Mal wiped the blood off her face and thought about taking another snort of Mr. Takimura, the enthusiastic Asian tourist who’d asked her to take his picture.

It hadn’t been the best decision, not in full view of a streetlamp, but he screamed so loud once he saw her, it hurt her feelings. She was pretty sure no one had been watching when she reached out and grabbed Mr. Takimura, drug him into the alley, and broke off his head. Besides, her big leathery wings folded up so nicely under her garbage-bag dress. Everyone mistook her for a homeless person; a small one, at that. No threat there but guilt.

She pawed through his Disneyland messenger bag. He had a shiny pair of sunglasses, and for a moment, she hoped. But they were just as useless as mirrors, reflecting back a face that was angled, fanged, with large eyes and a hook nose. Mal felt her own nose, saw the reflection do the same. Her nose didn’t feel anything like that. She crushed the sunglasses and kept looking. Stupid mirrors.

She found her prize under a stack of brochures. Mal couldn’t read English, nor Japanese, and it made the menus and the buttons hieroglyphic in their mystery. Delicately, methodically, she poked each button, but the thing was dead too, apparently.

Dead, or enchanted? She slung the messenger bag over her shoulder, stuffed put the prize back inside, and pushed Mr. Takimura off the roof. Her signal was the familiar bell ring as he hit the dumpster, then she jumped, her wings catching gulps of night air. The messenger bag was a bit of added weight, she being so small, but Mal was nothing if not a hard worker.

It was nearly three a.m. There wasn’t much time. Mal felt the spike of excitement course through her. After so much time, she would finally get to see what everyone else saw. She beat back against the night air, and looked for a photographer.

Barely thirty minutes till dawn, and things were not going well. She stopped for three pedestrians. Each time, she held out the camera, made the “clicking finger” she’d seen foreign tourists do, and pointed to herself. In dim light she looked human enough, she thought.
Must not have been dim enough. Twice the humans had screamed and run, dropping the camera in the process. The fools almost broken it.

The third time it was a teenager, and he’d tried to run away with her camera. Mal was getting bulbously full, at this point.

The sun was ten minutes from rising when she found the blind man. She’d seen him before, tapping out his way in the alleys. He was really homeless, without even an eaves to sit on. Sometimes he’d play music by the church, and she liked that. The wily squeal of his harmonica was a change of pace from the long, dreary hymns she heard each night.

“Huh? Wha?” He woke quickly when she shoved hard enough. His empty, shifting eyes rolled. “What time izzit?”

“Picture.” Mal’s voice was scratchy and out of use. She cleared her throat and pushed the prize into his hands. “Please. Picture. Sir.”
The blind man felt the prize, realized what it was. “Whazzis, a Polaroid? Goddammit, I’m a blind man, I can’t take a picture of nothing.”

“Money?” Mal felt inside the messenger bag, pulled out the wallet from the teenager earlier.

“Money. Now, now, money I can take.” He grabbed the wallet, feeling for the cash, and threw the remains away. Then, fumbling, he held up the camera to his empty eyes, and said, “Am I even pointing this the right goddamnned way?”

He CLICKED the button, and nothing happened. Clicked again. “Damn camera isn’t even on.” He felt for the power button, switched it, and the prize, dragon-like, breathed out a fine green light.

Even blind, he reads the symbols! Mal thought excitedly.

“Say ‘cheese,’” said the blind man.

Mal smiled big.

“Goddammit, say ‘cheese,’ or I won’t know where the hell to point this goddamn thing.”

“Cheese,” said Mal, and smiled even wider.

The flash almost blinded her.

Mal crouched on the church roof. She pushed the Pol-a-roid’s button again and again, enjoying the sizzle of light that temporarily hardened her skin, just as the sun did. The camera spit out card after card, and she would watch each one as its surface swam with gray fury until a picture appeared. So many pretty pictures.

