The Goat Hunters

What do you do once you’ve found them?

That was the summer of the wild goats, the pair who fled Old Man Wilson’s barn fire while the sheep all bleated and burned. Biking, we’d glimpse them in the tangled velvet of trees behind our house, grazing in addition to the grasses what strange museum of decay they could find: mushrooms, tree roots, and the oxidized barbed wire that ran the glade’s perimeter. You named them both. You were always naming what we found together.

I can’t remember a cool day that whole season, a day where briny dew didn’t nest in the scraggly sprouts above your lips. You started shaving before me, a limping knuckle waltz with the straight blade your daddy gave you. More than hair you grew nicks along your sharpened jaw, and behind my eyelids I tried not to trace the crosshatched patterns. We knew nothing but enough not to reach for one another.

I asked Maddie to show you better how to use the razor. My sister had more experience in hollowing out the caverns of her skin. You were too embarrassed to match her studied gaze as she molded your fingers with her own around the blade, the icy steel an oath between us as it drank accidental your blood. She smiled when you took the metal into your palm, growing confident, cleaving safe an avenue to the raised fruit of your throat. Now you’ll be able to teach my brother, she said with a thumb toward me, which launched us into a relieved hysteria.

You told me once you thought Maddie was hot, and I didn’t know how to respond. The part of me that was always reacting the way he thought he should told me to be outraged, told me to defend the intangible honor of my sister, a word that always brought the vapid image of jousting over a hapless princess. But that left no way to explain the plummeting of my gut, the way your grin scraped from the meat of my skin something I’d not felt birthing. I babbled dumb phrases, to stay in your lane, and you said you didn’t know where the lanes were anymore.

Our bikes wobbled down our ingrown town’s crooked cul-de-sacs, and we kept our helmets draped across their handlebars. If we saw anyone we knew, we’d dawn them, but they were too clammy to wear for long. My parents lectured me against the dangers of my brain splattered, the Rorschach of my thoughts on pavement, of some injury so permanent that I never saw light again. This was when I realized I wasn’t as scared of the dark as they were. That the fears I carried weren’t of pain or mortality but of being caught.

Old Man Wilson hired out his boy, Denton, to find the goats and bring them home, but the pair ended up far wilier than any of us would have thought. Where embers from the blaze had singed them, they had patches of fur missing, which is how we told them apart. We wanted to keep them gone in our tiny forest. We stopped blabbing to just anyone about where we saw them. We needed a way to better communicate with each other what we knew.

You’d insisted we buy the walkie-talkies after the first time your daddy cashed out his drunken stupor to purchase your momma’s ashy cheek. He’d hit her before, you told me later, but always in the space beneath her ribs, where it wouldn’t bruise. This lashing, though, cost her three days of work, where he both forbid her leaving the house and sulked about the money she was losing. I had no clue what to tell you as your voice crackled over the line, so much softer than the bluster you brought in person, no genuflection to deepen the tones. I still don’t know what to say. I’ve barely kept my head above the current of words I could have given us.

I gave just one, in the end, and it wasn’t enough. Just the other day, Maddie asked me about you in that whatever happened to the such-and-suches sort of way, and I told her I didn’t know. That I’ve looked for you online, crawling through hundreds of faces wearing your name. She was always better at finding than me, though, and she loaded within a few minutes a grown-up picture of you. With you looking on, we told each other for the first time the truths about our baptisms that August. I held my sister’s hands and asked for her forgiveness.

“My dad bought a gun,” you tell me.

“My dad’s always had one.”

“It’s different for cops.”

Really? I bite back.

“What’d he get it for?”

“Dunno,” you say. “Says he needs to protect us.”

I hear something like footsteps on the stairs.

I give our signal — two clicks on the send button — and toss the radio back behind the nightstand into an old holster I’d found in the basement, repurposed. The move is practiced; I’ve gotten good.

But nothing comes next. No disembodied head peering through my door announcing the time as if the orangey numbers of my clock aren’t branding it behind my eyes. I pick your voice box back up, lay you flat across my bare chest, relish the smooth cool of its plastic surface. Even with my window open, the air presses its wet tongues against my skin, and each morning I wake to find my sheets stained a little more horrid sort of yellow.

“Sorry,” I say. “Thought I heard something.”

“Your door still gone?”

