Josephine’s life was left in shambles for the third time in March of 2024, when the man for whose sake she’d renounced all her furniture, given her two-weeks’ notice, and declined to renew her lease informed her by text that upon further consideration, he didn’t love her quite enough to spend the next sixty years sharing his yacht with her.
She’d been living in Oakland at the time, in an unfinished basement beneath an Armenian family who’d paid her in cash to wait tables nights and weekends. Nine-to-five, she’d moved furniture. Altogether, she’d made just enough to feed herself and keep the lights on—not enough to reassemble the life she’d dashed to pieces in honor of her paramour.
Whether it was he she’d loved or the adventures that he’d promised hardly mattered. She’d long since put her landlocked childhood behind her, vaulted west on the long, slender legs that her mother had given her—all that her mother had given her—alighted in a coastal city, and she’d been about to leap again, this time out into the ocean—O pirates, O freedom—when that single message, surely composed in a matter of minutes, had flung her into catastrophic backslide.
Now she was back in Arkansas, in a two-bedroom apartment with two other adults, three children. Ellie’s name was on the lease—Ellie, the girl who, in high school, had taken Josephine for the homecoming-queen-in-the-making that she’d never been and spent two years toadying up to her, gushing and groveling, kowtowing and over-confiding. Ellie had considered herself the anointed one: Josephine’s Bestie. In truth, she’d been Josephine’s only friend.
Josephine was long and lean, and Ellie round and wide, but this alone could not explain the sheer extremity of her miscalculation. Perhaps she suffered from some chronic condition, which blunted her instincts or even inverted them. Nothing about her boyfriend weakened this hypothesis.
Samir was forty-one years old to Ellie’s twenty-nine, a slouching giant of a man with a swollen belly, eyes as angular and red-orange as Doritos, and teeth the color of crème brûlée. He’d come to the US on a partner visa, almost certainly expired now, and was still technically married, though emphatically separated. His wife, an American, lived in Fayetteville, forty minutes down the road, but aimed to relocate someday to EPIC City, Texas, when and if the self-governing Islamic community ever disentangled itself from the red tape imposed by a xenophobe governor. They’d met in Meknes, Morocco. She’d been working at a Catholic community center. He’d been mooching off foreigners, pretending to be a professional tour guide. In three weeks, he’d seduced her with serenades of false facts about each of the city’s historical sites. He’d proposed. She’d converted. They’d married. She’d brought him to Texas and borne him two daughters. He’d then renounced Islam, demanded a divorce, and moved to Arkansas—under the impression that American marriages were valid only in the state in which they had been consecrated—where he’d flung himself into a life of unrepentant hedonism.
Samir and Ellie had met and made love for the first time eight months before Josephine’s return to Arkansas, in the parking lot of Ellie’s apartment complex, where Samir had just spent the night with another woman, around nine in the morning, beside the dumpsters. Shortly thereafter, she’d invited him to move in with her.
“I needed a man around,” Ellie had admitted to Josephine. “Things were getting out of hand.”
By “things,” she’d meant Roger, her nine-year-old son, a whirling Tasmanian Devil child. Whomever she brought home, he’d bitten, slapped, and bruised. Whatever she’d brought home, he’d smashed to pieces. Whenever the school bus dropped him off before she got done cleaning houses, he would let himself in through the window he’d broken—his bedroom then, now Josephine’s—and pass the time demolishing whatever he could get his hands on. One day, in vain hopes of keeping the grocery bills under control, Ellie had put a padlock on the fridge. In response, Roger had climbed on the counters, torn open boxes of cake mix, and coated everything in powdery chocolate brown. He’d ripped up all her cash, scissored his way through her credit cards, and used the toilet as a wishing well for coins until the U-bend clogged. Then he’d squatted in the center of the living room, his pants around his ankles, and befouled the carpet.
Samir called him The Monster.
“He just needs a good male role model,” insisted Ellie. “That’s the main thing.”
In fact, Samir’s presence did seem to have had an effect on the boy, who began to exhibit a hitherto unknown linguistic faculty shortly after his arrival. Under Samir’s tutelage, he mastered the tricky gh and kh sounds and managed to add to his storehouse of bad words several variations of “Shit,” “Shit-eaters,” and “Shitty Ones” from French and Moroccan Darija.
He was still three grades behind, but this sudden multilingualism, however semantically limited, was better than nothing—enough, in fact, to give Ellie confidence that Samir would save her from her son.
