Swallow (Book 1 of the Swallow Series)

By A.M. Holly

You can serve your country or you can serve your government, but you can't do both.

In a future America wracked by climate change, disease, and civil unrest, Martene Fisher has risen from humble beginnings to realize her dream of becoming a military officer and pilot, positions usually reserved for members of the upper class. With an elevated social status and a lifestyle few in her world enjoy, she has everything she’s ever wanted and more than most could hope for: a career, a home, people she loves, relative security. But Martene discovers the job is not what it seems and her hard-won life begins to crumble when she learns she has been an unwitting perpetrator of horrific human experiments and genocide on behalf of the government. Martene embarks on a dangerous path to expose the government’s crimes and to right the unforgivable wrongs she committed by being a part of them.

SWALLOW is a dark and gritty work of speculative fiction inspired by real-life histories of human experimentation. This timely novel explores some of today’s most pressing social and environmental issues, including climate change, pollution, pandemic viruses, ethics in medicine, and criminal and economic justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A.M. Holly
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005615338

A.M. Holly

A.M. Holly lives in Florida with her husband and two rescue dogs. She is a former print journalist and lifelong outdoorsperson. For more about her, go to amholly.com.

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Swallow

A.M. Holly

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright 2020 by A.M. Holly

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Visit the author’s website at www.amholly.com.

To every life that has mattered less.

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." —William Shakespeare

CONTENTS

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO

ELEVEN YEARS AGO

TEN YEARS AGO

SEVEN YEARS AGO

SIX YEARS AGO

FIVE YEARS AGO

FOUR YEARS AGO

THREE YEARS AGO

ONE YEAR AGO

THREE MONTHS AGO

21 SEPTEMBER

27 SEPTEMBER

30 SEPTEMBER

7 OCTOBER

18 OCTOBER

11 NOVEMBER

15 NOVEMBER

19 NOVEMBER

21 NOVEMBER

22 NOVEMBER

23(?) NOVEMBER

23 JANUARY

24 JANUARY

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I used to think forgiveness exists for all who seek it, but now I know better. Some sins are too unfathomable, too egregious to be forgiven, such as those I document here. Don’t misunderstand me: My purpose is not absolution. These pages will serve as a record of what I’ve done and what I’ve witnessed, and they will give my mind a place to be, something to do, a way to hold on until I am finished here. The truth can’t be buried with them; it has to be told. That is my job now.

Truth of the past lives everywhere, in words. Ink bleeds truth onto stacks of paper bound with wire. Truth is whispered from the nubs of pencils, it’s written in margins, secreted in walls, hidden under mattresses. Truth is written in bones dropped into the ground, cold and untidy, with intended permanence. But bones can be unearthed and so can words. When the writers are dead, the words live on. That is my hope here: that I will have enough time to write it, that these pages will stay hidden and safe, that someday there will be a You to read it.

First, you should know this: I have taken hundreds of lives, possibly thousands. What I write here is truth, as much of it as I am able to tell.

My mind is fragmented, caught in a tug-of-war between past and present. It is filled with terrors that repeat on a loop that I can’t stop. I can’t call them nightmares because they happen in the day. I can’t call them nightmares because I see them when my eyes are open.

» » »

Sometimes it’s the boy I see. There is the smell of earth and hot brass and sulfur trapped in the air, the warmth of his skin, the feeling that it is all new, all happening right now. I have a hold on him and if he can still move, he doesn’t try. He has stopped struggling and sits, panting, with legs splayed in front of him. He is half my age. Thirteen, maybe younger. His back is against me and I keep my arms locked across his chest, pinning him to the ground and to me. All of the fight in him has settled into the half-grown heart that bangs like a drum under his skin. Hair sticks to his forehead in sweaty, mud-colored mats.

Boots and legs appear next to me. The boy is silent. I look up, start to speak. There is a spark, a flash of moonlight on a steel blade. It reaches down and rakes his neck in one smooth motion. Warm blood fans and sprays like water from a broken pipe. The boy gurgles and writhes. His heels dig shallow trenches in the damp ground under him. I have let go. I’m leaning over him, pressing hard against the wound with both hands, but my fingers slip inside the unnatural opening in his neck and the blood pumps through them.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. They are the only words I know how to say.

The surge weakens to a trickle. His mouth gapes and his lips relax, but his eyes are frozen on me.

