The God of Our Story

The throne was not a chair. It was a burden shaped like one—roots of light and shadow braided into a seat that cradled his body while insisting he could never rise. Loki’s hands rested on the carved ends of the armrests, ribs of Yggdrasil pulsing beneath his palms, the heartbeat of a universe that never slept. Gold and green bled through the darkness around him, threads of timelines weaving and unweaving, a million stories breathing at once. He felt all of them. He felt the way a child on Earth held her breath before touching the ocean for the first time. He felt an old man in Alfheim close his eyes and forgive someone who would never come back. He felt a widow in Madripoor tuck a photograph into a drawer and choose to live anyway. Every decision pricked at him. Joy scraped against him like glass.

He did not need food. He did not need rest. He needed something he was not allowed to have—skin against skin, breath shared, the private weight of another person choosing him in silence. He had traded all of that for this, for holding the strands so they did not fray into nothing. He had chosen an eternity of watching.

He listened to the hiss and murmur of existence. It filled the vastness like rain on metal, steady and endless. If he focused, he could peel a thread forward, see the color of its breath, the cadence of its narrative. If he relaxed, the threads blurred into a shimmering expanse that pressed against his skull until his eyes burned.

He could taste heartbreak at the back of his throat more often than anything else.

A comet of light streaked through the lattice of time, and with it came a cluster of futures that would never happen now. He inhaled and let them pass, steadying the line with the smallest tilt of his fingers. He had learned that kindness here was often restraint. He could hum against the roots and they would answer, bending around him like an animal seeking his hand, but he saved his voice. He saved everything. Even gods could run out.

He did not look away. He had learned the cost of that too.

The loneliness was not loud. It was not a wail. It was the quiet certainty that he could name a billion faces and not one of them would turn and find him. It was the way laughter slid along him without catching. He closed his eyes and the inside of his lids were bright with branching pathways, new and old. He thought of a dingy cafeteria, of a man who leaned back in a chair and smiled with his whole mouth, the corners creasing, eyes warm with patient humor. He had never tried to summon a memory here. They came whether he called for them or not, like a tide.

“Don’t be scared of happiness, Loki,” Mobius had said once, coffee cooling between his fingers. “It doesn’t punish you for noticing it.”

He opened his eyes. He watched a timeline where a woman lifted her baby out of a bath and pressed her nose to the damp curve of his cheek. A timeline where a teenage boy kissed another boy and did not pull back afterward, did not apologize. He let those moments ease across him, brief relief like a hand on his shoulder. They felt like heat through glass.

He did not imagine hands.

He dragged in air that smelled like metal and sap. He could place his hands more firmly on the throne and the tree would hum in recognition, a reminder: you are here. He was here. He held the skeins. He wore the crown of this place, if it could be called a crown—the corona of light that rested at the edge of his sight and never touched his skin. It was beautiful. It was unbearable. It was his.

This was not penance. He refused to believe that. This was purpose. The difference kept him alive.

There were voices in the weave—words spoken in languages without names, prayers that were not asking for anything, promises kept and broken. He kept himself small among them. He had to. If he let himself take up space, the tree tightened, its branches contracting to make room, and something somewhere faltered. He had learned to be weightless, an idea of a body more than the thing itself.

A thread at the edge of his focus shivered. He reached toward it without moving, the way he had learned, concentrating on the faint tremble moving along its length. It settled. The ache did not. The ache was inside him.

He could touch nothing. He could guide, could nudge in measures so precise they would look like luck. He could brace the narrative when despair tried to pry it apart. He could not hold a cup of coffee. He could not call someone by their name and hear it answered in a human voice, near and warm.

He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, a human habit that meant nothing here. It grounded him anyway.

The throne sighed. The threads breathed. He waited, the patience of someone who had learned how to keep the ocean from tilting. Somewhere far below his feet that didn’t exist, stars were being born. Somewhere to his left and to his right and behind, people were continuing, the ordinary miracle of it steady as a pulse.

The loneliness doubled in on itself until it became something clean. He let it sit in his chest. He let it be part of the cost.

He was the God of Stories. He would not abandon them.

He held on. He watched. He did not reach for the memory again. He did not need to. It hovered at the perimeter of his awareness, a gentler light than most, neither demanding nor fading. He breathed it in and let it go. The threads thrummed. The tree whispered back. And Loki stayed where he was, a still point in the flood, aching and resolute, while infinity moved.

