Neven wakes from the darkness of death.

With faint threads of strength, he takes his wife’s hand for the first time, as tears run upward into her eyes. She watches life come into him breath by bre/ath. He rubs newborn-weak at her wedding ring, smooth and blank-banded. The upcoming decades will engrave roses into the gold, ever-finer around the edges. They’ll form like the condensation of morning dew, slow but certain, lines sharpening as the wrinkles in Neven’s face smooth away. A balancing trade: life for death, death for life.

Neven’s wife whispers that she loves him, that she’s here.

Then she pulls her hands away. She rises from his side, backing away across the carpet, out of the room and down the stairs, away from her husband as he lies newly alive on his deathbed.

“Dad s’ti,” her daughter cries from the bannister. Her voice is slurred by unspooling time. “Kciuq emoc retteb uoy.”

 

Hours and days unwind, unyielding, as clock hands turn counterclockwise.

Outside, skeletal leaves quiver on the ground, flesh reconnecting their paper-weak bones. The russet of decay blushes at the oncoming summer. They don vibrant rouge, shimmer gold as the rising sun in the west, bask in the orange of Creamsicles that will be unmelted in the heat.

Then, on a rapturous updraft of yellowed emerald, the leaves rain upward into the air. They settle like flocks of birds upon the tree branches. They sing and sway.

Meanwhile, underneath them, the promised Creamsicles are spit bite-by-bite back onto their sticks. They’re sealed in wrappers and taken from the chlorine-wrinkled hands of children, who run away again, filling their lungs with shrieks of life.

 

Neven’s illness diminishes like the ground-swallowed shoots of grass, and he grows stronger, younger. Death occupies less of his mind.

His grandchildren hook fishes on their lines, lowering them into the water to catch worms on a quiet Sunday afternoon. They trade laughter for jokes and scolds for complaints. He untells them stories about generations that haven’t lived yet. At home—at night—he reads books from The End to Once Upon a Time, and their view of the world narrows with the dusk.

“Uoy evol I,” he tells each of his grandchildren. Always, forever, a repeating echo: “Uoy evol I. Uoy evol I.”

Then he loses them, one by one.

Each grandchild gets tucked back into their mother’s womb, sung away into oblivion—and after they’re gone, the dust blows out of Neven’s hair, strand by strand, and he has no memory of the children he used to take out on the lake.

 

In a world without his grandchildren—with two kids unearning their PhDs and one being demoted for his hard work—Neven thinks about how many millions of other lives must mean more than his.

He carries his award to the stage, where, with a laugh, he wipes a tear onto his face.

Neven says, “Siht evresed ot enod ev’I tahw wonk t’nod I.”

He makes a list: his not-yet-living mother, who will unteach him what it means to love without condition. Volunteers, who humbly shrug off hours of work they haven’t done. Publishers, who will unbind his books and wipe the words from their loose pages. The impoverished, the hungry, the frightened, the hurting—those priceless lives at the edge—whose strength of heart cannot be tarnished by time.

And, of course, his one true love.

He pitches a kiss across the room. It lands like a butterfly on his wife’s hand. She breathes it in through pursed lips, love sparkling in her eyes, and in her lungs, it flutters and flickers, caged. The first of the roses have begun to spring around her wedding band.

Neven says, “Eid reven lliw ew, yaw eht gnola hcuot ew sevil ynam eht hguorht dna, su ot nwohs evol eht morf nrob era ew.”

As the applause grows gradually into thunder, Neven relinquishes his award. He returns to his seat. He links arms with his wife, and the applause cuts off in an instant, and through the sudden silence, Neven whispers, “Dlrow eht ni ecnereffid yna ekam yllaer I od?”

His wife pats his empty hands.

 

Neven opens his manuscript document.

He highlights words, replacing them with typos. He removes commas where they’re needed and adds them where they’re not. He takes away word after word, diminishing his count from 89,927 to 10,000 to 1,000 to 100 to 10.