“Yeah.” I turn my head to stare through the hollowed frame. Without my glasses I can shape the gloom into a frenzy of swarming flies. I used to have night terrors where my room would particulate around me, pixelate into thousands of moving parts. I would scream out from my sleep, but I never had the words to recount what had happened.

“Why’d they take it in the first place?”

I flush, getting somehow hotter than the sticky room has me already. I try to make it a joke. “They said they didn’t want me tempted anymore.”

“To do what?” you say in a tone that tells me your teeth are out.

“You know.”

Your laughter makes me turn down the radio’s volume. “Seriously?” you say. “Wait, do they make Maddie do it, too?”

“Perv.”

“Prude.”

“Quit thinking about my sister touching herself.”

“Caught me,” you say, all innocence, and my stomach backflips.

“Shit. Hang on,” you say. Without your voice, the flies draw nearer. They buzz, but I can’t understand their speech.

Your words come back in a new tone. “They’re fighting again.”

“About what?”

“Money.”

“I wish my parents would help you guys out.”

Static from you.

“I mean,” I’m treading words again, “it’s just dumb that the government won’t give your dad his money.”

“Government’s fucked,” you say, and I like the way your mouth percusses the harsh fricative.

“Fucked,” I say like it’s a new word.

“Fu-uck,” you say, and even though you deliver the line like an ape on dick pills to make me laugh, something at the fringe still tugs me up, crotch first. I laugh, overloud, slap a hand against my mouth, bite my tongue.

I hear your momma scream in the background.

“Shit, I gotta go.”

“Stay on the line,” I say, quelling a whiney panic from my voice. After a beat, you say, “I’m keeping you in my pocket, so don’t talk or anything.” And then I hear the over-amplified slam of your fingers as you shove me in, as your athletic shorts surround me in their hissing folds. Then there’s nothing but scratches and rushed air, a cutting susurration fighting back the encroaching flies outside my room. They’re shaping into humanoid forms in the gloom. Maddie’s hair made animate by the bickering tempest. The heady buzzing of the cracked face. A crooked arm reaching down to holstered hip. I start to wonder what’s happened to you, but as long as the radio keeps transmitting chaotic waves, I have to believe the flies will come no closer.

The clank of your clumsy hand. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Okay,” you say, and I listen to a calmer wind, your breaths coming through my chest from three houses down. They seem to be hitching on some buried blade in your lungs.

Maddie breaks Denton’s nose after what he calls her brother. She doesn’t think between the time her fist leaves her pocket and when it connects with his formerly unblemished face. She’s instantly horrified at what she’s done. Knows she’ll get hell for it at home. Her brother checks a grin, doesn’t even say thanks. She stares as blood puddles in Denton’s hands and drips to the overwaxed linoleum of the school cafeteria.

The next week he comes up to her in band practice, cradling two drumsticks in his left hand as he proffers the right. Truce? he says, which is different than an apology, but Maddie still gives him half-credit. The swelling in his face is mostly gone, but his nose will never be quite straight again. She takes a hand off her clarinet and spits in it before she holds it out. He laughs. Winces at the pain.

He asks her out for ice cream the week after that. My parents grounded me for breaking your face, she tells him. What’s your house number? he says.

Her daddy’s impressed with the boy who smooth-talks his way into Maddie’s life. Pulls him over once out on 42 just to ask him what’s what. Says he’s got real guts. Maddie sees it, too — so different than the chubby kid she’d once known, playing cops and robbers around the tiny river glade behind their cul-de-sac. He’s tall. Confident. Is, she thinks, someone respectable.

One date becomes two becomes hanging out every day after marching band. They try to reclaim the forest they so loved as kids. Hand-in-hand. There are ghosts in the woods, creatures scuttling out of sight. Always for her, there have been the eyes. Never for a second has she felt unwatched.

She read on her family’s dial-up that a spider’s eyes parse only light and shadow. Its ocelli figure from black and white where could be its prey. These pixels crawl back to her unbidden as the recluse lands on Denton’s shoulder. He swats at it with a yelp. She wonders what it sees in them, huddling close under sunlight slanting through the canopy. If she is more light or shadow.

They’re laughing and she’s holding his shoulder where the spider had been when he startles her with a kiss. His lips purse in a way that makes them hard to melt into and then it’s over. He looks at her, shy, and then he startles her with a confession: I don’t believe in hell anymore.

She looks him square in the crooked nose. She knows what he’s getting at. Something’s rushing in her ears. She pulls him farther into the glade, all the way to the shore of the river. Picks up the perfect stone. She wings it and it leaps four times on the sweaty back of the water. Doesn’t quite make the other side.

