Chapter One / "Hemostasis"
the mechanism that leads to the
cessation of bleeding from a blood
vessel, the first stage of wound healing.

(content warning — foul language, donna berzatto, run-on sentences, familial/religious trauma, & depictions of animal death)

To heal a wound, you must first stop touching it.

Mairead Erickson is five years old when she learns this lesson, sitting cross-legged on James Kalinowski's kitchen counter, caged within the runaway spiral of a lemon-peel sunbeam.

School's out for the season — Natalie's away on an end-of-year Girl Scout retreat, Charlie's engulfed in preparation for an upcoming piano recital, Carmy's tugging at the end of her ponytail, a mischievous, shoebuckle sheen twining through the unbounded depths of his robin's-egg irises — and summertime has waded knee-deep into the affluent Winnetka suburbs, stippling brilliant patterns across every rooftop canvas in pursuit of civilian bewilderment — the human eye's highest praise.

It is unlike anything that she's ever known before: light breaking into prisms, the remarkable descent of glittering stalactites from mile-high skyscraper ceilings, a syrupy atmosphere tinged with the potpourri aroma of front lawns embalmed in chlorine and sun-spoilt charcoal, children's exhilarated squeals pinned to the air like half-edged paper cranes.

This, Mairead decides, is yellow, — it's curiosity and excitement rewound until they're spitting out stars, the wayward flicker launched from an electric fence's live-wired breast — refractive as twin headlights, as teeth strung together along the mucosal thread of a Duchenne grin.

Yellow becomes the first color that she can recognize anywhere. She feels the prickle of reincarnation each time its shades come to life against her skin, spinning themselves into visionary figures, inflorescence plumed from the grounds where she'd once tried to bury her most fleeting, intangible things. She finds it in the smear of plaque staining Uncle Jimmy's front teeth — second only to demise, it is a smoker's penultimate corollary — in the heaping pot of spaghetti left abandoned on the stovetop, and now, in the thin stream of pus that oozes from a consequential kitchen burn, tracing jointed pulselines across Michael Berzatto's hand.

James' — Uncle Jimmy's — instincts have prepared him for this — how to proceed despite the fact that he'd neglected to put any precautionary measures into place —  but he is no match for the excruciatingly inquisitive little girl, who — in pursuit of synesthetic aptitude at every level, a resplendent affair that fetters radiance to her senses — has already managed to plunge several fingers into the erythematous aperture, staining them with the inevitable: an empathetic fallout.

"Ah, ah. Hands off." He chides, in a pliant voice that firmly contrasts the way her features are quickly becoming matted with youthful displeasure. "Don't want it to get infected."

Still, he tries to draw her attention away from it — he tries and he tries, because what is loving a child, if not the quintessential incentive to keep trying? — and in another lifetime — perhaps, on a celestial plane that was much further away than their own — he might have been able to succeed.

In some other, better universe, the lines between legal guardian and loved one would blur long before the clock's hands lapsed into placidity, and looking out for Mairead would become second nature in favor of preventing the world around them from whittling her down to blunted edges.

Here's the path he'd tail to get there, citing routine occurrences like points on a treasure map: somewhere between the knife and the drawing board, Uncle Jimmy would decide when to take a saw-shark blade to every gray area, sinking his teeth into the leathery skin of morality and carving out the things that such an innocent, formidable child needed to survive amidst the chaos.

In their absence, he'd fill the three-pointed vacancies with extraordinary visions, cherish the opportunity to provide surrogate exposure to the principles that her parents had let slip through the cracks when they'd cast her aside. He'd teach her how to compartmentalize acceptance and value alongside intentionality and purpose; he'd help her learn how to break down walls built along the precipice of a generational neglect and let the salient concepts sprout perennial things in their place. 

Then, he'd watch, brimming with a paternal sense of pride, as each one wrapped around her like ribs around the heart, twenty-four outspread arms weeping ivory rivulets across a pulsing silhouette.

Yet, he wouldn't feel the need to protect her, because in some other, better universe, she'd have the chance to be young – to cherish every second of confinement to a tiny body packed with extra teeth and bones, hoarded like the family heirlooms that time would dissolve into hourglass granules once she'd grown up and left them behind – without falling into the proverbial jaws of an unbounded juvenile determination, fueled by the desire to engage in what she had always been meant to observe. 

But for now, there is no other, better universe, and in this one, she is still trailing her hand along the open wound, transfixed by the way it turns fever-warm beneath her fingertips.

This is hot, a marriage of fervor and discomfort. This is what red feels like.

After a long, wrung-out moment of contemplation – once Uncle Jimmy's initial command has almost completely faded away – Mairead's voice breaks through the standstill.

"What's 'infected?'"

Her question is barely coherent; the words taper off as silver-capped teeth chip away at their fish-eyed edges, each syllable lost beneath the fatty coil of her tongue once she's tried to manipulate it into shape – but none of that matters, as long as the meaning is there.

And it's there; emerging overnight amid blip-quick pinwheel spirals, it's capricious as pupils during a car crash – when, in a matter of seconds, the standard ocular nuclei erupt into a pair of quarter-sized new moons on the brink of celestial destruction — but it's there: a physical incarnation of the empathetic fallout, with all forty-four phonemes semantically intact.

"If we aren't careful, — that." Uncle Jimmy replies, wagging a finger at Mikey's burn, which – now that the drainage has subsided – is puckered into an angry broil, warping the air above it with febrile humidity. He nods in the direction of the bathroom. "Why don't you head in there and get some bandages to help me doctor him up?"

"'Kay!" Never one to miss out on the opportunity to lend a helping hand – and, in this case, get reacquainted with the internal configuration of the wound – Mairead hops off of the counter and skates a path of lopsided figure-eights across the kitchen floor, loose tiles creaking under her sock feet.

As she rifles through the medicine cabinet, past half-empty prescription bottles and dimpled tubes of antibiotic ointment, her mind comes alive with static energy. Merely the byproduct of a shift in the milieu, this newfound solitude is not meant to act as a comedown – this change of pace, no afterthought – but rather, the sparkplug to a little girl's attempt at picking apart what she should not yet be able to even comprehend.

She thinks about meaning. She thinks about the empathetic fallout, beyond a gluttonous pursual of leftover philosophies and metaphors lost to the subcurrent. She thinks about red, about contagion masquerading as a fusion of cicatrized rubies – a perfectly circular abrasion, soaked to fermentation by the juices pooling in its cherry-pit center – and about how – through all the chancels that she'd stood before, all the holy water stoups that she'd sluiced her fingers in – she had never been able to look at a wounded thing and understand why God allowed His most precious creations to be worn down to fragments so easily.

Maybe it's a phantom appendage of her steadfast admiration for Mikey – and his, for her, undeniably patterned across their every interaction since the day he'd turned up on the front step of the Ericksons' brownstone with a near-cold tuna casserole in hand, coffee-ground irises glimmering underneath the brim of his Red Sox baseball cap as he begged to meet their newborn twins – or maybe, just the selfish pleasure found in using these concepts to quell the bleeding from her own wounds, but some imperceptible force urges Mairead to do the only thing that she knows how.

Beneath the pharmaceutical glow of an overhead bulb, allusions of her marigold cathedral leaking in through a thin veil of dust and flies hot-wired into the afterlife, she kneels on the bathroom floor – elbows skewed at an obtuse angle on the edge of the toilet seat, candy necklace braided like a rosary between her clenched fingers – and hums an Ave Maria, perfectly timed with the metronome beat of the radiator.

Holy Mary, weren't you a girl once?

Didn't you hide your scabbed knees under your cloak, or grow flush in the cheekbones at Saint Joseph's single glance?

Didn't you mother everything around you into tatters, into a boundless oblivion?

I know how it went; I pressed the memories between swatches of light seeping in through the stained glass, early mornings at the catechism when – allured by the promise of gold stars and dove-shaped pieces of chocolate – I'd sit in the back of the sanctuary, poring over a pile of biblical texts in hopes that something meaningful would stick.

I first heard your name here, Holy Mary, and I chased it through the pages. I learned why they called you the star of the sea, the cause of our joy, and most importantly, the mother of the Messiah; I wrote about you in the margins, entire stubby-crayon volumes – how you counted eons on your hands and waited eternities for this holy child to become a part of your world, how you watched as He put His life's work into making the whole thing mine.

Need I recount the details? Under a canopy of pinprick stars and the stable's watchful eye, Jesus Christ was born to humble beginnings. Before you wrapped Him in swaddles and laid Him in a manger, you hugged His tiny body to your chest – your firstborn, prune-skinned beneath a coat of downy white lanugo – and when a higher power came to you, calling Him sacred, you feared he'd been mistaken for a lambkin.

But in time, you'd find it to be true; He was sacred, and before He was the world's, He was yours, so you let yourself become unapologetically enraptured by the things that He created. You marveled at the care He took with every feature, how He sculpted pairs of eyes and fingerprints in a way that would set them apart from the rest. You leant into your maternal adoration; you felt it alight in your chest each time He coaxed torpid bodies away from the brink of death with nothing but His hands and a scripture, and you snuffed it out each time He came back home – to temples, to caverns and synagogues, but never to you.

Still, just as the Bible would tell it, you were His mother above everything – even yourself. Your sundown years were plagued by the inexorable desire to reinfantilize Him, to hold your little boy in a way that you hadn't since the angel's wings snowed feathers down on Bethlehem. And as He took his last breath, writhing against the cross's dogwood sternum, you did just that.

You held Him – a moment that historians would later eulogize in marble, La Pieta; no linen cloths or guiding stars in sight.

In several years from now, Father John will tell me that here is where your story ends, and this will be the first time that I do not believe him.

He does not care to know you like I do – woman to child, dual knots in a tether strung from spines and eyelet lace, entangled by girlhood before we'd even departed the womb.

He cannot fathom the lengths I'd go to dissect every move that you made, when you'd climbed the tallest mountains and scaled the deepest valleys just to catch a glimpse of your son, whether it be in the snow-capped peaks carving pointed shapes into the apricity, or the match-thin bodies of water spitting veinlike patterns through the brush.

