the criterion of embarrassment

by seabiscuit

Chapter 2

Summary:

carol sturka saves the world comma marries your mom

Sometimes, Zosia thinks that the worst part of all of this might be that Carol Sturka looks exactly like her dead husband. She previously would have denied up and down that she had something as reductive as a type. And, if she did, her husband and Carol never would have made it into the bucket. Prior to Jamie the closest she’d ever come to identifying a common thread in her attraction was seeing the Brawny paper towel guy for the first time in an American grocery store and, a few months later, making love in a barn somewhere on the outskirts of Joliet with a dark-haired boy named Danny who sold tractors for a living.

But then, Zosia had met Jamie one year into a three-year teaching contract at NYU. Short, blonde, curly haired Jamie. She could have broken him in half over her knee. She thought of him when she looked at paintings of renaissance angels at the Met. He was a drummer working his way toward a PhD in music theory, something so catastrophically impractical that it did a 180 and became charming —and when she’d said this to him, which she had, Jamie had questioned whether a professor of Russian literature had any leg to stand on vis-à-vis the practicality of one’s profession.

She fucked him that night and married him two years later. Her mother hated him. Her friends told

her to never trust blonde men. He couldn’t speak Polish for shit and what he could do was ugly. He had a beautiful cock, was bad at dressing himself. Their house was always, always loud. It was like he had a primal urge to slam, bang, crash. Everything had a rhythm. The way he walked, the way he opened and closed cabinets when he was looking for soy sauce.

Upon reflection, Jamie was destined to die young. She knows this now because she can look back and remember how happy she was, in those years in the house in Queens. Happiness isn’t permanent, it breathes in and out like a tide. And one day, the tide had simply taken Jamie with it, out of their loud and happy house and into the quiet emptiness of the ocean.

She had never, ever even considered the thought of being with another woman until two, maybe three years after he’d died. Why would she have? A flirtation with lesbianism made sense within her grief, but not really outside of it. Before being widowed, Zosia understood her own happiness. After, not so much. Why not with other women? What did any of it matter, anyway?

By the time she’d begun to seriously entertain the idea, Zosia was living in Scotland. Teaching at St. Andrew’s. She’d traded in her busy family home for a meticulously kept one bedroom apartment off campus. Every day, when she came home, it was quiet.

It was Louise that first made the joke about Zosia sleeping with a student. Fucking Louise. Prior to being absorbed into the global hivemind she was probably sexually harassing a cabana boy at the Cheval Blanc in St. Barth’s. She’d told Louise that sleeping with a twenty year old boy to cure her ennui would be like lopping her hand off with a machete out of boredom. Louise had said it’s not just boys in your class, is it? And Zosia had made a face like she hadn’t just been talking about trying lesbianism in her widows’ support group in the same way somebody might try shoplifting to feel alive again.

The thing about Louise was—she was a maniac, but her points often bore out to be good ones. Like a sexually manic Nostradamus. And the point she’d made at that brunch did indeed bear itself out the following semester, in the faces of the girls who came to Zosia’s office hours.

At first, Zosia only noted remembering what it was to be that age, and beautiful. How brimming with life and misunderstood you were. Where twenty year old boys, on the best days, disgusted her, twenty year old women were bursting with a certain possibility.

Then there was more noticing. For instance, Zosia had never noticed before how attentive these girls were to her. They were, almost uniformly, exchange students from American colleges—Bryn Mawr, U Penn, NYU—who’s mothers had not paid them adequate attention. A kitten pulled from the teat too young and inclined toward trouble because of it. Dyed hair, nose rings, an inappropriate fixation on their older, female Russian lit professor. And on and on.

There was something different in the air that semester, anyway. The grief of Jamie was no longer sitting on her chest like a lead weight. She’d reduced it to a pebble, a worry stone, that she carried with her in her pocket. She was going on a girl’s trip to Morocco on school break. There was a general sense that life was moving on, moving forward, where before it had lain stagnant.

In the end, though, she’d dismissed the idea as crass. Zosia usually tried to do the opposite of whatever Louise suggested to her in a good faith effort to stay off of Dateline. Acting out like that seemed both a morally dubious abuse of her position of power and unfaithful to Jamie in a different and more serious way than when she’d previously considered with sleeping with a man her own age.

If Zosia had been able to see what was coming, she would have scheduled those girls in for 25 minute slots and then lined them up outside her office. Instead, well. Instead she has Carol.

Carol is the kind of woman that Zosia would have seen in the grocery store and taken immediate, absent-minded pity on. She is short, she is angry, and she does not have the first, second, or even the third best haircut for her face.

Zosia also has her legs in the air somewhere between her forearms and shoulders, is getting fucked by her and, yes, is loving it. God, Dostoyevsky was right. Pain and suffering really are always inevitable.

“Fuck, Zosia, come on. That’s right. That’s it. Fuck.” The talking is something Zosia should have corrected earlier on, but hadn’t—her fault. The fact that they’re repeating this mistake over and over again, like a fucked up, horny groundhog’s day—also, at least partially, her fault.

The first time had been a grasp at autonomy—the limp twisted, ineffectual grasp of a toddler, but a grasp all the same—and a punishment for Carol.

Zosia knows that Carol is not typically the…wearer. She’s seen her fragmented face through Helen’s eyes plenty of times, or the milky expanse of her back and ass, or the crown of her blonde head bobbing. She’d asked her to put it on in the first place half because she’d assumed that, rusty and out of practice, it would humiliate her.

But Carol hadn’t seemed all that punished by it, which is so extremely goddamn typical of her.

It would become one of what would turn out to be many grave miscalculations as to the indomitable spirit of Carol Sturka.

So she tries it a second time to try and make it stick. Invites Carol into the Martins’ bedroom, house rules—shirts on, no touching below the belt, strap-on only—and this time she works the I’m imagining you’re a man angle a little harder, says I love your cock into Carol’s ear. Turns out, Carol unironically likes that. Again—so goddamned typical.

It probably could have ended there. It probably should have ended there. The more they do it, the more Zosia finds herself being waylaid by pleasant memories of Carol. Carol, longer haired and tipsy, standing in front of a couch and undoing the buttons on a cornflower blue blouse. Her observer thinking, that color is so beautiful on her. Carol’s head bobbing, moving away, the back of her hand wiping her mouth. You can’t even feel that, aren’t you bored? The sensation not of boredom, but of a dizzying, tender gratefulness.

But the sleep. In the two weeks between being torn off of the global hivemind like a chunk of bread and fucking Carol for the first time, Zosia had only managed a few meager naps when exhaustion had simply overcome her. But then, after her first night with Carol, she’d slept like a baby. And again after the second time.

There have been many humbling realizations along the path that Zosia has traveled toward repeated sexual encounters with a woman who fucks like a raccoon eating pizza out of a dumpster. Never has there been a wider gulf between Zosia’s mind, which finds the concept appalling, and her body, which cannot get enough of it, which is part of the reason why she keeps opening her legs and letting Carol in like a friendly fucking neighbor. Why she is letting Carol Sturka, of all people on this tragedy of a planet, fold her in half on a memory foam mattress in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Somehow the sleep is the worst part. On nights they’re not together, she wills it to overcome her, and it never does. Those nights are becoming fewer and far between, anyway. It seems pointless not to do it when she wants it and Carol wants it and when Carol follows the rules and does not complain or try to push boundaries. Her shirt stays on, her hands don’t wander. And even when she is enjoying it, she never—

Suddenly, in the midst of all that thrusting, Carol slows down. Her hips still circle, but gentler. Zosia notices that she’s gone totally silent. The slowing down is not ideal, because it gives Zosia more time to consider the present. The soles of her feet pointing toward the ceiling, the fact that they have fucked not only the blankets and pillows, but also the fitted sheet, off of the Martins’ marital bed. The damp spot beneath her ass and lower back; evidence both of sweat and her own weakness.

It’s time to get this show back on the road. She scratches Carol’s shoulders with her fingernails. “Are you okay?” She whispers into her ear. Carol grunts. Seizes. Her face is buried into Zosia’s neck.

“I’m fine,” she murmurs brokenly. “Stop whispering like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that. Sexy like that. Stop laughing at me.”

Zosia is. Well, she’s giggling, really. There’s no tinge of cruelty to it whatsoever. It turns out that fucking somebody will, over time, blunt the edge of the sword that you’re trying to stab them with. Zosia imagines that this must be how it feels to be a sidewalk getting power washed.

“Are you trying not to come?” She whispers, as sexy as she can muster it. Carol stops altogether and the seriousness of Zosia’s error washes over her. “No no no no no. Don’t stop, come on. Just keep going slow.”

“You have to stop talking, I’m serious.”

“Okay, okay,” Zosia murmurs. Her words slip into a low mmm when Carol keeps moving at a lazy pace. She keeps one hand between her shoulder blades, the other tangled in Carol’s hair. She catches herself wishing that they were naked. There will be plenty of self-flagellation for that one, later. She breaks her promise fifteen seconds after she makes it. “What are you thinking about?”

“Manusos’ butt,” Carol grunts, then: “Fuck, that’s not enough. Manusos’ hairy butt crack,” a sigh of relief. Carol’s body untenses against her’s. “Okay, okay, yeah. We’re good.”

Carol starts pounding again. Goddamnit, she really is good at it. When Zosia comes, it’s with a shout, the headboard banging into the wall, a corner of the fitted sheet turning inward onto her. Carol dutifully fucks every last drop of it out of her. She’s good at that, too.

