Category: Issue 10

      by M. Shaw

         We caught a gnome in our house, in a trap we had set out for the raccoons who kept getting in the basement.

      “He’s adorable!” said Jean, and we put him in a cage. A big, old birdcage, it had belonged to my late grandfather’s parrot, who had finally died the previous year. The little fella didn’t seem to mind. He slept a lot, and then he did these little kicky dances and made all these noises that sounded like words, but weren’t. “Dow-tee hoy biddo! Funger hoo tee hoo!” That sort of thing. It had a pseudo-Irish sound to it, but we didn’t think he was a leprechaun, because of the hat. His was cone-shaped, definitely more the kind of thing you would associate with a gnome than a leprechaun.

        “Do you think he, you know, has intelligence?” I asked Jean after a couple days, while we were watching him in there. He had completely replaced the TV at that point, in terms of how we spent our time.

      “All animals have some degree of intelligence,” said Jean, “so it depends what you mean. Human intelligence? I doubt it. I mean, look at him.”

      “He’s wearing clothes and everything,” I pointed out. It wasn’t complicated clothing, just some baggy trousers and a shirt. It looked a bit like pajamas. And the hat. No shoes.

      “So is Princess Diana,” said Jean. That was the name of our Bichon, who was, after all, wearing a doggy Christmas sweater.

        I still wasn’t sure that they counted as the same thing. We watched him for another five or ten minutes, and then it hit me. “But we didn’t put the clothes on him,” I said.

        “I should make him some little outfits,” said Jean. “On the sewing machine.” I couldn’t tell if she had misinterpreted the point I was making, or if she was ignoring me completely.

         I lost a lot of sleep thinking about this. Was that a good measure of intelligence? To be able to not just wear clothes, but to put them on yourself? Did that mean that, when my parents dressed me, when I was little, I wasn’t fully human? What if I became quadriplegic, or developed some kind of dementia, and couldn’t do it myself anymore?

      We gave the gnome some steamed chicken and carrots, but he showed no interest. We gave him some canned dogfood, and he wasn’t interested in that, either. He seemed to never need to eat or go to the bathroom at all. I asked Jean if we were sure he was really a living creature. The lack of eating or pooping would seem to indicate no. But again, he slept. And when he slept, you could see his torso rise and fall, breathing. And he had a beard, and the beard was grey, suggesting growth and age.

        “I think maybe he’s a filter feeder,” said Jean, cutting out pieces of a sewing pattern. “Like a sea sponge. Or maybe he does photosynthesis.”

        “In the basement?” I asked.

        She shrugged. “I don’t know, Todd, I’m not a scientist. What do you want me to do about it?”

        I didn’t want her to do anything about it, so I said nothing. I was just worried about the definition of life. Honestly, sometimes I worried about whether it applied to me, though I don’t think that had anything to do with the gnome.

        “I’m thinking of naming him Bernie,” she said.

        This caught me off guard, and I still said nothing. She was thinking of naming the gnome? Somehow, I thought, that seemed untoward.

          “How does that sound to you?”

        “What if he already has a name?” I said.

        “Why don’t you ask him?” she chuckled.

          He was asleep when I went downstairs, but I tried anyway. “Hey buddy,” I said, “what’s your name? You got a name?”

          He didn’t wake up, and it occurred to me that he had never directly acknowledged me in any way. In fact, I didn’t get the sense that he was aware of his surroundings at all, except for the cage, which was a physical limitation. But as far as his behavior went, the cage might as well have been in the middle of a corn field. Or on top of a skyscraper. Or in the area with the high crime rate. I might as well have been anybody, to him. Hell, I might as well have been nobody.

          We never saw another gnome. We had an exterminator come out, to figure out how he had gotten in. The exterminator fiddled around the basement with her tools. Wrote some things on a pad with carbon paper. Looked at the gnome.

        “Funny little critter, isn’t he,” she said.

        Have you ever seen one before, we asked.

        “Can’t say I have.” She shook her head. “Can’t say I have. But, what are you gonna do? Stranger things have happened. Stranger things,” she repeated, “have happened.”

        I didn’t think that was true, but she said it with such confidence that I couldn’t disagree. She made some suggestions about the chimney, about caulking and insulation and things like that. She also sprayed some poison, and I still wonder if there are dead gnomes in the walls of the house. We never smelled anything, but maybe they don’t stink when they decay? Maybe they don’t decay? They just lie there, little lifeless rubber dolls?

