The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch

little three-circle massages. “Do you understand what happened? Because that story they told me on the phone is nonsense. Tell me any details you know. Tell me what the doctors are saying. She looks unbelievably pale. Her skin looks as thin as a communion wafer.”
    The performance artist sits mute and still. She looks to him like fatigue dumped a load of human in a hallway, like refuse. Can a person die of inside-hospital ennui?
    “I bet you get a performance out of this,” he says.
    “Yeah? And what the hell would that look like?”
    In the urban dictionary next to the word emo is this girl. “Well,” he persists, “you know, there’s a Beckett play. It’s called Happy Days . There’s a woman in it named Winnie, who gets buried in mud. Up to her breasts.”
    “You don’t say.” The performance artist eyes the elevator.
    “Yes, but we never learn how she got buried.”
    “Fascinating.” The performance artist gnaws at a new finger.
    “Or trapped.”
    She chews her fingernails.
    “What’s he done? Becker? Anything on streaming?”
    “Beckett. Samuel.” Briefly he wants to slap her into womanhood.
    Mercifully, the elevator makes a holy ding and the filmmaker enters stage left. The playwright walks—nearly hopping—twelve steps in sets of threes to meet him.
    He touches the filmmaker’s arm—Jesus, this guy is big. I mean, nothing he didn’t know, but Jesus. He could do some damage with those cannons. He pulls the filmmaker aside, whispery, needy, as if they’re guy pals or comrades or anything but what they are: the brother who abandoned her and the husband who can’t cope with her descent. “Just give it to me straight, no chaser. What’s going on? Really.”
    The filmmaker’s skin looks blue-gray and heavy mugged. “She’s . . . I don’t know how to answer that. None of this makes any sense.” His eyes are marbled in hues of hazel specked with brown.
    “Well, what was the instigating event? All they’re telling me is that she suddenly went deaf and dumb, and went on some kind of Kafkaesque hunger strike.” He swallows, trying to lower his voice an octave.
    “One morning she seemed a little distracted. Staring at the wall. That’s all. I said, ‘Baby, are you okay?’ She turned to me and smiled. We kissed. I went to work. So did she, I assume. I assume the day was like any other day—it rained, she taught her classes and I taught mine, neighborhood dogs barked, the mail came. I came home that night, she was on the floor. Unconscious.” The filmmaker draws a breath, sucking oxygen like a human vacuum.
    “She just dropped? Just like that?” Don’t say DEAD don’t say dropped DEAD don’t say DEAD. The playwright’s sphincter twitches. His lover’s voice in his head: Be aware of social codes be aware of social codes be aware. But it’s not working, the hallway lights of the hospital are too bright, the filmmaker is so physical, he’s like walking physicality, and the playwright’s longing to write it all down is creeping up on him, like it always does, like black letters and words growing larger and larger until they’re walking around on the white floor before his eyes, big as people, the word DEAD bigger than any, with cartoon-muscled arms and shoulders.
    “Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.
    “Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”
    “You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You dothat. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”
    “Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his