The lights in the bar were janky. The drinks were tolerable. The pool table was slanted. The bathroom stall doors couldn’t lock. Yet, we still hung out at Legends every Friday night. In a small town in East Texas, that’s kinda all there is to do. It’s not the fanciest bar; there are fights every now and then, bicycle gangs, alleged prostitution rings, but it’s been good to us. We would never speak to each other in “real life,” but on Friday nights? It’s family. There’s the bartender who clearly got back on meth, the homeless man who spends his collected change on beer, the goody two shoes college student, the local small town gay, and him.

I started to notice him a month or two ago. I tried to flirt, but I don’t think he noticed; or he just wasn’t interested.

Me: “You look really familiar, do you have a brother who goes to the high school? I’m a teacher there.”

Him: “No ma’am, I only got an older brother.”

Me: “You look just like one of my students.”

Then, he got his change and went to the pool room. Granted, that was not really a flirty thing to say to someone you think is hot at the bar. I saw him a few more times after that, tried to give him the eyes, but he wouldn’t make a move. One night I tried some more small talk.

Me: “I like your shirt”

Him: “Thank you! It’s my church shirt. And, now I’m wearing it to the bar.”

Again, he grabbed his change, and headed to the pool room.

“Maybe he has a girlfriend,” my friends tell me on the floor of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.

The next time I saw him at the bar was when I got back in town from my spring break trip to Michigan. It was a last minute decision; I only went because a friend didn’t want to go alone. It was a quieter night, not many people inside. “There’s no one in the pool room for once,” my friend mentions casually. I have always wanted to play, but there’s only one pool table and it’s always so crowded. We got some quarters from the bartender, and attempted to play, but it was clear we didn’t know what we were doing. Over time more people started to trickle in. Quarters were being placed down, and people were waiting for us to finish up.

He had on his boots and jeans and button up shirt. I could tell he just got a haircut. He looked over at me, and I gave him a smile. He nodded his head with a grin.

Eventually, my friend and I lost the table. One of the old guys wanted to play him, and he happily slammed the quarters in the slot and racked up the balls. It was my first time seeing him play.

Men look funny when they play pool: backs arched, ass out. I was sitting in the back right corner, trying to make eye contact, but I probably just looked creepy. The pool room is small, and there was not really any space when you walked over to take the shot in front of where I was sitting. 

Him: “Excuse me ma’am, is it alright if I put my ass in your face?”

Me: “Fine by me.”

I gave him a smile, and I swear he winked. He won the game, and the next person in line wanted to play doubles. He walked up to me, slowly.

Him: “You want to be my partner?”

Me: “I don’t really know how to play.”

Him: “I’m a good teacher.”

He racked the balls, lined up his stick, and smacked shit out of the cue ball. He sunk two or three solids before he undershot and missed. When it was my turn, he walked over and handed me the stick we were sharing. I have a pretty easy shot– anyone could make it. I bend down, extend my arm, and try to look hot. I feel a hand on my hip, guiding me down lower to where my head is leveled with the table.

Him: “The lower you bend, the more accurate your hits are.”

I couldn’t see him, but I felt him bend down behind me. His arm rested over my arm, his fingers grabbed mine and showed me how to hold the tip of the stick. He walked over to the ball I was aiming at, and pointed ever so slightly to the right of the red three.

Him: “Look at where the light reflects on the ball. That’s where you aim.”

I slowly extended my right arm and slammed into the cue ball. The red three rolled into the hole, and he walked over to set me up with my next shot.We ended up playing two or three rounds of doubles– us winning every time. My friend was outside talking to some other people; she got the hint earlier in the night. The bartender (yes, the one who clearly just got back on meth,) came in and started yelling at us to get out. I didn’t realize it was already 2am. He was talking with some of the guys, and I was awkwardly taking too long of a time to put my stick back in the rack. After a few minutes, he came up from behind, reached over my shoulder and put the stick up for me.

Him: “Thanks for agreeing to be my partner.”

Me: “Thanks for agreeing to be my teacher.”

Him: “Could I get your number?”

Me: “Of course.”

Bartender who just got back on meth: “Get the fuck out of my bar, it’s 2am."

