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He called a week before Christmas break to tell me the name of a cat, a new wife, and to ask whether I remembered him, and I said I did.

“I remember when we flew those paper airplanes at school. Fourth grade, fifth? But I don’t remember anything after that.”

“That’s because I moved away, remember,” he said.

He said he’d thought of me, called my father, got the number, and so the call.

I finished graduate school and went to work for the firm. On the way out of a meeting the VP slapped my shoulder and said, “Good job. Come in early. We’ll talk more.” When we did talk, the VP gave me the narrative of the Ladder, stories of Pitfall and character, and we drank until security poked in and asked if all was well.

He called two years later. He sounded like the underside of a clam, just rough enough to suggest the granularity of salt and water. Something in his voice gave me the impression of drowning, fatigue.

“It’s my second divorce,” he said. “It was odd. The other day, as I really felt the crash, I thought about those planes and you. So I had to call.”

“The planes?” I said. “Right, the planes. We were on summer break.”

Years later I fired Sarah H, who it was always questionable would she persist. I knew she was alone, with two children to raise, and when I told her, I saw nausea and something gray, like a rhinoceros, cloud the back of her eyes.

Her things were gone next morning, the childrens’ smiles, a cheek to a puppy’s nose, the pastiche of Farside, Mary, and Dilbert strips, that odd string of beads she’d hung from a hook on a lamp, the box of tissue.

If he’d have called that night I would have asked him about Sarah H, about me. How does one live with oneself? I would’ve asked. I couldn’t change Sarah H, I would’ve told him. But he didn’t call.

We’d just returned from Harry’s graduation, our last graduation. I put keys and wallet into the basket. She went upstairs to underdress and ready for bed. I poured a glass of wine and watched out the doors to the porch. And he called, called then.

He asked how I was. I told him I was easing out of the day with a glass.

“I don’t drink,” he said, but he said it sounded good.

Then he asked if I remembered those paper planes. “Do you remember the paper planes? We were on the highest landing to the third floor, where the older kids attended class. We tossed those planes over the playground gravel. The beginning of summer. We figured out how to make those things go pretty far.”

I sipped the wine. I thought about it. He and I, we knew only paper planes together, both of us unified at one instance, seemingly for life. But for the life of me I couldn’t recall his face.

“Yes,” I said. “We made them go pretty far.”

His Parts can be found at 365 Tomorrows.

We took our dog to that always empty place outside of town and unclipped his leash.

Our father said, “Go on.”

At an old, broken fence (we never understood what the fence had ever enclosed–“Pasture, maybe, or some settler’s yard,” our mother guessed), our dog stopped and looked back at us with an expression too distant to interpret.

“Do you think he’ll follow us home?” our father asked.

A woman sits alone in the old library. This old library creaks and when the wind blows readers swear the walls respond with sway, what readers there are.

Few readers attend the library so it also echoes. The door closes behind the woman. Her movements step down the main hall which grows small the longer she listens. In the far wall light drops from the small high windows. This is her final day in the library.

The woman’s problem is that she’s come to the library with only the memory of words, words she believes express everything required to know. The need is pressing. Long ago she heard rumors on the street and in the classroom, suggestions from the wise, references to authors long forgotten, so she can’t ask for assistance from the librarians.

Her problem is like the problem some people have with music. A long time ago they heard a beautiful song; they have a sense of the melody but can’t hum it out loud; perhaps they have two or three bars, perhaps a few notes, but as the title and players escapes them, all they carry is the echo of a melody and thus have no chance of requesting the song or finding it, as some things, some objects and ideas, are impossible to describe such that they refer to something specific in the mind of another.

For half a century she’s come to the library. She’d begun her search in the basement with its naked marble floors and steel shelves with the first book and the closest shelf within reach and from there went book to book, day to day, year to year for half a century. She sought indirect mentions, rumors and footnotes, the long lists at the back, some mention of ideas she had no ability to write herself, as she had no idea how they might be expressed and couldn’t ask.

The reading went slowly at first. But her skills grew day to day. She learned to read German, French, Italian, and English, those languages where the mysteries she sought had the highest probability of finding their way onto the printed page and since, paradoxically, what she sought was independent of language but must be expressed through it, she could skip through none of them, reading through even the indexes, the encyclopedias, and those folios of the obscurest playwrights.

She finished the basement, moved to the first floor. Over the years, the librarians sought her out when faced with questions for which they hadn’t the answer, and the woman would point them to the specific volume, the specific page, and the necessary selection. The parishioners asked, “Where is she?” and her employer finally had to fill her position with someone younger and punctual.

