He touched one, half-expecting it to crumble like ash, but the leaf felt normal—cool, slightly damp, alive—and when he pulled his hand back, his fingertips were stained with white.

He cleaned his hands on the weathered barn jacket. Was the dust glowing?
Now the jacket had faint luminescent streaks across the pocket, like someone had dragged a glow stick through fabric, and Greg realized the light was pulsing in time with his heartbeat.

“What the?” and the moisture leaving his mouth took on the visuals of musical notes. He sat down.

The ground beneath him hummed—a low frequency he felt more than heard—and the white leaves above began to drift down in slow motion, each one trailing a faint melody as it fell.

He handed the note over to his therapist.

“That’s it- in third person like you asked.”

“That’s what you saw?”

“All of it. I blinked again and I was sitting on the bench, hadn’t moved. Leaves were the right colors again.”

“Drugs?”

“I’ve done acid. Years ago. This wasn’t that.”

“There are flashbacks,”

“This wasn’t that. What was it?”

Dr. Fenway stopped twirling his pen and took 15 seconds. He counted them in his mind.

“The brain tries to find patterns. Order in chaos. Sometimes it’s more successful than others. Sometimes it’s so unsuccessful that it rips off the slate of your eyes and rewrites it on its way to your consciousness.”

“That sounds far fetched. Like an LLM?”

Dr. Fenway’s mouth twitched—not quite a smile. “In a way, yes. Your brain is predicting what it expects to see, filling in gaps, and sometimes…” he tapped the note on his desk, “sometimes the prediction model breaks down and you see the raw data before it’s been properly interpreted. The white leaves, the glowing, the visual sounds—those might be your brain’s error messages.”

“Or the raw data?”

Dr. Fenway set down his pen entirely, and for the first time in their sessions, Greg saw something flicker behind the professional mask—uncertainty, or maybe recognition.

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Whether your brain filters reality into something manageable, or whether it constructs the only reality you’re capable of perceiving. If it’s the former, then yes—you might have glimpsed what’s actually there.”

Greg sat back slowly. “Which do you think, doc?”

Dr. Fenway stood and walked to the window, looking out at the perfectly ordinary trees lining the parking lot. “Three months ago, I saw my dead mother standing in my kitchen. Not a dream, not a memory—she was there. Told me something I had no way of knowing.” He turned back to Greg. “The next day, I found out it was true. So you tell me, Greg—do I think you saw raw data?”

Greg swallowed. “But why? And why now? That’s what’s driving me crazy. You’re Jungian in your training right doc? What would he say?”

Dr. Fenway returned to his chair, but didn’t sit—just gripped the back of it. “Jung would say your psyche is compensating. That when consciousness becomes too rigid, too fixed in its patterns, the unconscious breaks through—sometimes violently. He called them ‘numinous experiences.’ The Self trying to get your attention.” He paused. “But he’d also ask: what were you thinking about right before it happened? What’s trying to emerge that you’ve been ignoring?”

“I was saying the Jesus Prayer.” It was almost a whisper.

“The Jesus Prayer?”

“I found my old copy of Franny and Zooey—I started tracking down the original texts so to speak.”

Dr. Fenway’s expression shifted—something between professional curiosity and personal alarm. “The repetitive prayer. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ Over and over until it becomes automatic, until it supposedly opens something.” He sat down now, leaning forward. “Greg, how long had you been saying it when the leaves turned white?”

“2-3 hours? The time slips while saying it.”

Dr. Fenway’s knuckles went white on the armrests. “Christ. Greg, I need you to listen to me very carefully. The Jesus Prayer, the Hesychast tradition—it’s not just meditation. It’s a technology. The monks who developed it documented… side effects. Visions, yes, but also—”

He stopped himself, stood again, paced to the bookshelf. “I’m going to tell you something that could cost me my license. After my mother appeared, I started researching. There are others. Dozens of documented cases of people who practiced contemplative prayer and started seeing things. Consistent things.”

“What kind of consistent things doc?” Greg realized suddenly his palms were sweating on the leather recliner. Leather recliner? Hadn’t it been cloth?

