The Triad

By Salem Youngblood

They call it the Quiet—what happened to the glands, to the gut, to the little glittering messengers that used to swim the body like minnows at dusk. There was a day when it simply stopped. No more serotonin smoothing the edges, no more dopamine taking the hand of desire, no more melatonin dimming the room from the inside. The night after the Quiet, the country did not sleep. The week after, the country did not laugh. The month after, the country stood in queues inside strip-lit corridors, tongues dry, eyes raw, palms shouting for reward like animals pacing in a cage they could no longer name. 

Aurelia Therapeutics released a statement with a logo that looked like a sunrise. They called their line the Triad: Dawn (dopamine), Noon (serotonin), Dusk (melatonin). The bottles were matte white, the price was obscene, and still the queues formed around blocks that smelled like boiled plastic and the faint iron of old blood. You could tell who had the money: pupils plump with purchased rest, movements that didn’t snag on air. The rest of us walked around like badly-assembled machines, clicking, stalling, coughing up coins and days to barter for a small vial that might keep us inside our bodies for another twenty-four hours. 

I mopped the corridors of Aurelia’s Dusk Plant, the one with no windows. The machines sang a constant vowel. Hoses arched from stainless drums into sealed bays where I wasn’t allowed. My badge said Auxiliary, as if I were a spare part the building could reject at any moment. I tried not to think about the locked rooms on B-Level or the freight elevators that opened at 3 a.m. to nothing and closed on a smell I could not place, like cut bark and the skin of a peach after it’s been pressed by a thumb. I did my laps, wrung out the mop head, watched the slick water gather and slide, felt nothing. 

After the Quiet, not-feeling isn’t peace. It is a type of hunger that chews through wood. It is a map with no towns on it. They taught us coping tricks: count to ten, grind your molars, touch something solid and name it—door, wall, hand—pretend it is enough. The tutorials made people cry because crying was a memory the face held on to, not a function of the chemistry. The body loves performance; it remembers how to kneel long after the god has gone. 

Dawn was the most expensive, maybe because ambition can be monetized better than sleep. Noon was priced like an apology. Dusk was priced like an ultimatum. I kept the Dusk bottle hidden in a shoe because if my neighbor saw it, she would ask to borrow two drops, and two drops would become a prescription I could not afford to fill again. Three nights out of seven, I did not take it. Three nights out of seven, I waited for a tide that never came, watched the ceiling fan ring around and around daybreak in its teeth. 

The underground began as rumor, as they always do. A phone number written on your receipt that shouldn’t be there. A man selling dried basil who wouldn’t meet your eyes and then said, very soft, “There’s a better way.” An attack ad from Aurelia about counterfeiters, the word counterfeiters in a tone that made a third of the city try to dial that number. By the time I decided to call, I had a stripe of pain under the bones of my face that hadn’t left for weeks, and I was starting to hoard empty Dawn vials because the blue caps were pretty.

The number led me to a market under the highway, a kind of intestine made of stalls and cables and the hiss of hot oil. At the back, a curtain made of old hospital wristbands and keyrings. A woman waited behind it with wrists like braided wire. She didn’t ask for my name. She asked: Which hole is the worst? 

“Sleep,” I said. “Then the other two happen because I can’t sleep.” 

She nodded, as if that answer mapped onto a diagram in her head. “We can help,” she said. “You’ll pay in the usual way. Or work it off.” 

“What’s the usual way?” 

“Money if you have it. Blood if you don’t.” 

The word didn’t frighten me. There is a point at which words are cardboard. You push a finger through and it goes. 

The product was miraculous, immediate. A vial with a paper label that said Night Garden. Two drops under the tongue and the body lowered itself like a crane setting a crate on a deck. It wasn’t the drugstore sleep of Dusk, the steep downward chute. It was rounded, a tide that went out slowly, taking small, sharp things with it. The morning wasn’t pain; it was a blank floor. I walked through the day without snarling at handles, without wanting to slam my head against the metal edge of the sink just to hear a sound that meant something. 

