[redacted]

CC:LIVH: Contrivance and Compromise

 A fine snow sifts down, turning red lights into glacé cherries as streetlights strew confetti.  It’s a glimmer on the air but a bastard on the feet: in the thirteen minutes Creighton’s been on the balcony, she’s seen five people bite it.  She winces, hands winding tighter on wrought iron, thinking “don’t think bite.”  Especially since Louis is hovering (literally hovering, his Pierre Cardin oxfords easily inches above the grating), making shooing motions with his hands back towards the goldlit window.  Creighton interrupts her circular breathing, learned during an unfortunate affair with a didgeridoo player during a high school summer program at Sarah Lawrence.

“I’m thinking,“  she snaps.

“And thus, being,” Louis replies, worrying his cufflinks, “but you will not be being for very much longer if Fiona suspects something.”  Creighton produces several cigarette butts from a baggie in her coat pocket: Nat Sherman Fantasias.  

“Et voila. My excuse.  And never doubt my attention to detail.” She stretches her hand into the light: they’re all the pink ones.  “Renfieldessa needed a smoke after the excitement.”

“I hate to ask” - it’s Louis’ turn to wince - “but just in case, have you any more of that vitamin, the one you used for Minerva?”

“It’s really difficult to get a non-hydroxylizable cholecalciferol.”  Louis looks at her blankly.  “You’re not allergic to the vitamin, exactly, so I need a metabolically stable cognate of the transient photoproduct, which is…”  Louis frowns, starts to speak.

“It doesn’t even matter.” Creighton puts her hand on his cheek, then rapidly moves it to his shoulder.  “I think I have it: a way to get us out of here safely, get Macky a scapegoat, and rein in our Amazons’ excesses.”  She tosses her hair back, shuddering off the last shreds of faux-subservience, and they step back inside.

It’s absolutely drenched in blood, and the women are prancing around the mens’ slumped bodies.  Upon a second perusal, one of them is alive - just passed out.  “Dancing Queen” is on the stereo.

“It’s an ABBAttoir!” Creighton smirks over her shoulder. If it’s going to go badly, she thinks, at least I’ll end on a decent pun. She takes a deep breath, and wrenches the volume knob to zero.  The sapphic vampire cult whips ‘round as one.  The silence is sudden and absolute.

“What is the human doing?” Fiona screeches, and makes a half-lunge towards Creighton, but a single eyebrow-crook from Louis stops her in her tracks.  Creighton’s unwillingly impressed.

“I have perhaps not been entirely honest with you,” Creighton says, voice surprisingly steady.  “I am not Louis’ pet, but neither do I wish to harm you.”  A few vampires snicker at the idea.  “I can’t say how I know, but the cops are looking into the CFO carnage.”

“We’ll kill the cops too! Male piggies are still men!” a vampiress with blonde dreadlocks and cut-glass triceps rises.  

“A) you can’t kill the entire NYPD,” Creighton rolls her eyes. “B) this is the twenty-first century. There are women on the force now.”

“Like Olivia Benson,” the new-turned vampire offers dreamily.

“Look,” Creighton says, summoning all of the essays she’s read on hostage negotiation.  “I understand why you feel like you want to avenge yourselves.  If I had fabulous fangs like you do, I’d want to rip the jugular out of the douche who roofie’d me the other night.  I just think there might be a better way to go about this.”  The vampires look cautiously interested.  Creighton tugs the neckline of her dress down a little bit, just in case.

“What?” Fiona’d definitely noticed the tug.

“You can hypnotize people, right?”  She waits for a few nods.  “And it eventually wears off?” More heads bob.  “So tell them they desperately want to quit their jobs and go work at a non-profit. Hell, if they’re particularly vile, tell them to sell all of their assets and become a dishwasher at McMurdo Station in Antarctica.”  The vampires, especially the newer ones, are starting to smile.  “They value their status more than their lives - they’d probably like to think they went out at the hands of an insatiable orgy of beautiful women.”  

