It was a strange time for us all. 

My mother, always a confident woman, acted odd her whole pregnancy. Was nervous from noon to night. My father, a nonstop talker, was silent. And I had what they called “sympathy symptoms.”

When she threw up, I threw up. When she gained weight, I gained weight. When her period stopped, my period stopped. I’d only just gotten it a couple months before. 

We craved the same things. We were repelled by the same things. We refused to touch apples. A whiff of one sent us running to the toilet.

I could feel everything she could in her body. I even knew when it was her time before she did.

When the contractions came, I heard her screams a half second behind my own. I felt the drugs they gave her. I was high in the sky. Like I’d climbed a tree that reached into the clouds. I was watching myself as I lay on the ground. 

I was ripped open when I heard my mother scream. 

What seemed like years later, I woke up. I told my mother if this is what I feel, I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling. She told me not to imagine it at all.

I studied the red, wriggling creature in my mother’s arms. During her whole pregnancy, I never heard my mother or father discuss names. Any name they picked would change the way I looked at the baby. Maybe even how I felt towards him. 

That’s when I asked my parents if I could name my brother. 

They looked at each other in alarm, then at me. Like I was a stray dog that might bite them any second if they made the wrong move. It was no stranger than they acted the whole of that year, so I waited until my mother, then father, gave a small nod.

I wanted him to have a name that marked the beginning of his story, so I asked my mother when she first suspected she was pregnant. She cried, which wasn’t weird after giving birth. But it was weird that my father cried too, cried even harder. 

She spoke more slowly than I’d ever heard in my life, asked if I remembered the day I fell from the top of the apple tree. She said don’t try to remember if I didn’t, but I did. That day we’d learned about Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in school. Important men in history books seemed to have their big ideas alone, so when the school bus dropped me off, before my parents came home, I climbed the tallest tree I could find in the orchard behind our house.

I could never do this when they were home. They never allowed me to go into the old man’s orchard alone, even though he’d encouraged me to come and play in the trees whenever I wanted. Especially if I was bored and alone. 

I sat on the highest branch I could find that day and turned my face to the sun. It worked for sunflowers. I closed my eyes, let the sunshine filter through the tiny veins in my eyelids, and imagined a great red ocean whose depths held kingdoms of new animals to discover. 

An idea was swimming into view, but then a tidal wave came up from the trunk of the tree and shook me loose. As I fell, I dreamed that I not only hit the ground, but sank down into it. The soil folded over me. Sealing me in. 

My mother woke me up with her screaming, held my head in her lap. My father brushed hair and leaves from my face. I touched a hand to my sore abdomen and wondered if I had fallen on my stomach. My father lifted me in his arms and blood ran down my legs.

My body didn’t feel like home after that.

The doctor wrapped my sprained wrist and bandaged my cuts. She took my parents to another room while I was left to my own thoughts on the exam table. 

The only thought I had was that I never got my big important idea. The kind of idea that got its own name—a law of motion, a theory of relativity, a principle of pain, an idea whose name began to answer the question it inspired.

The baby cried. Such a strange sound that made my chest hurt and prickle with sweat. I gazed out of the hospital window into the sun, peering again into my great red ocean. 

I said the first name that fell into my mind. 

We moved after Gravity was born. I’m still trying to have a big idea, but I can’t have them in the orchard anymore. My parents said they’d never liked the old man. It’s time for some space, they said. 

And we had space. From him, from the trees, but also, the natural divide between my mother’s body and my own returned. I felt what I felt now. She felt what she felt. 

I was lonely for a long time.

I didn’t mind the move. There are trees all over the world. Gravity too. Wherever my body goes, there my thoughts go as well, even if there is still an ocean between them.

Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep, and want so badly to talk to someone—but to who, and about what, I don’t know—I close my eyes and hold a flashlight over them. 

