When he entered the house, the first thing Sam did was open all the windows. It was early morning and he didn’t like how eerie the pale sunshine felt without bird song to accompany it.

Then he put a pot of coffee on, and soon the steady gurgling of the coffee maker began to brighten up the shadows in the kitchen that the sunlight couldn’t reach.

Monica hadn’t paid the electricity bill, he realized, as he attempted to flick on the hallway light. Resigning himself to the darkness, he strode down the hall, his loafers leaving damp footsteps on the carpet behind him as he made his way into the first room on the right.

The light switch didn’t work in there, either, so Sam began to hum tunelessly as he hunted down Gemma’s favourite toy-- a shaggy grey elephant with a blue scarf.

When he turned to exit the little bedroom his black overcoat snagged on one of the bedposts, and he froze.

For a split second he’d thought it was his daughter’s hand, tugging on his clothing like she always did, asking him to stay for just one more weekend.

Then he shook himself and left the small dark room behind him, retracing the damp footsteps he’d left in the hallway and making his way to the front door, stuffed elephant in hand.

He frowned down at the toy as he placed it in the passenger’s seat, wondering why it wasn’t familiar to him.

Monica had insisted that it had been Gemma’s favourite and he supposed she’d be much more likely to know about their daughter’s favourite things than he would.

She’d told him so often enough.

Frowning, Sam turned the key in the ignition and resolved not to allow himself to become distracted again as he had to get to the office in a few hours and if he wanted to have time to stop by the motel Monica was staying at he couldn’t afford to sit alone in his car and stare at a stuffed elephant for a half hour.

…….

By the time he reached the motel it was almost noon.

Taking firm hold of the elephant without looking at it he left the car and proceeded through the empty parking lot to room number six.

The door was yanked open a second after he knocked and he suddenly found himself standing in front of the small, underclad figure of his ex wife.

She scowled without preamble, sharp green eyes narrowing and thin lips pulling down into a frown. “What are you doing here?”

“You wanted this,” he said stiffly, and watched as she looked down at the stuffed elephant gripped tightly in his hand. When she looked back up her expression had shifted. She took a step back so that her face was hidden slightly by the shadowed doorway of the motel room.

“She wasn’t yours, Sam.”

He dropped his gaze and nodded. He’d suspected that, of course, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as he thought it would.

It hardly mattered now.

He pushed the elephant gently into her hands but her fingers didn’t tighten enough to hold it, so he left his hand outstretched, pressing the small grey form against her belly and between her hands.

She looked at him and he thought for a moment that she was waiting for him to leave, but then she moved closer and rested her chin atop his shoulder and he leaned his head against hers, revelling in the familiar feel of soft hair against his cheek.

“You smell like her,” she said.

I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. Sorry that those few minutes you managed to make for me were ruined by the accusing way I looked at you. I’m sorry that you felt the need to look away.

What I wanted most was to say I understand-- that I still love and respect you and that I could never hold any of this against you.

But when I gave you that coffee mug all those years ago, I didn’t buy it because it was the cheapest thing I could find-- I bought it because at the time I believed you were the greatest Dad in the entire world.

I didn’t think about the other fifty mugs on the shelf, each one bearing the exact same words.

But I’ve gotten pretty good at seeing things in context now-- I can see that you’re just another human, that you get stressed and lonely and thrilled and make split second choices without even knowing you’ve made them just like everyone else does.

You’d think that discovering the context of someone would make them more understandable and interesting-- but all it seems to do is make you look so small.

But that’s really all just a part of growing up, right? You find out what sex is, your parents gain new dimensions, and you realize that you won’t be a kid forever.

But the world’s been starting to reveal itself to me in ways id never considered-- with jokes about where prostitutes come from and comments about the excessive amount of melanin in absent fathers--

To be clear I know you’re more than this. You’re more than a statistic or a stereotype-- like I said, I’ve discovered your humanity.

So when someone mentions that everyone’s family seems to be broken these days, I remind myself that we’re different-- that you’re different-- that I know who you are at heart, cocaine be damned. I remember how good you are at chess, how your tone softens when I cry, how you cover up your social fumblings with jokes.

But it’s hard to remember any of these things when I haven’t seen you for a year. When I can’t send you a fathers’ day card because I’m worried you’ll take it the wrong way. When you couldn’t make it to my graduation even though you knew about it a month in advance.

It’s hard to remember you’re the same man who taught me how to eat crawfish and told ghost stories to my friends-- hard to believe you’re any different from the other deadbeat dads when the first word that comes to mind when I hear your name is absent.

So I can tell you how much I love you, how much I admire you and how much I want you to get better.

I can even tell you I forgive you.

But I can’t tell you I understand.

Rena tells me everything-- how self conscious she feels at mass, how she doesn’t like eating anything messy in public, how her mother doesn’t trust her, how a boy winked at her in English class today.

I tell her everything, too-- at least, I tell her things I could never tell anyone else. I tell her about crying without knowing why, about watching a couple have a completely silent argument at the mall. I don’t tell her that she’s the first person I’ve talked to since I left for school this morning-- but then, I barely acknowledge that to myself, anyway.

Tireton suggested imagining myself in a safe place whenever I start to feel anxious and she asked if there was anywhere I liked to go to relax. I lied and said I liked to go to the lake by myself sometimes.

I know it’s silly to lie to a therapist but I just can’t bring myself to spill my guts to someone who hasn’t even told me their favourite colour-- it’s not that I think she would blackmail me or anything, but I hate that feeling of one sidedness-- it feels like I’m sitting high up on a see-saw and my partner’s about to step off and leave me to fall crashing to the ground.

It’s unbalanced.