“I can see your point,” Fiona purrs, coming over to stroke Creighton’s hair, “but what about the Gardaí?” Creighton’s eyes go heavy-lidded and she looks lazily up into Fiona’s blue gaze. 

“All of the men here tonight, they’ve done terrible things to women?” Fiona nods.  “You’ve still got one of ‘em alive, haven’t you?” She nods again.  “Here’s how it’s going to work:  you’ll convince him that he’s a closeted bisexual and has read Bret Easton Ellis novels one too many times - not too much of a stretch there, should be easy to implant - and he’s gone full American Psycho. But here’s the catch: tell him that he’s done it on other I-bankers. And now his investments are going to shit, the guilt is too much, and he has to go down to the precinct and confess.”  Fiona draws back, draws lips over glistening teeth. 

“I like it, lass.”

“Only one other thing-” Fiona’s eyes Doppler-shift away into red.  “-tell him that he can only confess to Detective Macky Humboldt.”  Fiona smiles.

“Is the detective your boyfriend?  That’s sweet.  Ah, but does Louis know?”

__

Creighton’s back in the guest bedroom, and back in Valenciennes lace.

“May I get you anything else?  Warm milk? A glass of port? A nibble?”  Louis looks earnestly concerned despite the double entendre, and she blushes despite herself, pulling the neckline snug.  

“No,” cuddling against pillows.

“Do not quiet yourself around me, mon trésor.  Do not look away. I know you had to pretended, earlier, when I… but it was necessary. I…”

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend,” Creighton whispers, eyelids dragging down, fingers slackening at her collar.  Louis knows this time that it’s Derrida, but does not speak, or challenge, only gently closes the door.

We tried to stop Instagramming our food, we really did.  We realized it had become something of an obsession, rather than anything actually fun.  We halfheartedly threw up rationales: it provides a place card for memory so it’s like, when I look at my Hefe’d Scandanavian Benedict I’ll remember celebrating Aloysius’ birthday.  But really, how many times can you take a picture of brunch? Eggs are eggs, and even tarragon hollandaise made with quail yolks looks pretty much like the regular kind.

Besides, we were cool.  We were early adopters, trend spotters.  We were the backlash to the backlash.  If there were people in Duluth putting tilt-shift on their Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity?  We were over it.  So we quit, no pictures (of?) cold turkey.  Even when the pickled cauliflower in my Bloody Mary looked like a Frankenstein brain or a restaurant literally inverted the (so over) tower configuration by putting a dildo-shaped glass bowl through a hole in the table (you had to eat it with fondue forks), it went undocumented.  

Around this time we started losing weight, which was weird since if anything, the food tasted better now that we weren’t letting it cool while trying to get the right angle on the semolina toast points, and we were eating more of it.  We came up with theories: did you start Instagramming your exercise equipment?  But that didn’t seem to be the case - a rolled up yoga mat turns out to look pretty gross in photos.  We were starving all of the time: tacos bright with lime and cilantro in the mouth turned to dust in the throat.  

One brunch, when we were all poking listlessly at blinis with caviar, weak with hunger, not caring if we smeared black into cream in an unaesthetic manner, one of us, a scientist, came up with an idea.  His suggestion: half of us should just go ahead and take photos, the other half abstain.  A couple of us whose scallions were still in some semblance of order obediently produced phones, lined up the shot, scrolled through filters, and watched the status bar creep wormily rightwards.

When the photo appeared in our feeds, a heavenly feeling of contentment swept over us.  We clutched our stomachs and told our companions: we feel full! satiated! we are not hungry anymore!  The scientist warned us that it might be psychosomatic transference of the relief of a mental withdrawal, but we did the same to our dinners and the same flushness settled heavy in the belly.  It seemed that the very act of Instagramming had become a crucial component of the digestive process.

