Toast was burnt. It flaked over the eggs, all milk and cheese, the way he liked. His fork scratched the ruins while the locals bristled. They were prone to distrust him. With dirty nails, fish smell, and napkin tucked in his shirt front, the Croat appeared an older cut of man best left in photographs, in silk-covered albums on the toilet top. The dice, especially, rankled. Tattooed on the foreigner’s first and second fingers, the bluish black square pair ill accorded with Brighton’s flowerbox aesthetic and well-guarded inertia.

Fair enough, figured the Croat. Not everyone took their lessons in ink. Throwing a punch, his sister had told him, was like throwing dice: small chance you got what you wanted. In recent years, he had adapted her words into more of a challenge. Stretno, he’d say, fists up.

He’d tried his luck plenty and wound up here.

Brighton. Hardly punishment, it boasted a railway stop and strip mall; a Top Three school—Go, Bison!—with three lacrosse fields; a masonry house that sold honey, cheese and potpourri; an abandoned asylum; a reservation of hilly trails; a power plant between the pencil pines and, deeper into the green, an old Christmas tree farm. It was a pretty town with established families who prided in their lot. But the dogs whined.

So Alex—the Croat—would have diagnosed the problem upon his arrival. It wasn’t the skittishness his presence excited, but the undisclosed restiveness of individuals. Each nursed his own want, he deduced, rendering Brighton a waiting room where everyone smiled and itched. Perhaps he had moved at the wrong time. According to The Horn, and the editor’s nephew’s column, the air churned with “eels of ennui” after the desecration of St. Mark’s—repainted from white to pool bottom blue—and ahead of the local election that nobody cared for. Neither candidate would truly change a thing of pretty, restive, Brighton, manifested by the round booth of potbellied oligarchs.

They came most days by habit or hive mind for bagels, gossip, and endless mancala. They reminded Alex of the men’s bible study when he and Ivana and Mama lived in Hvar. Down the stone road they would process after mass and claim the row of chess tables by the water. Their bibles lay open, pages tossed by the Adriatic wind, while they frowned over stalemates and sipped thermoses of homemade grappa.

“Good morning.”

Alex started. The man nodded his mug—not grappa, but coffee of similar potency—and returned to mancala before Alex could nod in turn.

Feeling somehow caught, he set his fork down and peppered his plate. Another trick of Ivana’s, to prevent overeating, no matter how cold or congealed the food. If it remained edible, it remained to be eaten. Dog to vomit.

He pushed the plate away and shrugged on his jacket. How much to tip? The waitress was nice, the coffee tasted like wood, and he had twelve dollars. Cataloging the fridge (beer, banana, leftover banana pudding) he put it all down and left the shop, wondering when he might pepper memory.

* * *

While the Croat deliberated, a girl at the counter scribbled on a legal pad. Her coffee was pale with cream, and her muffin beheaded on the saucer. She ate the bottom first, savoring the sugary top even though it would no longer be oven-fluffy when she got around to it. She might stay eight hours, darkening her notepad with the first draft of the next blockbuster film franchise. So she dreamed, and in six years she would sit in the canvas chair and suck her teeth at the musclebound ex-influencer botching her life’s work.

Until then, she had breakfast. Midterms. The Waning Gibbous. It amazed her how phases of the moon might govern human interaction, or give lesser instincts license. If she were to act on crude impulses, she would try weed. Talk to strangers. Write lewdly, or not at all, and see if it shook anything loose.

College was supposed to embolden her. All it did was tease. The carpeted dorm-world of booze and boys had supplied her with knowledge from the Kama Sutra to Hobbes, but she did not feel liberated, altered, or much impressed by the classic baptizers of adulthood. She felt alone, while the things she wanted crowded and clamored her in their grossest forms. Classes were easy. Classmates were mice. Roommates went out with rainbow eyebrows and returned reeking of body fluids. She cloistered herself in safe simulations, where adventure was ready, sex fevered yet clean, and love unrestrained by herself and others.

That was one reason she wrote.

* * *

She pocketed the extra dollars. Big man, kid manners. His English was good, if dulled by a heavy mother tongue. She did not recognize the accent, which bothered her because she knew her patrons: their names, orders, parents, bowel movements (she knew the food). This one had come three times in the last week and a half and was making his way through the omelettes. While the unknown in his case had intrigued her at first, it now troubled her sense of all-knowing. Then what was she good for?