I’m scared of heaven, she says.

Our pastor gave an entire sermon about Adam’s rib. About the derivation of creation, the pecking order of feminine desire. We struggled not to laugh. We imagined the extra rib in Eve to be her breasts, and we used our half-assed doctrine as an excuse for more than one expedition to find the missing structure in each others’ chests. You be Eve today, you told me once, and it’s the only time I ever saw you blush.

The divots between your ribs held a sort of theological inspiration for me, gave me permission to leap past the fear of our double-tapped Morse code signal to stop talking, to break apart. In those spaces between your bones, my fingers became their own creatures, beholden to none. We had no language then. Our prayers had tapered off, even as we stroked the places where our wings should have been.

Without words between us, we could refuse the notion that tracing each others’ bodies signified anything like desire. That the tautness of our stomachs had nothing to do with lifting our sweat-stained shirts, and instead came from the dirty things we’d talk about, stuff heard in any boys’ locker room. Always about the girls. Did you see what Delaney wore on the last day of school? Natalie and Chad got caught by her parents when he tried to climb through her window. Brent said Meghan got her period at the public pool. We struggled to imagine blood and water, the peculiar affirmation of a creative power we’d never have.

And really, the girls were a mystery to us. As we partook, albeit crudely, in the unveiling of the supposed miraculous surrounding them, we disrobed only ourselves. My sister, I think, knew better than me what was happening. She cornered me after my shower one evening and asked me flat out. But I laughed. Gay guys wanted to stick it in each other. They wanted to kiss dicks. You and I weren’t anything.

But my sister was as shaded from my view as I tried to be from hers. I’d be attending her high school come fall, and although she’d already made me promise I wouldn’t be embarrassed to find her if I needed anything, I couldn’t shake the day not two weeks before when she’d pretended not to notice us on the sidewalk downtown. Who’s that beanpole Maddie’s with, you’d asked me. And then as they’d approached, we’d seen it was Denton, the kid whose nose she’d flattened. He still had severe babyface, even with the realignment of his features, and he was always smiling like he didn’t get the joke. I don’t know what she saw in him. When we were kids, Maddie and I would try to see who could keep their eyes crossed longer. Once we made it almost five minutes before I hyperventilated that I couldn’t remember which double was her, and which was the maligned fabric of my vision’s weaving.

You told me you wanted a sister, and I told you I sometimes wanted mine never to have been born. Not that I wanted to be an only child, but that I wanted to keep her safe in the womb of unexisting. The darkness of nothing that has come to be such a solace to me these days. A sort of remembering in reverse. Before God created the world, our pastor said, there was only emptiness. No senses, nothing to sense. And despite the way the preacher dodged the inevitable, I thought, God was lonely. He couldn’t stop himself from needing to touch.

Or to meddle, you said, and even though you pulled up the edges of your mouth and chanted and shook your hands around like a power-tripping deity, I knew you were, in the smallest, safest place of your head, thinking of the tiny bundle of bloodied fur and flesh that your momma had delivered in the hallway bathroom of your old house. The one that made her stop trying. Start refusing your father’s advances. You’d been only four or five when people started telling him he had the right to look elsewhere, even as you found that, from here on out, you could never look away.

So we became gods in our own way, you and I, biking into the summer’s echoing corridor. We loved best the sun’s shrugging off its responsibilities, the time of dusk when we became invisible and the houses on our streets lit up, dioramas for us to imagine ourselves inside, tableaus of feasible normality. Through their perfect boxes we could see the Traversens sit for their late dinners, the Sheridan kids looping their endless movie nights, watching the tapes in rewind as often as forward. We witnessed muted squabbles between husbands and wives, providing a ridiculous dialogue ourselves, laughing until water sprung from our eyes.

We couldn’t see our faces except in the glow of these near-strangers’ homes. It was easier this way, hiding in the language of predictable tropes, stories woven of flesh not our own. Flesh not of those we tried and tried not to love. We were always trying, you and me. To be something palatable. We slept and let our bones be stolen away.

The goats stare us down through their blissed-out meal. Eve’s chewing what looks to be poison ivy, and Adam lies prone, root muncher he is.

“Denton tried to make one of them eat a firework,” I say for some reason, then add, “A lit one.”