He will never understand how badly I want to crawl between the margins and let you use your mother's instinct to cradle me in your lap, while I recount a program I once saw on television that was centered around amputees – people doing great things with their lives, even after losing whole parts of themselves – and you laugh and laugh and laugh, stroking my hair as I tug on your headscarf, pleading with you to just listen.

But in several years from now – regardless of whatever version of you I keep tucked away, pinned above my heart like newspaper clippings or memorandums scrawled in loopy letters – I will realize that Father John was right about some things, too.

Because there'll be a time when I revisit this story, and I'm not able to see past your failure to mention the nails, the jagged edges and the stovetop burners, or how, — on every iteration of your boy's torquing paradise – a single, maternal touch is all it takes to break us open, a hemoglobin rapture as far as the eye can see.

Holy Mary, let me show it to you now: this ancestral masochism. Let me tell you about the kind of love He didn't plan for.

I found it in a blooming Judas bruise, branched off of the same ache I'd felt when my mother's hand split my skin for the first time, and as I watched my blood spill onto the carpet – redredredred  – I thought about how, if He'd really been the one to pour so much life into me, surely He hadn't meant for it to flush out all of my good things. 

I met it when I was just an idea, a flicker-beam congealed beneath heaven's eternal glow, and He'd held me in cupped palms while He swore to make me rich in His own image; but once I'd metastasized – from dust, to egg, to embryo, to tendon, to ligament, to bone – all I had to show for it was scar tissue, left behind in every place that He'd promised fine diamonds would be. 

Before he'd even known my name, Father John told me that your son loved us so much, He was willing to die for our sins – with iron rivets twisted into His extremities, funneling the ichor out from His body in hopes it'd be enough to wash lifetimes of hardship away — but when I pressed my fingers against Mikey's blistering skin, all I could feel was pain.

You must understand my confusion.

Like a car running out of fuel on the highway, Mairead's prayer ceases here: half-shuddering, abrupt and incomplete.

There is no Amen. No petition for deliverance taking flight from wicked tongues. No rhapsodic, "so it be." No wax to seal her solemn truths.

The only indication of repentance is a singular thread that dangles from the cuff of her overalls — snagging on the bathroom rug, then breaking loose once she rises to her feet.

Before flicking off the light switch, she catches a glimpse of herself between the crescent-shaped streaks on the mirror – all doe eyes and downturned lips as she traces a cross over her breastbone from muscle memory – and when she steps out into the hallway, Holy Mary trails behind her: matriarchal even in the afterlife, picking up her messes, tying her loose ends with a litany.

Here is your empathetic fallout. You think a wound hurts this badly at the surface level?

Wait until it tunnels into someone you love.

Then it's like losing a limb. 

_________

Since the day that its foundation was anchored into a freshly lain sheet of Midwest Topsoil, the kitchen has been the core of this household, of the Kalinowski's world – white-hot at its epicenter, simmering under the neon glow of fridge lights and oven-eye beams with an incessant aura of vivacity, like neurotransmitters rapid-firing after the body has been fed.

But now, gravity's iron fist shrinks the space down to its lithosphere: a dry-boned outer layer hued in shades of gray, closing off the gaps and sealing the liturgy away. 

Mairead's confessional does not make it to the kitchen, not yet; instead, the wandering hallway twines her words with the radio silence, melting the consonants and vowels into a halcyon flatline that snakes idly through the house's framework. Quietude settles across every surface like a whisper-light membrane of dust – sticking just long enough for it to transition from an idea to a perceptible thing – before it is eclipsed by an antithetical clattering sound that emerges from the direction of the bathroom. 

And with it, a tiny voice, bleeding through the aftershock. "Uncle Jimmy?"

"Hmmm?"

"Does 'infected' mean that Mikey's sick?"

"No, sweetheart. Just that he's injured." 

"What's the difference between 'infected' and 'injured?'"

"Well," From his place at the table, Uncle Jimmy closes his eyes and pulls a long breath in through his nose, suddenly craving a cigarette. In the time that it takes him to formulate an explanation that will satisfy her, he swears that he can feel a few new gray hairs sprout. "I guess you could say that infected is on the inside, and injured is on the outside."

A beat passes.

He tilts his head towards the doorway, where – given that the sound of eager footsteps pattering against the hardwood has ceased – he can infer that she's just appeared, and cracks an eye open, scanning her features for any indication of approval. "How's that?"

Mairead doesn't say anything, but casts him a hesitant smile paired with a one-shouldered shrug before crossing the threshold into the kitchen, then dumping what appears to be the contents of the entire medicine cabinet onto the table.

In addition to a roll of elastic bandages and a few pieces of medical tape, she's managed to unearth a box of Pepto Bismol tablets, a digital thermometer, a contact case, a quarter-empty sleeve of Nicorette gum, and – much to Uncle Jimmy's chagrin – a bottle of lubricant.

Once she's lain everything out – having ordered the products into tight-lined formations like an obedient army of wind-up soldiers – the little girl clicks her tongue in satisfaction, then climbs back up onto the counter and hugs her knees to her chest.

"Does Mikey need to go to the doctor?"

"Maybe." Uncle Jimmy half-nods, chuckling under his breath as he picks through her offerings. "If it gets worse."

"Will he have to take medicine?"

"He might." 

"Is he going to die?" 

"N-"

Mikey cuts him off with a loud grunt. "I hope."

On the opposite side of the room, the teenager utilizes Mairead's grand reentrance – and resultantly, Uncle Jimmy's distraction – as an opportunity to examine his new lesion in silent perplexity. Sheltered under a furrowed brow, he traces the pouching genesis of a fluid blister – feels it swell and take shape beneath his fingertips, – facial structures abraded by an expression that isn't quite able to be placed.

There is a deeper meaning tucked within the fibers of this interception – in skin pressed to skin, where Gemini delineations of him exist like the parting of curtains or the moment that an animal becomes roadkill, hidden entities catapulted into a sudden, blinding exposure – but it will not be decoded until the end of time, when he's buried six feet under with nothing but a pillow of dirt and a blanket stitched from pitted cicatrices to lull him into postmortem dormancy.

But for now, his focus lingers, unwavering, on the present. He brushes over a tender spot and almost instantly recoils as an amorphous pain spills through it, eyes dilating with tears that – in fear of embarrassing himself in front of Carmy, but also, proving everyone around him right – he wills not to fall, a quiet hum wobbling between his lips.

Before they can, though, Uncle Jimmy – always there to talk him down from the ledge – reaches forward and gently nudges his fingers away.

"Hey, seriously." He chides, persistent despite the piqued scowl that Mikey is actively shooting in his direction. "Don't pick at it, Mike, or it won't get better."

While he scoots his chair up next to Mikey's and begins to tend to the swollen part of his hand – droning on about all the possible side effects of contamination in untreated cooking burns – Mairead lets her mind wander back to red.

She considers everything else that she's seen in this color – cardinals and cherry preserves, expensive-smelling roses exchanged between her parents following an argument, Alinea's vacant lobby bathed in the medicinal glow of Chicago after hours – and she is reminded of how, as she watched the unaffected skin shrink back in agitation, she'd wondered what branch of science – what biological tick – could've possibly driven Mikey's bodily instincts to evade the injured area.

Why had this wound even bothered to swell?

What was the point of protecting something that was never going to try and heal itself?

In time, she'd associate red with leaving, too, with becoming long forgotten – the ghost of a goodnight kiss stamped across her cheek in Ruby Woo and a square-shaped cut of salmon flanked by dill and caper trimmings, an olive branch soliloquy in favor of every flighted escape from all the puncture-kissed spaces that a single body could possibly bear.

Red; when the occasional segment of skin didn't stretch across her bones quite right, the growing pains to follow could only be quelled by the one thing that Mairead – a little girl who'd been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, wanting for nothing – did not have: maternal adoration. A neuronal warmth that could only be replicated in the zephyred undertones of her mother's touch.

She'd find the answers to these questions someday, swear it.

Even if bridging their gaps meant spilling her own blood in the process.

Cutting the cord on her reverie, Mairead turns to where Carmy's squirming in anticipation beside her, heart twisting in her chest as their shoulders brush — tiny scapulae clinking softly together — and he nudges her aside to get a closer look. 

But as soon as he lays eyes on his brother, the boy's face contorts into a hue akin to the fiddlehead omelet that she remembered watching her father plate once; when neither of them could sleep, he'd let her drink Bug Juice from a deli container while he conducted late-night trial runs for his brief stint as chef de cuisine at The Lobby, and – every time he brought a spoon to her lips, offering her a taste of whatever he was working on, — for a moment so brief that it should've passed right by her, she'd feel cosmic love.

Sickly, and leaflike, and so, undeniably green, she knows this one like an old friend.

She has reached for it at the peak of countless eventides, when fatigue patterns the sky with jointed constellations and her loneliness wakes to watch over them from a wide-eyed fissure; she has heard it in every dyspneic silence that ices the opposite end of phone lines and tin-can receivers; she has filed it alongside half-melted birthday candles, locker combinations and recipe cards, tiny fragments of anyone who's ever cared to pour something worthwhile into her; she has cherished it – even in nausea, in pea pods and turtle shells, in envy and sidewalk chalk and avocados and four-leaf clovers. 

Green personifies life; it's unadulterated proof that a biotic thing has flourished here before – commenced its germination at the heart of this very pistil, open-mouthed and breathing.

Once he's decided to put a pin in his initial repugnance, watching it shrink back into his caged palms like a punctured balloon, Carmy –  in a volume uncharacteristic of his usual diffident, wordless demeanor – exclaims, "Holy shit!"

"Baby bear," Uncle Jimmy's tone is surprisingly apathetic, rough and laced with warning. He cuts Carmy a disapproving glance over the wiry frames of his glasses. "Language."

But before the man can intervene, Mairead steps on the toes of his deterrent syntax in a response that's fueled entirely by an unrelenting phase of echolalia, and with it, the youthful delight procured from reciting things that she's not allowed to say at ear-splitting frequencies.

Such as: "HOLY SHIT!"

Expectantly, she tilts her head in Carmy's direction, and it doesn't take much more than the exchange of a puckish glance between them for the pair to erupt into a fit of giggles.

