text: For the new-year Gregor had decided to give the woman who ran the restaurant he eats at every night a massive tip. Gregor had been saving up for this since the middle of October when it had become clear Sachi and her two children and 3 grandchildren were falling, perhaps they already had slipped and were only waiting with clenched teeth to hit the concrete, straight on their faces into the pavement of poverty. The grandchildren still don’t like Gregor much, but ever since winter fell upon New York the apartment Sachi lives in gets too cold for children to safely stay in for too long, unless they’re wrapped tightly with blankets, so nowadays the children sit in the restaurant and sometimes even eat with Gregor. Times like these, when the whole world feels so sad and desperate, leave Gregor vulnerable to fleeting bouts of good-will and charity, which is what had caused him to decide back in October he’d got to begin saving up for a gift. Every night, for what seems to be Gregor’s entire life, but really for the past two years, Gregor has gone to ‘The Winter Fly’, a restaurant owned by Sachi and run by her and her two children. Every night Gregor leaves work and walks, sometimes walks for quite some time, always going nowhere until he looks up from the ground in front of him, all too suddenly realizing how awful his stomach and head feel, remembering the too sweet smoothie he makes for himself every morning, wondering if tomorrow he’ll make himself a real breakfast of eggs and bacon. So by the time Gregor makes it to ‘The Winter Fly’ his body is drained to near emptiness, so tired his neck droops so low you can see the individual vertebrae running up his curved spine. One of the grandkids thinks, when Gregor slouches like this, he looks like a dinosaur. Always upon entering Gregor looks at Sachi, who used to always smile when he or anyone else would come in; she now only seems to smile. Her eyes move like she's smiling, but Gregor can’t see her mouth. Sachi used to not notice or pay any special attention to Gregor, he was simply another regular at a rather busy restaurant, but since March he slowly became Sachi’s sole patron. Some nights Gregor is the only person in all of New York to visit Sachi and her kin. Gregor has eaten something different every night since he’s gotten to know Sachi better. Ever since Sachi has had no one else to talk to, he’s been letting her just make whatever she thinks best at the moment he walks in. When waiting for his food he used to always order a can of Sprite, which would react poorly in a stomach empty save for milk and frozen fruit; but since Sachi became his friend he drinks the warm, refreshing tea she brings him when he sits down and takes off his mask. Gregor hates taking off his mask in public places, but he noticed a while ago it seems to make Sachi relax a little when he does it, so he does it despite his discomfort. Sachi’s daughter used to make most of what Gregor liked to eat. She somehow kept, even in the rotten streets of New York, an ocean air about her, this daughter. She was the only one out of Sachi’s family who showed any particular attention to Gregor before he was their only customer, an attention born from noticing that every night, at around 10 o’clock, she’d have to make her soup with oysters (this was before Sachi began deciding and preparing Gregor’s food for him, back when Gregor would eat the same thing every night), and an attention that led to some wonderful conversations between the two about the poetry of Masaoka Shiki, some of which Gregor kept on his body at all times, in his small pocket notebook. This daughter had mostly grown up in America, but despite her concrete world she had always dreamed of diving off sharp cliffs into ocean waves; she and the other woman of her imaginary village spending an eternity, day after day pulling oysters with pearls inside of them out from the sea. Even as an adult she’d pass her lonely hours by picturing her and her friends sparkling under the soon to be setting sun, catching their breaths and waving to their husbands and children who sit on the coastal grass, watching the divers, back and safe from the steep cliffs the woman leap from. This daughter used to always prepare the seafood at ‘The Winter Fly’, only she had to stop when she started spending her nights working somewhere where she would be able to make a consistent, guaranteed wage for her family. Since October this daughter has left her family every night to attend some minimum wage job in some awful, disgusting, upscale part of the city. Throughout the bitter autumn’s end and into winter this daughter could be found crunching dead leaves on Manhattan's pretty streets late into the night, traveling home to her mother and brother and sister and children and niece. And on the way home from the fancy restaurant she’s embarrassed to work at, she walks down a dim lit path along the river and stares at the un-lit penthouses towering above her, thinking about how happy her children and niece would be to fly up to the 200th floor of a skyscraper and enter a warm empty apartment; she sees in the high tower’s highest room a wooden bath filled with clear, nearly boiling water. Then she sees herself putting the three kids one by one into the water, and just laughing at how cute they look all lined up in the tub, which makes the kids laugh to see their mom and their aunt so happy, which makes this daughter laugh and smile so honestly she can’t keep up the fantasy any longer, returning to the cold night. ... In an apartment underneath some ugly building Gregor lives with his wife Daisy. He lives a perfectly miserable life. At only 24 years old he feels he has plenty of time to be miserable. But when he and Daisy walk through the park, led by their