She arrived at the ragged edge of the sea with four canvas totes. One for herself, and three for the children. Each bag sang faintly when it shifted, as if full of seashells or bones.

The townsfolk watched her climb toward the old house on the hill. They thought she was only tired. They didn’t see the trails of dark water escaping from the seams, runoff from the storm that once wore a man’s voice.

The house had a workshop; its air sweet with damp sawdust. Salt gathered on the windowsills where the ocean spray blew up from the shore below. Beatriu unpacked the bags. Inside were ribs slick with regret, a sliver of heartbreak, and the half-formed thoughts that once belonged to her daughter.

A thumbnail, a tear, a heart still beating faintly in a small brass box. When she lifted the box, it trembled, remembering the hand that had struck it down. Her own pieces she left for later. She would rebuild the children first.

Morning light pooled through the cracked window like frosted milk. She laid the fragments across the table. The children watched with solemn eyes as she fitted their parts together, flesh to flesh, memory to memory. The joints sometimes wept apart before the glue could set.

We are not broken things, she whispered, eyes flaring wide. We are blueprints waiting to be reimagined! The children laughed with shared excitement.

At night, she built herself, by herself. Quietly, by low light. Her hands shook as she pressed the edges of her hips together, smoothed the line of her throat, and tried to anchor her despair where a voice once rested. She turned too fast, and a piece fell to the floor; cracked into more parts. She heard the black hammer in her sleep, the voice that had said her name before it fell. Absolute and certain. Each time she woke, another piece had come loose, as if he were still finding her, undoing her from afar.

Days blurred: salt, sawdust, laughter bleeding together. Beatriu stopped tracking the hours, the weeks, the years. All that mattered was each new build. She understood now that they were made of many things, sensation, history, experience, and that the sacred act of putting the pieces back together was her grace: to shape and reshape, infinitely.

Her eldest, Melecia, with those deep brown eyes, learned to concentrate without splintering. Her daughter, Orosina, with her dark golden hair, painted the cracks in her arms with melted wax and crushed mica. Her son, Ferran, with his proud gaze, learned to run along the walls of the workshop, bright with the stubborn will to appear unbroken before any watching eye.

Each evening, when they slept, Beatriu searched the workshop floor for what she had lost. Things so small they had gotten misplaced when she unpacked her bag. A pinky finger here, long hairs hiding in the boards. She found her reflection, dulled and dusty, beneath the table saw. A small shard of her voice glinting in the rafters. She kept them in her pocket until she knew just how to set them back together.

From the window, she watched the sea. The tide moved like a serpent, calling to her. She wondered if she might one day walk the shore again. But the wind would tear at her seams. She wasn’t yet strong enough for the sea’s regard, its terrible honesty.

Still, she dreamed of salt on her lips. Of the horizon stitched from many tomorrows. Perhaps I was always meant to be rebuilt, she thought.

Her children grew stronger. Melecia’s mischief climbed the beams as they painted a scene of silver and green; in its echo, Beatriu discovered her missing hunger. Orosina stitched a golden weave across her brother’s back; in the center, Beatriu found her lost eye. Ferran raced through the doorway shouting his mother’s name; his footprints in the dust gave Beatriu back her spine.

She placed each piece within herself, and they locked together like questions quietly answered. For all the pieces she had already placed; there had been three holes. The puzzle shapes unformed until her children had been patched back together.

The faultlines glowed. The room thrummed, as if the sea were murmuring her name through the walls.

One morning, the wind rose early. The children begged to go outside. Beatriu hesitated, then nodded. They walked to the beach. Their bodies shimmered in the wind, seams alight with survival: gold, silver, copper. The sea roared, a sound of jubilant welcome. The wind pulled at them, testing.

Orosina laughed, a bright, uncracked sound, as her body swayed with the wind’s pull. “Mama! Look! I am a web, see how I flex but do not break!”

But the wind picked up, and she dropped a piece of herself in the sand, a small bright triangle of something part-flesh, part-light. She dropped to her knees, defeated in the moment. Beatriu knelt beside her, cupped the piece in her hands. Together they pressed it back into place, and Orosina smiled.

“You are in a new shape now, stronger than before. But what’s most important to remember, my love, is that even when you break, we can put you back together.” Beatriu’s dark eyes shone with a clarity for herself as much as her child. “And that is the beauty of our fragile life, the joy we find in placing the puzzle back together. No matter how many times the hammer once struck.”

The wind surged. Their hair whipped like banners. They held each other, the sea shining before them, the cracks alive and joyous.

That night, the workshop stood empty. The house was full of warmth and the sound of the tide moving through the dark, and the faint, steady whisper of things once broken, still holding.

I ask the boys to send me pictures, and then I build their faces.

They show me family portraits in parlors, hair slicked from severe center partings, and military snapshots in uniforms brown and crisp as paper packages. They come into my shop, and I lay paint upon their cheeks (or their arms, if they have no cheeks) until I match their skin tone, and snip pieces of their hair if they wish me to add a mustache.