          The gnome did not seem worried about his comrades.

          One day, Jean called me over. “Todd, look at this!” From the basement.

          I went down there, to find that the gnome was now wearing an outfit she had made
          for him.

          “He didn’t mind me putting them on him,” she said. “Didn’t make a fuss, not even a
            little.”

          He was wearing a black fleece pullover and dungarees. It looked like he was wearing little black sneakers as well, but on closer inspection, they turned out to be baby booties, made entirely out of linen but sewn to look like sneakers. She had taken the hat off and, what do you know, he was completely bald underneath.

          “He’s dressed like you,” she explained.

          “No he’s not,” I said, in a whiny tone of voice that embarrassed me immediately. I didn’t even own a black fleece pullover, which was the worst part, because it still seemed like the kind of thing I would wear, even though I had never actually worn one, as far as I could remember. Or maybe the worst part was the shoes, because I did own black sneakers, but mine were real sneakers. And this was like, these might as well be your sneakers, Todd, even though they weren’t even close, really. I’m not sure how the dungarees could have been the worst part, but maybe they were too.

          He absolutely was dressed like me, is what I’m saying, and I hated it. Not exactly like
          me, but like me.

        “Why did you do this,” I said.

          “It’s cute!” said Jean.

          It was cute, and there was nothing I could do about that.

          I decided to sell the gnome on the internet, secretly. I didn’t take any photos, but a few days after I posted the information about him, a guy came over to take a look while Jean was out with her friends at the roller derby.

        “Wow,” said the guy, watching the gnome dance in his cage. “It does this all the time?”

        “He actually spends a lot of time sleeping,” I said. “But apparently he doesn’t mind if you change his clothes for him.”

          “You ever let him out?”

        “Of his cage?” I said. “No. No, we never have.”

        The guy nodded. Princess Diana, wearing a tiny dog-sized cape with a Wonder Woman symbol, licked at his shins. “If I can ask just a really honest question,” he said, “is it legal to--well, I mean, not legal, but like--okay--I mean, to have a person, well, not a person person, but you--as a pet, or whatever--I--uh--like, is it kosher, you know?”

         “I’m not Jewish,” I admitted.

        He rubbed his temples with both hands. “I’ll give you thirty-nine dollars for it,” he said.

        “Okay.”

        “Well,” he made a wobbly motion with one hand, “thirty-seven.”

        “Okay.”

        “Actually, I’m not interested.”

        “You can have him for nothing,” I said. But the guy had already left. He really had turned on his heel and walked right out of the house, as if he suddenly found the whole thing appalling.

          Jean never found out that I had tried to sell the gnome. She came home from the roller derby and went directly downstairs to visit him, sleeping in his cage. When he first showed up, she and I would usually watch him together, and she would react to what he did by cooing or giggling or adding color commentary. Gradually, though, I had stopped spending much time watching the gnome, and she had transitioned into watching him silently. Like a vigil. But, that’s the way a lot of people watch TV, so I didn’t think it was all that weird.

            I spent weeks mentally destroying myself over why the guy who had initially wanted to buy the gnome became so upset. The gnome wasn’t doing anything wrong, so it must have been me, right? He must have found something repulsive about me. Maybe he noticed that the gnome, who was still wearing the fleece pullover outfit at the time, looked so much like me, which made it seem like I was trying to cast out this little simulacrum of myself. It would be like a kind of suicide, from his perspective. I wanted him to take away a facet of myself.

          The gnome was not a facet of myself, but the guy didn’t know that. And, from an outsider’s perspective, if the gnome and I seemed that similar, wasn’t that what mattered? There was no difference between me and the gnome, because a visitor to our house, who didn’t know me, couldn’t see one. And if that were true, then all the stuff I’d been thinking about, about life, was just wrong. Being able to put clothes on yourself, or have a name, that didn’t matter. It was all about how other people, with no connection to your abilities, thought of you. Which would mean that being intelligent, or being a person, had nothing to do with you. My body and my mind couldn’t be a person; only the idea of me could. Was that what the guy thought? Was that what everyone thought?

            I started watching the gnome with Jean more often, in silent vigil, the way she did. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing. If he was a person, in her eyes. If I was.