Her problem would not be solved by guesswork or luck but by thoroughness and precise association. One passage, for example, sampled from another, and that from which it sampled was yet another reordering of something she remembered with ease. Her problem was not a problem of bulk but of a comprehensive construction of relationships or, at minimum, a single comprehensible string of words with which she could say, “This is it. Now I can go to a specific work where this idea is treated more fully, and then I shall have the answer.” Or, “This is it; this I can type into the search line and I shall be taken directly to the source.”

The woman read vertically by way of the horizontal. She learned to dismiss the normal questions, such as “Is this one worth my time?” and the librarians cleared her wake of plates and drinking glasses. At night they left certain lights on and provided the woman with a key and access even to those rarest volumes reserved for specialists. One day a scholar came and conversed with the woman and ran from the library in a rush declaring, “Without her, I’d yet be daft. But I’m sorry to say, I myself, with all my knowledge, was of little assistance to her,” and he could be seen chasing down the street in a gray scathing of rain.

One day she happened on a clue and rushed to a lower floor with the excitement of discovery. The next day she came back to the book that had sent her off, shaking her head, and when she finished it, she closed her eyes, her lips moving to rhythmic reiterations.

This is the woman’s final day in the old library, which is as populated as ever with unfilled chairs. Her mind is quick and her mind is empty. The rumors have drifted away and the footnotes have become thousands out of thousands. For the past several years each book she’s read was the book she’d read the day before, the words merely posed in different patterns, every narrative every narrative, every point every point. She looked up; the floors above her rose into dimming light.

One of the younger, braver librarians comes and sits nearby. She asks the woman a question. The woman says, “I can’t remember. But I know that this my last day in the library.”

“Oh, you’re from Montana,” he said. “Arkansas. My mistake . . .

“Yes, from Texas . . .

“Hot yes, but the space here is more than what you need. Of course, we should always take advantage . . .

“No, I never saw one but you could hear them at night in the desert; they sound just like screaming children, babies. We used to come home late and hear them on the side of the mountain . . .

“Disconcerting . . .

“Did I ever go out to see? No, it was just a thing we heard. What about you, at night, what did you hear?”

“Like birds, frogs . . .

“Across the entire country? That’s an adventure, hitchhiking. I thought you were still in Arkansas . . .

“That must have been interesting. So, when you got to San Francisco you stayed there. That was after the attack . . .

“I can understand the need to search. But no, not related, at least not that I know of . . .

“Same last name, yes. Of course. But I wish you luck . . .

“Yes, there are many of us. Good luck. And I’m sorry for the loss . . .

“No, I wouldn’t mind another call. Sure, when the mood strikes. I wouldn’t mind at all . . .

“We make a long list for sure and I hope you find them. Good luck.”

See your hands. You notice a black spider on the knuckle of the left-hand middle finger. They’re your hands and now a spider. These wrinkles and those grains under the nails from the garden. Your hands. They appear to you suddenly with the somatic lucidity of a sting.

Thick hands. You’d trapped one in a bottle once when a ring had fallen in and the two of you had laughed. But then you’d thought only of the bottle, but now you recall the bottle’s inner rim and the pressure of your hand’s width against it. You let go, turned the bottle over and let the ring slide gently out and onto the table.

You’d once inked in the wrinkles of your palms but they didn’t seem the same. They became just glabrous lines, black tracks that had nothing to do with you, even though the woman in the tent had estimated you with them, gliding her painted red nail east to west across and down the head line with a shake of her head, which you resented.

And now you want to know what you’d felt: your hand or her nail? The person she described was far ahead of you and had no hands, lacked sensitivities and a name. She, the woman said, would die by drowning.

Everything behind your hands blurs and transmutes into background like foliage. You remember attempting a number for the palm wrinkles but lost count at the problem of intersections and curves. You imagine that the wrinkles may be infinite or accidental and when is a wrinkle not a whorl or vice versa?

And those are your impossible bones extending to the tips of your fingers over woven with thick green ropes, which you’ve never felt and which you find all of the sudden a horror. You find their complexity a thing to fear. You remember and resent the palm reader that much more. Or not the palm reader but you, giving her your hand inconsiderate of the veins, which feel nothing, and the bones and the scar you see along the thumb which is evidence of a fence and running and the swish of your desperate feet through a meadow, and nerves, which you know about but have never seen. You think, If we indeed registered the rush of blood, we’d go mad.

Your hands so much of which are all feeling and act in so many ways like eyes. Terrifying when you consider all that you’ve done with them and to them and how, when they are considered too long, they become ugly and alien, like crab shells.

The spider has yet to move. It’s weightless and black and you know exactly what it is. These are your hands and on one of them is a black spider, unmoving, as if it’s waiting for your next move, as if it crawled here to ask but forgot the question.

Jimmy had Ferengi teeth. The neighbor complained to his parents that Jimmy had bitten his shepherd on the leg.

