Nicotine by Nell Zink

frenzied. A woman with a strong voice keens a pentatonic song with the text “Norman, find your home, fly free.”
    Around eleven, Penny gets thirsty and seeks to exit the mob of dancers. A girl student takes her hand and tugs her sideways. All the dancers find hands to hold, and the dance, which had centered on her until then, becomes a spiral with dancers moving clockwise toward the hub, passing under a bridge made by a man and a woman Penny has never seen, and returning counterclockwise to the margins: a Shaker folk dance.
    As soon as this free interchange of positions in the circle arises—this democratization of the memorial service—her brothers, chatting casually about nothing in particular as they have been for hours, leave the yard for the house.
    Penny misses them immediately. When she reaches the outermost circle, she drops the hands of the boy and girl beside her to go after them. She finds them in the kitchen.
    â€œWho in hell are all these people?” she says by way of a conversational opener.
    â€œYou should check your eyeliner,” Matt says. “It’s smeared to hell and gone, and your hair is full of random debris.”
    â€œLeave her alone,” Patrick says. “Come here, kid sister. Give me ahug. I, for one, would like to say that I really admire what you did for Dad, staying with him like that. You’re a mensch .”
    â€œThanks,” Penny replies, thinking that too many years on a Francophone island have left Patrick speaking his father’s English.
    â€œI hear it was hard for you.”
    â€œOh yeah. Seriously fucked-up.”
    There is silence in the kitchen under the storm of people drumming and chanting “Norman! Fly free!” outside.
    â€œWhat a bunch of drug-heads,” Matt remarks. “They probably think we’re going to break out the psychedelics any minute, like at the Finger Commune. We should tell them there’s acid in the tiramisu.” He pokes an aluminum roasting pan full of tiramisu with its wooden spoon. “One hit of acid, and whoever eats the most tiramisu has the best chance of getting it.”
    â€œThat tiramisu is mine ,” Penny says. “Tell them it’s in the oatmeal or whatever this shit is.” She nods at a large glass bowl filled with a grayish substance.
    Smiling, arms folded, Matt walks out to the drum circle. The music quiets. Young strangers appear in the kitchen to fill their plates, shyly, with heaps of cold buckwheat kasha.
    Soon the strangers are festooned around the yard and even the house, where they lie on rag rugs and Colonial-style furniture, looking fixedly at the spines of books, waiting and hoping. Penny sits down next to Patrick on a braided rug to eat her tiramisu. “Aren’t they insane?” she asks.
    â€œDefinitely.”
    Swaying to the music as she eats, she closes her eyes and says, “I really love this place. I love the river.”
    â€œI remember Mom being here. I mean our mom, not yours.”
    â€œWhat was she like?”
    He shakes his head. “I can’t really talk about her. It’s painful. I just wanted to say that I remember her here. Right here, on this very rug.” He pats the rug. “Playing cards with us. Maybe Uno.”
    Finished, she puts her bowl and spoon aside and lies down flat on her back. “Then tell me a story about Dad. Something with Colombia in it.”
    â€œYou know I’m a photographer. I don’t tell stories.”
    â€œWell, it’s his funeral, and nobody’s talking about him.”
    â€œThat would be bad luck. He’s gone. We don’t know what he’s doing now.”
    â€œFlying around,” she says. “I saw it.”
    â€œYou saw his soul?”
    She nods.
    â€œDamn, Penny. You’re very special.”
    â€œSpecial. Great word.”
    â€œI mean it. You were always a cool kid.”
    A cloud dims the sun in her mind. Always a cool kid? He was