Samir worked odd hours, delivering pizzas as a hobby, drugs as a vocation, and he wasn’t always around or awake to discipline the boy. Yet the desired effect was achieved. After years of kicking, punching, biting, and verbally abusing Ellie and her suitors, Roger now turned to kicking, biting, slapping, punching, and pulling the hair of Samir’s two daughters. “Al-kharaya!” he would scream, drawing out the terminal a in a ferocious war whoop as he charged the girls, the elder seven, the younger five. They would cower against the wall, each attempting to hide behind the other, while Samir and Ellie sprawled on the sofa, lady-and-the-tramping their way through a bruised blue psylocibin stem and looking bemusedly on.
Hoping to curb his aggression, Ellie took to grinding up Xanax and mixing it into her son’s mashed potatoes. This had no effect on him whatsoever. It did, however, inspire Samir to try it with his girls. The Xanax left them stunned and glassy-eyed, less able than ever to defend themselves. They lolled on the floor, limp as ragdolls, barely aware of the rugburn as Roger dragged them hither and thither by the hair, shouting, “Merde!”
It was with hawk-eyed suspicions of such goings-on, if not with outright knowledge, that Samir’s wife had followed him to Arkansas, determined to go on sharing custody while the court proceedings were underway. She didn’t want him to share custody, and he didn’t want to share custody, and the girls didn’t want to be in shared custody, and Ellie didn’t want him to share custody, and Roger didn’t want him to share custody, and Josephine didn’t want him to share custody, but the judge did want him to share custody, presumably so that the girls wouldn’t end up decapitating journalists and hijacking planes.
It was not at all clear to Josephine that Samir was any less likely to radicalize his daughters than his wife was.
“They’re not my responsibility,” he said matter-of-factly one morning over eggs he was scrambling, bleary-eyed and five-o’clock-shadowed. “I did my part. Squeezed them out of my dick. They’ve got to take care of the rest themselves.”
“Oh,” said Josephine. She had a cigarette, and he had a cigarette. They were sharing an ashtray. The fire alarms had long since been disabled.
“This responsibility shit,” he went on, using a plastic spatula to push the eggs around the pan. “It’s all just religion. God shitting all over your freedoms. My life belongs to one person. One person. I won’t let those little gremlins have another second off me.”
On the floor behind Josephine, the girls were wrestling. She still didn’t know their names. When Samir wanted to refer to them collectively, he called them The Gremlins. When he wanted to refer to them individually, he called them One and Two.
“That’s interesting,” she said, taking a drag. “That’s an interesting way of looking at things.”
“It’s the only way of looking at things.”
Josephine had long since learned to take her feelings—all her horror, all her heartbreak, all her righteous indignation, all her rage—and wrap them up like treasures to be hidden in a musty crawlspace, stored away. She would dig them out and look at them someday, when she had the luxury, and maybe, if a market for such things had opened up by then, she’d even pawn them, as she’d once pawned her grandmother’s things, extracted from those cobweb-coated boxes the summer that her mother had vanished, and she and her father had run out of food: the first time her life had been left in shambles. Now, she took the urge to rub out her cigarette on Samir’s hand, and she wrapped it up, stored it away.
It was a practiced move. A deft one. She did it whenever he belt-whipped his girls. She did it when he shoved One’s head into the toilet, snarling, “Choke, motherfucker,” because she’d filled her cheeks with water from the tap and sprayed her sister. She did it whenever The Monster went after the girls, all dirty fists and gnashing teeth, Samir barking, “Hey!” from the sidelines, “Don’t just take it from him! Beat him up, why don’t you?”, and when the girls shrank and cringed, he marched across the room, pushed Roger out of the way, and took his place, wordlessly backhanding.
What else was she to do? Even if his visa was expired, the truth was not a lever, just a fulcrum, and she had no place to stand. She was the guest here. She was the fourth child. She was helpless at thirty, just getting started all over again: no car, no job, no education, and no home. She had her beauty, but others had beauty, too, and plenty of other cards besides, and beauty for beauty’s sake was worth next to nothing these days: not with airbrush and AI and Pornhub and Hollywood on the supply side of things.
The only time she ever heard Samir speak sweetly to his daughters was during their nightly baths. “What beautiful little toes you’ve got,” he would croon, his voice lilting to her even with the doors shut and the TV on. “And what beautiful eyes.”
The girls would shriek and yelp and splash: not the unadulterated mirth of the delighted, but the shrill, manic cries of the squirming and tickled.