The banks still haven’t returned to their normal levels since the waters rose and came rushing in. The warnings weren’t there either. Sure, the rain announced its arrival, but that wasn’t an uncommon thing. Not like a relative that visits only on the holidays, or a friend that comes around for yearly hunting trips. No, the rain was more like a regular gathering among friends and family whose company you enjoyed, like the warm food they brought to consume. So nothing to be alarmed about. Sure, at times it could outstay its welcome like the overly talkative uncle who only rambled about politics you weren’t interested in. But just like an awkward conversation that went on too long, we knew when to leave early, or at least prepare before the inconvenience of its chatter against our window panes turned into a roaring tone that ripped through the very soil our foundations lay on.

Which is exactly what happened here. It destroyed everything it came into contact with. It was almost like it had had enough of our constant pillaging of its natural resources. Its Rainbow and Brown Trout that satisfied our outdoor sportsmen’s fancies. I, for one, was not a fisherman by any means, but did enjoy the occasional campout along its banks. Preparing by fire and smoke, deliciously cured meat that would even serve as a worthy sacrifice to the Jewish God of our world.

The word God is another name thrown around here lately. The question being: Where the heck was he in all this? It’s in line with another question we were all asking. What did we do to deserve this?

The simple answer is: nothing. None of us did. It’s just a simple equation of opportunity for something to happen, and then it actually did. Sure, they knew for years that a flood could occur. It’s happened here before. The last time was 1987, and that tragedy struck a camp too. Just like the one that struck the ground where I’m sitting in my camp armchair as if I’m about to do anything other than sulk. They tried to save the teenagers in that scenario as well.

The eerie thing that comes to mind as I stare at the steady stream of water that continues to move forward is that it keeps moving forward. Like nothing tragic just happened over a week ago; that it’s moved on. Unlike us. Not that anyone can blame it. It is water after all. I suppose if it stopped and stood still, we would all be running to the chapel, thinking God had performed another miracle and that we should all repent before it’s too late. Some of the small-minded folks in this tiny town expect a rapture every few years, so it’d be right up their alley.

I, however, instead of expecting a miracle out of this, am experiencing all the multiple stages of grief at the same time. At least, according to the list the grief counselor supplied us, parents with. It went like this, or from what I can remember, I threw my copy in the trash the moment we got home: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

First denial, I know it happened, I know my daughter isn’t here. I know this because I checked her room multiple times since getting the call that they found her body. When I lost contact with her as she was leaving the camp on a school bus in an attempt to escape, I knew she wasn’t in our humble abode anymore. An abode that’s no longer humble. Not anymore.

Now the anger...oh boy, is it there. It’s been a moving target since the incident occurred. First, at the camp, for thinking they had things under control and waiting so long to evacuate our children, children that we sent to them every year, knowing they’d be safe. One father even admitted to me in private that he was contemplating killing one of the surviving members of the camp’s staff. I talked him out of it, I think. I guess we’ll know eventually. But then my anger turned towards myself. No matter how much my wife has tried to convince me otherwise. Hell, we’ve had to convince each other. I still blame myself.

Of course, we know we did nothing wrong, similar to a parent who loses their child in a school shooting. The only fault you had was not being a deadbeat and making sure your child at least had an attempt at a good education. It was the same for us; all we did was send our daughter to summer camp. The same thing we’d done every year since she was old enough to go.

I think I’ve skipped the bargaining phase, so at least I’m one step ahead of the other parents. The depression, however, is not going anywhere anytime soon. Which means the last step of acceptance will probably never come. I don’t think anyone is expecting that stage from any of us.

How could they? The entire nation is still reeling from it, and before the flood struck our town and the surrounding areas, I doubt they’d even heard of Kerrville. Most Texans had only seen it on a map, or a road sign, or casually mentioned in a weather report. That, and the local university, was probably the only thing that kept us on the map, and I’m speaking literally.

But now I’m sitting in the last place I saw her. The last place any of us laid eyes on them. Where we parents who came to know each other over the years, as we said goodbye for two months to our kids. A goodbye we always knew was temporary, that unfortunately has now become permanent. Wishing that it had never happened. That the river never rose to the point that it washed away all that we held dear. Now wishing that that very river…would now wash away… my tears.

My mother never plays the piano.