Dr. Fenway didn’t seem to notice Greg’s confusion about the chair. “Layers,” he said, pulling a worn journal from the shelf. “They described reality as having layers. The first layer—what we all agree is ‘real’—is just the top one. Stable, consensus. But underneath…” He opened the journal, and Greg could see cramped handwriting, diagrams. “Underneath, the monks wrote about a ‘living substrate.’ Where thoughts have color, where intention has weight, where the boundaries between self and other dissolve. They called it—” He looked up. “Greg, what is that chair made of?”

“Leather.”

Dr. Fenway closed his eyes. “When you walked in today, that chair was cloth. Charcoal gray microfiber. I’ve sat across from it for six years.” He opened his eyes, and they were wet. “Greg, I think your prayer didn’t just let you see the substrate. I think it destabilized something. And now it’s bleeding through. The question is—” He looked at his hands, turned them over. “The question is whether it’s just you, or whether you’ve opened a door for both of us.”

Greg started muttering something. Slowly at first. And then the hum was fleshed out a bit more before becoming almost audible.

Dr. Fenway heard the prayer in Greg’s breath and lunged to stop him. Too late. The walls took up the rhythm, a low chord rising through plaster and wood, and outside the window the trees began to unpeel into white.

Marcus leaned his bike against the peeling window frame and tried the door. Unlocked. Everything was unlocked now.

The smell hit him first—mildew and old clothes and something else, something sweet and rotten from the back room. His hands trembled as he pulled the bandana over his nose. Three days since his last drink. The shakes were getting worse.

The front of the store was picked over—clothing racks tipped, wire hangers scattered like pick-up sticks. But the back room, the electronics section, might still have something. People took food, medicine, batteries. They didn’t think about the guts of things.

He picked his way through overturned shelves. A microwave, door hanging open. Too heavy, and he’d already pulled one apart last week. The magnetron was useless without proper shielding, and the transformer was bulky. He moved on.

Calculator. He snatched it up, fingers fumbling with the battery cover. Empty, but that didn’t matter. He held it up to the gray light filtering through the grimy window. The solar cell was intact—maybe one square inch of dark silicon. He’d need at least six of these wired in series to get enough voltage. Into the backpack.

Another calculator. This one cracked, but the solar panel looked good. His hands shook worse as he tried to pry it off with his multitool. The plastic snapped wrong, and he cursed, but the cell came free. Two down.

A clock radio caught his eye. He hefted it—too heavy for what it offered. Maybe a transformer, but small. Not worth the weight. Twenty miles on a bike with a loaded pack. Every ounce mattered.

Portable CD player. He flipped it open, pressed the eject button out of habit. Nothing happened. Dead. He set it aside anyway, came back to it. Pried off the battery cover. Three AA. He could use the battery holder, wire it for a trickle charge system, but—no. Too complicated. The shakes were making it hard to think clearly. Keep it simple. Solar straight to the circuit, battery bank only for the fence pulse. He left the CD player.

A drawer of assorted cables and adapters. He dug through them, found a 12V wall wart. Cracked the case on the edge of the shelf—the transformer inside was tiny. Might step up voltage, but not enough. And he’d need to… no. He dropped it. The clatter echoed in the empty store.

Another calculator. Another. Five now. Maybe enough.

Then he saw it, back in the corner behind a collapsed shelf—the curved glass screen catching the light like a dead eye. CRT monitor. Old beige plastic, probably twenty years in this place before the world went to shit. His heart kicked up, and it wasn’t just the withdrawal.

He dragged the shelf aside. The monitor was massive—had to be seventeen inches. He rocked it forward. Forty pounds easy, probably more. His arms were already tired, and he hadn’t even started the ride back.

But inside…

He found a screwdriver in the drawer—phillips head, handle cracked. Held it in both hands to keep it steady. The back panel screws fought him, corroded. One stripped before he got it loose. Sweat ran down his temples despite the cold.

