she slid from him and lay atop him weeping and her face was pressing against his shirt and he didn’t know where to put his hands—certainly not on her bare bottom—and he held her tightly through her leather jacket and she cried and cried.
After a while she stopped and her hand found him again, and again she slid him into herself and was moving with an almost seriousness of purpose.
“Why are we doing this?” he asked.
“Shut up,” she said. “Just be quiet. Okay?”
He knew enough not to say even okay. She kept going and he was trying to move somehow—how could he be so ignorant about this, so unknowing?—and then she swallowed hard and her eyes didn’t appear to be looking at all, and she stopped and patted him lightly on the chest.
“Okay,” she said.
She maneuvered herself off him and stood and went to the bed for the duvet and came back and lay beside him on the floor and covered them both because it did seem suddenly colder than it was.
“You’ll be so much different when I come back in a year,” she said. “You’ll know how. The girls here have never seen a Dane and they’ll be curious.”
And neither of them could know—how could they?—that she wouldn’t come back in a year but in two and a half months, because it would turn out to be so awful over there, so horrible, in silly backward small-town Denmark, and her face would be so haggard and gaunt that she’d look at least thirty, sitting across from him in the breakfast nook as she smoked her cigarettes and rolled her eyes. And he couldn’t know and she couldn’t know that in just twenty years both her parents would be in the ground and she would be in the ground, that they would all be dead, leaving nobody behind except maybe him and he didn’t count.
He could feel her groping around and she dug out a cigarette from her jacket pocket and lit it and lay on her back smoking up at the ceiling.
“You know, we talked about it,” she said.
“What?”
“Ronnie and I. We talked about doing it. Fucking. I mean, we weren’t—” her voice caught at that. “Weren’t related, really. So we could have. And we talked about it. But we didn’t do it.”
“Oh.” For an instant, he had a vision of them doing it and it made him shiver.
“Is my little Dane cold?” She moved a hand toward him. “My little Dane who’d never done it before.”
“I know,” he admitted.
“You’re going to be fine,” she said.
And he was, he was going to be fine. Although they wouldn’t ever sleep together again, he would last the year and go to university and marry and have kids and, in all the ordinary meanness and tragedy of life, experience happiness. But none of them here in this house would experience that after today. Yesterday would be their last day. The police would determine that Ronnie wasn’t drunk, he just hadn’t been a particularly cautious driver. He liked to go really fast. Jens could remember that, how the trees whistled at them on their way to Race Point, how Ronnie turned Province Lands Road into his personal quarter oval. He could remember sitting in the passenger seat and thinking it was so dangerous he couldn’t even admit to himself just how terrified he was, the way Ronnie would look over at him grinning insanely but in a not unkind fashion as he brought the car up to ninety and then one hundred miles an hour, his zany American brother.
But that was a long time ago, before many of you were even born. Don’t think about it, there’s no point in thinking about it. There’s no point in trying to look back.
VIVA REGINA
BY BEN GREENMAN
Woods Hole
I was minding my own business.
I was at home watching television.
The show was a police drama.
Everyone told me that it was fantastic.
I didn’t see the appeal.
The older detective was always shouting at the younger detective.
The younger detective was always champing at the bit to solve the cases quickly.
Their female sergeant wore her uniform comically tight.
The show was set in Boston and the accents were broad.
I couldn’t keep track of anyone’s names.
I had started with the sense that I would watch the entire hour and while I did my best I was soon overcome with fatigue and I started to lean back into the couch and consequently into sleep.
I was so tired I thought I would never be alert again.
I