Milton heaved out of his car, wheezing breaths of wet heat. By the time he crossed the grass to the oddities shop, a triangle of sweat had blossomed between his shoulders. The medicines made him sweat too much, made him stink like sour garbage but even before they found the mass in his stomach, before the spiderweb of tubes pricked his arm, before the radiation machine hummed him asleep on Thursdays, Milton had hated summer.

‘Oddities and Remedies’ – bold yellow lettering painted on a plank, propped near the screen door. The shop was a weathered camper, aluminum shell dull and clouded, tires sunk low in grass grown wild.

He squeezed his bulk sideways into the shop. It was a narrow space, too small for a man his size and shrouded in thick curtains, dark as a tomb, stinking of cigarettes and baby powder.

The place had no air conditioning. That was the first thing Milton noticed, the second was the woman who sat among curios of animal skulls and dried petals.

She reclined in a plastic lawn chair, bare feet on a curio case. The two stared at each other for a moment, Milton wiping sweat from his jowls.

“I got asshole cancer.”

He was surprised how easily the words came and how easily more followed. “It started up in my gut, spread down to my asshole. Got my liver too, but just got him recent so I ain’t gonna die yet for a few weeks. Maybe a few months. They are gonna hook a shitbag up to me soon and that’s when I am checking out. I ain’t hauling around no damn shitbag.”

Milton was making fists, clenching and unclenching.

The woman stood,

shrugged. “I got nothing for cancers, honey. We don’t sell them kind of remedies.”

“I know that. My wife came here once, or her sister did. Hell I don’t remember. It was years ago. I didn’t think the place would still be here.”

The woman nodded, shrugged again. “We’ve been here for a long time. I got something that will speed up the end, if that’s what you want.”

“I got that covered. Had my Daddy’s pistol rebuilt. New firing pins, new barrel. Rebalanced. Hell, they even polished it up for me. I come in hoping you’d sell me some weed or something.”

“I can one better you.” She bent to an unseen case, returned with a stoppered tube. In side were tiny green bugs, the color of new grass, delicate and still.

“I heard about bugs that you can eat, give you a high like coke or something. Is that what them are?”

She shook her head, held the tube to what little light she found. Milton recognized the delicate wings, the spindly bodies like splintered gemstone.

“Those are just mayflies.”

Milton watched his wife snore, sprawled like a starfish on their bed. She had gotten fatter than him, a quivering little mountain in colorless moonlight. Two fans pointed at her, rustling her nightshirts, puffing them up with stolen air.

He walked to the bathroom, lowered onto the toilet and let out a burning jet of stool and blood. He had stopped looking at it, just flushed it. Washed his hands, looked at the thick hair grown wild. He had never gone bald, never gone very gray either.

In the study, he opened the locked drawer and took it out. The pistol was heavier now with the new barrel. He liked it better this way, liked the cold heft of the thing. He had shot bottles and cans and wooden boards with this gun. Sat in the shade of a cooling October day and traded pistol and liquor with his brother. It wasn’t this gun, Milton reminded himself, that one is gone. Take the barrel off, change the weight – it ain’t the same thing.

He sat down in the chair that had, over the years, sagged and hunched itself around his awkward body. The world was silent but for a television playing in another house down the street, loud tattering sounds of a video game.

He felt in his shirt pocket for the glass tube. They were still there, twelve little mayflies. They were bitter and soft and swallowed easily.

When the sun rose again, Milton was a baby. He didn’t understand what that meant. By eight o’clock he was six years old and running through the house, a stolen towel dragging behind him. He was Superman. By ten o’clock he was standing under the wide arms of the oak, a twelve year old boy now, throwing halves of bricks at mockingbirds.

He went back inside, heard a woman crying in their bathroom. He remembered her, vaguely, but couldn’t tell if it was his mother or his sister. Or neither.

“Don’t open the goddamn door, Milton!” She screamed around sobs. “I know what you did. I know what you did!”

“I didn’t do nothing. You did it. Fat ass.” Milton proudly raised both middle fingers to the locked door.

He had learned that, and he had learned how to look down the Peirson twins’ shirts, and how to smoke cigarettes, and how to use duct tape to keep the glass from falling out when they broke windows open with rocks to break in to dead people’s homes.

