I offer you here an example of my fiction. It is a short story from my book of collected fiction, Overone. It is available at Amazon Books by the title Overone, author John Battle.

The arc of time cut cruelly for Sister Jean Patrice. She loved poetry and teaching and writing, but now she loved people, specific people, a couple of sweethearts, men actually, in love with each other. Of all things, an old nun dying in the arms of lovers, neither of whom was her own, except that Zac, the blonde one, was her grandnephew, and, in that sense, was her own. Jorge was the dark one, and so beautiful. They were professionals. They took home-care lessons in the nearby town, and they would give her sponge baths and change her bed sheets when she messed herself—when it came to that. She knew they would do it without embarrassment. And she wouldn’t be embarrassed either because that’s how things go in the end. But she didn’t know she would miss them so. At least she had the idea she would miss them, the way people miss those few bright, charming others who enter their lives and then leave. Who really knows what missing means when one is gone, really gone? She would miss missing them; she would miss missing altogether.

She walked as much as she could each day, generally four miles, which could be done either around the section or straight out two miles and then back. As she walked on this bright, sunny morning in August, she studied the chalky white-and-yellow butterflies that gathered on the road. “Old habits die hard: that must be it,” she thought as, up and down the road, by the hundreds it seemed, they landed in fairy rings in the dust. Sand and gravel had piled up at the edge of the road, more with each passing vehicle, and the middle had become a washboard, from lack of rain.

The loose sand, combined with the number and size of the undulating hills in that part of the county, made her treks laborious. Her lungs ached, and her side hurt as she trudged the up slopes. It made sense that the butterflies gathered at the edges of rain puddles where they could lap up—or

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whatever they do—the water that oozes through the sand. But to do the same thing on a dry road; what was the sense of it? Well, perhaps landing in fairy rings was more important than any real benefit from doing so. Maybe it was in their nature, and that was all. She could not see the pastel butterflies of August, even when they were dead things stuck to car grills, their wings still wavering in the breeze, without thinking of Sister Justin.

At the end of an afternoon of writing on the board in the fourth-grade classroom of St. Philip Neri Elementary School, and just before leaving, Sister Justin rested atop an empty student desk, and spoke offhandedly to the last lingering students. As she did so, she crossed her arms at the wrists and held her shiny palms up on the hump of her black satchel. Chalk dust, sometimes yellow, sometimes white, filled the deep creases of her fingers.

It was in Sister Justin’s classroom that she learned multiplication and music and world geography. In truth, she remembered Sister Justin whenever she had to add a column of numbers by hand. She had explained to young Claudia (the name her parents had given her) once when returning an exam that most of her mistakes were attributable to not keeping her numbers lined up, so that as she added a column of numbers of varying lengths, she wandered. But mostly Claudia remembered one event in Sister Justin’s classroom. She had a tendency to speak superstitiously, but she was, at the same time, the best of the eight nuns at the school, at least when it came to forthrightness.

During religion lecture, she attempted to explain the wonders of creation by saying: “…and if the sun were to move one inch closer, we would all burn up.” Claudia quickly raised her hand, stood up in the middle of the aisle and explained, “But, wouldn’t it be the same, Sister, if we stood on our tiptoes?” The old nun did not withdraw her assertion, but the next day, near the end of class, she called Claudia up to her desk in front of the other students. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a scapular medal—a thin, wide stainless-steel cross with raised circles with religious scenes

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impressed within them on each side; she presented a carefully packaged one, with the medal mounted on white cardboard, the chain gathered at the back, and the whole thing covered in cellophane. Making no particular connection to the lecture of the previous day, Sister Justin commended Claudia for her “scientific mind.”

Sister Jean Patrice insisted on taking leave from her order, the Order of Teachers, O.T. for short, when she was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer. The order’s mission was to gain an appreciation of every field of academic pursuit and, by writing and teaching, show how it revealed God’s wonder. She had taken leave and, as well, the royalties from her recently published books in order to come home to the house she was raised in.

Walking now, on a long, coolly damp downslope, where the tall maples, oaks, and beeches touched overhead, she recalled where she had photographed Dutchman’s Britches in the spring, and she remembered the big maple tree at the base of which her search for the rare Solomon’s seal had ended. It struck her now as odd that she brought everything to bear—her education, her travels, her teaching— on this simple place where she was born. Thirty-five years earlier, as a graduate student, following her instructor’s urging, she had, in the audio room of the University of Michigan Library, listened to the old Caedmon long-playing records of the great poets reading their own stuff. Now in this quiet place, with light barely glinting through the tall branches, on a dirt road through a woodlot outside Hersey, an old logging town in the middle of Michigan, she heard T.S. Eliot say, in his perfunctory manner:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,

And snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

The last words were spoken with a kind of dying sound, as at the end of a profound speech in Hamlet, when the

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actor wants to signal that the speech is done, and that it is now up to the hearer to ponder its meaning. But perhaps she was wrong about how he said it—it was a long time ago. Her job in the afternoon would be to make friends with Jorge, Zac’s xeux, the term they used for each other, pronouncing it zoos. They had met on a particular December tenth, and when they had a jeweler make pendants for their third anniversary, they looked like x-u-x, but it was hard to read, so they changed the spelling. The word was their attempt to advance the cause of the search for a suitable term for gay spouses, at least male ones, since it still had something to do with Zeus and their being gods to each other. Since the one God seemed to have abandoned them, that seemed fair enough. It also had to do with sex, otherwise why the concentration of X’s in just a four-letter word? What would the women think of? Perhaps they would use Sapphic.

The couple had planned it all out, even to extent that they said people could say xeux-pair, xeux-couple, or xeuxes, at will. What were the chances of it catching on? —zero, concluded Claudia (that was what she was called now). And, as with any term applied to a minority, religious, ethnic, sexual or other, or one that had anything to do with sex, for that matter, the users ran the risk of it becoming a joke. Claudia thought, “A word like—I don’t know—FUCK? It’s a bad word; it’s a good word; it’s a curse; it’s a joke. But people still enjoy doing it, and in that particular moment, the word does not have a particularly bad connotation. Another choice might be? —NUN.” Her father used to say, “Do you know why they call them nuns? —Never had none; don’t want none; that’s why.” It was his predictable summing up of the foolishness of religious sisters. He was sure to work it into a discussion that followed the sometimes dismayingly stupid actions of the nuns at the school where Claudia was a student. (The bad grammar was mocking—her father worked with structural steel in the summer, but in the winter, his occupation was reading.) He never applied the saying to his daughter Claudia, first because she had never done anything that could be called dismayingly stupid, and second because

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in fact she had probably had some, having joined the sisterhood only after college and a stint as an English teacher overseas. She revised her thinking: xeux would catch on if it weren’t found to offend anyone too much.