A tug, not of duty but of something older and more tender, drew his gaze. The threads parted without effort when he looked for it. A strand pulsed warmer, the cadence of its days familiar at a level that had nothing to do with sight. He followed it down and in, the way one follows a scent, and the cold brilliance of the throne receded until a small, ordinary sun filled his vision.

Afternoon. A square of backyard hemmed in by a picket fence. The grass was not perfect—patchy in places, greener where the sprinkler had lingered. A plastic kiddie pool sagged in one corner, catching light like a basin of coins. There were two bikes sprawled on their sides, a red helmet dangling from a handlebar, a garden hose curled like a sleeping snake. A charcoal grill clicked as it cooled, scent of smoke and meat faint in the warm air. It was so ordinary that it pressed at him like a hand through cloth, a pressure that asked nothing and offered everything.

A man stood near the pool with a water gun in each hand, bare feet darkened by wet lawn. The sun laid a sheen on his forearms, on the small scatter of hair there. His blond hair was damp at the temples, pushed back in a way that showed the shape of his forehead. His T-shirt clung a little to his chest and belly where the water had soaked it, turning the gray darker. He laughed, head tipped back, the line of his throat clean and vulnerable, and Loki felt the sound more than he heard it, a vibration under the skin.

“Dad, no fair!” one of the boys shrieked, the smaller one, sandy hair sticking up in wet spikes. He was perhaps seven, maybe eight—the age where teeth are too big for the mouth and knees are perpetually bruised. He held a plastic shield in front of him, a toy with a cartoon shark on it, and barreled forward with the graceless confidence of the unselfconscious.

The older boy, lankier, maybe ten, darted behind their father and reached for a water gun holster that didn’t exist. He grabbed his dad’s shirt instead, yanking, using the fabric to slingshot himself past. “Flank him!” he yelled, and Don pivoted, slow on purpose, letting himself be caught.

Loki watched the play of muscle under wet cotton. He watched the way Don’s hands gentled in an instant when the smaller boy skidded, fingers finding a shoulder, a steadying touch. He watched the boys fire arcs of water that flashed in the sun, droplets catching light like glass. He felt the way heat pooled on skin and the way water cooled it in sudden stripes. He felt the press of grass under soles and the surety of ground.

Don chased them toward the fence, laughing until he couldn’t breathe, then threw his hands up, surrendering, a dramatic collapse onto the lawn. The boys pounced. The littler one straddled his stomach and tried to pin his wrists, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. The older stretched himself across Don’s legs, victoriously whooping.

“Okay! Okay,” Don said, breathless amusement rounding the words. “I yield to superior forces.”

“Tell us your secrets,” the older demanded.

“What secrets?” Don grinned and tried for an innocent glance that fooled no one.

“Where did you hide the popsicles?” the smaller one said, voice serious with the importance of the quest.

Don squeezed the boy’s knee, a light, merciless squeeze that made him convulse and squeal. He sobered, the kind of stage seriousness that children adored. “There are rules of engagement. Captives are to be treated with dignity.”

“You tickle us all the time,” the older pointed out, propping his chin on his hands and smirking.

“That’s training.”

“That’s cruel and unusual,” the younger argued, winding a fist in his father’s shirt.

Don’s free hand came up with a surrendering flutter. “Garage freezer. Bottom drawer. But if you get the grape ones, we can’t be friends anymore.”

“Grape is the best!” the younger gasped in scandal, launching to his feet and tearing toward the house.

“We’re on opposite sides of history,” Don called after him. He turned his head toward the older boy, eyes squinting against the light. “You okay?”

The question was quiet, instinctive, a check-in beneath the play. The older boy rolled off his legs and sat up, pushing damp hair off his forehead. “Yeah. Just tired of getting shot in the face.”

Don winced in exaggerated apology. “You’re right. Face shots are dirty pool.” His hand reached out, thumb brushing away a bead of water near the boy’s eye. It was a small touch, practiced and easy. The boy leaned into it without thinking, that unconscious trust children have with the people who love them.