When their bodies stop, she pauses for a moment. Zosia can feel a tension in her shoulderblades, an unreleased shiver. Carol swallows audibly, then makes a little sound—a whimper, almost—then gently pulls out and rolls onto her back.

Zosia almost tells her to put it back in and keep going until she’s finished, but controls herself at the last second. Poise is key here. All it would take, really, is one screw flying loose to send the whole train off the rails.

She shucks off the harness and hides herself with a pillow from the floor. Zosia finds that there is a sweetness to the gentle agony on her face; a rubber band pulled but denied the opportunity to snap.

Zosia keeps waiting for Carol to say something about it. She says nothing, and a minute passes in silence.

“Are you alright?” Asks Zosia. Carol opens her eyes and blinks up at the ceiling. As always, there is a gulf of space between them on the mattress. This is the first time that looking over at Carol like this has ever felt strange, almost melancholy. She’d just been on top of Zosia, inside of her. Manipulating her body. Now it’s like she’s pulled herself into another room.

“Yeah, I just need a second. Sorry.”

“No, that’s fine.” Zosia shivers. Her lower half is exposed and the damp spot underneath her is cooling. “Do you want to help me put fresh sheets on the bed?”

She takes Carol to the Martins’ linen closet. Carol, looking less tortured and more herself in her tee shirt and underwear, browses the shelf dedicated to games while Zosia looks at the actual sheets. The closet is a walk-in, and has just enough room for the two of them to stand back-to-back with the lightbulb chain dangling between them.

“Do you think these are all a fit for that bed?” Zosia asks. She feels Carol’s shoulderblades flex in a shrug.

“I dunno. Why do they have three different boxes of Scattegories?”

“I don’t want to unfold them all to check. I can’t refold fitted sheets.”

“Are there updates to Scattegories? New categories and stuff?”

“It feels a little ghoulish to take these out just to have sex on them. Look at these, they’ve got little daisies on them.”

They turn at the same time, Zosia with the daisy sheets in her arms, Carol with the Scattegories.

Carol asks: “Are you any good at Scattegories?”

“Didn’t we play once?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t you.”

Zosia purses her lips. “I think the only other time I ever played was at a faculty party a few years ago. It was bad.”

“The game?”

“The party. The wine was cheap but I drank too much of it and felt sick the whole time,” Zosia pauses. She doesn’t really understand why she’s saying any of this. “I’m not sure, under regular circumstances, if I would be good at it or not.”

“Where did you teach?”

“NYU, for a time, and then St. Andrew’s. In Scotland.”

“I know where St. Andrew’s is.”

Zosia rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she replies, and pulls the chain to turn off the closet light. Carol clicks it back on.

“Wait,” she says. “What was your subject?”

Zosia considers not answering this, but, what the hell. After somebody has touched your cervix playing cute loses some of its appeal. “Russian literature.”

“Mm. The strong stuff.”

“Indeed.”

“So I guess we have something in common after all.”

“Oh?” Zosia cocks an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

“Writing. Reading. Agony.”

“Well, one of us did her dissertation on the existential principle of suffering in Russian literature and the other wrote the Wycaro series. So.”

Carol’s mouth twitches, almost a smile. Her eyes are twinkling. Zosia feels a surge of something hot that has to be, has to be, has to be hatred.

“Pretentious,” says Carol.

“Hack,” says Zosia. She turns out the light.

They walk through the upstairs hallway. Zosia has taken down all the pictures of the Martins family and leaned them, facing inward, against the wall. She’d found them morbid, but the row of backwards frames is almost equally unsettling.

“You don’t sleep in here, do you?” Carol asks as they return to the room and begin to push the mess of old bedding off the mattress.

“No.”

“Then what’s the point in changing the sheets?”

“To not have a room in my house with a bare mattress covered in bodily fluids? It looks like a Saw movie in here.”

Carol’s mouth twitches again. Zosia makes herself look away and pretends to focus on trying to find the bottom tag on the fitted sheet. “I wasn’t aware the Saw franchise had a foothold in Poland.”

“After my husband died I was desperate to feel something other than sadness and boredom and the only feeling that ever overrode it was disgust. I’ve seen all of them. God, this honesty thing.” Zosia rubs at her temple. There’s no response from the other side of the mattress. “You’re not going to say anything to that?”

“You didn’t want me to hear it so I’m going to pretend you didn’t say it.”

“But you have something you’d like to say.”

“No, I don’t.”

Zosia isn’t stupid. She’s thinking about Jamie, Carol is thinking about Helen. The way this overlap in their stories makes Zosia feel an immediate, sharp twinge of empathy is disconcerting. There have been too many moments like this today and, if Zosia is being honest with herself, in the last couple of weeks, for it to be a coincidence. The sex is a bad idea. The sex had always been a bad idea.

She tries what she always does in these situations—to think of something embarrassing about Carol. What surfaces is from a girl at Camp Freedom Falls. It’s nighttime, the girls are asleep in their bunks. From somewhere in the dark, the sound of soft crying. It’s Carol. Carol is somewhere in the room, and she is crying, and she is trying to be quiet but failing. Her sorrow is too

much. That’s not a fact, that’s not from the memory, that’s Zosia’s interpretation, but Zosia knows a thing or two about the sound of unbearable despair.

The girl to whom this memory belongs stifles laughter.

Zosia blinks. “Bitch,” she mutters under her breath.

“What? What did I do?” Says Carol. She looks up from where she’s tucking a corner of the sheet. “You haven’t done your side. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re rubbing your chest.”

“I have heartburn or something,” says Zosia, tucking in her side of the sheet. She retrieves the pillow cases. They don’t match the sheets at all. “What are you doing after this?”

“Ah, what does any gal do after a hot date with a woman who hates her?”

“This wasn’t a date.” Zosia tosses a pillow to the head of the bed.

“Go home and fall asleep on the couch eating cheddar popcorn and watching Golden Girls with Manousos.”

Zosia pauses with the other pillow in her hands. Carol is spreading the flat sheet over the bed. “You’re not going to…”

“I’m not going to…?” The flat sheet flutters and settles, slightly crumpled. Carol gives her an expectant, searching look. Zosia hugs the pillow to her chest and makes a face. Eyebrows raised, lips folded in. Carol nods after a beat. “Are you asking me if I’m going home to jerk off?”

“I wouldn’t have used those words.”

“What do they call it at St. Andrew’s, autoerotic stimulation?”

“It’s just a question.”

Carol’s face has become guarded. “Yeah, a weird question.”

“Not really. You didn’t—”

“I know I didn’t. You asked me not to.”

“I never asked you that.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘if you think you’re getting another orgasm out of me, you’re—’”

“I never said you couldn’t masturbate.”

“Feels wrong to think about you when I do it.”

“There’s nothing else you can think about?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Zosia, my dead wife, I guess? Jesus christ, I think I’d be getting more humane interrogation treatment from the Bush administration.”

“So you go home and do nothing because you think that I won’t like it?”

Carol’s face briefly flashes bright with anger. For one brief, delightful moment, Zosia thinks that she will yell, and that the two of them will be able to retreat to the safety of an argument. “That’s not—” she begins, her voice loud. “You’re not the only one who—” But after a second, Carol’s shoulders slump. She doesn’t look angry, just defeated. Small. Zosia realizes that the game isn’t fun anymore. The mouse is dead. “Is it possible for us to take a five minute break from dragging all these…bloated fucking corpses out into the open? Aren’t there enough other wounds for us to be fucking right now? Why this one?”

Carol drags the comforter from the floor and slaps it atop the mattress. Zosia tosses the other pillow on. Between them, the bed is messy, mismatching, but complete.

Distantly, Zosia understands that she has miscalculated something. The air is heavy between them and it’s not simply Carol’s garden variety Carolness. She has been very focused, she thinks, on what she wants, and has spent very little time concerned with whether Carol would ever want to put a stop to their arrangement.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” says Carol after a moment of staring at it. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sorry that I clearly couldn’t…help you the way you needed. If there’s another way that I can—something else that would help you feel better, let me know. But I can’t—”

The sentence ends there as if shot down. Zosia wheels. She has simply never considered that this would happen, and is unprepared to react to it. She can’t exactly do what she wants, which is to just say…no.

“Okay,” says Zosia. Her stomach is tied up in knots, and she doesn’t know why. Gone is the sick pleasure of stepping on Carol’s face to get another rung higher on the ladder toward the light at the end of this fucked up tunnel. Toward absolution. Gone is her ability to wring some enjoyment of listening to somebody laugh while Carol cries. And where, exactly, does that leave her? “If you don’t want to, neither do I.”

“No hard feelings,” says Carol. “Other than the obvious ones.”

“Sure,” says Zosia. “That.”

*

Well, la di da for Carol. Zosia doesn’t need her, anyway. It’s the end of the world, and there are better things to do than have acrobatic lesbian sex. The sleep thing will resolve itself, she’s sure. It’s not like she needs Carol to sleep. That would be…embarrassing.

Once Carol leaves, Zosia stomps downstairs into the empty living room that she is using as a bedroom. She flops down onto her couch bed, shoving a pile of DVD cases and books out of the way to make room for her legs under her blanket. There’s a small ache in her thighs, between them. She lays horizontal, head on a throw pillow, feet pressed against the pile of things now crunched at the foot of the couch. She picks up the remote and turns on the TV.

The only other effective medicine she’s found for the panic attacks before falling asleep is narcotic TV. Infomercials, black and white movies, old American westerns—Bonanza, etc. She’s seen The Grapes of Wrath five times by now. Although Zosia hesitates to ask the Others to do anything because the thought of being the reason somebody’s body is piloted against their will makes her queasy, she knows for a fact that there are worse tasks than burning old Gunsmoke episodes onto a DVD.