“Dismayingly stupid”: Claudia had written about one such incident that occurred during her elementary school days. Her article was published in the quarterly journal of her order, titled simply Wonder. Sister Gaudini, the eighth-grade teacher when Claudia was in the eighth grade had the habit of disciplining—perhaps humiliating was more accurate—the farm boys who failed to prepare their lessons. Claudia knew that they did so only because they were too busy farming, especially in the autumn and the spring. She stood them at the front of the classroom and made them promise to do all their homework for the following day. When, one time, one of them made a clownish face for his sweetheart, who was in her seat, she slapped him on the back of the head. He subsequently fell to the floor and convulsed for half a minute. It had all been planned—Claudia knew from the way he had grinned at his sweetheart.

When he stood up without a word and began to stare at the floor with a hebephrenic grin, she beat him on the back with the bottom of her fists, until his horrified classmates, Claudia included, struggling against a great reluctance to speak sharply to a religious woman, began to shout, “Stop, stop.” That too had been in the boys’ calculation. Their failure to do their homework finally became Sister Gaudini’s humiliation, instead of theirs. Claudia’s article had discussed the fact that poetic justice is sometimes the only art of the poor farm boys, and that, being teachers, it is an art form we should learn to appreciate rather than despise, even when we ourselves might be on the cusp of menopause and might be stymied by a certain bewilderment all our own. It wasn’t a month later, on a sometimes-sunny day in May that Sister Gaudini saw the end of a rainbow touch the grassy hill between the school and the woods.

On that spot, with her own hands, she built a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the form of a fieldstone grotto and a

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carefully rendered, white, marble statue. To the end of fostering this art of tough kids and rebels, Sister Jean Patrice instituted the Court of Poetic Justice in every convent and every classroom. She said that in her life, at least, the Court of Poetic Justice would always be in session, and that it was a chance for anyone anytime to bring home to her the nature of any harsh reality that she had somehow missed. Lessons should come by way of creative dramas—the more inopportune, the better for driving the point home. “It’s not just your pet peeve, and it’s not just a bug up your ass, it’s the truth, an important truth, something that will help all of us be better people,” she always said.

Claudia had accurately predicted the slow decline she was experiencing. She had come in January after finishing the fall at UCLA and remained in fairly good health. The boys arrived from Chicago on a day in late May after Zac had finished the winter semester at the University of Chicago. Jorge parked their red Volkswagen Beetle revival in the long east driveway, just off the east end of the south arm of the porch where there were a few steps that had recently been renewed with that greenish-tinged, treated lumber. Within the porch, the unpainted wooden frame of the screen door bore dark smudges where people took hold of it above the handle to hold it open, and the screen was filled with grease and dust—grease from Aunt Lucille’s frying chicken, and dust that wrapped around the house from the road. Aunt Lucille, short, and round, limped to the door. When she saw Zac, she threw her arms out wide, and, in the deep shade of her old kitchen, yelled, “Johnny Boy, my sweetest, my best, most handsomest nephew; give me a hug!”

Johnny, as she called Zac, for it was one of his names, hugged her hard and said, “You know, Aunt Lucille, ‘most handsomest’ is ungrammatical.” Zac un-self-consciously pronounced Aunt as Ahnt, the way New-Englanders do.

“I know, Johnny,” Aunt Lucille answered, “but, guess what….”

Together they intoned her favorite declaration, “I— don’t—care.”

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Then Lucille hugged the adorable Jorge, and they exchanged kisses on the cheek. She reminded him, “I have thought often of the lovely day we spent at the Art Institute last summer. I will not forget seeing Grant Wood’s American Gothic right there on the wall, and your enlightened explanation—and that wonderful, restful restaurant on the lower level.”

“I enjoyed it too, Aunt Lucille,” said Jorge.

Zac and Jorge graciously observed the rights and privileges given to heterosexual couples, and everyone who knew them, knew it, so there was no surprise when Jorge laid claim to Aunt. It was delightful to have these sophisticated, accomplished young men give her a title, out here on a hilltop in the country, where their words echoed beneath the porch and traveled beyond to live somewhere in the dead stillness that existed for acres and acres, perhaps even up into the still blue sky. One never had the sense that the male partners demanded or took rights, for, with them, being a real couple was a practiced art.

Claudia heard them arrive. She heard the muffled conversation, partly as it floated up the stairs and partly through one of the open glass panels of her room. She waited for them to come to her room so that they could see her in the place where, together, they would spend much of their time. Claudia’s atelier was a twenty-by-twenty-foot glass room on top of the house. She recently had it fitted with two-inch-thick tatami mats and a long, shiny Japanese table of a color somewhere between brown and orange—perhaps rust was the name of it.

For ventilation, a couple of the glass sections on each wall opened, like French doors, onto screens. The room smelled deliciously of green tea all the time because of the fresh green rush the mats were covered in. Seeing rush grow in the Japanese countryside, as Claudia had, gave her an appreciation of how different it was from rice straw, the thing many people suppose the floors in Japan are covered with, when in fact it is only the rough filling of certain tatami mats.

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She slept there in the middle of the room on an authentic, wool-stuffed Japanese futon.

In the first week after their arrival, the xeuxes decided to test her. Zac knew all her writings—he would focus on her, Claudia Zane, Sister Jean Patrice Zane, and her writings on Japanese Literature for his Doctoral dissertation. For many years, she had been the last word on Japanese poetry. Zac and Jorge, on their own, decided to use the methods of the master. Certainly, she was knowledgeable about sexuality, and valued the sensual part of life as essential to understanding poetry; she had written that book about the women and men of the sex trade in San Francisco. She had even attended the Hookers’ Ball, in the years when it was fashionable, along with the sheriff and the mayor and other city officials. That was during her years at San Francisco State. But, still, she had vowed sexual abstinence.

