Camping in a ghost town in Utah

Poetry

Matthew Wallenstein

Crickets’ legs rubbing, making sounds like teeth clinking on the rim of a bottle. The night keeps spreading, spilling from it, spreading like the wet center of your body, moving outward, over me. A body swallowing a body, like feet releasing from the earth then pushing deep into it.

GRIEF, PORTRAYED BY INSIGNIFICANT ANIMALS OF CHILDHOOD

Fiction

Sabrina Canepa

When we were bored, we used to swat flies with our horseback riding crops.

At first, it was out of annoyance. We’d sit—me and the other girls who worked on the ranch—in the haystacks between chores, when the sun was too high, too direct, to work under it and aim for flies.

But then it became some sort of game. We’d time each other, how many kills we could get in a minute, a competition for the only blue Gatorade or to sit in the makeshift throne we made out of grass hay bales, the most comfortable bales.

The flies had always been there, barely alive and swarming during early spring and then fat with manure and blood by midsummer. They were dead once the first chill of late fall hit, but we massacred them by the dozens every day until then.

The wide-headed crops with short handles worked best. More control, more surface area. Dressage whips were too long and thin, wobbled in the air as they crashed towards a temporarily still fly.

I was a decent killer.

But the aftermath of it all. We left the exploded bodies, the dismembered legs, the blood.

Remember, these were just flies.

The hay barn we sat in was made of old wood, stained from storms and grime older than all of us combined. The blood soaked in all too easily; the flies’ black bent legs were covered in dust by the end of the day, blended with the fibrous wood as if a piece of the original design.

I don’t talk to those girls much anymore, but the barn still stands there. It’s been scraped of hay and whatever else we left on the ground. It’s reached landmark status. People used that barn for so long that the government intervened, said that’s enough humans inside, then boarded everything up and put a too-new chain link gate around it. Like it was a crime scene.

And maybe that’s what attracted the other flies all those years ago. For every fly we killed, twenty, thirty, forty more swarmed us. I can’t tell whether the flies who arrived after were mourning or not, bloodthirsty or not, but I know that they were more frantic in their movement, less willing to hover. To let us rest.

I used to sit in the backyard of my uncle’s house as everyone drank and mingled with other family members. He had a willow tree and an overgrown rock garden that led to a pond. The water was murky and lined with slick algae, but I could still see the orange-spotted koi fish twisting and turning beneath the surface.

I mostly just watched them, but I stuck my hands in a few times: wanting to touch, wanting to grab and hold in a way that followed me well into adulthood. But the fish always scattered, the broken surface warping their retreating figures into something messy and disorienting. I’d wait until the water settled and the koi resumed their choreographed-looking movement before walking back inside. It felt wrong to leave them scattered like that, like the harmony was shattered, like I broke something expensive and not just the reflective water.

Koi grow to the size of their enclosure. This worked for my uncle. The only purpose his fish served was aesthetic: something for guests to marvel at before they entered his three-level, marble-saturated home. He kept them at a medium size, so that they were impressive, but not huge, something to move past. They were below pets, more akin to the crystal bookends or mahogany grand piano he kept in the living room. He found that everything’s value matched its price tag.

But then the fish disappeared one by one; the water wasn’t deep enough for them to evade neighborhood raccoons.

“They scream,” my uncle told me as he grilled burgers and vegetable skewers. I watched a koi’s scale pattern fade from orange to white to black then back again.

“What?” I asked once I processed his words.

“They scream,” he repeated, “when the raccoons pull them out of the water.”

He flipped a burger. Scales blurred.

“It’s like a fucking buffet every other night; the raccoons rip them apart slowly and the noises the fish make wake me up,” my uncle continued.

I could tell we were both stuck on different parts of his story.

Him: on losing sleep. Me: on fish screaming. On imagining the sounds they made, how high pitched, why their vocal chords served an evolutionary purpose. To the raccoons coming back every night because the koi were easy prey despite the noise. Maybe the koi’s sound was some sort of warning signal for nearby prey: this isn’t safe, find somewhere dark.

And rabbits would run back into their holes, fish would sink into sediment, bats would swarm, as they do.

And somewhere inside my uncle would be awake, would be annoyed, wouldn’t get up.

I was always the type of person to look away from roadkill. To avoid eye contact with death, with bodies stretched across intersections, the insides of something left in the open.

The remains of bigger animals never seemed real. They were often off on the winding streets that not many people traveled, their bodies moved to the side of the road to allow safe passage for cars.