Uncle Jimmy tries his best to ignore their antics – instead, reminiscing on a time when he'd gone out to dinner with the children's father and, as he juggled the near-impossible task of entertaining a toddler with rocking a newborn to sleep amidst the lively cadence of an in-house jazz quartet, Michael Sr. had reminded him that the best way to navigate these types of situations was simply to pay them no mind – but despite it all, a smile still tugs at his lips. 

After securing the end of the bandage with a thin strip of medical tape, the man pauses for a moment to admire his handiwork – God, if the whole mafia boss thing hadn't worked out, he really could've been a doctor – before getting up from the table and making his way across the room to the refrigerator, which is barely visible beneath the assemblage of mementos plastered to its surface: report cards, school projects, science fair ribbons, an entire gallery's worth of Carmy's dog-eared pencil drawings, and the big vinyl banner that Natalie had given him for Father's Day, donning five lopsided handprints and a proclamation lettered out in half-legible scribbles: "We love you Uncle Jimmy!"

From the freezer, he nabs a football-shaped ice pack for Mikey and two grape-flavored popsicles in a last-ditch effort to occupy the children, because – once he closes the door and catches another glimpse of them – Carmy's hands are tangled in Mairead's hair again, a devilish smirk strung up like a clothesline between the rosy helixes of his ears.

Uncle Jimmy doesn't bother to scold them, though; he can't. This is normal; they're kids – just babies, really – beguiling and innocent, enthused over table scraps, dragging the world alongside them like the tail of a well-loved blanket. 

In lieu of discipline, he casts a terminal glance at the banner on the fridge, each name and age penned in a teacher's tight cursive below its respective print.

Who could bear to look away, even for just one second? Who could possibly want to miss this?

Any of it – save for Mikey's intentional nagging, which Uncle Jimmy would be lying if he said that he couldn't live without.

"Hey, no dessert before dinner." Sure enough, the teenager in question – no longer burdened by the acuity of an open wound – immediately shifts his attention to the popsicle locked in Carmy's iron grip, most of which is dribbling down his arm and into a plum-shaped stain on the sleeve of his hand-me-down Chicago Bears jersey.

He makes a loud buzzing noise at the back of his throat – alarmingly similar to those that played whenever a question was answered incorrectly on one of the television game shows that Uncle Jimmy's wife liked to watch in the evenings – and knocks his knuckles against his little brother's shoulder, before adding, "Not allowed."

In the heat of an exchange that should've left it scintillating with amusement, Carmy's entire face crumples – his expression caving in on itself like the corners of a paper fortune teller – as if he almost believes him. 

Almost, for now, is enough.

Turn the edges up and see. This is not a game that begins with a declaration of sibling raillery chipped between misaligned baby teeth; it is not one that will end in the derailment of a little boy who hangs upon his brother's every word as if the syllables were fishhooks and he was a wandering eye. But Carmen Berzatto – seven years' worth of things folded in half, all origami curls and a sharp-edged nose, whom boyhood has reduced to a fawn born on stilted limbs, blinking fluid from his vision as he tries to make sense of this sudden change in surroundings – will play the pawn regardless. 

Amidst a fleeting gyration of reciprocal gestures exchanged in the name of taking turns, he cannot help but wonder what the purpose of child's play is – of balls and jacks or knives to fingers, games that ended in his blinded grappling for the wayward flashes of validation that were determined by how well gravity had rearranged the environment to accommodate him – if he cannot derive amusement or enjoyment from its outcome. 

Moreover, he has never been taught how to sit idly with loss, only to thrash and contort at the mention of it. He does not know how to exist amidst the confines of a body depleted by surface-level casualties without picking them apart again and again, nervous habits stripping all the best versions of him down to scar tissue, and then – before anyone ever gets a chance to show him what kind of healing that the intentional brush of a tender hand can do – completely away. 

All of this to say, if the world is Carmy's oyster, then he cannot cherish something without first taking a knife to it, shucking out the innards in search of an obscured significance; an endless pursual of the glistening pearl-truths.

Briefly, he circles back to the paper fortune teller, considering what might've become of it if there had ever been a thought about this childhood spectacle being laced with a weighted meaning. He balances it atop sloped shoulders, tempts inertia with the roiling back-and-forth of a pinball debridement until his muscles grow weary and – aware of the fact that while an object at rest tends to stay at rest, an object in motion cannot cease to be in motion without a concomitant severance of the nerves that make it spasm and tick – he lets the inexorable force take him down along with it.

We know enough now to call him by name; Carmen, vineyard of God, a sacred incantation. To cry out as he becomes one with the debri.

It is this unraveling, an anthropoid sacrifice for the chance at a flourishing craft – splintering his own limbs and whittling their epiphyses down to cinereal pencil tips, bleeding out across sketchbook pages, using the clumps of hair that he'd torn out during a fitful metamorphosis and kept chrysalised in clenched fists to blot paintbrush spirals of hemoglobin into the margins alongside juices and ink, immersing himself within the chemical toxins of artistry not because he longs to be thought of as a quintessential thing, but just to be remembered at all – that will plot the bitter course of his lifetime; he is sure of it.

But even still, he cannot help but to go grasping at a rewind fueled by numbers and axioms, wondering how he would've sorted through the remnants had there ever transpired a splintering interpretation; a concept hidden behind the yes-and-no's and the twists of fate, buried deeper than the pseudo-future surmised by a union of kismet and half-minded phrases scribbled under its paper-fortune-teller flaps in the same way that ancient relics are veiled within their glass penitentiaries – almost reachable.

Luck, he decides, is the kind of proposition made to haunt him, to leave a bad taste in his mouth; yet it is also something that he'll tuck into his wallet and carry, unassumingly, for years – out of sight, but never quite forgotten.

Instead of an answer, Carmy's emotional pliability skews this moment into a callback, and suddenly, he's five years old again: sitting cross-legged on top of the wooden picnic table that's situated next to the Fak's trailer, absentmindedly picking at a hangnail on his thumb while Mikey and Neil toss a decaying leather football back and forth between them.

At some point – when he's only half-paying attention, drawn away from his watercolor painting by a combination of the garbled profanities that they're spewing at one another over the rims of their gas station cigarettes and the erratic buzz of Planet 93.9, Chicago's Alternative Radio Station! filtering out from Mikey's boombox – Carmy watches the ball go spiraling into a thicket of pine trees, and then – as unceremoniously as twain marbles clinking together at the bottom of a glass jar – sustain a headlong collision with a bird's nest.

Apprehensively, he cuts a glance in the older boys' direction, but the avian calamity seems to have passed right over them; that is, until – about twenty yards south of where they're standing – a tiny, squalling creature comes plummeting down to the earth. 

His eyes map the coordinates of it: this neonate chicklet, naked and wailing, still naive enough to believe that its mother will come swooping down on the idyllic afternoon breeze and fly it home to the comfort of a stick-and-leaf utopia. He lets the seconds tick by as it succumbs to the aftermath of misfortune's gravitational pull; he traces its outline with red-string configurations, twists a pin into the median of each one of its ragged breaths. He watches, and he waits for Mikey to have the heart to reach out, pick it up in his hands and put it back where it belongs. To sacrifice himself – or even greater, his dignity – in favor of keeping the things around him safe.

But he never does.

Though he is not aware of it yet, Carmy entered the world this way, too: tiny and squalling, solitary in his utter helplessness. Lost to an abrupt rewiring of circulatory systems, he had not been much more than a pair of flittering chia-seed pupils and a disordered rooting reflex when he'd realized that maternal protection was an idea gone septic; there would be no one willing to chase after him during his own split-winged descent – a fall to be broken not by the hesitant inquiry of tremoring fingertips, but silence.

No rustling leaves. No hopeful gaze trailing his breadcrumbs. No dearth of gnawing aches spewed from a metastasizing loneliness. Just silence – hollow as a cavity, a vacant distension between parent and child that all of the steel in existence would still not be enough to fill.

Donna Berzatto loved to tell this story – albeit, her own twisted version of it – at family gatherings and holiday dinners, usually after she'd had too much to drink. It wasn't like childbirth was a particularly appropriate thing to discuss over Seven Fishes or Sunday braciole, but alas, – somewhere, in the dangerously stagnant curtain of silence that hung between the plate-on-the-table and the food-on-the-plate – there it was, practically clockwork: a verbal memoir of the Berzatto children's genesis, a woman made over until she looked like a mother – think twin faces on the swiveling head, think a mismatched set of identities pulped into a singular body – three times' reprised.

Served in jointed fractures alongside the courses of their meal, the memories would slot themselves into chronological order, and Donna would command the whole house's attention with her animated retelling – gory details and all.

Naturally, Mikey's was perfect, she'd say, kicking her dining chair back on two legs and swirling her glass of vodka around in an unsteady hand. Natalie's too, but Carmen's – damn Carmen.

Mikey snorts under his breath.

Drink.

He was an accident, you know. A slip-up. I was not even remotely aware that I could still get pregnant at my age, or of anything that came along with a geriatric pregnancy – I didn't need to be. I thought I was done. I had my boy and my girl; I was supposed to be on easy street from that point forward. And then, after what I assumed was a just the consequence of a bad Italian beef, there they were: two pink lines, clear as fucking day, proving me wrong.

Drink.

Uncle Lee snaps his fingers, ordering anyone who's listening to swipe him a cannoli from the intricate display that's perched atop a hand-carved dining credenza.

Drink.

Then, – because Mikey's full-on laughing now, and the caramelly, split-seamed aria of it splays Richie's maggot-riddled heart wide open, shooting an empyrean light through the fissures, reminding him that everything the boy does might as well be plated in gold; for it is more precious than gemstones, or rabbit feet, or even God above – Richie starts laughing, too.

Drink.

So, of course, because he'd already established himself as my problem child, being pregnant with Carmen was – as you would imagine – nine months of complete and utter torture. I mean it; my feet were so swollen, and I was blowing chunks every fucking second, from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep – oh, and I had lightning crotch like you wouldn't believe! It felt like someone had taken the biggest match on planet fucking Earth and set my entire – okay, okay, I know, not dinner table appropriate. Whatever – I digress.