A saving solace to the trailer was its promise of adventure. Well, the slim possibility of drifting like a whale into open-road sunsets. Going home wasn’t an option, but she could glut her senses with silver dunes and scraped canyons and the bumpers between. Then she grew better acquainted with her condition, whose subtle chokehold precluded such liberties.

 “Done with that?”

She said it to say it, already knowing the counter girl’s reply: “Actually, can I get a refill?”

The waitress poured. She would keep pouring coffee while the trailer sank in the grass. It was growing roses up the sides. Call that saving solace.

* * *

 The glasses got him.

Owen watched him brood over the menu, as if he would deviate from the waffles and home fries. Extra syrup, extra ketchup. Staled of its charm by dogged routine, Adam’s order evidenced an invasive stagnation that had slowed them over the years and would surely entrap them like flies in amber. Owen felt stuck—and felt all manner of emotions because of it—but whether it smothered him was to be decided. Every moment held pivotal power. Owen recounted this week’s highlights:

Shorts in church. Eating over the sink. Toenails in the car.

He knew it was petty to tally details, and that he tended to pump meaning into minor incidents until the overinflation hung over their heads. But if actions showed character, what of patterns? He had long ago forfeited polish and polite society; what he wanted was compromise. He wanted Adam to know his discomforts and give a damn. He was tired of unmannered manliness, sitcom wit and ill-timed farts (there was a proper occasion, Owen argued: the toilet). And while he could forgive the immaturity, and the embarrassment in public, and even the erosion of his attraction for Adam, he could not overlook the deaf carelessness.

But he’s your striker.

His mother loved to play Venus or Nemesis, depending on traffic. I-95 must have been sparse.

It was his father’s interjection from the passenger seat that hardened Owen’s resolve. It’s only a sport when two play. Are you playing?

Owen kneaded the tops of his thighs. The waitress was coming. “Have you decided?”

“I was about to ask you the same,” Adam said, slapping the menu shut.

He ordered the usual, extra syrup and ketchup. “I like it dripping,” he said with a wink.

Owen hated the waitress for writing it down. The mockery.

She turned to him.

“May I please try the gyro with chicken?” Overcompensating and performative. She jotted his order and disappeared. Owen felt sick.

 “So?” Adam nudged him under the table. “Vienna or Budapest?”

“Budapesht.”

He didn’t hear the correction, or the difference. “Let’s book it! Get us some fat Hungarian sausage. Come on.”

Owen forced a laugh and took a napkin from the dispenser so he’d have something to quietly rip.

It was his fault. He expected progress where Adam was dug in. Happily riveted, proud to rust. It was like that since soccer. Adam had been no good, growing in spurts and parts. Until high school, his arms were too long for him, and when he dribbled or intercepted, he’d end up smacking the ball with his hand. The kids dubbed him Gangle and ran around aping him. Adam took to smacking them.

Owen stayed neutral. He felt bad for Adam, looking like that, and with the beatitudes burned on his amygdala he refrained from theatrics and even passed the ball. Be nice, get nice. It hadn’t stopped Gangle.

With an effusion of retrospective empathy, and love, Owen believed he had had good reason. It was only one punch, a jab to the gut that dredged up lunch, and it either signified his equality with the rest of the team or his singular status as Adam’s friend.

Behavioral analysis or wishful thinking, Owen was sapped.

“Hey.” Adam reached across the table, eyes rounding with uncharacteristic gravity.

Owen dropped the napkin. Hating himself, he joined hands. Adam’s were warm and, history aside, reassuring. He’d miss those hands.

“Why don’t we get married.”

* * *

Everyone likes muffins, she would say if asked. But the reason she ordered hers was self-loathing. If that didn’t explain itself, why waste the words? Economy of language was a virtue; economy of diet, a farce.

It sounded callous. Lucky for her, no one asked. And soon she would be gone without a trace. She would graduate with a portfolio and connections, and the world would know her name.

Her pen name. She had decided to use one in the second grade, when a liking to poetry assured her of her own genius (“A dog is more a friend than cat / And that is that!”) and future fame. She worried for the problems to follow. How would she manage her money, with relatives creeping for their share? How would she choose between Hollywood and San Francisco? How stay grounded when her fans fawned? The answer was obvious: a pseudonym. She’d learn that word later, when the time came to choose.

Alice Winterseed. Bianca Bangkok. Lady Larissa. They shimmered like wedding garments in her envisioned future. She couldn’t wait to wear them and be admired. It bothered her later, the realization that her writing was never really about writing.

What did it matter, when she got what she wanted?