That was a problem: it still wasn’t cool.  We tried just fucking with brightness/contrast in Photoshop Express, but it did nothing to soothe the pang and we concluded that the upload, the share was critical.  The scientist threw out half-baked theories about some sort of quantum equivalence and electromagnetic transmissions, but since he was an evolutionary psychologist we weren’t convinced.  So we stopped tagging, unfollowed, made anonymous Instagram accounts just for our food: @zysiuskdl and @URLSDK.  But people always found them, and we kept shooting our artfully blurred Polaroid mimetics out into the void.  We became more and more loser-y with each meal, but at least we weren’t hungry.

Artificial

When you’re putting some Emergen-C into your water, and the faucet hitting the powder on the bottom of the bottle poufs it out into an invisible cloud that leaves artificial flavors and an almost acrid sweetness on your tongue when you breathe in, and you remember a brief trend from 6th grade where it was de rigeur to carry around a small Ziploc baggie full of powdered Kool-Aid and eat it throughout the day, licking your finger and dipping it into the bag under your desk, coating it with a fine grain that melts into Red Number 40 stains, and how you went along with the whole thing, and did like the unflinching fruit acids and painful sugarpucker of it, but were honestly, earnestly terrified that a police officer would find your little white-frosted baggie and think it was drugs and that you would actually end up in jail for possession & intent to sell Kool-Aid mix.

Once upon a time, two little girls grew up together, side by side in an unremarkable house with a porch and a lawn and an apple tree.  The elder was Dorrie, the younger, Anne.  They played together, two little blonde heads bent over the same project, two white skirts whirling when the wind knocked the petals from the apple blossoms, two sets of green beans tucked under unfinished mashed potatoes.  Those days they were difficult to tell apart, from the back at least, and if Anne was perhaps a bit more mischievous than her serene older sister, there was no harm in it.

As they grew older, Anne would enter into the classrooms that Dorrie had passed through, and the teachers would rejoice that they’d gotten both Gray girls, a matched set.  If Dorrie had been a bit more conscientious with her homework, a bit quieter in class, it was attributed to her slight deficit in youthful exuberance: Anne was rather the more charming at that. 

As Dorrie entered her teenage years, her yellow hair lightened further in the sun, streaking almost to white in the summer, where Anne’s dunned, but at least they could easily be distinguished from behind.  This seemed an innocuous enough divergence, at the time, although later it could be pointed to as a sort of early warning.  

By the time Dorrie graduated at the top of her class, Anne was running with a rougher group, one that dealt in cadged Franzia and the odd squashed Ritalin.  This too was smoothed over, a child trying to form her own identity in contrast to an older sibling.  “They’re both just so bright,” the teachers would say at parent-teacher conferences.  It was all still reasonably normal, but as the years stretched on, Dorrie, who was good at those sorts of observations, noticed a pattern.

When something good happened to Dorrie, something bad would happen to Anne, like a cruel corruption of Newton’s laws of motion: an equal and opposite reaction.  When Dorrie got a prestigious internship, Anne was fired from her summer job selling salt water taffy; when Dorrie got into grad school, Anne dropped out just a few credits shy of an Associate’s. At first, Dorrie attributed it to coincidence, and then as evidence mounted, to an odd connection between sisters, one that likely went both ways.  She waited for her luck to change, but after a few ruefully hopeful phone calls (post-car accident, difficult breakup, and case of mono) it seemed it only went the one.

Dorrie, wracked with guilt, dyed her hair dark as if to fool the fates, but she kept publishing in peer-reviewed journals and Anne kept getting unadvisable tattoos.  It got worse: Dorrie moved to a new city, skyline and carefully curated IKEA, and woke up three days later to a call from her mother.  Anne had been kicked out of her boyfriend’s house and had been homeless for three days, drinking from hoses, hiding from the sun.  “You can’t be afraid to be happy,” Dorrie’s friends counseled, but when her boyfriend asked her to marry him, she took a moment to wonder what hideous inversion saying yes might entail, when she got a raise at work she cringed every time her phone rang for a week.   