Her own picture, taken by the blind man, sat off to the side, face down. She couldn’t look at it.

She’d fancied herself a pretty girl, like the ones that came stumbling out of the bars just before sunrise. Looking at her picture, she understood now why people screamed. A stone monster stared back at her: all big teeth and bloodstained grinning. Her skin was dry and congealed, and in some places, cracked like old leather. Her eyes were huge and swollen, and her mouth a ragged red armory of knives and chipped edges.

Mal snuffed back tears, and pressed the button again. A sparkle of light, another picture. Her stone hand filled the frame, the fingernails she was accustomed to looking much more clawlike when frozen that way.

What do you do when you are stuck with the person you are?

Mal tossed the picture off the edge of the church, let it flutter to the gravestones below, and tried to think of something happier.

A monster, maybe. But a monster with a nice messenger bag.

The idea was silly but it made her laugh. It was something to start from. She stuffed all her lovely pictures into her bag and wiped her nose. Time for one more picture before bed.

The sun crested the horizon, and Mal turned the camera east. When she felt the skin on her knuckles start to harden, she pushed the button.

The Majordomo grabbed a handful of the Butler’s collar and yanked him into a side-room. “Keep your voice down!”

The Maid had fainted, supported now by the three Carriagemen. The Cook, who’d recently had been heralded for his dramatic victory over a food addiction, was eating donuts and fried chicken and looking at the floor. The Herald, who’d done the heralding, drank scotch and talked to himself.

The Butler felt fear shoot through him. “What’s going on?”

“A major emergency.” The Majordomo peeled the curtain back just one eye’s worth, peeked through the window. The dog was still there, poised as the Sphinx. He lay there on the sun-baked Royal Patio and ear-flicked a fly away, legs splayed to warm his parts better, presumably.

The dog levered his heavy gaze toward the window, prompting the Majordomo to wrench the curtain closed. “A very… major…” The Majordomo searched for a word bigger than major. “A majordomo emergency.”

“A dog?”

“That dog is your king!” shouted the Majordomo, and the Butler froze. With no heirs from the King, the Majordomo was to be coronated the following day. The stress, it seemed, was getting to him.

“He says he is, anyway,” continued the Majordomo. “It’s hard to know. He arrived this morning, and plopped himself down on the lawn minutes after. When I came to shoo him, he just looked at me and said — said, you understand, he spoke — ‘Good morning, M.D. Bring my paper round, would you?’”

“The dog talks?” said the Butler.

“The dog talks and reads the paper,” said the Majordomo. “Then he pooped on it and looked at me quite expectantly.”

“He made me clean it up!” squawked the Maid, suddenly roused. “Demon-poo!”

“Silence, Maid!” shouted the Majordomo. “He might hear you!”

“What should we do about it?” asked the Butler.

“I do not want to be King,” said the Majordomo. “But I cannot step aside and let a dog ascend the throne.” He clutched the Butler’s waistcoat. “You knew the King best,” he said. “Go talk to him. Suss it out.”

“Suss it out?”

The dog scrunched his eyebrows and yawned as the Butler approached.

“Hallo,” said the dog, which wasn’t quite speaking, but making a kind of scratchy “har-rumph” sound that came across clear enough.

In ourselves we are all still ten years old, and that was lucky, because the ten-year-old inside the Butler had no trouble believing in a dog that could talk. The part of his brain that did taxes and watched his weight fainted instantly.

“You’re taking a lot of liberties with our patio, Mr. Dog,” said the Butler.

“My patio,” said the dog. “I’m the King.”

“How can you be the King? You’re a dog.”

“Divine right,” said the dog.

Matchpoint. Arguing divine right was a bit like claiming “dibs.” Historians might laugh over it centuries later, but in the right moment and done correctly, it carried the weight of law.

“How do you explain this then?” asked the Butler.

“The King’s reborn,” said the dog. “Long live the King.”

“But the king only passed ten business days ago and here you are, already a grown dog!”