Zac and Jorge slept in what amounted to a finished attic, a kind of half-level between the second floor and the atelier. The staircase to Claudia’s room took up a part of the wall of their loft, which had small, turret-like windows halfway between the floor and the ceiling, turret-like because the plaster tapered almost to the edge of the glass. One afternoon, with their clothes on, at the base of the stairs, Zac pushed Jorge up against the wall of the stairwell. He kissed Jorge hard, repeatedly slapped his bottom, and held him, arms-out, pinned to the thin wall, which served to drum everything up to Claudia’s space.

Discouraged by this display of rowdiness on the part of the young men who would be so important to her in the coming months, she asked in a voice that had naturally shifted to higher place, “Are you boys fighting?”

Jorge responded quickly, “No, Sister, we’re having fun.”

Claudia shot back, “I’m not your sister, and stop having fun.”

They were careful to shed their shoes at the bottom of the stairs before heading to her strictly Japanese room. Then,

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they bounded up to find Claudia sitting, her back straight, atop a blue Japanese cushion at her long table.

Zac said enthusiastically, “We were testing you to see what you really think about us. And you failed.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” she replied, somewhat bewildered.

Zac pressed his point, “You’re a knee-jerk nun.”

“I am not. I thought you were fighting. If you were in the middle of a violent sex act, well, forgive me,” she protested.

Jorge said, “It wasn’t violent sex. We were making out, just to test you.”

Before her, on the table was a prayer book with smudged pages, bound in flexible blue leather, a kind of breviary.

Zac said, “If we disturbed you, we’re sorry.”

She kept them from leaving by quickly asserting, “No, you didn’t disturb me.”

“Listen,” she said, “I know that you two need time together. Every Thursday and Saturday evening, I will be watching my favorite TV programs in the living room until ten o’clock. You can use my room if you like.” She added, “Another thing, I like what you did just now. It’s important that we understand each other.”

“Okay, then, we’ll explain your fault,” Zac said bravely. “We were playing around to get a response from you, and we did. The point is, judge each event fresh. Don’t rely on instinct or training or allow prejudice to assert itself. Don’t let your life provide the punchline for someone else’s joke. Judge everything for yourself. This idea came to me when I saw a university classmate of mine pictured in a national magazine at an encampment of neo-Nazis. He was standing beside an older guy, and they were both giving the Nazi salute. I didn’t even know he was a white supremacist.”

Claudia responded, “You must have been appalled. Do you know him well?”

Zac explained, “I went to a few movies with him, and we took a few trips to the mall. When I talked to him about

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being a white supremacist, I said, ‘You’re playing a part in someone else’s joke. It’s not even your own joke. It’s not even original. The skill the world needs in the future is not how to separate ourselves from other people but how manage life in a complex world. What you’re doing is dumb.’ Anyway, that’s the lesson for today,” Zac quickly concluded: “think before you judge.”

He hadn’t tied up the loose ends of his thoughts, bit it didn’t matter. Such talk—the half-baked wisdom and earnest musings of the young—was music to the ears of an old professor. She said, “Remember, the Court of Poetic Justice is now in session.”

A few days later when they were reading a novel by Shintaro Abé, she stopped them and asked, “Do you remember that movie—it was made about twenty years ago— called Our Sons? It starred Julie Andrews and Ann-Margret.”

Zac and Jorge both said yes.

Claudia elaborated, “The Julie Andrews character said it all didn’t she? —when she confronted the Ann-Margret character in her mobile home, The Ann-Margret character was unsure whether she ought to see her son in the hospital where he was dying of AIDS. As I remember the story, the son is a fan of classic movies, and he and his lover spend some time talking about movies in the hospital room. Ann- Margret was worried about what the neighbors might think of her having a son who was dying of AIDS. Did I make it sufficiently clear that she lived in a trailer park?”

“Yes,” said Jorge and Zac together.

Claudia continued, “So, at that point, the Julie Andrews character—the healthy lover’s mother—slaps the Ann-Margret character hard across the face. And then she delivers the best dressing-down speech I have ever heard. She says, “Your son is dying, you stupid bitch! And you’re worried about what the neighbors think?”

Zac got up and took a place beside Claudia. He put his arms across her shoulders. He kissed her cheek, and, misty eyed, said, “You’re the greatest, Auntie.”

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The next day when it was time to read, she took up a place next to Zac, and touching her plump finger to his chest, said, “The Court of Poetic Justice has an important finding to deliver.” Slowly, and with grace, she said, “In here beats the heart of a Japanese girl.”

Zac beamed so that the skin of his cheeks shone. He said, “I know.”

So, the doctoral candidate got reacquainted with his famous aunt and mentor. She had encouraged him to study in Japan when he was a high school student. She said it would help him get a head start on a career in Japan scholarship, and she was right. She even visited him twice in Nagoya, once on a sabbatical semester and once during a free summer. She knew when she visited him the second time that he was gay and lost, and she told him so. He was well on his way to becoming prissy and aloof. She sat across from him at a small kotatsu table, with the electric cord of the foot warmer wrapped up under the table for the season, on a sweltering June afternoon, on the tatami floor of his small student apartment near his high school.

She said, “Find a partner and stick with him. Don’t waste your life trying to understand how different gay is because it’s not. Nobody in the free world cares anymore—or they shouldn’t. Do something else with your life. Contribute something to the world; you’ve got the ability. When you watch a romantic movie, don’t sit there thinking how much you don’t get it. Instead, think of the male lead doing everything he’s doing with the classmate you had a crush on last month.

Being gay is not different. It’s the same, and it takes only a little enlightenment to see that.” She had a way of turning shame on its head. She continued, “An eighteen-year- old man shouldn’t have to wonder why a man and a woman hold each other close and put their lips together. Hold a young man your age close and put your lips on his if he’s agreeable. That’s what it means.” She had written that rather popular book on the practical wisdom of street hookers and

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hustlers, some of whom were transgender. It was this wisdom that she imparted to her grandnephew.

