Their surroundings resembled a community yard sale with everything underfoot up for grabs as far as the eye could see. A few curious residents provided commentary from afar.

“There goes the neighborhood,” grumbled Wesley, nodding at the people and cars all around.

"Lots of boxes they’re hauling away,” said Doc evenly.

“We’ve been here for years and now look at this!” exclaimed Wesley’s wife, Mabel. 

“They’re ruining the grass,” muttered Wesley.

“There won’t be any lawn left when this all washes over, though,” declared Doc matter-of-factly. 

“Don’t remind me,” Wesley retorted. 

“Ms. Atkinson is departing,” noted Doc. 

“I wonder where she’s going?” asked Mabel. 

"Everyone's moving to higher ground," explained Doc. 

“Can’t say I blame them,” said Wesley, shaking his head. 

"The dampness really does sink into your bones," admitted Mabel. 

"No one wants to be uprooted, but it’s for the best," said Doc.

“I expect our boy’ll be coming then,” said Mabel to Wesley. "We raised him right, you know." 

"We did," affirmed Wesley. 

“There goes Johnson,” said Doc.

“Dear. Dear. I did so like the flowers and flags he had out on Veteran’s Day,” said Mabel. 

“You won’t see any more of that for sure,” scoffed Wesley. 

"Look! They’re taking the fixtures!” gasped Mabel as a winch hoisted a statue onto a flatbed truck. 

“Things are looking mighty bleak,” said Wesley with a heavy sigh.

“Our boy is on his way,” said Mabel.

“I hope,” said Wesley.

“I’m sure of it,” said Mabel.

The three stared as the landscape continued to empty before them.  

"Over yonder," Doc chirped. "My family's arrived." 

“They look so lovely,” said Mabel. “The young one’s a spitting image of you.” 

“He sure is, isn’t he?" said Doc. "Guess I’ll be going.”

“Wesley and I won't be staying much longer ourselves," said Mabel. "Our boy will be coming soon.” 

“If we’re lucky,” said Wesley.

“I know he is,” said Mabel.

“So long, Doc,” said Wesley.

“You take care now,” said Mabel.  

“Till we meet again,” said Doc as he disappeared into the mist. 

When dusk settled in, Wesley looked at Mabel and Mabel looked at Wesley.

“I can’t believe it,” said Mabel, shaking her head at the desolate scene. 

“What do you mean? Don’t you remember folks always yapping about the glaciers melting?” said Wesley. 

“I just never thought the day would come,” said Mabel.

“Ha! The water’s been pooling around our plots for years,” said Wesley. Then Wesley added, "We're the only souls remaining." 

A silence shrouded the pair only to be broken every now and then when Mabel would wonder out loud, “Where’s our boy?" to which Wesley would seethe and answer, “Don’t ask.”

Hours passed.  Then a gurgling sound pierced the darkness and Mabel exclaimed, "Come hell or high water, he said he'd be here for us!'” 

A roar stabbed the air and Wesley snapped back, “Well, Mabel, the high water’s here and he ain’t,” as a torrent crashed through the cemetery gate and raced toward their headstones.

The wolf will not stand still. You must give chase;
the fire in his flesh will make him run.
Catch him, bind him, belly fur unlace,
and from his bloody gut release the sun.
Rope down the seven extras from the sky,
and re-condense the seas they burnt away.
In muddy graves command once more to lie
the wakeful corpses, there to ever stay.
Knit up the rents that in the earth were torn;
the pale horse chivvy back into his stall;
the molten metal river cool to ore;
the tentacles beneath the waves recall.

Though time’s long coiling twist we cannot yet uncurl,
mistakes amend. Undo the end. Remake the world.

They said the market opened only when the rain forgot how to leave. On those nights the city thinned, roofs pressing close like hands, and people who had been saving words gathered there. People who had misplaced vows, who had worn their names like borrowed coats. I went because my name had started to feel too heavy.

