Cowardice

In a story from LARB Quarterly no. 47: “Security,” Hannah Liberman’s narrator—who has a “lemon-sized” tumor in her throat—faces a possible cancer diagnosis that forces her to confront her memories, relationships, and losses.

By Hannah LibermanDecember 25, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Fiction

This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

WHEN THE DOCTOR calls in the morning, she says, “A lemon.”

One of the masses in Annie’s neck is the size of a lemon. Then, “cancer,” she continues on, clearly. Just the possibility of it. Or did she say “probability”? Is she allowed to say “probably”? And over the phone? It’s early still in the morning. Sun barely up. The house like a furniture showroom, newly unrecognizable. Annie has rearranged the living room’s couches, the dining room’s chairs, all angled toward the dirtied windows of the house where she lives alone. She rearranged it several weeks ago, in the time which will now be, she thinks while the doctor continues on about rating systems and textures and borders and densities, the time before. This will stand as one of those events that splits life into distinct categories—before, after. Then she hears from across the street the neighbor scream something at her husband that sounds like “the waterbed is leaking!” and the whole “before, after” split seems ridiculous, disgustingly amorphous and disgustingly solipsistic. She loses focus on the doctor’s words, trying to touch only certain parts of the wooden planks as she walks to the window, imagining water pooled along the floor. Limp mattresses. Puddles reflecting ceiling. A lemon. “Do you have any questions?” the doctor asks. No, no. And the doctor apologizes.

In an hour her parents will call, knowing today is the day the doctor had said the images would return. “A lemon,” she’ll say. She imagines the two sitting in their living room during their lunches, her father dialing the phone with the tip of his finger, both of them home because they don’t know how to begin a three-person call from their offices. On the couch, their knees will touch as if they’re teenagers, but they won’t notice, their closeness second nature.

And must she tell them, they who have already lost one of their two children? “A lemon!” she would say laughing to her sister. “A lemon!” they would screech.

The husband across the street rushes into the house from where he had been pacing barefoot, watering peonies along the house’s sidewalk, the water muddying and trailing down the cement in dark rivulets. A child runs along the lawn laughing, his toes coated in soil and grass, his face bared like a palm to the sky. From down the street comes the revving of a saxophone and drums, even this early. Annie thinks of blood as she watches the streaming hose and the child, and then she thinks of the banal, the way the inside of us warps the outside. So she tries instead to see the water as just that. Just water that begins to make its way down the street, into the gutters, down and down toward the crying of the saxophone and through the drainage gates, down and down into the city’s innards. Still laughing, the child runs in the open door after his father, his feet leaving shadows of water on the cement behind him. On the window’s glass, the citrus tree bears shade like hands. A bird careens into the window with a thump and then skitters away stunned. Unmoved, the tree’s shadows slap limply at the stain left by the body.

¤

Annie’s friend Renee once told her only two kinds of wanting exist—that for the future, that for the past. It was temporal, wanting. She had met Renee on an assignment, sent to a small town in the South where Renee had moved with her husband in the early aughts and the hills piled up green everywhere. Annie was there to interview her for the magazine where she then worked. Renee had just opened a new exhibit of her work, wooden sculptures carved along a hillside below the sky, their shapes angular and cold.

Renee was a good deal older than Annie. She looked at the stone ceiling of her house as she neglected to speak about the sculptures and instead told Annie how, as time went on, her wanting had aged to focus almost exclusively on the past—simply, there was less time to want on the other side of the present. She said this as she sat tall, her shoulders held as if tied behind her.

Once she was a woman with long auburn hair, she said. Once a woman in small shorts, a sweater. Once a woman who sat on the edges of couches and on windowsills. Once a woman who danced. Once a woman who ate cereal standing at her studio’s kitchen counter after a night out. Once a woman with a long span of future, stretching out like a child’s knee. Annie remembers that, at the time, the sentiment about wanting had recalled something a writer said about loneliness as either spare time or spare space, the two kinds distinct except for in their emptiness.

Annie liked this idea of loneliness. Too much empty space around one. Too much empty time. It meant one could fill it out themselves. This she had written in the interview with Renee, she remembers, likening the space of emptiness to the sculptures Renee had made.

Though now the memory of Renee’s idea of wanting seems askew, Annie thinks. Maybe that’s something Annie had written at another time, in a different essay. “Wanting” doesn’t seem right as the word Renee would have chosen. “Desire” maybe she had said? Or “longing”? Or had she even said anything about it at all? Annie can’t imagine Renee using the word “longing” in any way approximating earnestly, so it couldn’t have been that. “Longing,” Annie had assured herself righteously, was not of the vernacular she and most of the women with whom she spent time used. They had versed themselves in a different language, cut and crafted and punted out of the reach of whimsy. It was formed to keep them from the embarrassing burdens women otherwise incur: coquettishness, unseriousness, dumbness, neediness, and the list goes on. Any woman who deals in this other vernacular believes herself to have been lucky in this way: to have the choice. If it makes them pretentious, so be it. Better pretentious than frivolous, Annie had always thought. Better pretense than need. She thinks of her mother’s family hung out to dry by the government and working at survival in the desert. Pretentious, she wonders. Well, pretentious had always seemed better than the alternatives.

Renee was the type of person who could always discern how someone else was feeling just by running her eyes over them. Rare, rare, rare. Annie’s phone buzzes, dings. In fifty minutes, her parents will call. She sits down on the floor in front of the window and watches the child 
come running back out, blazing and euphoric through the wet grass, the 
window’s frame covered in dirt. He screeches and hops and laughs in the water streaming from the writhing hose.