It is a beautiful instrument: glossed black frame, with a brass plate into which the strings are set, burnished threads. The piano is supported by a central pillar and a trio of pedals -- the far right worn and sloping, thin as paper at the circular edge. The lid lies flat, concealing the internal twine of gold, keys hidden beneath the fallboard. The hammers are motionless, the strings are soundless, and the bench is stowed.

My mother never plays the piano.

Sometimes, I pull out the bench, bearing its weight with burning arms, breath held, preventing the legs from scraping against the floor. It holds me with a creak and a rustle as I sink onto the cushion. I run my hands across the keys, textured white notes as though laid with a lacquered layer of cream enamel. I depress the pedal and sway to a tune only I can hear, rolling applause in the silent room.

On daring days, I press a key. I keep the lid closed, the note a whisper within the piano’s bowels, contained, constrained. The instrument doesn’t breathe and neither do I. The note trills and I hold it until it fades. Then, I listen, primed, but there is no approach.

***

“Play something.”

My mother says nothing, lifting a fork to her mouth. Her back is straight, but her elbow balances on the table, eyes hidden behind her hand, thumb against her temple. Wrapped in a shawl, the fabric juts around her shoulders. I can see her collarbones. I am certain I could not a year ago, before my mother’s diet of cabbage and swede, selected for us both. I miss Parmentier potatoes and pâté, but I eat without complaint.

Light filters through the single panes, diluted and grey, the sky veined with clouds.

It is spring, but summer feels unreachable. I suspect the feeling has more to do with the barricades of sandbags in the streets, than the weather.

***

I am jumping the stairs, gripping the metal banister for leverage, my soles slapping against the marble tiles, when I see Madam Allard hovering outside her door. Her shopping bag is crumpled next to her feet, and her hand trembles as she attempts to shift the key into the lock.

“Madam Allard?”

I reach out and steady her hand. Madam Allard has lived below us for all my life -- possibly forever. I cannot imagine any other occupant of her apartment. Before the soldiers, she used to visit my mother, and they would drink Chablis long after I’d gone to bed. I think I remember the apartment alive with piano song, but recollection is fickle.

The door swings inward. I grab her shopping bag -- lighter than expected -- and place it just beyond the threshold. I peer into it, but there is only a small lump of bread and two swedes. She must be following the same diet as my mother.

When I turn back, her eyes are on me. She touches my cheek and I flinch at her frozen skin.

“You need gloves.”

Madam Allard huffs a single breath, but it does not blossom into laughter; the lid of the piano is down. Then, she is silent.

I do not leave; she has not dismissed me.

“Do you still have the” -- she lowers her voice -- “piano?”

Of course. Why would we not?

A smile crosses her features. “Good. They will never hear of it from me.” I am not sure who her next words are intended for, but, regardless, I hear: “I miss her playing.”

***

It is two o’clock in the morning, and I am tangled in my bedsheets, sweating and parched. I tiptoe down the hallway, into the kitchen, pressing a cold glass into the palm of my hand. On my return, I notice the drawing room door is ajar, a sliver of light spilling into the hall.

I steal towards it, pressing my eye against the gap. My mother is seated at the piano bench, a lamp resting on the lid, the fallboard raised, keys like parchment in the light. Sheet music rests on the stand, and she sits upright, her face turned towards the notation.

I lean closer, breath baited at the possibility of her playing, but silence persists. I glance at the wall. The shadows of her fingers flit across the keys. Entwined by melody, my mother sways, side-to-side, and the flame hops, her shadow leaping, flickering shade dancing to her rhythm. On the wall, silent notes sing. The shadows whirl to it, my mother curves to it. Her song is invisible only to me.

Beyond the window, the streets are quiet. The whole of Paris is holding a breath.

***

In June, they take the piano.

I stand in the drawing room, door splintered, and stare at the place it used to stand. The space hints at its ghost: scuff marks in the flooring; varnished squares protected from sun-bleaching by the piano legs; fragments of sheet music, torn amongst the wreckage of the apartment.

My mother is on the floor, tangled in her shawl. Her face is tilted away from me, towards the window and the wall, fingers curled in her palm. In my head, I hear her voice, harsh and cracked.

“You cannot have it!”

It takes two hours for Madam Allard to find me.

I sink beneath the weight of all the notes which will never be played.

***

I played it once.