The dog nipped at its own paw, sighed, and said, “Don’t make me debate the math of it, James, I’ve no head for it.”

“Why didn’t you get rid of it?!” shouted the Majordomo.

“It’s the King,” said James the Butler.

There are actually many advantages to having a canine King. As it happened, dogs seem to be born without the desire for conquest (which the King had suffered from a bit) but they will defend to the death the territory they already have. The end result is a very safe, very stable community where young men aren’t worried about going off to war every moment. Neighboring kingdoms would try occasionally to declare war, but emissaries had trouble looking into the King’s soft, blinking eyes and declaring anything. The King would offer them a biscuit and they usually went home a bit embarrassed.

Of course, Time has nothing to do with itself but move on, and one day, old and white, the King died, again. The staff was very upset, having had a second lease on their friendship with him, and coming to like him much more the second time around.

Then, ten business days later, a tiny, very prim lizard crawled on the patio and began sunning itself.

“This is getting ridiculous,” said the Butler, quite old by now.

“You’re telling me,” croaked the lizard. “‘Divine right,’ indeed.”

He checked the side mirror but it was fogged to hell, just a gray canvas of rain. Warm summer rain, no relief from the heat, and inside the truck it was worse, muggy, like sitting inside your own mouth.

Still, he was glad his brother had volunteered to go down and inspect the mainline this time. Sewer funk stayed in your clothes and your hair for days. Antonia wouldn’t be angry, but it’d dirty the moment he planned.

Mario stretched back against the reclined seat and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine what Antonia would look like when he knelt before her. The proposal was the only part of the wedding — the marriage — that the husband owned entirely, and he planned on making his good. Classic was the way to go. The ring, the kneel, a declaration of love, and then the simple question. Understated. Dignified.

It’d be the last thing she’d expect from a blue-collar schmuck like him. Antonia deserved better, everybody knew. College-educated, a good Catholic, and beautiful to boot, but she’d put all her chips on him, and after seven years of playing the game, he was ready to pay up, and big.

That’s if if his brother would stop playing around and finish the job. Mario looked at the clock and tried to figure out how long he’d been asleep. Math was never his talent: by the time he finished subtracting, he was three minutes off.

Almost an hour. Jesus Christ. He clicked his radio.

“Big brother, come on back.”

Nothing. Either he’d run into some kind of trouble in the sewer, or his radio was dead.

“Doing the best I can, Antonia,” he said aloud, and cracked open the door.

He was instantly wet when he stepped out of the truck. Fifteen slogging steps took him to the open manhole, where his brother’s safety cable ran taut into the blackness.

“HEY!” he shouted, cupping both hands to his mouth, and almost choked as rain gathered around his palms. He jerked on the safety cable, and almost fell on his ass when it gave way instantly. No slack at all. Three blocks away, lightning struck.

Mario pulled again, and the cable came. No safety harness, no eye-bolt. Just an abrupt, ragged tip. Jesus Christ.

Mario crawled to the open manhole, and this time he couldn’t bring his voice above a whisper, the sound almost drowned by the rain. “Who’s down there?”

There was something like a voice, shouting from a distance, barely audible over the sound of the water sluicing fast and heavy into the blackness below.

Mario dug into his pocket, pulled out the ring-box, kissed it, and pitched it into the open bed of the truck.

“Mother Mary, protect me.” His voice shook but his hands didn’t, grabbing the only weapon available — a wrench — as he slung himself onto the ladder.

His feet hit the sewer floor and he knew he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.

The safety lights had been knocked out. The water ripped around him, knee-deep. Mario clutched the ladder as he felt his footing wash away. His wrench dropped into the water and he watched it go, a seven-pound wrench pulled off like a paper boat. A bigger hole elsewhere, creating a current.

His eyes lost the wrench when it banged against something up ahead, something crouched and growling and darker than the darkness around it.

