Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

EXCERPT FROM SOURLAND

by ARIEL DELGADO DIXON

By the time I fell off the map, I had good reasons to be gone. I was not the same person who had arrived those years ago, desperate to change my life. I was not the same person who reached for the mountain lion or fucked with abandon because the hazards of my world gave me purpose, and purpose turned me on. It had been five years of smeared time. Time told by the weather. Five high seasons, five harvests, five winters spent kicking rocks. I wasn’t leaving Sourland as some touristing farmhand who’d had their fill of the lifestyle. Even if Sapphire and I fell out of love, I still knew how to drive the skid-steer. Even if we’d come to resent each other in the worst ways, I could still milk the cows and jerry-rig the manure spreader and treat the hens if one got bumblefoot. I sexed the plants and mastered the post-hole digger like a rancher. I fertilized and tended and tied and trimmed and no one packed a pound faster than I could, not Gentle Travis, or even Sapphire. My scissors were a third appendage, snipping through heaps of flower, their resin frosting the hairs on my arms until I learned to wear long sleeves, even when the heat hit 110, barreling up from the San Joaquin Valley like hellfire on the run. The animals knew me. When I scanned the land, I knew what did not belong.

You don’t throw away know-how like that unless you cannot trust someone, full stop. Even then, sometimes you do what you have to do.

+ + +

My last day on Sourland began like all the others. I dressed before the dawn, nuked yesterday’s coffee, and scooped kibble for Pistol the dog. Instead of cranking up the buggy, which only had a fifty-fifty chance of starting anyway, I decided to hike out on foot to the farthest pasture.

The cows were waiting for me there. Thirteen girls and a bull named Xanthus. Dome-eyed and impatient, the herd was already assembled at the fenceline. They understood the routine. I hitched up the high-tensile fence with a long PVC pipe to make an opening, and the cows filed dutifully underneath. Down the lane they marched, pausing at a patch of clover overflowing, or to pluck low-hanging leaves as their snacks. They swung their heads and lowed to locate their babies, who staggered behind on new legs, lusty for milk. There was no point rushing, and I did not mind the pace. It gave me the chance to perceive what the cows could not tell me. I noted who was limping with hoofrot, who was too skinny, who was in heat. In a putrid domino effect, they began unleashing the streams of their first morning shits, the sweet-sour odor of onion grass steaming behind them.

The patch wasn’t far, if you knew what to look for. There was the slightest tatter in the tree line where we had hauled in our supplies during spring planting. At this stage of summer, the plants had shot ten feet high and were still climbing, but I hadn’t laid eyes on them in weeks. It was no longer my turf. The patch was not where Sapphire wanted me anymore.

In the parlor, I recorded the weight of each pail of pure white milk in a ledger no one would read. All the cow shit collecting in the gutter would be scraped down the chute and into the manure spreader to become fertilizer for the plants in the patch. Even if commercial fertilizer was cheap, it was never as good as the real thing. For decent cash, we sold our brown gold to other grows on the hill who swore by Sapphire’s compost recipe. Few wanted the bother of keeping animals, but they would pay a premium for their shit.

After milking, the cows would return themselves to their fresh pasture and spend the day grazing, snoozing, licking one another, and cooling off in the shade of pine trees. There were chickens to feed, a coop to scrape, eggs to collect. With the tractor, I’d tow the coop to whatever pasture the cows were finished with, for the chickens to peck through the shit and the weeds. This kept the grass happy, the cows healthy, the chickens fed. Then I’d visit the pygmy goats, our loudmouthed lawn mowers, to saw their horns down so the tips didn’t curve backward and impale their skulls. Next, I’d haul kitchen scraps and a fifty-pound bag of feed to the Three Muses, our trio of four-hundred-pound pigs. The Muses were meant for the butcher two autumns ago, but no one had the heart to lure them onto the trailer. Everything was past due. There were a hundred inheritances from yesterday, last season, the years before, and now there was no tomorrow, because tomorrow I’d be gone.