¤

Many years ago, Renee had flown to visit Annie in Los Angeles. Those had been strange years, when Annie was caught in the aftermath of what then seemed a violent breakup, and she was no longer certain up was up, down, down. She was young then, and everything landed with more seriousness. It was then that Annie began sleeping with her bedroom door locked, lying awake through the night unable to sleep, listening to the sound of wind tossing outside the window, fixated on the difference between violence and brutality, as if, by charting a difference between those two words, she could set them up on a shelf out of the reach of her own life. Always she thought she might escape the world this way, through moving things up to the level of abstraction. But Renee knew all about the flesh of it, of course, because Annie had eventually told Renee the things she didn’t tell anyone, as Renee confided in her.

Renee had booked an early morning flight back home and refused to let Annie drive her to the airport, stubborn on this point. Though unfailingly generous, Renee wasn’t the kind of person to ask Annie for anything more than she thought she could give. She, like Annie, wasn’t the kind to need much. Only after her departure did she tell Annie she left her something in her hotel lobby, something Renee had received during a difficult period, one of too many difficult periods, of her life. A small stone bear, she wrote, small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, unnoticed. “Hold the bear,” Renee had texted her. “When things get tough, you can hold the bear.”

But Annie couldn’t get herself to drive to the hotel and retrieve the bear. Instead, it sat behind the desk of Renee’s hotel lobby for weeks. Less than a twenty-minute drive from Annie’s house and still, every day, she found a reason she couldn’t go. And for a while she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t receive the gift Renee left her, Renee with her seeing eyes, and her stories, and herself, open. And what did it mean, Annie wondered, that Renee had left the bear for her? That Renee loved her, she knew. Renee always said it just as easily. She could throw it in as if it were nothing at the end of one of their phone calls or when hugging her goodbye, calling clearly, “Love you!” The phrase always reminded Annie of some lines of David Berman’s, about all the young girls giggling out “love you” to their friends, dropping the “I” as if to distance themselves from the words, as if they might mean less that way. But over the years since her sister’s death, Annie had grown weird on that side of love. That side of love had come to make her slippery and strange. It was when Renee first said it over the phone, “love you,” casual as anything else, that there had been a long and, to her ears, unbearable pause before Annie had choked out, “love you,” dropping the “I” just as Renee had done, and failing to add “too,” because the “too” would have made it into some kind of bizarre exchange, she thought, some kind of formality, Annie having already received the love and just giving it back as if not wanting to be caught on the better side of a compliment. She had wondered then if Renee could hear the way her voice changed when 
she said those two words, the pitch rising as if formulating a lie, though of course she hadn’t been lying. Of course she loved Renee. That wasn’t
the issue. It was the receiving of love that made her strange.

So the bear had sat behind the lobby desk for weeks, its marble fur cold.

Outside the window, the hose twitches along the lawn abandoned by the husband, sputtering aimlessly. The boy has disappeared from its stream, tired. The memory embarrasses Annie. The lemon tree sways, rocked by hungry squirrels.

¤

At dinner the night before Renee’s flight, Annie had asked Renee to tell her about her husband, Michael, though she had already, and more than once. They had just finished a walk, and both were vacant, conversation tiring out like muscle. Why Annie brought up Michael she can’t now remember. He was an important man. Quiet and intelligent and generous, she liked him. She liked him despite the fact that they had always scared Annie, men with as much import as he possessed. Though, she thinks, this must be one of life’s aims. To live a life that insists on its own existence. One of the reasons the government keeps people poor and busy is because it is difficult to live this kind of life while also trying to survive. For this reason, these were not the kind of people from whom Annie’s parents came, nor were they, she knew, the kind from whom came Michael and Renee. And this must have been why all of them—Annie’s parents and Annie herself and Michael and Renee—took this as their aim: a life that insisted on its own existence.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Renee had started. “I met him so long ago.” Renee was eating salmon, pink and tender, slicing off thin slivers for Annie, setting them on the edge of her plate without even thinking, so immediate her propensity to share what was hers. “There were things that were important to me then, and he opened a different door than the one I was walking through, not better, not worse, only different.” The server had run by, pausing to pour water into their already full glasses. “It was not about money. I was not interested in money. It was about a different kind of love and a different kind of possibility. He offered a different future and it was one by which I was excited.” She smiled, took a bite and continued, “Other friends of mine married for other reasons. One theorist I knew married because she believed there were doors that would always have remained closed to her because she was a woman. She was radical in all senses of the word, and yet. Her husband was a theorist too. Marriage was a kind of doorstopper for her, and she was not embarrassed. It was a way of using the system once meant to use her, she believed. Nearly two hundred and fifty years, and this country has only been dictated by men. Yet we act today as if misogyny were passé. I suppose my friend was not interested in pretending that to be the case.” Renee smoothed the napkin in her lap. “And, of course, many other friends married for financial security, which seemed to me absolutely boring.”

“But I remember, when I was living in New York,” she continued, “running into a writer at a party. She was about to leave for some months for a residency, telling me that she needed the residency because she had no money, was hardly eating. She needed the money that would come from leasing her apartment while she was away. She had just ended a relationship so that she might go. And I knew after we spoke that I did not want to live like that, choosing my work over everything else. It seemed to me at the time, when I was young, incredibly sad and incredibly selfish. With time, though, I’ve only come to see that it stands as one way of surviving this life. There is individual creation and there is also love, and both are difficult, but they also make life bearable. Ideally, one can have both, but for too long it seemed that option remained closed to women.” Renee had paused, taken a bite of fish. “There were other things that were more significant to me. My parents were immigrants. They worked long hours. I had not possessed the security of others growing up, and that is what I wanted. Not money, but a kind of presence. I did not want to be the center around which the rest of my life orbited. I knew I did not want children, could not make the sacrifices I would have needed to in order to raise children; still I wanted to form a life with someone else and with my work.” Then Renee paused, seeing Annie staring at the nearly overflowing glass of water. “I don’t regret anything, but I do think about it. What it means, different notions of love. Romantic love. And how indispensable it is, in some ways. Because it’s tied to a constant reforming of the self. It becomes the world,” she paused and looked at Annie. “Why? Are you in love?”