            She made him a little dinosaur costume, from a children’s Halloween pattern. “It’s October,” she explained. We had found the gnome in July.

            At that moment, I remembered that the guy had also asked whether we ever let the gnome out of his cage. Maybe that was the problem: that we kept him in the cage all the time, never letting him leave.

          When I thought of this, I felt an unexpected stab of resentment. Why should anyone be concerned about whether the gnome was being let out? What about me? Was anyone going to let me out?

          What am I talking about, I thought. Let me out of what?

          “We should take him trick-or-treating,” I said.

        Jean wrinkled her nose. “Jesus, Todd, he’s not our child.”

      This was true, of course, but then, what was he? “Is he, like, a pet?” The guy had used
     that word, after all.

        “I don’t really know,” she admitted. “I guess I have fun with him. He’s entertaining. And he’s harmless. He’s more like a,” she twirled her finger around in the air, “a toy, or something. Well… eh, the attraction is that he’s not dependent on me. That’s really the key piece. A child, or a pet, they need you. You have to do all these things to keep them alive and happy, feed them and clean up after them and whatever else.”

        “What about a husband?” I said.

        She didn’t seem to have heard me. “Whereas he’s basically alive and has a little personality, but he pretty much does his own thing. There’s no responsibility. I can rest.”

      “But you do all these things for him,” I said. “Making clothes. And spending all this time watching him.”

        Jean said nothing. It must not have registered as a contradiction.

      “Is that what you want?” I asked. “Someone you’re not responsible for, at all?”

        She nodded. She didn’t look at me. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

           I could see the gnome, then, as I thought she must have seen him: as an ideal version of me. A person wearing my clothes, and living in her house, but with no needs at all. A harmless me.

          We decided that, instead of taking the gnome trick-or-treating, we would move the cage near the front door, so that trick-or-treating children could see him, dressed as a dinosaur, and be horrified or delighted. There weren’t very many children in our neighborhood, so we usually spent the trick-or-treat time eating candy out of a bowl, watching television and occasionally answering the door, often seeing kids dressed as the very characters we were watching on TV.

          This year was different. Jean sat in a chair, facing the front door, the gnome in the cage by her side. Not eating any of the candy. Just waiting. When the doorbell rang, she would exclaim delight over the children’s costumes, then say, “And look at this!” And look at the gnome. He was almost always asleep, and she seemed no less excited for it.

          “Is that a bird?” one kid asked.

           Weird, said most of them.

         “It’s baby Jesus,” said another one, with a completely neutral facial expression and no trace of emotion.

           Others simply ran away.

            For the first bit of the evening, I stood slightly behind Jean, out of a sense of obligation. I felt it would be disrespectful to do anything else. Eventually, I took a break to feed Princess Diana, which had to be done. After that, nostalgia getting the better of me, I adjourned to the living room and turned on a show I’d been watching. She had no reaction. I looked over at her every so often, but didn’t get up. It didn’t look like she needed anything.

              I wondered if this was how things were going to play out from now on: Jean watching the gnome, inviting herself to be watched, watching the gnome; me, off by myself, watching TV. She with her perfect, harmless version of me, and me doing my best to be as harmless as possible, as much like the gnome as possible. I closed my eyes, using the sound of the TV as background for picturing this as normal. In the vision I made for myself, I was doing my best to disappear, or at least, to become invisible. I could sit here, in front of the TV, all day if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t be bothering Jean, because she would be with the gnome. I imagined myself wearing very large, linen facsimiles of sneakers, imagined what the linen would feel like on my feet all the time. I saw myself sleeping all the time, never needing to eat. I heard myself talk, and I heard what I said mean nothing. And what else is a house, but a very comfortable cage?

                I was asleep, is what was going on by the end. Jean woke me up late, with all the children long since gone home with their candy.

              “Todd,” she said, “it’s time to take Bernie back downstairs.”

              “Okay,” I mumbled, “I’ve got you. I’ll help!” I wondered how long she had sat in front of the door, waiting for another costumed kid to show up, after the last one had left.

              “You fell asleep on the couch,” she said. “Are you okay? How are you doing?”