Dorrie and her husband are thinking about having a baby.  Anne hasn’t spoken to her in years, but Dorrie often thinks of her, of their childhood: the idyll of two little blonde heads, one slightly bigger than the other, bent over Sculpey or War!, over potions concocted from Drano and oregano or epic drawings spooling down unrolled paper towels.  She would love to have a daughter of her own, but something always stops her, a premonition, a dread, an unthinkable consequence that’s just waiting for her to decide.

CC:LIVH: Prose and Recons

“Yo, batgirl.”  Macky Humboldt stands on the sidewalk outside of the precinct, hunching shoulders into the wind and trying to make his official bulk inconspicuous.  If the other detectives knew he was reaching out to a 5’4” redhead with a penchant for artisanal bitters and Argentinian literature for help with his case, he could forget about a post-shift Jameson at the local for a couple weeks.

“Batgirl?” Creighton mumbles.  She’s been woken up from a nap after taking a few too many taste-tests of her Meyer-limoncello.  

“Vampire-bat-girl,”  Macky mumbles back, trying to edge further behind a domed blue mailbox that only reaches his waist.  

“Desmodus rotundus actually feeds primarily on quadripedal mammals, not humans.”  Creighton knuckles her eyes. 

“What?  Anyway, do you have anything about the, uh, the stuff I sent you, earlier?” His voice drops to a surprisingly melodic basso profundo by the end of the sentence.

“Hello, Osmin!” Creighton says approvingly.  “I haven’t really got anything yet, but unfortunately it’s definitely a supernatural issue.”

“Fuck,” Macky agrees.  “Wait, admin?  Admin for what?”

“Osmin? He’s only one of the best operatic roles written for the low bass.  Abduction from the Seraglio?”

“What’s a serralyo?  You know, never mind, I don’t want to know.  You owe me one, batgirl. The killings may have stopped the last time, but I didn’t bring in a perp, not even a body what with Miranda turning into forgotten shish-kabobs. I need a win.”

“Minerva, Macky.” Creighton sighs, tucking her phone against her chin so she can apply some anti-wrinkle cream under her eyes.  “You’re right.  Recon only, though.”

“Recon only,” Macky agrees. Creighton scowls at her phone and calls Louis.

“I need your help,” she sulks.

“Bonsoir to you as well.”  She can almost see the curve of his lips through the phone.  

“I need to meet Fiona again.  Not in an assassin-capacity, just reconnaissance.”

“And how do you think I can help?”

“I saw you with her.  She practically curtsied for fuck’s sake.  Don’t tell me you don’t have an in.”  Creighton gripped her phone with unnecessary force.

“I do have a certain amount of standing.”

“Then, there you go.  I was thinking I could pretend to be your vampire-slave,” Creighton presses a champagne flute against her cheek to cool the blush.  “Renfieldessa, or whatever.”

“Very well.”

____

Midnightish, clouds not quite obscuring the moon, the elevator doors of Louis’ Upper East Side lair sweep open.  Louis is clutching a compass-headed cane-with-embedded sword; Creighton, an aluminum takeout container.

“Your politesse honors me, but, chérie, there is no need to bring snacks to a vampire party.  Hmm, except,” Louis runs a cool finger along her jawline and down.  Creighton tosses her chin like a mare.

“They’re not for you.  Chili-roasted grasshoppers with a desiccated mezcal worm-gray sea salt dust.  All of the literature indicates that Renfields eat bugs, but I saw no reason to have to go downmarket about it.”  

“They eat live bugs,” Louis corrects gently, but Creighton’s glare compresses his lips into a firm line with just a squiggle of amusement as they exit.  “But I have just realized, nous sommes dans la galère.  If you were indeed my pet, your neck would not be…”

“Oh, shit.”  Creighton feels chagrin that after her careful eye-makeup routine she’d overlooked such an obvious chink in the disguise - and on top of that, an odd frisson.  “I have latex, in my bag… No.  I guess you’ll have to…”  Louis looks uncertain.  “Oh, fine. God!  after everything, you don’t even want to, maybe I could just poke it with a barbeque for…”

“Oh, I want to.” His eyes remind her that, despite their history of shallow sparring and unspoken truce, Louis is a predator.  “I merely regret that it has arisen out of necessity, and not, well…”  Creighton’s throat goes parched and she pretends it’s the limoncello.  “Do you want to return upstairs?”

