselves are welcoming, crowding together in order to cover up what might be buried there underneath the wide branches. Who wouldn’t want to be protected like that and covered up? Only it’s lunch time now, so you leave the woods and return home to make jelly and cream cheese sandwiches. Zoe begs to have the crusts cut off but you make her sit there until she eats the crusts as they’re the most nutritious part. Then you take a nap. Claiming she is too old for naps, Zoe plays beside you with Char and her other dolls, making them argue. When you wake, it is time to eat ants on a log for a snack. Then Barb comes home. Wash the dishes, Barb says. Would it kill you to have dinner ready, she also says. Then it is time for her to remind you this kind of lifestyle can’t go on forever. “You do know, right, that your schedule will have to change when Zoe begins school?” You tell Barb yeah, you know, because she is reminding you about this every fucking day. Then some shadows hang themselves from the ceiling, then it is time for Barb to open up the freezer and choose a family-sized frozen dinner tray. While you eat, the man with injuries around his eyes might wander into the room to pose beside the fridge, pointing at his eyes one more time in case you aren’t getting his point. Or he might go somewhere else. Perhaps he has other people to haunt. After all you were not the one who caused his injuries yet you did do other things.
After dinner is over, it’s 7 o’clock which is when you and Zoe have to go upstairs. Zoe, it is not bath night, you remind her, because she is tugging down her bathrobe from the hook on the door. She stops tugging at her bathrobe. Then she brushes her teeth in the dark with a toothbrush that pulses light and she also combs her hair as you’ve taught her to do. Cropped short, your hair does not need any tending. Do you think you’re a boy? Barb has asked you. Then it is time to enter Zoe’s room. You wriggle her out of her day clothes and dress her in a nightgown as if you are dressing a doll, although Barb says Zoe isn’t a doll so stop treating her like one. You are guessing Barb is still good because she will not leave you alone. But how can you be sure. Possibly bad people also will not leave you alone. Tonight it’s Zoe’s turn to choose what book to read. She chooses the one about the blushing turtle who breaks his shell but everything is fine in the end. Barb also wants to pick a story but you say no and shut the door to Zoe’s bedroom.
As you read to your daughter, the shadows from over there start crowding at Zoe’s window. What a long distance they’ve journeyed to find you, and now content pressing their strange forms against the window screen, they do not seem to want to go away. When you reach the part in the book where the turtle is afraid yet again, this time because he needs an X‑ray, as an X‑ray will expose how scared he is on the inside, and everybody, the hippo doctor, the tortoise parents, the owl nurse, is gathered around saying it’s all right to be scared, you can be scared and brave at the same time, the shadows shiver closer as does Zoe. What do they think is going to happen next? What do they think we’re going to see on the inside? It’s a relief when the book ends happily: the X‑ray goes fine, there are no monsters, the turtle is healed, he arrives home to the cheers of the neighborhood zoo, hip hip hooray! You return the book to the shelf, then the shadows fly away into the dark, into the forest, to wind themselves back around the trees. Then it turns 8 o’clock and time to lay Zoe in her bed and find her a doll to hold, and sing her a song about how, in the rain, you will be her shelter, and in the ocean you will be her anchor. While you sing, you rub your cheek against hers, allowing her downy warmth to sink into you, to sink to the very center of you, spreading over the chaos and the caves. You mean to tell Zoe to be careful, to walk delicately. “Closer,” she says.

July, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
I am learning loads about this very different country. Like there sure is a lot of sand out here! Who would have guessed!?! Though this sand is very different from our sand at home. At home, our sand usually goes around a lake, like up by Aunt Loraine’s, like at a beach, but over here there aren’t any lakes so the sand stretches on forever. A lot of people here hate the desert because it blows into our eyes and our mouths. I think all the sand is pretty. I bet you would like to play in it. When the sand gets in your mouth, all you have to do is spit it out.
In other news, your mommy has a nickname now! A guy here started it then the name stuck. Nicknames are fun because they make you feel like you’re a different person. For example, all of a sudden today I’m the kind of person who can kill a herd of ants with her left shoe! That’s what I did on my last shift, Zoe. The ants marched into a boy’s room (there are some boys and girls here) and the boy didn’t have his shoes, so I had to help him, because how was he supposed to kill the ants crawling all over him. Also I tried spraying Lysol on the bugs but it turns out that doesn’t work.
What did you do today? I hope it did not involve any hungry insects!
To be serious for a minute, I am counting down the days until I see you. I bet that day will be here before we know it. Until then, promise me you won’t grow taller if you can help it or change how you talk. I want to know you when I come home. I dream of scooping you up in my arms and hugging you on the glider under the purple blanket.
I’ll end here as the lights just went out. Probably the generator again. Do you still like the dark, Zoe? That’s when many interesting things happen, like the moon appears. (Tonight there’s no moon.)
Love, kisses,
Momma Tool / Rachel
P.S. for Mom, nobody talks about those cutouts scaring children so I don’t know why mine would be the only one. It’s actually supposed to comfort the child. As the cutout looks identical to the absent parent. On the website they said some kids start talking to it at night then the kids dream the cutout talks back which sounds pretty nice to me! Also it cost me much $$$ so can you give it a better chance. To be honest, the idea where I am watching over Zoe while I’m also here is very important to me. To protect her when I’m gone etc. I think she could get used to it.

Your daughter is wearing one more dress you didn’t buy for her, this one decorated with pink birds perched upon pink branches, her entire wardrobe unfamiliar to you now and also pink. In addition, while you were over there, she shot up several inches, and another change, no more glider. Now she prefers to sit at the kitchen table where the grown‑ups sit and tell you her own stories, in which people usually drown or disappear. “Mommy,” she begins, “I was washed on shore in Alaska far away from my mom and dad. They threw me in the river and then they ran after me but I got lost in the water. The end.” In her mind, every story is true once spoken out loud. “Your stories are sad,” you tell her. What could she know of becoming lost like that? Around you the shadows are taking on all sorts of human shapes. They put disposable gloves on their hands and flex their fingers as if crushing the air. If you shoo them off, they’ll merely pretend to withdraw. “Why are you staring at the wall?” Zoe asks. Some clarity would be useful here. Can the real things please become real and can everything else vanish? The shadows, when they touch you, feel like cobwebs draped in your hair and across your face, surprisingly delicate and soft, who would have guessed. Zoe takes your head in her hands and turns your head toward her and kisses you, once, on the lips. It is like kissing a flawless peach. You promised me you would not change.

Let’s assume young children such as Zoe cannot be monsters yet. The question then is how do they become so at a later point. And what determines whether they will become so. And how does one prevent it. If it’s the friction with the world that does it. So let’s imagine if the world is taken from the child. Or the child taken from the world. This line of reasoning suggests to you several ideas, one of which involves a still pristine and isolated portion of this country, like, say, Wyoming.

“You can not sit around,” Barb says, “staring at your daughter all day. I’m sorry, but life doesn’t work that way. That is not what I call a life. You need to get out of the house. Because it’s depressing in here, Rachel. Fine. Then I’m opening all the blinds. There is nobody out there trying to peep in at you. You know what, when Mrs. Anderson dropped by with her plate of welcome home cookies last week, she told me right off, ‘I don’t agree with what those young people were made to do over there, but it was a war, and you have to behave differently in a war versus if you’re at home watching it on TV.’ Zoe, go outside and play. Do you know how many troops have come home already? Thousands. Or tens of thousands. A lot. And do you know how many of them did a bad thing over there? Every one of them I bet. I said get outside. Shit happens. You do things you regret, all right? How do you think I know? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I mean that’s life. That’s what everybody’s life sounds like. Nobody is mulling over you and passing judgment on you each minute of the day. That you fucked up prisoners or you watched somebody fuck up some prisoners or whatever you did. I don’t want to know. Look, why don’t you tell yourself a story. If you change it in your head, I think that would make you feel better. Tell yourself you were rescuing children or building them a school. Remember I told you to go build a school? Nobody’s going to say you didn’t do that.”

The first job you were given over there was to name them. Their real names were difficult to pronounce so you were told to give them different names like Groucho, or Godzilla, or Bruce Lee. When touching their skin you had to wear blue disposable gloves which means you got used to always wearing gloves. The wind outside picked up tendrils of sand and shoved the sand through the cracks in the walls. “Come on, Piggy,” you said to the one you named Piggy as you led him down the corridor to his cell, knowing very well that such a name could be said either with spite and ridicule, or as you said it, softly, with as much kindness as you can muster, like it was a beautiful name. Pig-e.
Piggy rubbed the back of his hand against the urine-soaked mattress of his cell. What a cliché, this cell, this urine-soaked mattress, how unoriginal, as if it all hadn’t happened before. He asked you, in broken English, what was please that noise. To get sent here, he must have done something bad, the kind of things monsters do, despite his claims that he can’t remember what it was he did. A different part of your job will be to help him remember. “Possibly,” you tell him, “it is the dogs,” and it is time you learn that in a place like this filled with monsters, the rules are different, if there are any rules.

Today in the woods Zoe lags behind you to peel the bark off an old tree. Next she tears the gills from a shriveled mushroom, then is plucking wildflowers, although you’ve ordered her not to. What a boring world this is to her, and if given the opportunity, right now she would pick apart the entire planet, in the hope there would be a different world at its center, one where she actually wants to be. You can relate to this. When you look at Zoe, you imagine her hair becoming gold and turning precious in the rare light that is allowed to fall between the trees.
It is said to be easier for a child to leave this world for another world, at least according to certain books where it happens often enough, as long as one has not passed beyond a certain age. To leave this world for another world, all Zoe needs to do is begin singing to herself, as simple as that, the song quiet and private and indecipherable to you, a song, in other words, that isn’t meant for you. And there: when she reaches out her hand, she touches a fairy lantern bobbing on a spider’s thread. When she looks up into the trees, she spots a distant cave, and there are dragons in the cave. Don’t leave me here, you mean to say, take me with you, though she is already leaving. You have to speak Zoe’s name many times, each time more loudly, before she turns. Her eyes, hazel, like yours, are enormous. The way she stares at you, it’s like she’s trying to peer inside of you, as if peering into a cave. “Momma,” she finally asks, “what’s behind your eyes?” The world is shifting into whatever it was supposed to be all this time, a painted fable or a daydream. “Oh, dungeons and monsters,” you say and she does not appear disappointed when you begin to tell her the story of Wyoming.