Loki swallowed. The impulse to reach out was visceral, as if nerves that were not nerves remembered the texture of fabric in Don’s shirt, the heat of his skin beneath. He had no skin here, but the ache mapped it anyway: the way he would fit a palm to the slope of that cheekbone, the way the sun would make the hairs on Don’s forearms glow lighter, the way sweat, when it dried, would taste like salt if he ever— He drew the thought back sharply, held it still in his chest so it wouldn’t fracture into want. This was not for him. It would never be for him. He watched anyway.

The back door opened with a slam and the small boy reappeared with a popsicle in each hand and a third clenched between his teeth. He presented the spoils with the dignity of a diplomat. Don sat up, legs splayed, and accepted the orange like he was receiving a medal. The older took cherry with a long-suffering sigh that did not hide his pleasure.

“See, that’s a hero color,” Don said, unwrapping his and taking a bite, jaw working around the cold. He shuddered theatrically. “Ow. Brain freeze. Rookie mistake.”

“You always do that,” the older boy said, elbow nudging him.

“Because your old man is incapable of learning,” Don said, leaning back on his hands and tilting his face up to the sun.

He looked, for that one breath, entirely content. The planes of his face went soft. The lines at his eyes eased. He belonged to the afternoon like it had been made for him. The sound the smaller boy made—sticky fingers patting his father’s arm, asking without words if he would come back to the game—folded around Loki like pressure. He felt the response before he saw it: Don turned his head, smiled, and tugged the boy into his side, letting the orange dye his tongue, not caring about the stain on his shirt.

There was a jet ski magazine lying open on a patio table nearby, a glossy photograph of blue water and a white hull catching the light. Don’s glance slid over it without calculation, something moving in his face that Loki knew. A tilt toward a story he’d once told himself about joy. It sat there like a piece of a puzzle turned picture-down.

Loki didn’t breathe. Couldn’t. The throne hummed far away. Here, in the stripe of sun across a modest yard, a man’s laugh lifted and caught on the heat, and Loki let it hurt him. He let it fill him. He followed the curve of Don’s mouth as it opened for another bite, the small pink of tongue, the scrape of teeth on ice, and let that be what it was: a detail that would never touch him and that he would die to protect. He could not reach. He could only watch, jealous of the popsicle stick that rested in Don’s fingers, stupid and wooden and close.

“Tomorrow,” Don said, out of nowhere, voice casual, each word careful not to trip over the next—habit, perhaps, of making promises in a way that made them solid, “we’ll go down to the lake. Just to look. We don’t have to get in.”

The boys made noncommittal noises, more interested in sugar than plans. Don’s eyes went, unconsciously, to the magazine again. Loki followed and then back to the man, to the curve of his ear, the place where the skin thinned and reddened in the sun. He felt like falling and there was nothing beneath him but light.

He steadied the thread without touching it. He kept watching, because it was the only thing he was allowed to do, and because it was everything.

Dusk softened the backyard into silhouettes and gold. Don herded the boys inside with mock sternness and a steadying hand at each back when they tripped over their own feet, the scatter of water guns left to drip on the lawn. The house smelled like shampoo, laundry, and the last of the charcoal smoke. He corralled them toward the hall bathroom, flicked on the light, and watched them argue over who got the good towel.

“Teeth,” he said, pointing at the sink. “All of them.”

The older boy rolled his eyes and obeyed, the younger narrating his brushing like it was a race commentary. Don leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, and let the noise pass over him. He reached forward without thinking, turned the water down when the younger splashed too hard, thumb brushing a small damp spot under a chin. The boy looked up at him, foam at the corner of his mouth, trusting and exasperated in the way only a seven-year-old could be. Don’s chest tightened around something nameless.

They trailed down the hall to the small bedroom with the dinosaur posters and the glow-in-the-dark stars peeling at the edges. The beds were not made in the way magazines showed. Sheets had been kicked down, a stuffed shark dangled by its fin off the younger’s pillow. Don righted it, the habit of making things look safe even if they weren’t perfect. He pulled the covers up once each boy flopped into his spot, the younger on his stomach, feet drumming, the older on his side, already yawning, pretending he wasn’t.

“Story?” the younger asked, muffled by the pillow.

“Short one,” Don said, settling on the edge of the bed so his weight dipped the mattress, leaning over to tweak a lamp so it threw a softer circle. He put a hand on the small of the younger’s back, palm spanning warm cotton. “It’s late.”

“Make it about the lake monster,” the older said, not opening his eyes. “But not the scary kind.”