He was left dumbfounded. He didn’t think he needed to think about who he was, but if she was right, he had a lot of work to do. She provided a final anecdote as she held tight to both of Zac’s hands across the cheap, wood-grained, laminate tabletop. Zac attended a high school connected with an old German Catholic University. To gain fluency in the language, he had completed his senior year of high school there, taking regular courses, and now had made the transition to the university, where he could take some of his courses in English. Claudia said, “Zac, this isn’t the best place to be gay. But the truth must be served, or there is hell to pay. As a budding creative genius, you must see the sense of that.”

She gave a lengthy illustration. “I was on an electric bus that was making its way across Twin Peaks in San Francisco recently. Three young people sat in the back as it made its way around a hairpin turn. Then, one of the bus’s arms came off the overhead electric track; the driver set the brake and got out in a very precarious spot in the middle of that uphill turn. It was quiet with the engine off. The young people had just got off a shift at a crisis intervention hotline. I could tell by the things they were saying. There was a handsome young man, boyish looking, with curly blonde hair, perfect skin, and red lips. He was about twenty-two and smart. They were all smart, and their conversation was animated. The handsome young man wove into the conversation a hopeful assessment of his situation. He said he hadn’t felt like hurting himself in three months now— whatever he actually said, I understood what he meant. He was feeling a lot better and working at the center was helping him gain insight.

That moment disabused me of something I had always believed: if you’re smart and good looking, you’ve got it made. At that moment I realized that that charming, beautiful young man would not make it to thirty-five. I wasn’t being pessimistic. I felt he was going to check out early despite all the brave things he was doing to deal with his

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problem. I apply this lesson to gay people. They are too damned humble. They spend too much time on the outside looking in, and they get the wrong idea. And they have an “awe shucks” humility when people are the least bit kind to them. You’re not on the outside, Zac. You’re on the inside. You’re with me. You’re an insider. Get used to being gay, and do something with your life, Zac.”

Zac and Jorge had been xeuxes for nearly five years now, since their undergraduate years at Michigan and all the way through Zac’s postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, which consisted of teaching and writing. Jorge was a gifted painter and graphic designer who worked out of a studio in their home in Chicago. His big, beautiful paintings might as well have been assembled from torn paper because that’s the effect he achieved, with large sections of solid color that worked to represent people and landscapes and wildflowers.

Since Claudia was something of an expert on wildflowers, she had an opening with the beautiful, reserved man. Jorge had none of the artist’s moods. He was wide-eyed and happy, happy studying nature’s designs and making pretty pictures from them that everyone liked. And since he was fulfilled, he probably would not demand more of his talent than that. She was mostly tired of playing dowager empress to his eunuch, “playing,” for he was certainly not a eunuch, and she was not quite the slave to empty formalities that a dowager empress would be; she had had enough of it in the convent—superiors and novices acting out that eternal, tedious melodrama, poisoning the atmosphere, and occasionally forcing those around them into stunned silence caused mainly by obsessive dysfunction.

Their relationship was not so bad, hers and Jorge’s, but she wanted a really good relationship with the men who would soon be seeing her off. There was also that matter of the night before to discuss with Jorge. She suddenly realized that she liked the music of their names together: Ruben Jonathon Zachariah Zane, and Jorge Opal Sanchez.

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The three of them were paying guests in Lucille’s house. Lucille Zane-Monk was her name. She was born out of wedlock, married, and widowed eight years later when her husband, the sheriff of Osceola County was shot dead stopping the holdup of the Reed City Bank, one calm, late- autumn day during deer season. She lost her only son at twenty-four at a country crossroad in a two-car accident, before the road authority was in the habit of putting up stop signs at practically every corner, as they do now.

Lucille was Claudia’s niece, her eldest sister’s eldest daughter. So, they weren’t far apart in age: only four years separated them. The house occupied the highest spot in three counties, set nicely off the road, in the middle of the section on the south side of One Mile. It was a foursquare, cut-stone fortress with a shiny metal roof. Rising up through the roof of the two-story house was the glass structure—it seemed to pick up the center of the pyramid roof and telescope it ten feet into the air. Some had called the room on top of the house a cupola, but it was equipped as a penthouse, including a frosted-glass bathroom. Claudia now referred to it as her atelier. In San Francisco, or Yokohama it would have been a place from which to watch the ships come in.

Claudia’s grandfather, a lumber baron, had the glass room built with the house so that in his declining years—and with declining eyesight—he could sit and read books by the bright light of day and watch the weather move across Crapo Flats to the south. The east yard, which sloped sharply away from the house, was mostly an uncontrolled sumac grove now, but the neighbor maintained the other yards with a mowing contraption he pulled behind his tractor, the kind use to mow golf courses. No one anymore cut the hay from the fields below the house, and they were beginning to fill with scrub: honeysuckle, olive, and locust trees.

On returning home from her walk that sunny August day, Claudia rested in the cool shade of the porch at the back of the house. The yellowed hayfields lay along a ravine so deep that it had always seemed to Claudia, even when she was growing up, that it should have a river in it, but the high

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rolling land she lived on was just some mistake of the ice age. Claudia remembered the evening she stood atop the large pink rock (“as big as a car” they used to say) at the top of the slope in the east yard.

It intrigued and pleased her that the shadow of a girl of twelve could stretch so long as it dipped down across a small ravine and up onto the next round slope, all colored gold by the setting sun. She held out her arms, closed her eyes to the sky, and whispered something into the wind: “I want to live like this; please, God, let me live like this.” It did seem to her now that she had nearly lived her whole life on the verge of either religious or creative fervor. Whenever she recalled that moment, she remembered, oddly, the next thing she did. She went into the house and watched her favorite television program—television being fairly new in their home—Industry on Parade.

The program satisfied her great need to know how things work, for it covered in detail the process of manufacturing everything from glass milk bottles to automobile fenders. Looking out across the fields from the back porch was akin to looking out of an airplane window. The land was a patchwork of green and gold and brown. The tops of all the hills that stretched for some distance between their house and the flats were closely shorn pastures, with barbed wire fences marking exactly the place where the slopes became too steep to plow. The same fences extended along the roads. At moments like this, the shape of the land got into her body and produced a kind sympathetic rhythm. She breathed, and blood flowed through her veins in harmony with the undulating land.