One day a royal princess and her daughter went riding through a forest somewhat like this one along with their maid. The daughter – “that’s you, Zoe,” you say – rode on a white horse and the mother – “me” – rode a gray one. “Or you can have the gray one,” you say. “I don’t care, Zoe. It doesn’t matter what color your horse is. No one cares.” While their maid sat upon a horse that was brown and lame. On the maid’s neck, can you see there’s a birthmark shaped like a bird about to dive on top of its prey. They were on their way to the Country of Wyoming because they did not like where they lived anymore. In Wyoming, all the children are tall with hair like gold, and mothers brushed their children’s golden hair every night in front of the fire, and nobody died there, and the silver trees smelled of almonds.
Plenty of people before had tried making this same journey but most of them gave up along the way, as the forest is wide and dangerous and dark, and you have to go through its very center. Even if they make it through, the closest those people get is the border, where the prince’s castle stood. “This is the same prince I’m going to marry,” you say to Zoe. Everybody assumed this prince was someone great. If you stood in the north tower of his castle and balanced up on your toes, looking out of the highest window, you could see the light sparkling off the Wyoming trees, the very tips of the trees. That was as close to Wyoming as many people get.
The mother, the daughter, and the maid rode for hours through the forest until they grew thirsty and the mother said, “Maid, fetch us some water from that creek over there.” But the maid refused, so the mother and daughter had to kneel beside the creek in the mud, and they drank out of their cupped hands. When the mother stood to remount her horse, the maid pushed her down. “What are you doing with such a nice horse?” the maid sneered. “What are you trying to do wearing my clothing? Those are my clothes. That is my horse.” She made the mother take off her dress and wear her rags instead. “You don’t have to be frightened,” you tell Zoe. The maid said, “I will hurt you if you tell anyone.”

“Homeschooling is not a viable option for you at this time,” Barb says. “Because Zoe has to get out of the house on occasion and interact with people who did not fight in a war. Also does it look like I have a clucking hen here in the basement who can lay us golden eggs. What I’m trying to say is it’s time you found a job, Rachel. Now I set you up with two interviews for Thursday. Mr. Beedle is at noon and Cohen Dudek is for 3 o’clock. Please use your actual name. The name I gave you. Because that’s who I said would be coming in for an interview. That’s who you are. I’ll cover Zoe, don’t you worry about that. Worry about what you’re going to say and how you’re going to dress. They already know the basics, that you’re a single mom and a hard-working veteran who’s ready to settle down and do some good. Because I told them that. No, I didn’t mention exactly where you served. I think that might make them, or their office staff, uncomfortable. It’s probably best you don’t mention where specifically. I’m not saying lie. Can you simply say, in general, you served in the war over there, and they should get the idea. I mean, I’m sorry, you look like you were in a war. They aren’t going to challenge you about that one.”
You remind your mother of Wyoming and how you wouldn’t need a job once you move there. You are about to pull out the picture when Barb says to put away the fucking picture. “I don’t believe in that place,” she says.

In Wyoming there are no monsters. Instead, there are mountains and scrub, and grazing animals, and rustic fences, and people who don’t like company, and dead-end roads. At the end of one such road is a single-room log cabin, whose picture you print out and keep folded in your pocket because this is your plan, where you intend to move with Zoe in the near future. The cabin is large enough to hold a wooden stove and a bed and two chairs. “We can share the bed at first,” you explain, and Zoe claps her hands at such a prospect. Around the cabin the trees are scruffy and spaced far apart. Clouds, yes, but wispy, inconsequential. At this point it’s probably a good thing for the land to be exposed like that. “It will be like living in a closet,” Barb portends, “a tiny suffocating closet!” Snow on the distant mountaintops.
What do people do all day in Wyoming? “Sit back on the deluxe porch and watch your neighbors (i.e. the wild life!),” the real estate listing gushes. Or they hunt. Or whittle branches with pocketknives. Or ignite fires in their wood-burning stoves. Zoe falls in love with the quilt patterned by stars and draped, in the picture, across the bed. “I’m not sure we get the quilt,” you explain. There will be wildflowers in the late spring out back. There is the head of a deer mounted above the table. “Looking for long term occupants who want a life of dreams,” the listing concludes. The dead deer’s eyes gaze around the room with a gleam of protectiveness.
Barb says, “Oh and by the way, the VA called. Did you miss another appointment?” There is still a war going on. You begin to read a lot about Wyoming. “Did you hear what I said, Rachel?” About its deserts and wind and how, in the entire state, there is nothing bad. Instead, in Wyoming, most of the towns are small and wildlife wander innocently through the small towns grazing upon the landscaping. Many of Wyoming’s people believe in God, though Wyoming doesn’t have many people, so there’s a good chance God wouldn’t bother with it. You are fine with this. Instead of people and God, there are vast areas of emptiness, shown as blank spots on the map, and you will live in one of these blank spots.
Living in Wyoming will not be exactly like living as shown in the tourism booklet you received, where serious people lift their faces toward an expensive-looking sun. For starters, the serious people are taking a vacation and you will not be on a vacation. Nonetheless the theme of the brochure is relevant: how one can find themselves only after they discover, in a vast landscape, their own insignificance. You would like to feel insignificant, to believe that what you did over there was a tiny act which has no bearing on our reality. In Wyoming, you will have many responsibilities, including how to raise Zoe to be a hopeful and decent person. All the world is good, you plan to teach her when you are ready to talk about the world.

August, 20xx. Over there.
Mom,
Don’t read this one to Zoe but I was all set to take her a picture of the camels (finally!) outside the prison, then a guard shot the camel’s ear off. I took the picture anyway but no way will I show to it her. Then somebody else shot a dog because the mutt was licking up blood. I think it was human blood but not sure how you tell. I wanted to give that dog a bowl of water but this isn’t a restaurant I’m told. We don’t have extra bowls lying around. There was one more dog, and a guard (not me) cut its tendon with a knife because it wouldn’t stop barking, then somebody else (not me) said they would do that same thing to the guard, hold him and cut him. I don’t like it.
Your daughter,
Tool
P.S. Does Zoe like my cutout yet? Please say yes.

“We aren’t going that way today. We are going this way, Zoe. We’ll go your way some other time,” you say in the woods.

There was not much to think about over there. You were told what time you wake up and what time you should be in bed. You were told what you would eat in the morning, and what you would eat for lunch and dinner, and what you would wear, and who you would see. Soon you were told to do other things, such as to wake them up every hour and to laugh at them and flick corn between the bars, aiming for their heads. Or to take away their blanket and their clothes. Or force them to shower all the time then you could throw the windows open to the night air and watch them disappearing into themselves as they slid toward a state of shock.
It had appeared wrong at first. You do remember this, correct? The initial recognition that these were not the sorts of things people can do to each other in real life. Your commanding officer spotted the expression on your face and told you to knock it off. “This is called a war,” he explained, speaking very slowly, very clearly, “and I am positive you are going to save some fucking lives here if you do your job like everybody else here is doing their job.” There was diet manipulation. There was you cutting off their clothes with a knife like no one in real life would actually do. You told them someone will hurt them more if they cried one more time. If they cried out, they were like ghosts crying out. The wind was crying too, and the black birds along the wall were crying, as if everything was so surprised and sad. I mean, enough already. What you were doing there was going to save innumerable lives while simultaneously protecting your country and your family. Sometimes you were told to just stand there because you were told to watch them. Because they hated it.
In truth, you weren’t qualified to do any of this, unlike the ghost men who obviously trained for such work, who were said to be invisible, despite the fact they were not, who came and went as they saw fit, with their sleeves cuffed up above their elbows and their scary voices. “You aren’t seeing this so stop looking,” one of them growled at you, tugging along through the cramped hallway whoever, or whatever, that was, who was limping and wearing a hood. Only the first time did you babble on about the protocol, the need for every detainee to be processed then logged. The ghost man turned on you and asked what did you say. His eyes were angry and exhausted. “Go get your fucking glasses checked,” he snarled, “because nobody is here, understood.” The unspoken question: can reality change on command? Whatever reality is. Apparently a made‑up story people tell. “You didn’t see shit,” T. told you on another occasion when things, as they say, went a little too far. T. exemplified what you should be: obedient, fearless, and near-sighted. It’s not like anybody was living their big dream over there. The wars were supposed to have happened a long time ago to people’s grandparents. Nobody but a few Hollywood screenwriters had imagined America getting attacked by planes.
Anyhow, they said you were pretty good at it. Like a natural. Or at least that part of you was good at it. The other part of you apparently having fled to the far corner of the room, its fingers stuck in its ears, humming loudly. What curious things it turned out you could make a person do. At times you couldn’t help finding certain parts kind of hysterical, in the same way Tom the Cat used to be hysterical when Jerry the Mouse caused a heavy weight to plummet onto Tom’s head from a tall height, flattening him out. Kind of hysterical! Of course you wouldn’t have laughed if it happened in real life to a real cat. “Wow, they’re sure spilling their guts now,” someone important said. “Great job, Tool.” Meaning not you but whoever you turned into.
There were children too. “Why are you here?” you asked each child in the beginning. Either they didn’t understand or they pretended not to. Certain stories told of boys and girls in that country sprinting out of ditches with explosives taped to their chests. Does that turn them into monsters? One boy in particular kept staring at you. You tried convincing yourself he didn’t remind you of anybody. “Knock it off or I’ll put a hood on you,” you said. Who knew you could say such things. Saying such things was like letting go of a rope you thought you had to hold onto forever. Over there, it turned out you could make a person, or child, cower, or moan, or want to hide their face behind their hands. When you threw the boy a piece of candy, it hit him in the shoulder and he flinched.