“Idiot,” you say, and a frown takes hostage your features. “Isn’t he supposed to be bringing them in?”

I shrug. It’s easily the hottest day of summer, and our muggy bike helmets have soaked our hair to dripping. We practice the law, dutiful. Or my parents’ arbitrary rules. I never really know the difference-just a loose, inexplicable image of my brains leaking on the asphalt, swarming with gorging flies.

When we were little, our moms used to shave our heads as they chatted to each other. Some solidarity that passed once my dad started dressing up as an officer to tote your dad home from the bars. I always hated the way my scalp looked so lumpy without its silky blanket, but you got inspired, a grinning alien come from Pluto to eat as many human toes as you could find. I don’t know where any of your ideas come from.

You peel off your helmet, and the goats watch in mild interest, maybe hoping for a new source of food. It’s been weeks since the barn burned down, and they seem happier than ever. Your dark hair is matted and mussed. I unclip my own strap, begin the slow giving up.

“My dad took me to an autopsy,” I say to bring you back.

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. I think he wanted to win an argument.”

You pull from your bag your straight razor, and I realize you mean to shave right here as I talk, so I keep going, letting the words spin out.

“There was this guy — we went up to Columbus you know — this guy playing guitar and I tried to give him money.”

One of the goats farts, and we both bust up.

“So?” You say, reclaiming your breath, rubbing at a place on your neck you’ve sliced.

“So that’s not allowed, I guess.” I leave unspoken what we both know: my dad’s steely temper, the icy calm that comes over him before he begins dissecting me with his quiet scolding.

“What was the body like?”

“I dunno. Cold.”

“You touched it?”

“No, she — it — just looked like it could use a blanket or something.”

“Because she was naked?” I blush, and you push in. “Were you turned on?”

I shove you, hard. Your foot catches on some invisible divot in the ground and you go down on your ass, the blade spilling from your grip. You look up at me, winded but not angry. You had it coming.

I glance back to the road. “Yeah, it’s hard to be horny after they cut her open.” I make a motion with my hand, drawing the line as I’d seen it done, ear to ear like an overlarge smile. You wrinkle your nose, and I hate that I find it cute.

“What’s that got to do with the homeless dude?” You’ve left the razor where it landed, and your eyes on me are hard to ignore.

“I don’t know,” I say. “My dad said she was a junkie. The woman on the table.”

“Huh,” you say. I pick up an acorn and make as if to throw it at Adam. He bleats, implacable, intent on his prize.

“Don’t,” you say, and your hand is sticky on my arm, even if your grip isn’t tight. You hold it for a second and when we release the oak seed back to the ground, it is something we both want: for once to be boys who don’t destroy.

“We should go to the pool,” I say. “It’s fucking hot.”

“No shit,” you say, still staring at the grassy dirt in front of the goats. “But it’s Tuesday, so all the toddlers will be pissing themselves learning how to float.”

“Shit,” I say, because it’s this summer we’ve learned to cuss, not out of any obvious need besides relieving the sudden boredom of turning fourteen. Or maybe we want to sound more grown up than we are. Or maybe I like watching you spit out the words. No. I watch your mouth too much.

You reach into your pack, pull out the walkie-talkie. You press your lips against the mouthpiece.

“Here’s an idea.” Your voice comes squawking through the radio in my own bag. I grin and unzip, take it out.

“I’m all ears.”

“You know that spot your dad fishes?” you say. I nod, thinking of the many times he’s tried to teach me the dance of a dead fly on the river to tempt the fish to bite. You have to become the fly, he’s told me, so the fish know it’s real. Imagine the cold of the water on your wings. Your antennae.

You look at me, wait for the verbal response.

“What about it?” I say into the radio’s maw.

You pull your lips back from your teeth.

“Nah,” I say. “We can’t swim there.”

“Says who.”

“Says anyone.”

“Says your parents, I bet.”

We’ve ridden this road before, and I’m sick of the argument.

“One of these days,” you say, not facing me as you speak into the mic, “you’re not gonna have parents telling you which limbs to move and when.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Think of this as good practice. Like building muscles.”

“What do you know about it?” I say and then regret saying. Adam stops his incessant chewing to sneeze.

“A couple things,” you mutter. “Enough to know what I fucking want.” You click the send button twice and start to mount your bike.

The heat has the fight leaving me. Even Eve has started blinking slow, as if his meal has put him into trance. I hope he’s not actually poisoned. I draw the walkie close.