Cricket chirping came from the lower reaches of the hay fields and filled the air, and their sound was joined occasionally by the high trill of a lone cicada. In her youth, Claudia was sure that the strange trill of the cicada—that incessant mechanical vibration often heard on a windless summer afternoon—was a sound the power line emitted when it got overloaded. But in Japan, where she studied and later taught, she came to know cicadas and their sounds. In a

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tree-filled park in the middle of any major city, the combined sound of them threatened to vibrate people out of their skins. And, at the end of summer, when they are dying, they develop a white haze on their wings and bodies as though dipped in whitewash. When they are like that, in the late stages of life, they fly unsteadily, and sometimes dive directly into people’s foreheads and then fall to the ground and die.

Claudia walked into the kitchen, where Jorge stood at the long porcelain sink, gutting a dozen yellow perch into a shiny metal bowl. During his college days, he had been a prep chef at a good restaurant in Ann Arbor. The clean smell of fish flesh filled the pristine air of the dark kitchen, sheltered as it was from the sun by the porch that wrapped around the south and west portions of the house. It was approaching noon, and the smell of breakfast had evaporated, though Jorge would soon be boiling water on the black commercial stove and pouring it through coffee grounds placed in a paper filter, set atop a vacuum bottle: that way they could drink good coffee all afternoon.

Cindy, the xeuxes’ apricot standard poodle, was still getting used to life in the country. She stood beside Jorge sniffing the air incessantly, and sometimes dropping her head and gulping to gain control of the saliva that was coming forth. Claudia took a seat at the prep table, which was made of thick pine planks finished only with wax, so that it was yellow. She made the dog sit, and then, from behind, put her arms around her neck. When she kissed her on top of her head, she only half looked, because she was mesmerized by Jorge’s busy hands. She could not miss even the remotest chance that he might dangle a fish intestine in front of her nose.

“Where’d we get the fish?” Claudia asked.

“Nathan and Betty were here a half hour ago. They were fishing at Haymarsh this morning,” Jorge replied. He turned to the dog and commanded sharply, “Cindy, relax—a few more minutes, okay?” As Jorge said the words, Cindy looked repeatedly from his mouth to the floor, as though he might be eating fish guts, and might accidentally drool some

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of them on the floor. “Are you afraid we won’t feed you? We always feed you. Relax.” With that, he gave Cindy an air kiss. Cindy yawned; then, she circled once and lay down beside Claudia. Her bones clunked noisily against the floor, and as soon as she was resolutely in place, she gave out a human groan of disappointment. At last, she had given up all hope of getting a raw tidbit.

When Jorge had finished cleaning the fish, Claudia put a wok over a large gas burner, and, when it was hot, added a good splash of olive oil. She turned on the powerful hood fan, and Jorge poured the fish guts into the wok where she stirred them around until they were half cooked. They combined the sautéed fish innards with rice, fed Cindy a warm bowl full, and put the remainder in a plastic container on the counter to cool.

Putting her hand in Jorge’s Claudia said, “Come out on the porch, won’t you, Jorge?” On the west porch, shielded from the strong afternoon sun, they faced what could have been a summer postcard, framed by the deep shade and the giant, skinned timbers of the old porch: blue sky, purple hills on the distant horizon, and yellow hayfields. They sat in the heavy, rough-hewn swing seat, suspended from the timbers. Claudia took up a corner of the seat and made Jorge lean against her so that his head was roughly at her abdomen. Pulling back his bangs with her shiny fingers, she kissed him on the forehead. Then, she asked, “Where are the adults?”

With the shortest of ironic giggles, Jorge explained, “Well, Sister, the police officer came here this morning, and Zac and Lucille took him by the hand and are making him take a plaster impression of the footprints by the little girl’s window.”

“Call me Sister again, and I’m going to kiss you on those pretty lips of yours,” said Claudia.

“It’s okay, Sister; it’s just you and I,” Jorge teased. With that, she pecked him on the lips.
He announced, “I love you, Junie Moon.”

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“And I love you, you gracious man, but why Am I suddenly Junie Moon?”

“Whenever a girl kisses me, the name Junie Moon comes to my mind. To me every girl is Junie Moon,” explained Jorge.

“I’m a girl?” inquired Claudia.

“Yes, you’re a girl,” Jorge said definitively. “You’re my Junie Moon.”

He continued, “When we, Zac and I, were undergraduates at Michigan, the theater department put on a dramatic reading of the book Tell Me that You Love You Love Me, Junie Moon. That’s how we met. We were both alone, and he was seated next to me in the middle of a row. I was trapped. He was bobbing his knee frantically. Then, he stopped, crossed his legs and put his knee against my hand, which I intentionally held wrapped around the armrest. I didn’t move my hand, and he didn’t move his knee. I was not even sure he could feel my hand through his cream-colored corduroys. Then, suddenly during a shouting scene on stage, he asked me, “Are you gay?” He asked the question the same way a person might ask, “Where did you buy your shoes?”

I responded, “Yes, and you?”
He said, “Yes,” and we both beamed.
“If you had said ‘No’ it wouldn’t have fazed him,”

said Claudia. “He’s so cocky he would have removed his knee from your hand and continued watching the reading.”

Jorge explained, “That, and bob his knee—I said I was gay mostly so he wouldn’t return to bobbing his knee, which was bothering the hell out of me.”

Claudia cackled. She gave the impression of a boozy old literature hound who smoked too much. In fact, she had something in her of the distracted quality of Elizabeth Taylor’s best performances. Of course, she neither smoked nor drank, except to have an occasional glass of wine. It was the liver cancer beginning to weaken all of her body’s systems.

Jorge explained, “Then we got to know each other, and we realized that we were both scared of the future, and

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we were lonely because we wanted to accomplish real things with our lives and not just figure out after being with a hundred men, ‘Yeah, we’re really gay.’”

“You’re a beautiful couple. You argue with each other sometimes, but you defend each other to everyone else. I like that. And you consciously force others to see you as a couple.”

“We practice being married. It’s important for us. Zac’s father is not going to be there when I’m dying. And my parents aren’t going to be there either. It’s we who will be taking care of each other. It’s he and I.”

