got my own flow, get you to the dance floor.

[star studded]

<center>

I bongo with my lingo
And beat it like a wing yo
To Congo, to Columbo
Can't stereotype my thing yo
I salt and pepper my mango
Shoot spit out the window
Bingo I got em in the thing yo
Now what? I'm doing my thing yo

Quit bending all my fingo
Quit beating me like you're Ringo
You wanna go?
You wanna win a war?
Like P.L.O don't surrendo

I bongo with my lingo
And beat it like a wing yo
To Congo, to Columbo
Can't stereotype my thing yo
I checked that mouth on him
Fucking check that gas on him
I had him cornered him
Fucking shut that gate on him
Why would you listen to him?
He had his way I'm bored of him
I'm tired of him
I don't wanna be as bad as him

It's a bomb yo, so run yo
Put away your stupid gun yo
Cos we see through like a protocol call
That's why we blow it up 'fore we go

Semi-9 and snipered him
On that wall they posted him
They cornered him
and then just murdered him

He told them he didn't know them
He wasn't there they didn't know him
They showed him a picture then
Ain't that you with the Muslims?

He got colgate on his teeth
And Reebok classics on his feet
At a factory he does Nike
And then helps the family

Beat heart beat
He's made it to the Newsweek
He's sweetheart seen it
He's doing it for the peeps. peace.


</center>


(M.I.A.)

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ May 23, 2007 12:30 AM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>

[star studded]

The pocketwatch that glinted in Harlen's pocket always caught the light when Holden Hart was staring straight at it. Reclined on the couch in the main room of the Donovan-Prior apartment, he sat back and drummed against the flats of his skinny knees. The curled edges of hair fell lazily into the slants of light eyes and he lolled his head towards the door. He was waiting.

In the right lights, Holden Hart was a sleek, artful masterpiece. Well-dressed in fitting private school attire, he was a tall, soft-skinned stringbean of a boy. Bones angled sharply, but not awkwardly, his shoulders were slight, but not birdlike. He was his mother's grandest creation, from the sleek line of his aquiline nose to the sonorous purr of his voice. He was all soft consonants and sharp vowels, well-spoken and articulate until pressure cracked down and stole his voice.

"Where'd you get that thing? It's like.. antique. Does it still work?" The machinery of time always appealed to the young artist. He spent plenty of nights hunched over the table in Seven Thatcher's apartment, cracking open clocks and watches alike in order to examine the intricate inner-workings. Leaning forward, Holden motioned to the lump of fashioned, elaborate silver and glass. Harlen dug a hand into his pocket and plucked it out, clicking the face open with the press of his thumb. It made a soft click and the face was held out for Holden's examination.

"Still ticks," he informed in an unchanged, nasal drawl. The second hand coasted around the face, frail as thread. It amazed him.

"Where'd you get it?" Light eyes turned up as his hand reached out tentatively for it. Harlen agreed and handed it over so the boy could turn it over, looking for trap doors or modes of deception.

"It was my father's. He died. My mother gave it to me."

The story of Harlen's long-past tragedy was familiar and unspoken. It was something whispered if only to keep from offending with loose jokes and stupid questions. Turning it over, hand in hand, he clipped the silver cover over it and thumbed it open again.

"Did you know my dad?" The question was abrupt from the teenager. Harlen didn't see it coming. Wide-eyed, he cleared his throat and lifted a shoulder.

"We met. We weren't exactly.. friends, or anything. Michael knew him better than I did, you should--" He didn't finish the sentence. Somewhere, Lucy would hear and whirl in, cutting him off at the knees. The meaning translated well enough and Holden stowed information away for later.

"What was he like? I mean.. from what you knew about him?" Holden reached out to hand the watch back. In the heart of his palm he could feel it ticking, proceeding, carrying on.

"He was.. quiet. He didn't talk a lot. Not to me, at least. He ... I don't know. He was just Charlie. He was just--" The phrase trailed off again. Harlen felt helpless. He didn't know enough. He couldn't help.

Inside Holden's brain, the phrase echoed: He was just Charlie. A friendly, familiar term. Something distinctly human and alive. He clung to it, a shred of evidence, a clue along a beaten trail of dusty nothing.

"It just... I mean, you know she tells me nothing, right? And Aunt Lani won't even show me pictures, or tell me any good stories, or.. how do you go eighteen years, you know? How do you go eighteen years without at least trying to track someone down that you know is out there, that you know--"

"Because your mother didn't want--"

"Fuck that! That is such shit! People do it every day! People go to court every day, people fight, people.." He trailed off, his elbows balancing on knees as arms slouched between legs. His spine craned forward and he peered towards the door again. Nothing. No one returned.