The silhouette said “crocodile,” but it was too broad. The way it curled itself into the darkness felt too intelligent and alive: it lacked the dead coldness of a reptile. His brain made a second guess: dragon.

His mama used to tell him, There’s something in the sewers.

The thing roared.

There’s something in the sewers, don’t go down alone.

Mario felt his grip loosen, and the thing actually smiled — teeth terrifying and worse was the wisdom behind the eyes, the knowing —

Don’t go down alone.

The sewer water surged, pulling him free, carrying him toward the thing. It HISSED, gaped its fanged chops, and reached for him with fingered claws.

But the water was faster. Mario coursed past the beast and down into the black mouth of the tunnel itself, a tunnel Mario had never seen on any schematic before.

Across town, Antonia sat in her tiny Brooklyn walk-up and stared at her cellphone. Mario was hours late. She’d prepared his favorite tortellini with marinara. She thought that might make things easier on him, but…

He wasn’t answering his phone. On the fourth try, she left a message.

“Mario, it’s Antonia. I hadn’t heard from you tonight, so I don’t know if you are at work, or… I just don’t know, I guess.

“I’m calling because…” Her voice caught, and it all came out at once. “I’ve waited almost seven years. I’m still waiting. And I can’t – I can’t wait anymore.

“Please don’t call me. It’s only going to make it harder for both of us.

“I – I’m sorry, Mario.”

That is, until Twila Thornburn stepped into the restaurant.

Twila looked good, in that funhouse-mirror LA way. Four years and twice that many surgeries had been surprisingly kind since graduate school: Twila Thornburn had evolved from a sweet (if overweight) poet with an MFA in film production into a sleek glass jaguar of a woman, all sharp curves and teeth now. Whatever was round on her was artifical, whatever was flat was missing something.

Eleanor squeezed the bit of muffin top under her white waiter’s outfit. The freshman fifteen had taken root, and had a lively business going. She had three shelved screenplays and a stageplay that was doing “really well, Eleanor, honestly, really well for what it is.” A lease that felt like a noose at the first of the month. Not much else. Twila had produced three blockbuster films in four years (though what she actually did on any of them was tough to pin down).

Eleanor considered pretending she didn’t recognize Twila — Twila certainly seemed not to recognize her — but something wouldn’t let her. It would be rude, and besides: Eleanor had a career to think of, too. Maybe Twila did remember her. They’d gotten on all right at college. An airy feeling filled her up inside: maybe this was her chance?

She smiled big, grabbed two menus, and: “Twila! It’s been years!”

Eleanor saw the recognition in Twila. And she saw Twila bury it. “I’m sorry?” said Twila.

“From — from school –” The words stumbled on their way out, and vanished just as quickly. The airy feeling went sick and greasy and died. “My mistake,” she said, and, “This way,” leading Twila to a table. Her pride burned when she saw Twila’s relief.

Eleanor nodded and heard nothing when Twila ordered a seventy-year-old bottle of Merlot and a Diet Coke. In LA, tacky is tacky unless it’s expensive. Then it’s called “fashion.”

Eleanor stormed back into the kitchen and snatched the first dish she found waiting: a piping hot creme brulee.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck all. She yanked out the gris-gris from her purse. Fuck everything.

She used chocolate and raspberry syrup to mark the necessary charm circles, muttering quietly the words of power her grandmother had told her to save for emergencies, “in case of rapists and Democrats.”

The creme brulee bubbled only once, soft as a kiss, and Eleanor had it sent to Twila’s table immediately. Eleanor took a five-minute break, pulled out her spec script, and started angrily making notes. After a moment, a waiter burst into the breakroom, amidst screams of terror and sounds of crashing tables.

“Twila Thornburn’s table just exploded! There’s a seven-headed dragon tearing the place apart!”

Eleanor pulled the pen from her mouth. “She’s a bitch and she deserved it.”

“What’d you DO?”