I knew better than to ask how they made it. That was their advantage over Aurelia. Aurelia had process; the underground had myth. But on the fourth vial, I saw something. I was in their back room with a curtain of wristbands and keyrings closed behind me, counting coins, calculating time, when the bottler—he had a scar at the hinge of his jaw that pulled his smile sideways—laughed at something the braided woman said. The laugh was a real thing, loud enough to make the old fluorescent lights flicker for a second. The bottler’s eyes brightened and then dulled. His hand jerked, a quick, practiced movement, and he pressed his thumb onto a strip of gauze taped to his inner elbow. The gauze bloomed. He slid the strip into a tray with the neatness of a person who isn’t permitted to think about what his hands are doing. Then he capped another vial of Night Garden with appreciation, like a chef finishing a dish. 

“Work,” I said, pointing at the tray. “I’ll work.” 

The braided woman studied me for a while, like a problem in a language she almost remembered how to speak. “You look like a cleaner,” she said. “You can clean. And sometimes, when they need it, you can hold a hand.” 

“Whose hand?” 

“You’ll see.”

I saw. Work meant the Underrooms, which were under the market, under the street, under the idea of the city. Work meant valves and tanks and the soft sound a body makes when a needle skims a vein clean on the first try. It meant checklist names of reagents and recipes. It meant smells that crawled into your hair and stayed. 

There were three halls. ABOVEGROUND, the news called places like ours “kitchens” or “labs” with a sneer. Down here they were gardens. The halls were named accordingly. 

In the Sleep Hall—the Night Garden—they kept it cold and almost-dark. Not black. That would be wrong for the plants. A dimness like late evening, permanent, a softness that makes your hands think they are underwater. People lay on cots that breathed for them, air in, air out, a learned rhythm. No restraints. Darkness restrained better than leather. The donors wore masks that warmed the filtered air. They fed them on a schedule that had been calculated by someone who had memorized the endocrine systems of old textbooks. Tryptophan. Folate. Magnesium. A plate that looked like night soil, tasted like nothing. The donors slept. The donors slept because before the Quiet some people made more melatonin than others and after the Quiet those people were valuable. A handful had slipped through the dragnet of Aurelia’s research. A handful had been found by accident and sold, because poverty is a type of education. When a donor’s levels dropped, they cooled the room more. When a donor’s skin lost that faint bluish sheen we measured with a scanner, we added a sound: ocean, rain, low-field hums shaped like cradle songs. When their bodies remembered how, their blood learned to carry the dimness. We siphoned it carefully and pureed it with solvents until the liquid shimmered with a barely-visible dust. We called it Snow. One drop under the tongue and you’d feel the ceilings lower politely; two drops and the bed would tilt you down into good earth. 

In the Joy Hall—the Orchard—they kept it bright and clean as a dentist’s smile. Screens on all four walls played games: balls falling into cups, cards turning into other cards, coins clicking into metal bowls. Donors wearing electrode nets sat in chairs with springs under the seats, so every small body jump was recorded, the way a seedling leans into sun. They were rewarded with sugar, with sounds that used to be heard in casinos, with the applause of machines. Their pupils tried to widen and then stopped; their chins trembled; the electrodes hummed. Dopamine fell into the blood like a thin rain. We pulled it out on the other side through an access port slicked with petroleum jelly. There was a man named Orfeo whose numbers always rose when we played him recordings of a horse race from thirty years ago; there was a woman named Lark who needed the smell of gasoline to spike. We were all historians now: what did the body used to want? Who knew? Who would teach us? They’d tell you it was science. It wasn’t. It was prayer we could bottle. 

In the Balance Hall—the Field—they fed them. Bowls of something sour, something bitter, something that moved under the tongue like algae. The smell was animal in a way you couldn’t place: the loam of an old book, the white froth at the edge of a wave. Serotonin is the gut’s sermon; after the Quiet, guts fell silent like churches. But there were a few who carried good bacteria like smuggled jewels. We gave those donors prebiotics and spells of sun, though we

were three levels down; a lamp does tricks to skin if it knows how. We measured their stool like rain barrels. We had a room where we did mixing: a dark, warm place the technicians called the Grotto because after a while names mattered. Names were the only things we could say without invoices attached. 