Sometimes the roadside animals weren’t killed by tires or windshields. They were coyotes with a bullet in them discarded to public land.

People didn’t like animals they didn’t raise wandering around their property.

It was the squirrels, however, that made me stare. Because I’d seen countless squirrels get hit, not recover. I’d hit them myself by accident, twice. They were never alone.

The end of their life always involved some sort of chase, a kind of game, with another squirrel or two.

The squirrels who didn’t get hit always went back, always checked on their friend. As if the flattened rodent would rise again, would say, “You’re it.”

Coyotes where I’m from hunt in the sun. This is to say: coyotes where I’m from are comfortable, have evolved to walk among neighborhood dogs and pick their meals from family farms.

Like my family’s chickens.

At night, the chickens stayed in a coop with fencing and room to nest inside. But during the day, they were free to roam, free to get picked off by local coyotes, one by one. There wasn’t much we could do.

Or maybe there was.

We could’ve kept the chickens inside. But what kind of life was that?

I’m here, asking what kind of life that was.

This is about things killing other things. And isn’t that still some type of murder?

Eventually, the flock thinned out to one chicken, a hen, who had black- and gray-marbled feathers and was the meanest of all the chickens. The nicest was the first to go, as these things are.

Coyotes always left some feathers, so we knew which chicken was gone before we did a head count. It was my first experience with death, really, and how I learned that death wasn’t always the absence of something, but rather the presence of something else. Like tarantulas.

For a while, my family’s yard was a collection of the grotesque. Because as the chickens disappeared, different animals appeared. I hadn’t known tarantulas were native to our yard, that the chickens had feasted on them and snakes and sometimes lizards until the chickens were gone and the pests were present and I was too scared to go outside.

My family didn’t eat our chickens. They were there to provide eggs for a couple years then to live out their lives, if they had a chance.

With every new crop of chicks, I’d sit in the enclosed part of the coop with them, taking turns picking each one up so they’d grow used to touch, to my presence.

But the chickens always preferred each other. At least, until there was only one left.

I don’t know much about chicken anatomy, but I know that the last hen could crow, could scream as if she was a rooster. I don’t know much about chicken psychology, but I know that the chicken missed something, either the presence or the affection of the other chickens. I don’t know much about chicken communication, but I know she was trying to tell me something as she followed me around, making noises that I’d never heard come from a bird, or from any animal. I don’t know much about grief, but I know that the chicken forgot everything about herself in her loneliness.

Post-Covidia

Michael Thompson

Several Unaired Episodes of the Hit TV Show What Would You Do FICTION JP Mayer

What Would You Do is a reality TV show starring John Quiñones. On the show, hidden cameras record actors doing bad things to each other in public. Everyday people are expected to intervene. If they do, John Quiñones praises them. If they don’t, he yells at them. I have been caught by the show’s hidden cameras fifty-seven times. They have not aired any of the episodes.

Okay, so it was October, and I was walking to the grocery store to get sultanas and active dry yeast because I had been watching Bake Off again, and as I’m walking there, this dumb kid fell off his bike. And it was so sudden, too—like he was biking slow, all meticulous, eyes on the sidewalk right in front of him, then out of nowhere—bam. Just smack flat on the pavement. I laughed a little bit. And like, I get it. It wasn’t a great look on my part, I get that, but here’s the thing: he looked just like that kid from the Charlie Brown Christmas special—the one with the orange shirt and the buzzcut, who dances by shrugging over and over? You know the one. It was wild. And like, I haven’t watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special in some time, so it’s not like I was primed to see that little buzzcut weirdo in every twelveyear-old that rode by on the street.

But anyway, he fell off his bike and I laughed, and John Quiñones popped up out of a bush and told me I was a bad person.

#4

I used my blinker to change lanes on the highway. I was heading home from my partner’s house in Southborough—it was a forty-fiveminute drive, and it was 3:00 a.m., and I was the only one on the road, but I used my blinker to change lanes. It was instinct more than anything else.

I clicked it on, shifted lanes, and then, right behind me, a pair of headlights flashed on, and I could just make out John Quiñones driving this silver minivan, cameraman in the passenger seat. I saw him flash me a thumbs-up in my rearview mirror. He tailgated me for a little while after that, and I missed my exit.

#8

I snuck a roll of Thin Mints into a movie theater. I’d kept them in my freezer up until I left the house, and they were still icy in my jacket pocket. I had them in that inner pocket that jackets sometimes have. The pens, gum, and cigarettes pocket. I just had the Thin Mints in mine, giving me frostbite on my right nipple.