Harlen couldn't help but relate to the frustration that whirled in the young boy. An absent father. A partially unbearable mother that he couldn't help but love.

"It is. It is all a lot of shit, Holden." Harlen agreed with a sage sort of knowledge in his voice that the other boy couldn't ignore. "But the key to dealing with shit is focusing on what you've got rather than what you lack."

Holden smeared a hand over his face. Behind lidded eyes, images flashed, a conglomorate of faces that made up one feeling. Home. Family. Father.

"I know," he hissed, composing himself. "I got it."

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ January 16, 2006 05:39 AM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>

[star studded]

People are fascinated with other people's lives. This is evident throughout humanity. It's why gossip columns were so popular once upon a time. It's why sitcoms detailing the lives of fictional characters eventually were mowed over by reality television and that's all we watch. That's why the blockbuster action movie never wins the Oscar -- it's the ones about people that always sweep the boards.

When people meet me or recognize me or learn my name, they instantly ask me one of two things: Can you get me something free from your mother/Seven, or What's it like living with people like that? I assume they mean guys like my mother and Seven Thatcher, like Michael Donovan and Harlen Prior, Lani Stanton, Liv Liddell. I don't usually give them a real answer. I'm a big fan of the shrug. Or the, hey, look at that thing.

Maybe I don't even know what it's like to live with them.

My mother is erratic at best, a demon at worst. I don't know the exact details of her life before me, save for what I've been told, or what rag-rumours she's confirmed to me in order to spare me having to defend her and lie. She abused heavy drugs, but I don't know which ones. She married my father without ceremony, was in and out of rehabs, attempted suicide at twenty-four and was put on various mood altering drugs and started seeing a therapist. At twenty-five, for reasons undisclosed, her marriage fell apart and daddy-oh disappeared. Pregnant with me, she met Seven Thatcher through a complicated series of letters that I probably won't get access to and so the rest of the story was written. That's how she functions. That's how she exists.

Seven, on the other hand, is a sedative.

After my mother found out she was pregnant, she stopped taking her medications for obvious reasons. Claiming pregnancy and motherhood evened her out, she never got back on them again. She exists in peaks and valleys -- there is nothing evened-out about her, but we deal. When she screams too loudly, all Seven has to do is raise an eyebrow at her and she starts to settle. When she throws a fit and starts launching kitchen supplies at him for ruining one of her red dresses, he lets her exhaust herself. He takes every shock and abuse in stride. He presses his forehead to hers and she is silent and pliable again.

I haven't figured out how he does that yet. I've tried being silent with her and all it does is make her push my buttons even harder. I've tried agreeing with her, or begging forgiveness. She only relents when I say something unforgivable, or when Seven makes his odd, ghostly presence known in the room. She'll swing low and he'll pop his head up from whatever he's reading. I'll insult her, and he'll poke his head into the room. And that's usually the end.

The smallest fights I have with my mother concern my clothes. The biggest fights with her concern the identity of my father, and somewhere in between, there is my art. One of my first showcase pieces consisted of a flat, magnetic surface and a myriad tiny pieces of metal that I had painted. It was a movable mosaic, or that's what I thought of it as. Looking back on it, it was relatively unoriginal. My intention was for it to be interactive art, art that I could go in and change whenever I wanted, art that people could touch and create on their own. And as great of an idea as that was, it was poorly executed. Upon showing the piece to my mother, she decided to tell me how poorly executed it was. Every unoriginal design, every aspect of it that could fail at the showcase was pointed out for me, piece by piece.

Half an hour later, I had lost my voice from screaming and she had been uninvited to the showcase. I was furious. Looking back, I can see that this was her method of helping me survive -- by being brashly and horribly critical so that when someone else was, I could take it. Enraged, I wheeled the entire thing across the hall to show to Seven. I wailed, pointing out every flaw in it that my mother had brought to my attention, and how, how was I going to prepare something better for the showcase in the next hour?

Seven just looked at the piece, the scraggly line of his brow lifted. I remember that expression perfectly. He was looking at my work as art. Not something some kid had spent weeks on. Not something he had to be careful about.

"I don't know, I think it's pretty neat," he said, and went back to scrawling charcoal over paper in perfect, odd designs.

