Beginning Middle End

Chapter I

A mother asks her own mother what she fears most in old age. The grandmother answers in Spanish: "Perder la mente," to lose her mind. The daughter, listening, asks if this is for a novel. The mother is not sure. The daughter presses: will she finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end? The grandmother adds a second fear: "Perder claridad," to lose clarity.

Then the story proper begins. In the beginning there is a mother and a daughter. A ray of sunlight enters the bedroom through a sliver between the curtains, crosses the thick, smoky air, and touches the bed, staggering a line across the wrinkles of the sheet from the daughter's toes, up her legs, stomach, chest, and neck, then dispersing into her face. She is sleeping. The mother puts her hand on the girl's forehead and gently wakes her.

The world, the narrator reflects, had been looking for something like a beginning: a strange thing to expect from time or from life, the chance to begin, or to begin again. All she has to do, or so she thinks, is answer a simple question: How do I reinvent the story, our lives? For now, it will be only she and her daughter.

Endings and false beginnings

Finitude is eager to be elsewhere. The narrator has finished writing a difficult book, finished a project recording soundscapes and oral histories in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and then passed through a slow, entangled divorce. That constellation of endings, finishing, finishing, finishing, leaves her feeling like an astronaut: in circumflotation, enclosed but never quite anywhere. The weeks and months pass, the calendar turns unceasingly, but she finds herself always in the same spot. After those endings she stumbles from one false beginning to the next: scattered notes instead of real writing, no relationship that feels real, no sense of life starting anew after a big ending, even though many people report feeling exactly that.

Almost a year later, the book is about to come out in translation in several European languages, and she accepts every invitation sent to her agency. She even asks her agent to look for more: readings, conferences, workshops, book clubs. A friend remarks that she is like those people who will eat everything on an airplane just because it's free. She says nothing in reply, but for days she keeps telling him in her head: nothing is free on airplanes anymore.

She takes her daughter out of school a little before the end of the year and registers her for homeschooling for the rest of the seventh-grade cycle. She finds perfect tenants for April to September, a couple of Canadian medievalists who will take care of the plants, pay on time, and not steal her books.

The road

With one gray suitcase and one green one, they leave the city at the beginning of spring. The original plan: they will move and move again, light suitcases, loose schedules, until things fall back into place. In April and May they move every two or three days, mostly hotels, through small and large towns and cities, with readings, lectures, and symposiums. In Switzerland and Austria, the readers who come to her events are all septuagenarians or octogenarians, which is both deeply moving and somewhat concerning. There are brief stays in Lyon, Warsaw, Istanbul, Athens, and Berlin. In Munich she has an IUD extraction. In a café in Prague, her daughter loses a molar inside a bowl of soup.

The narrator watches her daughter closely, perhaps too closely now that it is only the two of them, and sees in the girl's behavior a strange mirror of her own capacity or incapacity to raise her well alone. Everywhere they go, the daughter obsessively buys old postcards, scribbles things on them, and then refuses to send them to anyone. Everywhere they go, all she wants to do is read on her own or play chess. In Berlin, the mother tries to teach her to ride a bicycle. It is impossible: the girl pedals always backward. The mother tries not to think about it metaphorically.

In a small coastal town near Amsterdam, they stand for a long time on the gray shore of a long beach and watch schoolchildren swim with their shoes on. As the swell approaches the shoreline, the children swim against the current, their sneakers visible above the surface, moving in short, quick, shallow kicks. It is a strange, disquieting sight, and afterward the daughter refuses to get into the water.

A few days later, in Barcelona, the girl cries inconsolably after the two of them pass a woman, maybe young, maybe old, possibly homeless, mumbling at a city wall. The woman opens her rucksack and pours its contents onto the sidewalk: a spill of old books. She holds one up, reads words they do not understand, then looks at them, points a finger, smiles a wide smile, and announces: "Omnes fines mundi!"

