David Antrobus

“Do you ever think about the sun, how strange it is? This giant fire hanging in the sky, this burning thing that makes the whole world possible, the most powerful thing there is, and the one thing we know, innately, is never look at it. It sits there

“Do you ever think about the sun, how strange it is? This giant fire hanging in the sky, this burning thing that makes the whole world possible, the most powerful thing there is, and the one thing we know, innately, is never look at it. It sits there in plain sight in the sky and your eyes dance around it without you even thinking about it. Because if you look at it directly, it will burn your eyes out of your skull.”

She gets to Venice just in time to watch the Pacific swallow the sun, like it does every night and always will until the end of everything. And she sits there on the dirty sand, grit between her sandal and her foot. She tries to think back to when the ocean changed for her, when coming west got to be too much of a hassle, when the ocean stopped being this rolling infinity and instead became about parking and screaming kids and drunk folks and sand in her shoes.

Mae walks back down to the river. The women have flat hair and Joni Mitchell hats and handspun peasant blouses that cost eight hundred dollars. The men in dirty jeans and stubble, thin, messy hair, looking like dog shit, and yet these women all cling to them. She walks past a French bakery, this woman who looks just like Natalie Portman—it is Natalie Portman—eating a chocolate croissant, Zack de la Rocha at the next table. Mae passes some invisible border, the hipness bleeding away just like that, past a Subway, a liquor store, a gas station, panhandlers, down the hill toward the river, passing a woman with her hair formed into a single knotted dread digging for cans in the trash.

This feeling washes over her, this soul-deep wish to just go back to when she could walk through this burning world without noticing it’s on fire. [...] And maybe she would have carried this thing with her the rest of her life, this secret pain, this secret worry, but who doesn’t? Who doesn’t know their lives are built on top of bones? Who doesn’t carry inside them that it’s only brutal violence keeping this world afloat? Child slaves making our clothes, factory farms turning animals to slurry, nations of plastic floating in the ocean. Is she supposed to yank all that down too? Just her?

A single wooden chair in the center of the room—they shove him in it. Dried blood speckles the floor. There is a handful of white pebbles under his feet. It takes Chris a beat to understand they are shards of human teeth.

“People’s sex lives are like their dreams,” Mae says. “I only care about them if I’m in them.”

They walk down to the water’s edge. Gray waves in the dark. That feeling when you are drunk and the air is the temperature of your skin and you get how everything is connected in this simple wordless way.

She kisses him, hard. Before he can really return it, she breaks off. She’s got this smile on her face. He’ll do anything to keep it there.