The back came off with a creak of old plastic. There it was, mounted to the circuit board like some kind of mechanical insect—the flyback transformer. Black epoxy block the size of his palm, red high-voltage wire coiled around it, and beneath it, soldered to the board, filter capacitors like small batteries.

This was what he needed. This was what would make the fence work.

The flyback could step his 6V battery bank up to thousands of volts. Maybe five, six thousand—enough to make someone think twice. Enough to make them scream. And the capacitors would hold the charge, dump it fast through the fence wire in a pulse that’d light up every nerve.

His hands shook harder as he worked the screws holding the circuit board. The CRT tube loomed above him, and he was careful not to touch it. Even dead, even discharged, the vacuum tube could implode if he cracked it. Glass shrapnel. And if it wasn’t discharged, there could still be—

Don’t think about it. Just get the board out.

He looked at the rest of the monitor guts. Copper yoke coils. More transformers. A whole power supply section he could harvest. The tube itself—if he could safely break it down—had copper wire, rare earth elements in the phosphor coating. Worth something, maybe, if there was ever worth again.

But it was forty pounds of glass and plastic and metal, and he had five miles of uphill grade on Old Post Road, and his legs were already weak from not eating enough, and the backpack could only hold so much, and—

He sawed through the solder points with the edge of the screwdriver, levering the flyback transformer free. The circuit board cracked. He didn’t care. The transformer came loose in his hand, heavy and dense, wires dangling like nerves.

One capacitor. He could fit one more. The big cylindrical one, rated for 400V. He worked it free, legs shaking now too, not just his hands.

The rest he’d have to leave. All that copper. All those parts.

He looked at the gutted monitor—at everything he was abandoning—and felt something tight in his chest. Waste. It was all waste. But he couldn’t carry it, couldn’t use it, couldn’t save it.

Just the flyback. Just the capacitor. Just the calculators.

He wrapped the transformer in a t-shirt from the clothing section, packed it carefully at the bottom of his bag. The capacitor went in sideways. The calculators he’d already found went in last, cushioned with more fabric.

Thirty pounds in the pack, easy. His shoulders already ached.

On the way out, he grabbed one more thing—a relay from a box of random electrical parts by the register. The kind with a clear plastic case so you could see the contacts inside. 12V coil. He could run it off the battery bank, triggered by the solar-powered sensor circuit. When the trip wire pulled, the relay would click, connect the batteries to the flyback, and—

His hands were shaking so bad he nearly dropped it. He shoved it in his pocket.

The bike ride was going to be hell.

But tonight, if he could keep his hands steady enough to solder, he’d have the bones of a fence that might actually keep them out. Might buy him another week, another month. However long the batteries lasted.

Fifty triggers, he figured. Maybe less.

He hoped it was enough.

Prologue: The Sleep Debt

You die and you have a sleep debt. There’s an amount of sleep you need and an amount you get. The delta is the debt, and you don’t wake up until you pay it back. When you first awake as a dead person, you can only hang around your grave. This was the story Carolina Washington told Mary Ann one humid evening in Iowa, 80 miles outside Omaha, as cigarette smoke created delicate geometries between them.

“Do you believe that?” Mary Ann asked, her 73-year-old fingers tapping ash onto a chipped saucer.

“I believe we carry debts,” Carolina replied, watching moonlight filter through the pine trees outside her farmhouse. “The kind that outlive us.”

Part I: The Record Keepers

Mary Ann

Mary Ann felt the warmth of sunlight on her skin filter in through the pink home-spun curtains. She blinked her eyes twice and ran her hand through the full of her face. Her hands retreated the sheets. She turned and looked at her husband.

“Hank? You awake?” she said in a whisper.

There was no response from Hank, outside of the low murmur of snoring she had been listening to all night. She stayed studying the lines on his face until it twitched and he turned on his side. She looked at the clock. It read 6:36 a.m.

In the bathroom mirror she studied her face in the trickle of light, ran five fingers through each side of her hair, tore sleep out of each eye. With the light coming in, she could see her irises wider than she had ever imagined them. As she moved closer to her eyes, she saw them narrow. She invented a game there, moving back and forth, looking at the changes in them.

“So much effort, just for light,” she murmured.