I took my seat, right in the middle of the theater. It was a Thursday 5:00 p.m. showing of some movie where Ben Affleck plays a detective who has autism, which is a real genre of movies that exists—like the only way we can respect autistic people as a society is if they’re master detectives or brilliant doctors or some shit like that. I’m in the middle of the theater pretty much by myself. Just me in the middle, some teenagers in the back row, and this one guy sitting right in the front row. And it’s like, buddy, what are you doing down there? It’s weird. And I’m curious, so I tried to get a better look at him—tried to see what his deal was—and as I was looking, I took my sleeve of Thin Mints out of my jacket.

As soon as I did, the screen cut out. Right in the middle of the trailer for Fast and Furious 12: The Apotheosis of Dominic Toretto, the screen cut out, and I saw my own face up there instead of Dwayne Johnson’s— and the camera panned out a bit, revealing John Quiñones in the seat behind me, that smug fucking look on his face. He lowered a microphone to my lips. He asked what gave me the right.

I saw someone cut in line at the Point Café. He was rude about it, too. He had a Bluetooth earpiece. I remember thinking, Now this guy’s got to be an actor. People like that don’t exist outside of Lifetime movies— waving their hands up and down and going on and on about “the figures” and “the New York deal.” Those aren’t real things people say to each other.

“I need it Friday afternoon at the latest,” he yelled. One hand pressed that dumb fucking piece of plastic further into his ear canal. The other grabbed the coffee that I had ordered, that the barista was handing to me. He threw a five-dollar bill at her. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t see John Quiñones anywhere.

It was December. It was snowy and icy, and I saw a man crossing the street. I’d been watching him for a little while, actually. And like, I don’t mean that in a creepy way. I mean, yeah, okay, it sounds creepy when you say that you were watching someone for a while, but just put yourself in my shoes.

It’s December, and you’re heading to the bookstore to buy your dad some book about World War II, or maybe baseball statistics because it’s almost Christmas, and you forgot to get him anything and you have no idea what he likes, because he’s your dad, and your dad doesn’t say what he likes. Your dad doesn’t talk about himself. But he does seem like the kind of guy who would like books about World War II or baseball statistics a whole lot, so that seems like your best bet.

But you’re me, right? And you’re depressed and cold, and it’s almost Christmas, which always sucks because you hate the Eagles, and one of the only Christmas songs they play on the radio is “Please Come Home for Christmas,” but the thing is, you actually like that song. You like it a lot. So you have a crisis every Christmas, like, wait a second, do I actually like the Eagles? So that’s a whole thing.

So it’s cold, and it’s December, and you’re thinking about the Eagles, having a little crisis, when suddenly you see this guy crossing the street, and he’s doing it in the most endearing way you’ve ever seen somebody cross the street. He’s wearing an oversized peacoat and a long purple scarf, and he has a paper coffee cup in one hand, gripped tightly against the wind. He’s trudging through the snow, walking in dramatic stutters across the ice, alternately holding his arms scrunched up to his chest, and then flailing them about for balance, spilling his coffee all over the place. And like, there’s not that much ice, so this all seems kind of unnecessary, but before you really have a chance to think about it—about the ratio of ice on the ground to the melodrama of this guy’s every step—he slips, right at the curb in front of you, and you—me you catch him. You—me—suddenly find yourself holding this very silly man whom you’ve been staring at for some time now. And you’re holding him holding him. Like you’re so close. Feel-his-breath-on-yourface, see-the-snow-in-his-scruff levels of close. It’s a real little rom-com moment.

And you say, “Are you okay?” and this guy—he smiles, nods, and he pulls off his mask, and it’s John fucking Quiñones.

#31

I met Jenny at the coffee shop on Hope. It was May, and she was telling the barista about her final project for her fine arts program. She said that she had synesthesia, and she was working on a series of paintings inspired by the aura of Harrison Ford’s voice. I told her that I met him once. I bussed his table back when I worked at Hemingway’s, which was where all the Upper East Side parents would take their kids whenever they visited for family weekend. I told her that he had ordered the lobster roll and a craft beer. She nodded knowingly. We started dating, me and Jenny. We dated for months. And it was so surprising, too, because I’d kind of given up on love. Like, I’d had my big, long relationship, and it had ended terribly, and I’d sort of fallen into that mindset of, like. Okay. I’ve experienced love. I’ve experienced falling out of love. Time to cross those off the list and move on with my life. Maybe try jet skiing. But Jenny was surprising. She knew a lot about plays—about the history of plays and theater across the world—and I was interested in hearing about it, not because I liked theater, but because it was Jenny telling me about it. Something about her voice—I don’t know. I have nothing original to say about it. But I did love her. I told her that, even before she told me, and I meant it.