The market sat in an alley where lamps leaned together as if sharing a secret. It smelled of lemon peels and old paper. Stalls were patched with printed pages and laundry lines. A bell of copper and glass dangled above a table where jars slept, each name wrapped like fruit. The man who kept them called himself the Curator, a word that fit and did not.

People spoke in small, exact sounds. Names were traded like insects, bright and delicate. The Curator lifted a jar, blew on the lid, and a name unfurled like smoke learning to sing. It hovered, shimmering with history, and settled into whoever paid the right price.

Some names were cheap, dulled from being worn: Son of a Baker, Widow of the Sixth. Others were sharp and expensive: Architect of Dawn, Keeper of Quiet. You could buy one to cut the edge off your past. You could buy one to sharpen the future.

I had coins and a folded photograph, a boy with a missing front tooth and a grin that made light feel smaller. That boy had once been called something clear and certain, but the name had thinned in other mouths. It rattled in my chest now like loose change. I told the Curator I was willing to pay in things besides money.

He peered at me with an expression like someone opening a letter you were ashamed to show. The Curator kept ritual. He wanted a tiny story for every buy. He wanted to know what a name had done for me, how it had failed, what I might do with another.

I told him about mornings when my own name did not answer. I told him how easy it had been to wear someone else’s until the heels fell through and I woke with wet toes. I told him about work done with the unconfident spine of a borrowed label, nights I could not recognize the person in the mirror. I said I wanted a name that taught me to keep my hands on myself. He listened enough to seem to understand.

He reached for a jar that hummed like tight string. The name inside read Quiet Architect. I felt its shape: low vowels, straight consonants, a blueprint of a life. He lifted the jar and the name flitted into my palm with a small embarrassed warmth. For a moment I tasted cedar and spare rooms.

The Curator smiled. He took the photograph and tucked it into a book. The market required balance, he said. Names wanted stories as much as people wanted names. To take Quiet Architect, I would have to leave something behind.

I had no more coins. I had no more photographs. I hesitated and then gave a promise I had made when I was young and fierce. I promised myself never to fold under the pressure of other people’s convenience. I promised to build soft rooms for speech, even when silence wanted to be owner. I promised to use whatever name I took to make places where small voices could be heard.

The Curator placed my promise into a jar and set the lid tight. He told me to say the name aloud when I left. Names that were not spoken tended to be shy. I pressed Quiet Architect to my chest and let the sound come out like cloth being smoothed.

Quiet Architect, I said.

It felt true and risky at once. A string tightened inside me, not the wire of shame but a braided cord of claim. Walking back through the city the lamplight seemed to open into rooms. People on porches noticed the way I held my shoulders. A woman selling roasted corn nodded as if to an old map. The name worked like a key that did not fit perfectly and yet opened doors.

Saying the name did not absolve me. It did not write my biography. It was practice. Saying Quiet Architect taught my hands to pay attention. It taught my voice to draw blueprints from ordinary air. I began to fold literal rooms out of language. I sketched small shelters in the corners of conversations, places where a neighbor could finish a sentence without being hurried. I listened like a sound catcher and I hung words to dry in sunlight so they might be reused whole.

Names are grafts, not guarantees. They take root and sometimes reject. When I leaned into the work, some people laughed. Old friends called me whimsical. My mother said names do not build houses. But names, once owned, call you to labor. You owe the thing in your palm the labor of living it. Quiet Architect asked me to design a life that would allow quiet to grow, and my days filled with small precisions: arranging chairs so listeners faced each other, setting kettles to boil so talk could bloom around them.

Not all traded names are kind. A man who bought Promised Tomorrow traded it for laughter and regret. A woman who purchased Renowned Son found herself thinner in the mirror, hungry for applause she never wanted. Names can be mirrors and also masks.

Once, three years on, I went back. The rain had forgotten again and people clustered in the alley. The Curator smiled as if he had been waiting. He offered me a jar with my old photograph tucked inside like a folded letter. The label read Name Found. He said the trade is not always irreversible; people return and rearrange. He said this with the weary compassion of someone who has watched many make makeshift repairs.

