What Makes You Think You're Awake? by Maegan Poland

Author:Maegan Poland [Poland, Maegan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blair
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The yard had been ravaged by moles. One morning, Colleen went to let the dog in and found her joyfully wagging her tail, a limp mole dangling from her mouth. When she picked it up, she was stunned by how smooth and velvety it was. Her dog had left the skin unbroken. She lightly pinched the mole’s foot, a wide paddle with embryonic digits, between her fingers. She could feel its tiny bones shifting, malleable and delicate in her hands, like the links of a necklace chain falling coolly into the palm. The dog meant it as a gift, but a few weeks later she came with another mole, this one long since dead, an already putrefied corpse. Colleen thought maybe she saw its organs roiling beneath the stretched, translucent skin. Nature’s water balloon, she had mused darkly, but a part of her was made serious by the irrefutable decay. She knew then it was an omen. The dog died soon after, and although the vet insisted that the dead mole had nothing to do with it, that it wasn’t that type of infection, Colleen felt like entropy was picking up steam, spinning away all comfort, and that somehow all the discontent in her life was connected, originating from a rotten core that she couldn’t name.

That was last summer, and now the moles were back. And so were the mosquitoes. No one could sip a bourbon lemonade on the porch swing at sunset, and thanks to the moles, the last lawn party was a disaster. Colleen had broken the heel of her gold pump when her entire foot plunged into a miniature sinkhole, no doubt a result of the extensive tunnels lacing her property. The croquet balls refused to go in a straight line, unexpectedly diverted by the undetected molehills. And of course, Zach had been bitten, although no one knew it at the time. It took nine days for the disease to take hold of him, and by the time she found out, it was too late to speak with him. She couldn’t call his phone. Who would pick it up besides Mindy? Everything that had passed between them had frozen with him, as if in amber.

Tonight would be the first nighttime party of the year. Colleen had screened in their expansive back patio. Before the epidemic, she’d added a gazebo near the wisteria and wrapped twinkling strands of lights around the vines and the iron scrollwork. It had been the perfect spot for a midnight chat, one of those wee-hour conversations that made you feel tethered to the other person. She liked to curate moments of moderate intimacy with others. She would seek some nugget of secret personality from someone she only knew in a distant, formal sense, and she would build worlds around that detail. The next evening, she would tell Kevin what she had learned, and they would speculate, dissect, and hypothesize on how their distant acquaintance, friend, or neighbor lived with this surprising trait, past, or secret.

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