Arrival

The questions circle: What is it to start again? Where is the beginning? Perhaps things never fall into place entirely. But when June comes, and the narrator has finished her last work commitments and cashed the checks she is able to cash, they take a plane that lands one evening at Catania Airport, and she feels, for the first time in months, that they have finally arrived somewhere. They will finally have a chance to settle down in one place for a while.

Her maternal grandmother was originally from a small town near Catania. The grandmother died when the narrator was still young, and the narrator has never come to the island until now. Yet as soon as she steps off the airplane, she feels a distinct sense of home, whether past or future, she is not sure. They climb down the metal stairs onto the tarmac and look up at the star-clustered sky. Her daughter says: "Look, Ma, a sky-yawning."

"A what?"

"A sky-yawning."

"What do you mean?"

Chapter II

"Nothing, Ma, never mind." The narrator brushes off her daughter's question, then thinks: maybe what she feels upon this arrival isn't a sense of home, but an echo of someone else's belonging—borrowed memories, rumors passed down. She remembers reading that "echo" comes from the Greek "oikos," meaning "house," and wonders if echo and belonging are closer than they seem.

It was, of course, an impossible plan, this moving until something finally fell into place, because usually nothing just falls into place. A liberating idea, an impossible plan. Eventually, she thought, she'd have a clearer plan. Eventually, though, they would have to move for very different reasons than the ones that first sent them outward, but that came later, and they didn't know anything about that then.

The Arrival

In the taxi from the airport to the apartment, a man on the radio says that Etna spewed a plume of ash and gas earlier today, but no damages are reported. He also says there will be a lunar eclipse before dawn, and that the Levante will soon be entering from the east. The daughter asks, "What is Etna, Ma?" A volcano. "Is it dangerous?" Not at all, darling. "And what's the Levante?" That the narrator does not know.

But the taxi driver says he does know. There are two kinds of taxi drivers, the ones who say they don't know anything, and the ones who know all the things. He tells them the Levante is a good wind, one of the many winds that sweep over this island. So many winds fill the skies here, he says, that the Greeks thought it was in one of the caves off this coast that the god Aeolus housed all the winds: the cold and dry Mistral, the Greco and Tramontana from the north, the warm Libeccio and Mezzogiorno from the south, the western Ponente which sailors wait for eagerly because it brings clear skies and quick departures, the brutal scorching Scirocco from the southeast which carries sands from the Sahara and makes people angry, anxious, or insane. And finally, this soft, humming, damp Levante coming in from the east, which turns the sea a much deeper, darker blue, brings relief from the dry heat, and sometimes brings rain. Sailors prefer it to any other wind, he finishes with almost lyrical enthusiasm, because it carries them forward with swift, smooth gusts from the stern.

It feels like a good omen, the narrator thinks, to arrive in her grandmother's hometown with the Levante. Or is she confused, and is a gust from the stern a good wind for leaving instead of arriving? In any case, maybe on this island, this summer, she and her daughter will finally have a real beginning. They just have to find a routine, a steady everydayness: she has to find a way into a new form of motherhood, and maybe even a way back into writing, turn all her notes into something and finish a book.

Talking About Nanna

The daughter asks, so for the rest of the drive toward the apartment the narrator tells her things she remembers about her grandmother, the daughter's great-grandmother. They called her Nanna, and she smoked a pack and a half of Camel cigarettes every day since she was twelve. She had a quick temper but also a wide warmth and a sharp sense of humor. She was born in a place called Philosophiana, was a farmer, and collected old objects she found buried in the fields. When she was twenty-one she had dressed as a man in order to be hired as a day laborer in archaeological digs near her house, took part in some important findings there, but then was caught cross-dressing, got fired, and decided to emigrate. She learned how to read and write while aboard the ship, read a lot of books after that, survived a shipwreck, played a lot of chess, was a terrible cook, believed in luck, and was extremely superstitious. She was inconveniently good looking, with dark olive skin, wild curls, disastrous teeth, and liked to brag that she had moonyellow Botticellian eyes. She threw insults at ungentlemanly men, aggressive drivers, and politicians on the television. She lost her memory in her seventies. She died alone in an asylum for the insane in Mexico City in 1989.