When she returned to the kitchen, she noticed the sand in the backseat of her car through the window. It had been there since Michael borrowed it yesterday. He was her neighbor, 19, while she was 73 – her white hair and aching joints reminding her of this disparity daily. The sand brought back memories of herself when she was Leonard’s girl, sneaking away and finding love.

Michael returned later that day with a stack of letters tied with brown twine.

“Found these in the attic,” he said, placing them carefully on her kitchen table. “They’re all addressed to the previous owner from different people around the country.”

Mary Ann untied the twine. The first envelope bore a Chicago postmark. “These aren’t mine to read,” she said, but curiosity won, as it often did these days.

Leonard

In Chicago, Leonard Cohen was humming in the background through old speakers. It was an LP. The hisses and pops competed with him.

“You like Simon?” Alex asked.

“Simon?” Mary Ann replied.

“You know, Paul Simon. On the record?”

Mary Ann smiled, faintly. She got up and walked to the record player. “Not really – it came with the record player.”

They’d been lovers once, years ago, before Hank, before Chicago became a place of business meetings rather than jazz clubs. Before her hair turned white and his turned to memory. The letter she’d sent him last month had been returned undelivered.

The phone rang. It was Mark calling from New York.

“I’ve been traveling,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of too many hotel rooms. “I found the letters. All of them.”

“What letters?” Mary Ann asked, though she already knew.

“The ones written by everyone who ever loved.”

Mark

Mark stood on the balcony of his New York apartment, watching the city unfold beneath him like a living entity. The letters were spread on his desk inside – a hundred stories written by strangers to strangers, collected over decades.

“It’s a pattern,” he told Jack when he called him later that night. “Every letter, every story – they’re all connected.”

“You’re losing it,” Jack replied, the sound of rain drumming against windows in Lake Charles coming through the line.

Mark lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl against the night. “Remember that story Carolina Washington told us about sleep debt? I think these letters are mapping something. The spaces between lives.”

He’d begun transcribing them, noting the recurring names: Mary Ann, Leonard, Michael, Robert, Kate, Gina, Nick, Ted, Martha. Characters living fragmentary lives in different cities, different decades, all somehow sharing the same emotional wavelength.

“I’m going to Budapest tomorrow,” Mark said. “One of the letters mentions a woman there who collects stories.”

“Just come home,” Jack said. “You’ve been gone too long.”

But Mark had already hung up, returning to the letters – to the stories that felt more like life than the life he’d been living.

Part II: The Dancers

Jack

The southern wind doesn’t blow hard – it’s more of a warm embrace. Jack felt this wind walking to Rosie’s diner in Raleigh. He felt silly, instead of prudent, wearing his full-length wool coat.

He took his seat in a booth. At Rosie’s, “Please wait to be seated” was simply a joke, meant to alienate the non-locals. He ordered coffee and a pack of cigarettes with a wink – Monica, the waitress, smiled and walked away.

He was half through the coffee when Maria walked in. He stood to give her a hug. They held each other tightly before breaking.

“How the hell are you?” he asked, looking at the brightness of her eyes.

“Good. I’ve been good – how are you?”

“I can’t complain – just getting settled in.”

She was in town interviewing for a nursing position – he had moved here a year ago. There were plenty of smiles and their hands brushed against each other for brief moments as they shared cigarettes.

“I got something in the mail yesterday,” Maria said, reaching into her purse. “A letter, but not addressed to me. The return address is your old apartment, but it’s signed by someone named Carolina.”

Jack’s heart quickened. “I’ve been getting these too. Random letters, all telling pieces of stories.”

“It’s about sleep debt,” Maria said. “And about a woman in Prague who keeps everyone’s memories.”

The bell above the door jingled, and Kate walked in. Jack hadn’t seen her since New Orleans, five years ago.

“I need to talk to you both,” she said, not bothering with hello. “About the letters.”

Kate

Kate and Jack had quit smoking two days ago. Today, they repainted the apartment – trying to get it back into the shape their landlord expected – back into what they projected their lives were when they moved in.