An A-minor arpeggio: I held the pedal, lid balanced on the prop, a sail rising to catch the breeze.

My mother lingered in the doorway. She watched me, palm laid against the frame, elbow bent, her shawl draped across her shoulders.

I eyed her, expecting some chastisement, clipped commands for me to hush. She said nothing, just lowered her hand, fingers brushing against the white paint.

I can’t remember a single thing we said that night in 2016. Not one word. We probably ordered the filet mignon and nodded at the waiter like we had opinions about the cut, just trying to look like people who had finally arrived somewhere. I chose gin for the elegance; you chose vodka—no ornament, no apology. That was the first pressure: trying to match your clarity with my own performance. I don’t remember the talk, but I remember the light. Your hair caught the sun and gave it back like a late-afternoon rerun, and I realized it wasn’t metaphorical gold; it was the kind you dig for with your bare hands.

I started imagining your future face; the laugh lines, the way time would write its little notes in your margins. It was hope pretending to be observation. When a friend asked later if you lived up to the hype, I didn't answer. I just kissed you outside the revolving doors, thinking if we kept spinning, nothing could land hard enough to break us.

But eventually, the spinning has to stop. You realize you can’t live in a revolving door forever, so you step out into the cold. Wear your heart on your sleeve—actually, just take the coat. It looks better on you. I’ll carry the bag. I know it’s a bit on the nose, trying to turn us into a couplet before the ink is even dry, but I’ve always had this hero complex.

Call it a cape, call it a heavy lifting habit; I’ve spent a lifetime auditioning for a rescue I wasn't sure was coming. I’m trying to be gentle with a wish this big. Most people call it luck because "miracle" is too heavy to carry up the stairs.

What time is it, anyway? I thought I knew sunsets, but this is a winter fire spitting sparks at the frost. We met in January, remember? I was a walking pile of wool and blankets, a soft fortress. But those layers were a joke compared to your hands finding mine. For a guy who never runs out of breath, I turned into a quiet, stuttering mess the second you knocked.

My heart was a bird hitting glass—panicked, sudden, and completely trapped by the light.

Now it’s night eleven. We’re swapping bomber jackets while the sky detonates; this violent shrapnel of gold. It feels right to call you Genesis. It feels right to drop the defensive crouch, lower my walls, and say: I’d love to build a house with you.

Even as I suggest it, I know the weight of the twenty years that came before. Love is mostly a long, agonizingly slow project in learning how to say goodbye without flinching. It’s a masterclass in letting go. You spend your "golden years" realizing that, eventually, no one is waiting at the terminal. There is no familiar face in the crowd. The trajectory isn’t a straight line; it’s a Slinky on a staircase; tumbling, silver, full of momentum, until it just... tangles.

A heap of metal coils in a heap of defeat.

And yet, look at us. Time keeps skipping and compressing. We turned into a story we told other people over drinks that tasted like chemicals but felt like closeness. We talked about death like it was traffic—just something happening elsewhere, and we talked about a child like a whisper the body sends ahead of itself. A notification from the future: You will love something fragile again. It felt like an invitation and a threat at the same time.

On Sundays, we’d walk the woods while winter still had a grip. Our boots were wide and clumsy, and we laughed at how committed we were to staying alive.

We wanted roses then; we wanted proof we could still bleed, that this wasn't just muscle memory. Your mind caught everything like a web, always humming. Mine just buzzed and flailed and sometimes went still. Sometimes I couldn't tell if I was being held or caught.

But I’m still here. I’m still reading the dark like it’s scripture in fine print, rubbing my eyes, squinting at the shadows, trying to find the one word that stays lit when the power goes out.

I think I’m looking at it.

 

And now—this part. A different room. A different ceiling.

I’m on the floor now, blue jeans crumpled beside me. The sky above me barely counts as sky; it’s just drywall pretending to be infinite. I lie here thinking, I built this. This soft cage. This sanctuary-slash-hiding place. Even my guardian angel, Nick (you have to call them something cute if you want them to answer) seems tired. I’ve worn him thin. I wanted him airborne and good in a crisis, but I keep him on call for small things. For praise I don’t trust. For comfort I don’t know how to take.