“Right. The friendly one,” Don said, his mouth moving before his brain knew what words would happen. “He hates grape popsicles.”

The younger laughed, wriggling. “Traitor.”

Don began to talk. He wasn’t sure where the images came from—a wide, flat lake at night, the water black glass, a big, bump-backed shadow making ripples like someone sighing. The monster liked engines, he said, and followed boats at a distance just to listen to the sound. He liked to watch people skim across the surface with their faces lit up, joy like a trail behind them. Sometimes, when he was very brave, he swam closer and let the wake lift him. No one noticed. He did it anyway.

His voice went low and steady, and he felt the boys’ breathing match it, slow and synchronized. He smoothed a hand over a small shoulder blade, the fabric warm from bathwater and skin. The older’s hand drifted out from the covers until it found Don’s knee. He left his hand there, fingers barely curled, a quiet point of connection. Don stayed still for him, made a promise with his body that he wasn’t going anywhere.

When the younger’s wriggles stilled, Don reached to turn off the lamp. In the dim, the shapes of their faces were soft and simple, the bones not yet insisting on themselves. He bent, pressed his mouth to a damp tuft of hair, then to a forehead, the press of his lips more like breathing than a kiss. The older grunted a half-protest and then tipped his head to receive the same. Don’s lips lingered an extra second at his temple, feeling the thud of pulse under skin.

“Dad?” the younger whispered into the dark. “You’ll be here in the morning, right?”

The question pierced something he didn’t know he had. It came at him like a déjà vu of panic—an image of empty air where someone should be. He exhaled slowly. “Always,” he said, and meant it with a ferocity that surprised him. He tucked the blanket tighter around small shoulders, a barrier against something he couldn’t name.

He stayed until both chests rose and fell in steady, unselfconscious rhythm, the room filled with the small sounds of sleep—the sighs, a sleep-mumbled word, the rustle of fabric. He slipped out, closing the door until it almost clicked, leaving it cracked because the older liked to see the sliver of hall light.

In the hall, the quiet hit him. It wasn’t silence. The house spoke in its usual ways—the clink of the vent, the hum of the fridge, the distant tick of the hallway clock—but there was a dip under the sound, a hollow. He leaned his shoulders back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment, letting his head rest there.

The ache rolled through him with no warning, sharp and clean. It wasn’t the ordinary tired of a long day. It was the feeling of reaching for something on a shelf where your hand had gone a thousand times and finding empty air. He pressed his knuckles to his sternum and rubbed like he could ease it out, an old instinct for a pain that wasn’t exactly physical. He could almost smell something that didn’t belong here—sterile air, something ozone-bright, a hint of citrus that made his mouth flood.

A name sat at the back of his throat, round and foreign, more shape than sound. He didn’t speak it. He didn’t know it. He only knew that his mouth wanted it, that his tongue knew where it lived. He swallowed hard and pushed off the wall, like moving could dislodge the sensation.

In the living room, he straightened a stack of mail that wasn’t crooked. He picked up the jet ski magazine from the patio and found his eyes snagging on the white curve of the hull again, on a man in a photograph leaning with his whole body into a turn, water throwing itself in sheets away from him. It hit him low, a rush of heat and longing that felt ridiculous and too large for the picture it attached to. He set it down and went to the kitchen.

He poured himself a glass of water and stood at the sink, the coolness anchoring his palm. Outside the window, the backyard had emptied itself of noise. The kiddie pool showed a trapezoid of sky, darkening. He lifted the glass and held it against his cheek for a second, the chill a rebuke and a comfort.

His reflection looked back at him in the glass, distorted by the water. For a heartbeat, the planes of his face were unfamiliar. A stranger’s cheekbone cut the angle wrong. A pair of eyes—green?—looked like they were watching him from behind the glass. He blinked, and it was only his own tired face again, the lines at the corners of his mouth deeper when he didn’t smile.

He smiled now, because that usually made the feeling back off. It didn’t. The hollow stayed, as precise as a missing tooth he couldn’t stop prodding with his tongue. He set the glass down too carefully, like the counter might not bear a hard sound.

He did a circuit of the house, turning off lights, checking the lock on the back door twice. He paused in the boys’ doorway and let the sight of them reset something in him: two small hums of life, two warm lumps under covers, the younger’s hand flung out toward the gap like he’d reached for Don in sleep and missed. Don reached back, touched small fingers with his own, and watched them curl reflexively around his. The ache shifted, got heavier and somehow easier to hold.