It was about three and a half months into our relationship—we were sitting at a bar, and she got so excited telling me about developments in affordably filming Broadway shows. She gestured when she talked, and she gestured a lot whenever she got excited, and that night she got so excited that she knocked my drink all over me—spilled it all over my pants—and instead of trying to sop it up with the napkin that was right in front of her, she pulled a tiny grocery receipt out of her bag and tried using that. Just patting me with this tiny slip of paper. And then at a certain point it clicked in her head, I think, just how absurd she looked, and she stopped, and her own laughter brought her kneeling to the floor. It brought us both to the floor, right there with the dust bunnies, hairballs, and bottlecaps. I said “I love you,” and she said, “I love you too,” and that was that.

About three months after that I got the text from my ex. The big one. They wanted to see me, they said. I think they’d gotten into a fight with their boyfriend or something—I don’t know. I remember I was sitting on my couch, and Jenny was in the kitchen making refried beans, and my phone buzzed again.

“I miss you,” it said.

“I miss you too,” I replied. I wasn’t really thinking. I did miss them, in the way that you miss a person who you’ve known for so long and haven’t seen in a while—the same way, I think, that you might miss a childhood home. Even after the kitchen was remodeled, and a new family had moved in—a family that put up weird art all over the walls and had kind-of-questionable takes on vaccines—still, it was familiar, that home. And you didn’t want to live there anymore. That would be weird. But maybe you’d visit once or twice for a barbeque. Use the pool. Drive by one night, and point and say, “I used to live there” to the person sitting in the passenger seat. And they’d nod and pretend to be interested, before going back to sleep, because it’s been a long day, and they just want to go home.

So basically, no, I don’t think I missed them, and I don’t think they really missed me. But we told each other we did. And the second I tapped the little blue send button, the boom mic swerved out from the tiny gap between the couch and the wall, and John Quiñones popped out of the TV console, knocking over photographs of my family and sending my DVD copy of Space Jam skittering across the hardwood. He stood up straight, putting his arm around Jenny’s shoulders as she came back into the living room. They both frowned at me and shook their heads.

These all happened in the same day, and I don’t remember very much of it. I’d gone for a walk by the river to clear my head. I remember feeding the ducks bread. I remember a group of teenagers at a picnic table, spooning flour into plastic bags. I remember walking by Buddy Cianci’s house and someone looking at me through a gap in the curtains. The window was open, and it said, “Thank god he doesn’t have a dog.”

I remember a lot of people running up to me and talking to me, but I didn’t listen to them. Any one of them could have been John Quiñones, or none of them, or probably every single one of them.

#45

And then of course Dad died.

I had to eulogize him at the funeral. One thing they don’t tell you about public speaking is that it’s even harder when your dad’s dead. When you have to say, out loud, to a roomful of people you know (and even more that you don’t), “My dad is dead,” and all those people stare back at you—they’re all thinking, That guy’s dad is dead.

They’re thinking, I wonder what he has to say about it, that can make us all feel a little bit better.

I took three shots of Fireball before the eulogy. I went up to the podium after my sister, who gave this long beautiful spiel about how Dad was always there for her, how he supported her through her divorce, when she was struggling badly with her depression and had to take care of Charlie—Charlie, who was only a few months old then—all on her own. For a eulogy, it was a real fucking bummer, to be honest. But I went up after her. And for the first time, I looked at my dad’s body—like, really looked at it. They’d put him in a tie, which he would have hated. He always said that—that after he retired, he’d never wear a tie again, and I remember thinking, Well, fuck. Sorry, Dad, because now he had to float around forever as a ghost wearing a tie. And it was ugly, too. Purple and beige—like where the fuck do you even find a purple-and-beige tie? I reached out to take it off, but I stopped myself when I remembered all the eyes on me. It probably looked very dramatic—this silent jackass reaching toward his dad’s corpse, then pulling away. Very Hamlet.