The moving mosaic got third place. It was enough for me. It was enough for me to be possible of creating something "neat" in the eyes of the artist whose work has been baffling critics and museum patrons for years. And that's the dynamic that I've had with the two of them for what seems like forever. My mother is my worst critic. But every negative thing she says can easily be countered by a shrug and compliment from the man across the hall.

[star studded]

Dawn crept up. In New York, there were no shades of red between concrete and glass, just the seeping in of light onto the slats of the floorboards, between the plastic blinds on his window. Sprawled out over the mess of his blue sheets on a rare night he stayed at home, Holden Hart groaned as the buzzer of his alarm clock sounded in his ears. Fumbling over, his bare hand clunked down on the off button and he peered blue eyes at the loud numbers. 5:45 AM. Monday morning.

Five minutes later, his door opened without ceremony. His mother's gravel, smoke riddled voice sounded out, her head popping in, a mess of sleep-wild blonde. "It's almost six," she offered, and that was all. She was gone as quickly and as quietly as she came, her son twisting over onto his back and pushing up into the morning.

Padding into the bathroom, he flooded the white tile with yellow overhead light. Bare feet shuffled across and he smeared his own mess of straw-brown hair out of his eyes, hunched over the sink, peering in the mirror. Fingers peeled over his features. He was all ginger stubble and light skin. A pronounced, aquiline nose. His mother's full mouth. Her sharp cheekbones. Nowhere in him was a trace of the artist. No animated brow. No furrowed forehead, no pronounced chin or dark feature.

Abandoning the search, he loaded toothpaste onto his toothbrush and sawed away at his mouth, gathering foam at the corners and spitting recklessly into the porcelain bowl. With the green end of his toothbrush jutting out of his mouth like a sidelong, rebel smoke, he cocked a quick stare at the mirror, one brow lifted up. If he had a camera, it would have been a prime self-portrait. Skinny in his white t-shirt and blue shorts, the perfect composition of his mother, desperate to imitate a lost, not-quite-father.

Turning away, still loosely brushing at teeth, he caught a glimpse of a white, plastic strip along the back of the toilet. In the center of it, a panel depressed down, a smear of color blurred on it. It was a telltale symbol, an icon of terror in young men and delight in certain women. It was his mother's.

Reaching over, he swept it up and stared down to read results, a flutter of anxiety rumbling in his stomach.

The test was set back down carefully where he had left it. Dressed and ready for her day, Lucy pushed into the bathroom without a knock and he twisted to spit in the bowl.

"I could've been showering," he grumbled good naturedly, rinsing mouth out and turning off the faucet with a lazy twist.

"I didn't hear the water running," she replied, diving straight for the plastic strip and lifting it up. Her face wasn't lifted enough to fall, or it would have, Holden imagined. Instead, the same, stony feature remained. His mother was sleek and steely. She was cast iron, never rusted. A thin, pale hand propped on her hip and she snapped the plastic in half -- a subtle revenge, before the thing went tossed in the small garbage can, covered over in tissue and paper.

"Did you look at this?" She asked sternly.

"Yeah."

Lucy looked up at him, her son a clear head taller than she was, wiry and long. Pushing past, she took up the bathroom mirror and reached to pull her hair back into a fashion that would be ruined by midday at best. Fingers twisted adeptly and pins from the cabinet were used to hold it up.

"You will say nothing to Seven."

"Okay."

"He'll be heartbroken."

"I know."

"He's in a good mood today. His hands aren't killing him, and he's been drawing like crazy, and he's just in a good place, I don't want this yanking the fucking rug out from under him. I don't want him disappointed."

"Okay."

Lucy glanced over to Holden, stern and intent. "Nothing, Holden. Do you understand? Nothing."

Holden nodded. "Okay."

His mother turned back to her grooming ritual, her makeup case cracked open as she applied eyeliner in its usual, ageless fashion.

"Ma?"

"Hm."

"Are you disappointed?"

The eyeliner cracked back into the case and she zipped it up sharply.

"I'm late for work."

[star studded]

"You are not particularly attracted to Elaine, who's too hard-edged in your view. You do not even think she is a particularly nice person. Yet you have this desire to prove that you can have as good a time as anyone, that you can be one of the crowd. Objectively, you know that Elaine is desirable, and you feel obligated to desire her. It seems to be your duty to go through the motions. You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure."