Typically, getting fucked into the mattress followed by an hour or two of TV time will put her down like a sick dog. But the argument—was it an argument?—has soured things. Zosia isn’t relaxed. She’s agitated.

Boredom sets in after a few minutes, and not the kind that makes her drowsy. She reaches beneath the pillow behind her head and retrieves two things; a copy of the first Wycaro and the pair of Carol’s underwear she’d stolen on that first night. Zosia’d had every intention of setting them on fire in some kind of quasi-cleansing ritual, and how they had ended up underneath her pillow instead is between her and the unflinching gaze of a very callous god.

She puts the underwear aside and opens Wycaro to her bookmark. It’s actually not bad. Diverting, certainly, although she’d never tell Carol this directly. Sometimes, when she reads, she does imagine a towheaded Lucasia with a mildly offensive bob and permanently inset frown and Raban as—

Zosia huffs, frustrated with herself, and throws the book down to the end of the couch with all her other junk. She turns off the TV and lays in silence in the dark for a moment, arms crossed, scowling at the ceiling. Now she’s just horny again, somehow. How is that even possible, under the circumstances? Zosia wonders if it’s some kind of procreative urge. Some kind of switch that gets flipped in case of apocalypse so the earth gets repopulated. It is being spectacularly wasted, if so. Then again, it would be just like Carol to do something asinine like get her pregnant. Thinking about it makes her angry, and, as is happening more and more recently, within thirty seconds of getting angry her hand is in her underwear.

Where Carol got the nerve, she isn’t sure. The nerve to be the way she is, the nerve to make Zosia act the way she does. Zosia has tried to tell herself many times that the low clench she feels in her stomach, the warmth in her heart, is borrowed, not hers. Borrowed from Helen and Becca and every other woman that has ever had the doomed audacity to feel love for Carol.

And maybe that’s true. It could be true, which is what makes it so easy to find comfort in. But it makes sense, doesn’t it, a voice in her mind reminds her—Maybe you do have a type, after all. Fuck you, thinks Zosia to herself.

At least now that her thoughts are private she doesn’t have to hand-wring about imagining something shameful. The only person Zosia has to answer to, after all, is herself. She can go straight for the top shelf, the blue label, the good stuff. She has options and she knows she has options because she has flipped through them, again and again, in the days since she became herself again.

One thing Zosia never does is remember what she and Carol had done together on their own. It is disquieting to think that after all those many months of ruminating, she had had sex with a woman, and she hadn’t even really been there for it. Hadn’t selected, based on her own mind, who that person would be. Hadn’t played the guessing game of what she would want from her, hadn’t indulged in the pleasure of good-natured fumbling with a new body.

She’d sat in an armchair in the corner of her own mind and watched herself do it. Watched herself do things that she wouldn’t have in a million years thought of doing that way on her own. Wouldn’t have sounded like that. Wouldn’t have said those things to Carol. She’d never called somebody sweetheart, or beautiful, or gorgeous during sex, and doubts that she will any time soon. She wants to think that she would be better, but that’s a farce. Better than all of the world’s lesbians, porn stars, and lesbian porn stars? Probably not.

What she will do, at times, is keep the meat of the sandwich the same and slap on different bread. No reason to invent something new when you could just put a fresh slipcover on the old sex memories you already have, existentially dreadful as they may be. She imagines her and Carol meeting at some hotel bar—at a conference, maybe, or perhaps they’re both traveling for work. Zosia giving a guest lecture somewhere, Carol touring for a book. Carol would be wearing something dowdy, something just a shade unflattering—with due respect to the recently departed, if Zosia were her wife, she wouldn’t let her leave the house in clothes like that, that’s for sure.

But Zosia doesn’t want to go through all the work of building it out. The middling, flirtatious conversation, deciding on the back story—is Carol married or is she not, is Jamie alive, what is hotter, what is less macabre—and dabbling too hard in what-ifs can take a sharp turn toward the melancholic if she’s not careful.

Another option, a fantasy. Carol is fucking the shit out of her as she is wont to do and Zosia says tell me I’m better at it than they were and Carol puts her mouth to Zosia’s ear and pants you’re better, you’re better, you’re—

No, definitely not. Not after Carol has just—no. Absolutely no.

Old faithful it is. The one original memory that Zosia can indulge in without the odd, out of body feeling. Their first time, Carol and—Carol and her, Carol and the Others. Carol and whoever. Carol had straddled her lap, buried her face in Zosia’s bare breasts and come within perhaps 15 seconds grinding in the inseam of her own pants. During, she’d made sounds like she’d been starving for days and somebody had just put a chocolate cake in front of her. There is some mommy stuff there, of that Zosia is deadly certain.

The world may disappoint and horrify her, but this memory has never let Zosia down.

Zosia tries always to take that Nyquil haze off of it, to pour herself back into her body. To get up off the chair. To make her movements feel like her own. It's easier here. She hadn’t yet touched Carol or reacted to her touch. And at least when Carol came in her pants it was because of Zosia’s face and her tits, which are hers and which she still has.

How would Carol react to Zosia, this Zosia, touching her? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to find out. Carol is, after all, used to fucking the ghost of her dead wife. Zosia doesn’t like thinking this way because it reminds her that, ironically, the only person who might understand the violation that she has endured is…Carol. She wonders sometimes how she would have felt if Carol had showed up at her doorstep and done that thing Jamie did, where he could make up parody lyrics to a song based on whatever they were doing—or drum a rhythm on the backs of Zosia’s thighs while she read on her stomach on the chaise—or—

Her hands still in their tight circles around her clit, which is so over sensitive from earlier that it almost hurts. This is not helpful. She tries to think of the sex they’d just had, but it’s tainted with something. Some thought lodged in the back of her mind that she either can’t or won’t shake free.

And then, upon thinking of Carol’s pathetic whimper as she’d pulled out of her, trying with every muscle in her body not to come, the thought surfaces—Carol seems to like fucking you just fine. Carol seems, in fact, devoted to fucking you the right way. Zosia, just on the trembling edge of her orgasm, yanks her fingers from her underwear, puts her face in her hands, and screams.

*

She doesn’t sleep. She goes upstairs to pee. She’s still wet from before and she has to change her underwear after.

Zosia stares at herself for a long time in the bathroom mirror before she returns to the solitude of her couch. She has nobody to answer to but herself. But she does, eventually, have to answer to herself.

*

Predictably, a nightmare wakes her from a pitiful thirty minute nap sometime in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes Zosia pinches herself. Sometimes she rubs her knuckles into her sternum. This morning she slaps herself, once, across the cheek.

“You’re fine, Zosia, you’re fine,” she mutters. The sheets on the couch are soaked through with her sweat; she goes to the basement and puts them into the washing machine.

She goes then to the eldest Martins daughter’s bedroom, to her window seat. Ah to be a fourteen year girl in New Mexico living in a bedroom with a window seat that overlooks your neighbors’ back patio. Then again, who knows what Abigail Martins is doing right now.

Zosia peers down into Carol’s yard with her cheek pressed into the cool glass. She can see that she’s been smoking. The ashtray is full. Probably with Zosia’s cigarettes. Maybe she can pick a fight about that later, and maybe the fight will draw Carol back into her bed. Maybe she’ll be able to sleep again.

You’ll have to answer to yourself eventually, Zosia thinks again. She falls asleep in the window seat thinking about arguing with Carol, her face against the glass. She doesn’t dream.

*

They’re close to something, close to a breakthrough. Zosia can feel it. Manousos and Carol are actually agreeing on things; normally the energy in the house is closer to debate club at a language immersion preschool. Now it’s quiet, serious. Manousos shows Carol equations scribbled on scraps of paper and she nods. They eat while they work. They rarely take breaks.

And, Carol is sort of ignoring her. Well, not really ignoring at all—but no longer radiating an explosive sexual energy in Zosia’s direction at all hours of the day. Manousos, at least, seems less on edge. But Zosia has stopped sleeping altogether.

She considers asking for sleeping pills but, for starters, no. And for another thing, it would feel like admitting that losing Carol’s touch has upset her life enough that she needs to be chemically knocked out in its absence. No, thank you.

Zosia waits for a few days for Carol to admit the error of her ways before remembering that Carol is one of the most obstinate people on the planet and had probably resisted the virus by sheer willpower alone. She maintains a vague sort of anger at her even if she doesn’t always understand about what. This shit always used to work on Jamie, and for lesser offenses.

She thinks for a while that she is going to have to take matters into her own hands, but Carol eventually gives in. Sort of. It’s their turn to wash dishes together—well, it’s Carol’s turn, but Zosia had insisted on joining.

(“Somebody needs to dry.”

“You never dry the dishes for Manousos.”

“Why would I dry dishes for Manousos?”)

Carol hands her a plate. Outside, the sky turns a hazy blue-orange. Zosia had never given much thought to the desert before, but it looks nice from Carol’s kitchen window.

“You’re not sleeping,” Carol says, without looking at her. She’s scrubbing an already clean spot on the casserole dish in her hands.

“Oh, I’m not?”

“No. I can see—” Carol huffs, keeps scrubbing. “—you’ve got bags under your eyes.”

“Wow, so this is how you charmed your way into Helen’s bed. It’s all coming together for me now.”

“Enough, Zosia. Enough with this, okay?” Zosia feels electricity zip up her spine. At the firmness of Carol’s voice, at the relief of their little tiff. “You need to sleep. Maybe if you moved off that couch…”

“I’m fine on the couch.”

“You could come here. I’ve got plenty of bedrooms.”