              “Good,” I said. “Really good.” I stood up, did a couple shallow knee bends, getting ready to carry the cage.

      by Ryan Pfeffer

I had a hurricane outfit, apparently: a blue towel with a hole torn in the  middle that I wore like a poncho, completely naked otherwise. I’d wear it  while watching every hourly update of the storm’s projected track,  rooting for any squiggly line aimed at our roof.

“It was my damn fault,” mom admitted one time, when me, her, and  Sam were having dinner at Rincón De Jalisco. "I told you that  hurricanes were just god blowing all the monsters out of town,” she  laughed, pushing ice around her very green margarita with a plastic  straw. “You were still so scared of the dark back then."

By the time Hurricane Imelda formed, mom had left Redland, and it was  just me and an extremely pregnant Sam. She was about seven months  along but looked more like eleven. It snuck up on us both. She gained  20 pounds in three weeks, and all the sudden I couldn’t look at her  without feeling a kind of nervousness that felt vague and endless.

Sam wanted to stay put for Imelda. She said these things were rarely as  bad as the news made it seem, and she was right. But this was going to  be the last opportunity I’d have to be alone — truly alone — for maybe  the rest of my life. And that didn’t feel selfish at the time. I thought I’d  earned it.

“Why even risk it?” I told her, and went on about the various concerns of  having a pregnant woman in 96 degree heat with no power or safe  drinking water. Sam smelled bullshit, because Sam could always smell  bullshit, but also because she knew she was talking to the same man  who allowed her two glasses of red wine on Saturdays and even a  bimonthly cigarette without putting up the slightest fight.

I told her I’d stay back and watch the place, and she said “fine” in a  voice that meant “fuck off.” But I think some part of her wanted the  same thing as me, just a small break before an endless marathon. I  wish I’d just asked her that. Instead I gave her a big hug, a phony smile,  and the keys to my car. And she gave me a to-do list that was mostly a  form of revenge for making her drive six hours to stay with my mom in  Jacksonville. Baby’s Room was the big one, underlined twice and  circled hard enough to dent the paper.

Sam found some stupid article about how an overwhelming percentage  of Nobel Prize winners say blue is their favorite color. But after five  weeks of deep research, she still couldn’t decide between Eggshell  Ripple or Autumn Dolphin. I was apparently not being thoughtful enough  about these kinds of details. Sam demonstrated that one night by  asking me to choose between two paint swatches and, after I pointed to  the one on the left, revealed it was a Chinese takeout menu, then  proceeded to hit me with it.

She left only a few hours before the storm hit, because Sam’s time  management skills were never the sharpest and those last 20 pounds  didn’t make her quicker. She was supposed to text me her final decision  on the paint when she got to Jacksonville, but that obviously never  happened.

The thing about Imelda is that nobody knew what was coming because  nobody had seen it happen before. We didn’t know they could do that.  We didn’t know that a hurricane could get so big, so fast, and then  just… stay put. Hover there. Like a spaceship trying to abduct an entire  city. We didn’t know that a hurricane could find the exact perfect set of  conditions that would allow it to remain completely still, stretching from  South Beach to the Gulf of Mexico, feeding itself enough warm water to  hold an entire city hostage for months.

I never talked to Sam after she left. Cell service went out just 30  minutes into the storm, and it didn’t come back. Every couple hours or  so I’d turn my phone back on and try to text her. Just little things like  “I’m safe” and “I love you” and, once, a video of me naked in the  backyard waving a golf club over my head along with the message  “EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF.” I wanted to make her laugh because I  knew, wherever she was, that she was pissed. I just didn’t know if it was  because I wasn’t out there with her or she wasn’t in here with me.

Four days in and the storm still hadn’t budged an inch. Imelda decided  to stop with her eye directly over us. You could call that luck, I guess,  even though it wasn’t exactly pretty outside. But it was possible to leave  the house without getting shish kebabed by a grapefruit tree, so there’s  that. And soon enough people were jogging and driving to go visit their  friends. It almost felt like a town again, if you could manage to ignore  the world outside the storm, which I learned could.

Ed Tiller drove by one morning with four people and a small mountain of  avocados in the bed of his pickup. He invited me over to try an  experimental batch of wine he’d been working on. Over at Ed’s that  night, about a dozen people squatted around the radio, shushing the  folks who’d already had a little too much avocado wine. At first the  consensus from the meteorologists was that this would be over any  minute now. Hurricanes were like sharks, one of them said. They had to  keep moving or else they died. But the days passed, Imelda just got  stronger, and theories adjusted. Maybe it wasn’t even a hurricane, but  something different, a new kind of weather system. One scientist lady  called it a “permastorm” and suggested it could last for a decade.