In his own room, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the mess on the nightstand: a book he’d been pretending to read, a half-used tube of lip balm, a keychain from the marina gift shop with a cartoon wave. He picked up the keychain and turned it in his fingers. The plastic was nicked at the edge from where he’d dropped it once under the car seat. He didn’t remember buying it. He remembered buying it. The contradiction tightened his jaw.

He stretched out on the bed without undressing, one arm thrown over his eyes, chest rising and falling too fast for someone who was exhausted. He breathed deliberately, counting to settle himself, but the rhythm snagged on that same absence. It hurt in the specific way it hurts to think of a laugh you can almost hear and a hand you can almost feel on the back of your neck, the squeeze and the warmth. He didn’t know whose. He knew what it would feel like.

He turned onto his side, pulled the pillow in and held it too close, as if it could answer. The ceiling was a lighter dark above him. He focused on the sound of the boys down the hall, their sleep a tether, and let the ache sit where it wanted. He couldn’t name it. He still reached for it in the dark, even as sleep finally reached back.

The branches murmured around him, every thread a living note thrumming in his bones. Loki sat with his spine against the cold curve of the throne, fingers braced on the armrests as if he held reins no one else could see. It was not sight, not really; it was sensation, a thousand rivers of feeling running through him at once—joys, petty arguments, the hush of a baby falling asleep, a grandfather tying a knot with trembling fingers, a woman folding a letter and tucking it in a drawer she would never open again. He held it all, let it course through, let it be.

The tremor came like a tiny sourness on his tongue. He stilled, turning inward to the web. It sang, as it always did. But under the harmony, there was a scratch. A string just a hair out of tune. His jaw tightened.

He followed the grit of it the way a tongue seeks a broken tooth. The discordance snuck through three minor branches and then slid into a quiet domestic line like smoke under a door. He leaned in. The house had a porch light that flickered; the man inside was making tea he would not drink, the woman checking her phone for a message that would not come. No. Not that one. He sifted again. The sourness sharpened.

He felt the corruption before he saw it, the way the weave thinned and then attempted to disguise it. He had felt this flavor before, faint as a half-remembered perfume, and it had taken him days then to find it. Now it pressed a dull finger against the back of his eye. He grimaced, focus narrowing until the rest of infinity blurred to a hiss of static.

“Where are you,” he said under his breath, not aloud, but the sound formed in him, as if his body needed the shape of the question.

A thread lit under his attention—soft, ordinary, speckled with backyard sunlight, the rhythm of school mornings, the whistle of a kettle in winter. It warmed his palms as if he held it. Don. The name the world had given Mobius slid through him, and his throat tightened as if he had swallowed something too large.

He should have pulled back. He should have widened his awareness to confirm the scale. Instead, he let himself look. The line bloomed open like a book. Don’s house unfurled in the dark, the smaller breaths down the hall, the faint soap on their skin, the quiet fierce promise the man had made into the dark. Loki felt it as a throb at the base of his skull. He closed his eyes to it and did not. He let it hurt.

The tremor hit again, neither large nor dramatic, but wrong. The boys’ sleep dipped; a clock stuttered and caught. In the yard, a wind chime gave a single sound with no wind to move it. The air in the kitchen thickened by a fraction, a heaviness that did not belong to humidity or heat. Loki’s chest tightened with the bound feeling of a pause before a fall.

He spread his perception farther along the thread and found it. A tiny bruise in the weave, a drop of gray where there should be color. It was nothing if you did not know how to see. The narrative around it compensated automatically—human minds would step around it the way a walker steps around a loose stone without thinking. But he knew the way it crept, replacing, dulling, drawing edges in where they weren’t before. His hand flexed on the armrest until his knuckles went white.

He remembered the first time he had felt it, when his throne was still a fresh ache in his bones. A happy ending had turned brittle. A woman who should have married in a city hall with chipped paint and a trembling laugh instead went home early and put the dress back in the garment bag without knowing why. No great tragedy. Not yet. The world adjusted around it. It had been only a taste. Now the flavor was stronger, bolder, presumptuous. It skimmed under his skin.