In all three halls the donors were adults. We had rules. Lines we drew and told ourselves we wouldn’t cross because we were better than Aurelia. The braided woman said it every week at the end of shift: We are a garden, not a slaughterhouse. She meant it. She was precise about hands, about cleanliness, about pain. She was brutal about anyone who tried to use the Garden like a brothel or a confession. We are not your mother, she hissed into the face of a man with a gold watch who cried during his first drop. We are not here to hold your guilt. We are here to keep you from breaking into the old woman’s apartment down the hall and stealing her pills because you can’t afford to make your brain remember your name. 

I worked. I held wrists during the first stick, because the anticipation was the worst, because the lack of dopamine made patience a science fiction, because the ache that surrounded bodies made them believe everything was an attack. I cleaned the cots. I labeled vials. I forgot day-of-week names and replaced them with the names of donors who did well on Tuesdays and badly on Fridays. I learned which smell meant a leak in the lines and which meant fear. Babies, someone said once, as if that was a funny joke, as if the air smelled like formula and talc. Nobody laughed. The Quiet had sterilized our laughter. You have to pay for it now; the market indexes it. The charts go red when the country laughs too little. A minister on the state channel uses the word morale as if it is a boat he can row. 

You can’t work in the Underrooms and not take the product. There is no rule against it because there is no rule you can enforce with people whose sweat cries for something you make. It’s not a perk. It’s survival, like being allowed to breathe inside a mine. I learned to stretch my doses like good fabric. A drop of Snow at midnight on shift, a grain of Orchard when I had to go negotiate with a man whose cousin wanted a bulk rate, a smear of Field when the grayness sharpened into glass. Aurelia used to hire psychologists for their ads. The underground hired people like me. They paid me in vials with paper labels that made my hands tender when I touched them. 

I was good at the work. If you keep your mouth shut and your face undramatic, people lie to you less. Or they tell you the thing under the lie because you don’t react. I started to hear things. I told myself they were rumors. I told myself the braided woman would never. 

The first rumor was this: Aurelia’s Triad and the Garden’s trinity tasted almost the same because they were siblings. According to the rumor, there weren’t two systems. There was one. The company kept the night-time vats; the Garden kept the guts and the games; they traded. This made sense in the way conspiracies make sense. Who else could afford the reagents the Garden used? Where did we get the machines that polished the molecules into their pretty curves? I watched the braided woman startle once when the freight elevator clanked into the Underrooms, an expression on her face I had never seen before: red, old, like someone had

spoken her family name in a tone that made it a debt. We received boxes with no labels. We sent out boxes with labels that said donate clothes for flood relief. 

The second rumor was this: donors do not stay donors forever. When their blood thins, when the numbers flatten, when the bacterial choir in their gut becomes a single voice that sings too slow, we release them. This was easy to believe because wanting to believe is a cheap drug with a long half-life. Some donors we did release. They disappeared into the houses of those who could pay, into rooms where they slept and were fed and developed a status that looked like care. I saw one of them on the street once, and he touched my sleeve and asked if the Garden still played rain for him at night. I lied: yes. I knew the pitched lamps over his bed were off-brand, I knew the hiss of his oxygen line was wrong. He carried a paper bag with lemons in it, like a prop. 

The third rumor was a rumor that came with a body. 

It was a Thursday in the Garden, although the Garden doesn’t allow time words. The braided woman uses shift numbers. I was downstairs, making labels. The elevator clanked; it hadn’t clanked in months. Two men in Aurelia blue pushed a gurney through the door, not meeting eyes, moving like people who have had their bonuses threatened. They wanted to leave the gurney by the lifts. The braided woman said no, this way. They shook their heads. She did not raise her voice—she never raises her voice—but the temperature of the room dropped by something you could have measured if you had the right tools. The men swallowed and pushed the gurney after her. I followed, because I am a moth to doors. 

In the Sleep Hall, the braided woman peeled back the sheet. The donor was young, but that is a word we don’t use down here: it folds and hides the teeth. The donor was a man with a tube in his arm and a port in his side. The port was new. There was a bruised stripe along the ribs where someone had been in a hurry. He was sedated, not entirely. The eyes fluttered under a lid like a spoon in a boil. 