I haven't gone back to the places where my past tightens. I just know I still want to be impressive. I practice being interesting. I rehearse compassion so my voice doesn’t shake when it counts. I’m still auditioning for myself, trying to make varsity in a life that doesn’t keep score.

I remember the first time I saw a photo of a dead body. I don't remember the year, only that I was drinking peppermint tea. Something meant to say, You’re safe. I told myself not to let my heart outrun my body, but the heart never listens. That was around the time success started sleeping next to dread. Every good thing came with a falling dream. I’d wake up soaked, whispering affirmations like spells: You’re happy. You’re doing well. According to the metrics, I was. But I envied the "Champagne Men" in old movies—breaking glasses and laughing without consequence. Nothing cost them. Everything costs me. Even the tea.

 

I imagine the superhero version of myself hearing his name shouted from blocks away. He shows up fast, cape torn, mildly annoyed. The ego thanks him, but he waves it off. He wants flashier rescues, though no one ever asks him to fix the roads. No one claps for maintenance.

This is what I think about while walking past my own life: the embarrassment of trying. Still smelling like where I came from. Wondering if my best moments will fossilize into heirlooms or cautionary tales. Neon messages flash contradictory instructions: Go home. Come here. As if either one would save you.

Then, it hits all at once. Salt water. Summer asphalt. A slow dance I barely remember. Flat tires and flat lines. Sunflowers burning themselves open. Me, standing nearby, still in costume, thinking that wanting to save something might count as flight, even if it’s just falling with style.

 

One spring, you mailed me a tiger lily. Just one. And shamrocks pressed flat like they’d given up trying to breathe. You said beauty has to be restrained to survive. I thought: touching ruins things. Then immediately: touching wakes them. So which is it? You tell me.

I tried to seal us with gentleness and permanence at the same time. Baby powder and cement. I loved you. I loved this ridiculous, collapsing world. I also knew we’d sink like empires do; like small creatures half-buried, waiting for someone else to decide what we were.

I’m still standing here in costume, waiting for a rescue that looks like maintenance. 2016 was a long time ago to keep a fire burning. It turns out devotion and debris look exactly the same when you’re going down.

They haven't returned her from surgery. Sitting in the empty ER bay, I look out to see a man step out of another, breaking down into tears. I won't be doing that. Crying is for losers, at least that’s what my sister tells me. My parents are sitting hunched in their chairs, both faces painted with exhaustion.

It smells of antiseptic and overly laundered sheets. A theatrical cleanliness, we all knew that this place was festering with disease and death, it's just one thin layer of Lysol between us and sepsis.

My leg jostles. Up, down. Up, up, down. If my mother weren’t so busy bargaining with God in her head, she’d tell me to stop. I imagine her voice—You’re shaking the whole room.

 Nurses and doctors move in coordinated urgency, a choreography so practiced it appears effortless. On television, this is where the swelling music begins. Here, there is only the low industrial hum of fluorescent lights and the tyrannical metronome of monitors. Beep. Beep. Beep. Each one is a small, mechanical insistence that life is measurable.

I want to smash them. I imagine a baseball bat arcing through the air, plastic shattering, the tyranny of numbers reduced to glittering debris. At the five-minute mark, I was fantasizing about demolition. Now three hours in and I’m mentally pricing lumber, calculating the tensile strength of rage.

My father sent me for a coffee about 30 minutes ago. I snuck a cup, even though I’m not allowed coffee, energy drinks, or anything with even a trace of caffeine. It tasted like someone's interpretation of coffee—like they'd heard about it once, maybe read a description in a book, then just winged it with hot water and regret. I drank it anyway, swallowing the gulp in one big gulp. 

Now my leg is shaking like a blender turned on high, my thoughts flaring from inexplicable sadness and the urge to leap from my seat and run around.

A nurse walks by for the fourth time, giving me that look. That "poor thing" look. I hate that look. I'm not a poor thing. I'm fine. Everything's fine. Well, actually, it's all objectively terrible, but I'm handling it with the emotional availability of a parking meter, which is precisely how I like it.

I start to wonder if they’re lying. Not maliciously. Kindly. The way adults lie to children about dogs going to farms. She didn’t feel any pain. She’ll wake up soon. Just a routine procedure. Medicine runs on merciful fictions because the truth is less marketable: your body is an ecosystem balanced on a pin, and sometimes the wind changes. Makes sense, I suppose. The truth isn't particularly reassuring: your body is a disaster waiting to happen, held together by hope and homeostasis, and sometimes both quit on you at once.