Then I take plaster casts of the gashes and craters that were once their faces, so I may fill them with new ones.

But Alistair Webb did not have any photos. He sent only a thick package filled with pages of writing, and eight £10 notes.

“Dear Miss Everdeen,” the first page read, “my home was destroyed by a Zeppelin bomb in 1916. My face then encountered an HE shell in 1918. The war swept away all I once was, even my photos. I have heard your skill is incomparable. I therefore enclose all that is left of me: the stories that once made me whole.”

What followed was a catalog of a life in body parts. Each missing piece was given its own packet: ten pages on his left cheek, twenty on his nose, forty-two on his mouth.

It was early morning when I began, and the clay was cold. I kneaded it in my hands until it was soft and warm as skin. Then I pressed it against the wooden mannequin I keep for wounds so complete I cannot make a plaster cast. Under the strokes of my fingers, clay caked into my lifeline and heartline, his face took shape.

When I was eleven, a cricket ball hit me between the eyes, breaking my nose. The ball was wet, as it was raining, and smelled of leather and grass. My mother mopped the blood with her linen handkerchief—it smelled of lemons and carbolic soap—and sutured my wound with her sewing needle while my father held me down. Be sure, then, to make my nose crooked—in a leather and grass, lemon and rain sort of way.

With a flat blade, I shaped the planes; with a ribbon tool, I carved the nostrils; with my fingers, I blended and smoothed. I did not so much carve as grow it: bones and cartilage, skin and hair.

That first feature took six days. I kept my shop locked with a sign in the window.

My left ear is slightly larger than my right, and more deaf—this is the ear I’d press against the flared horn of our gramophone, feeling it quiver as the music poured out. Be sure you shape it with the molten gold of Enrico Caruso and the shimmering silver of Nellie Melba. It should remember, too, the sound of Ragtime: boots and heels two-stepping and cakewalking.                                

With a wire I shaved down the right ear, and began to hear a faint vibrato, thumping shoes and swishing skirts, percussive piano and crowing trumpets.

Time slipped too quickly between the shop and my flat; to keep it still, I slept at my desk. In the mornings, I woke with clay still warm in my hands.

My left cheek is more freckled than my right, because it faced the sun in the mornings when I read on the porch swing. It has a dimpled scar from a tree branch; be sure to show that the tree grew red apples, and stood before the kitchen window.

I felt the sun on my back, smelled the bark and leaves and ripe, red fruit.

My mouth speaks Italian from my father, sings tenor, loves the feel of fizzy sherbet, plays the trumpet, laughs staccato, and has known the kisses of twelve women.

It was warm against my lips.

My eye has seen the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, the ocean and the Black Sea; it never tires of reading Hardy, watching cricket, looking at the moon between apple tree branches, watching my father swing my mother to the “Dill Pickles Rag.” It is dark green, and my eyelashes are pale. I never cry.

With a single horsehair brush, I painted a tiny woman in a square of light I placed in the pupil’s center.

She has my face.

It has been eight months: Alistair Webb is seated in my fitting chair. I have written to tell him the work is finished.

He is a large man, with thick brown hair falling in waves over his forehead. He wears a clean linen bandage around his face; it obscures everything but one eye.

I know that eye. I have painted its double—so perfectly that one cannot tell them apart. I know the scar that lies between his eyebrows, shaped like the stitching of a cricket ball. I know everything that lies beneath.

Easily, as though it is not warm and soft and glowing with life, I take the mask from my desk and hold it up to him. His body jolts backward as though he’s been struck, but no sound comes from him. After all, I hold his mouth.

Very carefully, I unwind his bandage. Around and around I go, until the end of the cloth falls away, and I am left seeing, between a thick slice of forehead and a sliver of jaw… a hole.

A yawning absence. A life erased.

Alistair Webb is looking up at me; his green eye is wide and frightened.

Very slowly, I place my hands over his wound. My palms are along his jawline, my fingertips against his brows. And then I lean forward and place a kiss on the scar above his nose, and I close my eyes to remember because he may not let me do this again, he may walk out of my store forever, he may have a wife, she may be sitting at home by a window near an apple tree, waiting for his new mouth.

Then I place his mask upon his face.

WHALEFALL

Lorenza is honest in therapy about everything except the whales.

She tells Dr. Adams a purgatory of bland truths: her hands shake, jelly seismic activity, when she walks outside and the world is small and real and people look at her with pupils that dilate too fast under the glow of a baleen-toothed sun; she cried this morning because the woman waiting at the bus stop across the street with the purple streak in her hair did not smile back.

She scratches at her eczema and avoids her reflection in the mirror. Can whales see their

reflection in tanks? Stupid whales. Throw a ball, and they’ll catch it like a dog, sing like a bird

underwater. What’s an IQ to a whale?

She can’t remember the diagnosis Dr. Adams gave her, only the whalesong that poured out of his mouth like sound was a prophecy delivered by angels with wings made of blubber.

It starts with a vowel, she thinks.

