Young Writers Society

At four he called his editor to tell her that the chapter was going to be a little late.

His editor sighed.

"Maybe you need a fresh perspective," she said. "Have you tried your friends? Is there anyone in your family you could ask?"

"Um," said Michael.

"Seriously," said his editor. "It always helps to have someone else look at it. A test subject, if you like, so you know that you're on the mark with stuff. Even if it's just checking over to be sure that the sentences make sense."

"Right," said Michael.

"Think about it," said his editor, and hung up.

It was warm enough still that he was sweating a little, and prolonged contact between the phone and his ear had left the skin there sticky. He put the phone down. He could picture the editor: her extremely adult office, her crossed ankles. She barely moved from the moment she arrived at her work to the moment she left it, he knew. She sat and took calls and wrote emails, her hands shifting to the left and the right on a flat axis, like a rigorous piano player. Now and then she might move her head.

He opened his laptop. He considered, and rejected, three separate people he could send the manuscript to. Stephanie had asked him about it, in the past, and he had said, "I can't," which had been- stupid of him; if he'd said no she would have backed off, but because he had said "I can't," she had looked at him with pity in her gaze. What worried him now, though, as he scrolled down through the pages of lurching exposition and half-finished scenes, was that he probably could. He could send her the document right now, and she would read it over the course of the next week or month, and when he had almost forgotten he had sent it to her she would come back to him and say, "It was great," or she would say, "I didn't get it"; those were her two standard responses to his writing. And it was possible that he would laugh: but he would never know if she had read it, in that special sense that writers mean when they wonder if a person read it. Sometimes people read a word and fill it with themselves, until they feel the word like a tide in the blood. Sometimes, reading, the sentences take on stutter of the heart.

Stephanie was texting him.

"dinner?"

"Don't wait up," he typed back. "I have a reading to go to remember?"

She replied with an isolated smiley face. Involuntarily, he bit his lip.

He sat there at the kitchen table for a long time. His toes brushed the linoleum. Then he went to the living room, where Stephanie's project notes were piled on the table next to a mug of congealing coffee that he must have missed in his earlier clean-up. Stephanie insisted on keeping a set of longhand notes. He told her it was a ridiculous affectation, especially in an engineer, and she said, "Yes. That's why."

He knew what her handwriting looked like, obviously, but his mind kept flicking back to what she had written on his calendar, comparing individual strokes as if he had no broader frame of reference. It made it hard to read; he would get caught up in the curl of a final e, the remembered mechanics of cursive and her wrist, and not move on to the next word for minutes. Most of her notes were a thistle of jargon and formulae, in any case. Near the end, though, there was one line, separated from the rest by white space, that read,

We are going to win.

Taped to the back of the page was a photograph. A picture of them as they had been shortly after their marriage, while he was still clean-shaven. He tapped it with one finger, and it rattled like a hollow thing.



The reading was scheduled to begin at six: he came ten minutes early, and regretted it, a little, as person after person squeezed by him to get to an empty seat. Once the place had filled up, there was a confusing period in which everyone seemed to be waiting for something that never happened, until finally the person at the podium, who was not the author, coughed. "Presenting," she said, and there were other words after that, but Michael was unable to listen. Probably the Wikipedia article would have told him more.

The woman at the podium stepped down, and the author took her place, although Michael had not seen him come in. He also coughed. He was smiling. He thanked the woman and the audience and with a minimum of fuss began reading his story aloud. Michael had picked a chair almost on the opposite end of the room, by the window, and it was only because he'd read the story so recently that he could track the sentences to their ends; track them through the hundred gentle shifts in the author's voice that could and did take place in a minute.

He was surprised to find that he was enjoying the reading, despite the effort of following along. The author went lightly over the words, his expert intonations making certain of the jokes actually funny where in text they had lain cold on the eye. More than that, he was kind to his characters; there was no veiled irony in his tone as he spoke their lines. When Michael had read the story on its own he'd thought the narrator, in particular, suffered at the hands of the author, but hearing it like this, opened up in a small room of intently listening students, the cutting little observations and moments in which the narrator's blindness is most brilliantly apparent took on a merciful quality, things said and then let go of. It helped, maybe, that the author's barely audible speech was so hard to hold onto, in his mind.

Even so, it was a long story, and when they got to the section where the narrator gets drunk and humiliates himself, Michael let himself disengage from the words. He should have gone to more readings, he thought. They could be pretty dry, no doubt about it; but there was something about sitting in a room with other people who were willing to be silent while a man read fiction aloud, and feeling the humidity of their diffuse attention, how it warmed the still air. It made him conscious of what he looked like to the whole thinking world. A stranger with a beard. And if he had been conscious of that in January-

He folded his hands, one over the other.

The sky outside the window was pale, with the sun gone but sunset somehow still far off. The lamps in the room were on. The yellow light of the lamps and the blue light of the sky reflected off people's hair in bright bands, the subtle curve of every skull traced twice over by the shine. Michael thought the shadows around cheekbone and ear of the man seated in front of him looked bluish, too, somehow invaded and altered by the nearness of the sky.

He looked at his own hands, resting in the shady corduroy expanse of his lap. The author had begun to describe the snow in Sarajevo. It wasn't summer any longer, Michael remembered, although it wasn't quite fall. The woman beside him had her phone cradled in her long palms.