“I’m fucking tired,” she said as she plopped down in the old recliner.

“Yeah, me too honey.”

“Do you think we’ll finish today?”

Jack thought to the bedroom that still needed paint, to the hall. “If we push through, we might. I’m not so sure, though.”

Kate got up and walked to the couch, her body a beautiful symphony coming his way. She rested her ankles on his lap.

“I wish we weren’t painting.”

“You wish we weren’t quitting?”

“Yes and no. I know we should. But I really miss it.”

“I miss it too,” Jack said and caressed her legs.

They’d found the first letter three weeks ago, tucked inside a book Kate had bought from a secondhand store. Now they were finding them everywhere – between pages, in coat pockets they hadn’t worn in years, tucked behind picture frames.

The letter Kate had found today was different. It contained photographs – strangers dancing in gazebos, standing on balconies, sitting in diners. On the back of each, a single name and a date. People they’d never met, yet somehow knew.

“What if they’re not stories?” Kate asked. “What if they’re memories we’re supposed to have?”

Jack kissed her gently. “Then we better start remembering.”

Robert

Robert was grand but Michael was grander, taking Mildee out for a movie and ice cream that tasted like it was coated in the silver from the screen.

After the movie they walked past houses that were immaculate, and he pointed out the ones that could possibly make a home for them in a few years. She kept quiet. She never really did believe Michael, but he was so sure of himself that you couldn’t help but fall a little in love with each word he said so confidently.

“Do you think that one has a fireplace?” he asked while pointing.

She felt horrible. She could tell the chimney was all wrong for a fireplace, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him.

“Maybe? I don’t know Mike.”

“I bet it does. I bet it has the best damn fireplace in a 2-mile radius. And that’s the one I’m going to buy for us.”

Robert remembered this conversation though he’d never been part of it. The memory belonged to Mildee, who’d written it down in one of the letters Mary Ann had forwarded to him. He’d begun collecting them all, these fragments of lives that seemed to float between cities, between people.

When he received the invitation to Prague, he wasn’t surprised. The return address matched one he’d memorized from another letter – from Carolina Washington’s final correspondence before she passed.

Part III: The Gazebo

The Meeting

The night is a freeze frame amplification of the desires, the longings, the hopes you’ve let go into the wind, the loves you still hold close to your heart.

They gathered in Prague, strangers connected only by the letters they’d received – Mary Ann, Mark, Kate, Jack, Robert, Michael, Mildee, Ted, Samantha, Nick, Sal, and others whose names had appeared throughout the stories. The invitation had come from Martha, though none of them had met her.

“I didn’t expect so many,” Martha said as they assembled in the small café overlooking the Old Town Square. She was younger than they expected, perhaps thirty, with auburn hair and eyes that changed color depending on how the light hit them.

“Why did you bring us here?” Mary Ann asked, her voice carrying the authority of her seventy-three years.

Martha gestured to the stacks of letters and notebooks on the table. “Because you’re all living the same stories, just at different times. The sleep debt isn’t just about death – it’s about the memories we carry for each other.”

“That’s impossible,” Ted said, though his hand instinctively reached for Samantha’s, a woman he’d just met but somehow recognized.

“Is it?” Martha opened one of the notebooks. “Mary Ann, do you remember standing on a balcony in New York, watching stars with a man named Leonard?”

Mary Ann’s expression changed. “That wasn’t me. I’ve never lived in New York.”

“But you remember it,” Martha pressed.

“I… I’ve dreamed it.”

Mark stepped forward. “The gazebo. Everyone mentions a gazebo in their letters. Dancing there.”

Martha nodded. “It’s the center. Where all the stories converge.”

The Dance

Every dance is filled with memories and I feel your hand on my back smiling into the back of my tuxedo so perfect and so longing for perfection. I know this doesn’t rhyme, that this isn’t a proper song swan or otherwise to our near perfect song. But I take the steps you expect and your feet move back in time, perfect, to the rhythm we’ve fabricated.

They found the gazebo at midnight, guided by Martha through the winding streets of Prague. It stood in a small park, illuminated only by moonlight, yet familiar to all of them – as if they’d danced there before, in memories not quite their own.