Bright Lights, Big City

[star studded]

Holden sits across from his mother because she no longer frightens him. When he was younger, the very cold glare of her eye could send him skittering to clear ground. They had endured a bizarre relationship, from hiding behind her legs as a toddler, to a volatile argument at eighteen that had resulted in a red shaped palm print on his cheek and his hand in the air, ready to touch down against his mother's stiffly drawn face.

It was the one time his father had ever put a hand on him in that connotation. His palm had pressed to Holden's collar and drew him back once, sharply, without warning. The argument had ended there, in a sprawl of sharp words that terrified him more than his mother's slurs ever could.

He sits across from her now because he is no longer afraid. He has watched her soften with the birth of Antonia, watched her plead with speech therapists and pathologists, developmental specialists that all returned the same useless information. There is nothing clinically wrong with his wild haired younger sister. At the restaurant, they are almost mirror images. He eats with his left, watching her pick and fret with her right. She looks taut and tired from what he imagines are difficult nights.

"Are you sleeping?" The question is cursory, asked between bites of his food.

"I heard you crawl in across the hall at five in the morning the other day. I think that question suits you a bit more." Her voice is a low gravel line of sound. He cannot associate it with lullabyes or bedtime stories. He remembers a lilt in Dutch from his younger years, his first acclimation to the now almost fluent language.

"I sleep," he answers, looking at her with a sliver of amusement. His expression falters and cracks, and he turns his attention back to his food. Silence passes between them for a few terrifying moments. He busies himself with bites of food and swallows of water. Drinking wine in front of his mother had never felt appropriate. Even the champagne he had toasted them with at their wedding had felt wildly odd. He sipped once and then ignored it for the rest of the night.

When his mother looks up at him, she is staunch and concerned, her hands pressed to the table, her red mouth pursed and drawn. He tucks a breath somewhere under his ribs for safe keeping. There is a terror in this, a worry smeared over her.

"I know." It is all she says, and he knows she is not affirming his ability to sleep. Holden feels a wash of both relief and anxiety. Relief because there is no need to tell her anything. Anxiety because he is now reminded of indiscretions, no matter how small of slivers they may be. He remembers his own indecision. He feels paralyzed. He feels something essential in him harden, clench up. Valves wheeze and hiss. His heart skips a flutter of beats that have him pressing a hand to the flat of his skinny chest. He was suddenly no longer hungry.

"Have you talked to your father?"

"He'll be disappointed." Holden's reaction is one of near panic. He cannot watch the fall of his father's face at the idea of something he had wanted so badly now turning sour with each rattle, each day.

"You tell him everything. More than you tell me. And I'm the one that--"

"I know."

The same silence lingers between them again, Holden's fork clattering down against his plate. He is no longer hungry.

"Ma."

"Hm?" She looks up from her meal, her fork poised, her green eyes catlike and attentive.

"I wish Marla--"

"I know," Lucy replies. It is her turn now, to be the confidante.

[star studded]

Rewound: December 7th, one year ago.

I.

The feeling is familiar. It starts like a low boil and then rises up. It is something backed up and unclogging. This is what it feels like when I have to vomit.

I am hunched over the white porcelain of someone else's toilet. The feeling is familiar. My knees dig into the blue mat beneath and I revisit my meals. There is breakfast. An afternoon snack. The brown and white swirl of dinner. My body cannot assimilate these things as its own. It rejects them, like it does everything else.

This morning, I cut my own hair in my own bathroom mirror. The result is lackluster. One side is uneven. I don't cut my hair very short, because I worry that I'll be forever waiting for it to grow back in. I wet it and trim it. The ends curl around my face. I feel like I stopped maturing in looks at age five. Pulling up from the floor, I rinse my mouth with water. I look haggard and worn out. This is what twenty-three brings to me, I suppose. Happy birthday.

Marla is in the doorway. I notice her immediately. She's covered her porcelain legs in opaque tights and a short skirt. The dyed-black of her hair is pulled back and away from her face. She is all red lipstick and eyeliner. This is my Marla. Marla who I have divided and conquered for some time now. Marla, whose bed I'll crawl into tonight if only because I can.

?What time is it??

She glances at the silver slip of her watch. ?Almost three.?

"Everyone's gone.?

?I told them the cops were coming. They scattered like roaches.? She wanders into the bathroom another few steps and puts her cup down on the back of the toilet. Easily, her hands hit my collar and she starts unbuttoning. This is not foreplay. This is her way of taking care of me.

?Tell me the story,? I insist, shrugging my shoulders and pushing out of my collared shirt.

?No.?

?Just tell me my favourite part then,? I sway back on my heels.