The narrator and her daughter share several things in common with her: the bad teeth, a love for chess and books, the superstitions. Never pass salt directly from hand to hand without first setting it down on a surface. Avoid eye contact with your own reflection in a window if it's raining outside. Make a wish at 11:11 a.m. and 11:11 p.m. The narrator inherited the nicotine passion and the soccer passion. Her daughter has Nanna's beauty, her enviable mane, all untamable curls, and her Botticellian eyes, a little darker than her grandmother's, the color of maple syrup. Perhaps all those little things can be called echoes of a person, in the sense of repetition and reverberation, but also in the sense that their bodies and minds are physical spaces where traces of those who came before them still live and bounce around.

The Apartment

The narrator wonders why the language of fiction writing is so full of real estate: plan, premise, plot. Piazza Manganelli 16, a Baroque arched entrance framed by pilasters with concrete cherubs and ornaments, a heavy wooden door, an internal courtyard, one flight of marble stairs up, keys under the doormat, apartment number 2. The apartment belongs to a man she knows, a friend, a man she knows. He is a pianist and would be on tour for the rest of the month, said he'd leave the keys under the rug and they should please make themselves at home. He'd be back at the start of July, and they would be welcome to stay with him as long as they wanted. He and she had met almost a year ago, when he was giving concerts in New York. They'd had a brief and feverish encounter sometime after the divorce, and they'd kept in touch almost daily all these past months, writing to each other, sometimes talking on the phone at absurd hours, talking mostly about divorce, talking about children, talking about his concerts and her projects, talking about their plans separately, but also possible plans to meet again one day, one day sometime later.

In the foyer, they leave their shoes, their two suitcases, her backpack, and the daughter's briefcase. They make their way straight to the kitchen, and the narrator fills a tiny pot, the only one she could find, with water to make a quick pasta with butter and some sage they pluck from a planter on the kitchen balcony. Then they sit at a big wooden table, waiting for it to boil.

Her mother writes to ask if they arrived safely. When her mother sends a message, she always sounds like she's delivering both a horoscope and a weather report, and she sometimes signs it at the end with her name and relationship to the narrator, as if she were sending a fax from a public fax machine. In this message, she confirms and doubles down on what the radio said, except that in her words the predictions sound ominous: "Eclipse penumbral. ¡Vienen tormentas! Tiempos de cambio. Besos, Mama, Manuela."

No longer so sure that a penumbral eclipse followed by storms is a good omen, they follow her mother's instructions, just in case, and take three garlic cloves from a garlic hive hanging next to the stove, then plant them with their left thumbs under the moonlight in a pot of rosemary out on the kitchen balcony.

Unpacking

There are two bedrooms, one large and one smaller, on opposite ends of the living room, each with an en suite bathroom. The daughter drags her green suitcase into the smaller bedroom, and the narrator rolls the gray suitcase into the bigger one.

In his room, she unpacks not the way she usually does, all clothes dumped from suitcase to bed then slowly sorted. Here, she tries to unpack as if she were him, the pianist, a man of systems and routines. She takes out one item at a time, from suitcase to closet, suitcase to closet.

She thinks of a story by Antonio di Benedetto called "Abandonment and Passivity," about a woman who abandons a man. But the reader never sees the woman and never sees the man, only a suitcase leaving a room and a glass of water on the bedside table, and a note pressed under the glass of water that is never read. All there is in the story is this bedroom that has been left behind, never a single living thing. Except somewhere in the middle of the story, when a fly suddenly appears and the narrator says: "Sanctioned by inertia, a fly goes from sun to sun, from sun to sun, but only twice." She has never understood this line. A fly that lives twenty-four hours? Or forty-eight? Or something else entirely in the flying pattern of a fly?