“Okay. The interviews didn’t go well. What exactly does that mean?” Barb asks. “As in, you couldn’t answer their questions or did you throw a chair across the room? Okay, why did you throw a chair across the room? I told you do not mention where you were stationed. Do you remember me telling you that. What did you think they were going to do after you told them, ask you about your hobbies? So moving on. There are other jobs out there, okay? There are all sorts of jobs. But you know what, Rachel, I think you could use some help. Whatever you’re screaming about at night. You have to tell somebody. So the VA didn’t work out but I’m thinking what about a different therapist. Or a priest. What about God? Right. Go ahead. Laugh. But you know what, God is a good listener, and you know what else? He forgives people. He forgives everybody, okay? Doesn’t that sound nice? All you have to do is say I’m sorry. Then it’s over. You’re like new again. Wouldn’t that be nice, to be like new again.”

Zoe’s legs are tired, as are her arms, and her eyes, and somehow also her hair. She has made this all very clear to you, complaining unceasingly about her exhausted body for the last half mile. “How can your eyes even be tired? They aren’t open,” you point out. “You aren’t even opening them.” Barely has this journey of yours begun and Zoe is refusing to go any further into the woods. Her voice is diminutive and scared. You wonder if she can see the naked ghosts above you exposing themselves in the trees and shaking leaves on you, or what else does she see to be afraid of. Are there still things you can’t see.
“Some monsters flew in here,” Zoe whispers, her arms reaching for you.
“No they didn’t,” you tell her. But how do you know for sure.

I’m curious, will you miss the monsters in Wyoming? As they can help give one’s life a purpose.

The maid dragged the mother and daughter off the forest path and dragged them deeper into the woods until they reached a cave, like this one. There were robbers in the cave. These are the sorts of stories you have to tell to keep Zoe’s attention, though you had meant to make the story a happy one. How do you tell a happy story again? It was obvious the robbers were no good because they wore patches over their eyes. Because they were missing eyes. The maid sold the woman and the child for half a bag of gold, then she rode away on the mother’s horse, wearing the mother’s dress, in the direction of the prince’s castle.
Immediately they were turned into the robbers’ slaves. Cook this, clean that. Of course it was bad but keep in mind the robbers could have done worse. “I don’t want to talk about what else they could have done,” you say. The mother slept with her daughter on a pile of scattered pine needles and awoke to the dark. It was always dark as the door to the cave blocked the light. Something in the dark sung them lullabies. Or there was someone singing. “No, I don’t think the singing is God’s voice,” you say. “Because I don’t think God is in this story. It doesn’t matter what Nana says.”
Eventually, on a night with no moon, the mother sprinkled certain bitter herbs into the robbers’ wine which made the robbers stupid, allowing the two of them to escape into the woods. After all that time spent in the darkness, they both could see in the dark now. They saw the yellow flowers, and the moss, and the sour berries, and the creek, and a slippery animal fleeing, and a broken twig which might have been a bone. They were still trying to reach Wyoming because everything in Wyoming would be all right.

Near sunrise, you encouraged them to pray. “Maybe it will help you feel better,” you told them. “Maybe it will make you more good!” Not all of the guards allowed this so here was one way to prove that you remained a better human being than the others. “Maybe your God will do something nice for you. Maybe your God will deliver you a big fat present.” You said this in spite of the fact that God was not around. Or if God was around, he was so uninterested in the day to day that he couldn’t be bothered with handing out presents or overseeing travesties. Then your night shift was over, and the mortar would either fall this day or the next, or on both days, or not at all, so there was not much point in guessing when it would fall, and where. In the corners of the rooms, shadows would be gathering to point you out, as if to make a warning out of you, or an example, and when the dark curled up close to sing you to sleep, you were too tired to push it away.
You used to say to yourself in the beginning, “Oh today was pretty bad, what we did.” But then you returned the following day because you had to, and what happened then made you realize yesterday wasn’t so bad.
Now it’s worth noting that sometimes who the monsters are will depend on who is telling the story. If a monster is telling the story, they may not realize they are, in fact, the monster. They might think they’re the storyteller or one of the heroes. Mirrors would help in this case so characters can see how they truly look or, if no mirrors are available, you could take pictures. You could take some pictures of the monsters doing monstrous things and, likewise, pictures of the heroes acting heroic, in order to keep everybody straight.
Please keep in mind such pictures won’t show everything. They can’t show what was happening stage left or right, or in the moments before or after. But they may have to do.

Is this idea of the monster beginning to feel somewhat forced? I mean, we all know what we’re really talking about, correct, so why don’t we put the term “monster” aside for now. It was just a metaphor anyway, a frame of reference, was it not. Moving forward, here are some suggestions of words to use instead: the prisoner; the enemy; the terrorist; the captive; the child (when talking about a child); the man (when talking about a man); the detainee; the “ghost detainee”; the “ghost.”

August, 20xx. Over there.
Zoe,
Grandma said that big picture of me was making you sad because it can’t talk. I’m sorry it doesn’t do that! I wish it moved its arms around too. Then it would hug you every second. Though maybe the company will find a way soon with modern technology. Can you give it another chance? I’m always talking to you but you have to listen better. Put your ear up to my mouth and you have to listen. Nana said you wanted to come visit me so you packed a suitcase. This put many smiles on my face. Like this many :) :) :) :) :). But I don’t think you should come over here. I don’t think you would like it anymore. Do you know anyone who is good with a red crayon? My wall is so sad it’s crying. Wah wah wah. It wants some drawings by a #1 special artist, I wonder who.
Love ya,
Mommy / Tool / Rachel
P.S. Mom, I feel like shit. This morning woke up with a sore throat and cough. Lots of people are sick so guess it’s my turn now. I guess we share everything here, even the germs. How great is that. Like a fucking commune. It’s not like you can call in sick for a day or like you’d want to. What would you do, lay in bed and have to listen to all of it?
P.P.S. Keep forgetting to mention. One of the kids reminds me of Zoe. He’s a boy but the same age plus the dimple. The other kids start clapping when we toss them candy. He doesn’t. Versus the adults who aren’t the smartest people I ever met. I guess the smart ones don’t get caught.
P.P.P.S. Can you send tea? Herbal. For my throat.
P.P.S.S. I need some good news.
P.P.P.S.S. Time to wake them up.

The reason they became lost in the woods was because the maid had stolen their maps, along with most of their food, so after several days, lost and now hungry, the mother sat down on that rock to cry. At first nothing happened. Then a man limped out from behind the tree over there, a man with bruises ringing his eyes. His hands looked broken and he stared at the mother as if he knew her. “Young lady,” he creaked, “give me a bite to eat and you won’t be sorry.” The mother thought she could trust the man because a butterfly perched on his shoulder. In exchange for a heel of bread, he drew them a map in the dirt. He also told them two important facts.
“First, on the way to Wyoming, you will come to a tree holding 100 black birds and one yellow bird. Shoot the yellow bird and in the dead bird’s mouth will be a magical stone that can protect you forever. Secondly, whatever you do, you must not drink the water in these woods, as a spell has been placed on all the creeks.” When the man was done speaking, the mother wanted him to go away. “Thank you, now go away,” she said. The man told her maybe he will or maybe he won’t. “Yes, Zoe, I hurt people over there,” you say. “That was my job. No, it isn’t my job anymore. I don’t want to talk about it.”
How do you tell a happy story again? For starters, you allow them to find the magical tree, where the birds, black as expected, cast shadows that pretended to be birds flitting across the ground, except for the yellow bird which fell because someone shot it. Zoe is on the ground bent over the dead bird. The daughter tugged the stone out of the dead bird’s mouth and there! They have their magic object to protect them on their journey. So why, if this is a happy part of a now happy story, did the daylight suddenly scuttle away from here? Off to your right, in the shadows, a twig snaps, then another. The bird songs stopped because the birds flew away. Clutching the stone, Zoe pushes her face close to yours. “Are you here?” she asks.

For the sake of argument, noting the limitations outlined above, let’s say there turns out to be some pictures. These are not the ones you showed your mother or anyone upon your return. For there may be something public, possibly absolving, about a snapshot of, say, a vehicle the enemy has set on fire. Such unarguable facts: there was a fire; there was an enemy; neither the fire nor the enemy was your fault. But the other pictures we are talking about are of a more speculative and private nature. When you took these private pictures, you told yourself this could be proof to someday turn in. And did you ever turn them in? The pictures become like trophies from a trip you had to take, and if the place you traveled to turned out to be devoid of decency and a certain essential light, it’s useful nonetheless to be reminded that you were once able to go there. That you could still go there.
Over there, your private pictures got passed around. Everybody’s did. “I’ve seen worse,” an important man declared as he looked over your shoulder at the camera’s screen. His point being everyone there has done bad things. Whoever expected you to come back a debutante or, better yet, a princess with golden hair riding in on a clean white horse, well, they were wrong.

“Because I think you should stay here,” Barb says. “Because this is where I can help you. Do you think Wyoming is some magical country where everybody who goes there gets better? Well it’s not. I know for a fact you have never lived in a cabin, or chopped wood, or made a fire. And Wyoming for one doesn’t strike me as this incredibly happy place. Do you know what living in a cabin means? It means you are nowhere. Nobody is going to hear you if you start blubbering or have a bad dream. Nobody is going to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to rub your back, or give you some warm milk, or tell you everything is going to be fine. Or if you get sick. Or Zoe gets sick. Or if you wake up in the morning, not that I’m counting but like you did today, and you think, okay, I really don’t want to deal with my daughter right now. Who do you think you are all of a sudden, Ma from Little House on the Prairie? She was a fucking made‑up character, Rachel. Nobody is like that in real life, least of all you. What I’m trying to say is you will still be the same person over there. That picture means shit. It could be the actual cabin or it could be somebody else’s cabin, and after driving all the way out there in a snowstorm, your new home might turn out to be an unheated and mice-infested storage shed, and this is where you’re going to have to live until I drop everything to rescue you.”