Annie had told her she might have been, with someone at the university where she taught, though it had been too soon to know and probably she wasn’t. She hadn’t said anything else, about the idea of fear or about that of necessity or about gender or art or love, though it was the kind of conversation Renee would have slipped into gladly. It was the type of union Renee described that unsettled Annie. Love, Annie had come to believe in the years since her sister’s death, had little to do with certainty. Renee could probably tell this is where Annie’s mind had landed. Back then Annie had often tried to splice love and need, have the first without the second, the former without the latter’s ugly desperation. As though one could have the mind without the body, language without speech. “You can’t,” Renee would have said if she had been able, really, to read Annie’s thoughts. “There is no love without necessity,” she might have said. But of course, she couldn’t read Annie’s thoughts. Instead, she had smiled and touched Annie’s shoulder, her warm palm gripping firmly the cloth above Annie’s bone. “We aren’t ever promised ease, are we” she had said, and Annie had nodded, and Renee had smiled, and the waiter had swept by and poured water into their already full glasses. Who had she meant by “we”? Annie wonders.

She misses her, Renee, whom she sees now so rarely. Annie can’t even remember anything about the guy she’d thought she loved at the time. And how ridiculous to have given it any airtime, any of those moments she’d had with Renee, she thinks as she touches the bear placed along the windowsill facing out the street. She rises from the window. The hose sputters. She picks up the phone she’d set face down on the dining room table, not wanting to see its screen, the hour. The tick, tick, tick. “Movie tonight?” she texts her friend Irina before walking to the bedroom to take her parents’ call.

¤

Standing outside the Americana in the cold after they’ve arrived too late to make the movie, Irina says, “You are having a normal response to an abnormal situation.” Ab-normal. From Moscow, Irina’s accent sticks to the words, changing the cadence of the syllables. “Ab-normal.” She’s smoking a joint while she talks, clouds forming before her mouth as she leans against the wall at the mall where fake snow cascades down and the storefronts spill out logos. One long drag in, Irina takes, and one long breath out. Grotesque, Annie thinks. The snow, the logos, it is all fucking grotesque in how offensive she finds it. Foam sticking to smiling faces, bags weighing down arms, the logos, the logos. But Irina isn’t noticing. Irina is newly in love again, her nails painted red as if for the occasion, and because of this Annie considers her, for the time being, of another world. A long time ago, Irina determined that life must be easier as one of two rather than as one of one, and Annie wants to stay on this, the positive, trying to stick to the subject of Irina’s new partner, how it all is going, feeling skeptical of the idea of the oneness of two, but smiling all the same because Irina is beautiful with joy. Beaming. Foam snow attaches to Irina’s tights, the tiny blonde hairs on her face, her eyelashes. Where will it go, all the foam snow? Into the trees and the lungs and the soil. Irina is quick, and while Annie scrutinizes the flakes shooting from above, Irina asks after the new person she’s been dating, Ben, whom Annie hasn’t spoken to in a few days, maybe more.

“It won’t work,” Annie replies. Her new relationship with Ben is, resolutely, done. The timing has ended certain feelings before they could begin. The relationship will be the first thing to go. Ben won’t know about the lemon in her neck, one among many Annie has determined not to tell. It doesn’t have anything to do with him. “Ab-normal,” Annie thinks while the clouds form before Irina’s mouth. The word recalls “abscess” or “aberration.” The prefix “ab,” which, she recalls from a class long ago, means from, away, or off. Ab. Ab. Ab. Ab. Ab. Ab.

In a recent lecture she’d attended for her department, Annie had grown annoyed at the speaker. From behind a small podium, he had tried to position fascism as the “exception” or “aberration” of liberal democracy. The lecture had centered on locating a definition of fascism in order to diagnose the contemporary US political moment, Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential win. A question of how, by defining one word, the US public might come to understand all democracy’s history and collapse, and, in so doing, predict the future. Annie’s university colleague had leaned over: “Shouldn’t he choose one?” he had whispered. “Exception or aberration?” The difference between the two words was the connotation. It was clear that, no matter how the lecturer defined fascism, the term was always, of course, only used pejoratively, Annie’s colleague had said. So why had he used the two words: “exception or aberration”? It had been a way of obscuring meaning, Annie thought, the piling on of words, near-synonyms with disparate connotations. A way of evading understanding. Equivocating, as her colleague had called it. The lecturer was equivocating. Making his ideas inaccessible because inaccessible meant safe from critique. It was the world in which they lived. And what is with all these words with the prefix “ab” anyway? Abnormal, abscess, aberration. Abnormal, abscess, aberration. Ab-normal. But what is normal? Ab-surd.

Through the blur of fake snow, a man stands on the street corner sinking strawberries in a pot of melting chocolate and singing along to the song tinny through his phone speaker. Not singing, but belting, really, while the air shifts around to make room for his voice. “All I want for Christmas is you,” his voice rises as he takes the chocolate-coated strawberries from the pot and rolls them in shattered nuts.

“Are you hungry?” Irina asks, watching the strawberries as she flicks out the joint. Annie isn’t, though she wishes she was so the two could spend more time together. But her stomach is stone. Irina asks if Annie wants her to spend the night. No, no. “I love you,” Irina says, and Annie repeats the words. They each walk to their separate cars. The next morning will be Saturday, Annie thinks while she turns on the car and drives toward Nicholas’s house, having texted him when she learned about the lemon in the morning. The next morning will be Saturday, all the doctors’ offices closed. But no, she looks at the date on her phone again. No, the next day will be Friday, the offices still open. Yes, the next day the doctor will call about a plan forward. Today must be Thursday then. On the drive to Nicholas’s, a song skims off the radio that she recognizes, the singer’s voice coming from somewhere else.