She wanted… Celebrity aside, she hoped to write films of substance. To spin masterpieces, sting audiences, and lay golden eggs for the world to admire… And again it came back to the shallow need, clawing up her throat for gratification. This was the second, primal, reason she wrote. Could she help it?

Eat the muffin.

Her stomach squelched. She shifted on her stool to hide the noise, but the slam of a tabletop did the work for her. She turned.

Two men in a booth stared at each other. The tall one, fists clenched, looked fit to roar while the preppy one got up, napkin fluttering, and made his way toward her.

No, just cashing out. She noticed his eyes—hard as jade and deepened in color by the creeping, wet red—and pretended to write while he practically shoved his money at the waitress, declining change.

Goosebumps. The rest of the diner murmured until both men were gone. She wondered what happened and how she might adapt it.

* * *

 Twenty minutes. 

The off-duty waitress bounded up and in. She kicked off her sneakers. The screen door slammed, rattling the hob. She had to fix that—but not now. She had better eat.

She emptied a bottle into the pan and lit the stove. Could she wait without looking? That would have been easy. She opened her cell phone for the first time since yesterday. One missed call. Nanette was slowing down. Giving up. Good.

There were times Gene felt exceedingly selfish, times she knew she had done right, and evenings in the balance when all she could do was mull right versus wrong over boxed mac n’ cheese.

Ten more minutes.

She had tried everything. Pills, joints, spirits, gods. Nothing stopped the terrible possession that occurred on the Half Moon and saw her naked and grimed by the side of the highway, or the green of Hole Three, at morning light. She worried for winter. Would the Brute be so stupid as to dance her body around the woods and then leave her to freeze over the hoarfrost?

It would be for the best.

The Brute minded no restraint or depressant. It observed the sole courtesy of a regular schedule, but even that Gene doubted. She couldn’t trust it to stay where it was and deny the temptation to pounce and glut on unwitting souls, Gene’s included. Waking with gristle in her teeth, she gathered the Brute was a deft predator that never went to bed hungry. She kept a second tub to the laundry basin so that she could wash herself of the gore and grim imaginings of what she’d done, without contaminating her clothes (really just the blue diner dress). She in turn washed the tub until her knuckles bled. Small recompense for the Brute’s inflictions.

She ate all of the macaroni, hoping to curb the Brute’s appetite, and watched night fall through the window over the sink. By the silvering pines, she had five minutes. She unzipped her dress.

The moon was crowning when she stepped into the cold. Hairs arise, she picked her way over the crabgrass and wondered where she would wake—

if she wanted to.

* * *

Quotidian Affection in Stainless Steel: holding hands on a greasy table, warped in the napkin dispenser’s reflective side.

It was the worst perversion yet, and he was at fault. So it would appear to every damn Brightonite.

Were they wrong?

But the sin of leaving Adam would absolve itself. Even Adam would see that it was only convenience keeping them together. It was knowing each other and no one better that compelled him to propose. For twenty years they had leaned on each other like sunflower and stake, thriving if twisted and unstable. And whether they loved each other, flowers died anyway.

They both learned that lesson when Owen said, “Pardon?” and Adam stared, moon-faced, having assumed an extravagant yes.

He tried again. “I said, Why don’t—”

“No. Stop. Here?”

Adam looked helplessly about the checkered floors and hanging lamps, families in line at the bakery counter. The diner had been their treat after soccer practice, their haunt after lecture. It was where they had fallen in love. He pressed Owen’s fingers, willing them warm. “I thought you wanted this.”

Owen tugged free. “We’re not working.”

He skirted the questions and self-flagellations, willing Adam to vent without raising his voice. The waitress darted in and out of periphery. If she noticed, fine. He dreaded the scrutiny of the old men at mancala or other parties with no stake in the booth, which felt more and more like an unfurnished terrarium where he and Adam were made to dance for observation.

“I knew you’d get tired of it,” Adam said.

“What?”

“Fixing me.” The old striker had resurged. “That’s what you really wanted.”

“Right,” Owen bridled. “Then I must be a saint. Or a fucking idiot,” He relished Adam’s surprise at the public profanity, “because you’re helpless. I’m done.”

He tore through the sunny streets and found himself home, packing, gathering momentum with each empty, swinging hanger. He would stay with his parents and sort the lease later. Adam watched in the doorway, reciting old stories to change Owen’s mind—Remember the oven roast? That time in the rain? The win against Newton?—and unwittingly tainting their sweetest memories. Spent of pleas, he watched Owen struggle to pull the burgeoning duffle with its dead wheel.