The idea had been brewing in the back of my head for months. Tomorrow, before the camp cook woke to prep breakfast, before anyone in the Pit lurched to life, I would slip down the long driveway and onto the ranch road, undoing each measure of security as I went. Silent alarm. Electric fences. Retrofitted rat traps that fired Hollywood blanks meant to deafen and deter. There was the backhoe parked at the front gate with a vital plug removed so as to render it conveniently immovable. Clear those, and the ranch road went on two more dirt miles before you met the skinny thoroughfare that snaked the mountain. Head right, and there came public land, the Shasta-Trinity National Forest with its creeks and gulches and two-bit towns like Peanut and Beegum. Left led downhill to Garberville and to the endless freeway thereafter. No matter which direction you chose, an unknowable number of grows were hidden along the route, carved out of the hill. Plots littered with junked trunks, empty skid tanks, the rib cages of hoop houses picked clean. So many of those parcels had been seized, stolen, or abandoned, or else were ticking away into the high season, cash millions worth of cannabis sown and soon to be reaped. Tomorrow, I would go left toward San Francisco. I didn’t know if I’d ever go right again.

I steered the tractor out to the farthest pasture, a bale of hay forked onto the front loader’s prongs like a nine-hundred-pound marshmallow. The last few summers had burned like tinder, and the grass was fried, our springs on the outs. Whatever water was left was earmarked for the plants in the patch, which guzzled hundreds and hundreds of gallons per day. Sometimes we tapped into the creek bed that ran opposite our property line, onto public land, but the creek was already bled dry by drought and the neighbors uphill with the good sense to siphon what they could. In winter, we collected rainfall in cisterns and a small retention pond, but by May the weather had broiled into the nineties, and the water was gone. The trouble with water, Sapphire always said, is that it’s never there when you need it, just like money and good health. Water was one of many unpleasant realities Sapphire wished to ignore.

I let the hay drop into the pasture and freed it from its baling twine with four flicks of my pocketknife. I gathered the loose twine and wound it into a single loop. I put the loop over my shoulder and walked.

I was strutting with my head down, sidestepping cow pies and admiring my boots. It was natural to feel affection for objects that never failed to perform, but there was no sense taking the boots with me. They were caked in old shit and leaked at the toes, and what would I use them for in the city? Still, I was seized by sudden tenderness for them, and worry for their fate.

I hopped back onto the tractor and fired it up. I tried not to think about the impending blankness ahead of me, the same blankness that was behind me, from before my life on the farm. I had been a dancer then, but what was I now? A farmer without a farm. The boss’s ex. I tried not to think of Sapphire and whatever it was I’d given up to her the night before when she’d snuck into my bed and made her one request. I moved my mind away from the thought. Perhaps I’d soft-boil two of the eggs I’d gathered that morning, dapple them in chopped pickle for lunch. Or it might be nice to borrow Gentle Travis’s truck and drive into Garberville, to sit down at the counter at the Eel River Cafe and see who came in. The tractor rumbled onward, into the sun, hammering over a divot where a tree had been cut long ago, its stump hauled away. That was when I felt a sudden tug at my shoulder. Rough, then insistent, like the cinch of a blood pressure cuff. Before I understood the how and the why, I was yanked from the tractor seat and thumped headfirst into the ground.

And still, I was moving. The tractor was moving, too. The loop of twine around my shoulder squeezed, the friction burning like soldered metal, and then I understood. I was being reeled in like a fish on a line. A loose end of twine had become tangled in the rear axles of the tractor, and as the tractor lumbered guilelessly ahead, driverless, I was on the other end of the twine, dragging behind on a short leash. With every inch the tractor gained, an inch of slack was eaten up. The twine constricted in its loop around my shoulder. I tried to pry my fingers under it, but there was no slack, no give.

The tractor was supposed to stop when the seat was empty. The engine was meant to cut if there was no weight, no rider. It was the most basic safety feature a tractor came with, but the farm was infested with broken things. The trimmers even had a joke about it. Someone would point to the jerry-rigged light switch in the drying shed that could only be toggled on or off with a wrench, or the brush cutter with no safety trigger, the blades bucking wildly as they spun. This here is the Sourland Standard, they’d say. They make them special like this, just for us.

That was why the tractor was still moving. That was why I was being towed toward its pounding gears, toward dismemberment and death. Another bad fix bombing out the moment it was most needed.

There was only ten feet between me and the tractor’s rear wheels. Nine feet. Eight. The distance was short but the seconds were long. With my free arm, I wiped away the slurry of blood, sweat, and dirt from my face and blinked into the intimate machinery of the tractor’s drawbar, its three-point hydraulics, the PTO shaft gleaming in the high noon sun. In the beginning, I hadn’t even known what PTO stood for. I thought it meant a part so dangerous, whatever injury it gave you meant Paid Time Off. This had amused Gentle Travis. “Nah, it won’t get you time off,” he’d said. “It’ll just kill you.”