» » »

Sometimes it’s her, at the tide pool, like the day it happened.

Movement catches my eye: a crab crawling under the spiked heel of a shoe—a shoe I recognize. The tiny crab raises a purplish-pink claw, its only defense. Lazy, shin-high waves slap the rocks and get sucked out again. The water’s edge is still far out but the tide is coming in. The shoe is on its side and there are scuff marks across the glossy red finish. It’s a flashy shoe meant to draw attention, and it is out of place here. I don’t want to look past it but I have to.

Look past the shimmering puddles in the rocks. Look.

The foot, the leg, the arms, the hair. Yes, it is her. But she is the wrong color; there is a gray cast that isn’t right and her skin looks like it’s made of wax.

No, no, no, no.

The right shoe is lying next to her foot as though it has just slipped off, but the left one is on. She’s lying face-down with her cheek pressed into the rocks and head turned to the side. Her right eye stares at something far away and the crab steps across her fingers in its sideways retreat toward the mangroves.

» » »

The bed is empty. That is the nightmare that is real now, every day and night.

It has been months since I’ve slept in that bed. There is no clock on the nightstand because I am not there to use it; I keep it on the floor next to the sofa because it’s where I sleep now. I can’t sleep in the bed because the emptiness is too much and the bedroom door stays shut so I don’t have to remember, but I do remember and will always remember. I scared the housekeeper when she tried to change the linens but now they know not to go in that room and not to wash the pillowcases because they still smell like him. If I go in that room I will see more than the empty bed. I’ll see what led to it, what they did to him. My mind will see what my eyes have not, and the imagination is wicked.

I pick up the bottle next to the alarm clock on the floor by the sofa and put it to my lips. It is empty, but the scent makes my mouth water and throat ache for what isn’t there. I grope for another bottle on the floor. Glass rolls and clinks. I find one that is heavier. I unscrew the lid and drink.

» » »

What would I say to them if I could? To those Forgotten Ones? I’d say I remember.

I remember you.

I know the truth.

And I will tell the world.

That boy’s death wasn’t the first I was responsible for and it will not be the last, but it was the first I had seen so clearly. He is one of the reasons I am writing this. He existed. They all did. It happened, and this is a record of it.

That boy was not the last, but I know who will be.

You might ask yourself what could bring a person to do the things I have done and will do yet. Even I would not have thought myself capable only a few years ago.

I don’t intend for this to be a record of my life, yet I can only tell you the truth as I have known it, and you will only recognize the truth if you know the person telling it. It started before I was here and will continue after I’m gone. I don’t know where it begins or ends; I only know where I do. And that is what I will tell you.

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO

At six years old, nightmares were easily forgotten. They didn’t visit unannounced, unwelcome, and unexpected during the day, whatever terror they might have brought into the hot shadows of a sleeping house. The worst of the fear remained only until I broke free from sleep and in the still minutes that followed.

My face was wet and my mother was already sitting on the bed, holding and rocking me, saying, Shh. It’s just a dream, just a dream. You’re safe.

The nightmare faded into the sound of her voice as she smoothed my hair, which had come loose of its braid.

You never have to be afraid, Martene. Do you know why?

I wiped thick tears across her shoulder, her skin a pale galaxy of rust-brown stars and constellations. I clung to her neck and bunched the straps of her linen nightshirt, thinned by years and sweetened with the scent of her.

Because of the bird?

Yes, baby, because of the bird. Do remember? She sat me down and dragged her fingers through my hair to loosen the tangles. You have an animal, a bird, that is always with you. It’s your protector, but it’s also part of you. My grandmother taught me about the animals inside us, and her grandmother taught her. My grandmother’s grandmother was a mystic and a healer who lived far, far north of here in a place they used to call Alabama.

She started to braid my hair again, beginning at the nape in a slow, practiced rhythm. Night air lifted the curtains away from the open window and revealed a blackness outside that stirred a vague dread from the dream. A faceless, shapeless monster in the dark.

Daddy says magic isn’t real, I told her.

"This isn’t magic. It’s a kind of faith, a way of walking in this world safe in the knowledge that you aren’t alone.

