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He makes dinner while I sit at the two-top and watch. He lives in a house with three other people and a dog, a compost pile and various recycling bins. They hang their clothes on a line to dry, eat a lot of quinoa.

It’s the kind of place I like to visit: too many lights burning and slumped furniture, a shared dog. He puts the tortillas right on the burners.

Two? he asks.

One, I say. I ate a late lunch.

You never let me feed you, he says.

He’s wearing tight clothes that make him look like a little boy. Or maybe it’s the haircut, his long hair in a plastic bag in his room. He keeps asking me to go in there and touch it, to feel how disgusting hair is when it isn’t attached to somebody’s head.

He sets our plates on the table and sits across from me. I eat alone so much I feel like we should pray. Have you ever loved someone as much as they’ve loved you? I ask, a precedent for this line of questioning already established.

Not even close, he says.

Me either.

The French found my talk of percentages ridiculous—what does it mean, they asked, to love someone 30%? What’s this 70/30 split? 60/40?

60/40, we agree, would be a dream.

I don’t mind when he brings up the years he spent in Paris, he does it so infrequently. He left a job there, a girlfriend. A job and a girlfriend he has been good enough to try and forget.

The girls have all loved him more. The boys have loved me more. Perhaps if two people who have always loved less got together? I don’t suggest this. I take a bite of my taco: vegetarian, spicy. It makes him happy when I eat. He feeds the shared dog bits of potato while I watch. I don’t like his haircut. He isn’t big enough to make me feel small.

I think we’re proud of something there’s nothing to be proud of, I say, uncrossing my legs.

I’m not proud of anything, he says.

Think about it—we form relationships with people we don’t love so they can’t hurt us, where we’re guaranteed to win. Though really we’re losing.

I don’t go into relationships trying to win, he says.

I remember the time I told him I felt awkward around him. He was in my apartment, where there were no people coming and going, no shared dog, no quinoa. Do you think it makes things more or less awkward when people say they feel awkward? he asked, before answering his own question. I knew it could never work after that.

I look out the window. One of his roommates is out there drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes but soon he’ll come inside and make the atmosphere festive again, ask me questions about myself, look at my legs. I take our dishes to the sink and soap them up—the hot water too hot, the lack of paper towels bothersome—and then I wash the rest of the dishes. When there’s nothing left to clean, I grab the dog’s leash from the bowl and watch him jump.

Mary Miller is the author of a story collection, Big World. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Mississippi Review, Oxford American, New Stories from the South 2008, and others. She lives in Austin, where she is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, and serves as Co-Fiction Editor of Bat City Review.

Joy Fong Golden Wok House (first draft)

The white towel.  The shirt, without a collar, that buttons to an inflectionless period beneath the haiku of the smiling face. Who are these obsequious men?  And what do their obsequies portend?  Fine dining?  A tank of carp? Lobsters?  The blood-stain on the red centerpiece flower, the deeper vermillion of the tightly-patterned wall.  A fine place to die, this Fong Golden Wok house.  Slumped into a robust booth cushion, face against your own face in the mirror, goldenrod and cranes etched over your cancelled head.

I have known chinamen.  They are not all wheedling and gormless. Fine duck, sir?  Yes. Fine duck.  The salty flesh dividing, delaminating from the boathull texture.  Is this a beak?  Spiced broccoli–I see no point in that.  A game of football–Oilers and Rams colliding inside the greasy white overhanging box, numbered men saying nothing through a speckling of unused soundholes, the words labeling the schematic armored violence

“And now…
it looks like…
Hubblerimmer will call…
for a…”