Drink.

A dribble of liquor slides along Donna's jawline and drips from her chin, penciling a needle-thin trail through her makeup.

Natalie groans, buries her head in her hands – a sea of tawny half-curls spilling over her folded arms – and begs: Mom, stop. Mom, you're embarrassing me.

Mom, no one wants to hear about how you hated Carmy before he was even born.

She doesn't say this one out loud. Instead, it sits like a globus sensation at the back of her throat, and she prides herself on her ability to keep the unruly, thrashing animal that emanated from maternal resentment caged within a prison barred by her own tongue and teeth.

Drink.

All right, where was I? Oh – as if it couldn't get any worse, when my water broke, it was like every woman in the city of Chicago needed to go into labor at that specific hospital on that specific day. We had to wait forever for a bed to open up, and I thought that I was going to have him right there in the lobby, and Micheal Sr. – oh God, Micheal Sr. – in the middle of all of it, he had the nerve to tell me that he needed a sedative.

Well, truth was, he didn't need shit, because all he did was sit around and twiddle his thumbs while I suffered through this traumatic birth. Seriously, it was traumatic; it took so long, and it was so scary, and Carmen just kept getting stuck, and they kept having to move me, and at one point, I was – like – fucking upside down, in what the nurse called a "sirsasana pose," or some other tai-chi ass shit, which didn't even help, because as soon as they got my legs in the air, I started bleeding, and it was – it was all just so scary.

Drink.

Cousin Michelle slants her an apprehensive glance across the table.

Noticing the round foam earpiece of a Walkman just barely peeking out from behind a strand of the teenager's crimped hair, Donna puts the pieces together; her niece's expression is a divided thing, a flicker of misaligned judgement bisected from an eventual attempt at genuine comprehension. In time, she will lose herself trying to decode the words; still, she may never recognize how their meaning would have changed if she had only been paying attention.

But Donna will.

In fact, Donna does not just recognize it, – the lukewarmth of ignorant bliss, of letting salient concepts run together under partiality's tapering stream — she understands it.

Drink.

Anyways, the torture didn't stop once he was here. Oh no, if I thought that the angels were going to sing when he came out – that rainbows and unicorns would shoot out of my ass as he arrived with the key to all my problems clenched in his tiny fist – I'd have been sorely mistaken, because the only remarkable thing that happened was that the cord was wrapped around his neck, and then – in all the chaos – the doctor fucking dropped him.

BOOM! Baby out of my uterus and straight onto the floor. So, they had to deal with that, and then – what? Uterus is not a dirty word, Neil! Stop giggling like a little girl, seriously. You too, Ted. Every woman has one, someday you'll – you know what, never mind. Just go. Both of you, please; just go.

Okay – backtracking, please hold; uterus, floor, Carmen, a fucking nightmare – okay. As I was saying, after they got him all checked out, cleaned up, and breathing, I figured that it might be smooth sailing from there, but no! It wasn't. Because once he was earthside, the child did nothing but scream. He screamed, and he screamed, and he screamed, all the fucking time; there was nothing in the world that was going to make him stop screaming. I finally had to send him to the nursery so that I could get some rest, and – get this! – when I went back later to check on him, he was still screaming.

Drink.

Uncle Jimmy lights a cigarette and takes a long, slow draw.

Drink.

I guess that this was the first time that I was really able to grasp just how quickly everything was going to fall apart. Sure enough, right after we brought Carmen home from the NICU, Michael Sr. started leaving me alone on the weekends. He never told me where he was going, or who he was with, or even acted like he cared enough to answer my damn phone calls; I had to pawn off my grandmother's jewelry to keep my stupid fucking kids alive, because he was hiding the money that I needed to buy formula in cans of tomato sauce at the restaurant.

Fucking tomato sauce.

The kids that he helped make.

Isn't that psychotic?

No, really – here's the crazy part; even though nothing had changed yet, I knew that this – Carmen – was what would make the curtain finally slip. He was the nail in the coffin that I'd built in the midst of trying to salvage our family. I realized it there, in that nursery, when – while all the other mothers were cooing over their new babies – I was looking at mine and thinking,

"What circle of hell did you come from? Who sent you here to antagonize me like this?"

Drink.

Carmy squirms in his booster seat.

Drink.

It was almost like – it felt like God was trying to punish me. For what? I went to Mass every Sunday. I always confessed to my sins, and I prayed the rosary whenever I could. I didn't need punishing. I didn't need another mouth to f—anyways, the whole thing was just completely fucked.

Drink.

He pulls a slobber-covered fist from his mouth, babbling, Mama, Mama, Mama.

It is all he can say, because she is all he's ever had the urge to cry out for.

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Slathered in a layer of thick saliva, – pink as the soft, fleshy underbelly of a mammalian cadaver just before it concaves beneath the weight of a surgical blade – this space becomes an open mouth; it roots and yawns, it gapes and stretches to make room for the Berzattos, who do not hesitate to fill it with distended jaws and rotting teeth. Having fled from the tight-cornered shadows of the cathedral's disciplinary gaze, they waste no time on saying grace, instead tucking into the silence – hereditarily ill-mannered, eager, and hungry – and taking pride in using their utensils to nudge aside the morsels of a dissonant wail that pulses beneath its freshly-exposed skin, a lineal melody plucked out on the thready carnage of countless ravaged throats.

It's alarmingly operatic, the way that music can be found everywhere; in the clearing of throats, the tapping of feet, or the drumming of restless fingertips against the heirloom dining table – anything with a rhythm.

Outside, a tractor-trailer hurtles by, all whirring tires and an engine humming with such a fierce determination that it rattles the home's entire framework. Stitches of heat-lightning crackle in the sticky midnoon air, a gurgling stream whistles through a scatter of soft-edged pebbles plugging the downspout, a grasshopper chirrs and rubs its branch-thin legs together.

Above it all, – this moment's fortissimo – a fork clinks against a china plate, chips the rim even; but that doesn't matter, because – in the manner of a dog on the side of the road: wounded, yet whimpering, of hopesong traipsing between the final breaths of soldiers at the battlefield – even a damaged thing is still programmed to carry a tune. At the command of mortality's maestro, pedal tones and inky measures clot beneath a slick of carmine, deeming it harmonious until its dying day. 

Opposingly, the score of the Berzatto's dining room – however tumultuous, discorded and brash – could've been titled Joy's Purgatory: every note a halfway-there, every rest an in-between. Each record-spin and persistent blanch of the needle would serve as a reminder of a livelihood patterned by almosts, by moments they'd saved like cassettes in a shoebox, using jagged strips of masking tape and heavy-handed marker tags to seal away their most cadent memories. 

There's the inappropriate jokes being racketed from the mouth of one Fak to the ear of another, masked by Natalie's off-key rendition of Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, which catches alight on stray flecks of dust in the air as she sets the table for dessert, skillfully reconfiguring the platter of cannolis to disguise the missing handful that she'd spent most of dinner passing to Uncle Lee under the tablecloth.

There's Uncle Jimmy's room-commanding aura, which – having just slipped away to sneak a ten-dollar bill under Natalie's pillow in favor of lending the tooth fairy a helping hand – swells into the space upon his return. His animated recount of the highlights from the recent Cubs vs Mets World Series qualifier game captures the attention of everyone except little Carmy, who's banging a pair of plastic vegetables together and grinning up at Cousin Michelle from his perch on Mikey's knee. He coos as she cards her fingers through his cookie-butter curls, pokes at the doughy crest of his plump toddler cheek, and – in the midst of her amusement at the way her pinky sinks into the concaved skin, as if it were scoring a half-risen loaf of bread – considers how it could be possible to resent such a cherub-like thing.

There's Richie's double-jointed breaths, calculated and tremoring beneath a salmon flush garnered from Mikey playfully hooking him across the collarbone, where – for the rest of this evening, and all of the evenings that will follow it – he'll feel the ghost of his knuckles next to the coin-round pendant of Saint Jude hanging protectively over his heart, – cool against the skin mottled by cigarette burns and fight club lacerations in various stages of healing, against the ribs where his respirations snag like kite-tails on tree branches – and he'll wonder if this, too, is a lost cause; something that even a lifetime's worth of devotion to the virtuous would not be able to save him from.

They're almost happy here. Almost nuclear, almost normal – all thanks to the music.

To the soundtrack of being and the way that its notes knot their stilted bodies together along a metronome pulseline, jumping and sputtering into place as each member of the Berzatto lineage is penciled throughout the composition of a melody written on unyielding adoration: a revolutionary sentiment, – gentle and apologetic, kind without a motive steeped in the poison chalice – beyond anything that they have ever been given a chance to grasp at before.

Where there was once deprivation, now devotion grows ripe at the rhythm's command. It's all lilted enigmas checkered ivory and black, all eyelet-lace ribbons rippling in the midnoon breeze and footpath grooves scratched across the fraying carpet, all dragonfly buzzes and tea-kettle whistles and xylophone trills ballooning forth alongside them into a newfound, lyrical world.

It's full and alive, love by the euphony, and it plinks a generational hymn on the strings that wind them into a congealed being. A community: free from raised voices and wayward hands, from tears icing scars into swells of cardinal red.

A family.

Inside the body of their home, the Berzattos coexist like vital organs – less disapproving glances and frown lines pitched over rotted-fruit skin, more viscera – funneling ichor through the gauzy tunnels of its veins and stretching its muscles to their sinewy limits, working together to conjoin passion and purpose at the level of a sternum bone worried into the shape of a vessel – something designed to cradle, yet built to withstand.

In a way, that's what this story is all about – the soft redemption of each other.

And, just as rescued things are still caged when they bite or draw blood, as are all of the stories within it. 

It's about the nettling squall of sharp notes cleaving the solar plexus into a bale of gnawed-off nerve endings, compressing the ribcage down to a boneyard of stars and spare cartilage – a cacophonous undoing; a war march twitching amidst the carnage of fear and resolve. 