"Daddy doesn’t know, but I went to see an old woman in the next county when you were big in my belly. She lived all alone, deep in the woods, and she had knowledge of these things, or so people told me. People tell you all sorts of things when you’re pregnant, most of it nonsense. But I wanted to hear what she might have to say, and I walked miles through spider webs, brambles, palms, and oaks to find her. People said she was crazy, that she would say anything if you were willing to pay her, but she had the knowledge my grandmother’s grandmother talked about. She said the child inside me would bring the evil things of this world to tremble, and an animal would follow and guide her all her life.

"It wasn’t until you were born that I knew she was telling the truth.

"I woke very early that morning, about the time it is now, and I knew you were coming. I tried to go back to sleep so Daddy wouldn’t wake up, but by sunrise, I couldn’t be still or quiet any longer.

I kept myself busy cleaning the house and took breaks when I needed to. Daddy left to get Aunt Iris and Marcella and I went outside to cook. I wanted everyone to have food to eat for the next few days because I was going to spend all my time with you when you decided to meet us. She tied the braid at my back and pulled me to sit on her lap.

I was cleaning the pots outside when he got home, and he had to help me to the bedroom. The pain grew, and each wave was stronger than the last, bringing with it both fear of what was to come and excitement. We had waited so long to meet you, but it was scary too, especially for Daddy.

Why was Daddy scared?

"I suppose because giving life is a dangerous business. Life and death are connected, they’re always touching, always near to one another. But it turned out he had nothing to be afraid of that night.

"I walked the room for hours and leaned on the bed when I had to, always moving. I felt hot, so very hot. It was late winter and I was thankful for the cool air outside. I think the wind felt sorry for me, because it kept pushing in through the window when I needed it most, but I was dripping sweat, like someone splashed me with a bowl of water.

"I was leaning on the window ledge when I saw it perched on the big oak limb outside, almost close enough to touch. The bird was not like any we had ever seen before or since. The dark blue and gray feathers had a sheen that made it look more like a metal figurine than a living animal. It just sat and watched me watching it.

That night was longer than I knew one night could last. By the time you were here the next morning, I had forgotten all about the bird outside. It wasn’t until later when Aunt Iris and the neighbors were in the room visiting the new baby that anyone noticed it still perched outside the window. My sister said it was a martin, a bird we rarely see here. It was a good omen. This beautiful animal had come to usher you, our first child, our only daughter, into the world, and we named you Martene.

Our first child, our only daughter. The way she said it made me feel like royalty, like the daughter of a governor or a president.

"There was new life in our home, new joy, a new beginning. You were welcomed to Earth by a beautiful bird to keep you all the days of your life, to protect you. You can’t see it, but it is always nearby.

Now do you understand? My girl, you have nothing to fear from evil. Evil should fear you.

I leaned back into bed and she bent down to kiss my forehead. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be as pretty as my mother. I wanted to have red hair like hers; I wanted to have as many freckles as the sky had stars, like she had. She tilted the little fan on the nightstand so it blew across my face, chilling the damp strands of hair and drying the sticky remains of tears, and turned off the light.

A bird to keep you all the days of your life.

Maybe my mother really believed that, or maybe it was the kind of story mothers tell so their daughters aren’t afraid of the dark. Time has proven her right, though she did not live to see it. For that I am grateful.

ELEVEN YEARS AGO

Where I come from, people stay close to the ground. Feet always on it, hands usually in it, and bodies too often laid under it well before old age has taken hold. Planting, picking, planting, picking. Six days a week, year after year. Toes in the dirt from the time you can walk. Little toes on the sand, on warm grass and oak leaves, on mud with hookworms that burrow through the bottoms of feet.

Kids don’t wear shoes in County 8 except to go to school. My brother Jule and I could have gone to the government school two miles south of our house when we were little but we didn’t because my parents taught us at home until my mother died. After that, we studied at home by ourselves. I taught Jule and our dad quizzed us at home. We read a lot. We learned the government textbooks but we also had old books. Illegal books. My dad kept them because he thought they were important and he required us to read them. Literature, textbooks, history, handwritten diaries from before the war. When I was old enough, I went with my father to his teaching job at the regional college adjacent to the grade school that we never stepped inside. The buildings were nearly identical—cheerless concrete block painted gray—but created entirely different trajectories for the lives inside. The college was the only one on the peninsula, and my father taught mechanical engineering, so that’s what I studied until I graduated at eighteen, despite my lack of interest and enthusiasm. Some days we rode together on his motorcycle and other days we walked and talked and we hardly saw anyone else on the limestone road except water trucks and sometimes police cars. The big white trucks said NORTH AMERICAN UNITED WATERS in blue print across the side and RELIEVING WORLD THIRST in smaller letters below that. Water trucks came to us most often in the dry season, when rain barrel stores ran low.