“From Research,” one of the men said. He said it like a prayer and a plea. “They said you’d know what to do with him.” 

The braided woman kept her face like a wall. After a second, she nodded. “We do not accept stock,” she said. “We accept guests. But fine. Leave. If you tell anyone the route, if you speak the name of the street with that pretty blue on, I’ll send your liver to your boss pickled in ethanol.” 

After they left, she placed her hand on the donor’s jaw and breathed out slowly, like she was cooling a burn. 

“He’s not from Research,” she said to nobody. “He’s from Waste.”

Waste. The word walked a lap around my skull. In the Field we had a metaphor for donors who had given as much as they could: fallow. They went out to pasture, we liked to say, not thinking about where pastures existed underground. Waste wore a uniform. Waste was where things went that did not fit the invoice: damaged batches, ordering mistakes, reagents that had been stored wrong by a person who would be fired next week, a quiet you could only hear once. 

“What happened?” I asked, the way a child asks a question into the sleeve of a parent’s sweater. I didn’t expect an answer. 

“Optimization happened,” she said, not looking up. “Aurelia found a way to get more from less. You induce sleep the wrong way, you push the body past the memory of how to make night by itself, and you can wring the darkness out twice as fast. For a while. Then the lines collapse.” 

“Can we—” 

“Fix?” She smiled, but the smile had no direction. “We’re not surgeons here. We’re gardeners. And even if we could fix him, we shouldn’t. We need him to keep the Garden alive.” 

We moved him to a cot. The braided woman clipped a net to his scalp, because sometimes gently waking a Sleep donor with ocean and rain kept the levels high enough to not make the next week a desert. The donor’s breath stuttered. Snow fell in his veins like a misplaced season. I held his hand because that was my job. 

“How long has the Quiet lasted?” she asked me. 

“Two years,” I said. 

“Three,” she said. “It’s longer than it feels because feeling is a commodity now.” 

The donor’s eyes opened. They were the eyes of someone standing on a shoreline. I told him his name, which I had read on the paper when we took the sheet off the gurney. He blinked. Tears gathered—not chemistry but habit, the way a dog raises its paw to a hand and it is love and training. He said thank you without sound. I pressed his palm, as if that could translate. 

I made it a practice not to cry in the Underrooms. It upsets the machines. It makes the donors tense and then you have to calibrate again. But my throat burned as if I had drunk acid. I left. I went upstairs, where the market rumbled and the smells tried to cover one another like blankets. I bought a cup of broth I didn’t want and drank it behind the curtain of wristbands and keyrings and did not feel it go down. 

If you have enough Dusk, you can choose when to break. I had not had enough. The break found me in public, like a bus running a light. I crouched between crates and sobbed with no salt in it. A man with a box of brass screws around his neck like a good-luck charm asked me if I had

allergies. He offered me a stiff napkin and a pill wrapped in paper. I took the napkin. I did not take the pill. He looked offended. People are devout about their brand of salvation. 

When I went back down, the braided woman was in the Grotto with the vats. She had a notepad and a pen that left grooves but no ink. I stood in the doorway, waiting for instruction. She wiped her hand over her face like someone rearranging masks. 

“How much do you want to know?” she asked. Her voice made the lights quiet. “Enough to do my job,” I said. 

“You already do,” she said. “But fine. Here’s what most people upstairs will never hear: Aurelia engineered the Quiet. Not alone. They had help from institutes with dignity in their names. Pay people to run a trial on something called an adjuvant that’s supposed to boost immune response; slip a viral cassette inside that changes the production schedules of certain neurochemicals; publish papers when it works; blame a contaminant when it doesn’t. Then the country needs a medicine and you have a medicine. It’s elegant. It’s patriotic. A headline that never stops paying dividends.” 

“Why tell me?” 

“Because you’ll keep your mouth shut. Because I am very tired and carrying this alone has made me older than I am. Because if I die, you’ll have to keep the cots breathing. Because—” She stopped. “Because a garden is not a single mind. If it is, it becomes a mausoleum.” 

I wanted to spit rage. I wanted to pick up the vats and throw them until they made a sound that matched the feeling of seeing that donor’s bruised ribs. Instead I nodded. That’s what the Quiet taught us: outrage is a luxury. You dose it or you go feral and end up on a video that makes people applaud. 