The Fight for Peace

The Fight for P

The Fight

The Fi

The

T

He stops at a blank document. He stares at it, and as he does, his cheeks glisten wet with tears. He’s thinking of his mother: how her casket will soon be raised, how she will breathe, how she will suffer.

He can’t imagine a world without his mother, not even while he’s living in it.

 

The flowers of spring shut their heads. They slump, unable to hold their own weight, and as the cruelty of frost bites the air, they slip down into the soil, going to sleep inside their seeds.

 

Neven’s wife laments the children not being home, so they move in: young adults forgetting more and more about the world and its gentle sufferings.

The two sons shove each other around, laughing. They lock themselves in their shared room and play video games together, working their way from Assassin’s Creed to Spyro the Dragon.

Neven’s daughter quits being an astronomer. Class by class, she unlearns everything she ever knew and loved about it. Then she comes with a tote of stuffed animals, which get arranged along her bed in neat rows, with a kiss between every set of worn-velvet ears. One day—one by one—they will be taken from her on birthdays and Christmases.

She plucks balls of tape out of the trashcan, sticking them to the backs of photographs. They cover the wall with the random intention of constellations, and she gazes at them for long hours on end, undreaming visions of everything she ever amounted to.

 

At a birthday party, her youngest brother gapes at a magician disappearing rabbits into hats.

“Ot uoy tnaw I erehw kool,” the magician says. “Hctaw.”

They try to catch how he does it, but they fail. That’s the trick. Sleight of hand. The magician links chains without breaking them. He calls a dove out of the sky, and she vanishes under the silk of his handkerchief, and he hides an ace up his sleeve, and the audience marvels at magic that works both ways.

“Dne eht ta kcirt eht ezilaer ylno uoy,” the magician tells them at the very beginning.

 

Neven unsings hours of songs to his children.

He pulls bandages slowly off scraped knees, tenderly wiping grit and gravel into them while his children cry. He returns dozens of precious I LOV M Y DADY cards and unevenly cut scribble-flowers and asymmetrical hearts done in crayon. He rocks his babies till they’re screaming good and loud, and then he lays them in their cribs, leaving them alone in the frightening dark, with nothing but nightmares of their upcoming unbirth to fill their softened minds.

In the end, he tells his daughter, “Uoy teem yllanif ot doog. Yddad ruoy—em s’ti. Eno elttil, ih.”

The sides of Neven’s eyes uncrinkle. His smile lessens to make room for worry. Then it disappears entirely, taking away his daughter’s final set of stars. He hands her off to the doctor, and the cord is rejoined, and she goes to the last place she will ever know.

Neven watches his wife’s belly shrink week by week, toward its normal size again.

“Eb lliw uoy ohw,” he says to the last of his once-was daughter, “rednow I.”

She had been so very much to him.

 

Neven and his wife lose touch after touch, night after night, younger and younger. Soon—as always has and always will be, at every beginning and every end—they will lose each other.

“Neven,” she says, “uoy evol I.”

Their loved ones cheer, snatching white rose petals and rice from the air. The couple walks backwards to the altar, where their lips press and pull away, where Neven hides her face behind the white of her veil.

“Edirb eht ssik yam uoy.”

Their vows are renounced before God.

Neven’s mother, whose cancer has gone away for the occasion, dabs tears into her eyes. She thinks about choices. She thinks about unintended love and intended love, and how it’s always better the first way, and how, same as our skeletons change cell by cell while we sleep, no one ever dies the same person they were born.

She wishes the couple a happy marriage.

She tells them, “Evila eb ot si ti lufituaeb woh fo thgis esol reven.”

 

Neven takes the ring from his once-wife.

He brings it to the jewelry store, and they give him money for it, and sometime later, the ring is melted to liquid gold. The roses are undone in their prime.

Neven and his girlfriend get to know each other less. Their dates dwindle from I’ve lost count to Somewhere between nine and twelve? to the big First Date. He sees the last of her in the town library, where he revokes compliments, flattens both their smiles, takes the pen from her hand to leave it on the floor between her feet. He lowers her confidence bit by bit with his presence.