Might there be some confusion mounting around the two Wyomings? Because by now you may have noticed that there are, in fact, two. Though there may be more. Probably there are more, although I don’t know whether the additional ones will appear here any time soon. To differentiate the two, I suppose you can say that one Wyoming exists in a made‑up world, but then so does the other Wyoming in a way, depending on who you ask. Likewise, depending on who you ask, both Wyomings might be considered real or at least real enough. Perchance you should choose one of them, I imagine you muttering. Or for crying out loud use a different state. Like Idaho! Unfortunately, I don’t think Idaho would work in this story because of all its underground mines. Too much hiding beneath its surfaces. In fact, it’s your problem to sort this out. I’m not sure what to tell you to help with your confusion, other than what makes you think a place must hold only one meaning.

There are other pictures, as well, of another man.

They told you make yourself scarce so you did, though toward the end of your shift, one of them came out from behind the sheets they hung up in that room they liked to use, and he said, “The fucker’s dead, all right? He had a heart attack, too many meatballs or whatever the hell. And you are cleanup, okay, we weren’t here.” What were you supposed to do, be the one who could bring back people from the dead now? Nobody prepared you to do this. But take a deep breath followed by one more breath. Remember you are probably still good as long as you are obeying orders. In the room there wasn’t any light at first so you can’t say where the light initially would have fallen when you stepped into the room.
You turned on the light.
The dead prisoner had obvious injuries around his eyes, and bruises on his chest, and cuts around his genitals and his wrists, and several broken fingers. There were no signs of a heart attack although part of his ear had been cut off. You noticed the missing ear after you lifted the gauze taped to his scalp. Behind the closed door, the pictures you decided to take become a final examination of him, an almost loving attention to his trauma. Is this what will cause your haunting? You photographed his teeth, his ear, his wrists, his groin, his fingernails. Snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. It is an activity you watched yourself doing.
What was true over there was supposed to stay over there, dissolving into the atmosphere on the journey back like, let’s say, a pestilence of bats leaving you with blood in their teeth, and good riddance. So what is true over there should not be real over here.
These photos of yours have made this last point difficult.

September, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
Thanks for your drawing of the cave (are those bats hanging from the ceiling? or babies?) and for your letter. You are asking some hard questions!
1. We haven’t killed the baddies yet. We aren’t supposed to kill people just because they’re bad. The reason being we aren’t like those other countries, we are American soldiers, so we have many rules to follow. I’m not saying we can follow them all the time but we try.
2. Yes I have a gun. If you want, I will show you it when I get home.
3. I haven’t shot anyone yet so I can’t tell you how does it feel because I don’t know. I bet it would feel not very realistic. I have a friend who had to kill the enemy in a battle.
4. You made me laugh because I am not in a different world, I’m in a different country. You and I are still on the same planet. Our planet is called Earth. I know what you mean though. Where I am feels far away to me too.
5. I’m pretending you asked one more question. The answer is believe in your dreams, okay? You have the biggest heart of anybody I know. So don’t let it close up. Keep it wide open and I bet loads of pretty things will fly on in, like butterflies, I bet. I’ll draw you a picture of the butterflies filling up your heart. This is your heart. These are the butterflies.
Mom

At the first creek, the daughter laid down on her belly for a drink, already forgetting the old man’s warning. “Go on,” you tell Zoe, “you lay down like this, okay, and you’re so thirsty.” Yet the moment she dipped her hands into the cool water, the creek splashed out a curse, threatening to turn the girl into a bear if she took a sip. They continued on to the next creek, where the same thing happened, but this creek transformed people into tigers. When they reached the final creek of the woods, right away the birds surrounded them. Not one bird, not two, but flocks of them, the trees coated in birds which did not even pretend to sing. It was all a warning but who among us listens to warnings. The daughter was thirsty so she drank anyway.
“I held onto you as long as I could,” you promise Zoe. The mother tried to tell the younger one her name, to remind her of who she was, but she kept beating her new red wings and clawing at the mother’s arms, so finally the mother had to let her daughter go. The bird flew off with the flock, the woods turned quiet, and all the light ran away.
On the far side of the creek there was a cottage where nobody lived, with a garden out back, and wild berry bushes at the edge of the clearing. This was where the mother stayed for a time. “Because I will not leave you behind again, Zoe,” you say. The cottage had a fireplace, and a bed, and a table with one chair, and it wasn’t lonely, as every day the man with bruises around his eyes came by to check in. He stood on the other side of the creek, his mouth moving like he was trying to shout a list of important facts but he was too far off to hear. The mother left food scraps on the windowsill which the bird swooped in to grab in her beak before flying off. “I think you love being a bird,” you say to Zoe. “In the afternoons, I watch you flap between the trees. Some days you are so busy with the sky you don’t look at me.”

Zoe has your eyes but the rest of her belongs to Beauty. Not that you have a picture of him but you can still remember. His exaggerated cheekbones and his generous mouth and she also has his smile and his dimple and his straw-colored hair. You don’t know where he went. He had talked of cutting his wrists because of what he thought he saw. Whatever he thought he saw, that was what drew you in. A dark current which could drag you to a quiet and still shore. When Zoe asks about her father, you tell her she didn’t have one. Instead, many years ago, you lay down in a field of flowers one wild spring day when the wind was banging around the trees – “What kind of flowers?” Zoe invariably asks, as if this detail might change with each retelling. “Daisies,” you say, you think they were anyway – and the wind blew under your dress, and when you stood up to go, Zoe was waiting for you at the field’s edge. It happened somewhat like that in any case, with your dress flying up at least and the flowers there.

September, 20xx. Home.
Rachel,
Don’t worry, I am reading Zoe a story every night from that book you left as I promised I would do this for you. Having said that, I have to tell you the stories in that book are ridiculous and not meant for children (in my opinion). Last night I read Zoe the Three Little Pigs, then I had to read it to her again, then today I had to read it again. I have no idea what she likes about talking farm animals who boil a wolf alive in a pot of water. Then tonight Zoe began crying before bed like her heart was broke, and she told me what if Mommy doesn’t know the story. I said Zoe, I think she knows it. Everybody knows it. But Zoe wouldn’t stop so I said why don’t you tell the story to me, and I’ll write it down, and we’ll mail it to your mommy.
Perhaps you didn’t know, Rachel, but there are many better options out there for children to read now. In the recent books nobody is ever mean. Or if they are mean, it’s for a page then they all hug. There is this series about a turtle family that Zoe fell in love with at story hour. I like the books too. I like that each book tries to teach at least one important lesson. In the first one, the turtle boy is nervous about kindergarten, but he overcomes his fear once he learns his teacher is nervous also, and everything ends up happy for him. The lesson being you don’t have to be scared.
A thought about the kids you are in charge of, why not read them a book like this one? If you don’t have access to books, why not teach them a song? Something with clapping and rhythm. That way they can have fun but also learn. You can even teach them about God (our God), Jesus, love, etc. Like that song from vacation bible school about the ark and the flood. Do you remember it? You loved that song, all the pairs of animals, and the sun coming out at the end. I can hunt the lyrics down if you forgot. Keep in mind not everybody in the world has had access to radios and instruments like we do. These kids may not have heard our kind of music before but my bet is they will love it.
In other news. The Dept. of State said to expect further attacks on American soil any day now, yet this time terrorists will use chemical and/or biological weapons against us. I am telling you this not to worry but so you know the government is aware and doing what needs to happen to keep this country safe while you are overseas. The tomatoes out back have the blight, and Charlie Roberto fell off his bike, do you remember him. He needed stitches on his forehead. They took him away in the ambulance. On Sunday, Mrs. Anderson brought over an apple cake. I would have used less sugar as apples are naturally sweet.
How is the weather where you are? Do you have blisters or do you find your boots comfortable? What about the local people, are you able to make time for meaningful interactions? If so, what have you learned about their culture? People here talk about them like they’re aliens. Yes they are different from us obviously but how are they the same. Knowing there are exceptions to every rule.
Anyhow here’s Zoe’s story. We can use more letters. Remember to make every choice a healthy one, there is no need to get yourself sick. Also enclosing some puzzles for expanding your mind.
Love,
MOM
xxx ooo

The photographs you took over there, when viewed downstairs on the house computer, are no longer clearly understandable at this point. Real or not real? You or not you? You may be the accidental shadow entering the frame. You might be the tip of a finger covering the lens. You will not look at them again, you tell yourself, yet with Zoe tucked in her bed and dreaming of the monsters in the woods, and your mother’s TV filling the upstairs with canned laughter, most nights find you here, in the room your mother euphemistically calls your home office, carefully opening each file once more, each picture enlarging to become a private room, and each man a room inside a room for you to wander through. Do you even know what you’re looking for? You are plodding through the wet hysteria of their minds. Your hands are searching desperately through the cavities of their bodies. Perhaps you would like to touch their hearts. You touch their hearts. On certain nights, you might blow air into their chests which will begin to rise and fall to the rhythm of your breathing. Whatever you are doing, the man with injuries around his eyes shows no sign of jealousy or disapproval. In the corner, on the floor, he sits cross-legged, shaking a leash at you. In certain of these photos, he is contained as well. Other times you re-enter the scenes only to stand there watching as you did before, your hands too preoccupied to help, because your hands are pinching the insides of your wrists, as if to participate, until there’s blood. While the shadows crowd in behind you to sleep on a bed of bones, the bones belonging to which one of them.
Tonight is different. After one final lingering look, you decide to take a hammer to the hard drive, the task a surprisingly difficult one to complete, as if you are also shattering a part of yourself that shouldn’t have been part of you at all though it is. And who wants to lose a part of themselves. Barb enters the room asking what are you doing sitting in the dark like that, like a kind of ghost. Either she doesn’t see the fragments of broken hardware on the carpeting or, more likely, she is ignoring the mess, perhaps guessing what it contained and silently agreeing with your decision. At least now there can be the possibility, due to a lack of evidence, that none of it happened. Barb flips on the ceiling light, and each of the floor lamps, then the halogens. Tonight the shadows take the form of bats, returning to circle around your head and to catch in your phantom hair. You were fine sitting in the dark.
If anyone did find out what happened over there somehow, you need only to repeat what others in circumstances similar to your own have also said. We had to. They made me. I hated it. What was I supposed to do. Although you were there and you saw the look on the other soldiers’ faces, which was the echo of the look on your own face.