“I summoned the Devil into her creme brulee.”

“Well, it’s too late to do anything now. She just signed him to a four-year deal in reality television.”

Goddammit.

It was shit work, but it was the kind of shit work that paid well. That promoted it to simply “distasteful” in Piyotr’s understanding. Being as big and strong as he was, men often asked him to perform distasteful business. Piyotr didn’t really care, and he did so deliberately.

Still, this job was almost enough to make him start caring. It was, as the people of his newfound New York City called, a “last william testament” job. Some rich man died, and had left a bit of unspeakable business behind for people like Piyotr to carry out. It happened more often than his neighbors would believe.

The lawyer (there was always a lawyer), a pinched-face man with tight skin and razor-like wrinkles, held up the newspaper. The headline was partially obscured by his spidery fingers, but Piyotr could read, “-ESLA DEAD.” When the Lawyer explained what the Last William Testament required, Piyotr was confused. Confused enough to make him break his first rule: never get interested.

“This Esla man – why he want to being dug up in New York and driving to New Jersey?”

The Lawyer was experienced and unaffected by Pyotr’s broken English. “This isn’t his will you’re performing,” he clucked. “No more questions. Your instructions are in this envelope. And you’ll need this.”

The Lawyer delicately handed Piyotr a pristine vinyl record – “be careful, it’s one of a kind!” – and a steel box, with a word on it Pyotr didn’t recognize.

The cemetery was empty when Pyotr arrived. He felt some mild twinkle of hesitation, but after the first shovelful of dirt, it went away. His muscled shoulders carved the earth, and it was only a few hours before he hit the coffin.

He tried not to look in the corpse’s face when he burned it, but carefully swept the ashes into the steel box.

The rain fell in angry slaps, and it made the driving more difficult. Pyotr didn’t arrive at the Museum (as described in his instructions) until half-three in the morning. The key in the envelope allowed him inside the building with his bundles, and he crept quietly, keeping his wet footsteps to the carpeted areas where they would be less noticeable.

He found the Death Mask in the center of the display, exactly where the instructions described. He was familiar with the custom: a plaster imprint of the final face of whoever this Museum memorialized. The face preserved there was wrinkled and angry. Even in death, something plagued the furrowed brows, and it gave the Mask a vicious energy and life.

As directed, Piyotr found a phonograph nearby and set the record on the spoke. Dragging a small table over in front of the Mask, he cracked the steel box open. Inside was the long pile of lonely gray ashes.

Pyotr’s final instructions were to direct the phonograph’s horn toward the ashes. He did so, carefully, and wound the device. As the record began to play, it became clear there was no music (as he’d expected) but only a single, somber voice. Echoing in the darkened Museum, it seemed like the Death Mask was speaking directly to the ashes themselves.

“I am dying. I record these final words freely, knowing they will only find the open air once more: on the day you die, Tesla.

“I do not know when that day will come. I imagine you will live a good ten or more years than I, and it is to that purpose that I set down these words, and dedicate a sizable sum of my remaining fortune to their delivery. I am free only here to speak what I fear the world will come to learn in the intervening years between my death and yours.

“I have spent my life in the field of inventing. As of this recording I have over a thousand patents to my name. And yet, despite the greatness I have achieved in life, I can only think of the wonders I know you will realize after my death. My remaining days are choked with envy and anger when I imagine what magic you will wring out of nature, and how quickly I will be swept aside, and my life’s work reduced to a preamble of yours. These words do not come easy, but like arrows, are spurred, and cut more deeply as they leave me.

“I, Thomas Alva Edison, am jealous. I have done everything in my final years to erase you from history’s memory, because I could not be you. You are the better man, and I am, at last, beaten by the clock.”

Lightning struck somewhere in the hills, casting a flash across the Death Mask. Pyotr moved to turn off the phonograph, jumped when it spoke again.

“But I refuse to be beaten.”