“Not here,” he said, almost a prayer and almost a warning. He sank deeper into the thread until he felt the grain of a worn wooden cutting board under Don’s palm, the condensation on a glass against a cheek. The throb of missing in Don’s chest almost matched the throb in Loki’s own. Loki swallowed against the ache, the old reflex of reaching for a person whose name he would never forget.

The blight teased him, an edge slipping away when he tried to pin it. It did not tear. It skimmed the surface of meaning and tilted it. It replaced a remembered laugh with a shrug. It turned reaching into retreat. The house at the corner became the wrong color. A photograph decided it did not know a face for a breath and then lied to cover its tracks. It worked not on events, but on the connective tissue between them, on the belief that gave them weight.

He felt it test Don’s line with the indifference of a thief jiggling a lock. The lock held; it would, as long as the story inside remained rooted in itself. Loki bent his will toward it, bracing it with the attention he had. He pressed gentle pressure along seams, shoring up the places the blight might push. His presence could not be permanent. He dared not fix his whole gaze on any one thread for long. But he could tuck reinforcement into the weave, small as a stitch, strong as a promise.

The discordance hummed, low and mean, and then eased off, like a mouth deciding one bite would not be worth the trouble—for now. Loki exhaled, and the breath felt like it had to fight its way out. He opened his eyes and looked up through the branches. The gold-green light of Yggdrasil washed his face, reflected in pupils he did not bother to make human.

It was growing. It would not stay subtle. He could feel it learning, adapting to the fact of his hands on the loom. And it knew how to insinuate itself. It knew where to lodge…the places where love was soft, where people told themselves it was enough to be fine. It would make them accept less. It would make Don accept less. The thought scraped Loki’s ribs raw.

On another day, perhaps he would have permitted himself the small indulgence of anger. He would have let it flare and then banked it, as he had learned to do. Now there was no room for it. Only the work. He steadied his breathing and tasted the web again, testing where the bruise had spread. The ache in him sharpened to a point. He had so few luxuries left. He took one: he reached along Don’s thread and laid, as lightly as he could, the sense of being witnessed. Nothing that would frighten, nothing that would burn. Just the knowledge that the space was not empty, that someone, somewhere, had a hand braced on the same invisible surface and would not let it crack.

The sour note receded. It did not disappear. Loki inclined his head as if he and the corruption had acknowledged each other. It would come back. It would come harder. He let his fingers uncurl from the throne by increments. A tremor ran through the whole tree, subtle enough that only he felt it. He set his jaw against it and did not move. He could not look away. He would not.

The house was quiet in the way it only ever was after ten—appliances ticking as they cooled, pipes settling, the light hum of the refrigerator like a memory of a crowd. Mobius stood at the kitchen window with his fingers wrapped around a mug so hot it made the bones of his hand ache. He’d microwaved the milk too long, stirred in the cocoa faster than necessary, watched the swirl darken and gloss over. He had wanted the ritual, not the drink.

The yard outside was a rectangle of black with the suggestion of grass. The porch light caught the edge of the rusted grill and the low curve of the boys’ abandoned scooter by the back steps. Beyond that, nothing until the pinpricks. The sky was clear. It always looked clearer after a storm, though there hadn’t been one. He found the three stars in a row he told himself were a belt and the small cluster that might have been a dipper if you were charitable. He had used to know the names. He didn’t anymore. The not-knowing sat in his throat like air too cold to breathe deep.

He lifted the mug. The steam curled up and hit the bridge of his nose, damp and sweet. He took a sip and burned his tongue. He didn’t curse. He set the cup down and pressed the pad of his thumb gently to the sting, like he could push the heat back. The smell in the kitchen was chocolate, a little cinnamon from the shaker he only remembered to use in winter. Under it, faintly, the trace of detergent from the dish towel he’d thrown on the oven handle, sun-warm cotton from the boys’ pajamas when he’d hugged them goodnight.

It came on without warning, the way nausea can roll in on an empty stomach. The air changed, though nothing moved. He breathed in and it wasn’t cocoa he smelled. It was sharp, bright, like the clean cut of the sky when a storm breaks, the kind of chemical sweetness lightning leaves behind when it slices the air. Ozone. The word rose as if it had been waiting under his tongue. It filled his nose and made his eyes prickle. He closed them and it made no difference. The scent expanded inside his head. He could feel the hairs on his forearms stand up, feel the prickle along the back of his neck, the static of a room charged with something you can’t see.