Proximity to Carol would actually certainly be helpful, but Zosia would sooner break the Pyrex dish in her hands over her head than admit that. “I’m not moving into your house, Carol.”

“Okay, well, so what is it? Do you need Ambien? Sleepy time tea? Warm milk?”

“Can you stop, please?” As if Zosia isn’t privately delighted by Carol’s attention, by the gruffness and intensity of it. Annoyed by it, yes, irritated generally by Carol as always, of course. But delighted in almost equal measure. She puts the dish down on their drying towel. “Stop pretending that you care about me.”

It’s a low blow, sure, but Zosia needs this to stick. Carol looks over at her for a second, brow knitted, mouth open. She gestures at Zosia with a pointer finger covered in soap.

“Hey, don’t ever accuse me of that, okay? If you want to fight, we fight above the belt,” she snaps, then stuffs her hands back into the sudsy water, working furiously at a glass. Zosia could say something, but she knows an unfinished Carol rant when she hears one. “Don’t care about you?” Carol continues after a moment, face beginning to redden, voice pitching upward. “Don’t care about you? You’re mine. You’re my responsibility.”

Oh, good. For a second, Zosia had been scared that Carol wouldn’t say anything insane to give her a foothold in this argument beyond antagonizing her. “Yours?” She exclaims, haughty, excited. “Yours? Did you fall and hit your head today, Carol?”

“My head is fine, thanks!”

“Yours?” Zosia repeats again, half because she likes the taste of the word in her mouth. “I’d rather drink nothing other than human slurry for the rest of my life! If you and I were truly the last two people on the face of this horrible planet I would look away from you.”

It’s a weird sentence. She can’t always put English together when she’s worked up. The hive mind hasn’t fixed that, apparently.

“Congratulations! Do you think that changes anything?” Behind them, Manousos walks in with his tea mug. “You think we’ve spent the last two weeks fucking like that because your deep desire to get rid of me means anything?” Manousos turns around and walks back out with the tea mug still in his hand. “‘I don’t care about you’. You’re insane.”

Now Zosia is feeling a little spun around, and she doesn’t like it. “I think you care about something.”

Carol’s face pinches, and Zosia does her best to swallow back the I didn’t mean that that threatens to come out of her mouth. She can be volatile but is very rarely cruel, and finds that it doesn’t sit as naturally with her as she had hoped.

Carol laughs, once, mirthlessly. She looks down into the sudsy water where her forearms are still immersed up to her elbows. She’s quiet for a moment, which is worse than the arguing by far. “You know everything about me. Everything that anybody has ever thought about me. And that’s still what you think of me. Fine, I guess. Fine.” She nods, blows out a breath. It flutters her hair. She pulls the plug on the sink and the sudsy water starts to drain from it.

Zosia gets knocked on her back foot so fast she’s surprised that the earth doesn’t start spinning in another direction. For some reason, her mind yanks her back to somebody’s memory. Carol tipsy. The cornflower blue blouse. That color looks— “I never said—” Zosia starts, but she had said it. Put your fists up, she wants to say. “—that’s not what I meant.” Carol doesn’t look at her. “I don’t know everything about you.”

“You know most things about me.”

“I don’t know what you think about you,” Zosia purses her lips. “The other day, when we were at the Martins’ house, making the bed. You were going to say something, and then you stopped yourself.”

Carol glances at her. Her brow furrows, then releases. She looks away. “I wanted to ask you if it ever gets easier. The dead spouse thing.”

“Oh,” says Zosia. She swallows. “Not really. Not in the way you’d expect. And not for a long time for you, anyway.”

“I think for a second there I was starting to at least get my arms around it, that she’s gone,” Carol continues, looking at the empty sink. “I spent 40 days alone and that was the only maybe good thing that happened. But then you—it—” She clears her throat. “It talked to me just the way she used to. It joked like her, it was almost a little spooky at first. But, you know. Forty days alone, and then it was like Helen was talking to me from beyond the grave.”

This has clearly been another grave miscalculation on Zosia’s part. It occurs to her that maybe what she’s trying only works if Carol is actually the unrepentant bastard that Zosia wants her to be. It occurs to her that she has known, maybe even from the beginning, that she is not.

Carol turns on the tap and washes the soap from her arms. “Thanks for your help,” she says, drying them with a dish towel. “Can you tell Manousos I’m going to bed early tonight?”

After she’s gone, dumbfounded, Zosia wanders into the dining room where Manousos sits with his head in a book. She crosses her arms and stands in the entryway for a moment. To say that that conversation was supposed to end much differently would be an understatement.

“Carol’s in bed for the night.” She says, and he gives her a withering, exasperated look.

“We were supposed to watch our stories. Now I have to wait for tomorrow to see what happens to Blanche?”

It’s clear where Manousos’ blame lies. Zosia flushes. “Sorry.” She mutters.

He puffs air out of his mouth and waves her off, returning to his book. Zosia lingers for a moment.

“Manousos, was I the jerk in that conversation?”

“No hablo inglés,” says Manousos without looking up. Zosia rolls her eyes. She stands for a half second more and then turns to leave, back to the Martins’ house. Back to laying awake in front of endlessly repeating infomercials. Before she can, she hears his voice again. “Yes.”

Zosia turns. He still hasn’t looked up from his book. “You are so annoying.” Manousos shrugs and turns a page.

“Right back at you,” he says.

*

She waits one more sleepless night before deciding that she has had enough. The three of them eat dinner in a kind of terse silence that’s uncharacteristic for them now—a couple weeks ago, maybe, but now. It’s odd. Zosia returns to her house after, engages in a staring contest with the long night in front of her, and blinks.

Carol is in a lawn chair reading when Zosia approaches the fence. She doesn’t look up from her book. She sits in her linen outfit, legs spread out in front of her. Slouching.

Zosia peers over the wood. “Hey,” she says. Carol grunts in response. Zosia looks at the cover of the book in her hands. “You’re reading Tolstoy.”

Carol does look up then. Once, quickly, then back down to the pages. “Cuff me, officer.”

There’s a fluttering in Zosia’s chest. Not the electric, sexual thrill of their arguments. Something softer and more horrible. “Why?”

“You’re the expert on man’s immense capacity for suffering. You tell me.” Carol says, and turns the page.

Zosia clears her throat. Sucks her teeth. Shoves her dignity into the trunk. “I came over here to apologize.”

This gets Carol’s attention. “What?” She asks, brow furrowed.

“I’m not going to say it twice.”

“You haven’t said it once.”

“I’m sorry.” Carol’s face opens in surprise. She dog ears a page and then sets the book in her lap. “There are a lot of things to be angry about but what I said to you wasn’t right. And it isn’t how I feel. It was a—” Zosia grasps at the English word for what she’s trying to say and can’t get her fingers around it. She has the comforting realization that yes, her English is still hers. Not hive enhanced. “God, you know. When you spill somebody’s drink on them at a party. Uh, I’m sorry dude.” She says the last part in the low intonation of a drunk American man at a party. Carol’s face softens with amusement.

“A party foul?”

Zosia snaps. “Yes, a party foul.”

Carol tries to smother a smile and does a shit job at it. “Shitty party, huh?”

“I’ve been to worse, believe it or not.”

“Well, thanks.” Carol says, and offers her a tight-lipped smile. She picks up her novel again. Zosia understands that she is going to need to be more direct, and seethes.

“Hey, do you want to come over?” She asks. Carol freezes and looks up at her like a bunny rabbit staring down the barrel of a shotgun. “Not for sex,” Zosia lies. “Just to watch TV or something.”

Carol squints. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I just could use some company, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you come inside here?” Carol asks. Zosia understands that this is probably not the first time a woman has asked Carol to just watch TV or something and reminds herself to dig up that memory later to either rage at or masturbate to, she isn’t sure which. “Me and Manousos are going to watch Golden Girls later, if that’s okay with you.”

“To be honest with you, I have been having some trouble sleeping,” Zosia says, finding the truth and weaponizing it. “I just thought—it’s stupid,” she fakes a little self-deprecating laugh. “But I thought having somebody over there with me would help. I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s not a good idea.”

She ends this with a flutter of her eyelashes. Carol stares at her, the wheels in her brain visibly turning. Men and women are really not so different, Zosia thinks with pleasure. She’s going to sleep like a baby tonight.

*

Zosia is surprised to find herself a little self-conscious when Carol re-enters her living room for the first time, as though it matters to her what Carol thinks about the state of her life. It’s not like she hasn’t been in there before, but things have certainly…devolved.

“Do you want a drink?” She asks, and quickly grabs the Wycaro book and underwear from underneath the throw pillow while Carol is standing, studying the back of one of her DVD cases.

“I’ll take water.”

Zosia slinks off in the direction of the kitchen. “Are you sure? The Martins didn’t have bad taste in wine, actually. There’s a whole cellar of it downstairs.”

“I’m good with water, thanks.”

Zosia shoves the book and the underwear into a cabinet on top of some cans of green beans and runs the tap. When she returns, Carol is sitting stiffly on the couch, next to a pile of books and a violin case. Zosia puts the glass down in front of her and sits.

“So what are we watching first?” Carol picks up one of the DVD cases and flips it around to the back. “Gospel’s Greatest Hits infomercial from 1989 or…Gunsmoke Season 4 episode 9, Land Deal?” She side eyes Zosia. “I’m still trying to decide if it would be weirder that the Martins just had these laying around their house, or weirder if you requested to have them put together.”

“Just put it in and play it from the top,” says Zosia, and Carol does. “I had them put together.”

“Ah,” Carol flops back down on the couch and hits play on the remote. “Is this another dead spouse thing that I have to look forward to?”