That’s what’s so great about our friendship, Rena. I give you all the little bits of me and you give me all the little bits of you-- not as a trade, but just because we can. Because we’re special to each other that way.

I think maybe you’re my safe space, because when something embarrassing happens to me, I picture telling you the situation later on. Like today when the teacher told us to get into groups of three and I ended up sitting awkwardly at the edge of a table of best friends since kindergarten-- I pretended to tell you all about it-- imagined how we’d laugh about it, and how you’d tell me that those girls don’t matter.

I wish she were here so I could tell her-- but I don’t think I’d be able to anyway. Maybe it is better that I’m writing all this down instead- I’d hate to interrupt her third retelling of how that guy from her math class asked her out by folding a note into a paper crane.

Last night she told me she was in love. She said it with dark eyes glittering in the moonlight from our bedroom window and with a small, thoughtful frown.

I felt honored she would reveal something like that to me-- and in such uncensored words--

“I’m in love with him,” she’d said. “Me, Cy. In actual love.”

-- I Couldn’t wait to sort through her thoughts and feelings with her, to find out exactly who this english class kid was and if he was worthy of my sister.

Rena tells me everything but she couldn’t tell me anything beyond the color of her boyfriend’s eyes and his opinion on Nirvana and she wouldn’t tell me what had happened when I found her in the bathroom with mascara streaking down her cheeks.

“It’s private,” she’d said, and suddenly I felt as if I’d overstepped a boundary.

I wanted to remind her that there were no limits to what we could tell each other-- but how could I tell her anything when she wouldn’t tell me everything? When she barely even smiles when I say hi to her anymore?

So I talk to you, the looseleaf section in the back of my latin binder.

It ’s not the same, because of course you can’t talk back to me, but at least I can put all my thoughts onto a scrap of paper without worrying that when I’m done the paper will still look blank.

A clique of lives surrounds a sunny maypole

which fosters glowing-warm integrity

so that every one of them is awed and able

to appreaciate their own identity.

I linger but a step from thermal rapture,

frozen in a cave of hibernation.

I try with all the arts to join their culture,

but my selfdom hides in icy rumination.

Yet suppose in years to come I leave the cave

and see that while I slept the maypole froze--

integrity was drowned beneath its wave,

and on its grave self worshipping arose.

To save the maypole from the frosty ground

I’d join the clique of lives and live half-found.

Take a moment to observe-- see the humans on this earth?

See the inordinate amount of them who, shortly after birth,

have chosen to ignore all their instinctive inhibition,

deciding that they’d rather focus solely on ambition?

However, if you squint-- if you’re as quiet as can be--

then you might-- by slim chance-- be allowed to see

a peculiar girl-- a slightly backward one--

a human with the tendency to shun

those who pay themselves in wages to convention--

Yet she, of course, pays much more just to evade attntion.

“Maybe,” she’s been known to say, “my life will contain more--

Perhaps when my breath beats gently at death’s door,

I’ll have established more in this tediously wanting life,

than the accomplishments of a salesman or the status of a wife.

But until that day, my conviction will stay drawn--

I’ll flip burgers until midnight-- I’ll do homework until dawn!

And if, by chance, hesitation is of mind to slice me through,

and I find myself undoing all I dreamt that I would do--

at least I can stand firmly, secure in the decision, tht as sturdy as success seems, it’s often just adhesion.”

Come further, my dear tourists, let’s observe the next one here,

were you aware that Jupiter has only one leap year?

Birth complications, terminal diseases, freak accidents-- these are the things I wish I could fight.

Things that happen so often just because of something as offensively meaningless as chance.

I wish I could make chance tangible. I wish I could look into the face of whatever it is that controls fate and ask it why bad things happen and then I would like to blow its head off because “these things just happen” is not a real explanation.

There’s nothing more satisfying than a fist colliding with an antagonist’s jaw, and, likewise, there’s nothing more frustrating than the inability to fight your demons simply because they do not exist.

I have had far too much experience with invisible demons, which is why if I could have any superpower I wanted, I woul choose the ability to turn the untouchable tangible so that I could destroy the randomosity of suffering.

I remember the first time I stepped onto the soft, cool sand of a beach, peering out at the stars and the moonlit ocean. It was the first time I felt science calling out to me-- mouthing in strange tongues and tracing shadowy figures in the sky.

At the time all I was aware of was a strange connection to nature. As time went on, however, it felt like everything in Rhode Island-- from the softwood to the soil to the sea-- was trying to make me understand something.

Eventually, this affinity I had for nature culminated in a career of science.

Many people regard engineers as the underlings of true scientists-- the Aminadab to chemistry’s Aylmer, if you will. But that idea is flawed. The truth, at least according to my own experiences, is that an engineer is a man who reaches beyond the various theories and hypotheses of science and attempts to become a part of the thing himself.

It was the day after I turned thirty-two-- the day I woke up to find that my best friend had been brutally murdered and I couldn’t remember where I’d been last night-- that I realized exactly what it means to be a piece of science.

One foot in front of the other. Stumbling in oversized loafers through rain-soaked grass.

Carefully maneuvering her way around mud puddles without stepping into the winding road for fear of a sudden car.

She doesn’t like cars.

She looks up into the pale sky, blinking away raindrops from an overhead branch which trembles in the wind.

She can smell snow.

The cool morning light illuminates the pale curtains but is unable to reach the small, dark figure which kneels, as if frozen, by the window. A still hand holds up a tremulous chain, at the bottom of which hangs a strange pendant in the light. Two soft, unblinking eyes scrutinize this pendant, watching as it sways ever so gently in the bleak sunlight, willing it to lend its magic to her.

The curtains shift slightly in a chilling zephyr of wind, and for a second the light touches the girl’s outline.

The moment ends and the girl is once again surrounded by darkness.