It's about a honey-green ectoplasm spewing infection through the undertow, about the life cycle of a germ as it cultures and wilts beneath the guise of precautionary measures. It's about kicking tragedy from the high dive and watching trauma drop on silks through a family's motheaten lineage, granting mankind the ability to tag the moment that sadness infiltrates its lifeblood like a tumor wedged into gray matter – gradual, somatic, dependent– just by the ache of the shift. By the spattered chemtrails of it; this heavy newness. This malignant, sinking feeling.

It's about the onset – heirloom tomatoes coppering in tandem with a season's passage, storms brewing clammy and nervous-warm like florid palms pinned against the warped horizon's breast, disemboweled headlines prickling bad news across tongues mottled with a thrush of sorrow – just as it is the resection – peeling the rind back from the seed, nailbeds away from the crescent-moon indents in flesh, summer's bruising rays from a dusk throttled pulseless, dull aches skewed in lilac and hematomal undertones. 

It's about the indelible outward curve of a spine with vertebral teeth needled into the shape of apple-cores, yardstick-skinny and bitten away at; the consequence of a lifetime devoted to bearing the weight of holy words upon an atrophied tangle of underdeveloped cartilage, spitting bloody half-truths through their seams in a disjointed attempt at overcoming secular illness.

It's about being able to tack a meaning onto love without hesitation – when there's no limit laws or steel-strung boundaries to taunt, just freedom: pockmark-mottled legs churning through the unkempt brush, winglike arms outstretched amid a chirruping breeze that lapses the world into an oil spill at its periphery, something medicinal in the wake of ancestry's chronic ache. To bisect the cinematic and the authentic, to sponge relief from the tonic of a melody — humming over sutures, dancing as bones are being set back into place.

But above all else, it's about how every member of the Berzatto family was born clean – stainless and lacquered in silver, more lukewarm, inorganic water-weight than sentient being – with their predetermined hardships still kneading at the swollen underbelly of anemic brain matter, hidden in the dirt-lined nailbeds of moon-soaked bedroom windowsills, and tucked beneath a threadbare duvet's iron-pressed hospital corners. It's about how they'd once been pious to their faith in restoration, clutching hammers and nails in the same hands that pruned from liquid guilt at the simple brush of a rosary, so determined to fix and to save that the risk of a consequence – of martyrship, and all of the ways that it could go so horribly awry – was worth whatever effort that was necessary in order to rewire fate.

Had it not been nibbled down to its axis by the ticking clock's pin-toothed hand, there could've been a world where purity held stagnant, where Seven Fishes and Sunday braciole were regarded as paramount circumstances – precious and familial, snatches of time saved between ricepaper doilies and pasted onto scrapbook pages framed by dog-eared polaroid corners. Memories canned so they'd last: rhubarb-sweet, drained of fermenting carnage, all bodily and biblical and – most importantly – theirs.

But this longing runs witless and stability is merely a pipe dream, a tangible itch only present in reveries and afterthoughts, embedded into the blood-rich plexus of the unassuming mind's eye like a fat-bellied tick: a six-pronged cellular virus, a foreign body nested among the vessels and the nerves.

Still, – for a moment so brief it cannot even be palpated – there are no bad spots here. No papery concave of infected tissue, no rotten teeth chipped down to periodontal webs spanning a pink-tender jawline; just a queue of ramshackle homes on the River North side of Chicago, stippled through the neighborhood like fever blisters – their gnarled, callous exteriors giving way to an internal atmosphere turned fluid-warm, placid, and safe. 

For the first time in the Berzatto's heritage, there is no desire to hack away at each other, or to amputate themselves from the source. 

There is not a need for it.

Even Donna finds the means to pen a requiem to this fantasy, although it feels half-nebulous: a dizzying elegy, matchstick prose toying with configurations skirted in vertigo, muffled and fuzzy at the edges.

(This is what it looks like to drown on dry land, breathless and strangling against a noose braided with the hairpin fibers of feminal addiction, forged from the glass-shard chassis of a thousand empty bottles. Spit and sputter. Revel and hum. Face away from the crowd, so as to not appear desperate in your attempt to use their disparaging glances as floatation devices, corneas for pillar buoys and irises for life preservers. Cough around the foot in your mouth. Cut your lips on its unclipped toenails. Let aspiration ladle a cocktail of toxins into your voicebox; relish in the paradoxical irony of a life tainted by the inability to make sense of things that don't hold their shape ending in amorphization: chlorine in the trachea, chemicals in the veins. The coda – a medicated, futile hum. A cacophonous flatline; proof that the substance is always what kills you, regardless of how enchantingly saccharine its siren call may be.)  

When everything around them changes, her words stay exactly the same. 

Once he is old enough to understand the true intentions behind her retelling – perhaps, amidst the same solstice that finds him padding across the disheveled kitchen in a pair of hand-me-down footed pajamas, delighted by the realization that he can finally see above the counter without needing to use a stepstool, and even more so by the enthusiastic manner in which Mikey waves him over, then presses his little hand into a slab of gooey mush that he swears will go into the oven as dough but come out a Christmas ornament – Carmy concludes that, in one way or another, he has always been on the run: owl-eyed and fleeting, a tangle of twig-lithe limbs appraising deliverance from the comfort of an eggshell bassinet, swathed in cached panic since his origin. 

This realization begins – like most things worth exhuming – with chicken-scratch philosophies scrawled into the pintuck corners of a lucid dream, ankylose and sinew-taut, a sentient dissertation authored by the emergence of activity. Of motion – omnipresent in the pronged silhouettes of sharp-nosed creatures that drape his walls in pictographs and murals upon his fatal slip towards dusk's advent; then, in the spring-footed pommel of his heart in his mouth as he breaks away from them – smothered and tremoring, a dead bird jammed between his windshield-teeth. 

In the early hours of the morning – once the nightmare has dissolved into a static buzz at the base of his skull, a wraith of perspiration along his hairline and a netting of pleural effusions matted across his toiled lungs – Uncle Jimmy turns the knob on Carmy's bedroom door, kneels into the patches of boxed starlight pitting metallic tinctures against the hardwood, then pulls the little boy onto his lap and tells him, All around you, for your whole life, everything's going to be in motion. Your job, kid, is to learn how to not be afraid of it. 

I don't know if I can, he says, with the chemtrails of sleep still swirling melon-ripe in his voice, words hoarse and sticky on his tongue. I don't know how to not be afraid of anything.

But despite it all – right there, situated under the waning glow of a midnight pilled with solar fractals – Carmy's disbelief turns to physics. To putty in his white-knuckled grasp. 

Before he had these hands to hold it with – before he even had fingers, or eyes, or a brain — movement was what let his mother know that he was alive. When he'd been a flutter in her abdomen, a scratch of uneven figures on an electrocardiogram receipt, a low growl at the base of her throat as her body contracted and reordered her entrails to make room for him, it had composed a melody of its own, and even in utero, he'd recognized it as music: the baseboard hum of a thousand atoms haphazardly clotting together in order to create a dismal harmony.

Some nights, he still lies awake, squinting through dusk's inky haze at the glow-in-the-dark stars poster-tacked to his ceiling and trying to untangle it all in his head. Or, whenever he's too tired for contemplation, he closes his eyes and repeats Uncle Jimmy's words until they bleed together on the curl of his lips, a whispered asystole amid the premature spillage of dawn's citrus light. 

Everything that moves makes a sound, therefore, there is no sound without movement. No song without motion. No rhythm without a footpath carved from disarming jitters and quirks. 

Are you truly afraid of it, or do you just not understand it? 

In between the notched arrythmias of his tempest heartbeat, windswept and jolting him into lucidity, he thinks of bodies. He thinks of faultlines, magnets, and bugs: half-alive things caught in a perpetual shift, pitching themselves toward a lifetime of discomfort and scrutiny just for closeness, the adamantine connection with another cognate being. He thinks of the discerning shriek of a wanton blade of grass, conjuring whistle-notes up from the Adam's-rib sanctum carved somewhere between his thumbs and his teeth, of a heady breeze picking old folk tunes on the strings of powerlines frowning beneath the weight of double-knotted shoelaces and slung out memories, of the dissonant rattle that bravely trails quivering sandgrains toward the gossamer crest of an indecisive tide.

He thinks of Natalie – leant into Lake Michigan, submerging her cupped palms in its bubbling green-gray, where – her mother's daughter, through and through – she'll make a futile attempt to hold what cannot be – and of Mikey, who — as his muscled calves turn sodden under a swirl of silt and debri, amid bottle caps and cigarette ashes and waterlogged tabloid advertisements — succumbs to the same fate: slipping a silver stone into the pocket of Richie's swim trunks, whispering, here. The smoothest one in the sea, for you. My heart outside of my body, all for you.

But more fervently than anything else, Carmy thinks of his mother's words – acerbic elegies that she'd sent wicking through his subconscious, each syllable and phoneme stamped in smoke-thick typography across the backs of his eyelids and along the walls of his developing cortex, anywhere he would see them.

Damn Carmen. He was so hard to catch. 

He thinks about how, as his siblings took flight, he sat on the edge of the nest – talons curled, beak twitching, – waiting for the friction of his restlessness to catch alight on the wind and send him tumbling despite his inherited aeronautics, then inevitably set him ablaze. He considers the idea that he hasn't always felt like this: a nervous, ill-fitting buzz – because everything that moves makes a sound – but try as he might, he cannot recall an existence before the sinking tug, the crushing weight of fear without reason for it.

Perhaps, he decides, it'd emerged at a point in his gestation where he had yet to know anything but the diaphanous build of Donna Berzatto's womb, the same fluids and tissues that once cradled his brother and sister, nursing them to fruition alongside the distant echo of her voice: a stagnant pulse, a wordless hum – therefore, there is no sound without movement – and, as he'd writhed through his own stint in the viscera incubator, her body had become infected with an urge to take advantage of his embryonic vulnerability. Strewing around him like a many-limbed pathogen, it'd sunken teeth and claws in at every pressure point, engorging itself on the fact that here, he was exactly as biology had meant for him to be: microscopic, immobile, and flesh-close.

He had no desire or reason to flee; still, he'd felt the cool ache of a linoleum floor before the gentle warmth of his mother's touch.