September, 20xx. Home.
Mommy,
The pigs live in a different country. Do you like this country? Do you want to go see them? I have an idea, he says. He climbs up brick by brick. Oh, said the pig, quick. Get the pot of water and make it hotter. The house is so happy now. That’s its happy noise. That’s its sad noise. They live in the goodie land where everyone gets goodies. This is monster land where you get scared a lot. The witch lives inside my head. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Zoe.” But she’s not magic anymore, she’s regular. “No,” I said. “I’m Zoe and I’m going to eat you eat you eat you.” They flapped their wings harder then they landed. They flapped their wings and landed. They went up into the sky, there was singing. This is what the singing looks like. I’m walking in a magical world all by myself. I’m by myself in the magical world by the fishes in the road by the magic.
Zoe

On their faces, meaning on your own face too, was an expression of curiosity, okay? An eagerness. Though for what? To see somebody else, not you, in pain. So what does pain even look like? All right, now you know. Then, what does it look like if you caused it? Tell me, is it one of those funhouse mirrors. Or is it a jittery reflection in a puddle. Or is it a fabric flapping in the wind unable to reflect anything back. Oh come on, any one of us who claims they would never need to find out is full of shit. As if it would have been possible to shut our eyes. It turns out you can lose yourself in another’s pain. Or not lose exactly but become transformed. Like in a birth. In fact, it wasn’t even you anymore. But if it wasn’t you, then who are you now. Wouldn’t you like to know. In the spotlight of your anger, whatever figures have collapsed onto the concrete like that or are whimpering on the mattress in the corner turn sharpened and precise. Of course, you thought you could come back to who you were. They promised you could come back.

Barb says, “What are you so afraid is going to happen, Rachel?”

For many months they lived like this in the forest, the mother and the bird child. The rains came, then weeks of sun, until one day, the man with injuries around his eyes was there waiting outside the cabin. He was sitting on a rocking chair, tapping his broken fingers upon his leg and all his nails had been cracked off. “I hope you had your fun,” he cackled, “because you’re not done yet, not halfway done.” The mother has to travel up the mountain to the monsters’ cave on some type of side quest, to pluck a hair from the largest monster’s chin, if she ever wished to break her daughter’s curse. “You’re right, Zoe, this is turning out to be a long story,” you say.
A robin led the mother to the cave. Outside the cave, the bird dropped a handkerchief into the mother’s hands. The cloth was dirty and spotted with blood. “Put it on the left eye, the left eye,” the bird chirped. In the cave, the monsters slept on their bed of bones. The largest monster had one hundred eyes and all of the eyes were closed or looking the other way. Creeping over the bones, the mother leaned forward to drop the handkerchief over the sleeping monster’s left eye, or what she thought was the left-most eye. As the monster had a lot of eyes. She had to get very close. Terrible things were stuck in its teeth, like pieces of skin, and its breath stank like soot. “If you touch a monster, does that turn you into one?” you ask. The monster didn’t wake, not even when she pulled a hair off its awful chin, then the mother went running down the mountain, splashing through every puddle. It must have rained the whole time she was in the cave.

October, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
Ever since you were born, I wanted to take you away to a different dimension or world, you know the kind they write about in books, where there are things like magic rocks and enchanted creeks and all your wishes come true. I’m pretty sure places like this exist only I never knew how to get there. I tried and I can’t get there. So what I decided is to work my hardest to improve the current world for you in case this is all we have. Other people are fine to stand by and watch while our home (U.S.A.) gets covered in filth and parts of blown up buildings but I can’t do that. What I’m trying to say is live your life as if every day might be your last one so make it count. Then when you are my age, you can look back and see everybody is better off because you tried to make some good choices, whether or not you were 100% successful.
I promise to come home if I can. Stay real to me.
Love,
MOM
P.S. Mom/​Barb, I did the best I could. There’s buckets of shit going down now.

Before the war your dreams used to be ridiculous. The worst that might happen was you are on a plane to Canada then you realize you’re barefoot because you forgot to bring your shoes along, and in addition you’ve forgotten to bring Zoe, instead choosing to pack a series of outdated guidebooks for the wrong continent. Waking in the dark, there was that laughable panic followed by the waves of relief as you realized what was true and what was not: that you were still in your bed, you never traveled without your shoes or the appropriate guides, and you never forgot your child. It was just a dream.
In your latest dreams, you are back over there yet there are notable differences. One difference is Zoe is there with you, standing above you on the second floor overlooking the cells, all dressed up as if for a party, a pink dress, pink bow, peering over the balcony from which she can see everything that’s been done. The prisoners are calling out nonsense. “I am looking for so‑and-so,” they might say. “Do you know what I am looking for?” What does such a question even mean. You are aware of other people around you dressed in uniform, as you are, however they are scrambling to leave, disgust on their faces, demanding of their commanders, in loud theatrical voices, to be stationed elsewhere, sir. In your recent dreams, you do not request such a reassignment. In fact, you are doing the same things you did before. In fact, despite Zoe’s presence, part of you is glad, almost hysterically so, to be back and doing what you knew you would do, like you never had a choice.
“I see him everywhere,” you tell Barb after she wakes you up because you were screaming again. She must still be good because she holds you as if you’re a child who has yet to do anything wrong. You mean the man with the injuries around his eyes. You are growing tired of him. “It was a dream,” Barb whispers, rocking you. Whatever that means. Somehow you eventually make it to the summer.

November, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
Over here it’s the same old.
Blah blah blah.
I don’t know what else to say.
I’m tired.
I love you.
(Mom, can you reread my last letter and pretend it’s new?)
Mommy Tool

The man with injuries around his eyes was one of the monsters (if we are still to use such terminology, which we aren’t), a very wicked one, they said, of the very worst kind, the kind you do not get to see often, so when the next shift arrived, you handed over your camera for someone to take a picture of you with him or, more specially, with what’s left of his body. In this picture, you are kneeling in close to smile, your gloves on because earlier you had to move him in order to scour the room, while in your dreams, he is the one wearing the gloves, and his gloves appear absurdly clean, unrealistically so. What had been done to his face. There was the piece of gauze covering his left ear. You knew he was not good because – he was dead? Actually you don’t know how to tell anymore. He looked like he had either been good, or not good, or was something else entirely. Scrubbing down the room had taken some time as the walls and floor had not wanted to come clean and he was usually in the way.
Often at home, in your dreams, or not, he whispers at you, asking why you didn’t save him, not seeming to understand how he was already dead by the time you stepped foot into that room. You have some questions for him as well. What did he do to get taken there. Whom did he harm. Why didn’t he talk when they asked him to talk. But he only repeats himself. Why didn’t you save me? He appears to like it when his voice touches you below your ear, rubbing along the skin until it’s raw. His tone more inquisitive than harsh. Most times you can hear him because now he is standing beside you, though not always. Other times he is far off in the distance and he must lift his chin and shout.
You see him in many places. When he is wearing clothes, he keeps a handkerchief stained with blood in his pocket which he uses to dab the leaking cuts around his eyes. He does not run from you or pretend you are someone else despite knowing what you have done, and you begin, on some level, to appreciate his lack of accusation. Sometimes you wake and he is sitting in the chair beside your bed, a troubled expression on his face, like he is seeing dangerous objects you can hardly imagine hanging by a thread from the ceiling above you. At least go on to some better place now, you intend to tell him. Aren’t there supposed to be places full of radiance for whomever? Or you look out your window to see him there below, leaning against the streetlamp in a circle of light and pointing at your room. One time, he is wearing a hood with a garish smile drawn on its front, you can recognize the hood, and he lopes toward you across the front lawn, his hands making lewd and familiar gestures. In the privacy of his haunting, you have begun to comprehend him.
He makes a rough tugging movement at the front of his groin: Uh oh I know what you have done.
He attempts to use his fingernails to tear out his eyes: I think I will follow you forever.

“They are obviously reaching out to you for a reason,” Barb says. “Because they care about you, all right? Because I bet you all went through a lot together being overseas and away from home for the first time. You told me they became like a family to you, remember? Is this how you treat family? Here, I’ll only open this one. You sit down. Sit down. You will not become this deserted island to me, Rachel. You know where I got the letter. From the garbage. I fished it out of the garbage. Nobody is deserting you. Even pretend families do not abandon each other. All this one says – look, he is writing to tell you he’s just fine and living in Missouri now. I don’t know why he’s down there. He’s probably with relatives. What are you afraid he’ll say? He has some anger issues. My goodness, so who doesn’t. He wants to know if you do too, and his wife left him, and remember that old magic, whatever that is. If his letter triggers a flashback he says don’t bother writing. That’s it. Half a page. Now you can have it back. I don’t care if you burn it.”

If, at any point, you begin to feel hopeless or in despair, don’t forget about Wyoming, because it will be far better there. The stars there, for instance, will be neither cold nor full of allegations. Instead in Wyoming every star will helpfully be paying attention to you, ready to intervene and guide you, if need be, if you go off in the wrong direction. And there will be enough stars. The stars will be forces of good spreading light upon you so you will be surrounded. If you are surrounded by goodness, how could you not be otherwise? Goodness woven into the long grasses and let it be falling through your hair and goodness spilling out onto Zoe’s hands and so forth. This is what you tell Zoe to expect anyway.
All Zoe wants to know is if the stars in Wyoming can have wings. “Will they come down and visit us?” she asks. Fine, the stars can have wings, you say. If that’s what she wants to believe. The stars will come down and visit us, fine. “Can we get wings too?” she asks hopefully, and when you explain adults don’t get wings, only children and stars can have wings, Zoe sobs the entire afternoon until you give in. She begins to draw pictures of the two of you holding hands, you burdened with a pair that takes up the entire width of the paper, and her with the petite pink glitter wings, both of you flying upward toward Wyoming which appears as a smiling star. “That looks nice,” you tell Zoe. “I’ll like flying up to the stars with you. What an adventure. I bet we’ll like it there so much we won’t come back.”
“That’s okay,” Zoe says. Earlier that day, you stood outside in the rain and the rain had been unafraid to touch you. The question is how to put things right. Or can things be made right. Zoe asks when does that adventure happen. You say, “Soon.”