I told myself to buck up and think. I always kept a knife on me. I reached my free hand into my back pocket while trying to skip along in time with the tractor. Carefully, I fished out the knife, gripped the hilt, and triggered the blade. I placed the sharp edge against the twine just as the tractor lurched over a divot and yanked hard on the line between us. The knife fell away. The lane was plateauing. The tractor picked up speed. If I died alone on this back pasture, Sapphire would never know I was going to leave her. And I swore I would, for good, just as soon as I could walk free.

+ + +

Four hundred pounds. That’s about the weight of a single tractor tire. Hollis told me that. He was an old-timer on the hill who Sapphire brought around to decipher our antique machinery when the usual quick fixes wouldn’t do. If I sensed someone’s expertise, I liked to gather what I could. I wanted to understand the numerology of danger. So little in life was certain, but you could arm yourself with the unassailable formulas for death, the only certainty there is. There was a book in Sapphire’s den that ran a different set of numbers, the math of omens and outcomes. The book said four hundred was an angel number. Four hundred was a reminder to trust the currents of the universe. But four wheels at four hundred pounds apiece made sixteen hundred, and this number was the gateway to new beginnings. And the tractor alone was two thousand pounds. Two thousand was a sign the angels were watching over me. Two thousand meant I was not alone, that my future was protected and blessed. Which number was the right number? They could not all be true.

These are the things you think of in the heat of helplessness, when a tractor is trying to eat you. I knew this because it wasn’t the first time I wasn’t supposed to make it. My near misses had been piling up for years, collecting interest. When a cow’s hoof whooshed by my temple, or when I ducked under a hot fence and my spine grazed the polywire, electricity ricocheting off every vertebra (twice, I pissed myself when this happened), or on my visits to the Muses, when my boots suctioned into the mud and the pigs charged me in wild hunger, pressing my body into the wet—always, I braced myself for the end. And these were just the animals and machines trying to do you in, not to mention the glare of the sun, the Feds, or some bad-seed trimmer with a crush or a death wish. There were neighbors who tried to steal your crop. Neighbors who ratted. Neighbors with sheds full of guns.

If the end was coming for me now, to rescind all the grace I’d been given, then the tractor was a brutish way to go. It would be awhile before someone found me, far out as I was on the back pastures, as isolated as I’d become. Maybe Sapphire would blame herself, but more likely she would accept the harsh way of things on the hill. She would mourn efficiently, and carry on.

The night before, we had argued about what came next. Sapphire had a gift for making the future seem easy. You could walk right into the life you wanted—or walk out of it, beelining like a shoplifter. So long as you believed, it was true. For months we had not shared a bed, but there she was, crawling in beside me in those hours before dawn, as if a lesser part of me had summoned her.

The air that rushed under the sheets alongside her was as sweet and vegetal as tomato vines, scented with chlorophyll. She had come from the Pit, where the seasonal hires made their home from spring until harvest, their quarters divvied up among a smattering of tents, a punctured yurt, the Blue Bird school bus from the eighties, and an old RV with weeds growing through the subfloor, the word winDjAmmer painted in block letters on its bumper. That was where Sapphire had been sleeping, ever since she’d taken up with Fizz.

At first, their coupling had been part of our arrangement. Sometimes during the low season, Sapphire would drive down to San Francisco for a few days and find someone for a brief affair. I preferred smaller ponds. I drove to Eureka, or Sacramento, sometimes I even saw the same girl two or three times before I cut her loose. Once in a while, Sapphire and I went down to the Bay together, to stake out the Siren Bar in Bernal Heights, one of the last girl bars in the city, where we’d hunt for a third. We never pulled the trigger, but the fun was in deciding who liked who, and why. I fucked whoever’s body I liked, and whoever could make that liquid feeling happen inside me by the way they talked or didn’t, or reached for a part of me, or did a kindness I happened to witness. There are a million reasons to fuck someone. In a way, it’s like auditioning. After a certain level, what moves you forward is arbitrary.

In our old bed, in the dark between us, Sapphire whispered, “How long do we go on like this?” Forever, I thought but did not say.

“I’m sleeping,” I said. “I’m snoring right now.”

“I think you want me to be happy.”

“Sure I do.”

“And you want to be happy, don’t you?” she asked.