He slipped out of my hands. He was born without wings.

Carmy thinks of everything, and – until the world begins to expect it of him – somehow, he keeps still.

He hasn't stopped trying to fly away since.

_________

At the focal point of this memory, Carmy finally comes unwound beneath curiosity's nagging pull, a tangle of knotty threads and sharp objects drilled into cotton-glutted pin cushions as he sets his watercolor palette aside, sidling hesitantly across the clearing to get a better look at the carnage.

He squats against the straining of seams – an inexorable reminder that he will have outgrown these garments by next season's time, and alongside them, the innocent urge to protect without an afterthought – and eases the baby bird into his cupped palms – so like him, so young and unkempt – briefly examining its catatonic state: eyes rolled back into a concaved skull, tongue lolling, hairpin bones splitting in half at the gentlest brush of his hand.

Before he can even comprehend the severity of the damage, he finds himself wiping away tears, blinking through his salt-sullied lashes at a glassy haze that only widens as they dribble down his cheeks, across the angular bridge of his nose and along the bow in his quirked lips, then converge into a half-hearted puddle on the surface of its beak. The baby bird does not move; it does not try to drink or blanch at the sudden pooling of moisture, and a part of him already knows that he will not be able to save it. 

In some sense, he has always known this, and yet, he is still naive enough to hope that his penultimate gesture of love might be what makes a difference. 

After all, isn't that that the goal? What is love, really, if not a lucky avoidance of tragedy? A life changed for the better by meeting grief at its completed metamorphosis, an opportunity for satisfaction and contentment to come butterflying to the surface without arrows through their fluid-sticky wings?

Upon his cursory dissemblance of flight's mechanics, Carmy is met with a series of ill-fated entities that he is much too young to conceptualize or remember: Orville and Wilbur Wright, Amelia Earheart, Icarus. Each bound to a little boy on his knees in middle of the trailer park – just as they'd been to one another – by a pipe dream epitomized in feathers and flesh stretched rubber-taut, the plucking desire to launch themselves into the atmosphere on pinions forged from spare parts – all for a glimpse at a feeling that they would never even be given the chance to completely digest.

But like him, such a dyspeptic revelation was not enough to avert them from pursuing it regardless, and so – stricken by an infectious bout of unrelenting determination – they'd merely been left to watch as their own avian trajectories went horribly awry – the fundamental consequence of devising an exit plan centered around infatuation as opposed to precision, a jinxed ascension on near-clipped heartstrings, shuddering towards a fruitless demise amidst the same stratospheric dwellings that their spruce-and-muslin airframes were once attentively designed to take space in.

Again, and again, – more times than could be bet on flipped coins or wished conscious over dawdling eyelashes – history amended itself. Entire centuries disentangled and rewired knotty details across their iterated chronologies, where planes came tumbling down to landlocked gravesites on cavalcades of smoke and engine matter, entire wingspans disintegrated against the molten push of an unforgiving sunbeam, and arched bodies were reduced to the same fate as matchbox cars and soft toys, tucking away into the sliver of open space between the sofa and the carpet floor: loved to tatters and to rust, then – upon the cessation of each timeline, or the severed end of every generation – promptly abandoned.

Willfully forgotten; in a domain stripped of knowledge — of scrutinized principles and quantum mechanics — these biographical anecdotes were certainly doomed to end in black-tongued recounts of frenzied aviation: a haphazard attempt to take flight without considering how the materials would hold once they'd been cast out to the wind.

To the unforgiving, indisputable world.

But despite it all, Carmy realizes, – in a boyish defiance of fact, circumstance, and theory – that the baby bird is writhing through a bout of comatic dormancy in his hands instead of its nest, which must be proof that an organism can do everything right, but still fail to survive the first flight if it happens before it knows how to use its wings correctly.

For it is decension that serves as the paramount consequence of premature abandonment meshed with an unforeseen circumstance, something that he has borne witness to enough familial calamity, watched enough bruises age, then pucker into golden-brown sours along the surface of his siblings' skin, and scattered enough blotches of dirt over just-buried rosary beads to understand.

Still, with no regard to its preordained fate, Carmy'd brought the baby bird home – curled into a sagging wad at the thready corners of the dish towel he'd used to line its homemade enclosure, a glittery pink shoebox that he'd found shoved in the back of Francie's closet – then spent the remainder of the evening pushing the limits of his capability to nurse it back to health, raking his fingernails across its downy pin feathers while humming through a repertoire of lullabies and hand-feeding it Cheerios moistened with water from a turkey baster, until it died sometime in the early hours of the morning.

A blip-quick moment of involuntary distraction was all it had taken for the helpless creature to transition from a living being to an exanimate clump of fuzz and toothpick-skinny bones in a botched cardboard diorama, and he'd almost missed it. Death had almost passed right by him, when, dizzy with impending fatigue, he'd placed it back in the makeshift nest as a tradeoff for the opportunity to briefly slip into an altered state of consciousness – not quite sleep, but something equally as paralytic and unaware – before jolting awake just in time to watch it take its final breath through a sticky, half-lidded gaze, his mortuary bedroom soiled by waxing dawn-light and the miasma of early decay.

Years later, while sitting cross-legged in the heart of Uncle Jimmy's kitchen and crumpling under the weight of his big brother's tantalizing glance, it would not be the baby bird's demise that stuck with him – not the thing he'd hold onto, shrunken-close and forceful as an ataxic limb — but the role that he had played in the negligence of it.

When, before he knew that promises addressed to the smoggy haze curtaining the trailer park from a mouthful of near-rotten baby teeth could only hold their meaning for so long, he'd sworn to save it.

And paradoxically, when – for a single, quivering exhalation of a second – he'd unconsciously retracted his statement; instead, allowing himself to become so out of touch – so inattentive, so extraordinarily far away from it – that, by all known science and logic, he'd been the one to act as the linchpin in stripping any chances that it had of living through the night away.

Carmy would reminisce on that summer for what felt like an eternity – never due to its heady aura of lifelessness, but because it was the first time that he had ever let something that he cared about slip away from him that easily. He'd wasted so much time desperately attempting to funnel vitality into a set of lungs that were already damaged beyond repair, that he'd failed to realize that the animal was always mere hours away from its premature demise: a fate sheathed in plastic tape and lightbar-siren glows cutting across a ramshackle gravesite, sealed long before he'd even made contact with it.

This is all my fault. Still, he'd think the worst, amid every retelling of the event for eons to come. I abandoned any opportunity that I had to realize how greatly it was suffering, just for a chance at fulfilling something deeper inside of myself.  

Realistically, the baby bird had never been a creature to be saved, but Carmy had tried. He'd tried – to alchemize chordate biology, to defy bodily mechanics and suspicions corroborated before he was even a speck in the universe; all for love, he'd tried. And for love – or perhaps, something greater, such as devotional remembrance – he'd pulled Natalie's favorite purple bathrobe on over his rumpled pajamas, clambered out the living room window, and buried it in one of the flowerbeds that dotted the railing of the apartment's tight-cornered fire escape.

For love, he remained there – even after the sun had risen, its neonate rays frothing across the sky in a mottled jumble of blush tones – until Donna Berzatto came shuffling outside in her house shoes, tandem nursing an American Spirit and a near-cold mug of black coffee. He could still recall how she'd grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, like a lioness irritably tugging her cub away from the safari's persistent commotion, and instead of comforting him, she'd said:

Boys are not supposed to be soft, Carmen. It makes them look weak.

She was not his mother here, but an entity he didn't recognize. A matriarchal anomaly of empty words, a lonesome beat of voiceless stagnancy picking through the hollow of nursery rhymes and satin-bowed edges, places where she'd once attempted to store all of the things that she had ever treasured, before inevitably losing them to an infection of her generational stigmata.

This makes you look weak.

She was not his mother here, so she'd left him in a fog of cigarette smoke and the prickled cacophony of memory foam scratching over the threshold, where he'd stayed – trembling against the serrated Chicago wind, tears carving liquid cicatrices into the fat of his cheeks – until, some time later, Mikey came tramping up the stairs to the fire escape, sweaty and sheeted in burgeoning wounds.

Instead of offering an explanation as to what he'd been up to, the teenager opted to pull his little brother into his lap and – with the same instinctive, salving tenderness that Carmy had used to coax the baby bird towards immortality's great white light – bury his nose in his honeycomb curls, relishing in the syrupy aroma of youthful stagnancy that rooted and clung to the follicles.

Mikey would later recall being overcome by a prodding desire to wrap his arms around the boy and lock him firmly in place – paying no mind to how effortlessly that such an overbearing hold could smother him, but just that it meant that he'd stay there: the pulpy ambiance of bodily heat pasting them skin-to-skin, corked off from worldly disaster and harm – but it was quickly beaten away, buzzed into his subconscious by the sound of Carmy's small voice jutting through the silence. 

"Why does everything I love have to go away?" He'd asked defeatedly, in a tone that was meek and became noticeably garbled as he wiped his snotty nose on the sleeve of Natalie's bathrobe. "Where is there to go, that could possibly be better than right here?"

Mikey hadn't witnessed the baby bird's tumultuous voyage through the winding labyrinth of its final hours – when Carmy's despair was merely an anticipated onset, blossoming into fruition as he'd exhausted himself trying to build it a future out of scotch-tape and cereal, something it would not live to conceptualize, or ever become cognizant enough to even reach for – but regardless, he'd pillaged his brain for a feasible answer to his brother's innocent plea. 

Why does everything I love have to go away? 

There were so many nights where he'd lain awake – draped in a veil of cold-sweat, limbs contorted like pretzel-ends beneath the navy blue duvet that was draped lazily across his bunk bed – and wondered the same for himself. But now, he thought only of their father: his namesake, Micheal Sr., who'd left them when Carmy was an infant, barely weaned from the complex faction of wires and tubes that kept him alive in the NICU. 