¤

Many years ago, back when Annie was beginning a PhD, she had been deciding between a university on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and one in the South. The Southern University had a travel agent. It was that sort of place. The sort of place where university affiliates kept their receipts when they dined out or went to conferences and were promptly refunded, where most campus events were catered and catered well, where the wine provided at said events always required a wine opener, not wine of the variety preserved by way of a flimsy metal cap that a thin humanities student could screw off in one firm turn of the wrist. Okay, a firm turn or two, and then screw back on as if nothing had happened at all, nothing had changed.

She had never met the Southern travel agent, though they had communicated not infrequently over email while discussing flight dates and times, seating arrangements and hotels. She remembered her because of her name, Jo. Jo replied either within a matter of minutes or after nearly a week. There was no way of knowing which it would be, nor did Annie ever understand why or how her response time could vary so widely. Not her problem, Annie told herself. Not her problem, Jo’s unpredictability. But then again, it quite clearly was, her plans all hedging seemingly on one woman. One mercurial woman. After weeks of back and forth about a prospective visit, she and the travel agent had settled on a red-eye that arrived in the early morning in late February. It all went better than fine, Annie remembers. She checked in to the hotel the university had booked for her. In the room, beyond a window, a heavy river sprawled out to the point where tides were no longer distinguishable against sky, and Annie wondered about living in a place with a view like that.

The travel agent had died soon after that trip, she knows. Her ex-partner Charlie had told her. And it was during that visit that she met Charlie, who played her the song now thrumming from the car’s radio. This is from where the singer’s voice is coming, Annie realizes. Charlie.

Charlie had once driven across the country, parking on the side of the road and sleeping in his car through the nights, looking for a landscape painter. This was one of the first things he told her. Many years ago now, when she was just barely in her twenties. He was a bit older, but not much, already a PhD candidate at the Southern University when she was considering becoming a PhD candidate. That’s how they’d met. It was one of those things where the university was courting her and the several others whom it’d accepted, flying them out and placing them in hotels via the travel agent, seating them in the classes led by only the most famous instructors, all of whom had received express orders to put on their best performance. But they couldn’t, because they were only academics. At that point, it was clear to Annie how many people went into academia because there was no other place they could function, really, and it seemed to her that the category contained nearly all academics, as it would come to include herself. This bias was vindicated after a well-known theorist made a scene during a lunch meant to seduce the prospective students, starting an argument between the prospective candidates and the current candidates. It was an argument with misogyny at its center disguised to pass as an argument about something else. Their work was to critique an argument based in ideal theory rather than contemporary politics. And though Annie agreed with the notion theoretically, the practical effects were trickier. So a brutal attack was waged on a small detail, a small sentence-level inconsistency, rather than on the misogyny at the core of the essay. It was something not so easily resolvable, the argument, one of the reasons Annie had decided in the end not to accept the university’s offer. Until the circus of graduate school, she had not yet seen so blatantly the way certain people constructed and defended the scaffolding of institutions otherwise erected to keep them out. Charlie had warned her that if she were to become a PhD candidate there, the head of the program would assume less interest in her work than she would that of her male counterparts. This was not just, Charlie said, but it was a fact that she should know before making her decision. What Annie did not say was that this fact was boring in its ubiquity. And still Annie liked the chair, because it was difficult not to, because she was smart, and she was kind, and she was funny, and she was, also, careful. She couldn’t have been aware of her own biases. They were as much a part of her as were her eyes, her hands.

Still Annie trusted Charlie immediately when they first met and she took his warning seriously. And now she can hardly remember him.

She can’t recall the landscape painter for whom he was searching on his trip across the country, nor his relevance. The painter was a he, this she can remember, and American. And maybe the painter was having an affair, if she recalls correctly. Though the fact of his affair was only revealed posthumously and through letters. That’s right. Love letters. Love letters that Charlie once read aloud to her from a research file somewhere on his computer after they had started dating. Love letters the painter had written with a woman who was not his wife on the other side.

And she remembers, too, that the painter had something to do with the American Museum of Natural History. But that bit seems askew, and so she stops trying to remember anything more about the painter for whom Charlie was searching. Instead, she tries to remember the way Charlie’s mouth had moved as he described to her the painter, the way his tongue had pushed at the backs of his teeth in the stark night when they first met. If she can’t remember his words, she guesses, then maybe she can remember the shapes his mouth had formed, the parting and closing of his lips, and the breath coming through them as he turned his face to look at her, then moved back into profile in the street’s light coming down fragmented to frame the sidewalk.

The painter was dead, Charlie explained. “Dead.” Yes, Annie remembers that—the symmetry of that word, “dead,” as it came through his lips. Upon hearing it, a strange indignation had slipped over her. She fell into the swamp of herself from which it was always difficult to communicate much at all. For she had been incredulous, really, about the symmetry of that word as he said it. “Dead.” Beginning and ending with such resolute finality. Then Charlie had touched her shoulder, yes, that she remembers. He’d touched the place near her collarbone when he had realized she’d gone somewhere else and was no longer there with him, so to speak. Though they hadn’t known each other for more than a few days, hadn’t exchanged much more than a few dozen sentences, he’d touched her shoulder to bring her back beside him. Remind her where she was. It was maybe then she’d determined she had liked him, though it also could have been some time before.