He gripped the counter with his free hand and waited for it to pass. It didn’t. It layered. Another taste rode in on it, and it was ridiculous, it made no sense, but his mouth flooded like he’d bit into a lemon and sugar at once. Josta. He didn’t have the word at first, only the purple of a can he couldn’t place and the rush of a sip that tasted like cola if cola had decided to be reckless. It fizzed at the back of his throat. He swallowed reflexively and the cocoa turned sour in his mouth, wrong, like he’d grabbed the wrong bottle by mistake.

He covered his mouth and breathed through his fingers. A laugh that wasn’t a laugh flashed—head thrown back, a hand slapping a table, something ridiculous and precious and ordinary. The memory wasn’t a picture; it was a shape pressed into him. He felt the crease of a hard plastic chair under his thigh, the hum of lights that didn’t flicker, the way a room can be too big and too clean and still feel like a booth in a diner when you’re leaning in, sharing something only you would get. His chest tightened. He knew there had been a second cup. He knew the other cup had been across from him, lined up with a forearm in brown leather that had creased to softness at the wrist. He knew how a grin had pulled crookedly, how the edge of a napkin had absorbed a ring of condensation like an eclipse.

He opened his eyes. The stars were where they had been. The kitchen glass held his reflection faintly, a ghost layered over the dark—his hair messed from his hands, the shadow of stubble he meant to shave in the morning, the little furrow between his eyebrows he had tried to smooth out in the mirror a hundred times. He touched it now without thinking and felt the muscles resist, then soften, then settle right back.

He picked up the mug again and took a careful sip. The cocoa tasted too sweet. The aftertaste of something else lingered like a joke he almost remembered the punchline to. He swallowed again, frustrated at himself for feeling anything at all about a phantom flavor. He had never liked soda. Not really. It went flat too fast. It wrecked your teeth. He licked the burn on his tongue anyway and chased the ghost of it.

The ache that followed wasn’t sharp. It was the opposite—a slow, spreading heaviness that filled his ribs like water poured into a basin. It made his shoulders drop, made his knees feel hollow. He pressed his hip into the counter to steady himself and let his weight tilt. The clock over the stove ticked like it was trying to get his attention. He didn’t look at it.

He thought of going upstairs to check on the boys again, just to have a task to do with his hands. He didn’t move. The window held him. The sky didn’t care if he stared hard enough to make the little lights blur. He set the mug on the sill and wrapped his arms around himself, palms pressing the opposite biceps, thumbs fitting into the existing grooves there. He rubbed once, the way he had rubbed his sons’ backs when they were smaller and waking from bad dreams. It didn’t help. Or it helped enough to keep him here.

There was someone at the edge of the feeling. Not a face, not yet. A presence, like the knowledge of a person just outside a door, the sense of a familiar footfall even if you couldn’t hear it. It didn’t scare him. That annoyed him too. He had earned a quiet life. He had planned to enjoy the small hours without drama. And here he was with his chest tight and his mouth full of an old soda he may or may not have ever tasted, his eyes burning at a sky that had not changed in his absence.

He reached for the mug and took another sip because he needed to do something other than stand still and let the ache have him. The cocoa was cooling fast. A skin had formed and he swallowed it without thinking, the way a kid does because the rest is still good. He made himself picture Saturday morning: pancakes on the griddle, the boys arguing over who got the first one, the dog two houses down barking and setting off the whole street. He made the list of groceries in his head that he would write down on the magnet pad. He held those things the way you hold a railing in the dark.

The smell eased. The taste thinned. He breathed out and it shuddered. He glanced at the ceiling and then at his hands like he could see the current fade out of them. He told himself it was stress. He told himself men his age had moments. He told himself he needed to go to bed.

He rinsed the mug in the sink, ran his thumb over the rim until the water went from too hot to just warm. He set it in the drying rack and left the light over the stove on, not because he was afraid of the dark, but because it felt like a kindness to the morning. On his way to the stairs, he stopped at the bottom step and looked back through the doorway at the black square of the kitchen window. The stars didn’t follow him. He climbed slowly, careful not to let the treads creak, the phantom fizz still lingering at the back of his throat and a grief he couldn’t name tucked under his tongue like a seed.