?When the doctors took the bandages off, the lights flickered. The generator kicked on. The stitches weren't there.?

?The body had accepted them. Like when you get shot and it's more dangerous to remove the bullet than to leave it in your body for the rest of your life. The body learns to live with things. Objects. Systems. Benign things.? I am sobering up, inch by inch. Marla sighs and peels off her jacket.

?I want to fuck now,? she says. She draws on the mirror in her lipstick. Stick figure versions of us. Her hair is long and tumbling. Mine is a shaggy mess. I remember the first time we fucked, in the backseat of the car we had rented to get to her father's house. She had a pink smear on her cheek the size of someone's palm. I remember her screaming louder than me, just so she wouldn't have to hear my voice.

TWENTY THREE YEARS OF THIS BULLSHIT, she writes underneath the picture.

My sentiments exactly.

[star studded]

present day. early autumn.


Holden sat on the hood of the old Chevy as Jack tinkered around beneath. Rather than a proper sliding board, the Stanton boy had jacked one of his younger brothers' skateboards for the task of maneuvering under and out from beneath the car's undercarriage. He would reappear now and then, his face smeared with dirt and oil, his father's blue eyes furrowed. Holden would wonder what it was like to be the golden boy and problem child all at once. Jack had gone to military school. Jack had been a child terror. Jack went shopping with his mother every Sunday. Jack played ball in the park with his father and brothers. It was an inverted Norman Rockwell painting with something lingering around every corner.

When Jack emerged, Holden took a drag off of the Marlboro Red and handed it down to him. They exhaled smoke towards the fan that would blow fumes and evidence out of the Stanton garage. It was only Asher that they hid it from, though Jack's father would do little if he caught them.

"You're in a load of shit," Jack informed his friend, pushing to a stand and smearing palms off with a rag.

"Yup."

"I mean, a whole lot of shit. Shit up to your fucking neck man. Uncle Michael's going to make your life a living hell if he finds out and you know Uncle Michael always, always finds out what goes on with his precious little china doll daughter."

Holden snatched the cigarette back and plugged it between his lips. "Fuck Michael," he mumbled around it. "I'm a grown man."

"A grown man living off the last of your art grant. What're you going to do when that runs out?"

Holden knew damn well what he had planned on doing, but it now seemed ridiculous. He was just as spoiled as the rest of them. The only advantage that they had was that they never tried to deny it. A hand smeared over his face, pushing scruff across his palm. Sometimes he still felt seventeen, scrounging for money, itching to spread the legs of the prom queen, just to say he had.

"I sent in three more tapes this week. Someone's going to pick up my work. Someone, somewhere is going to recognize something," he insisted.

"Not unless you call yourself Holden Hart, son of Seven Thatcher on your introductions."

"Fuck you." A screwdriver launched in Jack's direction, but clattered mercifully to the ground. Jack's skinny shoulders lifted high.

"Do you want my advice?"

"No, Jack. You work at a bike co-op and live with your parents. You've never had a girlfriend in your life."

"And pretty soon, Holden, you'll never have a decent girlfriend again. Just a string of miserable little conquests with pretty faces and unmemorable sexual stylings."

His stomach churned, wrestling with itself and the inevitability that Jack Stanton, for once, might know what he was talking about.

"You're not a shitty person, if that's what you're thinking, Holden. You're twenty-three. I can't say I wouldn't do the same if I were in your situation."

"How reaffirming," he sighed, stubbing the cigarette out against the concrete of the wall.

[star studded]

Between them, the joint had nearly been finished off. Burned down to the tips of their fingers, it lingered as they passed it back and forth, finally snuffing it out and storing the end bits away for later. Holden's hair was strapped back with a strip of cloth in tribute to a distant Donovan, or the way his father looked in old pictures from de Stjil, his wild hair wrapped up in a beaten t-shirt.

Beside him, Rusty grumbled, his fingers wedging under the window and pushing it up higher.

"It's fuckin' cold," Holden protested, his paint splattered t-shirt thin and doing little to protect against the mid-autumn breeze that had plowed in without warning.

"It smells like paint thinner in here."

Rusty pushed to his feet and hunched over the sill, breathing in the city air that filtered in. Exhaust fumes and subway air must have been better than the smell of Holden's oil paints. Rusty Taylor was a dark-headed mop of a short kid, all rumpled clothes and half-shaven face. Peering over the slant of his shoulder, he watched Holden a moment, perched in front of a stretched out piece of canvas that would intimidate even the most professional of painters. The cloth was half painted. All he could make out were someone's crooked arms, suspended on string. Legs were heavy beneath an ill defined body, knees bowed in, hips cocked to the side, like a slumping, lifeless marionette.