three pointing dogs who subtly but constantly pull their walkers forwards, Gregor can’t help but feel like he owes something more to life, as if he accepted too great a gift by just being born and now he must repay his debt. The pestilent lurid thoughts of the too conscious mind bother his wife too, to the point that at any given moment at least one of them is likely dealing with a searing headache; they’d met on a subway train when Daisy had noticed how brutally Gregor was shoving his thumbs into his eyes. If only they could spend more time with one another, but things keep them apart. Nowadays, Daisy feels it best to keep a safe distance from her husband, mentally speaking. Sometimes Gregor says things that make Daisy’s stomach sink; a seemingly arbitrary remark will fester into days or sometimes weeks of worry. Like when Gregor started reading about metaphysics and kept telling Daisy that ‘everything is meaningless’, which neither seemed true or important to her, but he kept saying it like it was some great discovery, and Daisy had noticed that since Gregor started telling her and anyone else who would listen that ‘everything is meaningless’, she reckons it's been since sometime in the fall, her husband’s whole posture has changed. Not as if his back has straightened out, but more as if his spine lost its will to fight and like a willow tree it’s left itself to blow the way the wind decides best. She can’t help but feel glad for Gregor, glad he’s finally seeming to leave whatever trance he’d entered when he woke up to life too late in his late teens; but more than that Daisy can’t help but loathe her husband’s willingness to leave her behind, still fighting for air. She thinks about this all the time, him leaving her to the lonely thoughts of depression. So, when they walk through the park Daisy looks at her husband like he’s a million miles away, straining to stare at the lips she loves and knows, familiar lips that spout something nonsensical and scary about how... ‘it’s not that there isn’t a self, I’m not saying you or I don't exist’. Daisy glances down at their dogs, her mind drifting to a picture of her and Gregor, along with their three headed best friend, fighting their way through hell. HS dark cloak covers from his ankles to his nose and the brim of his bucket hat droops so low his eyes are covered by a visor of shadow; she wears a kimono the color of moss, patterned with cherry blossoms. She stabs a sword that’s twice her body length straight into the neck of some infinite demon, she sees Gregor follow their Cerberus into a fiery cave filled with screaming violence, unafraid of the nightmare. ‘What I’m saying is that the self is an illusion, you see, as in, “You are a product of your own imagination.” A figment!’ ‘What did you just call me?’ ‘A figment!’ Every night Gregor gets home at around 11:30, giving the couple only a few hours together before Daisy must leave for work. Usually 3 and a half hours exactly. His visits to ‘The Winter Fly’ always give Gregor energy enough to smile and ask questions and be kind to Daisy, but she knows how hard and long his days are. All Gregor’s fried mind can process is basic entertainment, so the two spend most of their time together watching TV, and it just makes Daisy’s heart melt when she sees Gregor batting his eyes, trying to stay awake until his love must go, too tired to do anything but stare at his own blank mind. But they just watch TV, and sometimes Daisy watches Gregor not-sleep, and when it's raining she sits by their window and watches everything get washed and soaked and cleaned. And every night, the first thing he does when he walks inside their basement apartment, Gregor leaves a bag of food that slowly cools or warms to room temperature on the table by the front door, for his wife to take to work. The food used to always be that daughter's delicious oyster soup, but nowadays she eats whatever treat from the sea Sachi has prepared for her. On the train to work Daisy used to drink coffee, but now, when no one else is in her car, Daisy removes her mask to sip deeply from the tea she asks Gregor to buy her, but that Sachi always gives him. Gregor works for the New York Public Library’s cataloging department, and across town his wife works for one of the city's many hospitals. Gregor works late into the night, long hours, because he’s basically the only person in the city that can do his job. Although, you would think finding books in a modern library is as simple as typing a call number into a computer and then finding the appropriate section where your desired books wait for you. At the least you’d think you could like hire people to take requests from patrons and know the library well enough to quickly find the books. Not so at the public library on Eucalyptus Ave. There, somewhere in its corridors bent to all sorts of inhumane ways, a phantom waits for all who come to take. One time a persistent public school teacher had insisted on receiving a tour of the library’s attic, an idea which Gregor almost begged his department head to snip in the bud, but which ended up happening on a cold May day last year. The phantom had found the teacher, leading to an epic end of the tour: his students passively watching as their once sane instructor was dragged down the library’s front steps by two pale officers, screaming about some made-up government agency that was abducting him so they could inject radioactive liquid into his veins and neutralize/silence yet another enlightened, free soul. You surely want to know why Gregor and the children were not harmed by the phantom, and of course that is the key to it all. When Gregor came into ‘The Winter Fly’ tonight he was surprised to find a young man sitting in the restaurant, eating a claw, a can of diet coke unopened on the table he sits at. ... Malcom’s mom had told him to get a can of diet coke for her from the restaurant down the block. Malcolm hates his mom. With tears just behind his wide young eyes he’d left her rundown apartment for the last time, holding a dollar and ten cents in coins in his hand. ‘I don’t give fuck’. Malcolm kept saying to himself. He likes to have his music at such a loud volume it hurts his ears to even listen. ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Malcolm is only fifteen years old and already he’s decided to kill himself. His mom is cruel and violent towards him, no one cares about him, his only friend is a fat ugly mean kid. When he can’t sleep at night he stares at his phone for hours on end, thinking about killing himself. At least since this last October, so for the past few months. He’d read a few books that mentioned slitting your wrists and lying in a tub, but Malcolm’s family doesn’t have a tub. Despite the obvious opportunities of living in New York, Malcolm thought jumping from anything, building or bridge, might be too much of a spectacle even for his own internal viewer, who was likely to be the only one to know about it anyway. If only he lived by the ocean so he could just walk out onto the beach, take as many of his mother’s pills as he could swallow, and swim out to sea. In his suicidal fantasy Malcolm imagined that when his body fell to the ocean’s floor it passed through some threshold, onto an entirely different life, one where he could swim all day and have friends and a wife and search for pearls beneath the crashing waves in an air of silence. ‘Are you sure that's all?’ the woman asked. Malcolm nodded. ‘Well, please stay as long as you like, it's too cold out there for a little boy!’ Malcolm stopped looking at the woman who kept bringing him food. It smelt so good, but he had to stop looking because both the woman and her food were just too warm, and he’d been out in the cold for just too long. So Malcolm stared at the ground, his music slowly bursting his eardrums, slowly deciding whether he should go back to his mom's apartment, or stay with this woman and her two silent grandkids, or just go starve out in the cold. Out the corner of his eye he noticed the woman leave the front of the store, then he checked to see if the children were still attending their coloring books. He immediately took the opportunity to grab some alien leg out from one of a half dozen delectable steaming bowls, not-smiling while he sucked white meat out from the boiling hot claw. As he prepared for the final bite from what was probably the most delicious thing he’d ever eaten a man walked into the store, and Malcolm immediately stopped eating. ... In his hand is the red envelope containing the new-year’s gift of 1,000 dollars. Gregor notices the boy’s face quickly flush and a calm fade out his eyes. The boy is sitting at the table right next to the entrance and he seems to stare at Gregor with an intense hatred while Gregor listens to the soft music he can hear through the boy’s headphones; this despite the amplifiers being shoved deep into the boy’s ears. Gregor notices the soup the boy is not-eating, each bowl filled with urchin and eel and fish cakes, each steaming like a chimney, and it all reminds him of Sachi’s daughter and the loves she cooks with. Gregor stares at the leg of some twisted dead creature and imagines him and Daisy, with their three dogs pulling them along the way, walking along the high cliffs of lands’ end; above him a gray sky that always rains so the poetry they write gets wet and wrinkled; but that's no matter, he and Daisy write hundreds of poems every day, there’s no time to read them. Gregor walks over to the counter where he can’t tell if Sachi is smiling at him or not, he greets Sachi, accepts his tea, and asks if her children might be in the restaurant tonight. Even though the mask covers her mouth, Gregor now can tell Sachi is not smiling, he can tell she wants to cry. She starts telling Gregor about the boy sitting in the corner who had only just enough money for one soda, but he looked so cold and lonely. And so she’d told him to sit down with her grandchildren, and that she’d make him whatever he’d like so long as he’d stay a bit. In a flurry of excitement, since Sachi had barely spoken to anyone all day, she told Gregor how the boy had just stared at her. Clutching the diet coke he’d bought in his hand, after probably 20 or 30 seconds, he’d finally spoken, and what he’d said touched Sachi in her soul. "My grandmother once cooked us seafood". Sachi said she knew just what he meant, and so that's why, even though the boy won’t eat anything she brings him, she keeps trying to find something he might be interested in. As if that’s why this boy isn’t eating, as if just the smell of Sachi’s cooking isn’t killing him. Gregor glances at the boy once more, takes his food to go, then hands the red envelope to Sachi. The kid seemed to be staring at some blank horror, and Gregor notices the boy’s eyes look like Daisy’s, when the couple walk through the park. ... Inside their apartment Daisy sits by the window, waiting for it to rain. She stares at her phone, scrolling aimlessly, upset by how much music there is out there and how much her friends seem to explore and expand their musical tastes. Daisy just listens to the same songs, over and over again. Tonight keeps listening to a really, quite incredibly sad one: *Candy says,* *I’ve come to hate my body* *And all that it requires* *In this world* On the street above her (she lives in a basement) people are hurrying by, trying to escape the coming rain. Daisy thinks about going for a long walk. *I’m gonna watch* *The blue birds fly* *Over my shoulder* *I'm gonna watch, them pass me by* *Maybe when I'm older* *What do you think I’d see* *If I could walk away from...