“He climbed the fence and took old Charger’s leg into his mouth and bit the poor fellow. I couldn’t believe it. And with those deadly Ferengi teeth he has.”

“It’s unnatural,” Jimmy’s mother told Jimmy. “No skateboarding for you for a week.”

Jimmy’s school chums teased Jimmy for his weird teeth, which were sharp and often dirty. But when they ran screaming with bleeding legs to the fourth grade teacher, they decided that this Jimmy was not a child to be teased. On the cool side, they’d carry interesting scars for the duration of their lives. One of the boys, who became a lawyer, showed his leg to a client and said, “I got this one from some kid, Jimmy was his name, who had the teeth of a Ferengi.”

“What’s a Ferengi?” the client said.

One boy, named Sorenson, pointed at Jimmy after the schoolyard attack and said, “I’ll have those teeth. Look for me and my bat.”

Suspended for drawing blood, Jimmy went dejected yard to yard, kicking at the uncut grass. He paused at the fence that separated the school from the empty neighborhood, and watched his friends at recess. “Why do I have to have these Ferengi teeth?” he asked himself. “They give me the urge to bite. I’m a biter. And now everyone hates me.”

On his way back home, he met an old man on a door stoop. The man asked, “Why so glum, son?”

Jimmy told him and pointed at his teeth.

“You do look like a Ferengi,” the old man said. “You must get into loads of trouble.”

“I bit a dog and my friends at school hate me.”

“I know a doctor who could take them out. That would solve your problems, eh?”

“Could you? Would he?”

“Sure. But you should ask your parents.”

Jimmy’s father looked at Jimmy as if he’d been snorting drugs. “Those are your teeth. You just can’t go pulling them out.”

“And who is this old man?” Jimmy’s mother wanted to know, bringing soup to the table. “We have no idea who this man is. He could be a molester.”

Jimmy stayed in his room the next day. He watched out the rain-soaked window. In the window the reflection of Jimmy’s teeth multiplied in the droplets. He felt as if he were drowning in a pool with piranha. He wished he had normal teeth. He wished the Ferengi had never come to pass in the art of the day.

In the late evening after dinner, he opened the window and found his way to the stoop where he’d met the old man. He entered the apartment and went door to door, listening. On his way out, he met the old man coming in with a bag of groceries. “Ah,” the old man said. “You.”

“I need these teeth gone,” Jimmy said.

“And your father and your mother? I think I know. Sorry, boy, but it isn’t going to happen this way.”

Jimmy sulked on the streets. Under a red light he saw boys and as he drew near he recognized Sorenson and then he remembered.

“Hey,” Jimmy called. “Sorenson, you’ll be a poor ass all your life. No lawyer you.”

“It’s Jimmy the Ferengi,” Sorenson called back. “And who’ll be poor all his life and never a lawyer?”

“You’ll have sex with your mother when you’re sixteen,” Jimmy said.

“Look at this,” Sorenson said, swinging his bat. He started across the street with his friends.

“I’ll bet you’re a cowardly doll,” Jimmy said.

“Oh you, Jimmy, you asked for it,” and Sorenson prepared a great swing at Jimmy’s face, stepping in quick and clean.

And Jimmy gave Sorenson a big Ferengi smile and waited for his new face.

The boy announced, “I’m going to run away.”

Dinner at the Franks, chicken, salad, and white beans on the black table, a round of white plates.

“You’re going to run away?” Father asked. The boy tapped at the edge of his plate with a knife.

Mother took a sip of her drink. “Please don’t do that. You might chip the plate.”

“A train, a train will take me away,” the boy said.

The sister said, putting down a rumpled napkin, “I was the one who cleaned the room. If he’s going to run away, it can be my room. And more space for my things. Plenty of room.”

“A train. And where would you go?” the father asked. “What would you eat?”

“You’ve always wanted the room. But it’s not my room. It was never my room,” the boy said.

“You haven’t told us about the train or what you’d eat,” the mother said. “A train would be some adventure, I’m sure.”

The father said, “I’m sure food would come from somewhere, though. Nothing like this chicken and these beans. But I’m sure it’ll come. Of course, a train wouldn’t be the problem. The problem would be what you’d do when you got there.”

The boy said, “There’s always just walking. I could just walk. Maybe a train would be too slow. With walking I can go away to wherever I wanted.”

“But a train would be some adventure,” the mother said. “Could you stop tapping the plate with your knife. The edge may chip.”

“More chicken, please. I’ll put all the animals on his bed,” the sister said. “We can get them out of those boxes finally.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll walk,” the boy concluded. “I’m going to walk. In the morning I won’t be here, so don’t even look for me.”

“Walking’s good, sure,” the father said, tearing chicken with his fingers. “There’s so much space outside.”