The quiet objects in his closet seem selected and arranged by the steady hand of method: shoes, trousers, belts, shirts, ties, jackets, a few T-shirts. She hangs and folds her shirts and pants and long dresses next to his things. His: all black or marine blue. Hers: a jumble of colors. One of her dresses hangs next to one of his jackets. Suspended, they hover together in a strange, ghostly kind of dance.

Chapter III

Chapter: "Chapter III"

Morning in the new apartment starts slowly. The mother is on the bed, typing, while her daughter sleeps beside her. She senses the girl stirring, gets up to raise the blinds, opens the window to let in a damp, warm breeze. When the girl finally opens her eyes: "Morning, darling. Morning, Ma." Breakfast is the plan, so they go to the kitchen, find cereal and milk, sit down at the table. The daughter asks, "What's the plan, Ma?" The mother doesn't answer at first. She's thinking about how the gravity of the family nucleus no longer holds them in place, and she doesn't know how to reinvent this small planetary system. The daughter asks again. The plan: after breakfast, they'll go see the port, walk around, buy fish at the fish market, and eat it for dinner. "And that's it?" the daughter asks. "And that's it."

As they put on shoes in the foyer, the daughter asks why her mother still uses a backpack. The girl carries a red leather briefcase that once belonged to her father. The mother hurries her: "Shoes, laces." They fix their hair at the entrance mirror, one emulating the other, and rush out the door, down the varicosed marble stairs, through the arched doorway, and out into the street.

Through the park

They walk through the crowd toward the port. The street leads to a long masonry viaduct for the train tracks, raised high above the ground with stone arches. Crossing under one arch, they enter a circular public park, hoping to cut through to the port. Along the path, they pass tents and stretchers where migrants, probably recently arrived, wait their turn to be seen or ignored by asylum officers. The mother tells her daughter that her grandmother Nanna, the girl's great-grandmother, left from this very port on a ship almost a century ago. She was twenty-two when she left and never came back to her island. The mother finds it difficult to imagine that only one century ago, Europeans migrated to Latin America to escape poverty, and difficult to understand that now they receive migrants as if it had never happened to them, as if it could never happen again. Under an old tree, they see a headless statue of a Bourbon king. The daughter asks where the head is. No idea.

At the end of the park, they still can't see the port, only a large parking lot toward a busy avenue. There's no direct way to the shore, no glimpse of the sea. The girl holds her mother's hand tight as they turn back, past the tarps and stretchers again. In the middle of the park, near a fountain, men gather around two folding tables with chessboards, mostly silent, concentrating on two simultaneous matches. The daughter peeks attentively. "Ma?" "Yes?" "Nothing, never mind." She doesn't ask to stop and watch. They keep walking toward the market. Though both suspect she's too old for it, she keeps holding her mother's hand, and will only let go if another child her age comes into view.

The market and the swordfish head

The market sprawls in the shadow of a cathedral devoted to Saint Agatha. They enter briefly to pay respects, though neither is a good Catholic. The mother tells her daughter that Saint Agatha was the name of the ship her great-grandmother boarded in Catania. A text on the church wall recounts the story: Saint Agatha, a virgin martyr, refused the advances of Quintianus, the prefect of Catania, and was tortured, imprisoned, and mutilated, her breasts torn off with tongs. A Zurbaran painting on the fifth altar of the left nave shows her holding a platter offering her two plump, upright breasts. She is the patron saint of floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and fires, of rape victims, breast cancer patients, wet nurses, and bell founders. Looking up, the mother thinks: bells are shapes that suggest breasts, with nipples pointing toward the implacable skies.