I spent about a minute just staring at that ugly tie before I even got to his face, and that’s what did me in. His mouth was ever, ever so slightly open, and his teeth were stained gray from the formaldehyde. And the sliver of his tongue between them—

I threw up. Right there, right into the casket. I buckled over. Probably killed the mood—I heard a lot of gasps and saw a lot of people I didn’t know standing up. That’s the other thing about funerals: there are always more people you don’t know than people you do. And it’s like, who are you people? This is Dad’s funeral we’re talking about. Dad, whose favorite hobby was sitting on the couch after work and watching Frasier reruns. Sometimes I think there are people who just go to random funerals. Who just bask in all the grief to make themselves feel better about their lives. People thinking, Well, I might be divorced and unemployed and live in a shitty studio apartment, but at least I’m not as fucked up as that kid, who just puked next to the decaying corpse of his father. That’s what it is, I bet. Lots of those people.

So I puked, and my mom ran up to me, put an arm around my shoulders, and led me to a back room. I remember because it was the first time I heard her stop crying.

She sat me there, in this fluorescent-lit back room of the funeral parlor, which is never a good place to be. As places go, the back room of a funeral parlor is just about on par with the dentist or the DMV, and just a couple of notches above the podium beside your dad’s corpse. But now I was settled at a folding table with a box of stale, half-eaten donuts in front of me, and Mom went to grab me a bottle of water. There was a water cooler right there next to the door, but no cups. I remember that. That annoyed her, that there were no cups, but at least now she had a task. She looked determined, like if she could just find me a water bottle, the world would be okay again, and Dad wouldn’t be dead, and I wouldn’t have thrown up right in front of the hungry eyes of a hundred grieving relatives and in-laws and funeral parlor employees.

So she went to get me a bottle of water, and the second she left I knew I wasn’t alone. And lo and behold—John Quiñones was sitting on a folding chair in the corner, elbows propped on his knees, head propped in his hands. He was wearing a black suit, which was nice of him. That he had dressed for the occasion. I nodded. He nodded back. We didn’t say anything. I could see he’d been crying.

I screened texts from my friends. I quit my job, and I lied on my resume to get a better one. A poet asked me if I wanted to trip acid with him after reading at a speakeasy. He’d performed for about an hour—this long slam poem that compared the homelessness epidemic in Providence to the song “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. It was hard to pay attention. The speakeasy was in the back room of a sex shop—which, don’t get me wrong, is definitely top ten for me, in terms of kinds of back rooms I’ve been in—but there wasn’t any air conditioning, and only one tiny window in the corner that was all sealed up. I was sweating. Everyone was sweating, and the folding chairs they’d put out were the kind with fabric on the seats and backs, so everyone’s sweat was getting all sopped up into the chairs, like a sort of reverse sponge bath.

So we’re all sitting there, sweating and miserable, and this fucking guy was going on and on, rhyming Bezos with pesos at one point—and of course, he wasn’t sweating at all. He was wearing a sweater and corduroy pants and one of those thin, puffy fashion scarves, but he was completely dry. It was bizarre. But you have to support the arts and small businesses, so, like, what are you gonna do?

After an hour, this guy finally finishes his Tracy Chapmanhomelessness epic poem, and I finally went to the bar to get another drink. It was twelve dollars, and it didn’t even come with a cherry in it, or a little umbrella, so you could tell right away it was a speakeasy drink. And I was still drenched with sweat, but at least now I was also drinking. Huge improvement.

After a while, the poet came up to me. I was on my third Sazerac (but at this place they were called “Romeos” on the cocktail menu, which was weird because, like, who the fuck was Romeo, but anyway). This poet came up to me and said, “Thanks for coming tonight.”

“Of course. The arts.”

“What?”

“Supporting the arts.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

The Edison bulbs behind the bar were dim, but I could still see right away the outline of the microphone taped under this guy’s shirt. I’d already clocked a hidden camera, too, shaped like a bottle and plainly labeled “VODKA,” tucked behind the Svedkas. I’d already clocked, too, the top of the mic guy’s head—the mic guy ducking under the bar right in front of me, waiting to pop out at my first slip-up. I had trained myself to look for these things.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t normally do this, but you seem super chill.” That’s what he said—super chill—like an undercover cop. He got close, whispered, “I always drop acid after a reading. Want to join tonight?” His breath smelled like cigarettes and his teeth reminded me of my dead dad’s.

I’d tried LSD once before with my buddy Zed, right after the whole mess with Jenny. I thought it would be a good way for me to process everything that had happened, but instead I just spent hours staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, and a few more hours after that sobbing into a bottle of shampoo.

I put down my drink. I played along. I said, “Yes.”

I said, “I would love to drop acid with you, a stranger, on this Tuesday evening.” I leaned really close to him when I said it, so the mic would catch every word. He subtly nodded to a potted plant across the room.