Then he piles picture books on his passenger seat, having unread them to the children inside, and he drives out of her life forever.

A crushing sense of loneliness creeps into the woman who was his soul mate. She will never feel loved again after Neven, only lusted after by boys who toss her down the line like an increasingly unused toy. None of them will ever know her heart the way Neven did. None of them will ever try to.

As she grows young, she will do things to herself to make the pain go away. They will never work. She will whisper, “Nrob reven saw I hsiw I,” almost nightly, and one day, her wish will come true.

 

“Ris, uoy sselb doG.”

From dusk to dawn, Neven takes food from the hungry and coats from the cold. He approaches a woman who will shortly leave the shelter for the last time. She looks comforted as he puts his hand over hers—over the bowl she is holding—but her comfort becomes concern, uncertainty, embarrassment, as Neven pulls the stew from her hands. She backtracks toward the door, realizing she doesn’t know the next time she’ll eat real food. She leaves hungry. They all do.

Neven reverses home.

He carries the full pot of hot stew from the back of the car, into the kitchen, where he puts it on the stove. He leaves it on low heat. Outside, the sun peers between trees under a canopy of twilight blue.

After catching a few hours of sleep, Neven drags his toes into the kitchen and makes a mess on all the surfaces, until the towels are clean and the paper towel roll is full.

He takes a Band-Aid off his finger and closes it sterile into its package. The cut seals itself on the sharp lip of a can, and Neven keeps working. If he stops working, he stops feeling that his existence is justified in the world.

He makes tomatoes whole with his knife. He turns easy-to-eat chunks of beef into tender steaks and puts everything away. He returns them to the market later that day, and they’re shipped out to farms, where the tomatoes are hung like ornaments on plants that will sap them of their nutrients, draining them to nothing.

The steaks are assembled into cow shapes, zipped into hides, and set breathing and blinking into the fields. The cows watch the sun rise and fall. Soon they, too, disappear into the womb, in a slower and less certain form of death than a blow to the head.

 

The man who never felt he was good enough removes himself slowly from the surface of the world. He unwrites his name from volunteer lists, removes his signatures from checks to charity, helps himself to spare change from collection boxes at Christmas. He loses sight of what his life means.

His job experience dwindles as he pays companies for their time. He returns his cords, his ribbons, and his certificates, walking backwards through the hallways of his college, losing friends, unearning credits.

Every night at his desk, he props his head up on his hand, hating himself secretly. He thinks of how he isn’t smart enough. He thinks of how he doesn’t do enough good.

“Nrob reven tsuj saw I hsiw I,” he murmurs on dark nights, “semitemos.”

At his door, a classmate thanks him.

She apologizes in advance for being rude. She tells him that, now—in the sobering day—she sees how his actions will probably save her life.

Neven says, “Olleh, ho,” and closes the door in her face. She knocks on it, but Neven goes on studying until she leaves.

 

“Syek ym em evig!”

Neven obliges, tucking the keys into her sweaty fingers.

“Uoy truh ll’eh,” Neven tells her. “Gnihtemos yrt ll’eh. Krej a s’eh. Yug taht wonk I. Esaelp. Hcum oot dah ydaerla uoy.” 

She screams at him to get out of the way. She has to get to Matt’s house. He invited her for a few more drinks after the party—just the two of them—can’t Neven mind his own fucking business?

Neven gets out of her way.

He turns his back.

He minds his own fucking business.

 

Neven packs his dorm room into labeled boxes and bags, leaving nothing behind, and goes to live with his mother at home. She steals a kiss off his forehead every night while he sleeps, having missed him for years, but as college drifts further into the past, she does it less often, less secretly, less sadly.

At high school graduation, Neven catches his cap just before the district takes his diploma. He goes to eleventh grade, then tenth, then ninth, all the way into the awkward years.

He calls pebbles to the toes of his scuffed sneakers, kicking thoughtfully along the sidewalks of his town. He always turns away from those on hard times.

“Lla s’taht. Yako eb ot elpoep tnaw I.”