He picked up the other end.

Together they carried Owen’s things down the walkway. Owen had wanted to line it with pansies. Adam brought it up. Silence. They reached the trunk. Adam lifted the duffle in. Owen got behind the wheel. Adam stood, hands on hips, while Owen rolled down the driveway, no longer theirs.

He heard later that Adam had moved towns. It didn’t ease the separation. There was too much time to reminisce, memories self-selected and colored in Adam’s favor. He saw Adam’s stubble, his patterning of veins, his tongue hissing Budapest. Why was there so much time?

He filled it with night classes at Brighton State, and drinks afterward with his classmates. Most of them were the younger end of their twenties, sloppy over shots and opinionated about nineties music. One of them, an older man with tattoos and a strange accent, was the unlikely chaperone by whose side Owen sulked, judging and envying their carefree peers.

The man was named Alex and had immigrated from Croatia. He talked of small things from home—the fish, the cypress, the snickering cormorant—but no people. Not yet. He was a woodsman by passion, mechanic by trade. Owen found their acquaintance a well-timed curiosity.

“Why are you here?” he asked one night.
“Why are you?” returned the Croat.

Second chances and old flames.

Neither admitted his truth, so they drank. It was cold when they left the pub, and the fog of their breathing made Owen theorize that, while spooks came from within, they could be respired.

* * *

She exed the bark with a box cutter and moved on. She had three more bags, each a mile apart, to stash before sundown. She couldn’t help the frozen hair, but the numb jog back would become a death march. On the last Half Moon, she’d had to stand over the stove until her hair charred in order to regain the feeling in her face. It wouldn’t surprise her if she lost digits.

She determined, however, to enjoy the holidays. The Brute’s next takeover was a week off. In the meantime she would get a tree. A short spruce would look nice behind the trailer, with multicolor lights she could see in the sink window. She knew a good spot where she could cut one unnoticed and drag it on an old tarp back to the grass lot.

Why hide? What else would she spend her tip dollars on? She contemplated sending Nanette and the children gifts, but it would only complicate her distance from them. Their safety outweighed her loneliness. She might as well get used to it.

The Christmas tree farm opened at eight. She didn’t expect so many people about, inspecting the rows of fir, pine and cypress and haggling for the perfect one to clip, skirt, and hang with gold balls while the little ones played hide and seek.

Gene paced the quadrant of firs, scenting the sharp, heady boughs. She brushed one with her glove to see how many needles would fall. Growing up, she had hated vacuuming under the tree. Nanette would do it, accidentally bumping the gift boxes to gauge by their weight and sound what they might contain. Usually scarves and socks from unknown relatives. Nanette envisaged them by their taste. The Browns, always with the argyle, were busybodies with ski jump noses. It was a shock to learn, at cousin Peter’s wedding, that they were short, loud folk who smelled of deodorant and liked the chicken dance.

Gene sidestepped as a boy in a yellow coat ran giggling by. “Come out, come out!” he yelled.

She watched him disappear, heard the crunch of gravel behind her, and turned again. A girl toddled across the firs, giggling mad. Her dark snowsuit blended perfectly into the greenery, and her well-timed movement made Gene grin. She and Susie, her niece, would get along. They were too clever for their own good, like Nanette.

She found a scrappy little balsam for fifteen percent off, charmed more by its bent shape and grim prospects than the discount, and bullied the teenaged salesman to twenty-five. Then came the hard part: the delivery. The manager needed to okay her address, which ended with directions and landmarks rather than numbers. Having committed to the Christmas spirit, and having tried and respected the strength of her coffee, he signed off.

Gene left in a triumph. She had not indulged herself since the move four months ago, following the Brute’s first, inexplicable emergence. She hardly understood it now, but she’d found a way to live despite the heartache of—

There she was.

It was Susie. And Peter, her brother. And Nanette. They held hands as they crossed the parking lot and a man dragged their tree behind them.

Nanette had gained weight. That and the haircut suited her. She had always wanted to be a mother, board books and Cheerios on the minivan floor, and she bore her achievement like a laurel wreath. Gene watched in awe, receding between the cars. She grasped for that feeling, which until a moment ago had convinced her of her own rightness. Seeing Nanette had confirmed and, at the same time, paled it. What was Gene’s world—the crabgrass, the box mac, the two wash tubs—to her home?

* * *

He taught the kid to shoot.

He didn’t expect Owen to like firearms. Or the outdoors. Or killing things.

That was off the table, Alex made very clear. You’re not ready.