“How is this possible?” Michael asked, his youthful face clouded with confusion.

“Carolina believed we share more than blood and history,” Martha explained. “That stories are living things that move between us. That every time we remember, we’re remembering for someone else too.”

One by one, they began to dance. Mary Ann with Robert. Kate with Jack. Mark with Maria. Strangers becoming familiar with each step, recognizing movements they’d never made, words they’d never spoken.

“Dance me to the end of love,” someone whispered, and Leonard Cohen’s voice seemed to materialize from the night itself, a soundtrack to their collective memory.

For Mary Ann, it was like being young again – feeling Leonard’s hands on her waist, though the man holding her was Robert. For Jack, it was reuniting with Kate in New Orleans, though they’d never been there together.

“The sleep debt,” Martha said, watching them. “It’s being paid right now. With every memory reclaimed, every story acknowledged.”

Part IV: The Letters

The Writer

Through the window Mary Ann saw her two children safe on the bus – she finished the dishes and wiped down the breakfast table. Drying her hands she decided against phoning Michael – his measured conversation at work was never much fun. Or interesting. With this thought the telephone rang.

“Hellow?” She used a horrible imitation of an English accent for unknown callers.

“Mrs. Smith? Great news here!”

Mary Ann was not Mrs. Smith. She thought about life as a traditional yet so anonymous ‘Mrs. Smith’.

“News?”

“The vacation. You’re a winner!”

Vacation images flashed in her mind. Beaches, there were always beaches, but also dimly lit Spanish bars with individual wafts of smoke entwining towards the ceiling.

“Where – Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Roy – name’s Roy. Forgot to mention it”

“Roy, Where am I going?”

“Why beautiful Denver, of course! Perfect slopes this season!”

“Well, Roy, Thanks. Thanks a lot. But I’m afraid I’m not Mrs. Smith.”

Back in Prague, decades later, Mary Ann recounted this memory to the others gathered in Martha’s apartment. But Nick interrupted.

“That happened to me,” he said. “The call about Denver. About winning a vacation.”

“That’s not possible,” Mary Ann insisted. “It was my phone that rang.”

Martha spread more letters across the table. “You’re both right. The stories move between you. They always have. That’s what Carolina discovered – why she started collecting them.”

“But why us?” Mildee asked. “Why these particular stories?”

“Because you’re all connected to the first writer,” Martha said. “The one who began recording everything.”

The Collector

Winter falls suddenly in the midwest, snow drenching leaves before they have a chance to settle in for rest. There were plenty of leaves on Carolina Washington’s land. Carolina lived in a farmhouse 80 miles outside of Omaha, on the Iowa side.

Since the Washingtons had stopped farming, and then she had stopped leasing out the farm, more and more trees had encroached on the farmland. At present, 75 percent of the farm was forest. Hence the leaves. Blown hard against the farmhouse, their sheer mass started making it difficult to open the door.

When she reached 74, ten years a widow, she decided to stop bothering. Every mid-fall, Carolina would avoid risking a nasty fall and stock up on supplies for the winter. She would purchase months of supplies of food, medicine, a little hooch, and read in her library while energetic, watch TV while catatonic.

For fifty years, Carolina had collected stories – overheard conversations in diners, snatches of lovers’ quarrels through hotel walls, whispered confessions on train platforms. She transcribed them all, sending copies to the people whose lives they might touch – a vast network of interconnected narratives spanning decades and continents.

“She was the first to understand what was happening,” Martha explained, herself Carolina’s granddaughter. “How memories could become untethered from their owners, how stories could be shared across lives.”

“But why collect them?” Jack asked. “Why not just let them float free?”

“Because without someone to record them, they’d be lost. And so would the connections between all of you.”

Martha revealed that Carolina’s final project had been bringing them all together – the people whose lives had become intertwined through shared stories, shared memories.

“She called it ‘the sleep debt,'” Martha said. “The memories we owe each other.”