“That would grant an undeservéd context,” Creighton sniffs, untying her scarf.  Louis is slowly advancing, making her step back until her spine meets a young treetrunk.  Her weight against it dislodges yellow leaves that rotor down onto their shoulders.  His hand is soft on her face.  “You don’t have to make it romantic, okay, Nerval?”

“Who knows if there is not a link between these two existences, and if it is not possible for the soul now to bind them together?” Louis whispers, brushing his lips against her forehead, the top of her ear.

“Derrida?” Creighton manages.

“No,” Louis says against her cheekbone.  

“Sappho?” squeaking.  ”Oh, duh, Nerval.”

“Me,” against the corner of her mouth, hand fisting her hair. “Nerval was a bit of a plagiarist.” Her mandibula. “But I’m not certain I truly understood my own words,” tongue on the place where her pulse was a metronome set to presto, “jusqu’ici,”  and she could feel his fangs slide into her neck with a soft pinprick and then, oh.

____

“I can’t believe you got blood on my Hermès,” Creighton says, leaning against Louis in the town car, not quite summoning pique.  

“Attention!” Louis hisses, pinching her inner arm.  “We’re here.”

“Damn it, where are my grasshoppers?”

“Baisez tes sauterelles. You need to be alert.  Information, then out, as you promised.”

“Looouis!” Fiona cooes, ratcheting open a door that opens garagelike from the floor.  “And your friend, Molly, isn’t it?  Are you sure,” pitching her voice low, “she will not cause a fuss?”

“Absolutement!” Louis cries, waving his cane magnanimously.  Creighton just smiles.

“Meet our guests.  Tonight, we have Cam, Dan, and Tam!”  Three men tied to Danish modern chairs nod feebly. Tom, one says, resigned.  Creighton watches Fiona advance on the one she thinks is Cam to straddle his lap, pushing her shoulders forward to try to get the best shot from the stick-insect pin/camera affixed to her lapel.  Just when Creighton, who has a high tolerance for erotica, is about to avert her eyes, Cam tosses his head back in ecstasy and Fiona rips it from his neck with a neat jerk and a messy shower of blood.

“That,” Creighton whispers to Louis in an attempt not to barf, “is what you might call a coup de foutre.”  

“Hush,” he whispers back, but Creighton’s on a mission.  

“Fiona,” she slurs purposeful, shaking her body from Louis and standing up.  “That was beautiful.  A misandrist live-action Pollock! The apotheosis of the mantis! The…” A young vampire rises to her feet from a Mongolian sheepskin barstool. Creighton can tell she’s only a few weeks old based on the queasy transition from spray-tan to pallor.  

“He deserved it,” she said flatly.  “He date-raped me, then invited his friends over, then left me in an alley.  I called the cops from my cell, but Fiona was the one who found me.”  Creighton sits down as if kneecapped; Louis runs his fingers over her hair as if to calm her.  But Creighton doesn’t need calming: she’s suddenly conflicted, a Trojan Horse trotting north-northwest towards Stockholm. She cranes her neck up towards Louis, skin pulling at puncture.

“Can we go home?” she murmurs.  Louis looks almost tender but Fiona licks her fingertips clean.

“Oh, no, darling, it’s just beginning.”

“Still, bio designers must grapple with the Frankenstein factor: a concern that their experiments will unleash some unmanageable new horror.”

At first we were skeptical about buying a couch made out of slime molds.  The color, for one, but the designers assured us that yellow slime mold couches were so 2023.  They could make them any color now.  We considered.

Pros: Ecologically sound; incredibly ergonomic (they would adapt their structure to your specific shape, even sending up stalks around your remote so it won’t get lost in the slime-cushions); definitely trendy.