He was ashamed of his hands. They were so small. Milton was a late bloomer, his mother said. By eleven o’clock he was blooming: little hairs growing from his legs and he stank like sour garbage. Milton looked in the garage for his bike and found nothing, so he walked on foot to the hamburger stand.

When he arrived, he was fifteen years old and proud of the stubble peppering his face. He saw her there, again, the girl he first loved. She hiked her foot on the bumper of her truck, yanking hard on the bootstraps, sun dancing in red hair bound in braids down her back.

“You got a sweet ass, girl.”

Milton whistled, grabbed his own ass and squirmed it at her. He turned to laugh with his friends but was horrified when he saw only an empty parking lot. When Milton turned around again, maybe to appologize, she was gone into the sunlight.

He wadded up the burger wrapper, tossed it into the trash, a man now, eighteen and confident. In the parking lot, Milton watched starlings turn overhead, a breathing cloud, wings fracturing sun across empty sky. Milton didn’t see the perfect summer day. He wasn’t listening to life’s quiet dreaming. His mind was fixed on a woman he didn’t know.

He was twenty when he made his way back to his house and got into his own car. He heard the woman in his house, and in the front of his mind he knew it was his mother, but in the back of his mind he knew it was a monster he couldn’t face. Not yet. Not until he went looking.

The day was spent driving fast and reckless through backcountry. He knew every road, every chalky deadend in the county but he didn’t find her at any of the old haunts. Milton climbed a few trees, napped for a year in the shade of a tar-black barn, circled the strip mall. He asked about the woman, who’s name he remembered now.

“Hey assholes, seen my old lady? Yeah, Doreen. Nah? Alright.”

Other memories of Doreen came like swayers under a river, some crashing against the sides of Milton’s mind, others soft and gentle just outside his reach. No one knew her, so he looked for his friends but they must have all gone somewhere. He found only old men hauling garbage to the curb or older women shaking their heads.

By sunset, Milton was past thirty years old and he was tired. A weariness that filled the empty parts of him, sand settling between pebbles.

He parked at the riverbank where the road ended at a tree stump. There was a copper cannonball lodged in deadwood, waist high from the grass. A Civil War relic, smoothed green by countless hands rubbing it for luck.

“I didn’t want to see you, I knew you ate them mayflies like I knew you would.” The voice gathered in darkness behind him, a woman, leaning on the side of his car. She was familiar but strange, something cruel about her.

“I saw you by accident when you come to the house to get your car. I had never seen you at that age. So handsome, the world hadn’t lined your face yet.”

Here was the monster, Milton thought, and another tree crashed the bank, little twig-fingers scratching him.

“I what? Who are you? Where the hell you’d come from?”

“You done forgot me? Forty years. Forty goddamn years. Most of them years I wish I had back but now I own em, so they’re mine. You don’t even know what you did, do you?”

She laughed, crossed into faint starlight to kneel at the cannonball. She was an old woman, white hair braided long down her back, white arms webbed in veins.

“I ain’t got time for some ass-crazy old woman. I gotta find my wife. Doreen’s expecting me.”

It was still hot, even at night, so he rolled the windows down, grateful for the breeze. Driving past the hamburger stand, Milton remembered the summers of his youth when birds gathered in great clouds in the sky. Something happened, he didn’t know when, but now tomorrow began behind him, half faded down a road, tangled in trees.

He was a man of fifty when he lay in his bed that night, after watching a few shows on TV, after drinking bourbon till his nose tingled. He woke in the belly of the night, stirred by dry wind howling through the world.

Milton staggered into the bathroom, saw his face was lined like a folded map. Wind in the night. Mayflies. Little green bugs, delicate and biter. A trailer, a hot day, the doom of cancer.

He sat up the rest of the night, reclining in the chair that had been shaped to his body. A dry storm shook to the house he’d built, pulling at shingles, throwing acorns across the gutter.

The next day was Saturday and a house down the street came alive with the sun, cartoons blaring loudly from open windows.

In the yard, Milton heard someone dragging something to the curb. Old tree limbs fallen in the night, gathered for the trash.

He tried to raise up from his chair to offer Doreen a hand but his body was thin and tired. Instead he cussed himself to sleep and in blankness he died.