I could think of several things I wanted more than happiness, hers or mine.

“Maybe you think I don’t deserve it, deserve happiness,” she said, “whatever that is, after everything.”

“There’s no problem,” I said. “I don’t think anything.”

“What would you have me do? And be honest. Do you want me to send Fizz back to Idaho? You want me to throw him to the wolves?”

“What wolves? They’re just rednecks.”

“You know how people are. They will tear him to bits. Or worse, they’ll lock him up. He’s a sitting duck out there.”

Out there. As if Sourland was a fortress and not a patchwork of trees, fields, and potheads tripping on botany. “He’s not a wounded animal,” I said. “He’s a man.”

Sapphire had taken up with men before, and other trimmers for that matter. Trimmers made a hundred dollars cash for every pound they could pack. If you got good, you might trim two or three pounds a day and be flush by season’s end, so long as you kept your hands busy. The trimmers who came before had been like playthings to Sapphire, or else her liaisons were transactional, with personalities she didn’t especially like or respect, but whose brute physicality she was drawn to against her higher mind. This time was different. Fizz was different. The future was a place they were going, together.

For months, it had been in the air for all to see. Sapphire and Fizz were both enthusiastic flirts, but there were special tells only I could decipher. That’s what longevity bought you, the kind of access to a person no amount of passion can bypass, and lately Sapphire had gotten sloppy. She came to milk the cows only a day or two a week, leaving the other days to me, and the cows had gotten loose more times that summer than ever. A week earlier, Sapphire had forgotten one of the gates and Xanthus the bull found his way down to the road, where some passing motorist called it in to the sheriff. In little ways, she was becoming reckless. And now there were double the plants in the patch, double the work, double the risk, all Fizz’s big ideas. As soon as I left, the last dam between Sapphire and total indulgence would be broken. It would be someone else’s Sourland after that.

“What are you thinking right now?” she whispered urgently, but I let a long moment pass before I spoke. I liked having her full attention. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it first.

Sapphire sighed and kicked the covers down around our feet. The bedroom window was open wide, the char of campfire smoke drifting through. I thought of Fizz waiting for Sapphire in the Windjammer, the way he had to duck his head as he walked its galley.

“I’m thinking I have to get up at four in the morning,” I said, “and you’ve appeared in my bed, trying to make me feel sorry for Fizz for some reason. Maybe that’s why you’re really here, because he sent you to get some kind of stamp of approval from me, though I can’t understand why it matters. Tell him he can stop darting around like a punted dog, trying to see what kind of mood I’m in. That’s what he reminds me of. A sad, dumb dog I keep tripping over—and for what? Even if he’s twenty years younger than you, he’s still too old to be mothered, especially mothered and fucked at the same time.”

“What’s his age got to do with anything?”

“You’ll get bored of him, like you got bored of me. Then, you’ll find his opposite.”

“Frankie, I was never bored with you.”

“The next one will be pretty and small. A woman. Younger and innocent and not clever in the least. And you’ll teach her everything, all over again.”

When Sapphire and I met, I was twenty-one and she was forty-six, a perfectly torrid gap. She had eked past fifty since then, but I was still languishing in my mid-twenties, and Fizz was two years older, at twenty-nine. I preferred not to contemplate the ways in which Fizz and I were alike, or how neatly I fit into Sapphire’s pattern.

Sapphire spoke to the ceiling then. “I’m not asking you to go, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I told you I’m not thinking anything.”

“I always said you could stay on the farm as long as you wanted, and I meant it. It’s your home and it belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. That was the deal. Sometimes I wonder if you know it better than I do anyway.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Okay, then you know it in a way I can’t, at least. You chose it. I was just born here.”

In the past, whenever she turned sincere and drew me into the secret center of who she was before we met, I always softened. Now, it annoyed me. It made me want to press her buttons and see what dispensed.

“Did you come here to fuck me, or to be fucked?” I asked, and the air changed between us, as I knew it would.

We turned to face each other. It would take only the lightest touch, a breath landing too near. I thought I could hear the Pit, people laughing by the fire. Sapphire’s bare ankle crossed mine in a habitual gesture. The old apparatuses of affection remained between us, however obsolete. “I doubt you remember this,” she said in a conspiratorial murmur, “but I have the strongest recollection of this one moment from your first summer.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I didn’t say it was embarrassing.” “What is it then?”