“Oh, Jorge,” she said, “your words are brave and true.” She delivered the words with a dying sound as one might produce at the end of an important speech in Hamlet.

She thought briefly of what men’s fantasies of love must be. He was pretty, she was old, and with her arms around him, she felt as a man must feel with his sweetheart resting her head on his bosom. His was, she thought, perhaps the most irresistible face in the world. His skin glowed brown, and his lips could only be described as soft, full, and, by contrast with his skin, a powdery orange color. They were lips without corners. The whole circle of his mouth was soft, translucent flesh, filled up and holding the light like a water blister. She knew then what it was like for him and Zac. She felt the heat of him, the strength of him. Finally she said, “The very idea of the two of you being peeping Toms. How strange. People are just acting strangely because we three interlopers are in the neighborhood.”

“You know, Zac won’t be able to get any work done today. He’s really upset,” Jorge said.

“Matt told me that the boy who harassed you last night is Corinth’s cousin’s son,” explained Claudia. Corinth is Matt’s wife, across the road.” Claudia continued. “I talked to Matt at the road before I took my walk. He was working on his mailbox.”

“So, the story’s all over the neighborhood,” said Jorge.

“Sure. Two adorable young men walking their poodle in the cool of twilight past a farmhouse on a quiet back road,

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where there lives a mother, raising two children alone. What could these young men be but child molesters?”

Jorge talked about the incident, “After a while he would not listen to our explanation. He said he had called the police. Then, he turned his radio up and followed us fifty feet behind with his bright lights shining on us.”

“Zac was hoarse this morning from shouting,” Claudia observed.

“The scariest part is he seemed ready to kill us. He was so angry at us for walking past his cousin’s house. I have never experienced such irrational behavior,” said Jorge.

“Why was he so threatened?” asked Claudia.

“Something might have happened at his cousin’s house, but to be so angry and wrong about us—I’m scared,” explained Jorge.

Just then, Cindy flipped open the dirty screen door, and, seeing their embrace, gave one loud bark, and then stood as though waiting for an explanation.

Jorge lazily sing-songed, “Come here, Cindy.”

She responded by barking once more and loping off into the yard.

Claudia said, “It might be someone using you as a scapegoat.”

Jorge added, “Somebody who thinks, ‘I can do my weird sexual thing now because gay people are here, and everyone will think they’re the bad ones.’ He’s jealous.”

“That young man’s family and my family have lived in these parts for nearly two hundred years, and it has somehow escaped his knowledge that we are a people not to be fucked with,” Claudia explained.

Jorge was displeased by her choice of words. “Have you ever said that word before? You say it as though you don’t know how to pronounce it. You say faahk or something.”

She enunciated, as if addressing the wide world, “Do—not—fuck—with—me.”

“That’s offensive,” Jorge said. “Please stop saying that word.”

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“Sometimes you have to stay angry, Jorge,” Claudia said, defending herself.

“I want to solve the problem,” Jorge explained. “Zac and I will be here for a while.”

“Yes, until me liver gits me,” Claudia concluded.

“Yes, until yur liver gits ya,” Jorge tried on the accent. “I want to live here in peace. I don’t want to be afraid to walk down the road.”

“Walk down the road as though you owned it,” Claudia asserted.

“Yeah, with a gun in my pocket; then, I’m just another psychopath. Don’t you see, Claudia?

Jorge placed his hands over Claudia’s on top of his chest.

He continued, “His name is Dorn. The police officer talked to him at his house after he questioned us here. He made him call and apologize—it was after you went to bed. Zac didn’t want to talk to him, so he put his dad on the phone, and his dad had a lot to say. He said, ‘Hey, you know, young fella, you’re not the only person who gets upset. You’re not the only one in the world who’s looking out for the people he cares about. Listen, you do exactly what you did last night again, and you’re the one who’s not going to be welcome on these roads.

We know mentally handicapped people. We have all kinds of friends. They’re going to be walking on these roads, so you’ve got to change your ways, son. You call up and offer an apology after scaring my son and his lover—not now, son, not now. They’re closer than most straight couples. They wouldn’t do a thing like this. They’re going to be here studying with my aunt who is a literature professor and a nun, so back off.” With that, he hung up the phone.

“He reported his feelings. That was smart. He didn’t get too excited,” Claudia said. Then, she mused, “Life is a cool medium.”

Jorge narrated some more, “After he talked to Dorn, Zac ran to his father. Betty sat at the table with her head

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down, sobbing. Zac hugged Nathan, saying, “Oh, Daddy.” He could hardly breathe because he was talking and bawling at the same time, so he started to hiccup.”

“They had a guilt-fest,” Claudia concluded.

“Then, I hugged and kissed everyone, and I cried,” Jorge said.

“When the officer arrived at the house last night, he seemed very level-headed. I was confident he would do the right thing. Perhaps he has an idea who it was at the little girl’s window,” Claudia said.

Then, she changed the subject, “Now, for lunch, let’s sauté butter-flied perch fillets and steam some fresh green beans from the west garden—and we’ll dress both with butter and lime juice.”

Jorge concluded enthusiastically, “Yeah, that’s what I want.”

That evening, they were, after all, able to pick up their reading. Despite the very real traumas of the moment, they all understood how to take art seriously. That summer, Zac and Jorge were reading to Claudia the final great four-book series of Yukio Mishima, which he titled The Sea of Fertility. They were halfway through the last story, The Decay of the Angel, having finished Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, and The Temple of Dawn.

When reading, they always sat on zabuton at the long Japanese dining table in the brightest corner of the room, but out of direct sunlight. Sitting before the floor-to-ceiling plate- glass windows, their minds took off across the countryside and went to distant places, even to Tokyo and Yokohama and Izu Peninsula, places that figured prominently in the stories. They all agreed, after studying the early chapters of The Decay of the Angel that the signal-house scenes—all inclusive—were some of the most charming and best realized in all of literature. They began to think that the novel was likely one of the best in literature as well, perhaps on a par with The Great Gatsby for its compactness and beauty of language.

They read the four novels in translation, because Zac was scheduled to teach them in the fall of the following year,

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and that was something of a target for all of them. Sister Jean Patrice had that much time to get her dying done.