So, Annie tries to remember now as the song vibrates on the car radio. So the painter was dead. So Charlie mustn’t have been searching for him all those years ago as he stalked across the country. He wanted to see the places the painter had painted, that was it. Maybe the places he had painted for the American Museum of Natural History. Yes, dioramas were what he had painted. Though he wasn’t the painter known for the museum’s dioramas. No, that was someone called Fred. If she remembers anything about the painter, it was that his name was not Fred. It couldn’t have been. Because that name she would have remembered. Probably because the two of them, she and Charlie, would have laughed at that name, for no reason she can really articulate or understand. But, if she had to guess, maybe because of the name’s closeness to that other word. The absurdity of the similarity, phonetically, between “Fred” and “dead,” since there’s no other reason she can think of that the two of them would laugh at that name, “Fred,” no other reason that the name is so funny in and of itself, because, really, it’s not. It’s a perfectly fine name, Fred.

Annie tries to remember. Sometime during his life, Charlie thought the painter whose name was not Fred had fled to capture the ripples of sand dunes somewhere in the Southwest near where she grew up and the buffalo and the mountains farther north and the glacial streams cutting down the meadows in cool arcs, buds pushing radiant colors through the soil dark along their edges, curving beneath the water’s lapping, the water’s lapping quiet on its journey from snow to water and down, down the mountain, and his oil paints rendering all the colors more miraculous, sharper, and more vibrant, as is tradition, everything too much the same in reality, even the flowers and the buffalo and the looming peaks too banal for humans to render them just as they are. And it was this repetition, this recapturing of the world, that made the world bearable, wasn’t it? So, Charlie tried to trace the painter’s path across the country sleeping in his car through the nights looking for what the painter had seen. This was one of the first things he had told her. He needed to see what he had seen not to understand his work, but to understand him. If she remembers correctly, it was probably then that she realized she liked him, that everything he said, everything he told her about himself, only made her like him more in those days when they were young.

Later this would change—doesn’t it always? she thinks now—but we never see that change from the blinded view of the present. At least she hadn’t, never could. Maybe this had been one of her greatest failings, not being able to see how things would warp with time, degrade as all things naturally do. For it would be unnatural, she always knew, for anything to remain static. Her folly when she was younger lay in her belief in love’s individuality, in love possessing some supernatural ability to weather degradation or offer salvation. This and the idea that a person’s actions, no matter how terrible, could always be forgiven, that a person was never irredeemable, because they existed separate from their actions, she always thought. And though this tenet was meant to have the opposite effect, it served often to make life more difficult. Sure, maybe people’s actions can always be redeemed, but maybe it’s better not always to think that way for oneself. Because she might have needed some more solid notions of good and bad. A bit more contempt too, in order for the world to have cohered a bit better. Because her commitment not to moral relativity, really, but to the idea that anything could be done and anything forgiven, well, it wasn’t a good way to live. It only ever made anything more difficult than it needed to be. But it seems to her now that those two things always went hand in hand: her belief in the capacity for redemption and her belief in some thing able to weather degradation, cheat death’s natural progression, and her folly when she was young was to believe that thing was romantic love between herself and another, when it always must have been something else. Something else, she thinks now.

But she was unspeakably young, anyway, when she met Charlie, naive as young people are naive. She couldn’t have thought any of this then. Instead, she would spend years regretting that time of her life, when she didn’t think about the PhD program, the best of its kind at the time. When she didn’t think about the classes or the city or the heavy river or the other candidates. When she thought only about Charlie, sleeping in his car through the dark nights as he searched for the painter whom now she can hardly recall. Then she remembers. The diorama painter had never visited those places, she later found out. He had scaled up the dioramas from that woman waiting at home. That’s what the letters had been about. The paintings were not a shrinking but an expansion. And Charlie had a dog too. How could she forget? He had a dog too, named for his favorite album by his favorite folk singer, and she laughs, now, as the song by that singer howls on the car radio. She laughs now at how contrived the name seems. But it didn’t then, when she was young. No, not at all. Roseanne. Roseanne. Rosie. Charlie drove across the country sleeping in his car looking for a painter with his dog, Rosie.

That had been a long while before the last time they saw each other. It had been before she made life decisions based on his word. And then. After she took his advice and chose the West Coast program. After they began dating from their separate cities. After she flew back south to see him, and he drank enough to joke about her dissertation, little of which he’d read, and she laughed along. After he determined she should sleep on the couch. After she went mad and cruel with begging. After he grew distant and cold. After she embarrassed herself, then the both of them. After, when she decided he would no longer have access to her mind. After, when she decided he could still access her body, sure, why not, “please,” she remembers begging, “please.” After the spit and the cum and the bruises, because they were in the field of language, weren’t they, they were interested in communication without speech, weren’t they, they were people interested in violence, weren’t they? And how can words be disappeared? How can language work without speech? And power? And when does violence become brutality? It had been a question she had asked herself frequently. She had learned to ask it. It was irresponsible, she believed, to ignore the relevance of violence. As if it would just disappear. It was long before that, anyway, that she realized how the mind can go out, out, out beyond the blood and bone. Out beyond the skin. Out. But it must always return to the inside, mustn’t it?

She forgave him, and she forgave herself. Oh well. She did. It began and it ended. They were no longer those people. Those people no longer exist. The skin sheds. The nails and hair grow out. The menstrual blood leaves the body. Semen dries. Cells turn over. The mind changes. We disappear. And Annie turns off the song on her car radio, the song sung by Rosie, and she parks her car and stares at Nicholas’s house.