Under a blue tarp at a fish stall, a man cuts the head off a swordfish, an enormous, powerful beast with a long, sharp silver bill. One clean strike severs the head. The daughter tightens her grip on her mother's hand as they approach. The mother asks the price of the head. "Cinquanta," the man says, fifty euros. She offers twenty. He insists a head that size, about three feet long, with a lot of meat around the neck, would usually cost at least fifty. But the morning has raced into afternoon, the sun has reached mid-sky, and she's probably one of his last customers, so he agrees to thirty. He wraps the head like a flower bouquet in a cone of newspaper. A cardboard sign hangs from his stall: "Cu nasci tunnu non po moriri pisci spata." She asks what it means. He translates from Sicilian to Italian: "Chi nasce tonno non pud morire pesce spada." If you are born a tuna fish, you can't die a swordfish. The mother smiles a vague smile, tight-lipped. He smiles a gentle smile. Her daughter scans the scene in mild disapproval, though the mother catches a glint of the rascal in her, a meteoric flicker in her glance.

The head is impossible to fit entirely in the backpack, so the rest of the walk becomes a slow, careful balancing act. The daughter has to help hold the long bill, which sticks out of the backpack like the strange horn of an imaginary beast, or maybe an old TV antenna. The mother notes that the word "beginning" comes from the West Germanic "onginnan," meaning "to open," and in Old High German, "in-ginnan" was "to cut open, to sever."

A question about the proverb

They pass a small vegetable stall. The mother picks seven tomatoes, seven yellow potatoes, one head of lettuce, five carrots, half a pound of mushrooms, a pound of rice, two boxes of pasta. Then she puts four tomatoes back and three potatoes back. It's so much harder to calculate quantities for two than for four. She thinks about everything she thought she had to reinvent: the grocery shopping, the way they made breakfast, the way they defied rainy afternoons, the love affairs she could have, the chores the daughter would take on, the new tax itemizations, the new meanings imprinted on old things.

The daughter asks: "What did that mean, Ma?" "What did what mean?" "The man, what did he say? Chi nasce tonno non pud morire pesce spada?" The mother explains: if you are born being a tuna fish, you can't die a swordfish. People cannot change what is in their nature. "And is that true?" The mother doesn't know. But the daughter remembers the man's smile: "Why did he smile like he was saying it to you, about you?" "He didn't." "He did?" "He did." "I don't know."

The Polaroid camera

Under another viaduct arch, they pass a stall that announces "antiques" but sells cameras and radios from the eighties and nineties. The daughter spots the cameras lined up on a table: "Can we buy a Polaroid camera?" Not now. "Look, that one is only ten euros." Sometime. "Sometime when?" Sometime another time. "But when?" Her stepbrother used to take Polaroid pictures of everything; they'd gotten him a camera for his twelfth birthday. He was a boy with a nostalgic disposition, a strange sensibility for the fleetingness of little things, and he struggled to capture everything he felt was leaving him. The mother hesitates, wondering if her daughter wants to emulate him, to take his place, his empty seat at their new table, and how heavily that responsibility could weigh on her without her noticing. The daughter never mentions him, never asks. The mother says, "It's okay to miss him." The daughter replies, "What are you talking about, Ma?"

The story of Proteus

They pass a row of stores selling Sicilian tiles for tourists: representations of the island's flag, fruit arranged in geometrical patterns, representations of old Greek gods. The daughter points out one that looks like the tile Grandma gave them. The mother thinks that one is Medusa; their mosaic has Proteus. "Proteus," the daughter repeats, and wants to know everything. The mother tells her a version of the story her own mother told her many times.