I hesitated. The photograph smelled faintly of cedar and blueprint now, and my hands had learned other tools. Quiet Architect had built rooms that held more than nostalgia. I left the photograph and took instead a small scrap of paper the Curator pressed into my palm. On it someone had written, Keep building.

There is something the market never admits. You cannot purchase courage. You can purchase a way to practice it. You cannot buy forgiveness. You can buy a space in which forgiveness might be taught. You cannot purchase the person you were, but you can purchase a path to becoming someone who recognizes them and does not turn away.

A woman once offered me a name without asking. Her palms were rough as dried fruit. She said, I will trade you a name for a thing you do not yet have, and she gave me Keeper of Meals because once I had made a table where a neighbor with trembling hands could eat without fear. Names teach you to be the thing they promise. Keeper of Meals taught me how to feed and to be fed in return.

Markets are full of rules you do not notice until you learn them. Names prefer to be repeated in the right room. They must be fed with action. Some nights you will wear your name like a glove and it will fit. Other nights it will pinch and you may want to trade it. That is part of the market’s mercy.

On the night the city held its breath I sat on a crate and listened, not to trade but to hear other names live. A woman unlatched a jar and her name spilled into the air like a flock of small birds. She closed her eyes and remade a sentence she had said wrong. Names are not endpoints. They are tools for making sentences you mean. They are bridges you cross again and again until your feet forget the old ruts.

When I left that night I said my names into the rain so they would learn resistance. I said Quiet Architect, Keeper of Meals, and Keep building. The rain listened and then it remembered how to leave.

If you ever find yourself in an alley when the rain forgets to go, bring coins and a photograph, but bring more. Bring the promise you keep to yourself. Bring the work you are not yet strong enough to begin. The market may give you a jar and a bright new syllable. It will not do the building for you. Only you can make rooms where your name will feel like home.

They say the museum appears only to those
who’ve run out of words mid-sentence.
That’s how I found it-tongue heavy,
heart buffering, language half-asleep.

The first exhibit was a jar of air
labeled what my mother meant to say.
Inside, a faint purr-like chant.
The same feeling her throat made
when she wanted to apologize
but dinner was burning.

Next: a cracked tile floor, still warm.
The plaque read the argument you almost won.
I stood on it anyway,
just to feel my own pulse fight back.

There was a hallway of with rooms of the scents
I’ve almost tried to bottle up-
fried plantains, old perfume,
rain hitting the Bronx tenement steps
where I learned to braid my silence
into something close to patience.

In the corner, a glass case
held a payphone that rang only once.
I picked it up.
My aunties voice came through the static-
not words, just the smack of her lips,
the emptiness of a recipe never-remembered.
The receiver turned to darkness in my hand.

I passed a mirror etched with the word translation.
It showed me as a child again,
holding a notebook full of unsent prayers.
Every word trembled like it wanted to become music.

In the final room, I found a bench.
The sign read: For those who still believe
silence is a second language.
So I sat.
Listened to my breath
until it sounded like someone else’s.

When I left,
the museum folded itself into the fog.
But the air carried something new-
not speech, not song,
just the buzz of everything
we keep trying to name
before it disappears.

The first piece of meat we ever ate together as a family came from my mother’s body. Earlier that day, she had asked the doctors to remove a bone from each side of her ribcage. The right one she sold for our upkeeping, and the left one she took home to teach us the taste of success and ambition. Unlike the bitter weeds we usually dug out for dinner, mother prepared her rib with a list of ingredients we had scarcely seen in our house.  She caramelised sugar, pairing the rib with cinnamon, orange slices and bay leaves. Despite the sight of her hollowed waist, my mouth watered.

We picked at her flesh under dim candlelight, slowly, each morsel of meat densely flavoured with guilt. One of my bones will make a pretty decoration on a rich family neck, she said. But one of them will be for you, my children. Whatever they have, you shall have, too. I only ask you to try and deserve my love. We nodded along, our throats tight, our stomachs gurgling for more, our bodies burning with undeservingness.