¤

She had gone into the doctor for a bump she’d found on the crease of her leg while in a basement steam room in Koreatown. Thick with bodies. It must have been August or September. The bump was too far away from anything, really, to be an STD, but that’s where her mind went anyway, knowing Nicholas and his reputation. Though it wasn’t his reputation that did it, really, because that she didn’t mind. Had never minded. Whatever precedes us precedes us, she always thought. And it wasn’t him, either, that caused her concern. Because he was always there, driving her to and from the airport with the front seat cleaned, and cooking for them late at night, slicing strawberries in one hand and placing them lopsided around a bowl of yogurt, lighting the candles on his table with a match, letting loose a smile so suddenly when he saw a child, or the smile he couldn’t help when he danced, the soft strange slope of his shoulders.

She wonders now, parked outside his house, if it was his art that raised concern over the bump. Those oil paintings. Held in the museums and the galleries. Though she made it a point not to discuss them. One gallery in Paris where she went just to see those paintings of his there, though she never told him. The one where she went just to find it shuttered. The parts of him contained in the paintings she couldn’t quite see when they were together, though she tried. She tried to imagine him in front of the canvas each day detailing the intricacies of the figures and the bodies and the sex, the sex, the sex. Was it the content of the paintings, then, that made her think twice when she found the bump? The way he rendered the female body, which bothered all of her friends, made them move their eyes away toward the ceiling when she brought up his name. But it didn’t bother her, the way he purposefully conflated real and representation, transmuted the body, the female body in particular, shifted it to something artificial, mechanical. Camp. Transmorphed. It had been the point of his art. The transgression and transmorphing was its purpose, she thought. Who was she to comment. She didn’t mind. It had nothing to do with her.

So, what had been the reason she worried over the bump? She couldn’t see him in full. Cameras with the wrong-fitted aperture, she remembers once joking melodramatically, describing their attempts to understand each other. The focus a mechanical error, that was all, not for lack of trying. Her trying and trying to get an unblurred clip of him, but all the blurring, all the fighting she couldn’t stop provoking. Always the fighting. But she could see him, couldn’t she, and he, her. That was the problem. Because though he did often want her body, he didn’t want her mind. Because she was pretentious, he said, because she couldn’t say what it was she actually fucking meant, what it was she actually fucking felt. It was just fucking abstraction.

¤

“Are you sexually active?” the doctor had asked in the office when Annie told her about the bump on her leg.

“Yeah.”

“Men and women?”

“No, just men right now.”

“Multiple?”

“No.”

“Are you partnered?” she asked. And the simple answer had been no, but for some reason Annie couldn’t say it.

“I’m seeing one person.”

“Are you on the pill?”

“No. They made me feel psychotic.”

“Say more?”

“Like my brain wasn’t mine.”

“Say more?”

“I couldn’t think on them. I started seeing a psychiatrist because I felt psychotic.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you using condoms?” the doctor asked.

And Annie had lied and said “yeah,” but it had come out a lie. Both of them knew it. And anyway, she had been there for her worry over the bump. So the answer was obvious, the question nearly rhetorical.

But no, Annie thinks while staring at the clothesline blowing in the garden outside Nicholas’s house, his draped shirt flinching from the wind. That timeline can’t be right. They couldn’t have been seeing each other anymore when she first went to the doctor, or she would have sent him a photograph while at the appointment. She would have sent him a photograph of herself as a joke. The timeline can’t be right, or she would have texted him a photograph as she changed into the hospital gown. Naked sinewy legs, arms, toes, strange jut of collarbone and ribs, standing in the middle of the examination room, wide feet bare on the cold linoleum, before putting on the hospital gown, getting on the table. It had been some kind of joke between them she started, one of the first jokes she started because she had been in the same room when they first began whatever it was they were beginning, her already trying to sexualize that newly desexualized space of her body while Nicholas was in the studio, painting probably a woman’s body, sexy and sleek and free of blemishes. That sanitized space had always scared Annie, so thin the line between healthy and ill, living and dead, sexualized and desexualized. But never was she able to get anything sexual to color those ridiculous photographs she sent him, and that had been to her the joke: how that space desexualized the otherwise unwaveringly sexual. The unwaveringly sexual that has been overlaid on the body: curves of fat and muscle, flesh, flesh. And perhaps, Annie thinks as the clothesline spasms, that will be another thing to come from that word, “cancer,” entering her vernacular, however improbable, however probable: her body, for the first time since adolescence, might be finally devoid of sexuality. Flesh without the fucking overlay.  She looks in the tiny car mirror, where the lemon curves from her neck.

Many would skewer this idea, she thinks. It’s one of the notions of illness with which so many have taken issue. But what about the relief of it? If illness makes the body a kind of cage, then it is a cage of one’s own. No one else’s. The cage internally imposed, not externally. And there must be some relief there, Annie thinks. Her body’s new project of destruction is all hers. Before she was a teenager must be the last time her body felt this way—devoid. And she scrolls her phone outside Nicholas’s house looking through her photographs, finding no naked photograph taken on her phone that day of the exam. No photograph at all. So, no.

“No,” she must have told the doctor. “I was seeing someone, but not anymore,” she must have said. That must have been it. “No. I’m not sleeping with anyone, no.”

And the doctor must have said something that only could have been “I’m sorry,” the kind of person who apologizes for things that are not her fault. And now Annie remembers.

Annie had replied, “It’s all for the best.” And she thinks of the emptiness that has since opened in her life, the emptiness where Nicholas used to be. Though if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. It’s the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, she thinks, writing most recently about the emptiness opened by loss, the emptiness opened by giving up, the emptiness as something positive. The freedom opened by emptiness, maybe. It’s too remedial for her, but she remembers something in that book, something about how it tells us something about ourselves, through whose perception we aim to see ourselves. Nicholas had not wanted to see himself through her. After Nicholas, she had not wanted to see herself through Ben, that had been one of the problems between them. His perception bored her. Unfortunately, Nicholas had seen her more or less as she was; with him, she had no choice in what she kept for herself and what she gave away. He saw the way speaking in a certain register guarded her, thinking in a certain way allowed distance. And he didn’t like it, and it didn’t work with him. Both came from similar families, a rarity in their nepotistic circles of artists and writers. Both knew how easily the body could fail, then disappear. She chose abstraction as escape, and so did he, though a different kind.