“I thought it would help me sleep. And the Martins have shit taste in DVDs,” they watch Billy Mays clean a towel with Oxyclean for a moment. “I did find their sex tape, though.”

A gasp from next to her. Zosia suppresses a smile. “No you didn’t. Mr. and Mrs. Martins?”

“Don’t act so surprised. They had four kids, didn’t they?”

“Exactly, and they’re still doing it recreationally?” Carol laughs and sits back into the couch. Without looking, Zosia can tell that she’s more relaxed. “Wow. Me and Helen used to kick their asses at neighborhood Bunco night. Who would have thought.”

“You’re really that surprised that people you played Bunco with have a sex tape? We’re sexual animals, Carol. It was vanilla, anyway.”

A shocked pause. “You watched it?”

“Yes, of course I watched it.”

“Ew!” Carol laughs incredulously. “Ugh, all I can think of is Mr. Martins’ combover. What possessed you?”

“It was a tough watch at times, to be fair.”

“Well, you’re a woman of many layers, Zosia.”

Zosia scoffs and looks over at her. “It didn’t do anything for me.”

Carol’s eyebrows shoot up and she makes an annoying face. “O-kay.”

“Please. Gunsmoke turns me on more than Mr. Martins’ ineffectual thrusting.”

A startled, delighted laugh. “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“Remind me to never ask you to use any adjectives to describe my thrusting.”

“If you say so,” says Zosia lightly. “But I think he should have been asking you for tips.”

Carol’s only visible reaction to this is a twitching at the corner of her mouth. The beginnings of a smug expression. She doesn’t look away from the TV. She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and bites it. “So you’re more of a Burt Reynolds gal, eh?”

She studies Carol’s profile. “It’s more the women.”

Carol shifts on the couch and clears her throat. Bullseye, Zosia thinks. “It was before my time, but I don’t recall there being very many women on Gunsmoke.”

“There‘s women almost every episode. Somebody needs to be in danger. Some…saloon keeper’s busty daughter needs to get tied to the train tracks so Burt Reynolds can ride in and save her.”

“Saloon keeper’s busty daughter,” Carol repeats, the amusement evident on her face. She rolls the words around in her mouth like marbles. “I didn’t realize you were so familiar with the show.”

“I had to learn English quickly after we moved to America, so that my mother could put me into public school. But we couldn’t afford lessons. So I thought I’d just…watch television until it clicked. It was the dream logic of a fifteen year old girl.”

“Fascinating,” says Carol. “But doesn’t really explain why you had a 40 year old man’s taste in TV as a teenager.”

Zosia weighs the pros and cons of telling this part of the story. She comes out on the side of pro. “I was just beginning to, you know. Discover myself, at that time. Discover my body, I mean. But we were poor, I lived in a tiny two bedroom-apartment with multiple generations of my family. I had one window of alone time per week; on Tuesday afternoons, right after school until about 5 PM when my mother got home from work.”

Carol picks up her water and takes a big drink. She is pointedly not looking at Zosia. “You forgot to start this one with ‘Dear Penthouse’.”

Zosia snakes a foot over and kicks her. “Can you get your head out of your ass for two seconds? I’m trying to share something with you.”

Setting the glass back down on the coffee table, Carol raises her hands. “By all means.”

“As I was saying, I got one window of alone time every week and anything I wanted to do by myself I had to do then. Read a book or sing in the shower or masturbate. I always masturbated, actually, because it only took a few minutes and it put me in a better mood after—but this was before, you know, computers and porn everywhere, and. Whatever. My brother and my father knew better than to keep dirty magazines around the house. So you had to be quick and creative.”

Carol officially looks like she’s regretting not taking that drink. “And we’re still talking about Gunsmoke right now?”

“Do you skip to the end of books before you read the middle?” Zosia asks pointedly. “A few months in I could make anything work. My mother’s still life calendar. The Farmer’s Almanac. Cereal boxes. You know, the tiger guy. But the best were always these old cowboy shows, I think because they tried so hard to make them wholesome. It was almost like a game I was playing, to make it dirty somehow. The thing that always did it for me was when they had these beautiful women fall into the clutches of the bandits or the outlaws. Something about the control, the power. The helplessness. Maybe that was when I really first realized that I might not just be attracted to men—I could masturbate to the image of a woman tied to train tracks without really finessing it at all. Just from waiting to see if her dress would go any higher while she thrashed around.”

When she finishes, Carol is staring at her, lips parted, brow knitted, cheeks pink. They’ve drifted closer on the couch, and their knees are almost touching.

Carol says: “I think I’m going to go sit on the arm chair,” right before her eyes flick down to Zosia’s mouth.

Zosia tilts in. “It’s covered in junk.”

Carol tilts back. “I’ll move the junk.”

The unstoppable force has hit the immovable object. Zosia cedes her ground, shifting out of Carol’s space. “Stay,” she says. “I’m going to make popcorn. We can’t share if you’re over there.”

When she returns to the living room with a metal bowl of popcorn, Carol seems less on edge. She has her elbow propped on Zosia’s violin case and is absently watching the infomercial playing on the television.

“Oh, thanks.” She says when Zosia sits back down, putting the bowl between them on the couch. No use in spooking her again. They watch without speaking for a few minutes, but the silence is like a sopping washcloth waiting to get rung dry. It’s dripping wet and heavy.

“Zosia,” Carol says finally. “Can I ask you a question?”

Zosia’s heart begins to race. “Sure,” she says, playing at nonchalance. “If you want.”

Carol clears her throat. “Are you—when we were—” She stops, seems to be redoing the math in her head. “—you said you were imagining a man. Were you really?”

Zosia eyes her askance. At least they’re trending in the right direction, if only by a bizarre back road. “I did, sort of, the first time.” It was a man that bore a striking resemblance to Carol Sturka, but sure.

Carol looks over at her. “But not anymore.” She says. Zosia shrugs.

“It only worked because it was a little bit you. The man I was picturing. Is that a thing?”

Carol looks nervous again. “Is what a thing?”

“Having sex a woman but pretending that she’s a man who’s still sort of a woman. Is that customary to lesbianism?”

“Technically speaking I think I’m the only lesbian left on earth right now, and I’m fine with it.”

“I’ve never done it before, so I wouldn’t know,” says Zosia. “I’ve never done it as myself, I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Carol says quietly.

“I was having what you would probably call a midlife crisis. Right before—” Zosia waves her hand around. “—I had this idea that I was going to start sleeping with my students. My female students.”

This gets a startled noise from Carol. “Your undergraduate students? Like, a twenty year old woman?”

Zosia nods, puts a piece of popcorn in her mouth. “They were all so…attentive and needy.”

“I’m sure they fuckin’ were. So just to recap,” Carol shifts on the couch so that she’s propped against the back of it, tilting in towards Zosia, her face bright with amusement. “Prior to this you were seriously contemplating sleeping with one of your young, nubile, coed students, and you get turned on by…women being tied to train tracks?”

“Treat lightly there, Carol.” Zosia pauses. “You can get away with it if you look like a Polish supermodel.”

A laugh explodes from Carol, a real one. She smiles in a way that is genuine and consumes her whole face. It’s a nice smile; top-heavy, toothy. And her eyes, when she laughs, are brighter.

“You’re being surprisingly candid,” says Carol.

Zosia shrugs. “I thought I’d throw you a bone.”

“You don’t owe me anything. But I like knowing more about you, even if it’s, you know. Perverted and kind of scary.”

Zosia studies her for a moment. “Are you scared of me, Carol?”

Billy Mays is wringing out a tee shirt. Zosia knows something in the air has shifted because the image of the water droplets forcing their way through his knuckles is…arresting, suddenly.

The smile ebbs from Carol’s face somewhat. She isolates it into the corner of her mouth. Not entirely gone, but restrained. “Yes.”

“Is it because I’m different?”

“Different from who?”

“Different from her.” The her in question doesn’t need to be elaborated upon. Carol exhales out of her nose.

“Zosia, this conversation is—”

“Is what? You said you wanted to help me feel better. This would help me feel better.” Is Zosia seriously getting jealous of herself right now? This might be a new low in a season of lows.

Carol folds her lips in and casts her eyes up to the ceiling, like she is asking god for something. “I…like that you’re different.”

“I don’t see how that could really be true.”

“What?” Asks Carol. She seems almost offended by this. “Of course it’s true, I just told you so.”

“Well, you also told me you didn’t want to have sex with me anymore. So.”

“Yeah, not because I don’t want to have sex with you. Because I’m trying to spare us both further psychological damage. There is…a world of difference between those two things, okay?” She pauses, turning toward the TV with her arms crossed. Zosia doesn’t look away from her.

“Do you ever wonder if I would touch you like she did?”

Carol’s tongue pokes out, touches her bottom lip. “I know for a fact that you wouldn’t.”

“So you do think about it.”

“Of course I do.”

“Are you thinking about it right now?” Carol says nothing, which is an indictment on its own. “I am.”

“Zosia.”

“I just don’t know how you can be fine without it,” to Zosia’s deep shame, it isn’t even a manipulation. It is the truth. The honest, god-awful truth. “I don’t understand how you can walk around all day acting fine when I can’t even—”

“God, fuck, I’m not fine, I’m—”

They both lean in for the kiss at the same time, and their collision flips the popcorn bowl over and sends it sailing into the coffee table. There are multiple DVD case casualties. Zosia couldn’t give less of a shit. She’s half crawling into Carol’s lap and Carol’s tongue is in her mouth.