“Well,” I say, grinning, “I fucking want to fucking go fucking swimming,” which makes you laugh, shoulders shaking as you turn to me once more, and I ignore the swell in my ribcage that makes me feel like I could explode. I take one last look at the goats, but if they get the joke, they don’t let on.

They keep trying new spaces. They want to see if anywhere is unhaunted. They explore the old houses, left empty when the auto factory laid everyone off. In cobwebbed corners they find and steal kisses. One night they sneak into the church itself, but just beyond the sensual buzz of taboo is a sort of spiritual dread that brings up Maddie’s breakfast after his hands try for the first time to explore above her ribs.

Outside in his truck, he’s profuse in his truce-giving, and she laughs it off. She wonders, though, if there’s a more permanent way to blind the watching eyes. If she can ever feel unguilty. His pickup radio blares positive, encouraging K-Love, and the song lyrics carve into her.

She refuses the reality of staying trapped within her body forever. Of always wanting to be alone and never finding a way. Jesus will fill you up, says the singer, and she’s crying and she doesn’t know how to stop. She sees his concern then, genuine. Tries to smile back. All that comes up is a sort of wet gurgle from her throat, and they both giggle and push her tears and snot out of the way.

His lips are furry with his ill-shaven mustache, and she opens her eyes to watch him kiss her. She wonders if she wants him or just wants to be wanted. Maybe she wants only to be the forbidden fruit. The proof against heaven and hell. She imagines his teeth scooping out her flesh. the look in his eyes as he realizes he can never go back. Adam and apple, pushed downriver from Eden.

She imagines them naked together. She tries to want it. Maybe with the river water between, she thinks. It could keep them clean. The notion is ridiculous, but the thought stays unveiled. They might drown. It could all be an accident, the falling in. The tug of the water down all the way to the Ohio, the Mississippi, the gulf, the ocean, but wouldn’t the round world would just bring them back here anyway? She’s takes a breath to ask him what he thinks.

Check it out, he says, and he’s holding a foldable razor in his palm. Found it when I was hunting.

Maddie recognizes the blade. You ever gonna catch them? Everyone knows the woods aren’t that big.

He points out the window. What do you see?

She squints at the gloom. Sees nothing but the shadows’ endless scrutiny. She shrugs.

No one’s watching, he says. No one cares.

The radio hums to itself, losing the station. Guess someone tripped over the wire, her dad would have said.

We’re safe here, he says, almost to her. No one’s going to catch us, he says, more to himself.

She looks back at him. Slips a hand over the power button and clicks the static off. She grasps his hand and brings it to her chest.

Let’s try again, she says, shutting her eyes.

The current floods her thoughts.

Later in that everlasting summer, after you swim the river together, after you stop talking to the boy altogether, after you trace your fingernails like blades against the blueish avenues of your skin just the way you’ve learned, after the static of the radio brings no sleep, you will find your father’s .22. You will wonder how long it will take him to miss it, if he will have the wherewithal to suspect you, or if his own damaged pride will make him keep his mistake yet another secret: that he let his weapon out of his sight, that he failed to serve or protect even for a second.

You will listen to his breathing in the other room, your ears honed by the constant hearing you have always done, and you will find his snores coming wheezy and clogged, the sleep apnia that made you cry as a child when you thought he was dying. But always will come the sudden gasp of air, the thousand-volt resurrection. You will never know a thing to stay dead.

You will handle the pistol carefully. You will not expect its weight. This mix of trepidation and surprise will let your clumsy hands drop it to the kitchen floor. You will jump back in the first earnest terror you’ve had in what feels like, but certainly couldn’t be, generations longer than the short lifespan you, up until now, took for granted. You will cover your ears from some useless instinct, as if muting the sound could prevent the shocking discharge of the cartridge. You will open your mouth and have no idea what to scream.

But the gun will remain silent, unsmoking. You will not wish to touch the icy metal again, but you’ll know that you must, now that you have taken possession of your daddy’s fear. You must find a safe place for it in the webbed creases of your palms. You must raise it again and amen, world without end. You must pray to a god you haven’t until now realized you no longer trust that your father will not find it was you who took his extra limb.

You will have no choice, but the choosing will, from here on out, never stop. You will think you brought the end of summer with your own three hands.

I make it past my parents’ room without them seeing the state I’m in, the mud still dripping from my hair. And then turning on the last step, I run full into Maddie, knocking us both to the ground.