He thought of Natalie, on the first day of fourth grade, when she'd stood on the fire escape in a plaid Catholic school uniform and wind-rustled pigtails tied with red ribbons, grinning toothily up at Donna, who'd – in a rare moment of maternal adoration – proudly snapped photo after photo of her daughter on their old Polaroid camera. Over the pat-pat, pat-pat of the shutter-click, Carmy – who'd been plunked down on his Big Wheel in a futile attempt at distraction – had wailed incessantly; his discomposure was not a product of the fact that Natalie'd sworn to keep any promise that she made to him – including this one: she was to return home sometime in the late afternoon, bubbling over with enthusiastic retellings of half-truths and new knowledge to share – before disappearing up the steps of the school bus, but a transient sense of uncertainty that, for seven agonizing hours, had led him to believe she never would. 

He thought of himself, of midnoons wasted at the gnawed-off end of a blunt, where – filmy-eyed and stupid with permeating adoration – he'd sat next to Richie on the hood of his father's banged-up 1990 Ford Taurus, tracing wanton patterns on his palm as they plucked constellations from the hazy sheath of smog looming over the city. He thought of all the murals that they were responsible for spray painting throughout the back alleys of his apartment complex, phallic images bespattered in technicolor across the exposed brick, and of disorienting shifts at the fight club ring, where he'd often struggled to make sense of dawn's genesis, numbly assessing a slew of injuries backlit by a warm, chestnut glow. 

Mikey hadn't been there for Carmy when the baby bird had finally slipped into an eternal slumber. He hadn't been there – he was too preoccupied, too distinctly unaware to bear witness as the little boy hunkered down against the brute force of yet another cherished entity's impromptu departure – and it would plague him for the rest of his life, like a rotten taste on his tongue or a chronic pain that he just couldn't seem to dose away: all the minutes that he'd spent without his brother.

For years, – in snatches of time that would become alarmingly fleeting, leaving him in a semi-permanent state of elopement from the paralytic clutches of a bad dream: grappling for closeness, breathless and spongy-warm – he'd regret every one.

Where is there to go, that could possibly be better than right here?

"Into the nether. Into the great beyond." Mikey had ended up telling him, still reeling from adrenaline drunkenness, dizzy and half-sensible as he pressed his lips to his little brother's forehead. Carmy couldn't help but notice how strongly the older boy smelled of sweat, of cigarette smoke and pugnent floral laundry soap masked by a deep, musky cologne. But even still, he didn't object when Mikey tugged him in closer, and the dark shadow of scruff on his face – as if a pepper shaker had toppled over and scattered tiny granules along his pointed jawline – scratched roughly against his skin, baby-soft and unscathed. "But not me. I'm right here; I'm not going anywhere."

Beneath the flaxen tenting of a cataclysmic sunrise, Mikey's words had epitomized Carmy's entire being: all his growing pains, too-tight sneakers and close-cut khaki pants giving way to a bevy of dinosaur-printed bandages shielding the blisters that clung to his Achilles tendons, the cold sore bulging off the spotty underside of his tongue, the ingrown patch of bristled hair on his left eyebrow, the milk-stained fingernails that he'd absentmindedly nibbled down to the quick. His features were nothing, if not the battle scars of a lifespan spent with his thumbs in his ears, naively taunting demise, piddling away the brief slot of time where he'd still been innocent enough to believe that the thing that had stolen so much from him already would not go without stealing him, too. 

And miraculously, one tiny morsel of his big brother's attention was all that it'd taken for the little boy to let every single one of his tribulations go. To give up on the fear and the dismay, to undress himself from seventeen weighted layers of tragedy in the same fashion that a cicada sheds its chitin skin – effortless and assurant, basking not in existential dread, but the lukewarm shrivel of just-born light puddling across his tender, naked exoskeleton. 

Even then, though, the truth was inevitable; it loomed overhead like a proliferating raincloud – broiling with vexed anger, cotton-picked and swollen beneath its own water weight, an overhang of greyscale sky obstructing it from the average onlooker's view.

The truth: fish do not survive a hooked eye, just as baby birds do not survive a fall from the nest, but the death is not immediate – rather, a prolonged flurry of thrashing cowardice, everlasting and unpredictable.  

Carmy does not know that, in nearly three decades' time, he will be sitting in a rental car outside of the dilapidated chapel that raised him – he'd watched it grow wearier, just as he grew older, taller, – dressed in an iron-pressed tuxedo with a stiff neckline and too-tight cufflinks, having never closed the loophole for loved things to keep escaping his grasp. 

There is nothing he can do. He has no knack for needle and thread, no innate desire or reason to begin attempting to repair it at all. He is not a miracle worker, but merely a child; he should be dreaming of starcatching. He should be dancing with his toes in the grass. There is nothing he can do. 

There is nothing he can do but watch.

_________

Watch! He is jolted out of this memory in layers: his brother's saddled embrace plugging a harmon mute into the baby bird's agonal breaths, a wayward football torquing through a tangle of brush, a single fork – sliver-thin, silver and tantalizing as the moons he'd once assessed through his bedroom window, wasted countless boyhood wishes away on – lacerating a platter of overstuffed cannolis at Christmas dinner. It's a turbulent emergence umbrellaed by his mother's beady-eyed scowl, rotary-kicking him into a lifetime patterned with generational farces, distorted renditions of a nuclear family from the epicene caricatures of heartache and rhythm.

Each one shrinks back to expose him – in all his shriveled, virginal tenderness – like dominoes trooping along the path mapped out in angular configurations, or dried-up scabs, wiped vacant from raisiny flesh in the same rectifying, particular manner that one might thumb a wayward smudge of rouge away from their teeth or collarbones.

There is a certain stretch of time that rewinds itself again and again, a canned echo in his skull – funneled and blurry, as if he were waking from a dream, then staggering chimera-drunk into consciousness' mind-numbing purgatory – before he's back in Uncle Jimmy's kitchen, clinging to his brother's jest like a crucifix: eyes screwed shut under a shadow of helix-spring curls, a single hand stretched out in front of him, quivering and utterly defenseless in the wake of such a biblical iniquity.

Reduced to something impressionable and tissuey-soft under the weight of the teenager's baiting glance, Carmy cannot possibly harness steadfast concentration, much less the obstinate language required in order to adequately rebuke his mockery – just as Mikey had declared it, no dessert before dinner! You're just a baby; you're not allowed. – so instead, he simply impels the remaining entirety of the popsicle into his mouth, as if to say, ha! There is nothing you can do. I'm eating dessert before dinner, and there is nothing you can do but watch.

Surprisingly, it is not Mikey's voice – fifteen years of laryngeal euphonies, half-vile and half-saccharine, all worried down to a singular knot wedged beneath the seahorse-shaped memory cortex of Carmy's hippocampus – that wax-presses the seal on his return to reality, but Mairead's: every word like catatonic hymnsong lilted from the corners of her grape-jelly smile.

She brings her hands to her hips and quirks an inquiring eyebrow in Mikey's direction. No dessert before dinner. "Says who?"

To her, this feels like purple: amusement and exhilaration, didactic vices brought on by a newfound sense of youthful, girlhood defiance. Perserverance; it's lopsided paper valentines sneakily tucked into an unassuming mailbox, it's violet sprigs pushing through the slipshod construction on 27th & South Harding, it's tiny chalices of communion wine stowed away and sipped upon until she turns giggly. It's monkey-bar bruises gone paraplegic in the sixth stage of healing and runaway mulberries squelching between her toes on the kitchen floor, the tonic stench of acetone ticking at the corners of her freshly-polished fingernails during a rare afternoon with her mother, a commodity often left like an antique in a china shop — tarnished and incomplete.

Above all else, it's the summer that she spends submerged in Uncle Lee's swimming pool – holding her breath until her cheeks blush mauve with near-syncopy, when she knows vertigo better than her own name – and, caring only for the synthetic body of water that is somehow just as placid and serene as the purposeful sense of solace that she's learned to hand-syringe from Carmy's eyes, Mairead never obtains an urge to wish the present away.

In fact — floating belly-up along the rim of the shallow end, equipped with patterned water-wings and squished between gurgling pockets of chlorine sludge — she doesn't mind that, in nearly three decades' time, she will instead become engulfed by a noxious swathe of total blindness, doomed to spend the rest of her life locked in a penitentiary built from new, color-void memories and even longer trying not to need him, because this is purple. This is now; it's carbonic, and bold, and – in some primitive and upending way – it's healing.

"Says," Mikey narrows his eyes in a last-ditch effort to mask an impending sense of defeat. Mairead's gaze trials the crown of his head as it bobs about in earnest contemplation; he thinks for a long, slow minute. Searches for a way to combat in a battle that he has already lost. "Your face."

"What my face says," She drawls, flicking him an unamused look in return. "Is that it wants to eat this popsicle."

"Y-yeah!" Carmy agrees, having finally found the confidence to push back against Mikey's relentless taunting. He raises his bare popsicle stick in triumph. "Mine does, too!"  

"Well," Mikey lifts his hand to his forehead and mimes an L shape with his fingers, proving the ideal distraction for Carmy and Mairead; they do not notice that he's swiped the bottle of douche still sitting proudly on the kitchen table until he's already spraying it in their direction. Pitchy squeals of alarm and surprise bubble up into the air as the liquid soaks through their playclothes, and he adds, "Fuck you guys, then."

Less human being and more teenage anomaly here, Mikey rolls his eyes at their response; but a hoarse laugh is thronging out from the empty hollow of his chest, and like Uncle Jimmy, he, too, is smiling.

How could he not be? He's in the kitchen with his baby brother, there's pasta on the stove, and the world around them is swaddled in temperate hues of burmese amber, resin-sticky and secure; this is all he's ever wanted.

This is everything.

"Hey! You – language." Uncle Jimmy nags, jabbing an accusatory finger at the eldest boy. "Seriously, your ma might be okay with it, but I'm not going to have you guys swearing like a bunch of sailors in my house."

He shakes his head, ambling across the room to where Carmy and Mairead are still perched expectantly on the kitchen counter and scooping them up into his grasp – one child per arm, a feat that he's mastered across innumerable years of babysitting – then gently lowering their wriggling bodies back down to surface level. He passes each of them a paper plate from the stash tucked behind the microwave – all shaped like various animals with exaggerated cartoon features; Mairead receives a cat and Carmy, fittingly enough, a bear – before motioning to the pot of spaghetti on the stovetop.