They wheel her back in around 3:17 AM.

For a moment, I do not recognize her.

She is the color of weathered marble, drained of the mischief that used to electrify her features.

She is not dead.

But she is too close.

Comatose was the word used. Like she's taking a really committed nap. Like she might just be thinking it over, deciding whether consciousness is worth the bother of coming back to.

The nurse—a different one, they multiply like rabbits in here—adjusts something on the IV drip and leaves without meeting my eyes. Even she knows the script is wearing thin.

I pull the chair closer. One of those vinyl hospital chairs designed by someone who definitely hates the human spine. It squeaks against the linoleum, breaking the machines' rhythm for half a second before they reassert their authority. Beep. Beep. Beep. The most boring metronome in the world, keeping time for nobody.

Her hand is sweaty when I take it, puffy too.  Damp. Foreign. This is not the hand that once shoved me into a lake because I dared her to. Not the hand that braided my hair too tightly or the one that chopped it all off when we were just little tikes. Not the hand that squeezed mine under the dinner table when our parents were fighting, and we needed a secret truce.

"You look terrible," I tell her, because that's what we do.

That's what we've always done. I insult her, she insults me back, and somewhere in the creative profanity we remember we're family. Usually, she would fire back—Have you seen yourself?—and the world would right itself.  Except now she doesn't insult me back, and the silence where her comeback should be sits in my chest like a stone.

I should say something meaningful. Something Important with a capital I. That's what people do in moments like this, right? They say the thing they should've said years ago, make the confession, bridge the gap. But I've never been good at Important, and she's never needed me to be. We spoke in sarcasm and eye-rolls, in showing up without being asked, in remembering how the other takes their coffee, even when everything else got forgotten.

And as I look at her face, I see her smile, her laugh. Not the polite one she uses for strangers or the tight one she uses for our mother, but the real one. The one that starts in her eyes before it ever reaches her mouth, the one that made her whole face rearrange itself into something luminous. I see her running through the forest behind our rented lake house, twelve years old and convinced she could outrun anything—time, consequence, the future that was already rushing toward us. I see her diving off the dock at the Arnold Lake, all reckless grace and confidence, surfacing with her hair plastered to her skull and that same wild grin.

I feel, most of all, her hug. That enveloping, all-encompassing hug that starts at my shoulders and somehow reaches all the way down to whatever broken thing lives in my chest. The hug that heals me without her ever really knowing why, without me ever being able to explain that sometimes another person's arms are the only thing holding your pieces in place.

My throat tightens. Blame the antiseptic. The recycled air. The twenty-seven sleepless hours. Anything but this.

If my sister is going to die, I will not cry.

I repeat it like a vow.

But my eyes are burning, and my vision's going blurry, and something hot is sliding down my cheek despite my face's complete lack of permission. Then another. Then I'm folding forward, forehead pressed against our joined hands, and my shoulders are shaking, and I'm making these sounds I don't recognize, sounds I didn't know I could make.

I'm crying like those losers. Like that man in the hallway. Like every person who's ever sat in a hospital chair at 3 AM holding the hand of someone who can't hold back.

Turns out you don't get to choose. Turns out grief doesn't care about your tough-guy routine or your carefully constructed emotional walls or your decade-long commitment to being fine. It just shows up and kicks the door down, and suddenly you're sobbing in a hospital room, and all your clever words have deserted you, and all you have left is this: the truth of how much you love someone, stripped of every defense you've ever built.

"Don't go," I whisper into the sterile silence. "Don't you dare go."

The machines continue their indifferent accounting. The fluorescent lights hum like distant insects. The hospital persists in being a hospital—efficient, antiseptic, unimpressed by our private apocalypse.

And I cry.

Not because I am weak. Not because I have lost.

I cry because love, when threatened, has nowhere else to go.

My tears fall onto the back of her hand, and for one impossible second I imagine she might feel them, that they might travel through her bloodstream like a message in a bottle: Stay.

I am a loser, then.

Undone. Exposed. Split open in a room that smells like bleach and fear.