“In a hurry much?” she says, already trying to stand. She’s shoving something metallic back into her hoodie pocket. Then she really looks at me. “What happened?”

“I, uh, went swimming,” I say.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she says, and we both laugh and then catch ourselves, listening downstairs to see if we hear any movement.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” I say. She gives me a no duh look.

I’m about to slide past her and take a shower when she says, “You and he . . . ?”

And I know what she means, and I know that she knows, and I flush and tears come to my eyes without my wanting them, and then Maddie is hugging me despite the grime.

“It’s okay,” she says, and I really want to believe her. And then, because she’s the Maddie who hogs the dial-up researching obscura, she says, “I’ve been . . . reading some stuff online.”

“Okay?”

“About . . . boys. Liking other boys.”

I jerk back.

“I’m not a fag,” I say, and my ferocity surprises me. I wonder if she’ll take a swing at my nose, too.

“No, nono, I — ” and the space between our words grows larger. I go for the parry.

“How’s Denton these days? See enough of him?”

“I just wanted to talk with you,” Maddie says. “I think — I think you really love him.”

My ears start buzzing. “You guys do it yet?”

“Hey.”

“What’s his load taste like?”

“Stop it!”

“Sure sneaking away enough.” I don’t know where the cruelty comes from, but it feels good to let it loose on anyone but myself.

“I was just trying to help,” she says, and she walks down the hall toward her room. The shadows start to swallow her.

“Wait,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

She takes a deep breath. I see her shoulders go up and down. “He has a tough home life.”

“Yeah?” I say. “I get that.”

“Do you?” she says. “His dad’s on this medication that helps him not mood swing, but it’s still up and down, and his mom’s working all the time and Denton feels all this pressure to bring in more money and no one else sees it except for me, and he just has nobody except for me. And I feel like I’m finally doing something good, you know, by being there for him. That sounds so stupid.”

“No,” I rush to say. “I — I actually get that. It’s the same with . . . ” but I can’t bring myself to say your name after what we’ve done.

“Yeah?” Maddie says.

“But it doesn’t matter, because it’s over. It was . . . stupid. Not that we did anything. I don’t know.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I’m scared,” I blurt. “That things will always stay the same. That people will never change.”

“I don’t want to live forever,” she says.

“Me neither,” I say.

“You can tell me anything.”

“You, too,” I tell her, but we turn away. I go to wash the river from my skin. To wash you out.

Denton finds his daddy in the bathtub, heart shocked out of beating. A radio floats beside him, the cord taut, still plugged into the wall. It crackles, weak, some overeager song about a big house with lots of food. He sits on the closed toilet until the EMTs arrive. He asks them again and again if it was on purpose. They tell him there’s no way to know.

The police scanner on the kitchen counter tells Maddie all she needs to know, and no one reacts fast enough to stop her sprinting from the house, jumping in the van, and flying down the state road to get to Denton. A goat straddles the highway, ever looking lost. She doesn’t have time to register swerving, staring the creature dead in the eyes as she flies by, before her mind sets itself back to her destination. To the boy who needs her. The van rights itself by a slim margin.

The cops recognize her as her father’s daughter, let her through the tape to where Denton and his mother sit, shock writ plain in their features. Denton’s mother hugs her, asks her if she wants any coffee, even though it’s ten at night. She says okay, hoping it will make her feel better.

Then she and Denton, are, for a moment, alone. His eyes search hers. He says he doesn’t understand. He had a good life, he says. We did everything for him. And Maddie decides that she won’t let this boy die. That she can make him happy. She tugs him toward her, holds him close. He can’t cry, even though he wants to.

The night leaves a wet slug trail. And then another and the next. They bury him, and the pastor speaks of suicide in terms too loose to mean a single thing, focusing instead on the eternal joy the corpse must now feel. Denton laughs at the funeral. His mother stares at her name written next to her husband’s on the grave marker. Maddie imagines a gravestone like that for Denton and her. Wonders who there will be to remember who they were. If it matters.

She envies Denton’s father. He found a way to cut ties. The weight of the borrowed blade grows heavier in her pocket. She starts researching on the home computer, but as diagrams buffer there is time for the guilt of leaving Denton the way his father did. She must not think of only herself. She decides to content herself with the path she’s on. She decides to live eternal, since she has no other choice.