The police never stopped us. After a few decades of traveling the same two miles to work, my dad was well known there. Once on a recruitment year an Armed Service bus came up behind us and we pulled over, obeying the law that said you had to make way for any Armed Service vehicle and wait for it to pass. It was to show respect for not just the Armed Service, but for the governor-general and president it represented. You had to open your home to them if they ever asked, and if you saw them face to face, you had to thank them for their service.

My dad told me about parades in some communities whenever a fleet of Armed Service vehicles drove by. Everyone in the area had to wait on the roadside and wave or clap as they passed.

I don’t want you inside one of those buses, he said after it rolled past us, raising his voice over the grasshoppers in the fields. We were standing in front of his motorcycle, which he’d stopped in the grass off the flat side of the road. I squinted at the sky, a sweltering blue that burned the clouds to wisps and seemed to stretch on forever.

There was an urgency in his words. He stooped in front of me and set his hands on my shoulders.

Mars, there is only one thing in this world I will ever ask you to do for me. I want you to live a quiet life. You might be tempted to do differently, and I won’t blame you, but you have to trust me about this. I would be so glad if you could get a placement here and live nearby. But you might not be able to, and you might not even want to, and I will understand. I only ask that you don’t go to live in a city. Don’t go to work for a big agency in a job that gets you noticed. His fingers dug into my shoulders and he looked at me so hard I wanted to look away. Teaching was my choice, but there are other things you can do. Just please, stay away from those buses, away from the Armed Service, and stay out of the cities. He straightened and let his hands drop to his sides. We stood not saying anything for a minute. He rubbed his chin and looked down the empty road.

Do you remember the Greek myth of Icarus? he asked.

I thought about it. No, I don’t think so.

The one about the boy who flew too close to the sun?

Oh, yeah. I remember that one.

"His wings melted and Icarus fell from the sky. Those places—the cities, the government agencies, the Armed Service—they’re the sun to you, and you can’t get too close to them, okay?

Martene, do you understand?

Yeah, okay. Blue’s not really my color anyway, I said, referring the color of the military uniforms we saw most often. He stood up straight and laughed.

Most of the other vehicles in the area came from another road north of the schools, so we didn’t pass them. A handful of times we saw the alligator that lived in the pond halfway between home and school sunning itself on the roadside, and occasionally we’d see the red and brown specks of wild horses grazing in the fields far away. Otherwise, we were alone. We’d ride the motorcycle on the white road, dusty in the dry season, full of milky puddles in the long, wet months. I liked to stand on the back and reach up to the airplanes that occasionally flew over, to catch them in my hands. The first time I did it my dad got mad and stopped.

What’s the matter with you? Did the devil dare you to do that? Then he smiled and started again, cautiously, and let me stand the rest of the way to school.

From the time I was little, he made it clear he wanted me to join the Civil Service, and he made sure I understood there was no future for me in the fields or the Armed Service. I could be a teacher like him, if I wanted, and that’s what I always planned to do after college, but my dad got sick the spring before summer enrollment, two months after my eighteenth birthday. He told me to join anyway, knowing there was a chance I wouldn’t be able to come back to see him or my brother for a long time or perhaps at all.

I chose to stay with him because I was worried. When trouble came for us, it didn’t let go.

I stayed and he disintegrated. Weeks became months, and I watched the strong and healthy man I loved dearly become a breathing skeleton with yellow skin and yellow eyes. If the creation of new life is a miracle, this was the opposite. It was the agonizing consequence of having been born, the reckoning, the collection of the debt we owe from our first heartbeat.

The days felt like weeks. We washed him, read to him from his old books, cooked his favorite foods in hopes he would eat, walked him to the privy outside while he is still able, dabbed water on his lips when he stopped drinking. My aunt helped some. The boxy white medical trucks that were supposed to come once every four weeks only stopped in our county twice in three months. We sold his old farm truck to the neighbors so we could buy drugs for the pain, but none of it mattered. Not the food, not the water, not the attempts at comfort, not the drugs. There was nothing that could save him or any of us.