"Let's eat now," The man pauses to eye the long-forgotton wound on Mikey's hand, now burgeoning in mummed agony beneath a rotund lump of bandages. "so that Mikey's hurt is worth something, then I'll take you two to the park to blow off some steam. And, if you behave yourselves, we might even stop at the chocolate-covered banana stand on the way home."

Carmy – who is utterly pleased with this arrangement – doesn't hesitate to begin shoveling noodles and sauce into his mouth, but Mairead hangs back, collapsed into a puzzleball of inert adoration by the mere sight of the food in front of her. It's hard to pin a color to Mikey's dish – vivacious, flavorful, and passionate – but eventually, she decides on orange.

Orange is ardor; it's elegence, tradition, and achievement; it's a feeling riddled with labrynthine complexity, one that she will not know how to name for years. It's lapses of time made perrenial through film strips tinted in sepia and heriloom family traditions, it's participation trophies glinting amid vitric captures of sunshine, it's newborn features crinkled under the enticing glow of incubator bulbs and crinolines soured with age, the shriveled orchestration of beginnings and ends alike. One way or another, — whether it be through conception or satiety — it's mammalian bellies swollen to capacity with life; it's grapefruit rinds, syrupy daybreaks, and sponge cakes rising beneath the pyretic heat of the oven. It's watching her best friend eat, and wondering, how can I make someone feel like this? How can I make you feel like this?

What must I give, for the opportunity to spin a cullinary miracle from merely flour and dust? To knead such transitory compounds into substinance, the very thing meant to sustain?

Briefly, she captures a faceless effigy of her parents, whirling through her mind's eye with the same controlled, intentional fervor that often wills them to flit nimbly around Alinea's kitchen at the height of the dinner rush – working late, filling bellies – and suddenly, everything falls into place.

For the first time in her life, the last five years make sense.

They get to love so many people, just by keeping them fed. No wonder there's no room left for me.

This feels like blue. Blue is a stopgap, a transient, dull ache that warps into a nagging tug at her gut, growing stronger and less forgiveable with time.

It's an immobile cadaver of bruising solitude; it's an open sky tarping the heavens, eerily smooth and amorphous despite being littered with a thousand celestial puncture wounds. It's fate in suspension, a three-cornered entity jostling through the murky waters caged within her Magic Eight ball. It's the sectioned-off innards of a manse wallpapered in strange, needlepointed shadows, just as it is an ocean with a gaping maw — a tangle of noxious, foamy fingers coiling around her ankles at the peak of every nightmare.

And, in a dwindling force against the malignant, it's Carmy's marbled gaze: lacunar and tranquil, fluttering on jointed lashes above two coasts' worth of freckle-sandy shorelines, always waiting for his chance to rise up and reel her back in to safety. Always falling short of enough.

She doesn't want to think about blue anymore.

Because Uncle Jimmy keeps every single one of his promises: he takes them to the park and the chocolate-covered banana stand, and on the way home, both children fall asleep with lopsided grins plucking at their features, bananas half-melted and smeary in their grasps. Mikey forfiets the playground in favor of tagging along with Richie and Fak to the skatepark; as she watches him scuttle out the front door at the tetchy honk-honk! of Richie's car horn, armed with a teetering stack of Tupperware containers, Mairead understands that he, too, must know the importance of making people feel full, loved, orange.

Sure enough, when he returns, hot on the tail of his curfew, as a tangerine-shaped sun is settling relievedly into the Chicago skyline, he presents her with a brand new book: acquired in a way that – once Uncle Jimmy, who's practically boiling over with an intrinsic deluge of suspicion, finds the means to interrogate him about – he is unable to explain or elaborate on. But none of that matters to Mairead.

All that matters is that he knows how to cherish her.

All that matters is that he knows her at all.

_________

At bedtime, tucked beside Carmy – who insists that having her there aids in quelling his plague of nightmares – under an eyelet lace duvet in the guest suite, with Charlie curled into a tight spiral atop a nearby air mattress, Natalie and Mikey nestled in bunk beds across the hall, and Richie stretched across their carpeted floor, a pajama-clad leg peeking out of his Star Wars sleeping bag, Mairead requests for her new book to be read.

Naturally, Uncle Jimmy obliges, before it's even in his hands, before he's ever felt the title on his tongue: Baldardash the Brilliant.

"I have a question." The little girl pipes up when the story has concluded, the wizard has funneled vibrant hues back into a kingdom once sworn to greyscale permanence, and he has set the book back on the nightstand. "Can people feel colors?"

The man considers her proposition for a moment, carefully calculating his answer – after all, this is the same child who'd asked him if moons were really just dead planets at three, and how plants could be considered alive if they didn't have heartbeats at four – before assuring her, "Of course they can. You felt your toothbrush when you held it, right? That's turquoise, and your pajamas are pink, and the blanket is –"

"No, Uncle Jimmy!" She cuts him off, scowling as she sinks back against her pillow in frustration. "I said, can people feel colors? Like when Carmy's mommy gets really mad and leaves us alone so that she can go smoke, it feels like black. Or, when it rains so much that my head starts to hurt, that feels like gray."

"Oh, no, I don't think so, sweetheart." Her question stills him, almost knocks the wind right out of him, and — albeit, just briefly — he marvels at her ability to construct queries loaded with such an unusual, neurological heaviness.

What are you made of, girl? He wants to ask her. What's going on in that little mind of yours? What noxious, cerebral entity is sickening you with the profound consideration of such inconceivable things?

But instead, – because he knows she's getting older, and in turn, beginning to take his answers to heart – he simply opts to cease her inquiries. "That's just your overactive imagination talking."

The sheets rustle as she wiggles and squirms against them, the iron bedframe groaning squeakily before it adjusts to her shift in weight. "What's overactive imagination?"

"Hmm," Uncle Jimmy purses his lips, half-feigning contemplation. "How about I tell you in the morning, okay?"

Mairead scrunches up her face in annoyance, but her features are twisting into a yawn before she can even begin to put up a fight. "Oh-kay."

"Okay. Goodnight." He nods, leaning forward to press a gentle kiss to her forehead. "Sleep tight."

In what is quite possibly the smallest voice that he has ever been able to make out, she replies, "Don't let the bedbugs bite."

_________

The next morning, as peals of dawning sunlight scooter in through the dew-glossy windowpanes, Mairead sits across from Mikey at the breakfast table. She sips apple juice out of a little plastic cup, listening intently as he plunges a fork into his stack of chocolate chip pancakes with the meticulous precision of a conductor's baton, and tells her about colors.

Uncle Jimmy's got it all wrong, he says. You can feel them. You can, and I know it, because I'm just like you; I feel them, too.

Fury is red, an unmistakable sizzling in his chest. It's the needling sensation of Donna Berzatto's handprint branding itself across the leather-tough hide of skin on his back, the whites of his eyes reduced to vessely citadels for the tears that — whenever bravery was whittled down to his ability to defy the inconsolable, many-limbed creature of his mother's displaced fury — he just couldn't seem to wish away.

Purple is a distant twinge, an aftershock, a dull and pulsing ache. It's a haphazard attempt to bury his seismic frenzies of anger and rage before they sink into the soil on their own accord; it's weeding through a garden of silvery cicatrices and bruises in various stages of healing, detaching wounds from memories with hopes of evading all his sharp-tongued generational cycles.

Richie is orange – not a feeling, just Richie, and a fulfillment so present that it suffocates him; a looming urge that's so immense, he can't even see past it sometimes.

Yellow is promise, purpose. It's a guiding echo that flings itself from mirrored skyscraper walls and into a misshapen puddle on his kitchen floor, instantly spotlighting a teenage boy into something of transient greatness.

Blue is anticipation, undoubtably so. It's cornflower-tipped flames gnarling a stovetop at its hottest degree, playing backsplash to the temporal contractions that ripple through a flimsy labyrinth of muscles and nerves every time he watches a new dish begin to stir into consciousness at his own blister-capped fingertips.

And lastly, of course, there is green: a reverent sickness, the eager plucking of last season's cooking herbs from the near-wilted flowerbeds on the Berzattos' fire escape.

Or, more favorably, the unrecognizable warmth that augmented through his ribcage when a nurse in a soft paper gown had placed a swaddled newborn on his lap and said, "Meet Natalie Rose, your sister," then, years later, like clockwork, "Meet Carmen Anthony, your brother," and nothing – no experience or feeling that he'd weathered throughout the course of his short lifetime – could've ever measured up to that one.

Green is just as Mairead had named it: life.

Then, as if none of it has ever happened at all, he passes her a plate and says, eat.

(In nearly three decades' time, Uncle Jimmy's words will mean so much more than what this moment has to offer.)

Let's eat now, so that Mikey's hurt is worth something.

here's what han has to say!

at long last, welcome to IN THE WEEDS <3

it's almost surreal to be publishing my prose writing online for the first time in almost three years, but i think this is some of my best work and so i am conquering my fear of first chapters, and more importantly, my own writing, to post it. i have been working since feburary to develop these characters and this storyline (and doing research in order to write a blind character somewhat accurately — fun fact: this is the only chapter, aside from an eventual flashback to her accident (i have plans i cannot speak of) where you will see mairead sighted) and i am so excited to finally bring them to life. i appreciate anyone who stops by to read it, and like every other author on this app, i would love to hear what you think! writing is as important to me as eating and sleeping, but regardless, comments and feedback fuel my motivation.

special thank you to fxllmoons and -punisher for enduring countless hours of yapping about this fic. and also to nightwvngs who i forced to edit the beginning when they came to visit me over the summer. milfs 5 ever

a lot to say about this chapter and the metaphors but im tired so i will leave them open to interpretation for the most part. if you couldn't tell, carmy being unable to save the baby bird/not realizing it was suffering & could never be healed all along is a metaphor for his relationship with mikey 😍🥰 also here's some visuals so you can put sweet little faces to the emotional torment i just put them through.

also i half-assed proofreading this because im tired and hate my own writing so if it's bad don't yell at me. or do. idc

next chapter is seven fishes so BUCKLE THE FUCK UP!!!!!