I waited three days after Old Man Wilson’s body kissed the earth before I called you again on our line. I suppose the number might be significant, as if the whole town was waiting with bated breath for a resurrection. Or maybe just me, hoping that we’d not done something so permanent.

It was, I decided, far too coincidental not to be divine, especially after the pastor had taken a tangent in his sermon the week after our tryst that felt directly aimed at you and me. Or just me. You didn’t show up for church ever again. Especially not after what I said to you.

The facts were simple: Old Man Wilson had been electrocuted in his own bath mere days after you and I skinny dipped in the river. The town was starting to call it suicide, but I knew it was far more sinister than that. Old Man Wilson had taken the lightning meant for me and you. The river connected to the sewer connected to the drainpipes connected to the houses of the innocent. And me? I had been out biking that night, staring through the windows. I had seen their lights flicker.

I knew far too much. I’d asked my dad to take me to the autopsy, but when he pressed me for a reason, I couldn’t come up with anything. He told me to watch after my sister, and for once I should have listened to him. Spiders and flies all in the wrong spaces.

When your voice came through the walkie talkie, it was the first time I’d heard it since that day together. It didn’t sound like the you I wanted. It was the you who deepened your tone to talk to teachers or girls or your dad. Not that it mattered much: I didn’t let you get a word in edgewise. I told you what we’d done was perverted. I told you we were dirty. That I was ashamed and so should you be. I told you there was still hope.

For a while you said nothing, and then we heard another noise on the line, another voice. I imagine we both sat up, held the tiny box closer to our ear. I thought it was the voice of God. I listened harder than I’d ever done before. I wanted the simplicity of purpose, the easy knowledge of a divine mission.

But the radios must have picked up the frequency of one of our neighbors’ phonelines, and after a beat, when we’d figured out this truth, we let their tinny voices — the words we couldn’t make out — replace our own. I peeked out my window to see if I could match the conversation with the house next door, and I saw Mrs. Traversen in the dark of the waning moon walk through her backyard wearing nothing but a bathrobe and a watering can. She tended each flower in her tiny Eden, their buds closed tight to the midnight. I took the batteries out from the radio, crushed my serpent under my heel. It was so much more fragile than I’d thought, and the quick fracture came as a surprise.

I panicked, worked to put the pieces back together, but nothing would stick. I had silenced you. I had taken away your voice from me. I couldn’t hear all that you created in the folds of your mouth.

Maddie disappears from all but family dinners. She spends every waking minute with the boy, and everyone commends her ability to cope with his grief. Some still whisper. She goes numb to compliments and gossip alike.

They start foraging the state routes, parking his pickup in high cornfields off the roads’ margins. She feels the speed, doesn’t know how to slow. They’re racing toward an end she’s not sure exists.

One night her dad catches them out on 42. He flips the siren on his squad car, one sharp whir. Maddie tries to stuff parts of herself back into her clothes, but he’s already opening the door to the cab, writing her up.

Get out of the truck, he says to Maddie.

Go take care of your mother, he says to Denton.

He drives her home in silence, and she wishes she has the words to explain anything to him, but she realizes that she could throw her entire river at his feet and he wouldn’t understand. Just like Denton. Who’d taken all her wait and no and crumpled them into paper balls of yes. She doesn’t understand how it all happened so fast.

Her brother’s standing in the driveway when they pull in, and all her words fly out at him.

Did you tell them? she screams. Why did you tell them?

And then she decides she won’t say another word. She marches inside and past her mom who’s looking to her dad and waiting for explanation. She plows her feet into the stairs and into the bathroom, crunching home the pushbutton lock. She stares at her reflection. Wants to leap from her skin. She brings out the blade. Sees a fleck of cum in her hair. She hacks off the lock. Then another. When she’s finished, her alien skull glimmers through the patches of her handiwork.

Her parents finally pop the door handle open, barge into the bathroom. She’s never seen them speechless. She hides the razor in her pocket and stares back at them, a new creation. They reach for her and she slaps their hands away. She breaks past them and reverses her path and she is outside the house and there is just her brother standing in the way.

Don’t stop me, she says. They can hear their parents shouting her name, pounding down the stairs in her wake.

He looks at her. They are the same height now. She doesn’t know when that happened.

I love you, he says and he steps aside.

She steps out into the rain. She is done with the sky. She is done with the terrifying promise of forever. She wants only the mud, and the river. To rot is a kind of mercy. This, her only prayer.