Autumn came. Outside her room on the west side of the house, the full locust tree reached over the roof toward her room. Seated at her long table, she studied what the autumn sun did to the golden leaves of the locust tree that were arranged on fronds of a dozen or so individual leaves. It was the kind of day the Japanese call akibaré, a crisp, clear day in autumn when the edges of everything stand out in sharp focus. Claudia had written somewhere when discussing the soul of the poet that sometimes in a moment we experience the fullness of time, or in a phrase the fullness of life. In the gold color and the crisp shadows of the locust tree, all the autumns of all her life came back to her.

The autumn moment that stood out, however, was neither crisp nor clear. She thought of an autumn morning when she was twenty. She sat in the same place, but higher, at a library table, looking at the gray dawn and clutching a cup of coffee in a milk-glass mug enameled tan on the outside, with an aurora sheen, the kind that filled the cupboard above the sink then. A heavy blanket of fog covered the flats, and the silvery sheen of the sky lit up the dark wood floor.

She dared to pose the question of where life was taking her. It was with a sense of foreboding that she realized something like a calling. She would become a religious sister, and she would spend a good part of her life overseas. She sensed it clearly. Then, she thought about how to prepare herself, for she knew that teaching others how to be Catholic or even American was precisely what she did not want to do. “How much more interesting it would be if I were the one to learn by immersing myself in a foreign culture,” she thought.

She had nursed several colleagues in their dying months. One of them had said that sometimes the pain is too much and that her body didn’t always work right, but that as long as her mind worked, she could remember. That’s what Claudia was determined to do—remember, instead of lie there thinking about how unfair it was that she would be dead at sixty-five. Aunt Lucille sat with her often after each

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meal at the kitchen table and reminisced about people and times and places. She thought about how the landscape and wandering around in it throughout childhood and playing games at home and talking with family on a Saturday night about all kinds of things and listening to adults recite from memory long bits of Yukon poetry had shaped her.

There were times when she envied others their life and vitality, and there were times when it pained her to count herself out of the future when it came to discussing life and careers with Zac and Jorge. In late-autumn she took to her bed, the Japanese futon laid flat on the floor. By the time the leaves were off, she was using a firm foam wedge to raise herself up during the day in order to look out the glass walls. She was more and more under the care of Zac and Jorge.

On a day in December between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the snow started. Claudia saw it first as a kind of haze between the house and the dull-gray trees that stood on a rise in the middle distance. Something in the slant of it said that a storm was settling in and that it would fill the country before it was done.

February was frigid. Early in the month, an ice storm coated everything. The land shone like chrome. A couple of weeks later, the wind scoured the newly fallen

snow off the hills and revealed the ice once more. The cold, cold land. To be going through the changes of death with the land like that. She was forlorn to be leaving the cold earth, and going where?

She wondered—she wondered deeply. It was good when the xeuxes read to her. Sometimes they read from her breviary. The old familiar words settled her mind and calmed her prickly nerve endings. She couldn’t always speak, and sometimes her eyes didn’t work properly, despite the cleaning and dabbing the boys did to get at the profuse mucus that coated them, but she could always listen.

In early April when the snow had finally gone off, on a particular rainy day, it looked like autumn again. The soaked and still smartly colored maple leaves lay on the

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ground in the north yard, and, as though hinged, flip-flopped in the wind.

At the end of April, as she lay dying, she pushed aside the pain that came from every inch of her skin and inner organs, and she pushed aside the sure knowledge that it would soon be over in order to use her last conscious thoughts. Her breathing labored, she made herself think over the haiku she had composed during her time in Hersey, some of them taken from earlier experiences. She had written them out for Zac and Jorge to send to her publisher, who would await Zac’s forward, which would, of necessity, mention her passing on the such-and-such day of the such-and-such month of the year 2010. Those haiku would complete the five hundred collected poems of her career. She composed them free style in English. Her rules were simple: three short lines that capture a moment of realization and refer, however indirectly, to the season.

In the spring of the previous year, as she drove along U.S. Highway 131, returning from a visit with her oncologist in Grand Rapids, she had observed blackbirds hanging onto cattails that had come through the winter, with the brown parts all exploded like cotton, ready to release their floating seeds. The rush and the long, blade-like leaves that went along with them were yellowed and dry. Blue-black clouds quickly moved across the sky, and the whole scene—the new green grass, the birds, and the cattails—were caught in the quickly changing light. Sunshine barely glinted through the clouds.

Out by the road
Blackbirds cling to last year’s cattails

Bobbing in a sudden gale

In the fall before she got so sick, Nathan had driven her to the local campus to participate in a Japanese Language and culture course by explaining the influence of The Tale of Genji on Japanese art. She sipped coffee from a plastic mug through a sipping hole in the lid, as their car descended into a

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deep gully. The tops of oak and maple and beech trees were visible. Then, the car gently settled below the brown, yellow, and gold of the trees caught in the morning sunlight. It was like falling into a gigantic pile of leaves and losing oneself.

The gully is gold
With beech trees in morning sun;

I sip coffee.

She remembered how, in June, before the hay is cut, the swirling gusts of wind work their way across the deep green fields.

The summer fields glint and swirl

In sunlight broken loose

From the racing clouds

In the autumn, when she was at the local university, she crossed the main thoroughfare and came upon a scene of devastation. The first hard frost of the season had caused all the walnut leaves, along with the scuffed and bruised walnuts themselves, to fall to the ground all at once. It was like stepping on something alive. The leaves were green and velvety and soft, piled up on the lawn.

Overnight, the still-green fronds of

The walnut tree fell

In gentle layers on the lawn

She had arrived in January, four months before Zac and Jorge could get free from their obligations in Chicago. She walked the forlorn, glistening, snow-packed roads of the section and noticed for the first time that not only in art but in reality, deep snow shadows are blue. A white-domed pasture glistened on one side of the long, steep hill, and a drifted-over hayfield sloped off the other side of the road. At the base, a pine grove came almost to the edges of the road, leaving the

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lower parts in blue shadow, not very different from the blue winter sky.