In the clearing beside the cottage, the man with the injured eyes stroked the daughter’s downy chest. Only after the mother handed over the monster’s hair did he give the daughter up. The daughter stepped out of her feathered skin. Her eyes were like pieces of the sky. “You don’t recognize me either at first,” you say to Zoe. But then the daughter came running – “come on now,” you tell Zoe. “You come running. Yes, just like that” – and she kissed the mother’s face until that foreign look disappeared.
Life in the cottage was good enough for a time. They dug buckets of potatoes from the garden out back, and the magic stone should have protected them from harm. In the afternoon, the daughter removed her socks and lay on the grass in the clearing to watch the flocks of birds fly away. “Be quiet while I’m telling the story,” you tell Zoe. Every day the light found them at least once and said, I know who you are, and there is nothing to be ashamed about.
One afternoon, the mother was off in the woods gathering tinder when she met a prince, or it was a young man who said he was a prince. Not the prince in the castle the mother was to marry. This was someone else. He had golden hair and hazel eyes. “Like your eyes and your hair,” you tell Zoe. “In fact he looked like you.” She danced with him under the trees. They liked each other from the beginning but they never saw each other after that. “But he was thinking of me forever,” you say.
They would have stayed in that cottage if it wasn’t for the Country of Wyoming, as they were still trying to get there. So the day came when it was time for them to go. Before they left, they swept the floor clean and washed the table down and made the bed. Some shadows flapped after them when they entered into the woods. They thought the shadows belonged to bats. “If you need a break for real, I guess we can rest here,” you say to Zoe. “Though we may never get there if we keep resting. This can’t be the ending because I don’t want the story to end here. I’m not sure when it ends.”

Come the summer, your entire neighborhood begins raving, like a kind of heathen cult, about the sunrises. For good reason though: each pre-morning reveals a line of old people in their bathrobes facing the east to bask in the fanatical washes of oranges and reds that, for one brief moment, overtake the world, making it practically another world. You, also, out there, amid the retirees, wearing your mother’s robe, as you can no longer sleep at night. It’s hard to believe such intensity of color wouldn’t contain a message for you. The message could be, I forgive you. Or, Look the world is carrying on with its moments of enormous beauty like this one despite whatever you did over there. Or it could be a warning. You don’t deserve this. You have no claim to be gazing upon this. Or it could mean the opposite. You may look at this now. You listen but are unsure how to tell. In a minute, the sky will turn ordinary. You have one minute to understand. Did you see that, you ask. See what, Barb says.

One of them was splayed out upon the ground because you wouldn’t let him get up because he had spent half the night taunting you. “Oh stupid guards! Oh guards! Stupid American guards!” Some kind of superstitious nonsense about how he could not be hurt by you, or anybody there, because of, get this, a magic stone of all the things. You didn’t think this man could have any good in him because of how he smelled. He smelled like an animal who ate scraps off the ground. There must have been terrible things stuck between his teeth.
“Oh yeah? I don’t see any stone,” the other guard scoffed. Take a closer look at this particular guard’s hands. Pay attention to how clean they are. You can be fairly certain his clean hands made him good, not a trace of dirt under his fingernails. Unlike that other man’s hands.
“That is because it is inside of me.”
“Oh yeah?” the other guard said or maybe it was you or somebody else. “So who, if I may ask, gave this magic stone to you?”
The prisoner spoke a few words in his own language, and even if it was only a name, his voice deepened, it widened almost, becoming rich and nearly beautiful. It had been a long time since you’d heard anything nearly beautiful in this place. What was this not good man doing with a nearly beautiful voice. Did he go and steal it from someone.
“I think we better yank that magic stone out,” the other guard said. How do you even steal a voice. Do you pull it out from somebody’s throat. Do you put your hand down their throat or do you have to use a knife to cut it off. Likewise, how would one remove a magic stone. Do you pull it out? Must you cut it out?
“I say we test it,” somebody else said, maybe it was you, or not. You aren’t sure how to tell who is talking anymore. The other guard’s clean hands were clenched around his baton, which he jabbed with stabbing movements at the air. Do good people clench their hands like that. If good people don’t clench their hands, then what does that make the other guard, or you.
Look, the man is not afraid. His unafraid eyes are wet and black with belief. His belief is in a benevolent force who must, he thought, be watching over this scene. You want to believe in this force as well: to witness proof that someone up there is actually paying attention to what you are about to do.
A test was performed and for the briefest amount of time, the guard and you and the man on the floor who once swallowed the magic stone are bound to each other by the golden light of a possibility. Could such light be enough? Could such a possibility be enough? It may be all you get. It’s like each of you are giving off light as each of you peered down at the man’s hand for a second or it could be two, before the blood came, and the man lost his voice, which was almost beautiful, and you have to run and grab the bandages from the office upstairs.

“Do you need me to pick anything up from the store?” Barb asks. “Because when you go to the store at 2 a.m., Rachel, I feel uncomfortable. Because that’s when the not-normal people go. I have to tell you something. Are you listening? It’s like you’re not my daughter. It’s like my daughter went away and this different person who I don’t really like right now came back in her place. What did you do with Rachel? Can you send her home please? Because Zoe needs her and so do I. Stop it. Stop moving around the chairs like that. This isn’t your house, it’s mine. Put the chair back where it’s supposed to go. It goes right here. Here. It’s like you’re not this real person anymore.”
The following morning, half an hour early, your mother bustles into your bedroom to clasp a silver crucifix around your neck. Today, to be exact in 65 minutes, she plans to drop you off at confession. Already she’s begun to count off the reasons why this is a necessary idea – such as forgiveness, such as closing one door so you can actually open a different door – but you surprise her by, for once, agreeing. “I’ll go, Mom,” you say. Because to be made new again, or at least to be made recognizable. Doesn’t that sound nice. Your confessor, Father Rob, sits in front of you on a folding chair in one of the conference rooms of your mother’s church, his legs delicately crossed as he stares down at his hands, which he can’t see, as they are under his robe. He is waiting for you to speak.
He will wait a long time.
“Well, I think God wants to hear your voice,” Father Rob finally says. “As do I.”
“What does God want me to say?”
“I think he wants you to tell him what you’re carrying around in your heart.” The priest continues studying his hands or, more accurately, studying the shape his hands make under his robes.
“Fine. I lied twice.”
“But there is more?” You keep your eyes wide open, not even blinking. Can you see this, you wonder. What is inside of me. Their mouths shaped into circles of suffering and, get this, surprise. At first they were so surprised. It might be useful for someone to see this. The man with injuries around his eyes is tapping at the door with his broken nails, trying to come in and make himself clear. No one gets up to let him in. Father Rob lifts his head and looks into your eyes. “Am I correct in believing that you have done something.” For a long time, he does not look elsewhere. He sighs. Waits. Says, “I refuse to see this place as an evil world filled exclusively with our garbage, no matter what it is that you’ve done. There will come a certain point when you have to make yourself look up and see there is still good lying around. It’s not like you went away – you went away, am I right? You went over there? – and all the goodness vanished.”
“Then where is it?” you ask. “Show me it.”

November, 20xx. Home
Dear Mommy,
This is me and you walking to meet the sun. We are holding hands and loving each other and then we fell.
Love, Zoe

In Wyoming, you will be responsible for teaching Zoe the basics, like geography and mathematics, but equally important is what they call character training, according to the popular homeschooling curriculum you plan to use, where you introduce important concepts like diligence or, let’s say, forgiveness. We can use forgiveness as an example here. With forgiveness, you would teach Zoe sometimes it’s enough to say, “I’m sorry” if you commit a minor mistake, for instance if you forgot to put the cups out when setting the dinner table. “I’m sorry, let me go get the cups,” you would say. But other times it may not be an accident, in which case an apology becomes inadequate. More is required of you. You must ask for forgiveness and then you must find a way to make things right.
Such concepts could sound overly abstract but the curriculum guide promises all sorts of good ideas about how to teach this, such as the use of role playing.
With role playing, you would pretend to do a really bad deed.
Then you tell Zoe, “I’m sorry.”
You say, “Will you forgive me?”
Then you prompt her. “Now you say, ‘I forgive you, Mom.’ ”
Zoe says, “I forgive you, Mom.”
But it’s unclear about how to actually make things right after that. Or what you do if the person you’re asking forgiveness from is, let’s say, far away, or dead, or both. Hopefully this will be explained later in the curriculum. Another good idea is to cut a heart out from construction paper, make sure the paper is black, and then rip the heart in two. This heart is broken, you would tell Zoe, so we have to throw the broken heart away because it’s useless. Forgiveness can’t tape broken hearts back together. Instead forgiveness makes you a new heart. Doesn’t that sound nice, to have a new heart? Then, this time with clean white paper, you cut out your new heart.

After arriving home from confession, the first thing to do is explain to Zoe how seriously you’ve fallen behind schedule. There the two of you are, standing around in the kitchen, this is in fact ridiculous, Zoe sipping her milk leisurely as if she has all the time in the world, when it’s 11 o’clock and you’re supposed to be exiting the cottage in the clearing and emerging from the forest so you can actually reach the Country of Wyoming someday. “Why do you look like that?” Zoe asks. In the woods, either Zoe is good, or not good, because of how she is tugging at your sweatshirt. She won’t let go of it. When you yank your sweatshirt out of her hands, she backs off, startled. Now you have to rush through the beginning and middle parts, the whole cave of robbers, and scary creeks, and turning into a bird, pausing only when you stumble upon the leg of a deer, because such a leg of such a deer is not part of the story. Actually it is merely the lower half of the leg nestled in some ferns. You ask Zoe what is she so afraid of. You used to be afraid of things like this but you’re not anymore. Above you the shadows are oblivious, reenacting scenes as usual from whatever you did over there, like obscene tableaus thrown into the air, but this time you don’t shoo them away, focused on the deer leg as you are: its daintiness, the particular hoof, the white ankle, and at the top, a bit of red muscle exposed, as is the edge of a snapped bone, its force spreading out in front of you like a silvery exhaust.