I see my great red ocean and imagine myself slipping into the pull of an underwater current. There is still so much to discover there. Divine creatures and monsters alike. I don’t know where it will take me. 

Maybe it’s not a place, but somewhere in time. Sometimes the past pulls at me like seaweed gripping around my ankle, dragging me into a rift in the ocean floor. And if I just look down, look at the face of the sea creature holding me, then some great idea will be illuminated. Maybe.

I turn off the flashlight and open my eyes to my dark bedroom. The present wraps me in a thick blanket of sleep and I am gone. 

The move has been good to us. Instead of an orchard, we have a lake. Weekends I swim and draw every plant and animal I can find. On this new side of the world, my mother smiles, my father talks, my brother is a wonder.

My body is starting to feel like home again.

The baby is walking and climbing and falling down on his own now. Most people call him Gray. But I’ll always call him by the name I gave him. A beginning as strong as the laws of nature. Somewhere to start and somewhere to end all at once.

M.M. Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine, Rejection Letters, JAKE, Icebreakers Lit, and Identity Theory. Read more on mmkaufman.com. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman, Blue Sky @mmkaufman.bsky.social, Instagram @mmkaufman, or at the carwash.

We watched the movie in Julie’s basement. Back when she had a mansion. Back before her parents got divorced. The plot was convoluted. The runtime was excessive. They’d filmed it like 20 minutes away in La Crosse, and we recognized about a million Wisconsin landmarks, or I did anyway. I was sitting three feet from the screen. Julie fell asleep on Keith’s lap, and I could hear occasional rustling behind me, Keith moving softly, Keith trying not to make things weird. In the movie, there’s like some kind of minorly mutated flu virus, and a bunch of old people refuse a vaccine. What happens is they die. They die, and they do so in enough numbers to constitute like twelve percent of the difference in a real close presidential election that swings to the Democrat, and there are media stories. Academic studies. Outsiders flood this town, and a bunch of kids like us get together and use rose petals to write “STAY STRONG” in front of every single former home of a now dead voter. The roses look all bloody on top of the snow. It’s hard to tell if the movie switches to black and white or if everything’s just so grey that it’s all indistinguishable. I caught Keith in the glare. He was scrunched way to the side of the sofa, Julie snoring away with her hair rolling over his legs.

“I figured you were having some kind of boner situation,” I said, on the way home.

“I was trying to like move her head real gentle on account of I didn’t want her to wake up. It wasn’t supposed to be creepy at all. And then like two clumps of her hair came out in my hand, and I kept daydreaming she had cancer.”

“Fuck,” I said, looking at him. Not wanting it to be true. But also imagining if it were. Watching Keith do the same.

“I’m not good with sickness,” he said, and I told him how the thing about cancer was that people who had it didn’t want to think about it, and you could do a lot by mostly ignoring it. Mostly waiting, which was all we could do. We waited for Julie to show up bald or dead, but the closest we got were wigs. I liked the blonde one. Platinum with bangs and cut tight shoulder-length. Keith was into the same style, only he preferred it jet black. Nobody else seemed to have an opinion. Julie’d walk by, and the hall would kind of tense up, and Keith would give her his math homework. Statistics, it was. I didn’t have much to offer until Julie started sleeping at her mom’s new place. Maxine’s. It was a lot smaller. Two blocks from the high school. We got invited over more often. We invited ourselves. Julie laughed louder. The movies got lighter. We tried to play games. Sometimes, Keith had an early curfew, and before he left, he’d look at me, kind of ambivalent, kind of asking.

“Gonna catch a ride with someone else,” I’d say, and he’d nod and shut the front door real quiet. One time I stayed until 2AM, and we watched music videos while Julie played with her bangs. We talked about the bands you play when no one’s awake to hear and she told me not to tell Keith how late I stayed, “Not because anything happened, but he’s probably not ready to hear it.”

“Okay,” I said, and I never told Keith. Even though I wanted to. Too scared he’d see right through me. 