***

Breathe, she tells herself, and she applies the topical lotion to her skin. She is going outside. Think about sweet corn and hydrogen peroxide and the dust bunnies hosting afternoon tea underneath your green velvet couch.

She got that couch off the side of the road. Dr. Adams told her not to because it was upholstered. He believes in bed bugs. She believes in vacuums.

What’s a little more itching when her skin is already in tatters and burns like it stole all the sun the angler fish never got.

***

Dr. Adams has a leather couch in his office. She doesn’t trust his opinions on interior design.

***

She tells Dr. Adams that moving to a new city is scary, and she isn’t very brave when it comes to large things, because she knows this has enough glass fragments of trauma response sticking out of it to make Dr. Adams grin. When Dr. Adams smiles she can count his cavities, see which of his molars have sucrose rot gnawing into the insides of his bones, exposing the nerves and roots of him to the open air, like a whale breach in the middle of an empty ocean.

That’s what it’s like to move to a new city, she tells him, a cavity. She does not tell him about the whales.

***

Ever since Lorenza stepped across the clear grey air of invisible geography, ever since she found herself tumbling with the car tires over state lines to a patch of land that met up with the ocean along its collarbones, she has heard whalesong. It lives in her now. She is 70% whalesong like she is 70% water, like she is percent enough water for a whale to swim in her, a whole pod of them, like they made their homes in her lovely sternum.

A whalefall is a burst of life in the underground crevices, a spark of joy in the places so deep the fish never learned to weep at how sunlight warms the skin in gentle, reassuring particles.

She wishes she had heard blobfish instead of whales. They’re trendy.

***

Moving to New York from Kansas brings out an algal bloom of rashes on her skin. Rashes she hasn’t had since she was a baby. It’s like being born again. When she was a kid, she would pick every dandelion she saw and wish for the sick gold frogs in Panama to win the battle against extinction. Nowadays, if she had a dandelion, she’d wish for better lotion or for the bodega near her apartment to be empty whenever she needs to buy US Weekly and tampons.

***

Agoraphobic, her doctor called her, but she couldn’t hear him over the whales.

***

When a whale in captivity dies, it cannot be reborn into the phytoplankton and the bottom

feeders. It cannot find new life in the nitrogen cycle. It is only a tragedy of dead matter.

Over the chatter of a living city, she hears their overwhelming vibration, swears the sky must be an ocean full of whales. Dumb fucks, she thinks. Too big. Too gentle. Salty-eyed luminaries. The noise bleeds her brain dry as landfall. Oh the whales, she thinks, oh what a bright and fearsome tragedy it must be, to be so cold, to live in water but breathe air, to communicate pain by singing.

I wrote tenderness on a sticky note and stuck it on my computer monitor. The next person who wandered by my cubicle, I tried to hug. Their arms flailed like ribbons. I was fired.

So that wasn’t it.

At home, I made a cake, and my wife made a list: sugar, fat, calories, carbohydrates, and, again, sugar. I ate it alone in a shaft of sunlight. To the sunlight I said, “Teach me.” It burned a perfect angle of red skin on my cheek.

“What will you do?” my wife spoke into the dark.

We were in bed, and no one had touched no one.

“I will work again,” my mouth said, but not me.

“Good,” my wife said. “We just bought that car after all, and there’s this purse I’ve been eyeing—”

“I used to draw as a child,” I told her.

“Yes, you’ve said.”

“I was very good.”

She deflated the room with her sigh. In the morning, though, the room was not empty, and neither was I.

That day, I hugged all the life that could not resist me. Dogs, cats, trees, grass, flowers. To hug a flower, lightly press a sunburned cheek to its petal.

When my wife came home, she said, “You’re still in your robe.”

“Hold me.” I don’t think I’d ever asked.

She laughed and put me in charge of dinner.

“Potatoes were once alive,” I told her over the music of our forks.

She was the bass clarinet when she said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I got a job,” I lied.

She transformed back into an ambitious girl. “That’s better.”

Out under the stars, middle of the night, the moon wet my eyelashes.

“Hey,” a smoky voice said from the other side of the fence.

“Hey,” I said.

“Look here.” There was a knock near a penny-sized hole in the fence.

I did as I was told. “The Moon,” I said, “helps.”

“Right?”

“But no thank you.”

“Oh, no,” the man said with a chuckle. “I only wanted to show you.”

I felt sick.

Inside, my wife was uncovered and had rolled into the center of the bed.

The next day, after she left for work, I got in my car and drove. I touched my own cheek. I ran fingers through my own hair. I took the car out into the hills, sped up the inclines to feel my belly squeeze itself when the car crested and fell. I could go on like this forever, I thought. Excited by the prospect, I took a hill even faster and came upon stopped traffic.

I did not die.

Instead, for months, the nurses called parts of me tender. This is tender and that is tender and your poor tender bones.

“You’re a steak,” my wife joked, her new purse like a sleeping child in her lap.

“Meat,” I said with no teeth, so it just sounded like me.