At the end of the forest, all the birds lined up on the lower branches to sing goodbye. These birds with dainty flecks of blood on their beaks. Away from the shelter of the trees, the sun shined so bright into their eyes neither the mother nor the daughter could see clearly anymore. Their path twisted into the hills until finally, three days later, the mother and her daughter reached the castle at the border to Wyoming, a castle bustling with cooked pigs on decorated platters, and barrels of wine toppling over, the ovens stuffed with rolls and roasts and sweets. There was to be a wedding, the stable boy breathlessly told them, the bride marked by a birthmark in the shape of a bird. “That’s the maid. Can you remember her?” you ask. The maid would marry the prince that afternoon. The mother’s prince. As the prince believed the maid was someone else. “Quit interrupting!” you tell Zoe. “I don’t know what that even means. ‘Whoa this is sharp, she gobbled it and ate it up.’ What does that even mean.”
The mother shouted at the stable boy with urgency how they must speak with the king immediately. The stable boy, smelling of wild mint and hay, agreed to help if he could fondle the mother’s dress. He fondled the mother’s dress then he led them to the throne room, where the king was stuffing fresh figs into his mouth. There the mother explained what happened to them so far. When she reached the part about the yellow bird and its magic stone, the king plucked the stone from the mother’s pocket. “Give it back,” the mother said. The king would not give it back. This is a sad part of the story, okay? The sad thing is you never really had a chance to test the stone, so you will never know if you were actually protected for a little while or if you imagined it. The shadows from the forest had followed them here and they were hanging themselves from the ceiling. Happy? No. But you have to tell what actually happened. This is what happened. “Go down to the kitchen,” the king ordered the mother, “and heat up some water in the scullery’s largest pot, a pot large enough to hold a maid.” You say to Zoe, “Oh, you think I am going to change the maid into a beautiful flower.”

Later, Barb says, “I didn’t mean that. I was upset. Whether we like it or not, you’re going to be my daughter until the end of time. This is hard for me too, okay. Do you think you’re the only person who’s having nightmares? Come here. No, come here. I know you don’t want to be touched. You don’t have a choice in the matter. I will follow you out there if I have to. Do you understand what I’m saying? Oh you think there are special places where nobody but you can go – that’s bullshit. I am not giving up on you. Because I still believe people can save each other.”

November, 20xx. Over there.
Dear Zoe,
Sorry about that last one. This letter will be better. I promise.
Guess what, you were in my dream last night. It was sure nice to see you there! The dream was like a book I read a long time ago, where some children get to go away to a different world by walking through a closet. In that world, it’s winter all the time but the animals can talk so they are very helpful. The book is supposed to be made up but a lot of it feels real. Maybe Nana will read it to you if you ask her nicely. There are some scary parts in the middle but by the end, everybody is happy, so if you remember that, the middle section doesn’t seem as scary.
Can you do me a favor? If you ever find a new world like those children did, don’t leave me behind. The reason I’m saying this now is because you left me behind in the dream I had last night. In the dream, you opened your closet door and went inside and shut the door and you never came back. You didn’t come back because the walls of the closet disappeared so you walked right into a forest with snow falling off the branches. When I opened the door to find you, it was just a closet. I don’t mind you going there but I want us to go together. Maybe when I get back we can go.
How was your day today? Was it the best day ever I hope?
See you in 1,128 hours (not that I’m counting).
Love,
Mom

You return to see Father Rob.
He will not act surprised when you walk into his office.
He will tell you, “If you can’t see what I’m talking about, then you must deliver this small lecture to yourself. I would suggest repeating the following each morning: I’m going to give this world the benefit of my doubt. What this means is I’m going to give me the benefit of my doubt. Then you repeat these words every day, or twice daily, until you believe them. You can believe there is goodness in the world and in us whether you see it or not.”
You will tell him, “What if I see other things.”
He will tell you, “How do you know those other things are not also what God is seeing?”

As for the man with injuries around his eyes. Lately you’ve witnessed, or think you’ve witnessed, a softening in his look when he turns in your direction, and he often turns in your direction now. In many ways he resembles Beauty, you realize. They have the same eyes at least, and he opens up his arms to you in the same way that Beauty did back in the field of daisies. At night you feel him beginning to crowd closer to you or lately even during the day, as if some boundary is slipping off, the shadows gathering to cheer him on. There is the chance you have misinterpreted his gestures all along, the threatening expressions which you mistook for mockery or exaggerations, when it could be the entire time he was trying to tell you certain important facts. Such as why you did what you did over there. Of all the people he should be the one able to make sense of it. He looks at you as if he’s known you for a long time and he knows what you plan to do now. There may come a future date in the dark when the man with injuries around his eyes appears in your room one last time and you will say okay I’m finally ready.

As for that other part of you. You know, the part of you who turned into you while you were over there. That part who thinks they are still you. It’s still here. When you are about to speak, it has begun to open its mouth as if it, likewise, is speaking. When you raise your arm, it is raising its arm too. It is peeking over your shoulder to see what you are seeing. It is preparing to applaud you.

“I’m scared, Mommy,” Zoe says.
“So am I,” you say.

The castle was supposed to be this great place but it turned out every window and door and gate was kept locked. No one claimed to be sure about what happened to the maid. “Think whatever you want,” you say. “She’s just not there anymore.” What they did know now: the king was not good because a single black hair grew on his chin. All they wanted to do was get out of the castle so they could reach the Country of Wyoming, which was the whole point of the journey. The king said no way. He did not allow them to leave his sight, not even for the bathroom. The prince married the mother and it was stupid. Shadows came tumbling from the ceiling and wrapped themselves around the mother’s mouth, making it difficult to take a breath. The prince pretended not to notice. He was busy in front of the mirror making exaggerated expressions so he didn’t have to look like himself, while the wind drummed its fingers against the bedroom window, asking, in a phony voice, will you let me in.
At night, the mother met her daughter in the dark hallway. They tiptoed up the stairs into the tallest tower, from where they could almost see the Country of Wyoming. Is it possible for anyone to tell a happy story anymore? Maybe it is no longer possible. They saw the tops of the silver trees. “I don’t know why everything in the whole wide world isn’t good. Now’s not the time to talk about that,” you say. When the breeze blew in from that country, the air smelled like almonds.
It looked like they would be stuck in that castle forever until, one night, in the stone hallway, the man with the injured eyes returned to help. Though this time he wanted a payment in exchange for a key. He wanted an eye. The mother’s eye. A piece of a butterfly wing was stuck between his teeth. You say, “I’m not sure why he wants one of my eyes. He just does. You don’t have to cry, Zoe.” He pulled out a knife, like this one, from the pocket of his jumpsuit, and stabbed the mother’s eye in its center. Her right eye. “He could eat people’s eyes. I have no idea,” you say. “I don’t care what he does with them.” Once he finished, the mother took the key he offered and went to push it into the lock of the main castle door. It didn’t fit. The man started to laugh. “Oh you wanted a key to that particular door, did you, dearie? You didn’t say! Keys aren’t free, you know, and if you want a different one, I’ll need your other eye.” She let him take out her other eye. “That’s why I’m tying a blindfold around my head,” you explain to Zoe. “That’s why I can’t see you anymore.” The man with injuries handed her a second key, a key that worked, and now yet again the mother wanted the man to go, only he wouldn’t. “I’m getting sick of telling this story,” you say. He wouldn’t leave them alone, not for a minute. Instead he crept up close and jabbed his boney fingers into the daughter’s ribs, like this. Then the air filled with spitting ghosts –
“Is your arm okay,” you ask.
“I think you’re okay,” you tell Zoe. “Oh fuck this, I don’t know what I’m trying to do. What does that mean. How would you know what happens next. It’s not your story. I don’t want to do this anymore. Fine, you make up the next part.”

Your great-grandparents, who nobody really knew, did not speak English. They did not write letters. Perhaps they didn’t know how to write. They didn’t smile. In fact they had actually been starving when they sailed here many years ago like steerage in a converted cattle boat. In the middle of this journey, we can see them as they furtively emerge out of the stench and noise of their confinement onto the topmost deck, where your great-grandmother, under a sky filled with more stars than she ever thought possible, will lean over the railing and open her hand, allowing dirt scooped days ago from the family grounds to drop into the water, plop!, her last contact with her first home, an act of forgetting which, her own mother has promised, would ensure not happiness to her future descendants but simply a life, which is all anyone is hoping for now. Her old self, the sole one she’s known up until this point, is already becoming like a dream that she might tell truthfully or, more likely, she might not tell at all. Here’s what else they jettisoned overboard that night: their proper names; their village morals; their childhood stories; the smell of their grandmothers’ kitchens. In other words they let go of whatever might hold them back, or drag them down, or hinder their survival in a new world, as after their arrival here, they have more important things to do than keep track of their history.
Your grandparents are born. They spend their American childhoods slurping bowls of cabbage soup and perfecting their English as they move into, and out of, a dizzying array of apartments across the city. Such a scattered geography will prove impossible to piece back together in later years. Nobody knows exactly where they lived. Nobody wrote things down back then. Nobody had time to attend high school either or apparently brush their teeth. The grandfather you know grows up to be an industrious and well-muscled man, whose daily work is thrusting a knife into the throats of stunned beasts on the stockyard’s killing floors for 12 hours each day. While the grandmother you know becomes superstitious and quiet, a woman who believes she is visited nightly, but not unkindly, by the ghosts of the dead. By the time they reach 40 years of age, they are wearing dentures and they look old. These are the people who contain the future of you. They are dreaming in black and white images of a knife stuck in a beast’s throat, and of a ghostly man from an old country who keeps pointing to his eyes, as if to say look at my eyes, can’t you see my eyes. Who knows what anyone had done or what they were pretending not to do. Part of those dreams will turn into part of your dreams as well. In a rare early picture, posed stiffly in front of a photographer’s textured curtains, they look out with grim yet satisfied expressions, because at least they are not starving.
Now your mother is walking into view. She is probably carrying a book, a habit which puzzles your grandparents up until their early deaths, as they can’t imagine spending their non-existent free time pretending people are real when they obviously are not real. Your mother is carrying her book from the bus stop to her after-school job where she sells gloves to women who don’t need gloves. In order to sell gloves in every season, she has taught herself to smile on demand, another habit which puzzles your grandparents to no end. Why is she smiling to begin with? Then, why is she still smiling? Her job provides her with a piddling but still somewhat disposable income, which eventually she learns to spend on costume jewelry that she will have no occasion to wear. In this brief history of your family, she becomes the first to actually finish high school, resulting in a backyard party of legendary proportions, the multiple card tables covered by Jell-O molds and platters of mini rye sandwiches. Your grandfather stays up for hours the night before to build a frame for your mother’s diploma out of solid oak. He anchors the frame in the front room, in the most prominent position on the wall, with a light above the frame, and that light is kept on all day and night, illuminating a promising gold seal and the fragile script of her name, part of which will become your name.
Your mother dreams specifically of items she would like to own.
Then your dad appears like some fantasy.
Then there you are: everybody’s blank slate. Everybody’s golden dream.
For a while the world had been all right, at least the narrow portion of it you bothered looking at as a child, in which there was a river, a forest, a historic shopping district, a bridge, and some bluffs which did their best, for as long as they could, to block the view of whatever lay beyond. But after the towers collapsed, and the bombs began dropping on those places with the ludicrous sounding names, and each day brought more panicked pictures of wailing men shaking fistfuls of anger at the sky, even you, stuck in middle America, recognize the mess we’re all in. A jittery energy rattles the air. You get the feeling your life could become a lot more important than it is right now. What a satisfying memory: the potential of first feeling like that, like you are waiting high up on the edge of a cliff and not sure what will happen when you take one more step, because anything could happen. People don’t invariably fall to their death when they jump. “The sky’s the limit!” chirps the happy monkey who, on the graduation card your dad actually remembered to send, clutches a fistful of balloons that lift him away from his shrinking home into the great expanse of sky.