An illegible Chinese notice taped to the box.  Children coloring on the mats, circling zodiac animals.  Cock, rat, ox.  A sequined arm raises up, gold skirt, mimes a dance.  Come back, her mother says, come back and sit down.  Spiced broccoli–nestled seeds deep in the spongework of loamy green, varnished unevenly brown, all pointless, all pointless.  Bring me dumplings.  An ecstasy of steam in the parchment of my face.  Dumplings are fine and right.  Cut through the damp skin sac, a grey translucence, splitting open, tender fistful of unstrung meat.  Its mother tells the one trying to eat a crayon, he was born in the year of the tiger.  I’m the tiger?  Yes, give me that, yes you’re a tiger.  The word Prang hangs asymmetrical black on colored paper from the vampirical mouth like a torn tooth, a pennant and a stalagtite.  The figures scuttle on the painted grass, looking after a ball.  Carapaced, padded, banded, their sharpnesses rounded against impact, piling one on the next.  White noodles lie untouched.  A lobster looks at me, and I at him.  Imagine spending your last days in a public swimming pool where everyone had a pair of claws.  (Idea for story–prisons full.  Swimming pools used as death row–Makes no sense.)  These footballmen–are they not also lobsters?  What are the transformations here?  What is asked of men?  To eat with sticks.  To pour cupfus of tea.  To explain a restaurant.  To write in a notebook. To be seventy five. To look insane.

Zak Smith is an artist who first came to prominence with his mammoth work Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Smith’s paintings and drawings are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. We Did Porn— a book includng drawings and stories about his experiences working in the adult film industry— his third book and his first to include writing— was published by Tin House Books. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

The wires had been fed into my father’s face. We stood around and watched him take it, and the white was gray really and I was older than I’d meant to be and there was no way now to stop. No way now to let them take me before my father and let me be done with my hours here surrounded, as there was anyway no way I could have what I wanted, not because I didn’t know what that was but because the sky was close enough now that you could nearly not breathe a hunk of it into you without looking or thinking and behind the sky we did not know what there would be. My father’s face charred politely almost on the dais before the endless children came to crowd around him in offering to no one. They raised their plastic fists and rained away with voices from the boxes underneath their tongues, a sound without language, tone for tone’s sake to consecrate this demolition of a man. A man, my father, who had raised the very foundation of this township underneath us years before any of the rest of us here crowded in witness as the machines made his death, as my father had been the oldest man of all our people at 49, which meant that he next would be the one we filled with the excess light of electronics in the hope that it would be enough to hold the black inside the black and keep our skins against us nearer pressed to cling the blood in. In death my father made no sound, or at least nothing loud enough over the frying wires to be measured in a way I could feel enough to cling to. The smoke he gave was weak and cherry-brown, which allowed them to write down in formal record that his time had come for him at regardless and at last, that even had we not begun this exploratory procedure for sacrifice of eldest locals for our protection he would have soon died; even if this forced death was not what whatever the black inside the black had ever wanted, we would not be called to blame, his skin was ready, his mind was ready, he was a worried man like all of us, the sickness had leathered in him, he was ready as a man. I knew this not to be true at least in formal practice, as when the men had come for him on the morning of the death of the prior elder to secure his corpus for the next method of rite, my father had locked himself in our guest bedroom bathroom, hardly bigger than himself, and through the keyhole begged the sparing of his time, swore in fact he was not as old as he looked, he was a child here, a child trapped in a man, and instead they should take our neighbor, any of them, anybody. At that time I’d been ashamed. I’d shamed my father’s name and apologized to the silver men holding him up and disowned his posture and called him weak. I’d brought the lockpick for the door out of my mother’s knit box and handed it over to the men and stood with arms crossed and rather smirking as they pried him from the house, his frame still whooping no longer in our language but simply sounds like some gone animal in pain. I’d even taken a photograph as they strapped him to the plastic mobile altar and paraded him to where for his last days he would live in intense sun, in a black wire cage at the center of our township so that the black inside the black could see our willingness to make our dead, in the name of whatever it was, again and again, until we were nothing even, if that’s what must be done to slow the seize of time and aging in the rest of us all waiting for the same eventual end if slower and already begun. Give us reaction, is all we asked it, any answer, some kind of way to set a set of us to live without the wall of time, a way to live as the machines did without fear of counting down and losing form, a door into some closer guise of perpetuity if not at last the thing itself. When at last the smoke ceased pouring from the place my father’s body had been just before then and on the dais I saw now nothing left but pulp of char, a snotty gloss where my father had struggled through the spurting and the shakes, the sound coming out through all his pores at once same as the foam and then the ash did, his surface sort of turning inside out. I moved within myself to say a vow still in his name, a last remembrance of the man he’d been for me before the shitty parts over the years inside my raising to become the man like him now as I am, though where in the syllables my brain chose for me to give my want a life out of my mouth I found already I could not recall much of anything about him there at all beyond the way the shine of his skin had glinted in the last light under the sky surrounded, the machines all plugged up in his holes, his eyes sewn shut and seeing nothing, as well as perhaps a texture of the smell of how the final cinder-wafts of him at least had spread generally into our breathing vortex holding crisply like baked spaghetti and old oil, though even that recent thing already as I caught it I found its idea covered over by the music of the one note that rose over the air, formed our township’s anthem the machines all tooted slow and long into the faces of the children barking hard and splaying arms raised wide toward the calm long old sky above the dais, their toothless mouths wide open in wait to breathe in what might be offered in return for what we’d given up today and any day however near now would again and would and would.