Julie lost weight, then she put it back on. We didn’t know if she was getting better. Time was passing. It was senior year. Winter. Some weekends she’d spend at her dad’s place, and Keith and I would drive by. Julie drove this yellow Jeep, and sometimes it would be parked there. Sometimes not. Sometimes there was music. Sometimes not. On one of the quiet nights, Keith kept driving in circles. We couldn’t see the Jeep.

“Didn’t you say she’d be here?” said Keith.

I shrugged. “I don’t remember what I said.”

Keith pulled over. The mansion was behind us, built into a bluff. Somewhere below was the river. We couldn’t see it in the dark. “Listen,” he said, “If you want me to, like, stop, you just need to say so, okay?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. I looked at the house and thought about movies and basements and the way people fall asleep.

“Like.” Keith drummed on the dash. “I’m just trying to make her feel better, I guess, is what I’m saying. If it makes you feel weird or whatever. That’s all.”

“I don’t feel weird,” I said.

He nodded a little. I nodded back. He put the car in drive, and we wheeled around town for a while. Stopped at the Hy-Vee. Keith grabbed some roses, and I did too, and we found the Jeep parked outside Maxine’s. The lights inside the house were on. Julie was talking to her mom in the kitchen. Her hair was short and a little patchy.

She didn’t see us write “STAY STRONG” in rose petals on her lawn, but, on Monday, at school, Julie shrieked and hugged the two of us, hugged us like the ship was sinking and here were two logs in a broken life raft, and she went to prom with Keith. He said nothing ever happened, “nothing except some cloudy intense shit I don’t even understand,” but I didn’t know if I should believe him. I didn’t know how much I cared.

But that night with the roses, the moon was on us. We fought a little over the last petal or two, Keith in front of me, me in front of Keith. Laughing. Joking. Then Keith drove us away. Keith was more confident. Keith always drove. And the whole way back to mine we talked about last summer. About this uniform they made Julie wear at the drive-in, this knock-off nostalgia place where the high school girls put on roller skates and shorts that were too long to be sexy and too short to be chaste, and we let that image hang there, whispering. No music. No more talking. The bluffs cast frozen shadows, and the purity of our intentions sat there between us. Its levels were static and jumpy, all of them muddled as leaves beneath the reddened snow.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction, 48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.

Robin and I are coping well with the end of the world, by which I mean we usually wake up by eleven and agree that eleven is not bad at all. We start our day with reading: Robin prefers Plato, while I prefer Garfield. My love, ever the philosophy major, has drawn up a list of essential texts and downloaded as many as our laptops can hold, since the Internet will go out any day now. We argued for weeks over whether Garfield deserved to survive the apocalypse. Robin said everyone would hate a fat cat when they were starving, and I retorted that wrestling with Plato would burn too many calories. Eventually I pointed out that matters would likely snowball too fast anyway for starvation to be our cause of death, and if Robin wanted me to be bearable to live with until the end came in whatever way it did, they’d better stockpile some Garfield. They’ve never been able to resist me.

Once we’ve read our fill, it’s time for a late lunch. Robin insists that we discuss our respective literatures to keep our minds agile. They say we’ll need our problem-solving abilities when things get worse. This is another reason they resent my Garfield: they say it does not stimulate the brain. But I point out that, unlike Plato, Garfield is very good at procuring sustenance. While Robin descends into the cellar to make a selection from our menu of freeze-dried camping food, I go out to the yard and look up. Each day it becomes more difficult to breathe. The sky toys with the hues of an oil spill, sometimes green, or yellow, or purple. Most of the time, though, we are cloaked in a grayish-brown that shimmers vaguely, like some vengeful god changed his desktop to a color named death.

We force down our reconstituted pad thai or bun-less lentil sloppy joes or scrambled eggs which, in their freeze-dried form, are crispy like chips. For now we’re still vegetarians, but the vegetarian meals down in the cellar are getting low, and pretty soon we’ll be reverting to a more primitive carnivorous state. The idea makes Robin anxious, even though I point out that the animals we’ll be eating have already been dead and bagged for years.