The mosaic belonged to Nanna. She found it when she was an excavation laborer in the archaeological ruins of an old Roman villa, just south of her farmhouse in Philosophiana. According to Nanna, she discovered the enormous triclinium, the dining room, with an impressive mosaic floor showing the Twelve Labors of Hercules. But she never got credit for it, because she was just a day laborer; the credit went to the head archaeologist. In further excavations, Nanna uncovered a smaller vestibule with perfectly preserved mosaics depicting a myth about Proteus: the elusive, ever-shifting god of the sea, son of Poseidon and Phoenice, a prophet and shepherd of all sea beasts. Proteus could see the future, past, and present in complete clarity, but he detested being asked about it. The only way to get him to speak was to capture him, hold him down long enough, and compel him. He

Chapter IV

Chapter IV

The morning is warm and quiet, and the narrator sits writing in the kitchen with the balcony doors open. She has no clear idea yet what she is doing or what will happen next. She gets tangled up in possible beginnings: a story about a mother and a daughter. In her imagined premise, the daughter is a middle-aged writer who suspects her mother is developing dementia, so she writes a novel about her, then asks her mother to translate it, one installment at a time, hoping to keep her mind active, a dike against forgetting.

Her own daughter comes into the kitchen, sits down heavily, and asks what's for breakfast. They go through their morning rituals. Then the daughter opens the fridge and closes it immediately: the swordfish head in there looks like it's crying. The narrator opens the fridge herself, avoiding eye contact with the fish. She writes to her mother at her daughter's insistence, asking how she would cook a swordfish head. Her mother replies that the best way is to make a broth: a big pot, lots of thyme, coarse sea salt, an entire head of garlic, olive oil, keep it simple. But when the narrator looks around for pots, nothing is big enough, because all the pianist's pots are for single servings, for a man who eats alone.

SKY-BEAMS

They spend the rest of the morning and afternoon in the apartment, quiet explorers of someone else's life. The living room is tightly curated, heavy with period furniture. The marble coffee table, the two oak armchairs and green velvet sofa, the Steinway piano in the corner, the long ebony dining table for ten, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering three walls. Despite the high domed ceilings, the space feels tight, almost suffocating, so she opens the enormous windows and swings open the wooden shutters. When light and air flood in, the room feels lighter, even welcoming.

They step out onto a Juliet balcony overlooking the plaza. Far on the horizon, framed by low buildings, they see Mount Etna, its white-gray plume rising into the intensely blue sky. Her daughter asks if that's the volcano from the radio, and what would happen if it erupted more and lava came down. Nothing, the narrator says, nothing would happen to them. Lava moves slowly. How do you know that? She just does. Lava moves slowly.

Back inside, her daughter flops down on the velvet sofa while the narrator walks along the bookshelves. There is an entire wall of the Loeb Classical Library collection, more than five hundred green and red books. The narrator's mother owns many books from that same collection and has always wanted to complete it but never managed. She sends her mother a photo of the collection. Her mother replies instantly: is it the complete collection? The narrator replies that she thinks so. Her mother responds with an enthusiastic emoticon of a lady raising both arms.

SKY-YAWNINGS

Later, the narrator sits on one of the armchairs with her computer on her lap, and her daughter sits at the long dining table, drawing. The girl rolls a lineup of pencils against the table and complains that she's bored. The narrator tells her that boredom is not a bad thing and that mothers are not entertainers. But immediately she feels guilty. Maybe her daughter is not asking to be entertained but asking for real companionship.

To bridge the distance, she shows her daughter a game she used to play with her own mother and, before that, with her grandmother: stand in front of the bookshelf, close your eyes, ask a question silently, then pick a book, open it to any page, feel the page with your fingertip, then open your eyes and read whatever your finger is pointing at. Her daughter plays along, smiling. She reads from Aristotle's Problems: "Why is it that in damp regions, copulation is more likely to produce females? Is it because the greater quantity of moisture thickens more slowly?" The narrator can only say, "Oh." Her daughter asks what the book is, what it means. The narrator apologizes: the game doesn't always work. Nothing. They'll try it again another time.