Ed ran out of fuel for his generator about a week later and the batteries  in the radio died not long after. Ed’s generator lasted 72 hours longer  than the other generators in town because he convinced Ivan to siphon fuel from the monster truck he was restoring in his front yard. My phone  died around then too, but I sent one last text to Sam. I told her not to  worry about me, that I was doing just fine. And I tried to not think about  how much I meant it.

One night at Ed’s the wine was flowing pretty heavy when all the  sudden Ivan started shouting and pointing at the sky. A silver box the  size of a coffee table was floating down to earth, blinking red lights on  each of its corners. It looked for a second like it was going to hit Ed’s  truck, but missed by a few feet, and landed with a hollow thud. There  was a handle on top of the box next to the words “Pull Here,” so we did,  and the top slid off to reveal an impressive selection of canned beans.

“They could have squashed someone,” Ed said, stacking cans.

“They could have sent beer,” Ivan said, checking the empty box a fourth  time for booze.

After that, the sky drops — I’m not sure who coined the term but it stuck  — started coming about every three days, and kept coming for the next  month. Sometimes you’d find one smashed to pieces in an empty lot  with a crater around it. But most landed safely, full of food, batteries, a  little gasoline, firewood, cell phone chargers, first aid kits, water  purification tablets, toothpaste, toilet paper, playing cards, and socks,  which seemed odd at first but quickly became the most sought-after sky  drop item. One of the boxes had radios too, so I got my own and started  listening in the morning while I stirred instant coffee with a fork.

Imelda was getting less airtime every day, because different things kept  tugging at the country’s attention span: a pop star stabbed on the red  carpet of the Grammys by a crazy fan; the first daughter caught doing  heroin in the White House bathroom; Osceola, beloved horse mascot  for Florida State University, poisoned by a rival UF fan, and collapsed  on the 50-yard line during an important playoff game.

But Imelda was still a daily news story. One morning, NPR interviewed a  scientist who said that if Imelda wasn’t gone by March, things could get  real bad. El Niño was coming, he said, and all that warm water could  hypothetically sustain the storm for another nine to twelve months.

I turned off the radio and tried to imagine it: another year of this life.  Quiet walks and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, cooked directly on the fire.  Drinking Ed’s wine in the backyard while the sun sets. Falling asleep to  the sound of wind and peeing outside, wherever I wanted. It didn’t scare  the shit out of me, and that’s when I first started to wonder if I was on  the wrong side of these clouds or the right one. And then a year didn’t  quite feel long enough.

The next day I woke up to a knock on the door and there was Ed,  lacquered in a layer of sweat and dead mosquitoes.

“You’re gonna want to come see this,” he said, and waved me into the  truck.

One of the sky drops had a little armored military laptop inside. When  Ed opened it, a video started playing. It was a video of our various loved  ones, hundreds of them, reciting pre-written words of support. It began  with a statement from the president, who said, “We’re going to show this  storm who’s boss,” while nodding solemnly.

The video was nearly over when mom came on screen, eyes all red and  looking like this was her fifth take.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “We love you so much. We’re all thinking about you  every day, and we know you’re going to be alright.”

She kept saying “we,” but there was no Sam. Mom paused to look at  someone off camera, probably signaling her to wrap things up.

“Baby, there should be a letter for you in the box. I need you to read it.  Everything’s going to be fine. I’m here and I’m taking care of it. But read  the letter.”

When the video ended, I found the white envelope with “JOSH” written  across the front in jagged black marker. Definitely mom’s handwriting. I  tore it open, and the words registered in bunches, like my brain was one  of those claws that could only grab one stuffed animal at a time.

“Premature… baby’s okay… named him Josh… complications… bad  infection… medically-induced coma.”

I could see Ed staring at me so I tried to keep a poker face, because I  didn’t want to cause a scene. But then I felt the wine in my stomach all  at once, like a water balloon exploded in there. I stumbled to the kitchen  and Ivan was leaning against the fridge, peeling an orange. I didn’t even  look at him, just went straight to the sink because I couldn’t tell if I was  about to throw up.