She severed the leftover bone into two, and chained each delicate crescent bone across our necks, and pumped us up with visions. Pork cooked twice as tender, and lamb sizzled in chilli oil. Beef so fresh that the slices still carried leftover animal warmth. A world filled with gluttonous contentment, and lights so bright they could pollute. A life where our kneecaps would never again ache from winter’s bite.

Her sacrifice was greeted by our mediocrity—our not always straight-As, and the poor choice of friends we made, the constant reminder of what-we-were-still-not. She never said anything. Only tapped against our sternums, hard enough to make her own crescent rib vibrate against ours.

Her tap tap tap followed us through exams, job hunts, right onto the doorstep of an apartment in the city we barely manage to cover rent for. We heard it every time we chose to fit in; fill our plates with organic leaves that once grew in front of our door, dim the lights for baby wicks of flames that set the mood, bare our legs under minus fourteen degrees of cold just to find a moment of existence in the leering gazes of passing strangers.

She caved to illness before her first visit. At her funeral, we lit the parlour with the brightest lights and ordered an obscene amount of meat. Tearing through half a rack of honeyed ribs, the funeral clergy wiped his mouth and sighed. “Your mother missed out on so much good food. Shame, really. If only she wasn’t so vain.”

We stared at him. Under our burning gaze, he pointed at his chest almost defensively. “I’ve warned her about the risks of removing too many. But she wanted that cinched waist. Took out such a big loan for it, too.”

It took a while, but eventually, I managed to move. With numb fingers, I clicked open the latch of my necklace and dropped her bone amongst the barbecue carcasses. We don’t speak of her but the taps follow me into the years. I hear it every time my own children yell and scream. My hand would instinctively drift down, thumb and forefinger catching the ends of two floating ribs, reminding myself of their potential function.

boy learns hellish hunger by beholding the fist close boy
boy engulfs thunder to savour what reticence owes boy

boy engineers walls around a house already incinerating boy
boy christens ash a father & genuflects before it turning boy

boy clamps a bloody belt as if clinging to a history boy
boy morphs into his own bruise — lineage in mystery boy

boy stashes fucking tears in the gobs of laughter boy
boy gnaws reminiscence till it smashes like water boy

boy erects tall in a goddamn field of shattered mirrors boy
boy witnesses father in every reflection that shivers boy

boy supplicates to sleep without the echo’s voice boy
boy rouses to unearth himself — the echo’s choice boy

boy forsook how to express in any tender tongue boy
boy effortlessly inherits silence as his only rung boy

boy touches scion’s face & shudders at the skin boy
boy gazes at himself again… again & cannot begin boy 

boy hannan chisels truth from the bone of men boy
boy bleeds bloodline until nothing bides again boy

Simon stared at the night sky, counting stars. When he reached five, confirming the passage of a full day after the Great Knight’s death, he thanked Saint Bartholemew and started the Walk. He felt the steel of the sacred dagger cold against his left breast, grazing the scar of his initiation branding with every step. The plain starched white shirt that concealed the blade scratched his freshly bathed and scrubbed skin as he hastened to the temple. Simon had fasted since the annunciation almost two days ago, but he felt no hunger, only anticipation.

For twenty years, Simon had served the Order, first as acolyte, then apprentice, then guard, and now intimate. He had devoted his labor, his family fortune, and his sacred honor to its holy work. He had committed many acts that, had they been for any other cause, would be considered transgressions. But when performed for the glory of the Order, these acts protected the righteous against the verminous legions that corrupted and poisoned the world. Simon was the Order’s most devoted servant. Now he would become its leader, the twenty-seventh Great Knight.