I was with him night and day but I had to force Jule to help. He liked to disappear all day whenever he could get away with it, and he would sneak in late at night only to leave in the morning again.

This is difficult for him, my dad told me during the early weeks. We talked a lot then but I tried to hide my anger at Jule. I didn’t want to draw attention to his absence because it hurt my dad, however much he tried to hide it. He’s coping the best way he can.

I wanted to say it was difficult for me, too. It was the hardest, worst thing that ever happened. I wanted to yell, wanted to scream at Jule. I wanted to know why he didn’t care enough to spend my dad’s last weeks on Earth with him. Our father gave us everything and my little brother was abandoning him.

The end came too slowly and too quickly. I didn’t think my dad could hear me reading, but I worked through the old volumes anyway. I’d moved from sitting in the chair opposite his bed to the hard floor next to him and rested one hand on his arm and the other on the book in my lap. I sat close so he’d hear me over the box fan in his window and the table fan in the doorway that swiveled on its base, humming and shaking its mechanical head no … no … no … no … all day and night. The fans moved the air, but it remained soured with living decay.

The tea-brown pages ticked away the minutes and hours. Some were as thin as dried moths’ wings and crumbled as easily under my touch. It was soothing in a way, for me and for him, I think. The words were constant when nothing else was. They never changed. The words were permanent when life was fleeting. They would outlive all of us.

This hill though high I covet to ascend— the words tumbled out automatically, obediently, but my thoughts wandered up and away from the bedroom of our old house with the rusted roof. I had been reading all morning and most of the afternoon, had lost track of how many days in a row I’d done the same. My mouth was dry. I wanted water, but I didn’t dare leave his side. I thought if I left for a minute I’d come back and he would be gone. My dad had not woken that day, but he said things in his sleep I couldn’t make sense of and his hands picked absently at the cotton sheet under him, long since yellowed with sweat. The difficulty will not me offend; for I perceive the way of life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let’s neither faint nor fear.

He groaned but now his cracked lips were smiling. A little smile, imperceptible if you weren’t looking hard for it. Hm. Read that part again.

Which part? Dad?

He didn’t answer. He was back in that other world that he was going to leave this one for. I would have given anything for him to be able to talk to me again the way he used to. I had already lost him although I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it had happened. It was hard to remember what he was really like when he was still himself. I tried to picture him before this.

Solid and able, square chin and kind, deep-set eyes that shone with intelligence. Lips and mouth that smiled often and spoke softly. Suntanned, freckles on his face and arms and hands—the kind of freckles that hesitate until the sun brings them out, not like the ones my mother had. Sort of young. Not the old man lying in front of me.

His lips moved, made an O, unmade it, and made it again. He exhaled a groan that could have meant something.

What did you say, Dad? I didn’t expect an answer. I was used to him dreaming out loud.

Mars, your mother is here, he said, straining. Sitting next to me … on the bed. He motioned with his hand but his eyes stayed closed.

Oh. The familiar prickle of fresh tears stung my eyes. I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted to believe it was real and not the delirium of a dying mind.

My father’s voice was lost to all of us after that.

I cried a lot during these awful days, but I tried not to when I was in the room with him. Even if he couldn’t see, I think he would have known.

I continued to read, pausing now and again to dab his mouth with a wet cloth until he started pushing it away and it was clear to me he wanted nothing more from this world.

With each hour he was pulled farther away and with every breath his chest rattled and the room grew more empty.

» » »

In September I went to stay with my aunt, who oversaw a farm in our county, and I started working in the fields. Others my age had been working for years already but I’d gotten a reprieve with school. Jule stayed behind with the family of his friend Scott Gidry, who was the same age as Jule and would start college with him when he was old enough. It was a privilege teachers’ children were afforded that most weren’t unless your family had connections or parents had a high-ranking job or money, and none of those was easy to come by.

The rows of green in the pepper fields seemed endless and so did the hours working them. The only shade came from the tattered black cloths above them that kept the fruit from seeing the worst of a full day of sun, and the rows were narrow, with enough room for one person to walk between and too long to see the end well if you were standing on the other. It gave the illusion that time stood still. Six days a week, we worked from the first light of day, hovering around squatty plants until the sun was at its strongest, or until rain and lightning made us stop. We started again in the late afternoon and worked until a half-hour before sunset.