She swept one thumb across the top to wake the dormant screen and rocked forward. Her hair fell away from her neck so that it hung in front of the side of her face, leaving her throat bare. She had moved her hands to frame the phone's edges, her fingertips obscuring parts of its elegant geometry and making it seem almost natural, like a flat piece of obsidian. The chairs in the room were placed together closely enough that he could see her fingerprints smeared across the screen. She was texting someone. Her thumbs moved in small regular motions. Someone told her, "You're my daughter, and i love u", and he saw her hesitate, visibly, rocking back just far enough that the line of her forehead emerged from behind the wall of hair. Then she was leaning forward again. She was typing in a smiley face. He had no way of knowing what she was doing with her mouth.

"He kept looking for a newspaper, a poster, anything. He was perversely and deeply afraid that he had been asleep for a hundred years," the author said, his voice rising suddenly.

Michael wanted to take her wrist. The thought came to him very clearly and straightforwardly; he wanted to take her wrist, with its fine mobile bones and its light furring of hair that stopped where her hand started, and feel its hot smooth skin against his palm. He wanted to put his hand on her narrow knee and cover the grain of dark denim. He was certain he would feel the warm texture of her thigh even through her jeans.

As soon as he had thought it he was disturbed- and then almost frightened- by the brief sharp bite of the idea, which seemed to belong to someone else entirely: it was as if he were being written, and his author had mid-sentence realized that the reaction was all wrong for the logical progression of his character arc; had accordingly deleted the whole line. He bent forward in an unconscious echo of his neighbor's posture, lacing his fingers through his beard.

The author had finished his reading and was ready to take questions, he announced. Michael tried and failed to master the tremor in his arms. The sky looked rosy, now, like something burning from the inside out.

There was a question in his mind, waiting to be constructed, but his hand shook and he did not raise it. The sweet gorge of the unasked thing stayed with him all through the rest of the discussion; it was still with him when he left his seat.



The lights in the house were off when he got home. He got out of the car. His shadow was caught and doubled by the headlights, overlapping itself, and only then did he remember to turn the engine off.

Inside, Stephanie was sitting with her ankles crossed. It was quite dark, but there were quadrangles of moonlight on the floor by the sink, and he could see her feet flex against the lower bar of the stool she was sitting on. He saw her toes bend inward around air.

"Hey," he said. "How was dinner?"

"Oh, you know," said Stephanie. "Ended up going out with Dana and some of her friends. I think they think I'm old."

Michael thought Dana thought his wife was many things. He kept his skepticism to himself, though. He couldn't tell whether he was afraid. He did not say: "I have a question."

"How was the reading?" she said. She dropped off the stool and landed on the balls of her feet. He could hear the material of her skirt fall straight.

"You would have hated it," he said.

She kissed him. Her eyes were very near, and brilliant. Bile rose in the back of his throat, like the lilt at the end of a question, intolerably sweet.

Then she reached to touch his face, and he flinched.

She did not, visibly, react. She paused, and then cupped his jaw gently, nestling her palm against the tight black curls that grew there, and he held himself in place.

"I was actually thinking of going out to for drinks tonight," he said. "I just needed to pick up my wallet."

"Ah," said Stephanie, dropping her hand. "I should take care of some paperwork tonight, I guess. If you're sure."

"Sorry," he said, numbly. The warmth of her hand remained on his cool cheek, like grease. "You could come-"

"I can't," said Stephanie. She went downstairs.

He walked to the living room, which was his wallet was. He stopped and stared down at the papers fanned out on the coffee table, filled with handwriting like hair that grew too sparsely to hide the blankness of the skin beneath. Stephanie's work ID rested on top of one page. Unthinkingly, he picked it up and turned it over. The gloss of moonlight on the laminated surface meant he had to tilt it this way and that before he could see her face in the photograph.

He held it between thumb and forefinger, like a weapon he did not know how to use, for a long time.



The lab was also dark.

He stopped by the crate of safety glasses, and then moved past it. It seemed silly to worry about lab policy when he was technically breaking and entering. He lifted the tarp off the android with care, though, his hands trembling faintly.

Moonlight slanted cleanly across half the android's placid features, and somehow it looked more whole with one eye and most of its jaw lost in black shadow than it had under the fluorescence of the lamps. He was glad he had not put on the safety goggles. He was glad he could be certain that the color had been drained from its face not by plastic but by light.

It was off, he knew. He didn't want to turn it on. He laid two fingers against the pulsepoint on its neck, and waited. Eventually, he thought, the pulse in his fingertips would fill the silence there.



And then, again, later-

Stephanie had a broad head, which sat heavily on the slim column of her neck. When they were younger, and newly married, she had gotten haircuts to conceal the weight of her jaw, curling inward at the tips; but now she wore it in a bun high on the back of her head. Michael, for his part, liked being able to see the clearly drawn corner of her face, jutting from the side of her throat. He lay with his head pillowed on his arms, looking up at her, and he could see the skin there, soft and taut over bone, lit from beneath by the position of the bedside lamp.

"Tired?" she said, turning, so that the flesh of her waist bunched into two diagonally divided parts.

His arms ached with the effort of not unfolding to touch her back. To test the pliant meat.

"No," he said; "well, yes;" and he might have said more, but she smiled, then.

"Sleep," she told him, "you've had a long day."

He wanted to protest that she didn't know what kind of day he'd had: she hadn't been with him, and he hadn't told her. But probably she had seen it in his face.