Part V: The Return

The Homecoming

The moon bows, and we watch it set, thinking it’s for us that it does its dance. But we’re fools, lost in the romance, of a tide that widens with each breath.

They parted in Prague with new understanding – Mary Ann to Iowa, Jack to Raleigh, Mark to New York, Kate to New Orleans. Each carrying notebooks filled with stories – their own and others’ – the burden of memory now consciously shared.

Mary Ann returned to her home, to Hank still snoring softly each morning, to the sand still in the backseat of her car. But now she understood why Michael’s presence had always seemed so familiar – he carried fragments of Leonard within him, stories passed through time.

She began writing letters of her own, recording everyday moments – the way light filtered through curtains, the taste of coffee at dawn, the whisper of her husband’s breathing. Sending them out into the world to be caught, held, remembered by strangers who would recognize them as their own.

In Chicago, Mark reconnected with a woman named Gina who remembered dancing with him in a gazebo she’d never visited. In Lake Charles, Jack taught Maria Leonard Cohen songs she somehow already knew. In New York, Mildee stood on a balcony with Robert, watching stars they’d charted in another life.

The sleep debt was being repaid – each memory reclaimed, each story acknowledged.

The Final Letter

There’s a champaign flute in her hand, shimmering, glittering – a perfect accent to the room, but it’s powerless in its attempts to draw attention away from her eyes. She’s standing, talking to some people in casual conversation, but who she’s simultaneously miles away from. She sees him and the ends of her mouth quickly betray a smile then return back to the task, the chat, at hand.

Mary Ann found Carolina’s final letter tucked inside an old Leonard Cohen record sleeve – written decades ago but somehow arriving precisely when needed. It described a New Year’s Eve party none of them had attended but all somehow remembered – where strangers became lovers, where time folded back on itself, where the barriers between individual lives dissolved.

“We think our stories belong to us,” Carolina had written, “but they belong to everyone who carries them forward. The debt we owe is to remember for each other, to keep each other’s stories alive when memory fails, when time separates, when death divides.”

Mary Ann added this letter to the collection she’d compiled – the chronicle of intersecting lives that Martha now maintained in Prague, that Jack referenced in his songs in Raleigh, that Mark taught in his literature classes in New York, that Kate painted in her New Orleans studio.

The final line of Carolina’s letter read: “The spaces between heartbeats – that’s where we meet. That’s where the stories live. That’s where we’re all dancing, always, in the gazebo, to music only we can hear.”

Epilogue: The Awakening

Time passes like a train barreling down a straightaway in some circumstances, and in others, it passes like molasses down a dispenser. This is the latter.

Carolina Washington opened her eyes. One hundred years had passed since her death, just as she’d predicted in the story she’d told Mary Ann so long ago. She stood beside her grave, watching descendants she’d never met place fresh flowers against the weathered stone.

She looked down at her hands – no longer wrinkled, no longer tired. The sleep debt had been paid, one shared memory at a time. One story at a time.

She could leave now, move beyond the boundary of her grave. She could explore the world that had continued without her.

Instead, she walked to the gazebo at the edge of what had once been her property. It was weathered now, the wood gray with age, but still standing. Still waiting.

And they were all there – Mary Ann, Leonard, Mark, Kate, Jack, Robert, Michael, Mildee, Martha – dancing to music only they could hear, their stories continuing in the spaces between heartbeats, in the memories they’d shared across time.

Carolina stepped onto the gazebo floor, and the dance went on.

Maeve was visiting with her sister’s family who lived 2 miles up the road. She had left three hours earlier- their oven was out and Maeve had cooked them a meatloaf.

Rationally, Maeve would be back soon. Rationally, he wasn’t hungry- he had made eggs right after she left and had a good late lunch. And, rationally, the branches scratching at the side of the house were just that.

But nothing was rational. His hair, thinning yet still present in wiry, whispy, whiteness had a few pieces standing at attention. His hand could barely control the shakes that his heart produced.

Bernard, the dog, started barking on the porch. John stepped outside to find Bernard, tail wagging, a kitten whimpering in the corner. He took a piece of jerky from the jar he kept between the chairs, and threaded it. Bernard was all attention, but he sent him off into the yard with a snap and a point.