And he, Alex, was not going back.

But the skill of marksmanship would help focus the kid, whose relentless enthusiasm and desperate chatter fooled no one. He was spiraling after twenty years’ attachment, longer than some marriages. Some lifetimes. Alex sympathized, and took him to the target range. When Owen got the hang of it, they moved to the woods.

He practiced on gooseberry clusters and knotholes. Alex lent pointers and subtle nudges until Owen’s left-listing aim vexed the Croat to take the rifle and demonstrate a proper shot. Eyeing a smattering of pine cones forty feet off, he shot them one by one.

Owen’s reaction tickled him. Guns weren’t always bad.

He was settling nicely into Brighton life. He got a job at the gas station and moved from selling candy at the counter to diagnosing engine troubles. He passed Finance 101 with a coveted A-. He adopted a mutt from the rescue shelter and named her Princess, after Ivana’s dog. His was a sorry excuse for the smart black shepherd who would tear gulls from the air, but Princess 2.0’s crooked gait and rheumy eyes made him love her more.

Rain or shine, the sky hadn’t decided when he took her to the trails on Christmas Eve. He wore the rifle over his shoulder, intending to shoot the highest pine cone he could find, spray-paint it gold and hang it on his door. Is that a tradition? Owen would ask when he came later for wine and Les Mis (a tradition of Owen’s).

Yes, he would say, just to mess with the kid in the name of fast friendship and yuletide spirit. He accordingly veered from the wide walking path, taking an uncertain offshoot in search of the lofty cone. Princess circled him in confusion, not knowing what to make of the unexpected divergence. She settled on adventure and loped ahead, halting at the top of a short, steep rise. She barked, tail wagging, and waited.

Alex trudged uphill, slipping on dead leaves. He braced the pencil trees on either side for support and crested the rise, breathing heavily. He should lay off the diner food, but he was growing to like the place and its steady rotations of food and people. The impression of unrest had not gone away, only mollified under the growth of new habits.

The land fell sharply before the Eastern stretch of the forest, patched at his right with the sparse and orderly tops of Christmas trees—the farm. He had not yet been and grinned to see it from this unlikely angle, gilt by the early sun. He peered down the ravine and found a diagonal path across the rock face. It was stupidity to take it. So he did.

Only by approaching the farm on foot did he notice the unusual translucence through the branches. An old tarpaulin, he thought, drawing nearer. He didn’t like snooping, but he was only following Princess, who loped happily ahead. She saw what he saw. They entered the green lot. Alex ignored the queer feeling that bunched his legs in the way growing pains had when he was younger. Ivana used to make fun of his whining, but her choppy laugh turned the joke on her.

Alex fancied it at his shoulder. No, it was the rifle.

He had promised not to shoot again, yet here he was, anxiously sidestepping as if he had transported to that last hunt in Hvar, when he thought he had felled a buck but instead…

There was no tarp. It was a pale pile, steaming over a dark radius sprayed with pine needles and gore. Alex moved forward, crunching gravel.

It moved.

From a heap of long limbs, a creature surfaced. Needles in her hair and blood down her front, she pinned him with her flat, silver stare. Alex knew the face vaguely. He knew death in the woods. He knew he made a promise and, in the throes of danger, let everything go.

* * *

He was lucky to have the rifle, so they said. They also praised him, interviewed him, and pictured him in The Horn. All the while, he wondered, was this what he had wanted? Could anyone tell and rightly pursue what he wanted?

Stretno.

No. No earthly person had that talent.

The human carcass was later identified as a twenty-something local by the name of Adam.

“We were going to get married,” Owen said over and over, gasping between sobs.

The ex must have returned to see loved ones at Christmas. To try again.

Owen’s heart, crushed and dripping, opened a sister wound in Alex. He had betrayed Ivana, and he could not calculate what good this particular rifle had done him. The haunt of Brighton Woods—hitherto unheard of—was dead and unable to claim more victims. But, if without arms he had encountered the creature, would it have attacked? If it did, if it killed him, would it have done ill?

Would it not have relieved him of this penitential American farce?

It was past time to question.

He and Owen fell into step. They breakfasted, walked, and parted ways to gather more stories for the next day’s banal stimulation. It stirred some gossip until they faded into town folklore, the hunter and the heartbroken, and then anonymity. In the meantime, a certain busybody wrote them into a sitcom called Denim Romance about a fussy gay man and a boorish foreigner and the tender moments that may or may not have passed between two slow-scabbing souls.