“And that’s why you are here, Tesla. You will not have the last word. Your burned remains are now in my control, and your ashes confined to a steel box bearing my name, preserved here, in the museum I have established for exactly and only this purpose.

“The world may have Tesla’s greatness, but at least I will know, somewhere, that they do not have you. For all your genius, you will end the same as I: a dusty relic misplaced amidst another man’s life’s work.”

“At the cost of my fortune, I have set in motion these events.”

“At the cost of my soul, I have beaten you, Tesla. God damn us both.”

The record skipped, and ended. The silence hung heavy, punctured only by the splatter of indifferent raindrops. Piyotr’s ears grew hot, and for the first time, he felt hesitation in his duty. Outside, the rain thickened into a full-fledged storm.

He numbly went about returning all the borrowed objects to their places, and when he returned to the steel box of Nicola Tesla’s ashes, he looked at it for a long time.

Tesla’s ashes funneled out into the rain as if lifted by God’s own hand, carried up by the screaming gale. Pyotr stood there, watching them go, and then knelt, filling the box with gray soil from under the Museum’s rafters.

He left the steel box where the instructions specified, and drove off into the night. He did not feel guilt or delight for what he’d done, only a satisfying sense of purpose fulfilled. The rest, as far as the world knew, would be a secret known only to him and Edison.

Roland’s father died a few years later, in a messy business everyone worked to forget as soon as possible. And Roland’s mother wasn’t stupid: she kept that roll of film in a safe, and any time a bill went unpaid too long, she’d draw it out and sell a photo. There was always someone willing to buy one of the Last Originals.

Even this one. This one’d be gone already, if Roland hadn’t filched it from the safe and kept it in his room.

The guilt of having the picture ate at Roland, but he never told. He didn’t even know why he kept it. He didn’t like his father very much, or the business that drew him away from his family. But somehow, Roland couldn’t let that photo go.

Even when he was in high school, and there were no more photos to sell, and money got tight. Even when his mother would check and check again in the safe, in the hopes of finding one last frame to pay the gas bill or keep the lights on. The harder things got, the harder Roland held onto that picture.

When the bank started sending letters about the mortgage, Roland picked up a camera.

He’d learned enough from his father’s photos to know how to shoot something decent, and enough from his mother to know how to sell it. He photographed old tin cans and stone walls and back roads and burned tires. Anything timeless. Anything that could be discovered in an old coffee can. Everybody wanted the Last Original. And Roland made sure each one got it.

He got clumsy toward the end, accidentally catching a Toyota Hybrid in a photo that shouldn’t have been taken after 1993. Some car website caught on, and the story broke big. Twenty-five former customers ringing his mother’s phone off the hook, demanding to know which photo, if any, was the real Last Original.

One of the calls was from Vanity Fair, offering Roland a cover spot for his photography, and more money than he’d ever seen written out before.

After that call, his mother rang up each angry buyer, and listened to their complaints for as long as they wanted to yell. And then, she would tell them each the same thing, and each became very quiet, and at the end, each would apologize.

“Roland took those photos in high school, and you thought they were made by a master in his prime. You’re so concerned with the Last Original? The last – and maybe the only – worthwhile thing my ex-husband ever created was my son. He’s the Last Original, and what you’ve got are his earliest works. Now, if you’d like to send them back, I’d be glad to return your money. There are some people in New York who are very eager to have them.”

TO: Mr. and Mrs. Ladybug
22 Crunchgreen Ct.
Tiny Town, East of Steadville
USA

Dear Mom and Dad,

I was going to write earlier, but things were difficult for awhile, and I didn’t want to write home with bad news and worry you. I’m getting a better grasp of it all now, and I feel like I can confidently say I’m on my way.

Things are hard. Some days I feel like I’m falling upward, and other days, it’s all I can do to put one leg in front of the other and keep going. But I keep trying. And it seems the same wind that blows me off one branch sails me onto the next one somehow.