Carol tears herself away and Zosia simply redirects her attention, licking her ear, pulling at the lobe with her teeth. “God,” Carol breathes, “I don’t care if you run me over with your car for saying this, but I missed you. You’re a fucking terrorist, but I missed you.”

They’re going to do it in missionary again, Zosia decides, so that Carol will lay her body down on top of hers and she can wrap her arms and legs around it and squeeze. She does not call this action by its other, more common name because…god. Someday she will have to answer to—

A moan, from one of them. Carol pushes the violin out of the way and it clatters to the floor. Zosia is pushing into her so hard that the couch moves, scraping across the hardwood.

She barely even realizes it when she shoves Carol’s shirt up over her head, feeling only a stab of disappointment when they have to pull apart for the fabric to come off and then a wave of relief when she has better access to Carol’s gorgeous fucking tits.

Carol is wearing a bra, it’s beige and too small and somehow it has a coffee stain on it. First order of business, upon saving the world, is getting Carol nicer underwear. Something actually befitting of her.

Zosia reminds herself that she doesn’t touch Carol. But she wants to touch Carol. Looking at Carol’s chest heaving in that ugly fucking bra makes her wet—but is that her or Helen or Becca fucking Wertz—Zosia dislodges the thought by kissing her so hard that Carol grunts with the force of it.

She tries to make the kiss mean—to get revenge on herself or on Carol, she doesn’t know, but it’s one of them—and succeeds only in making Carol’s body melt into hers. Jesus, she smells good, and her skin is soft. Her mouth tastes like coffee. Sometimes Carol has coffee after dinner. It’s one of the only times during the day, other than when she’s fucking Zosia, that she seems to be enjoying herself.

Zosia realizes that somewhere in the scuffle of their kiss, Carol’s bra strap has slipped down and one of the cups, too. The pink skin of her nipple half-exposed beneath the edge. You can’t pick the apple off the tree, she thinks, but you can eat it off the ground. She puts her mouth to the exposed skin of Carol’s shoulder and licks.

A hard squirm against her. They’re so pretzeled together that it’s impossible to say who is on top of who. “Jesus, Zosia, I—”

“Shut up,” Zosia mutters into her shoulder. “Please shut up.” She grabs Carol’s waist. Her skin is soft. Her body is a responsive organ; it twitches when Zosia handles it roughly.

Memories flood her brain. Her body, her hands, doing all the things that she wants to do right now. Carol’s breast in her palm. The texture of her nipple against her tongue. The shiver of her stomach. Again, Zosia feels jealous somehow. How come they got to feel it and she didn’t? How come they got to enjoy it? They couldn’t even fully appreciate it, and Zosia—

All at once, Zosia opens her mouth and bites down. She takes Carol’s breast in her hand and squeezes. Zosia knows immediately that it’s too much; too sudden, too hard, too eager. Carol makes a startled, strangled sound, half a gasp, half an ow.

It’s like getting cold water splashed into her face. Zosia pulls back, a string of spit connecting her mouth to Carol’s shoulder. She moves her body, panting and near-vibrating, to the other end of the couch.

Carol’s eyes open, her brow pulled in confusion. “What—sorry, I’m sorry. You just surprised me.”

“You told me you didn’t want to do that anymore. I shouldn’t have,” says Zosia. Her arousal has been replaced with a hot flush of embarrassment. Carol is gawking at her, panting and strung out.

“Yeah, but I—” Her jaw flexes once. “—Zosia, it felt good. It just took me off guard, that’s all. You’ve never—”

“No, I haven’t, because I don’t want to,” Zosia says, which is a lie, and she becomes suddenly and acutely aware that Carol knows it’s a lie. The realization makes her want to cry. “Maybe you should go sit on the arm chair.”

“Okay,” Carol says. She’s pulling the cup of her bra up, and that makes Zosia want to cry harder. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No, I want you to stay,” Zosia says, like a child. “I want you to stay and sit over there and forget that happened.”

Carol takes her shirt from the coffee table. “Forget what happened?” She meets Zosia’s eyes and offers a warm half-smile, gentle and full of understanding. Upon seeing it, Zosia does start crying.

“Oh, crap,” says Carol. She hastens to get the shirt over her head and then reaches out to her. Zosia shrugs away.

“Don’t touch me,” she says through her tears. Carol nods and shakes her head at the same time, standing.

“You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

Zosia cries harder. “Don’t go.”

“Right, okay, arm chair.”

By the time Carol has moved the junk from the chair and sat down, Zosia’s active sobbing has been reduced to the occasional sniffle. She sits with her arms crossed and stares at the TV. An infomercial ends. An episode of Gunsmoke begins.

“If I so much as see a train track,” says Carol, “I’m fast forwarding.”

*

When Zosia wakes again in the early hours of the morning, the house is dark except for the glow of the DVD icon bouncing around the television screen. She is sweating, and there is a nightmare lingering somewhere at the edges of her mind.

A quiet snore draws her attention to the arm chair. Carol, asleep with a throw blanket over her lap and her legs kicked out in front of her, shifts slightly. Zosia eyes her, sighs.

“Carol,” she whispers. Carol grunts but doesn’t stir. “Carol,” she says louder, and Carol jolts.

“Whahu,” Carol’s hand snakes out from underneath the blanket and rubs her eye. “Timeisit?”

“Late,” still supine, Zosia turns so that her cheek is pressed to the arm of the couch. She gazes through the dark at Carol. “Carol? Are you awake?”

“Sorry, Zosh, yup,” Carol’s voice is slurred with sleep still. Zosia forgives her the slip of her name. “Did something happen?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh,” Carol sighs. She sounds more awake. “Bad dream?” Zosia grunts. “About anything exciting?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“I was dreaming that I was in the grocery store but all the labels on the food were in another language. I couldn’t tell what anything was. Funny, you think during the apocalypse your dreams would be more profound. But it’s all just the same bullshit.”

“Your insights into the human psyche are truly riveting, Carol.”

“You woke me up,” Carol says, but there’s no bite to it. She shifts again and pulls her blanket up to her chin. “Okay, let me think. Tell me about a good memory. Before, you know. This mess.”

“Mm, I got new boots, when I was in Morocco,” Zosia rolls so that she’s on her back, staring at the ceiling. “Don’t know where they are now, though. I tried rfissa while I was there. I liked it, I’d never had it before,” she pauses. “I wonder if I’ll ever try a new food like that again.”

“Don’t get melancholy on me now,” Carol says, and pauses. “Is that where you were, when you got—”

“Mm. I was on a girl’s trip. Celebrating the end of the semester.”

Carol hums. “What was it like?” She asks, and then: “Sorry, I don’t—”

“I’ve been waiting for you to ask.” Carol never has. Manousos did, once, in an academic way, and never brought it up again. Zosia has always figured that they are scared to know. “It felt like falling asleep. But sort of like falling asleep after you’ve had half a bottle of wine and chased it with some Nyquil.”

“I know the feeling,” says Carol.

“I figured you would,” says Zosia.

“Did it feel good?”

“In a way. It felt good like being drunk feels good, right before you get sick. I’ve never done heroin, but I imagine it’s…similar.”

“Do you ever wish that you were still there? Still…one of them?”

“This is your attempt at light conversation to put me back to sleep?”

“Okay, whatever. Name stuff you’d find in a grocery store in alphabetical order. That always helps me.”

Zosia huffs. “It didn’t start to seem awful until I was me again. If I was still in there, none of the things that are hurting me now would still be hurting me. But I would still be doing them.”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

“Is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Says Zosia. “I don’t fucking know, Carol. I’m here now.”

There is a long stretch of quiet. When Carol speaks, her voice is barely there. “I’m happy you’re here.”

Zosia wonders where she went so wrong over the last month that she is laying on that couch wishing that Carol Sturka would come nearer to her.

“Okay,” she says. “Apples. Bananas. C…c…”

“Couscous? Weren’t you just in Morocco?”

Zosia pivots her body to give Carol a glare that she’s sure she cannot see. “Are you supposed to be helping me?” She twists back onto her back. “Smart aleck.”

“Sorry.”

“Dish soap, I guess.”

She’s asleep by salad greens.

*

Carol sleeps in that arm chair every night for a week. Every night for a week, Zosia wakes from a nightmare and they talk until she drifts off again. It’s not the heavy, uninterrupted sleep she gets after they have sex. But it’s something.

*

“The Brawny paper towel guy, seriously?”

“You’re not even attracted to men, Carol, I’m not sure why I’m talking to you about this in the first place.”

“I mean, I don’t think he even has a face, does he? I guess it makes more sense than Tony the tiger, but marginally.”

“I was a poor child from communist Poland, I wasn't exactly rich in material.”

Carol grunts. “What did Jamie look like?”

“Blonde, blue eyes, small. He was an asshole, like—” Zosia stops dead in her tracks and purses her mouth. The silence between them is damning. “Shut up, Carol.”

“I literally wasn’t saying anything.”

*

“What do you think of Albuquerque?” Zosia makes a farting sound with her mouth. “Oh, come on. Are you twelve?”

“It’s flat and orange. What would you like me to say?”

“There’s a lot of cultural heritage. Landmarks and stuff.”

“I’ll be sure to visit one of those on my lunch break.”

“Georgia O’Keefe. You know Georgia O’Keefe.”

“I know the painting you stole,” says Zosia. “A lesbian with yonic art on her wall thinly veiled as a painting of a flower, how novel.”

“Thanks for the reminder that I have to turn that around lest you start mastur—ow! Fuck off, how’s your aim so good in the dark? You’re like Babe Ruth with night vision. I’m keeping this pillow, by the way.”