We planted the seedlings, now and then gave them baths of fungicide and pesticide to ward off diseases and weevils and worms, and once the little white flowers appeared, we pollinated them. Without help, there wouldn’t be as much fruit, not as many big, sweet peppers for export. Fewer to load on crates for transport trucks to take away. It was the most tedious part of the work. With slender brushes that had little, feather-like ends, we did insects’ work, gently touching each flower, on and on, the way a bee would, picking up minuscule bits of pollen from one and depositing them on the next, like a bee would. The plants were always putting out new flowers along with the fruit, and we pollinated until the end of the growing season, an eternity to me. Sometimes there were bees here and there, but you couldn’t depend on them. The wind also helped to spread the pollen but this was the surest way, and there were workers with nothing else to do. I was never happy to go to the fields in the morning, but I enjoyed the bright scent of the peppers when we cut the stems to harvest and I relished the rosy skies that often met us at daybreak: a delicious pink-and-orange display set against the ground wet with morning and dark green leaves that I saw all day long and even in my sleep.

Through the seasons there were field peas and watermelons and there was okra. Other farms raised sugar cane and bananas and mangoes. In the dead of summer not much was willing to grow. Weeds, children, hot peppers, and, for me, desperation. I could have spent my life in those fields, picking never-ending rows of peppers under a relentless sun, watching the years repeat themselves the way the old people who worked beside me did. It became my greatest fear.

Marcella, a woman my mother adored, one who helped deliver me, worked those same fields for fifty-six years before I joined her. The decades of repetitive movements shaped her short, sun-darkened body to resemble one of those bushes in its roundness with shoulders and back always hunched forward. She was old and weak and her health was failing, but she kept working. I thought she would work the fields until the day she died.

The people of her generation didn’t go to school when they were young and most don’t know how to read. Now, in my county, young people had choices. You could stay home and spend your life working the fields, which also meant being with your family, you could leave to join the Civil Service, or you could leave to join the Armed Service. If someone stayed now it was always because of a boy or a girl or because they wanted to take care of their parents. In the services, you don’t choose where you live.

I didn’t enroll in the Civil Service earlier that year, which meant I had to wait two years to try again. The services accepted new applicants on alternate years, so next they would be taking people for the Armed Service.

I no longer belonged in the place that had been my home. I felt as though I’d overstayed my welcome at a party and had only just noticed, standing alone in the hallway of another person’s house after everyone else had gone. Somewhere along the way I missed my cue that I was supposed to leave. Two years was too long to wait.

TEN YEARS AGO

Name.

For a second I didn’t realize he was asking a question; it looked like he was talking to the clipboard in his hand. I was sitting on the edge of a metal folding chair in front of a folding table in the middle of the stale auditorium of the grade school that doubled as a makeshift recruitment outpost once a year, alternating between the two services. Across from me was a balding man with pockmarked cheeks and yellow teeth.

Martene Fisher, I answered, and watched him scribble the letters. No, Martene with an ‘E,’ not an ‘I.’ M-A-R-T-E-N-E. F-I-S-H-E-R. He sighed, crossed out what he’d written, and wrote my name again.

Age.

Nineteen.

You can read and write then?

Yes.

You know you won’t be able to pick your job, and it probably won’t be one you want. Highest grade completed?

I have a degree.

He looked me in the eye for the first time and set the pen down.

From the regional college next door. I studied mech—

They’re going to cut your hair, he said, clipping my words with his, pointing his chin at the braid that hung over my shoulder down to my waist.

Yes, I know, I said, now self-conscious about it. I flipped my hair behind me and straightened.

Here. Use that education to fill these out yourself. He pulled a cigarette from the pocket of his blue uniform shirt and walked out of the auditorium. On the way he handed me the clipboard of forms that all started the same:

NORTH AMERICA UNITED

ARMED SERVICE DEPARTMENT

SOUTHEAST REGION

COUNTY 8 ADMIN CENTER

OLD FLORIDA

I put my life down on paper in single-word answers, and the pages reduced my family to footnotes. Father: deceased. Current age or age at death: 41. Mother: deceased. Current age or age at death: 28. Siblings: brother, Jule Fisher. Current age or age at death: 15. Information apparently as inconsequential as height (68 inches), weight (?), blood type (?), hair color (brown), eye color (brown).