Blake Butler’s most recent book is Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial). He lives in Atlanta.

It wasn’t easy to live in the woods, especially when we wanted the light on our heads. If only to know shoal and wave and dune. Maybe The Mountain thought so.  Or maybe not.  Maybe The Mountain was too busy pointing his chair in the direction of the house he’d lost to think any of us deserved such things.

So we did what we could to convince The Mountain. We fed his hummingbird with a dropper. We built an enclosure for his baby deer. We bandaged The Mountain’s wounds after he fell asleep one night, but when he caught us tending to him, he brushed us away. When we walked him through the hospital we’d built for the animals, he said, you’re cold and ruthless. His tone couldn’t have been further from fury which made it that much harder to take. And when we tried to lift our heads to meet his eyes, we couldn’t see past his disappointment, big enough now to blot out the country we’d built in his name.

That of course made us work all the harder. In the coming days we broke some bones, we fused them back together. We worked 24 days and nights to build a suspension bridge–the highest in the world at that time–across the water to the house he’d lost. He let us drive the pylons into the muck even though he must have known we were wasting ourselves. We needed to do something with our love, or whatever it was, which could have taken the whole town down if we hadn’t committed to giving ourselves up first.

One day it came to us that he wanted us to hurt him back. There was no other way out of it–he wanted us to destroy him. We weren’t the kind of children who were wont to hurting back. We knew such children existed but we wanted to believe in peace. So one day, with a regret greater than our names, we walked to the store and rented the biggest cannon they had on hand. It took all our might to push it out the door, to roll it up the slopes to the jungle. We lit the wick, we counted to ten and put our hands over our ears. The turmoil roiled inside our heads, so much louder than the sound of the blast, which split The Mountain into a thousand pieces. We tried our best not to catch the flying pieces, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We put him underneath our hats, we put him inside our pockets, but not before we kissed every third piece, although he tasted of aluminum.

Were we surprised when The Mountain reassembled himself in front of our eyes? Not really. Somehow the mountain got even bigger after he’d been split apart. When he calmed himself down and took in what we’d done to him, he laid us on the slab and lifted a piece of himself from his pocket. My God, he said, lifting his eyes in confusion. And just before the rock met our faces, we felt the force that he’d summoned calm us from deep within, and The Mountain went flying apart for good.

Paul Lisicky is the author of LAWNBOY, FAMOUS BUILDER, THE BURNING HOUSE, and two forthcoming books: UNBUILT PROJECTS (Four Way, 2012) and THE NARROW DOOR (Graywolf, 2014). He is the New Voices Professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden.