Applesauce maker, pine, tin cover

the shapes of massive intersections in the major cities of the world. Our interests have so few overlapping places, or rather, my interests are alive within his field but unseeable from his perch. He takes the aerial view of a problem, while my lens is elemental, stuck in the soil, the undergrowth. I do not complicate his expertise, and he does not threaten my solitude. I drain the remains of the coffee Cory left in the pot and open the laptop computer that sits by his side of the bed. I also have a computer…had. Who knows? It all reminds me of camping in that whatever you bring is too much and too little. Camping! An image: my mother, her hair streaked with charred marshmallow, raving about ants. I type: Hi Mom. Here, well, we’ve made it! We’re getting settled in. Really, Cory is getting settled; I am putting it off. He likes it here. The weather is temperate… I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t name, with certainty, the season. But weather is that thing people talk about to signify their lack of cannibalistic intentions. Boxes. Cory’s things. Now that we are foreign workers or expatriates or roving lumps of meat or whatever we have been officially tabulated as, now that his role is solutions architect and mine is wife, I have become suspicious of him. I want to know what ominous inkblots bloom behind his eyes. It can’t speak well of him, for instance, that he’s ended up with me. At the bottom of the box, I find the lightly spiderwebbed face of a phone and think of the day Cory dropped it onto pavement. We had our own pavement—a long expanse of it—on which we parked, and it connected to roads, roads whose names we knew, and they connected to other roads we still knew but not as well, and on and on like that, this very phone locating us and offering guidance at each juncture until, were we to continue for days, we would eventually hit upon a checkpoint for a new country, and if we crossed it, the phone might work or not work, depending on which arrangements the ranking gods of telecommunications had made on our behalf. Here, it is a block of metal and glass with some dark accumulations of dust and skin, its innards uncoiling beneath the fractures. I press my thumb on the button, and nothing happens, but then it does. A fat smiling picture of the two of us on a hike fills the rectangle. I type the access code and paw through the choices—zap the marbles, splatter the birds. A barrage of stale notifications crosses the screen. I peek into his social media. It’s all held over from before these boxes crossed the ocean, the information posted weeks ago, and it feels like waltzing into a cabinet of cryogenically

32 CAROLINA QUARTERLY

preserved lawyers, their commentary organized for some unnamed magistrate. For some reason I want to keep it from him, but the apartment offers no hiding places. Each corner is so clean that even our meager little thoughts ricochet through the emptiness. Spoken words glare, confrontational as neon signs. I fall asleep on the couch clutching the phone. I dream that he returns from work, faces me bluntly and says, “Are we in a fight? I literally can’t tell.” I respond in an evasive, tedious style, which is more or less my signature. “You can’t tell in a literal way, you mean? You can’t tell in a way that is expressed in letters? You can’t tell in a way that is plain, factual, and unvarnished?”

“I mean that I just can’t tell.”

“If there is a fight, the belligerents in this fight must be you and me. We are the only people here. The body of you and the body of me. The continent of you and the continent of me. The government of you and the government of me.”

“If we’re talking like this, there must be a fight.” In the dream, Cory’s face is a smooth, confident thing. Maybe this is just how he is at work, that place he spends almost all of his days but where I have never seen him operate. “But it doesn’t need to be you against me. We could be fighting our problems in this country, together. Or the memory of our last country. Or this apartment. Or this kitchen. Let’s fight the kitchen; this kitchen sucks, and we both know it. Or, well, the memory of you could be fighting the memory of me, or the future of you fighting the future of me. Any version of you could fight, at any time, any version of me, or this country, or that neighbor, or any room in the whole goddamn world or maybe,” and his eyes brighten and inflate, “all this tension is about how your mom never calls you on your birthday.” When Cory the living human comes home, he lies down opposite me on the couch, pokes me with a warm foot clad in a dress sock, and says, “I think it’s time we got a television.” He picks one out using the credit card, and on the day it arrives there is another intrusion of midday barks and a situation with a delivery person at the door. The television is smooth and oblong and expertly designed, and like everything else, I hate it. It hates me too. Quantities of starlight bounce harshly off the glass—a little world of zingy, faithless overtures. Men eating steak. Men hitting homers. Women on boats, in restaurants, trying on clothes. Women’s bodies dumped in lakes. A woman singing with her leg curled around the mic stand. Men ice fishing. Theaters of tenderness and lovemaking. I watch with the sound off. Language is my home, if I have one.

EMILY FLAMM 33