She bit her lip, deciding how honest to be. It had been a long time since I had looked at her up close. There were new sunspots and rivulet lines over her face, like an aerial map. I knew her prettiness embarrassed her. She either kept herself scrubbed plain or else made her loveliness practical, using it to her advantage. In the dark, the blue of her eyes drained away to the scuff-shine of an empty glass and I imagined her young, my age but unafraid, with those same roving eyes that found yours and pinned you where you stood.

“We were in the greenhouse,” she said, “the old one, before the roof caved in. I was teaching you how to sex the plants, so it must’ve been April or May. Warm, not hot. And you had this look of pure concentration on your face. So pure. You were trying so hard, eating up every word I said and nodding along like a maniac. You didn’t want to miss a thing, and you were always like that, but I really felt it in that moment. Like you were aimed right at me. If I had any doubt about you lasting”—Sapphire sliced a flat line through the air—“it stopped there.” She took a deep breath and blew it out in the direction of the past. “I don’t know why I remember that. Something about the light maybe, the wildfires making everything so dramatic—and it was dramatic. Everything happened that first year. And Frankie, you were so thin. I worried about you all the time. I could see you were scared shitless of everything, but there you were in your little blue jeans and borrowed boots, all red in the face. Relentless.”

It had been just the two of us then, making something from weeds. Sapphire had debts, and she couldn’t afford extra hands. The crop had to yield, or else. And I’d run off to be with her, to change my life.

Most days, we toiled until ten at night with our headlamps on. After, we’d sit on the porch steps in the dark and fork at cans of cold beans in silence before dropping into the utter blankness of sleep, a pinch of time between the predawn hour and when we rose again. It’s only later, after the harvest, when you’ve partied and spent some money and slept in, that it seems at all romantic. It’s only romantic from this end. While it’s happening, you despise everything in your path. You want to punt the dog, the calf, the anthill, the fog-headed hippie trimmer. Your feet stop working right. You reek of fermenting shit and sun-roasted garbage and a thousand flies bite at you, land on your lips, and crawl up your nostrils. If you dream at all, you dream of labor. I used to have the same dream. I dreamed I was running through mud with a newborn calf slippery in my arms. Do you know what happens when a heifer calves? A heifer is a first-timer. She doesn’t always know what to do with the little one that’s slopped out of her and onto the ground, all hers and still half in the sac, blinking up with eyes of China blue. A heifer will look at her baby, and walk away. I had seen it a dozen times. You had to scoop the calf up and dry her off the best you could, keep her warm. A brand-new being had been dumped into the world and gazed at you like you were the world. I knew that feeling, both ends of it.

Sapphire had a wistful look on her face. She was waiting for me to re-member it all the way she did.

“That was a long time ago,” I said, and the moment passed us by.

She lifted her ankle away from mine. We both knew I wasn’t like that anymore. Not so malleable as I’d been in the beginning. When we met, I had never been dirty before, or truly frightened. Whatever I thought fear was in my old life—the firing squad of an audition or even performing center stage—none of it could kill me. In the beginning, I hardly took a step without confirming I was doing it the right way. All newcomers are like this. You don’t want to give anyone a reason to let you go.

“I want to start over,” Sapphire said finally, “with Fizz. I want him and me to move into the house. I miss my bed, and my kitchen. It’s simple, and perhaps unfair, but that’s the truth for me.” When I said nothing, Sapphire took a deep breath and pressed on. “So. I guess I’m proposing a swap. Obviously, there’s the spare room, but, you know, it’s a little close. And small. Full of old papers. Honestly I’ve thought a lot about this and the Windjammer makes the most sense for you. It’s open out there, and closer to the barn for your early mornings. We can fix it up, too. Make it feel new again. And I’d never ask you to share with any of the crew. Sharing would be out of the question.”

Five years we’d shared our misfit cottage. No air-conditioning, no insulation, its charm blunted by DIY additions, discount drywall, generations of putty and steel wool stuffed into varmint tunnels. Its hexagonal shape was prolapsing at the center, so that spilled milk did not pool on the floor but flowed rapidly toward the door. The roof panels were at odds, like shifting sheets of mantle subducting. I hadn’t planned to miss it, but now it seemed worth cherishing.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay. Try not to sound so excited.”

“I’m surprised, is all. I was dreading a fight. Fighting with you is tor-ture. Your poker face is torture.”

“You’ll miss my poker face.”