I guess that’s what being on your own is all about. I just keep my eyes open and my mouth closed, like you and Dad taught me. Life out here makes you use every inch of yourself.

I remember reading how, when you’re a child, your parents are superheroes. The world is full of magic and it all flows from them, somehow.

Then you hit puberty. And suddenly… your parents know absolutely nothing. And each time they open their mouths, you shiver at their lack of it (“it” being that thing that they just don’t get).

Then one day… after high school and college are gone, and you look out over the expanse of whatever will become your life, you see just how hard it can be, just to push through another day. And you realize there was a time when your parents looked over this same expanse and had to make their own choices about their own lives, and you were one of those choices.

And you begin to understand just what your parents gave up to to keep you comfortable and ignorant of this long expanse of life and difficulty, and keep the world magic and amazing and fair for as long as they could. And knowing that, and remembering how well they did despite their very human frailties (the same ones you struggle with), you see, with clear eyes now, that your parents were superheroes after all.

I don’t have the words to tell you how I feel. The world is so big out here.

More letters to come. Give everyone my love.

Your loving progeny,
Pumice

P.S. I took this self-portrait on my new iMac. I know you said not to spend too much money but it was so awesome and so perfectly-suited to my lifestyle.

P.S.S. Please send lettuce.

It’s not Greco-Roman wrestling. It’s not even really about being big or strong: physical ability is just the price of admission into the ring.

Professional wrestling, like its cousin Theater, is about drama.

Like an illusionist, the wrestler’s drama relies upon the audience’s belief, even superficially, that the events portrayed are real. It’s something like the magician’s code, but a lot more serious: magicians don’t go home bleeding after a performance.

Like a masochist, a wrestler’s success is defined by how much pain he can endure. And the good wrestlers seek it out: they bring the audience with them on their journey, until every person can feel every blow and share in every triumph.

Like a samurai, becoming a wrestler is not easy, and entrance to their ranks requires discipline and adherence to a code of honor. This seems almost obligatory, as each man holds the keys to every other man’s survival: if he is not at the top of his own game, he could injure or kill his ring partner. A bad performance might ruin the drama of an entire night, making every bruised bone for naught.

That’s the essence of a wrestler: they are willing to subject themselves to the extremes of punishment, if it means they are serving their craft.

Saying, “Wrestling’s fake” is like saying, “You’re not fooling me. I see what you’re doing there.” And the truth is: you don’t. Can’t, really. You don’t know them, you only know their performance. You were never handed a razor and taught how to cut yourself to simulate a serious head injury. You’ve never driven six hours to perform for twenty minutes and received thirty dollars for the effort.

When two wrestlers throw each other onto a concrete floor and bash each other with chairs, that’s not an illusion. They’re not trying to convince you it doesn’t hurt. They’re trying to convince you that, when they’re through beating the hell out of each other, they don’t go out for beers after.

They live a life of commitment to performance at the cost of pain. And that’s the crux of it: they spend their years “fighting enemies” for the pleasure of an audience, but after the applause and the autographs have faded, the only people who can appreciate their sacrifices are each other.

There was no saving the ship now, just a bit of bailing left to prolong the end.

Every day (how many days? he wondered) he’d stare at this photo and recreate his lover in his mind. The tiny hint of the graceful legs sent his memory coursing over countless afternoons spent wrapped together. Those legs wrapped around him.

Those legs. That’s right. The delivery room. Twice seeing those powerful legs bear down against the stirrups, fight the universe and damn the devils and force new life into the world.

Memories stir like startled butterflies, beautiful in swarm and individually indistinct. So hard to remember the individual butterflies.

But not butterflies. This photo. He remembered this photo. And it was important to remember.

And he was sure, if he thought about it long enough, he’d remember why.

(I won a prestigious international photo contest with this picture, beating out some stiff Norwegian competition. She forgave me, though, and bought me drinks after.)