Simon tried to keep focus as he strode, for the awesome task before him demanded both mental clarity and spiritual purity. He reached the temple within twenty minutes. He knocked on the great oaken doors, doors against which his predecessors had knocked in identical ceremony reaching back hundreds of years. He gave the password, and the heavy portal opened on silent hinges. An honor guard clad in the Order’s traditional chainmail bowed and led Simon to the sanctum sanctorum. Although the temple had electric lights, they remained off. Instead, torches blazed in medieval sconces, giving the stone hallways a smoky aura not appreciated since the last succession thirty years prior.

They marched in step, arriving at the antechamber where the nine other intimates stood watch. The intimates wore heavy red and white military robes, their right hands resting on the hilts of their swords to symbolize their vigilance in the holy struggle. Per tradition, they did not acknowledge Simon, who from this moment forward no longer their mere equal. Peter, the priestly guard, unlocked the door to the holy sanctuary, turned the massive sand timer at the entrance, and stepped back. Not even Peter, with all his holy wisdom and splendor, was permitted to enter at this time. No, only a Great Knight might pass.

Simon breathed deeply and stepped into his destiny. In the center of the chamber, on a stone slab, lay the body of the 26th Great Knight. The corpse wore a simple white sheet to demonstrate humility in death. On the dead man’s chest lay the sealed scroll. Simon trembled as he beheld it, for it contained his commission, the mysteries and knowledge he would need to lead the Order. Next to the body sat a wooden desk, almost as old as the temple itself, on which had been placed a fresh parchment, a quill, ink, sealing wax, and the Order’s great seal. The first duty of every Great Knight was to write instructions for his successor. Although it might be altered later, the first commission reminded the Great Knight that he was not indispensable but only a placeholder, a servant, an instrument of the Order. Simon was to emerge from the room with a new sealed document in two hours, when the sands ran out.

There was no ordained ceremony for this moment, but Simon instinctively knelt in prayer and asked the saints who protected the Order for guidance. He arose, grasped the scroll, and broke the seal, red wax fragments falling to the stone floor. He unrolled it and began reading.

As he read, his legs became weak. His body shook, almost convulsing. Although the document was short, he needed to sit to finish it. He could not fathom its contents.

Per his predecessor, the Order was a fraud, its precepts nonsense. It was a means to extract wealth from the gullible and conceal its avarice and acquisitiveness beneath a mysterious veil of supposed public service. Its presumptions were rank idiocies that supported base and ancient prejudices masquerading as precious tradition. The Order no more served justice than did a casino and was no more sacred than a public urinal. The scroll concluded for a wish that there was no divine judgment in death, for if there were, the author, like every Great Knight before him, would assuredly reside eternally among the damned.

The document proposed that the successor had two options. Simon could write his own commission that would let his predecessor know this truth in good time but then continue as the Great Knight, enjoying all the prestige and power of the office, its easy entree to fabulous realms of earthly power, until his own demise.

Or, he could terminate the Order, reveal its unhappy fiction, and bring its centuries of maleficence and deceit to an end.

Simon thought long and hard. His entire belief system had been overturned. He started writing at least a dozen times. It would be easy to continue. Maybe he could steer the Order to a more just course. He could be a force for good where others had failed. Yet, he knew, that way lay perdition. No, he would disclose the Order’s true nature and begin its dissolution. It was not the commission Simon had anticipated, but it was what justice demanded.

At the end of the second hour, as final grains of sand ran out, Peter opened the door and, by tradition, gave the new Great Knight his first proper salute. Peter asked for the new sealed scroll to be given him to entrust to the priests. Simon started to explain there was no new scroll because there would be no need for a new scroll.

The time for scrolls, for the Order, had ceased.

Simon never had the chance to explain. As soon as Peter saw Simon empty-handed, he drew his blade and ran Simon through. Simon could offer no final words as he collapsed in a pool of his own blood.

Peter had his own scroll, to be read just before he opened the door. This document instructed that if the would-be successor emerged without a new scroll, that man had been corrupted and must be slain without hesitation to protect the Order and all it represented and safeguarded.

In such a case, Peter was to replace the fraudulent, fallen knight. For Peter, all knew, was a true servant of the Order.