Sapphire laughed. “You’re not going anywhere fast, are you? I’m not saying goodbye.”

I imagined transferring my few possessions into the Windjammer, the gossip and pity oozing through the RV walls as I sat alone in the dinette booth built for two. That was Sapphire’s dream for me. That I might carry on as Sourland’s devout caretaker, tending my rust-bucket RV, her cows, her patch, deferent to her and Fizz’s new life as it unfolded in the same swift cycle of bud, blossom, wither, die. And after it died, however long it took for enchantment to die between them, I would be a stone’s throw across the yard, and she’d have me all over again. No, I thought, with the force of an ax swinging down. Tomorrow, I’d be gone.

“I’m not going anywhere fast,” I lied. “No goodbyes.”

I thought Sapphire would take her leave then, satisfied her errand had been fruitful and that the cottage would soon be hers again. She and Fizz could scrub my stay from the shelves, deliver the relics to the farm junkpile, like I was just another trimmer passing through.

Instead, Sapphire undid her shorts. Without speaking, she toed them off and nuzzled into the pillow next to me. She sighed a big sigh and closed her eyes. I did not move a muscle. It felt like the first time sleeping next to her, a stranger, performing each peaceful breath.

I came to when the cottage’s screen door snapped shut. I had fallen asleep, and she was gone. I was alone again. I believed I’d woken in a bedroom of the past, during that first winter on Sourland when someone broke down our door and Sapphire went scrabbling for the shotgun in the closet. But it was not winter, it was not that bedroom. This bedroom was empty. The windows were wide open.

+ + +

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Not eaten by the gears of a tractor, not alone on a back pasture. Hitched to the runaway machine, with my lost knife shining on the lane behind me like the flash of a distant signal lens, I was not convinced. The numbers did not compute.

I twisted at all angles to free myself. I ripped at my skin, at the vise grip of fibrous twine around my shoulder, my fingernails prying from their beds. It did nothing. The greasy haustellum of the tractor farted its fumes in my face, hauling me in like a downed tree trunk to the chipper. I could not win a tug-of-war against heavy machinery. There is no winning; there is only living. I thought of Gentle Travis and his mountain lion. I stopped fighting then. I did not plant my legs. I did not pull taut against my tether. I offered myself to the inevitable by running straight at it.

In a renewed burst, I fumbled toward the tractor, close as I could to its pistons and levers, the spinning PTO shaft like an alligator death-rolling its prey. The sun was blinding, my lone witness. One wrong step and I’d be ground to meat, but the closer I ran toward the tractor, the more slack I earned. I held my breath in the heat of the exhaust as the twine around my shoulder gave a mere half inch, but it was all I needed. I pried a finger under the loop, and slipped the loop free.

Around me, the dust began to settle. Birdsong returned to my ears and I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. I was no longer being dragged. The tractor was still lumbering forward but without me attached to it. A tail of blue twine trailed in its wake.

I thought: Okay.

I thought: I’m still here.

Still, the tractor carried on its warpath, unmanned and dead set toward a gate it would surely crumple. I sighed and began to trot until the rear wheel of the tractor was rolling alongside me again. I timed it right and hopped back up into the seat to kill the engine. A natural quiet rose up from the grass. Birds were still singing. I was still bleeding. It was still hot.

+ + +

I beelined for Sapphire’s den. I was high on an old instinct, the wish to be fawned over, to be held or fucked after disaster was averted. I wanted to push back my sleeves, slip down the straps of my overalls, and show Sapphire the mosaic of wounds along my left side, let her fingers pad over them in her assessing way, solver that she’d been to me once, the woman with answers. A forbidden thought came to me, the stupid kind. Perhaps all was possible to retrieve, so long as I was brave enough to take it.

The door to Sapphire’s den was closed, but instead of knocking, I went right in. There they were. Sapphire and Fizz, entwined on the chair in the corner.

Sapphire was on his lap, her hips rolling languidly. His long arms were around her, one hand guiding the base of her spine, the other cupped around her neck. I had seen all this before. I had been in Sapphire’s position, or Fizz’s. I had even been central to a few iterations during the long night the three of us spent together in Eureka, but I had no part to play now.

Fizz saw me first. He began to scramble Sapphire off his lap, but she placed a hand on his shoulder to still him.

 

Ariel Delgado-Dixon was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. She is the author of the novels Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You and Sourland. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she works in farming and teaches writing.

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