The face was missing. Like a Mohammed portrait it was just a white glow, a round space of blank canvas to be filled in later.

"You haven't painted since high school."

"I know."

"I thought you were into that whole, interactive art shit. Installations and performance and blowing shit up in museums."

"That was one time, and it wasn't my idea." As if that justified everything. As if that was excuse enough to attach small explosives to a multimillion dollar sculpture.

"Who are you painting?" Rusty turned away from the window long enough to take a good look at the canvas.

Holden knew, but there was something appealing about the ambiguity of it all. It could be anyone. Anyone with skinny limbs and a definitive curve at the dip of her waist, anyone with ribs that stretched under white linen like accordion paper. Anyone with a fall of dark hair, with a dip of shadow in their collar.

"Hey. Holden?"

"Yo."

"Who are you painting?"

"It doesn't matter."

[star studded]

I can count the times I have argued with Seven Thatcher plainly on my left hand. I can tick them off one by one, each memory as vivid as tonight's car ride home.

(1) Age six. We are at the MOMA. My mother is perusing the Jackson Pollack pieces, her stark heels clipping across the floor. The security monitor watches her, but not because he worries she'll trip the alarms and wander too close to the canvas. Seven says nothing. One room away is the massive red sculpture that I have only ever seen in pictures. Every time we come, there is always some reason that we don't go into that room. My mother takes my hand to guide me out of the gallery, towards the stairs, but I am resistant. My awkward legs haul for the room that houses Seven's art, but she hollers after me. Seven stops me at the door, a beanpole giant. He shakes his head. I stomp and howl in protest.

"You will listen to your mother."

The fight ends there.

(2) Age eighteen. My pregnant mother and I scream at each other over dinner. Seven digs into his jar of peanut butter with a spoon and lets us deflate at our own rate. We wind up standing, debating the usefulness of college, whatever path I am treading down, the necessity of experience to facilitate art. I say something insulting and foul. Her hand cracks my face. Instinctively, my own lifts, and falls short. I cannot swing, but he has already flattened a hand to my collar. I will not treat his schoen frauline like that. I will not say such things. Later on, at night, I hear him repeating nearly the same words to my mother, behind closed bedroom doors.

(3) Age nineteen. London. I am shacked up in a shitty West End hotel with paper walls and dirty sheets. The bottom has fallen out. My right stretch of ribs are bruised and my back aches from meeting brick. Every glorified image has shattered -- I hate to admit that my mother was right all along. Seven appears like a ghost from the doorway. He tells me to pack, that I will return home. It is time. The trip is over. I refuse. We argue over what is enough, what family means. He throws his black card down onto the dirty bed and tells me to take it, if that is all I want. See the world, run his account dry, he does not care because he wants me to be happy. It breaks me. We pack my bags and fly home. On the plane, he buys extra whiskey and coke and pours it into my empty can of Sprite when the flight attendants aren't looking. We laugh about terrible London venues. We miss Amsterdam.

(4) Age twenty-three. Tonight. I confess all to him on the way home from the police station. He grits his jaw and tells me that he would never do what I have done.

"Well aren't you a saint."

He pulls the car over and we fight. I tell him I worry that the only time he really accepts every single part of someone is when they are making all of the right decisions, doing exactly as he expects and is used to. He takes my face in his hands. They are the same gnarled, twisted pieces of useless appendage, like old trees against my cheeks. The knuckles are swollen. I can tell that the cold weather is making them ache. It isn't true. None of it is true. I should not do what I don't want to do, because I worry about the parts not fitting. His English becomes garbled. We flutter in Dutch for a spell, a language he is miraculously fluent in, and I am half-comfortable with. I should not move if I do not want to. He is proud. Above all, he is proud.

I wake up in the morning on my sister's floor, in the pajamas he gave me, on the pillows and blankets he dragged out of the closet. I remember. We sat up last night. He made tea and we drank it downstairs while my mother sewed and Antonia slept on her lap. Antonia now dances around me in the outfit she picked out for herself, bowing down with her red marker and finishing the masterpiece she has started drawing. She traces over the tattoos on my arms. She pretends she is our father, hard at work.

"Come downstairs!" Antonia stamps her foot. "Papa is making pancakes but Mama calls them a mess."

I am home. Everything is a mess.