Cons: If you feed them too much they revert to existing as single celled organisms, your furniture melting away; if you don’t feed them enough they die; you have to feed your couch in the first place; they are goddamn slime molds (the designers have been trying to get people to refer to them as “domestic mycetes” but come on).  

It’s arguably true that the cons outweigh the pros but eventually we caved and bought one, in a nice heather gray.  We put it against an interior wall, as we had been warned that too much sunlight could produce “uncharacteristic results”.  I missed curling up in a beam of light with a book, but I had to admit the slime mold couch was pretty comfortable.

After Iannis lost his job, we had to downsize to a smaller apartment, in a worse neighborhood, one with a slight mouse problem.  It also had east-facing windows that drowned the whole place, including the couch, in light.  We tried blackout shades at first but they made Iannis depressed, sluggish to wake, so we just let the fucker bask.  What could really happen?  If it was truly that dangerous, we rationalized, they wouldn’t sell them in the first place.

We started noticing small items going missing shortly after that, a pepper grinder, a pair of not-terribly-expensive earrings, a toothbrush.  At first we suspected the building manager, but as the list grew more and more baffling we couldn’t conceive of a man who would want all of those things.

The week of April 6: A plastic spork, the plug adapter for Britain (the European and Israeli plugs still in their mesh bag), a dishtowel printed with a map of the Puget Sound, six bobby pins, a grapefruit, an old Christmas card, a muguet du bois-scented French milled soap, and a bag of PG Tips.

It was also around this time that we noticed that the couch seemed to be getting bigger.  It’s probably just that we’re not used to seeing it in a smaller space, we reasoned.  We considered replacing it but, after moving costs, we couldn’t really afford another couch, so we kept it.  A few weeks later, we noticed that the mouse problem had drastically subsided, our traps sitting empty and no ovoid droppings on the ledge behind the stove.  It’s probably that the building manager set out poison somewhere, we opined, but from the corner of the eye the couch sometimes looked like it was pulsing.

On May 17, our cat went missing.  He ran away I wouldn’t want to live in this apartment either if I were him ha ha, we said.  We mourned, and put up flyers, and studiously ignored the terrible thought that was slowly dawning on us.  The hair tangled in my brush started to disappear, the morning’s bristle-twisted strands gone by evening.  It’s getting a taste for me, I joked, smile strained.

By June, the couch was definitely bigger, taking up almost half of the living room.  Its nice heather gray was edging back to a virulent yellow.  We bought it more expensive food, food that we couldn’t really afford, but things kept disappearing and the couch grew more obese and malevolent by the day.  The solstice was coming up, and we finally faced the couch and our dread, and decided to carry it down to the street.  When we placed our hands on it, the fabric had gone yielding and gelatinous, and we couldn’t get a handhold.  We overfed it, hoping that it would dissociate in times of plenty, as the research said it would, but if anything it just got hungrier.  We put up the shades but they disappeared again and again. We tried to take it out of the apartment one more time, and Iannis’ hand went so far into the upholstery it frightened us; when we finally extricated him his skin was pink and tender and he said he’d felt a sucking. 

Tomorrow is June 21, the longest day of the year.  The forecast is for sun.  We are putting this note somewhere far away, somewhere we hope the couch cannot find, just in case.

What Happens When a Scientist Gets a Spa Facial:

Aesthetician: Just relax.

Scientist (thinking): Okay.  Deep breaths.  So, based on the informatics clusters, there are a lot of virus-interacting proteins so knocking down these genes might affect the efficiency of infection which would skew the assay … oh my god.  Shut up.  My face is tiiiingly.

Aesthetician: Now I am putting on the collagen mask.

Scientist (thinking): Is it an agent that protects or stimulates the production of collagen? Or is it just, like, collagen.  Because that’s kind of like sprinkling cut-off hairs onto your scalp to promote hair growth. Ugh, just enjoy the experience.

Aesthetician: This rubberized mask will be peeled off.