Snow glints on the hills,
And in the gully, the pine grove

Casts a blue shadow across the road

When she was a child, she and her mother built wood stacks after the wood cutter had come and dumped a load of cut wood on the lawn. What seemed to define these moments was sleet, something between snow and ice, bouncing like buckshot of the yellow pieces of hardwood that she took from the disorganized pile to build an organized stack.

Winter started
The way it always did

The sleet came before the snow

She grew weary and stopped thinking of when and where. Mentally, she recited them one by one.

The noise of it,

Sleet falling

In the cattail rush

An old elm tree, knee deep
In a yellow wheat field:

Will it drown in the waves? ___

Hail stones blown by the storm—

I mistook them

For cherry blossom petals ___

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I stood, studying van Gogh’s Irises;

The woman next to me wore

Lily of the valley perfume ___

Studying van Gogh’s Irises,
I could think only of the yellow light

And the long shadows of spring afternoons ___

Noise from the alley
Falls through the open window

Because it is spring

When she had finished reviewing her haiku, she began to think of an endless line of half-grown locust tress that ran along an endless length of three-strand barbed wire fence that divided an endless run of pasture. It was an often- repeated scene from her dreams. She liked it because it was happy and hopeful. When she woke up in the morning after having dreamt this dream, she was always happy and hopeful. There was a cow path, a worn cow path, that formed a narrow lane, and on both sides of it were the locust trees. “And the fence is over to the south of the whole thing,” she thought. “The cow path is between the two rows of locust trees, and somewhere is a house and a barn, somewhere off ahead, a house and a barn.”

It seemed important to describe these things to herself and get the location of everything right. And then she began to feel cheated. She thought, or rather, felt all at once, ‘My last fully formed word as a conscious human being: barn. I knew lots of words. I was a teacher. I was a writer. Barn, it seems pointless.’ And then she saw them clearly. She would miss the xeux-pair—if missing meant anything now. Their chins were covered with pin pricks, their quivering lower lips turned inside out, and their faces wet. They came to her side then, and each put his face to hers. They lay beside her.

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When her heart stopped, her throat became an organ unto itself, violently plunging into her chest to open it for air. And finally, the useless effort stopped. The skin of her body turned blotchy, some areas purple and some white because of the irregular way the blood settled.

At her burial, after the church funeral, with a cool breeze whipping the microphone on the podium set up at the old cemetery, Zac talked about how death informs life and how death slowly becomes a thing we are not quite so afraid of. Jorge read from her book of haiku and added a few from the classic literature, mostly by the Haiku master Basho. He carefully chose ones that related to the moment and ones that captured the great beauty of the beauty that surrounded them at that moment.

A few days later, although the weather was still cool, Zac and Jorge were lying on striped towels, one powder blue, one burgundy, at the beach at Saugatuck, a resort on Lake Michigan. They lay cheek-bone to cheek-bone with their legs going out in opposite directions, the better to produce a running commentary on the scene before them. All of what they said had the effect of whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears—in addition to lying cheek-bone-to-cheek-bone, they were also mouth to ear.

Jorge held his arms up and spread all ten fingers to the sky. He moved his hands in the sky, playing with ways to shield his eyes from the sun, which was shifting red and settling low in the sky.

Jorge flipped over and brought his face to Zac’s from above. “She kissed me like this,” he said. His kiss was soft and warm and long.

When they were finished—Jorge still hovering over him—Zac asked, “Upside down?”

Jorge countered, “Passionately. Then I said, ‘I love you,’ the way lovers say it.”

“She did not kiss you passionately,” Zac protested.

“You weren’t there,” Jorge said weakly. Then, he lay down and asked Zac, “What’s the most cynical thing you have ever thought about me?”

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“The Court of Poetic Justice is defunct,” Zac reminded him.

“I know, but it’s opened up a new way of thinking for me,” Jorge exclaimed.

“’His looks won’t last,’” Zac replied.

“Hmm,” said Jorge, playing with the hair just in front of Zac’s ear on the far side of his face with his left hand, because that was the easiest place to reach.

Zac responded, “But I’m teaching myself not to care. I’ll still change your diaper when you’re old, as long as I can remember you the way you are today.” He continued, “What’s the most cynical thing you’ve thought about me?”

Jorge said, “It’s related to what you said. I think of that quadriplegic actor and how he and his wife still have sex. They’re still dedicated to each other, and they still satisfy each other’s needs. I used to be afraid that we didn’t love each other like that—well, that you didn’t love me like that.”

“Yeah, like you’ve thought about it so much more,” Zac said.

“I have, Baby,” Jorge explained.

Zac turned over and brought his face close to Jorge’s. “I don’t know if I can get used to kissing upside down. Where do I put my chin?”

“I’ll show you where to put your chin,” Jorge said suggestively as he stroked Zac’s hair. It was disorienting, pulling his blonde hair back from his cheeks with his face upside down. Jorge continued, “With the sky behind you, you look like an angel. Let your arms slowly spread out in the sand and lower your face to mine and kiss me. Then, I will surely die, kissed by an angel.”

That’s exactly what Zac did; then, he lay back down, his face beside Jorge’s.

Jorge, as proof that Zac was not the only ancient soul on the beach that day, quoted from William Wordsworth’sIntimations of Immortality. With practiced charm, in pair- shaped words, he said:

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The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare, Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Zac said, “Your words are brave and true.” He added, “That was beautiful”; then, he turned and kissed Jorge quickly on the cheek.

Jorge said, inquiringly, “Claudia said that to me once: ‘Your words are brave and true.’”

Zac explained, “That was her expression. It’s a reward for having the courage to say something beautiful that’s true,” Then, he added, “If you had continued you would have got to the part, ‘And all the earth is gay.’”

“I know, but it’s not, so I didn’t,” Jorge elucidated.

“I thank God every day that I’m gay, because I get to be in love with you,” Zac enthused.

Jorge said, his fist suddenly clenching all of the hair on top of Zac’s head, “Your words are brave and true.” But he forgot the dying sound, or perhaps he was incapable of making one.

Zac giggled with delight as Jorge held tight to his long, silky blonde hair.

As the cool vermillion sun dipped below the jade- colored waters of Lake Michigan, on a sandy bluff, tufted with tall grass, above the pounding shore, it could be said that the gods were laughing.

The End