COLORS OF THE SKY

She couldn't just make anything up, she reflects. She has to be careful finding a beginning. Some weeks ago in Amsterdam, in the middle of an interview in a loud café, a very young journalist asked her whether she would define her work as autobiographical or autofiction. Neither, she said defensively, denying it like a petty crime. But then her daughter, who had been reading in silence next to her, looked up from her book, stared the journalist straight in the eye, and reproduced an entire monologue from a character in one of her novels, a little girl who in the novel is the daughter of the narrator. It was a flawless delivery. The journalist looked back at the narrator and raised one eyebrow, a smug smile, and scribbled notes. How was she to explain that her daughter was impersonating the character, that she had learned the lines, that she was imitating the narrator, and not the narrator imitating her?

SKY-FLAME

Time moved with the speed of emergencies at the start of the divorce: the lawyers, the doubled therapy, the division of objects, the papers filed, the evidence, the night terrors, the palpitations. The present felt fast, fragile. All the while, right around the corner, unreachable, the feeling of a new beginning, beginnings always so full of possibility and expectation, but also so full of bait. For months her hair fell out, big chunks spiraling into the drain of the shower. For days in a row she developed migraines and stayed in bed unable to open her eyes. Her mother moved in with them. She helped her get back on her feet, helped with dinners and breakfasts, with her daughter's homework, tight braids in the morning, rigorous routines, but also loose, long conversations over wine and sturdy hugs on late nights when she thought she'd fall apart. But after a while, her mother had to go back to her own house, her mah-jongg group, her eco-radical group, her book club, her Dzogchen community, her tarot clients, her life. It becomes expected that one will move on, that one has moved on. Moved on to what? To the middle part, possibly. But she wasn't there yet. She needed more causes, more explanations, more reasons. Or maybe she just needed a new narrative thread.

SKY-WREATHS

She has, of course, used slivers of her own life, shades of moments, pluckings from a family lexicon to write fiction. Not because she cares to write about her life, but because she wouldn't know what else to write with. And maybe that has had consequences. Her daughter has been sitting through her readings in bookstores and book clubs for months, pretending not to listen, always reading her own book, but she does indeed listen, it turns out. Perhaps something is happening to her memories of early childhood. The stream of her daughter's memory and the stream of her own imagination are flowing into one another, and one day they will not know how to tell things apart. Her daughter is convinced that when she was five she almost drowned in a swimming pool in the shape of an electric guitar in Memphis, Tennessee, like the girl in one of her books almost did. It took a while to convince her that no, she has never almost drowned, that she has never been to Memphis, Tennessee, and that there is no such thing as a guitar-shaped swimming pool.

SUDDEN RINGS

As night comes over them, right before either of them falls asleep, their conversations remind the narrator of those old men who stand on piers or sit on benches looking out toward a distant horizon, mumbling things to each other without really minding if the other is listening at all. What would you say makes a good beginning? For example, tomorrow: breakfast. No, I mean in a story. I don't know, Ma, but do you think my feet and nose are getting bigger? Definitely. Ma, can we do something with the swordfish soon? Tomorrow. Promise? Fine, okay, yes.

PROLONGED SOLAR ECLIPSES

When do we start speaking like our mothers? "Fine, okay, yes" is exactly what the narrator's mother says when asked something she is not happy to do or answer. The narrator reminds her she has to get her annual checkup: Bueno, okay, sí. Will you look into new medical insurance? Bueno, okay, sí. Caulk the house for the season? Get rid of the saltpeter? Bueno, okay, sí. Her mother likes to tell everyone that from her kitchen window she can see the Pacific Ocean meeting the Sea of Cortez, and that some nights while she does dishes she can see the moon rising, and the moonlight reflected on the water marks the exact seam where those two waters merge. But if she doesn't get rid of the saltpeter, the windows of her house become white and lose their translucency, and if she doesn't caulk the house once a year, every morning is a Sisyphean choreography against the sand, the ants, the dust, against time. She has started forgetting simple things: the caulking appointment, lunch with a friend, the annual visit to the dentist. She keeps misplacing her things: credit cards, keys, earrings, especially earrings. She sometimes messages the narrator, as if her daughter