“And what’ve you got here?” he would wonder aloud. “What’s this here? You two are going to be hot when you grow up, you know that?”
Pure evil. That was what Josephine saw when she looked at Samir. Yet even this gut feeling, righteous as it was, turned things upside down inside her. How could he be evil when her own father, all these years, had been merely sick in the head? Confused? Was it just because he was a foreigner? Was that who she was, really—she, who’d left her father’s trailer, and his trailer park, and his entire South, who’d put it all behind her, who’d made it all the way to California, who’d respawned herself from nothing, reassembling her essence cell by sweet-tea-saturated cell, who’d pledged to walk the straight and narrow path until her breath was gone, who’d learned to bum her cigarettes and rides from anyone, and who’d fulfilled, without discrimination, the most lurid and primordial fantasies of men of every color and creed?
She wasn’t the woman to right history’s wrongs—that would have to fall to someone else, more qualified than she—but she had shouldered her own share of the responsibility, taking it upon herself to give back what she could whenever possible, making little reparations in the only ways she knew. She used to think she’d ever quench her father’s screams this way, still slick and sweaty in her ears. Now she knew she’d never kill those ragged bellows about the spics, the Jews, the nigger bitches coming for him in the dark, dark bodies all ganging up on him, and all he could see were their eyes and their fingernails. Those had been the good nights, when he wasn’t in her room.
Even though the yachtsman’s great betrayal had left her with no appetites, she still knew what to do. She still had her accounts, intact, inactive. It didn’t take much to reactivate them.
She spent the summer swiping right on men and sometimes women, meeting them in the grungiest of bars, drinking whatever they offered, doing whatever she was told. In bed, she still knew how to give. In bed, she worked on learning how to feel again that she was capable of giving. That there was more to her than vast and all-consuming need.
It occurred to her, too late, that just like everything else, betrayals were in the world principally to reproduce themselves. By that time, she was a breeding ground, unwilling mother to the offspring of the yachtsman’s deed. Her lovers’ messages came in like missiles, jilted and cuckolded, ragged as wounds. She didn’t block them. She read and reread them. She studied herself this way. Learned who she was.
Ellie got her a job cleaning houses. She took it even though it stung her with irony: she couldn’t even get from her bed to the toaster without taking a spill over dirty clothes, dirty dishes, sex toys, and children’s toys. She had no clutter to her name, but her room was still a landfill, strewn with shredded lampshades, stomped-on CDs. One day, The Monster disemboweled one of her pillows, left the feathers floating grandiosely in the air.
Summer ended. Autumn came. And then November. And then November 5th. And then November 6th. That morning, Trump signs bloomed along the roads like flowers after rain. The president-elect was sober, sound of mind, and that fact, more than all the others, made him easy to despise. His deeds could not be written off as the transgressions of a drunk, a madman. His quest for power had been waged in the spotlight, in full view of the nation. His insidious aims and lascivious wantings could not be denied.
Josephine was faintly shaken, as if by explosions through the walls of a deep bunker. Ellie was blindsided, terrified. Samir alone was unafraid. “You really think he’ll pull it off?” he demanded, manspreading on the sofa, the hookah’s mouthpiece in his jaws. “How many illegals he wants to deport again? Twenty-two million? They haven’t got the planes.”
For the first time in memory, Josephine wasn’t run through by the holidays. This brought its own peculiar pleasure. Let all the families of America stuff the buses and clog the planes and coagulate in one another’s homes and tear themselves to pieces over distant things. She had nothing to do with it. Nothing. Meaning nothing to lose.
Work picked up for all of them, more drugs and pizzas to deliver, more big houses to be cleaned, but Ellie still found time to order a plastic tree and ornaments on Amazon. She ran Christmas lights along the sofa, threaded them through the kitchen cabinet handles, even stapled them to the ceiling. The night of Thanksgiving, she insisted on dinner at IHOP: a longstanding tradition. “I want you to know,” she sniffed, eyes wet and chins a-wobble, gripping their hands, “I’m so grateful for both of you. I hope nothing takes you away from me. You’re the best family anyone could have.”
Samir’s forty-second birthday fell a week later. In his honor, Ellie bought ten grams of weed, chopped it roughly, spread it on a baking tray, decarbed it in the oven, then wrapped it in cheesecloth and soaked it in melted butter.
“Why not just get tinctures?” asked Josephine, who’d never seen Ellie commit herself to any project.
“It’s more special,” she explained.