* Daisy’s singing voice was once described to her by a friend as sounding like someone might sound if a bleeding ulcer rested next to their voice box, but she doesn’t hold back to sing: *“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’.* As the rain picks up, she writes a note to Gregor: she’s got to leave for work early and won’t see him tonight. She wraps herself in the poncho that she’d stolen from the National Gallery of Art’s museum gift shop a few years ago, its pattern a blurry looking picture of a stream. Daisy thinks about whether or not the fact that she stole something from a museum, when like normally you would think if someone stole something from a museum that’d be a major crime, is funny or not. On a train, deep underground, she tries to think of something. She tries to find a song she wants to listen to. But Daisy can’t do it, she doesn’t know what to do. At the hospital she works at people die every day, people die of viruses and cancers and accidents all the time, and here Daisy sits, a young married lady, pleased with the thought her train might stop at some station she’s never been to, hoping it will let her off by the sea. When she gets off the train her stomach growls at her. She has only a few hours till she must be at work. Often people say stuff like ‘you can’t get a bad slice of pizza in NY!’ or ‘even average pizza in NY is better than most pizza!’, but they’ve never had this pizza Daisy’s having right now. It’s not even that the pizza tastes bad, she barely tastes anything at all, just that sitting in some lonely late-night restaurant, terribly alone, tired but with your whole day ahead of you, your whole life just waiting to be lived... Picking at her terrible skin, Daisy doesn’t notice the proprietor of the pizza joint staring at her, watching her as she squeezes and plucks and examines all the tiny brownish , slightly translucent little bugs that grow in her face. While working on an exceptionally small, un-compromising blackhead she’s finally swept from herself by a dream of cold water that washes over her irritated thoughts like a wave; she's floating in a silent forest growing out the seafloor. Although she doesn’t remember it happening, she knows Gregor used to swim down here with her, but as she looks to the water’s bright surface she gazes at her love treading water, breathing in the sunny air above. Daisy looks at her barely eaten pizza, thinking about ‘The Winter Fly’ and what Gregor probably will bring home for her, but what she couldn’t wait to receive. ... Malcolm watches them speak. He can’t believe what he sees or what he hears. The man hands the envelope to the woman, seeming to be thanking her for something. They speak in a tongue Malcolm doesn’t understand. He still was holding the claw he’d taken from the food the woman had been bringing to him, but he no longer ate it. It just hung in his hand, drooping boiling liquid onto the fluorescently lit floor. No one ever gives Malcolm presents, but he thinks ‘I don’t give a fuck’ and starts swiping through his phone to find a new song to listen to. He’d listened to the same 3 songs over 100 times today. But then a panicked voice, and it only gets more surprising when he looks up. Malcolm sees both the man and the woman with their mask pulled down, the man smiling at the woman aghast, the envelope now in the woman's hand and slightly open. Perhaps what came next was just too much to handle. ‘TOO MUCH!’ The woman yells, as she hands the envelope back to the man, but he just smiles and refuses to accept it. ‘It’s TOO MUCH! Please Gregor, my family will kill me! I can’t accept this money!’ ‘You Must!’ For once in his life, or at least for the first time in a long time, Gregor feels triumphant. Not like a king, but like a man satisfied with life, amused by its silliness. ‘Gregor! You are poor just like we are! You and your wife are our best customers! What are you thinking?!’ Malcolm listens closely but understands none of this. He just watches with open eyes as two people haggle over more cash than young poor Malcolm has ever seen in real life, but the oddest thing about an already unusual scene: They both seem to be trying to get rid of money. They don’t want it like it’s something someone is trying to sell you on the street. Only, with every passing second, things get stranger. ‘You Must Sachi!’ ‘But... I.... Gregor!’ Malcolm nearly drops the claw he's holding, watching the woman literally try to put the money in the bag of food the man is carrying out. ‘Sachi! Please listen. Me and my wife owe our lives to you and your family. Without the food you’ve made us, we wouldn't be poor, we'd be dead!’ While their voices calm down and the woman begins to smile and cry, the idea comes to Malcolm all at once. Loud in his ear drums his music bangs against his skull. No more living with mom, no more school. Suddenly Malcolm remembers his cousin even said once, all though it was maybe a year or two ago, that he could live with their family, if only Malcolm could make it out his mother grim place and somehow survive the journey across the country. Before this moment that idea of adventure was just a dream. Neither of them makes a sound, the woman just lets go when he grabs it, and then Malcolm is gone. He barely stops going forward for the next 30 years. He makes it to the west, and ever since and forever more there was and never will be a wilder soul across all the rolling roads of America than that kid Malcolm. He runs out of the restaurant so fast the only thing Gregor and Sachi can make of him, when they finally react, spinning to see the door already swung shut, is the thief’s shadow still moving across the bright white floor.