Scientist (thinking): Can I keep it? Like, a spa death mask? Will it look like a corpse face? Can I ask? She’ll think I’m weird, right? She’ll totally think I’m weird. Oh, it’s already in the trash. It doesn’t matter, this is nice, right? It’s nice.

Aesthetician: And I am now spraying elemental oxygen onto the skin.

Scientist (thinking):  It feels liquidy. Oxygen turns into a liquid at around negative 170 degrees Celsius, so it’s not that.  There’s some other shit going on here. Oh duh it was pressurized so adiabatic cooling is maybe causing moisture to condense out of the atmosphere.  What is this actually going to do to my face?  Oh my god, is it making free radicals? No, relax. Reeeelaxxx. This is great.

I’m sure you’ve seen those delivery yards, the fenced-in lots on slightly disreputable blocks, the ones full of anonymous cube trucks that never seem to drive in or out.  I’m sure you’ve heard the faint echo of dogs barking, though you never see the dogs, and why someone would need a dog to protect this grimly abandoned array of old trucks is rather beyond you.  

Perhaps you’ve walked past them, wondering briefly why you never see anybody or anything enter or leave.  Late night delivery schedules, you say, or, Maybe there’s another exit around the corner that I just haven’t noticed, and you walk on to be distracted by the next curiosity, a ring of keys dangling from the branch of a tree, or a lone kielbasa lying inexplicably on the sidewalk.

I’ll tell you why you never see the men who drive these trucks.  Suited in gray coveralls, they exist only in your peripheral vision, treading the interstices between the seen and the suspected.  When you’re walking near one of those lots and you seem to hear your footsteps take on an echo, a little trochee PAH-pum PAH-pum, and whip around only to find an empty street, you’ve almost met one.

When they mount the cabs of their trucks, the trucks can only be noticed if they want you to see them.  They don’t make them invisible, mind you, just conveniently overlooked.  You can sometimes see them, really see them in all their dingy bulk and indeterminate acronyms, usually on delivery days when they can blend in.  Next time you’re on the bus and the rightmost lane is choked with trucks gaping at the rear and men are ferrying diapers and bananas like ants carrying their eggs after a flood, look closer.  Look for the ones that are silent and unopened: those are the ones driven by the gray-suited men, though even on delivery days you’ll never see the driver.

I bet you’re wondering, why all the secrecy.  What could they be delivering, you say as you check your email or scratch the back of your knee, That merits all of that creeping around.  I’ll tell you, but first: have you ever pulled up short with your gait going wonky because you can’t remember if you locked your door, you always lock your door but you can’t remember actually doing it.   Acutely regretted an offhand comment you made to a colleague, they almost certainly think you’re a dreadful weirdo, now, what will you say to them tomorrow. Woken up at daybreak concerned that you haven’t seen your passport since you moved apartments it’s probably in that box but no there’s probably an Estonian prostitute being smuggled into the country using your passport right now as you think about it.

No, that’s not a non-sequitur.  Can’t you see? That is the province and product of those men, the cargo stacked unseen in those dim truckbeds.  Those yards are the stockyards of every free-floating anxiety that plagues us, the breeding ground for late-night Facebook friend requests regretted and irons left on.  I don’t know if they actively cultivate them (carefully blended crosses of when I was drunk, I think I texted my ex boyfriend to ask if he’d left the iron on), or if they just collect the locally occurring ones (after all, nobody in the city suddenly panics about whether or not they’d latched the sheep pen). I also don’t know why they do it, if it’s a calling, a punishment or if they somehow feed off of our anxieties, latched onto neurotic vein, tick-swollen. I don’t know where they come from.

Although I do not know how or why, I do know it to be true.  So, the next time you walk past one of those lots, step quickly lest you catch their eye.  When you’re randomly paralyzed by the dread of a small and inconsequential uncertainty, breathe deep.  Look for an anonymous truck, let your vision encompass its own corners.  You might be able to catch the contrail of one of the graywraithed men, seeding misgivings like crumbs among pigeons.  But don’t look too close, in case, privy to the secret, you must become one of them, never seen, cloaked in disquiet.