But that wasn’t the end of it. He took my hand, led me outside behind the bar, pulled the tabs out of his wallet. It was windy, and my sweat-drenched clothes clung to my skin, wrinkled up at all the joints. He tilted his head. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, this isn’t right,” and I thought, here it comes, but he just put his hands on my shoulders, shuffled me a foot to the left, turned me forty-five degrees. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”

He took the tabs out of their little plastic bag, split them apart.

I said, “The production value is high for this one.”

And he said, “What?”

And I said, “Never mind.”

He held a tab out and told me to open my mouth. I played along. The attention to detail was something else. They’d even printed little rainbow donuts on the paper as blotter art.

“Ready?”

“Oh, yeah. For sure,” I said, and then he kissed me, which was annoying, but I played along. His mouth tasted like eggs, and he pushed me back against the wall of the alley—against the bricks. I think he was trying to be Very Romantic, but it just kind of scraped up my shoulder blades and left a me-shaped silhouette of sweat on the red bricks. And then he smiled, this small sexy-adjacent smile that just looked silly, because he clearly thought he was the shit, but his mouth was so tiny, so he just looked like a smug mouse. I opened my mouth to make a joke about hooking up in the alley behind a sex shop, but before I could say anything he put the tab on my tongue, which was probably for the best anyway because the joke hadn’t gotten any farther than its pre-production stage. But anyway, he kept his finger in my mouth for a second too long, and I had no idea what to do with that, so I just licked it. I never know what to do when people put their fingers in my mouth. His fingers tasted like cloves and cinnamon, like he’d just rubbed off a Christmas tree. The tab tasted like nothing at all.

When we went back inside—I’d expected the speakeasy to be empty. I’d expected John Quiñones to be standing behind the bar polishing a glass with a white rag and clicking his tongue at me, like he does. I’d expected cameras and microphones tracking my drunk steps, panning across the room as I stumbled up to the bar, vaulted over, and tackled John Quiñones to the carpet—the carpet stained with years of bar juices and dropped olives. I’d expected cameras on me—one left, one right, one above—filming me from every angle as I shook John Quiñones’s shoulders and begged him to leave me alone. Shook his shoulders and begged him, only for the mask to fall off his face— because no, it would never be so easy. And the real John Quiñones would step up behind me and ask me why I had tackled him, why I had resorted to violence. He’d click his tongue.

But the bar was the same as we’d left it. My Sazerac—my “Romeo”—was right where I’d left it, the condensation from the ice pooling on the counter. I’d left my coat and wallet there, too. No one had taken them.

“You okay?” the poet asked.

I nodded and took my seat. The employees were folding up the sweaty chairs, and some prick was being an absolute ass to his date, bragging about his job in New York. I remember wondering if it was the same guy who cut in line at the Point Café, who took my coffee. I remember the chairs squelched as the bar employees folded them up.

The poet sat next to me, leaned way too close to my earlobe, and whispered, “It won’t kick in for a bit.” He squeezed my thigh. He smiled. He said, “I gotta take a piss,” and I wondered if that was code—if that was the signal for John Quiñones to come rushing out. But nothing happened. When he stood up, I could no longer see the outline of the microphone under his shirt.

I dream about him, sometimes. Not the poet. John Quiñones. I dream of helping an elderly woman load her groceries into her trunk, and John Quiñones popping up from behind her sedan. He smiles at me. He asks me why I decided to help the woman with her groceries when it would have been so much easier to do nothing. I shrug. He says, “You’re a good person.”

And I say, “Say that again.”

And he says, “You’re a good person,” and I kiss him on the mouth. I hold him in my arms.

I dream that he takes me to a movie, and dinner after, and the conversation is stimulating. He surprises me—the way he can hold my attention, the way he knows so much about random things. He says, “Did you know every curling stone used in the Olympics is made on the same island off the coast of Scotland?”

And I shake my head. “I didn’t know that,” I say. “Could you tell me more?”

I help an older gentleman at the table beside us with his coat, and John Quiñones bites his bottom lip. I laugh at all the waitress’s jokes, and I address her by her name. “Thank you, Kate,” I say when she takes our menus. “Kate,” I say at the end of the meal, “that was absolutely lovely.” She hands me the check, and I tip her 30 percent, and John Quiñones fucks me right there on the table. The cameras are on us the whole time. One left, one right, one above. “Get a good zoom on the face,” John Quiñones says, and I don’t know if he means his or mine or both. It doesn’t matter. It’s not usable footage. But the cameras—they’re on us the whole time.