“Dub, tahw?”

“Mom, efil ni tnaw I tahw wonk I.”

He looks back at his lost past, not recalling a moment of it, and he wonders whether he was ever strong enough to carry the weight of his own heart. He unkicks another stone.

He dreads and prays for the increasing innocence of childhood.

 

Neven’s mother catches him as he bikes backwards to her. She stays with him all the way from the mailbox to the garage, where she puts training wheels on for him that night, while he’s asleep.

She kisses pain onto his boo-boos. She makes him ignorant, as gently and gradually as possible, to all the hardship in the world. To how deeply heartache can cut. To how much it’s still worth believing in love.

He loses his vocabulary for pain.

 

They watch the snow grow from the ground, covering their neighborhood.

Neven plays in it while he can: smoothing sled tracks and unmaking snow angels with his mother. Soon—far too soon—the last of their footprints are gone, and the white glistens unbroken, as if they’d never been there at all.

The sky picks up the snow flake by flake, drawing them delicately into the clouds. When Neven and his mother wake up the next evening, the winter wonderland is gone, and so is their memory of it.

 

“Uoy ta kool, yob, ho!”

Dimples in full glory, Neven charges across the room to his mother. He drops to the ground and rolls over, kicking his footsied feet in the air. His mother’s eyes twinkle over him. She finds herself smiling, because despite everything, her son can always bring her joy.

She nurses him, taking milk from his belly. He begins to fuss.

“Ereh s’ymmom,” his mother whispers. “Thgir lla s’ti.”

 

Neven laughs for the last time. He gives his final coos and gurgles. The act of moving becomes increasingly difficult. He grows smaller by the day. The world closes in on him, until he can see almost nothing but his mother.

She smiles at him. She smiles at him. She smiles at him.

She sits by his crib and sings while he screams, night after night. Never mind that she will get so little sleep. Never mind that she just finished a long shift and has another coming up. Never mind any of that while her baby cries.

Eventually, Neven blinks for the final time, too, and unlearns the face of the divine, delivering love that carried him through all his life. He cries his last, as they towel amniotic fluid onto his infant body.

“Lufituaeb s’eh,” his mother cries. She sees the past stretching out infinitely before her. “DoG, ho.”

And thus, given to the warmth, the safety, the eternal and impenetrable sunrise. The baby loses hiccups and gets them, puts its thumb into its mouth and pulls it out, watches vague dreams pass by, growing hazier and hazier, in a world at last with no pain. By degrees, the baby ceases to be a baby at all. The baby becomes a once-baby. A not-quite baby.

Fingerprints smooth away so as never to leave a mark.

The morning blue of the eyes retreats into shadow.

A tiny valve that was once a whole heart goes pitter pitter pitter pitter…

… while the young woman’s heart beats strong but broken. Watching her stomach shrink day by day, she grows more certain of herself. She undreams the past and dreads every certainty of the future.

She runs to the man she thinks she loves, and he puts the fragments of her heart together with a hammer. She hides away with him in the holy darkness and brings a final end to all that had brought her so much joy and so much suffering and so much pride and so much pain. The man revokes petty promises. He unsows the last seed of the already unspun.

He leaves her.

It comes the same in either direction.

 

A lonely girl is left to lie awake through the night.

She makes her skin unbroken with paperclips, sometimes, and other times, she simply stares at the ceiling and murmurs hatreds like incantations under her breath.

“Ecnereffid yna sekam od I gnihton. Nrob reven saw I hsiw I,” she says. “Flesym etah I.”

She wishes she could take back every trace of herself from the world—and it comes true through the unwinding of time. She flees backwards through days of purifying youth, tear-wet eyes always locked on the vague idea of the grandmother, the mother, the woman, the sufferer, the seven billionth delicate daily miracle she had been. She disbelieves. She forgets. She runs, forfeiting sorrow by slow, novacaine degrees. She gives herself up. She unlives, yearning always for the merciful nothing of unbirth.

And it comes, and more endings become beginnings, and more beginnings become endings.