“Sick of this palace too?” he said in response to my dry heave. “Me too,  papi. Me too. That’s why I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“What do you mean leaving?” I asked, once I managed to swallow.

“I found more gas. There was a tank at the station everyone missed.  But not Ivan. I got in there with a jackhammer and now I have enough  fuel to run up the Turnpike. They say the wind’s not so bad after Boca.  Annoying, yeah, but it won’t kill you.”

Ivan was an alcoholic, but he was also a pretty competent mechanic.  And the truck in question, which used to go by the name Deadbolt in its  performing day, could run over sedans like they were speed bumps. I’d  seen it with my own eyes at the rodeo three years ago.

“Tomorrow at noon,” Ivan said, heading out the back door on the hunt  for more wine. “I’ll drive by and honk.”

As he swung the door open, I could hear laughter. People were  breaking into the latest batch of avocado wine, which came out like shit  this time. The same fucking Eagles song was playing on the radio. Ed  and his daughter were working on that night’s dinner: more unseasoned  canned beans and freeze-dried packets of buffalo chicken nuggets that  were more rubber than chicken.

I left without saying bye and when I got home, I went straight to the  baby’s room, grabbed the screwdriver on the floor, cracked open  Autumn Dolphin, and stirred the paint. It was an executive decision, but  I just knew Sam was leaning toward Autumn Dolphin. She was just  waiting for me to say it too.

Sam had never been to a hospital. It’s not that she never needed to go  to one. She was covered in scars if you knew where to look, and at  least several of her toes had been broken, judging by their angles. But  she would rather super glue a bagel-related laceration shut than take it  to the professionals. She claimed it was due to a scary movie she  watched at too young an age. She could not remember the name of the  film, only that it had an evil nurse who liked to murder people with a  sharpened tongue depressor.

That’s what really freaked her out about being pregnant — the thought  of spending the night in a “death hotel,” as she called them. I told her  that, if she gave me the word, I’d break her out of there. Me, her, and  the baby. “What are they gonna do?” I said. “Arrest us for stealing our  own baby?” And she laughed and kissed me on the neck.

I’d only finished one wall when I heard the beep outside. There was  Ivan, as promised, with one arm hanging out an open window, dangling

just above the D in the word Deadbolt, which was painted across the  truck in melting green letters.

“Road trip time!” he screamed over the truck’s gurgle.

I had to take a running start to get into the passenger seat. It smelled  like cigarettes and gasoline inside, and I couldn’t hear Ivan over the  sound of the engine. I flashed him a thumbs up and we pulled out, my  house getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until I couldn’t  tell it apart from the horizon.

When we reached the Turnpike, we were right up against the  Everglades, and I could see for miles since the truck was so tall. It was  just an even buzz cut of sawgrass as far as you could see, but if you  looked up, you could tell where the eye of Imelda ended, and the sky  turned black.

Lightning flashed inside the clouds silently, and I could feel the humidity  getting sucked out of the air. It suddenly occurred to me that there were  no windows in the truck. I looked over at Ivan as he lifted a red cup to  his mouth and swallowed hard.

I really didn’t know where we were going. I never bothered to ask. Ivan  didn’t seem to have any luggage in the car and I noticed that he was  only wearing underwear from the waist down. He looked straight ahead,  at the same clouds I saw, only he didn’t seem to see them at all.

“Stop,” I said, but Ivan didn’t respond. So I said it louder, right in his ear.  And when he still wouldn’t, I unbuckled my seatbelt and dove headfirst  to punch the break myself, which sent Deadbolt into a fishtail that lasted  forever. I scrambled out of the truck and landed on my ass while he was  messing with the shifter. Then Ivan pulled away, middle finger out the  window until Imelda swallowed him up.

Standing there on the shoulder of the Turnpike, I felt my phone buzz in  my pocket. And then again and again. Cell reception must have poked  through the clouds, for a brief moment, because the notifications were  coming in machine gun bursts, one after the other. My pocket kept

shaking for the next ten minutes, and I just stood there crying. When it  finally stopped, I forced myself to look, the way you force yourself to  jump into a cold pool. You just do it without letting yourself think about  how bad it’ll sting. I only read one message, the first one that popped  up, and it was from Sam. All it said was eggshell ripple.