*

“Manousos keeps saying we should cut each other’s hair.”

“Leave me out of that.”

“That’s what I said to him. To leave you out of it.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll just shave him down like a doodle. He’ll be fine.”

“But what about you, Carol?”

“He said he’s cut his nephews’ hair before.”

“Just nephews? He didn’t mention any nieces? A hot sister?”

“Maybe my Spanish just isn’t there yet.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Oh yeah? What are you going to say?”

“That if he makes you ugly, I’ll kill him.”

A pause.

“Honesty thing again?”

“I wish I were dead.”

*

They sleep in the same room for a week and, by the end of that week, they have gone from close to figuring it out to scary close. When she was in college, Zosia had a friend who used to tell her that there was a relationship for every season of one’s life. The first love, the first heartbreak. The rebel, the dependable one. The one who you marry only to die young and leave you wanting.

She wonders what you call the person who stays up with you all night, every night, in the sliver of light between the end of one world and the beginning of a new one, as though there is nothing better for her to be doing than talk to you. In the end, Zosia gives up on the idea as stupid and reductive. She decides that she’ll just keep calling her Carol.

*

The air on the roof of the KKOB radio station is a lot colder than Zosia thought it would be. Carol shivers next to her. She’d given Zosia her sweater a few minutes before.

“Are you sure he’s okay up there?”

“Manousos? He’s loving it,” Carol peers up at where Manousos is scaling the radio tower. He is nothing more than a spec against the darkening sky. She shoots a thumbs up his way.

“We’re getting close,” says Zosia. “Manousos will get his…dohickey, and then…” Carol grunts an acknowledgement. She is staring out on the horizon, knees to her chest, arms around them. “Are you nervous?”

“Well, causing a global humanitarian crisis and only killing a few million people is…the best case scenario. What’s there to be nervous about?” Carol flashes her a grimace. “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, right?”

“You quoting me?”

“Oh, you wrote that?”

Zosia just snorts. To say that she has gone soft on the subject of Carol Sturka would be a terrible understatement. “Cigarette?”

“Sure,” Zosia takes the pack from her pocket and lights one. She puffs, passes it over to Carol. In front of them, Albuquerque yawns wide, just as flat and orange as ever. There’s something that Carol loves about this place, and maybe someday she’ll know what it is. “I honestly wouldn’t have taken you for a smoker.”

“I’m not, really. My grandma smoked them. The smell reminds me of giving her a hug.”

Carol pauses, exhales a cloud of smoke. “Honesty thing?”

“No,” says Zosia. “I just felt like telling you.” They smoke a second in companionable silence. “You couldn’t have taken me for anything, anyway. You don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s not true, I knew one or two things about you,” Zosia gives her an unimpressed look and Carol, to her credit, turns a little sheepish. “Alright, fair play.”

“I’m nothing like she was.”

“No freaking kidding you’re not.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Hard?” Carol’s face screws up. “What do you mean, hard?”

“To go from your placid sex bot to—” Zosia gestures vaguely around. She has the cigarette clutched between her pointer and middle fingers. Carol, impossibly, laughs.

“—to the woman who slaps me and jerks off to the Farmer’s Almanac? Yes, but I like you. You, Zosia, you. I’ve liked you since you were trying to beat the shit out of me in the car. I’m terrified of you, but I like you.”

“Sorry for that.”

“I deserved it.”

Zosia shrugs. Suddenly she’s unwilling to commit to it. Carol is handing her the gun, even, and she’s unable to pull the trigger. “That was an ugly trick they played on you,” she says, and snubs the cigarette on the roof.

“Yeah, but you were—I shouldn’t have—”

“Carol,” Zosia cocks a brow. “Are we fucking the wound?”

Carol scoffs a little. “I don’t know, it kind of seems like you’re going soft on me.”

“Who, me? I don’t think so.”

Resting her cheek on her forearm, Carol looks off into the sunset. “It’s okay if you want somebody to apologize to you. And, really, I’m fine being that person.”

“What person?”

“The person who says sorry.”

“You can only apologize for what you did.”

“Hey, don’t limit me,” Carol’s nose scrunches. It’s adorable, and makes her look younger. Zosia pictures leaning over and kissing it, kissing her face, feeling her skin relax under her mouth. For a moment she thinks that it’s somebody else’s memory, before realizing that it’s just her own mind. “You have no idea what I’m capable of being sorry for.”

“Lately it just seems like a waste of time, and not very helpful. So you apologize to me, and then what? I…move on with my life?”

She hasn’t finished the word life before they’ve both burst out laughing.

“I don’t know, Zosia, maybe,” Carol says, sobering somewhat, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “Technically you can do whatever you want.”

“Who would keep you and Manousos from shaving each other bald?”

“I guess so,” Carol agrees noncommittally. They lapse into silence. For a second, it feels like that might be it. A cold breeze blows through and Zosia burrows further into Carol’s sweatshirt. She puts her nose into the collar of it and smells.

“I like you, too,” she says, with her eyes still closed and her face tucked into the sweatshirt. It’s weird, she’d expected admitting out loud to feel worse. Like getting to the parking lot and finding out that your car’s been keyed. But it feels comforting in that way the truth sometimes does.

Zosia opens her eyes. Carol’s face is all twisted up.

“What? No you don’t.”

Carol’s resistance actually makes it easier for her to double down. “I do. I like your funny little walk and your piss poor attitude—”

“You like my funny little—”

“—and the way you make me laugh. You make me laugh really hard, sometimes, even though there’s nothing to laugh about. And your eyes. You have eyes the color of the freaking Hope Diamond, Carol.”

Carol is looking over at her with the same slavish devotion with which she fucks her, with which she loves her dead wife, with which she is currently saving the world. There are worse people to spend the end of times with than Carol, by miles and miles.

Zosia realizes with a hot, satisfied clarity that this is just another memory of Carol. That this one is hers, and that nobody else has it.

“I’m sorry for that, too,” Carol says. “You can throw it on the bonfire with all the other shit.”

Zosia rewards this line with a kiss, for some reason. A soft one, chaste, with a hand on Carol’s cheek. She tastes like cigarettes and coffee. Above them, Manousos shouts, and they break apart.

“Oh, he didn’t like that,” Carol says, peering up with a hand shielding her eyes. He yells down something in Spanish and she yells up something in Spanglish and then the two of them are engaging in a lively argument while Manuous dangles from the side of the radio tower.

Zosia sighs, looks out toward the horizon. Do whatever she wants—what the hell else would she do? Albuquerque is starting to look different, anyway. Almost liveable, from this angle.

*

Carol tells her she needs to sleep in the bedroom, Zosia tells her she’s not doing it alone. She thinks it is a pretty clear invitation for Carol to get into the Martins’ bed with her and fuck her into those hideously mismatching sheets.

Instead, Carol puts on a full compliment of pajamas—tee shirt, sweatpants, the whole 9—and drags a goddamn arm chair into the room. Zosia sits propped against the headboard, legs under the comforter, arms crossed.

“Carol,” she says. Carol flops back onto the chair and flips open her book. Tolstoy.

“Yeah?” She asks and, when Zosia says nothing, continues: “Do you want me to read this out loud?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” The clock behind Carol’s head ticks. A page turns. “What did I do?” She asks after a moment.

Zosia pouts. “Nothing.” That’s sort of the problem.

“So why are you trying to zap me with your brain?” Carol arches a brow over the top of the book. “Do you need something?”

“It would be more comfortable in the bed.”

Carol’s expression doesn’t change. “Ah. Do you want me to get into bed with you?”

Zosia isn’t sure what further invitation Carol needs. Yes, perhaps the last time they’d done something like this she had burst into tears. Yes, while emotionally stunted, Carol is no fool. And, yes, Zosia understands, on some level, that if she says yes, Carol will do whatever she wants. But the idea of admitting that she needs Carol for something still makes her feel like a child refusing broccoli at dinner. Petulant.

She says: “I don’t care.” Taking the knife, cutting off her nose. Face successfully spited.

“Okay,” says Carol, eyes flicking back down to the book. She is an asshole. Zosia wants to eat her in one bite. “Then I’m comfortable here, but thanks.”

*

Zosia has that dream again, the dream where she falls into the ocean. The dream where the whole world dives in after her, chasing her, until the ocean is more hands and mouths than it is water. She dreams it over and over again and still it takes her a minute before she realizes that they are trying to pry their way inside of her. Fingers pressing past her lips when she tries to scream. Feet kicking her ribs. Then somebody grabbing her, grabbing her by the scruff of her neck and pulling her upward—

“Zosia, Zosh, baby, you’ve got to wake up—” When Zosia opens her eyes, she’s already sitting up. The hand at the back of her neck is Carol’s and, regrettably, she moves it when she realizes that Zosia is conscious. “Are you okay? Fuck, I thought you were having another seizure. Are you—”

Carol’s nervousness is palpable, even in the dark. “Don’t call me baby,” Zosia croaks out. Her heart is only just beginning to slow.

Carol laughs. A relieved sound. A moment of hesitation, and then she reaches up and puts her hand again on the back of Zosia’s neck. She doesn’t move, doesn’t rub. Just…leaves it there. The feeling of her touch is like a warm blanket, like hot water pouring over her head in the shower.

“Thank god.”

Zosia sniffs. “Thank god?”

“When you talk like that, I know it’s still you. God, what a relief.”