This is how your day will begin in Wyoming. (Now are we talking about the Country of Wyoming? Or the other one? Or have they always been the same place.) You will wake up at 7 o’clock and wash in the tiny shower stall of your cabin and, after pulling on sweats and a t‑shirt, at 7:20 you will lean in close to Zoe and wake her as well, probably by singing a song that she likes, such as the one about rowing the boat. At 7:30 you and Zoe will sit at the table beside the window which overlooks the mountains and eat your oatmeal with a choice of toppings, such as dried cranberries and chopped walnuts or, on special days, unsweetened cocoa powder. The cabin will smell like sunlight. After the oatmeal is finished it’s cleanup time, and as you sing the cleanup song, you wash while Zoe rinses then dries, and you are the one to stack the gleaming dishes on the shelf. It should be 8 o’clock by this point. Zoe will need to get dressed then it will be time for homeschooling. Over here you are her only teacher which means you have much responsibility. Namely you are in charge of shaping Zoe into whoever you want her to be. The knowledge that you could tell her anything and she will believe you. The world is safe, you can say. Everybody in it is good. There are no monsters left. In Wyoming, all the monsters have gone.
If it is a Monday, you will take out the composition workbook to focus on writing. Mondays are writing days. You might read about alligators then talk about the letter A. What else starts with A? How many large A’s can you write? How many small a’s? You have no idea. There is not only one correct answer to these questions. You might get out some apples and sort them by color, piling the green ones over there, and the red ones here. At 11 o’clock you will put the books in the crate and bring the box of dolls out for free play on the porch. If Zoe wants, she can carry the dolls down the wooden steps to the field. She will probably want to pretend the dolls are real children, so she can give them naps, and take them for walks, and comfort them. The field looks burnt and brown though it isn’t actually burnt. This is how the landscape out there is supposed to look. Under certain movements of the wind, the distant trees appear just as human as you. It’s not like everything there is dead.
Lunch, which begins at noon, will be peanut butter and honey sandwiches cut into triangles for Zoe and left whole for you. You will bring the sandwiches out to the porch for a picnic. The food will taste better there in Wyoming because of all the fresh air. You tell Zoe if she sits still long enough the animals might come and she believes you, her sandwich trembling in her hands for long expanses of time as she attempts to freeze every muscle in her body. You hope an animal will come like you said it would. The sun is above the cabin so you can’t see it directly but its light is falling all over onto the mountains which are still a long ways off from you. When Zoe finishes her sandwich, then it is conversation time. On certain days, Zoe will want to ask many questions about her old life and the dirty old world in which the two of you once lived. Especially at first you will not want to answer these kinds of questions. “That life is so old,” you will say. “That life is so boring. Today is not old boring question day.”
“When is boring question day?” Zoe asks.
“Not today. But today you can ask me anything you want about the letter a.”
Zoe asks if aardvarks exist and do avocados grow on bushes or in the ground.
At 1 o’clock Zoe will carry in her dishes and, if it’s still a Monday, you will dig out the math workbooks, because in addition to writing, Mondays are math days. Zoe will begin learning how to count pictures of turtles or to subtract the sad pig from the happy ones. Then the math books are put back in their place and it will be half an hour of looking time. You are unsure what exactly you are looking for but you and Zoe settle upon the rockers on the porch anyway and wait for it to come. Every day you have to do this. In Wyoming, it will merely be a matter of time. Whatever it is, you want it to shine down around Zoe as well. To watch over you and keep you both from harm or from doing harm. A force of benevolence that can cover you in peace, all the parts of you, including the hidden parts. If not today then tomorrow or the day after that. A kind of living light. “What do we look for?” Zoe asks and you tell her that depends on the day. One day the sign might be a flock of birds flying in an odd formation above your heads, like in the shape of a teardrop. Another day it might be a song you can hear if you’re very quiet, sung by voices that are way better than us. Or the intake of someone’s breath. Or a silvery mist that settles upon your shoulders. “Like wings?” Zoe asks with such determined hope so you have to say wings are a definite possibility.
From 2 to 4 o’clock is active play, when you will take Zoe’s hand and lead her into the field. One of the great things about homeschooling is how everything, even play, can turn into a lesson. Zoe, you can say, let’s count the number of vultures in the sky, and guess what, you are teaching her numbers. Or, let’s write down what we think will be under the rock, Zoe, and afterwards you lift the rock, and there’s her first experiment. The sun, angled behind you, slips golden light across her neck and her back. Are you jealous a little bit of the light? In the field there are all sorts of games to teach as well, freeze tag, or tug of war, or Zoe might decide to go alone to her special spot, which is also okay. Her special spot will be underneath a specific tree, where she likes to make nests out of grass, hoping enchanted birds will come to rest in her lap, the birds eventually transforming into 11 princesses who want to play with her. On a different afternoon you might take Zoe for a walk in the direction of the mountains though you will probably never reach them.
Then it is 4 o’clock and time for character training. We’ve already discussed how a lesson in forgiveness would work. On other days, you plan to talk about responsibility or truthfulness. If Zoe asks you questions, you won’t answer them. What a busy day it’s been so far. There is no room in such a busy day for anything troublesome to jump out from behind a corner and surprise you. Like the dead man with injuries around his eyes. In the beginning he will not come to Wyoming with you. One day he will probably come for you but not now. You don’t know where he is. There’s the chance he has gone on to some place distant and more comfortable, or is he simply lost. Perhaps it’s better to be lost sometimes. When you’re lost, it’s possible you can forget who you are, or what happened to you, or what you did, or what you could do. Has that other part of you become lost as well? By this point it will be 5 o’clock and, depending on the time of year, the day might be growing dark. If it’s dark and cold, dinner will be by lantern. You plan to eat vast quantities of potatoes, onions and eggs because those items are inexpensive but full of healthy nutrients. “I’m tired of potatoes,” Zoe might complain. “Well they are not tired of you!” you will remind her. The lantern will throw its alien shadows upon the walls that will not look like the shadows from your old life. These new shadows grow around you, protective as wings, and it’s like the world outside of this place isn’t true or there. In Wyoming anyway there can be nothing bad. You will keep the curtains open and in the dim light of the lantern, Zoe will look like an illusion.
After dinner it is 6 o’clock and time for the next cleanup song. This time Zoe washes and you dry. Everything you need is right in front of you. Then it is story time. “I want it to be true,” Zoe will say. In this place is it possible to tell a happy story to a child? You will need to find this out. After the story, Zoe bathes in the shower stall because the cabin is without a bathtub. The shower makes her feel like she is drowning. “But you’re not drowning,” you reassure her. The soap will smell like lavender. Then with a towel you dry her off, and sing her a lullaby, then it is 8 o’clock and time to extinguish the lantern, tucking the sheets tightly around her arms and legs and leaving her with a kiss. Even then in Wyoming it will not be completely dark. There is the moon casting down its glow, for one, or the stars which do not look away from you this time. “Mom,” Zoe might say, calling you back, and when you go back to her, she repeats the usual questions about her old life. Where did her friends go. Where did Nana go. Where did the river go. Your daughter will be gazing up at you. Do you know what she’s waiting for? In such a moment you may notice a light growing around you. A strange light. A great deal of light. Do you know where it’s coming from? It will appear to be coming from your daughter. Or not from her but out of her. Leaking out of her eyes. But what child is allowed to illuminate like that. As if she has acres of votives inside of her. And do you know who lit them? What force is allowing them to continue to be lit? To have light like that again on the inside. To be shining light like that onto people like you. All that is in her eyes will be light. Wells of light. Caverns of light. A bottomless pit of light. How to keep Zoe like this forever? You brush your face against her face in the light. Her cheek is as soft as a bird’s wing. That was all just a dream we dreamed, you will tell her.

“One day I left the woods. Mommy you did too. This is the true part. Your story was made up but this part isn’t. You can see because I kissed your eyes like this, one, two. Surprise! Look, the sun is on top of the flowers. Everything in the whole wide world is turning to real, can you see it, Mom? This is my favorite part. Look at them. Look at the birds. They’re going to teach us the song but you don’t get to sing, only I get to sing. Their feathers are red, that means the song will be a little sad. I don’t want them to leave. Sorry, sorry, you say so the birds can come home. Do you like this, Mom? I’ll make it for you then my heart is all done telling stories. You have to hold my hand for real.”

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Debbie Urbanski’s stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, The Sun, and in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest 2012 (Indiana University Press).