» » »

In the afternoon, I said goodbye to my parents where they were buried, under the shaded canopy of the big oak tree behind the yard of our old house. Shriveled resurrection ferns waiting for rain and floating Spanish moss covered the limbs that were like giants’ hands reaching to touch the ground beside the graves. I read the markers, brown plaques bearing their names and dates mounted to lime-rock boulders, as I had many times before. On the left, Ann Rose McCalvey Fisher, and Stephen Phillip Fisher on the right. It still surprised me how new the hurt could feel after all that time.

It was a good place to be buried, and I wondered for the first time where in the ground I would end up when it was all over. This was peaceful. I pulled my shirt out in front of me like a basket and filled it with plumeria flowers from the yard. I sprinkled the banana-colored flowers on the ground, sweetening the air and coloring the patches of grass and sand and fire-ant mounds that covered my parents’ bones.

I stood there at their feet like I did the day we buried my father. Aunt Iris and our nearest neighbors, the Medinas and the Stokeses, both large families compared to ours, and some of the college faculty were visiting on the front porch afterward, talking, sharing memories, and offering food and comfort. I was looking for Jule because the neighbors were asking about him and I thought he wanted privacy. I thought he wanted to be alone because he was too broken up to face anyone. He did want privacy, but not for the reason I thought he did. I found him in the woods behind our house with a girl, and I welcomed the anger because it felt better than sadness. I wanted to embarrass them but couldn’t without embarrassing myself, so I watched ants crawl in the crevasses of the rough bark of the oak tree in front of me and told him to get dressed and get over to the house. I told her, whoever she was, to go the hell home. She wasn’t a neighbor. Probably the daughter of a farm worker, and probably the reason Jule was hardly around the few months prior. She looked younger than Jule and I guessed she would have a couple of babies before she was my age. I wanted to knock him on his ass and drag her to the road by her hair, but I didn’t.

What stopped me was remembering the words my father spoke to me in his final months. This is difficult for him. He’s coping the best way he can.

I was angrier with Jule than I’d ever been, but patience with him is what my dad would have wanted. I didn’t think Jule deserved it that day, but I could do that for my dad. There was nothing else I could still do for him; I would do this.

They had their clothes on almost as soon as I got the words out.

Get inside. People are asking about you, I told him, and watched her scamper toward the road with her tangled head down and him stomp past me, mumbling something and not looking me in the eye. I went back to the house and opened one of four jars of watermelon wine the eldest Stokes, the grandfather, Temple, brought for us. It was sickly sweet and warm, but I downed it in furious gulps.

Now, a year later, the yard looked different. The grass was full and tall in the sunlight and sparse in the shade. The rain collection barrels were still there and on their sides I could still read the words PROPERTY OF NORTH AMERICA UNITED WATERS, the company that owns the rain even before it hits the ground. Our big solar panels were gone, but that was okay. Better for someone else to use them than leave them out there. I walked up the back steps to find the house untouched, everything inside the way we left it after we buried my dad, except for a film of dust that had settled on the surfaces. This house was special, one of a few wooden structures that remained of a mineral mining community back when there were still resources to extract from the ground. It had lasted a long time, but it was already starting to decay after being empty for a year with no life inside to sustain it.

The house was silent apart from the floor groaning under my feet, and it was filled with a lifetime of memories. Thoughts of what had happened this time last year, of what my dad turned into in his last weeks, what he suffered, threatened to crush me.

I opened the front door to let air flow straight through to the back, but sweat already covered my forehead and glued my shirt to my back and belly. It was hard to believe I lived there only a year ago; so much had changed that it felt like a lifetime ago.

I visited with my father’s old books hidden under clothes in a large airtight container in his closet and told myself I would come back for the books and his motorcycle someday, though I was not sure how.

I couldn’t take anything with me but I went through my old room anyway, spending time with my younger self and remembering when the four of us were a family. I took it in with new eyes: metal headboard, bare mattress that I hardly ever slept on except when I was little, favoring instead one of the sleeping hammocks on the porch to escape the heat at night. Folded linens stacked on top of the mattress, lace-covered window, doorless closet filled with boxes, wooden dresser. Beside the green glass lamp on the dresser was a blue rock, palm-sized and smooth, with the words I love you painted in white letters in that careful-yet-sloppy way little kids write. Jule had given it to me for my birthday when I was eleven, and seeing