God, what a relief. Unable to help herself, Zosia turns and pulls Carol into her arms. She grips her—a hand tangled in her hair, another fisting the back of her shirt, and makes a strangled, desperate sound. Carol is here. She is Carol’s responsibility. Carol is relieved it’s her. Carol holds her back, pushes her face into Zosia’s hair. “Hey, it’s okay—it’s—oh,” Zosia has pulled back a sliver and is starting to yank at Carol’s tee shirt. Carol freezes, then pulls the shirt back down, recovering her midriff. Zosia grunts in protest. “This is, uh, not a good idea. I think.”

“Carol,” Zosia says. She shifts her head slightly so they are pressed cheek to cheek as though in a dance, rather than a wrestling match over a shirt. She is sure that Carol can feel the tears dried to her cheek, and the ones that are coming afresh. Suddenly the idea of lying to herself, to Carol, feels so fucking pointless. “I need you. I just need to feel your body for a second. Please. I think it’s the only thing that’s going to fix me.”

She hears Carol swallow and then the direction of her grip changes and the shirt is coming over her head with a soft, static pop. Zosia makes that hideous grunting noise again but is too dizzy to care. Carol’s hands are at Zosia’s tank top then, and thank god, because it needs to come off, it needs to come off immediately, Zosia is too busy grabbing her, holding her closer, mouthing at the bared skin of her shoulder.

The tank top gets stuck halfway around Zosia’s neck because she won’t break apart. An avalanche of things happens seemingly all at once; they kiss, Carol moans. She yanks at the fabric of Zosia’s top ineffectually. Their skin rubs together, the hard pebble of Carol’s nipple against her’s. Zosia takes one of Carol’s hands and shoves it down and into her panties, which are already sticking to her skin with slick.

Carol pauses a moment, still sitting up, still tangled in Zosia. Her wrist in Zosia’s hand and her fingers just under the band of her panties, her other hand gripping the back of Zosia’s tank top.

“Do you need me, too?” Zosia asks, like she is crawling through the desert and asking for a glass of water. “Please say yes.” If Carol says no, she figures that she can work their way back in degrees starting from prolonged naked hug until they find something she’s comfortable with.

Carol says: “I do,” Carol then says: “I just can’t undress you and fuck you at the same time.”

A wave of primal relief. “Just try your best,” says Zosia, although she moves back just enough for Carol to remove her top before returning, wrapping her free arm around her shoulders, and pulling Carol on top of her.

“Where’s the strap on,” asks Carol. Her fingers are pressed up against the damp curls between Zosia’s legs, but they’re unmoving. “Which nightstand is it—”

“Just touch me,” Zosia puts her hand fully over Carol’s and presses it down, and in, and her fingers slide into her with no resistance at all but the angle is shallow and constrained by her underwear and Zosia can barely feel her at all. She holds Carol by the wrist and tries fucking herself, moving her hips, but it’s insufficient and borderline pathetic.

“If you let me go for a second I can get a better angle.”

“Take off your pants and underwear,” gasps Zosia. In an effort to get closer, she rolls them so that they’re on their sides and hooks her leg around Carol’s waist. It is, coincidentally, a better angle. Carol’s fingers slide in further, guided by Zosia’s hand. Zosia moans, broken and low. Carol reaches around and grips her shoulder, then starts to move.

“Your pants, your—,” gasps Zosia after a dizzying moment of this. “I want you naked.”

“Give me a second, I can make you—”

“I don’t care,” Zosia says, then grips her hand so that she stops fucking her. Her muscles clench around Carol’s fingers and one of them, Zosia thinks it must be Carol, makes a sound. “Naked, right now, please.”

“Okay,” Carol nods, starts to withdraw her hand. Zosia holds it steady.

“Definitely don’t pull out.”

A pause. “Okay.” A complicated series of motions takes place under the blanket. Carol reaches down with her left hand, cross-crosses it between their bodies, starts to push her own bottoms off. The movement jostles the fingers inside Zosia and Zosia moans again and then Carol moans and they’re moving again, Carol’s sweats and panties down somewhere below her knees. Zosia pushes them the rest of the way off with one of her feet.

Carol fucks her to her first orgasm with a warm, comforting urgency. She kisses her mouth, then her neck, then down to her breasts. She doesn’t seem to mind when Zosia holds her head there, although it can’t be easy for her to breathe.

“You can move your hand,” Carol gasps, tilting her head, lower lip still half-caught on the curve of Zosia’s breast. “I’m not going to stop fucking you, don’t worry.”

Zosia decides to trust her, and Carol does not let her down. She’s a good man in a storm, Carol Sturka. When Zosia is done with her first orgasm she rolls her onto her back and gives her a second with her mouth, so insistent that the act shivers in the line between pain and pleasure. Carol makes the same noises when she touches Zosia that she does when she’s being touched, like she is starving and Zosia is just barely enough to satiate her.

She licks her clean after, the insides of her thighs, the still-swollen flesh of her cunt, until Zosia feels the irresponsible urge to go a third time.

But when Carol kisses her way back up her body, Zosia finds herself instead exploring her topography. She squeezes the flesh of her ass, then lower to her thigh. She grabs and her fingers brush wet hair when they curve in.

Zosia’s hand wanders up to Carol’s breast and touches. And there it is again—that wonderful sound that she knows Carol is capable of making. Especially when she rolls a nipple with her thumb, especially when she sucks Carol’s lower lip into her mouth and bites. They tremble together in a haystack of limbs, wet kissing, Zosia’s legs up around Carol’s hips. They’ve fucked roughly 60% of the bedding off the bed again.

“I have something to say,” announces Zosia. Her hand is halfway to crawling down Carol’s stomach and Carol is shaking like a nervous dog. She brushes her belly button with her fingertips.

“Floor’s yours,” Carol murmurs. Her hips squirm, then pitch forward.

“I no longer have the collective knowledge of every person on earth who’s ever had sex. I have some—memories—obviously, but I don’t want to—”

“You shouldn’t,” Carol cuts her off. She puts her hand over Zosia’s hand and strokes her knuckles.

“So in a roundabout way, I’ve never done this before,” Zosia finishes, and her hand moves lower, through tawny curls, and lower, and Carol moans. No, she moans. “Some ground rules. Carol?”

“Sorry, you’re making me multitask,” Carol says, of Zosia’s fingers strumming over her clit. “I’m listening.”

“No laughing.”

“This is so profoundly unfunny. Oh, god. You’re a natural at that.”

“No jokes.”

“What if they’re really funny jokes? Ouch, don’t pinch—I hear you. I hear you,” Carol fumbles through the dark to find Zosia’s face with her hand. She touches to feel. So does Zosia. “You’re just you and I’m just me, okay? Let’s try it like that and see where it gets us.”

Beautiful words spoken by a wise person. Zosia rolls her onto her back and tries it exactly like that.

*

“Okay, enough, enough, enough,” when Zosia’s hand moves away, Carol squeezes her thighs together. A guard against re-entry. “Jesus christ, don’t you need to change your batteries or something?”

“What did I say about jokes?”

“I just came five times. I’m being dead serious.”

Zosia’s fingers brush the tender skin of her stomach again. It trembles. Her hand is soaked, the sheet is sodden too. She hadn’t realized that, how wet the whole affair would be. The last couple especially had been—

“One more time,” says Zosia, burying her face into Carol’s neck and inhaling. She strokes her thigh clumsily. Her forearm hurts. “Six is a nicer number. Rounder.”

“Zosia, I’m fifty. Six orgasms could put me into cardiac arrest. It could kill me.”

“Oh, poor you.”

“And then you’ll have to explain to Manousos that you fingered me until I died.”

“Hmm.”

“Six orgasms isn’t sex, it’s an assassination attempt.”

“Are you seriously complaining about coming too much?”

“Never underestimate my capacity to complain.”

Zosia puts her mouth very close to Carol’s ear. “I haven’t tried using my mouth yet.”

“You’re right,” Carol says, unclenching her thighs. “Six is better.”

*

Zosia sleeps on her stomach. Carol sleeps draped over her body as though protecting her from a bomb blast. Ironic. Sweet, but ironic.

She has one more dream that night, or a memory, or both. It’s not hers. It’s Joey’s, but not really, because she’s not seeing it through Joey’s eyes. She is looking down at Carol as though from a bird’s perspective, or a tree’s, or the sun’s, or god’s. Was god in the hivemind? A foolish question, maybe. If all the people on earth were there, so was he.

Carol is twelve and she is wearing a red jacket. She has just wiped out on her bicycle and sits on her knees on the asphalt of a suburban New Mexico neighborhood. She turns her face away from Joey so that he will not see her cry. Zosia looks for Joey’s secondhand embarrassment, but for the first time, she can’t find it.

Instead, she watches as Carol rises unsteadily to her feet. Her jeans are ripped at the knee and Zosia can see the hole in her flesh. She can see all the inside parts of her exposed, the gravel inside of it. Carol, still holding back tears, picks up her bike. She takes a step.

“Do you want me to see if I can use somebody’s phone?” Asks Joey. Carol shakes her head. Of course she does. That’s Carol, that’s always been Carol. Twelve or fifty or one hundred. Zosia feels such a tenderness and pride for her that she could almost fall out of the sky.

“Let’s just walk home,” she says, voice thin. And then Carol does walk. She limps, really, stifling tears and ashamed and bleeding, but she moves. She does start to cry, a few tears on her cheeks at first, and then many, but she moves. She cries and moves toward home. She moves in the direction of the horizon.

When Zosia wakes with the sun, with Carol’s body still draped over hers, she realizes that she’s been crying, too.

Notes:

i don't know if anybody ever actually got tied to the train tracks in gunsmoke tbh

Notes:

I do have an idea for a second part of this from Zosia's POV that I may or may not come back with. But. Anyway. I hope you enjoyed!