Adam Gnade

It was a bare mattress on the floor. The mattress was light blue like all mattresses are and it looked brand-new and the springs bounced you when you shifted your weight. For a while we sat and talked and then we wrote a song together that started off sarcastic and angry but ended up sad and earnest. I played the singing saw, a musical saw. The sound it made was like whale song—high and deep at the same time, warbling, mournful—and you sat cross-legged facing me and played an orange acoustic guitar with nylon strings.

Eva, you sang in Russian. Your voice was low and soft and husky and you said the lyrics were about a man from your village whose wife was killed by wolves on the shore of the mill-pond and how in the night when he gets up for a drink of water he can hear her boots crunching through the snow; how she’s walking endlessly through the woods looking for him but she can’t see him because he’s alive and he can’t see her because she’s dead. She can only hear the sound of his bare feet on the linoleum (and only at night) and he can only hear her boots in the snow (and only at night). That’s all they have left and, as time passes, the nights when they can hear each other are becoming less and less frequent and they know that soon those nights will cease forever and they will have truly lost each other.

The chorus of the song is them singing back and forth. Where are you? I can hear you but I can’t see you. Why aren’t you here with me?

In the final verse it’s revealed that the man is dead too, that he hung himself in the kitchen after she drowned, and that their souls have been hunting each other for nearly seven years. The last line tells how at the end of those seven years they will both be gone—passed on to the next world, and separately. The wife to heaven because she lead a good life. The husband to hell because he took his.

(Excerpt from The Heat and The Hot Earth by Adam Gnade)