“It’s okay,” Annie now remembers saying to the doctor.

“Are you on the pill?” the doctor must have asked.

And Annie must have replied, “No, I’m not seeing anyone. There’s
no need.”

And the doctor had resumed the checkup, holding two fingers against Annie’s neck, where she paused.

“Have you gotten the ultrasound I recommended for these masses?”

“No, I forgot.”

“Get it,” the doctor had said, “they’ve grown. I would like to run some labs.” And Annie had said okay and left, not thinking anything of it.

¤

She walks now to Nicholas’s door, framed by broken ceramic pots and overgrown plants. He opens it before she knocks, standing there in plaid pajama pants, an old band T-shirt cut at the bottom. His hair, longer since the last time she saw him, leaves little wet marks on his forehead.

“You look very professor,” he says, making a weird hand gesture at her old slacks, old loafers. He doesn’t say good, nor bad. When she doesn’t respond, he says sorry and asks if she’s okay. He’s made soup, boiling on the stove. He’s left two kinds of ice cream out to soften. Squeezed juice from the oranges in his garden. Later, when they sleep together, he takes care not to touch her neck. After, when she shocks and embarrasses them both by crying, he says, “I’m so sorry. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?” For reasons she understands too well, he was the first person she texted. “Tell your doctor to work on their bedside manner,” he’ll say before she leaves, wrapping a blanket he’s trying to get rid of around her shoulders. “I don’t like that she told you this over the phone.”

¤

Friday, the next day must be. In four hours, Annie will go to lunch with Irina. Just four hours she needs to get through, occupy her mind. Then lunch. Then the time on the other side of it. The oncologist’s office will open in an hour, and she’ll call them again then. It’s eight in the morning, and already she has been up fidgeting for four hours. She will go for a run, maybe. She could go up the mountain? But the lymph node in her hip hurts when she runs. Okay, she could walk up the mountain. No.  She could read the news. She goes to the window and watches the child run through the lawn jubilant across the street. He shrieks with joy. She opens up her mouth and tries to mimic the sound, the pitch. He shrieks again in response.

¤

Her parents ask her to go home for a long weekend, and so she does.

Sitting downstairs trying to grade student papers, Annie notices new cracks in her parents’ ceiling. Her mother inhales and the whole house seems to shake. She exhales. She imagines her mother on her side upstairs in the dark conjuring her sister and lemons behind her eyes. It is 6 p.m. and the darkness is everywhere, outside and in. Her mother inhales, and the walls move. She exhales.

¤

A few weeks prior, Annie had picked up her friend Lisa at the airport after her mother’s funeral in Texas. Lisa’s plane was late, so Annie spun around LAX, watching the headlights. “I held her,” Lisa had said after getting into the car, “and the whole room quaked. The walls, they croaked.” She had been sitting in the passenger seat eating pad see ew with her hands because the restaurant where Annie bought it had forgotten to add a fork, a napkin. “I understand now,” Lisa had said, and Annie had nodded. She knew what Lisa meant. The terror of seeing the body without the soul. Bits of cilantro lodged beneath Lisa’s fingernails, slivers of lime pulp. A man ran across the crosswalk, laughing. And quietly, without any warning, the two began to laugh with him.

“Things will just be different now,” Annie had said on the freeway, not totally sure what to say, and then the two had been quiet, their breath uneven. So thin the line between life and death. So thin. It had been pancreatic cancer, Lisa’s mother. Three days prior, the doctor had called Annie. “A lemon,” she had said. One of the masses the size of a lemon. And so Lisa was added to the list of those whom Annie had determined not to tell yet. Annie had dropped her off at her house and watched her walk into a different life, a different home. Graffiti covered the fence’s planks, dead fruit, the ground. “I love you,” Annie said resolutely before Lisa left the car, turning her eyes away as Lisa repeated the words.

And there it is again, before and after. And how naive any of them are to think, Annie knows, that any of the suffering incurred might be the last time life would fracture so cleanly. As if suffering were somehow cumulative, as if life were not endlessly subject to fracture. Not for her sake, but for her parents? For Renee? Irina? Lisa? Far worse things happen. Many worse things are happening. But what solace is there? In the suffering of others? Life has no idea of mercy, it seems to Annie. It’s not a principle by which it abides. And she thinks of Renee. “We were never promised ease.”

¤

It would be stunning were it not terrifying, how quickly certain words enter their vernacular and remain there. Lodged, so it seems. But that’s not right, lodged. Are rendered banal, sure. Though that description is trite, she thinks. And it’s not the entering and exiting of the words but the pace. The pace at which they are normalized and then alienated again. This is what terrifies Annie, stuns her.

This is one of the first instances in her recent memory when a word has appeared as a specter and refused to disappear. There’s something here about agency, she thinks, about which words we are forced to hear and recite, and which we are allowed to let go. Certain words can be expelled by will alone, ignored. Here she thinks of a word such as loneliness, or betrayal. Words that sting, but don’t demand recounting or recitation. She thinks about language and extremity. Language and necessity.

Illness. Prognosis. Diagnosis. A distance between the first and the following, she thinks. But none of this means anything, does it? she thinks. All of it, just words, just constructions, signifiers. Overlays of images. Just sounds and patterns that will disappear with the body. The fat of the brain. The lull of the tongue. The breath through the lips.