After lunch, we have our nature walk. If I were in charge, I would probably take a nap instead. Doom’s approach makes me snoozy. But Robin says we have a responsibility to exist in the world while it lasts. I slip my hand into theirs, and they lead me into the woods and make me look at things. They make me look at trees and mushrooms and birds (if we’re lucky), and they call them immense rough-skinned intelligences and fleshy fruiting bodies of fungi and the ones who could still escape if there was anywhere to go. They exhort me to fix the images in my mind, and I say what good will it do for a dying beast to remember other dying beasts?

But I only say this in my head, otherwise it makes Robin pull their hand away and pat at their eyes. Robin still finds hope useful, and I try to be sympathetic.

The woods are quiet these days. When we stand still, my ears feel the fuzzy silence of earplugs, like there might be something to hear if only I could take them out. But I can’t. So we don’t stand still very often; instead, we create the illusion of life by cracking twigs under our feet. Today I nearly step on something else: a matchbook. Robin bends to pick it up. The cardboard, still dry, bears the unfamiliar insignia of a bar called Dante’s. Someone has been burning the matches; only two are left. Robin says, Who—? And I say, Don’t think about it. Robin stares at the packet in their palm, and by the time I lead us home, it’s nearly dark. The sun doesn’t set because it’s never there to begin with. The pall just dims and dims.

After dinner, Robin usually tries for something more contemporary: Hegel or Nietzsche, or Foucault if they’re feeling cheeky. But tonight they make me sit while they read Mencius aloud, and for a few minutes I admire the length of their fingers absentmindedly turning the matchbook over and over. They’re looking for answers, but I already have mine. So I excuse myself to the bathroom. They think I have a weak stomach, that the camping food doesn’t agree with me. I let them think this even though it isn’t particularly flattering. In the bathroom, I sit with my back against the tub and grope around in the depths of the cabinet under the sink. From beneath the rolls of toilet paper, I pull out a stack of small square pages that I ripped off years ago from a cartoon-a-day calendar. If we’re still alive when the toilet paper runs out, these pages will see things they never asked to see. But for now, I peruse a few of the cartoons every night. Sometimes I find one that makes me laugh even though it never did before. People used to get that worked up over a family dinner? A fender bender? A fractious boss? Ha-ha. The days are hopelessly out of order, and I never bother rearranging them.

Robin and I go to bed early. I fit myself against the soft curve of their back and nestle my nose into their neck, where the musk of wheat and lilies soothes me just the same as it did when our ends were not so imminent.

In the darkest part of the night, I wake. Robin is sitting up. They’ve lit one of the matches, and it blazes towards their fingertips. Their face is shining with silent tears. Mencius, they say, believed in the fundamental goodness of humans. Shouldn’t we be struggling towards survival like the products of evolution that we are? Shouldn’t we be devoting our time to useful pursuits, figuring out how to hunt and forage and make fire?

I hold my breath as the flame gobbles its own lifeblood. For months this question has hovered between us unspoken. Robin has tried to ask it before, and I’ve stopped them with kisses, eaten the words out of their mouth. Yes, my sage, I want to say. You and I will be the library, and the library must go on.

Just before the flame blisters their fingers, Robin extinguishes it with one sharp hiss of breath. Into the black silence, against the blue memory of fire that twitches before my eyes, I find I can only speak the truth.

I fumble the matchbook out of Robin’s hand and rip off the last match. I fold the book around the nubby tip; from it, I pull a conflagration. And to Robin’s question, I say no. Because survival—isn’t that how we got here in the first place?

Julia Rose Greider lives in New Hampshire and works in Vermont as a public librarian. Her fiction has been published in Nat. Brut, West Trade Review, and CALYX Journal, and she is an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.