The night of, Josephine didn’t get home until 6:30. Her back was aching, and hands and her eyes were on fire, and in the hollows of her joints, acid pooled. Ellie and Samir had the hookah pipe out on the table and more coals were heating on the stove. In one corner, Roger was at Samir’s drum set, hammering and flailing and letting loose guttural metal screams. In the other corner, the girls were silently combing each other’s hair.
On the table, by the hookah, lay a huge skinning knife, its mahogany handle flowing smoothly, almost sensuously, out into its gleaming blade.
“Josephine!” Ellie leapt ecstatically up from the table and wrapped her in her arms. “You’re just in time! We were about to cut the cake!”
“Go ahead,” said Josephine. “I need a shower.”
Under the water, she tried not to think of the girls, trapped in this very tub, squirming and grimacing. It wasn’t easy: not with the rubber ducks rolling between her toes. Even with the door shut and the water clattering around her ears, she could still hear Ellie’s chortles, strident, almost feral, from the other room.
“It came out amazing!” she declared as Josephine emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in one of their moldering towels. “Your girl’s first cake ever. Freaking amazing!”
The cake was cooling on the table. She’d used M&Ms instead of sprinkles. They hadn’t even melted. That was the whole point of M&Ms, Josephine remembered reading somewhere: heat-resistance. They’d been used during the Berlin Airlift because of their hard coatings. All the other candies on the market had melted, but the M&Ms had weathered the heat of the jet engines.
“Have you ever seen one of these?” Samir picked up the knife and turned it over, letting the light from the overhead fixture scatter off the blade. “This here is what I use for slaughtering animals.”
“He slaughters everything,” Ellie giggled, her voice bubbling up from inside her like the water in the hookah.
“Goats,” said Samir. “And sheep. And chickens. Whatever it is, I’m going to slaughter it.” Swip, the knife sang, slicing through the air. “Mountain Dew cake,” he added, gazing hungrily down at the pan. “I’m going to slaughter this Mountain Dew cake.”
“It’s like…” Ellie’s fingers wove together, illustrating, “…like American and Moroccan traditions…mixing. It’s beautiful!”
“I used to spend all day and night on those animals,” Samir went on. “I loved Eid. You know who I really wanted to slaughter? Don’t bother guessing. I’ll tell you. My parents. That’s who I wanted to slaughter. But you can’t slaughter your parents. You can’t do that. You’ve got to just slaughter the animals.”
At that moment, Roger leapt up from the drums, knocking the snare askew, flung his drumsticks at the girls, and started punching the wall.
“Hey!” In two quick strides, Samir was across the room, whipping the knife through the air as if cutting through jungle. “Cut it out!”
The girls clutched each other, eyes wide, and screamed.
“You better calm down, Kiddo,” Ellie warned, slurring around the mouthpiece of the hookah. “You better not make him come over there.”
“Khara!” Roger roared, sinking his fist through the drywall.
With his free hand, Samir seized Roger by the collar, wrenched him away from the wall, and flung him down onto the floor.
“You’ve got it coming now,” taunted Ellie. “You’ve really got it coming, buddy. I told you. I freaking told you.”
Back flat, stiff-spined, towel-clutching, Josephine edged along the wall, making for the girls.
Samir crouched over Roger, who was huffing and trembling. “You want me to slaughter you?” he demanded. “You want me to slit your throat? Want me to skin you? I know how to do it fast and not-so-fast. For you, I think I’ll do it not-so-fast.”
The girls were as stiff as figurines. They let Josephine’s arm snake around them and moved with her, taking their cues from her, sidling silently, leaving their breath behind. As flat as moonlight, they advanced along the wall.
“Sheiße!” Roger bellowed from the floor. “Stück sheiße!”
“You know what we do to little shits like you where I’m from?” Samir seized his wrist and held it up before his eyes. “You pull this shit in Morocco, they’ll chop off one of your hands.”
“Chī shǐ!” Roger screamed. “Sǐ pō! Sǐ tàn! Sǐ gong!”
Then they were out on the patio. Josephine didn’t have anything on but the towel, but this was irrelevant. The air in her wet hair was cold. “Let’s go,” she heard a voice chanting, “you’re okay, let’s go, you’re okay.” She realized that the voice was hers. “You’re going to be okay,” she went on, an insistence, a mantra, cutting across the parking lot in the direction of the road. “We all have bad nights, okay, but we’re going to make it. We’re strong.”