¤

When they go into the oncologist’s office for the first appointment, Annie’s father brings only a pen, newspaper, and legal pad. The parking lot full, they park far enough from the building for the asphalt to warm the soles of their shoes as they walk into the hospital. Inside, the chairs in the office are tall, so when her father walks to the edge of the room and takes a seat near the window, his feet dangle in the air above the carpeted floor. Annie and her mom can’t help but laugh at the sight, his shoes swinging like those of a young boy. Teeter-totter. Teeter. Her mom buys a Diet Coke from the vending machine.

Once in the appointment room, her father’s hand does not stop moving as the doctor speaks, his pen scrawling inscrutable notes on the legal pad, his eyes fixed on the page. When they walk back to the car from the appointment, he asks, “Is it possible that they might do a transplant?” She feels her stare going blank. He clarifies, “That they might cut out mine and give it to you?”

She touches the sun marks on her father’s arm. “That’s not how it works,” she replies. And she can’t look at him, so she looks at the telephone towers cutting the horizon into machinery out past the freeway and the cruising cars. She can’t look at him knowing how this needs no thought. It is pure instinct, his offer to sacrifice his body for hers. A teenager drives by blaring a song from his open car window. “I believe in miracles,” Annie’s mother begins to sing along, pointing her first finger at Annie’s chest, “since you came along, you sexy thing.”

¤

At home in the days after the first surgery, Annie’s younger cousin Lilah comes to visit. She has just turned seven, still too afraid to sleep alone. Lilah lives with her grandmother because her father is difficult to pin down. Lilah’s mother too. Neither of them easily reachable by phone, by address. The difference between Annie’s and Lilah’s fathers is not lost on Annie. Language was the vehicle through which she evaded his future. This is the reason Lilah is here.

Lilah is the top reader in her class, with ears that notice everything and a mind that creeps a step ahead as if poised around a corner already waiting for everyone else to catch up. She’s recently cut her own bangs, the line of hair jagged, a tiny bruise from where she fell running with the scissors blotched on the side of her cheek. Annie watches Lilah’s hurried footsteps as her mom gives her a tour of their house, accompanies her through each of the rooms.

“This is where we eat,” her mother says to Lilah, gesturing around the dining table. “This is where we read.”

At the very end of the last hall, they come to Annie’s sister’s room. The curtains hang drawn, the room, still. A smell like darkness ebbs through the room, held discreetly behind the always-closed door. Her mother stands strangely for a moment, staring at the bed left unmade.

“This is my other daughter’s room,” she says to Lilah.

“Where is she?” Lilah asks. She peers around the quiet room as if Annie’s sister might jump out.

“She passed away,” her mother replies.

The girl stays quiet for a moment.

“Oh,” she says finally, “that’s sad.”

Annie’s mother closes the door. They leave the room.

“Yes,” she says, “yes, it is.”

¤

On a walk the next day, Lilah asks Annie about her sister. “How did she pass away?” she asks, parroting Annie’s mother’s language. She is smart, already learning how to absorb and reflect language, learning exactly what Annie learned at her age. How do you tell a kid? Annie wonders.

“She was poisoned,” Annie says, “by accident. She poisoned herself by accident.”

“Oh,” Lilah says, “my daddy poisons himself sometimes too.”

Is it a glitch in their genetic code or a disease of the country, their wanting more than anything to escape the body?

¤

That night, Lilah sleeps in bed with Annie, her tiny toes wiggling against Annie’s calves while she reads to her from a book about women and magic. When they finish the chapter, Annie takes a pill for the pain in her neck and shuts off the lamp on the bedside table. She tugs the blankets over Lilah’s shoulders. Outside, birds rustle.

“Are you asleep?” Lilah asks after a few minutes.

“No, not yet. Are you?”

“No, I’m talking to you!” Lilah laughs.

“Sleep talking, maybe,” Annie says, and Lilah laughs again.

“I love you,” Lilah says. She curls into Annie’s side, her breath drawing out as she falls toward sleep.

“I love you too,” Annie replies after a long pause. In the dark, she turns on her side and holds Lilah’s tiny body, listening to the sound of her breath coming and going, coming and going again in the still room.

As she listens, she thinks of the final two lines in an essay by Marguerite Duras. “I know they can die,” she writes. “I measure all the horror of such a love.”

Annie tells herself not to think of what will happen in the days, months, and years that will come. Woman and girl. Ill and healthy. Before and after. The words collapse in the dark. What terror for the mind to be held in a body at all. What terror a woman’s body. But what terror a man’s too. What terror all in between, how much harder then? What terror a child’s and what terror that which holds the passing of time. What terror a body that needs. What terror a body in pain. What terror a body that needs. What terror to love. And what terror to be loved. How to be loved when one can die? What terror, what terror. “They can die, I know they can die,” Duras writes. “I measure all the horror of such a love.” I can die, I know I can die. Annie listens to Lilah’s breath coming and going, coming and going again in the dark. And what joy too, the body. What unspeakable joy.

“I love you,” Annie repeats under her breath until the words sound like something else. A circling. An opening and closing of the mouth. Breath in the throat. Push of the tongue. Whatever precedes us, precedes us. Whatever follows, follows.

“What are you doing?” Lilah interrupts.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were sleeping.”

Lilah is quiet for a moment.

“Are you sleeping yet?” Lilah asks suddenly, startling Annie again.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Stop,” Lilah says.

Breath in the throat. Push of the tongue. Breath.

 ¤

Featured image: Marsden Harlet. Peaches and Lemons, ca. 1927-28. Gift of George Hopper Fitch, B.A., 1932, Yale University Art Gallery (1972.81.1). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed December 17, 2025. Image has been cropped.