The kitten was smitten with the piece of jerky and John picked her up to his own amazement. He started singing a lullaby that he had sung each of his three children. Once inside, still holding her, he poured the gristle from the frying pan where the eggs had been into a bottle and attached a nipple.

Feeding it to the kitten, whose teeth pirced the nipple, he said, “Just a little.”

Maeve opened the door, closed it, and removed her jacket before she saw him.

“What do you have there?” she asked, voice weary.

“A little friend Bernard made.”

“It’s cute. Beth loved the meatloaf.”

“I’m glad.” He replied. Then his eyes focused on the window darkened by the night sky.

“I do wish Paulie, Georgia and Maggie-” He paused and swallowed. “Would visit again.”

“I do too.” She said, with more than a bit of glimmer in her eye.

She had a pair of speakers standing tall in her living room, one on each side of her fireplace. On the mantle was the random assortment of knick-knacks that I imagined mirrored her thoughts.

She grabbed my hand and picked me off the couch like a feather. Between the speakers was the kind of heaven you have to have a more sensual mind to imagine.

“Hey.” She said, and pulled my shirt collar closer to her chest.

“I like this song,” she went on, pulling my waist towards her.

My head was breathing in an intoxicating mix of shampoo and smoke when her hands found my chest and asked, “Do you know this song?”

“What?”

“Do you know it?” She nodded her head and her eyes grabbed just the right amount of shine from the light.

“I don’t think I do.” I stumbled.

“It’s ‘If I needed you’ by Townes Van Zandt. I’ve always wanted to be buried to this song.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She pulled away from me and sat on her couch. She easily reached towards the table to her cigarettes and lit one.

“It’s nothing.” She exhaled. “There was always just a sense of insecure longing in this song. It made me want to be buried to it.”

I said nothing.

“It’s a good song.” I said after a while.

“Yeah, I guess.”

We hold ourselves with baited breath,
lost steps and all the rest,
cocooned in our thoughts,
when it all happens too soon.

I’m sketching words you’re not ready to carry,
the thoughts are good, but would drown a ferry,
but they may just roll down a river,
of yours.

But I hold onto this with baited breath,
I don’t know the future,
or even what’s next,
But I can still feel the warmth by your side.

Practically and mathematically,
we have only so many days to live.
We can fill them with joy,
or the things we miss.
But I still find myself leaning,
at some greater grace.

Now the rhythm is getting slower,
blood thickens with age.
But as the heart grows older,
it increases in shape.

The rain stops, as quickly as it came,
the flood averted, the ground satiated just the same.
You ask me what it means.
I have no answer, so simply reply,
“New Orleans.”

These chairs weren’t here,
when we counted last.
dress them up and
then take them down,
They’ll still serve as reminders,
of all the things,
we used to call laughs.

These chairs weren’t here,
when I saw you last.
But they take space up now,
Where I can still picture you,
drawing a tear from my eye,
and the love from my heart,
just before that goodbye.

Good for him.

It is a good name though, grazing on the American landscape till you’re so full that all you can do is process it through 8 stomachs or rewrites till it’s perfect.

G-d bless him.

And G-d bless everyone else, especially the people that damn us that refuse to use the Word and write G-d. I’m sure you have a good reason for the hate, and I really don’t give a shit- it just feels better to write it this way,

Back to the story.

It was a pleasant September night in Chicago when Darius went to mow the grass. The machine didn’t start at first and he gave it another pull. It roared to life.

He pushed it along his acquired piece of land, smiling. He made one loop, then two, then three. He looped and bobbed until all the grass was uniform. He looked back at the lawn with the satisfaction of a job well done.

He stepped into the garage, closing the large door behind him.

He walked over to where the shotgun shells were and inspected one’s weight. He rolled it in his finger, almost hearing the pellets dancing within. He danced with the shell for 30 seconds before re-affirming that he couldn’t go through with it.

He heard his wife calling from the house.

He lit a cigarette and shouted back that he’d be back to bed soon.