They were barefoot, all three of them, walking on crumbled glass, but at least her father’d never had a knife like that. At least he’d never threatened her with mutilation. Cars had collided here. Bottles had broken. Slingshots had taken out sodium vapor lamps. At least what he’d done to her, she’d half-consented to. Or maybe just a-quarter. Maybe no more than a sixteenth, a thirty-second—better than nothing. He’d been lonely. She’d been lonely. Both abandoned, both obliterated by the same betrayal. She could hate but also understand. And there were tennis shoes hanging from power lines. And there were the dumpsters. And there was a condom, used, abandoned—Ellie and Samir’s? And there was a curb—but who had time for sitting? Who had time for destinations? Forward motion was the only thing. CPS had been the second time her life was left in shambles, and ever since, she’d been in motion: forward, westward, back again. Bloody footprints unfurled behind her like breadcrumbs. Cold fingers tousled her hair.
The second time around the block, she steered the girls back into the parking lot, still empty, the apartments still quiet, the curtains still closed. Ellie’s door was still unlocked. Inside, there were no pools of blood, no signs of human sacrifice. Stretched on their bellies with their phones propped before them, Samir and Ellie trembled with gelatinous mirth, their pupils reflecting cartoons. The cake pan was on the table, as was the knife, but the cake itself was gone.
“He ate the whole thing!” shouted Ellie, spotting Josephine and the girls in the doorway. “I didn’t even get a piece!”
“You didn’t get a crumb.” Samir rolled over onto his back like a beetle, limbs writhing.
“Not a crumb! Not even a single crumb!”
“Where’s Roger?” asked Josephine.
“We sent him to your room. I hope you don’t mind.”
He was whole, she confirmed, peering around the door: stretched on the pallet she slept on, light from his iPad flickering across his features, utterly absorbed.
In the bathroom, she washed and bandaged her feet and the girls’, squeezing their ankles against the peroxide’s sting. They sucked in their breaths, teeth gritted, and didn’t complain.
Normally, they slept in the living room, but that night, Josephine commandeered blankets from the other bedroom, made a nest on her floor so that Roger could stay on her pallet, and lay facing the wall with the girls in her arms. Together, they gazed into the depths of the electrical outlet before them as if its holes were mineshafts from whence the secrets of the universe might be extracted. For a while, the glow from Roger’s iPad mingled with the streetlamps’ seepage. Then both were washed away by sun. Josephine rose, and dressed, and brushed her teeth, and went out through the living room, where Ellie and Samir lay snoring, and ate an apple, and went to the bus stop, and waited, shivering, for her bus to come.
For Christmas, the girls were entrusted to their mother lest their faith be corrupted. Ellie ordered rotisserie chickens, and they ate picnic-style, off paper plates on grease-stained towels. Roger spent most of the night in the parking lot, racing back and forth and drumming on the dumpsters with a two-by-four.
The new year came. The new administration swept away the old. The world grew more frenzied, somehow, than before, though no more so than her mind. In every house she cleaned, the TVs were all tuned to the same stations, talking heads emitting variations on the same apocalyptic themes. She removed and replaced In This House We Believe… signs as she dusted the windowsills. She caught glimpses, through the windows, of We’re All in This Together posters on the wrought iron fences surrounding the winter lawns.
When the police came knocking, Ellie tried to drag Samir into the bathroom, perhaps intending to wrap him in the shower curtain, but he shook her off, saying, “The bathroom and then what? You going to dig me a tunnel?” and answered the door.
The officers, a middle-aged man and a young woman, didn’t sit because he wouldn’t. He towered over them, but they held their own. They informed him that they’d received a call from his daughter’s school: during show-and-tell, she’d allegedly held up a crayon drawing of a pistol and told the class matter-of-factly that her father kept one in his closet and would shoot everyone at her school if she pissed him off.
“I never said that.” Samir shook his head wearily, beleaguered and sad. “I never fucking said that.”
“Kids don’t just say stuff like that out of nowhere,” said the older officer.
“This kid does.”
“You’re saying you don’t keep a firearm anywhere?” asked the young woman. “You’re saying, if we search this apartment, we won’t find any weapons?”
“Why shouldn’t I keep a firearm?” demanded Samir. “It’s my first amendment. I’m just saying, I never said nothing like that. Nothing.”
Josephine overheard this exchange from her room, where she was folding clothes. She’d just returned from the laundry room, the hamper warm and heavy in her arms, but she had nowhere to put them except for the floor. Roger would demolish any stacks she made next time he came through her window, but folding clothes still made her feel better.