And if this is what it means to love someone—to be reduced to salt water and prayer in a vinyl chair at the edge of morning—then I accept the title.

Let me lose.

Let me be the one who breaks.

When the aliens landed, Nina was showing a four-bedroom ranch to a couple on the verge of divorce.

“The master bedroom is too small,” the wife complained, “and the ensuite? Needs a complete gut renovation.”

Nina took in the jetted tub, the beige vanity, the fuzzy toilet seat cover. The owner of the house had died and her heirs were selling the property. The woman who’d lived here must have loved the toilet seat once, must have smiled every time she walked into the bathroom.

Aloud Nina said, “I hear the 90s are making a comeback.”

“We’re not doing a reno,” the husband told his wife. “I’m sick of you spending my money.”

This was the 27th house Nina had shown them. She longed to ghost the couple, but her manager kept telling her she better make the sale or risk losing her job. There were no other promising clients right now. High interest rates and low inventory had rocked the Long Island market. 

On the way out of the bonus room, the husband – a wolfish stockbroker with a paunch – brushed a little too close to Nina’s chest and she sensed he was one opportunity away from slipping her his work number. 

“My husband and I live in a ranch,” Nina said. “It’s great having everything on one floor.”

She’d mentioned her non-existent spouse several times in the past three weeks. The man didn’t seem deterred.

Out the bathroom window, purple lights flickered weirdly.

“What the hell?” the husband said.

 

Nina had trained to be an artist. She had her MFA. She’d sold a few paintings. But she quickly realized that with framing costs and the 50 percent galleries took, she couldn’t afford housing, not to mention food or gas.

 Her parents had retired to Florida. Her few friends from high school had moved away. She told herself she didn’t have time for a social life. She was staying in a basement apartment in Huntington, dipping into her savings to help pay rent. On her feet all day, touring listings, extolling the virtues of sixteen-foot ceilings and luxury vinyl tile. She felt sorry for each empty home she toured. She’d begun to think of houses as abandoned, transient places and wondered how people could shed the past so easily.

An online quiz indicated she was moderately depressed, but not in need of medication.  

When she wasn’t working, Nina sketched her suburban surroundings. The silky pink and cream petals on a magnolia tree. The ocean at high tide, restless, churning. A gaggle of preening seagulls. Identical mansions on a court at dusk, formidable and grandiose as aging dowagers. Small Cape Cod houses on ramshackle streets. Unseen and unappreciated. The way shadows formed on a lawn, dividing it into dark and darker. A seam in the sky revealing grey tipped clouds. 

Everything was more beautiful on canvas. Fixed, perfect, calm. 

 

As they walked outside, the wife complained that the pool was too close to the house.

Beyond the oval pool, flecked with fallen leaves and the remains of a frog that had jumped to its death, was a big cube made of crisscrossing tubes in various shades of purple. Lavender, lilac, eggplant. It reminded Nina of a large-scale art installation she’d seen in a museum years ago. A neon sculpture made of LED lights that spelled out different phrases: You are guileless in your dreams. Words tend to be inadequate. Alienation produces eccentrics. Abstraction is decadence.

The cube on the lawn made a weird noise that sounded halfway between humming and Country music. 

“Is this some new stereo system?” the husband asked.

“Yes,” Nina lied. “Made by Apple. It’s a prototype, one of the few in the neighborhood. Comes with the house.”

He seemed like someone who valued what no one else had.

“For God’s sake,” the wife said. “One more thing to clean.”  

Later, Nina wondered why she wasn’t afraid when the cube extended one long purply tendril, creating a narrow pathway atop the yard’s expensive pavers. The husband and wife drew closer to it.

“That purple is just awful,” the wife was saying. “We’d need to spray paint it black if we kept it.”

Before Nina could tell them to come back, she didn’t know what the thing really was, they were sucked inside like dust bunnies whooshed into a vacuum bag.

Nina tried to run but found herself rooted in place. Her legs didn’t work.

“Please,” Nina shouted to the cube or the universe. “I really don’t want to be with those people."

The cube hummed some more. The lights like giant spider legs, reaching, considering. The afternoon hovered behind it, then settled.

“Please,” Nina repeated, noticing how sunlight bounced off the pool’s glassy surface, how the potted pansies needed water. “I like it here.”