We will hatch from our shirts and leap into the river. I will not overthink your skin. I will not overthink splashing you to watch the rivulets crawl down the accordion of your ribs. I will not overthink your teeth, the way you’ve begun to shark my wading’s wake, sensing my trepidation like bloodied water. I will not overthink how easy it was to convince each other to jump, how the current carries us farther and farther from our parents’ gardens.

We will become radios. Electricity will drip down our Adam’s apple, down the nape of our neck, tingling our spine. We will have more wires than we know what to do with. We will only know to receive in waves. We will understand then what sudden shock feels like. We won’t know what is an accident and what is on purpose. We will hope we are not on purpose. Our antennae will stay open to all the coming signals. Our body will stay safe within the knitting of our skin.

I pedal hard after Maddie, but the van, dumpy as it is, outstrips me. It starts to rain. I bike the neighborhood. I make wider and wider circles, uncertain. I know my parents need me home. But I don’t need them.

I can’t find her. The roads are slick and empty, the cornfields hissing in the downpour. I turn the handlebars toward the only other place I have left.

I find you out playing our game, staring into your own lit-up house. You’ve drawn your hood over your head to keep all the pieces inside. You clutch something heavy-looking in the folds of your jacket. Not the razor. Not the walkie-talkie, either, but a weight I didn’t know you’d been carrying.

I step forward to watch the silent movie with you. Through the window, his face turns red as he screams at your momma. His meaty fingers walk like spiders up her arms, pin her shoulders against the bedroom wall. I see my sister’s face turning away in shame. There are no words we can possibly say to stop it. There is nothing in all this flood to say.

I reach out, fast, to yank your arm from your pocket. Your daddy’s pistol flashes, slick from rain and sweat, threatens to leap from your hands, but you have a new grace to your movement, and you stop it this time from falling to the ground. You hug it close to you like a friend. You take a step away from me, breathing hard.

“Give it to me,” I say in my dad’s voice.

You don’t move.

“Hey, I’m serious,” I say.

Static.

“Lucas,” I say.

It is no longer your name.

I break the distance between us and take your teeth in my mouth. The nothingness of the dark deluge covers us. The pistol rests hard between our stomachs. You jerk back, surprised, but then you realize I don’t care how much of my blood you drink.

And that’s when I yank the gun from your grip. Wheel. Plant myself and level it with the window’s perfect frame. My hands stay sure as I aim this third arm at your daddy’s head. I can already see the flies. I can see him strapped to the autopsy table. Imagine my father coming to the scene and realizing it was me, it was always me he was out chasing in the night. I close my eyes just as you widen yours.

I pull the trigger.

Through the glass, the blush of your father's face deepens, a sun setting into violence. He does not flinch. He screams, and the sound is a physical thing that shakes the frame, but he does not die. I am a ghost to him. I am holding death in my hands, and it refuses to speak. I lower my arm, loaded and useless.

I look at you. You aren't surprised to find my chamber empty. You reach out a hand.

"Give it back," you say.

The demand breaks the spell. I stumble backward, the metal slick in my grip. I can't let you have even this hollow power. I turn and sprint.

"Nick!" you yell, but I'm already scrambling through the backyards, tearing my clothes on the barbed wire, slipping on the wet grass. I hear your footsteps pounding behind me, a hunter in the dusk. I run until my lungs burn, until the houses fall away. I slide down the muddy trail to the river, seeking the only sanctuary we know.

And there before me is Eve.

Maddie is floating in the center of the current, her face turned up to the rain. A halo of blood slicking the surface.

I freeze. Behind me, you skid to a halt, and I hear the air leave your lungs. We wait for gravity to remember us.

"Maddie?" It's hardly more than a whisper.

She opens her eyes. She doesn't look at me. She looks at the sky.

"It didn't work," she says. "I'm still here."

You stumble past me, toward the bank, and your foot strikes something soft. You look down and cry out.

Lying in the silt is the goat. Adam. A red mouth grinning where it shouldn't be.

I look from the carcass to my sister. I don't understand the ritual. I don't know what she promised the river. But I see the razor—the one she taught you to use—glimmering in the mud, and the clean, sure cut across the animal's throat.

And I know two things: She made it bleed so she wouldn't have to. And I am just a boy cradling a heavy nothing in my hands.

I watch the current take the blood from her skin and carry it downstream. We don't speak. We don't pray. The water is the only thing that moves.

We swallow up the night. Eat ourselves whole. We wait to spit out stars.