“This is a warning,” said the older officer. “We’re in touch with your wife. We’re in touch with your daughter’s school. If anything happens, we know where to find you.”
The following morning, scraping gunk off a wood floor, Josephine was arrested by the newscast coming from a television. “You don’t have to go home,” said a smirking official from behind a podium, “but you can’t stay here.”
That night, she found Ellie alone in the living room, disheveled, pacing, sucking all the calm she could get from a vape pen. “Something’s happened,” she raved between drags. “I know it. He’s not answering his phone.”
“Where are the girls?”
“Some of his stuff is still here,” Ellie continued, not seeming to hear, “but his clothes are all gone, and his drugs, and his sex toys. Why does this always happen? Why?” She flung herself down on the sofa and gazed up at Josephine, wild-eyed. “Every time I find a good man, he up and leaves. Jo, be honest with me, would you: is it me?”
“Where are the girls, Ellie?”
Ellie blinked a few times before jerking her head toward the bathroom. “In there.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Two wanted to know when Josephine took her seat on the rim of the tub. Her voice was flat: no rise, no fall. Here eyes were glassy. She and her sister were up to their necks in bubbles. They must’ve emptied a whole bottle of something.
“Do you want me to lie to you?” asked Josephine. “Or do you want me to tell you the truth?”
“The truth, please.”
“That’s a good choice,” said Josephine. “You’re wise beyond your years. I never wanted the truth when I was your age. I just wanted love. I kept that up for a while, but eventually you realize there’s no one who loves you, and that’s okay. At least you have each other. Has anyone ever told you how smart you are?”
The girls shook their heads side-to-side: no.
“Well,” said Josephine, filling a pitcher with water and dumping it over their heads, “you are. And since you are, and since you want the truth, and since I think you can handle the truth, I’m going to give it to you. The truth, in this case, is that I don’t know. I don’t know where your father is. I’m guessing he’s on his way back to Morocco, but who knows?”
They stared at her blankly.
“Do you miss him?” asked Josephine.
They didn’t shake their heads. They didn’t nod.
“Yep,” she said. “I get it. Wise beyond your years.”
The next night, Ellie, too, was gone. Josephine finished her last house at 4:00 and was home by 4:40. She found Roger at the kitchen table, playing with his iPad and eating pickles. It appeared that he’d eaten at least half the jar.
“Where’s your mom?” Josephine asked. “Do you know?”
He ignored her.
“Hey.” She leaned across the table, snapped her fingers under Roger’s nose. “Did she tell you where she was going?”
“HoH,” he barked, biting at her fingers, which she jerked away just in time. “P’tahk!”
Leaving him in the kitchen, she made a circuit of the apartment, taking inventory of what was there and what was gone. There included Samir’s drum set, Ellie’s macramé, the children’s toys, and the groceries, dishes, and cleaning supplies. Gone included Samir’s skinning knife and the pistol he kept in the hall closet as well as his and Ellie’s clothes, sex toys, drugs, and cash.
They wouldn’t be back any time soon.
The girls were under the bed in Ellie and Samir’s room. “Do you want to come out from there,” Josephine asked, crouching before them, head ducked to peer under, “and hang out with me for a while?”
Two heads shook in unison, side-to-side: no.
“Fair enough. Let me see if I can fit, then.”
It took some doing, but Josephine managed to squeeze her long body beneath the bed. She lay on her stomach, parallel to the girls, unable to prop herself up on her elbows. Cheek to the carpet, she eyed them.
“It’s a little weird,” she said, “that I still don’t know your names. Maybe you should go ahead and tell me.”
“No, thanks,” said One. “Not right now.”
The sun slid away from the window, ducking down behind the sill, behind the world. The compact yellow rhombus on the carpet lost its edges, giving up its geometry, dissipating. Soon, there was nothing but mist, hazy blue, which clung to the carpet and hung in the air. Josephine could feel her own hard edges softening. She could feel her own geometry sifting away. The girls were losing their forms to the darkness. All she could see were their eyes and their fingernails.
“Do you want to hear a story?” she asked after a while.
The shapes of the girls’ heads bobbed up and down.
“Good,” said a grown woman’s Cheshire-cat voice. “This is where we begin.”
About the Authors
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. Their fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Modern Literature, The Good River Review, Southland Alibi, The Stonecoast Review, Hidden Peak Review, The Brussels Review, Jewish Life, Chautauqua, and elsewhere around the globe. Their work has also received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform. They hold an MA and an MFA, respectively, from the University of Arkansas.