The Garden went on. The donors slept. The donors ate. The donors learned to want again, in small, measurable ways that we wrote on clipboards, that we confessed to digital systems that chewed our data and spit out graphs with polite colors. Aurelia trucks came at night without license plates, carrying boxes of reagents and sometimes things that were not reagents, if you looked too long and then knew to stop looking. We traded with an efficiency that tasted like sin. We imagined we were subverting and they were consolidating and perhaps both were true. 

I started to take more than my allotment. Not on purpose. An extra grain of Orchard on the tongue when my fingers shook. A thin smear of Field at noon when the market sang too loudly. Two drops of Snow on a night when the air felt serrated. The body learns new altars with terrifying speed. Once you kneel well, the act becomes its own prayer. I told myself: I work here, I’m paid in kind, this is the arrangement. The braided woman said nothing. It is worse, sometimes, when the person you respect does not reprimand you. It means they have

calculated the cost of the scolding against the cost of the product and decided you are cheaper if you continue functioning without a scene. 

There was a day—no, a shift—when a man came down the stairs who was not a donor and not a buyer. He had a badge that covered the whole chest of his jacket. The badge said COMPLIANCE the way a brand says mercy. He looked at the Grotto and said nothing. He looked at the Sleep Hall and put a note into his phone that someone above us and outside of us would read, parse, file and use like a knife. He turned and saw me, a mop in my hand, a vial in my pocket. He smiled. 

“You were at the Plant,” he said. 

“I mop,” I said. 

“I know,” he said. “A good cleaner is a better resource than a bad chemist.” He was not wrong. 

Two days later, on shift, the braided woman called us into the Orchard. The screens were dark. The chairs looked like animals lying down. 

“We’ve received a request,” she said. “Large. Impossible to fill without hurting the Garden.” 

“We say no,” someone said from the back. His voice was the hopeful tone of men who believe in votes. 

“We don’t say no,” she said, cool and tired. “We can’t say no to the people who know the names of our mothers. We will negotiate terms. We will choose who can go Fallow without… without cruelty.” 

She swallowed. She never stuttered. It terrified me. 

After the meeting, I went to the Sleep Hall. The donor from Waste was awake, barely. He looked at me with that shoreline expression and moved his fingers. I took his hand. He squeezed once, hard enough to leave my palm humming. He mouthed a word. 

“Home,” I said, guessing. “You’ll go home.” 

He closed his eyes. His breath steadied. He slept. 

If you have enough Dusk, you get to pick when to break. I had not had enough. The break found me in public like a bus running a light. I crouched between crates and sobbed with no salt in it. A man with a box of brass screws around his neck like a good-luck charm asked me if I had

allergies. He offered me a stiff napkin and a pill wrapped in paper. I took the napkin. I did not take the pill. He looked offended. People are devout about their brand of salvation. 

When I went back down, the braided woman was in the Grotto with the vats. She had a notepad and a pen that left grooves but no ink. I stood in the doorway, waiting for instruction. She wiped her hand over her face like someone rearranging masks. 

“How much do you want to know?” she asked. Her voice made the lights quiet. “Enough to do my job,” I said. 

“You already do,” she said. “But fine. Here’s what most people upstairs will never hear: Aurelia engineered the Quiet. Not alone. They had help from institutes with dignity in their names. Pay people to run a trial on something called an adjuvant that’s supposed to boost immune response; slip a viral cassette inside that changes the production schedules of certain neurochemicals; publish papers when it works; blame a contaminant when it doesn’t. Then the country needs a medicine and you have a medicine. It’s elegant. It’s patriotic. A headline that never stops paying dividends.” 

“Why tell me?” 

“Because you’ll keep your mouth shut. Because I am very tired and carrying this alone has made me older than I am. Because if I die, you’ll have to keep the cots breathing. Because—” She stopped. “Because a garden is not a single mind. If it is, it becomes a mausoleum.” 

I wanted to spit rage. I wanted to pick up the vats and throw them until they made a sound that matched the feeling of seeing that donor’s bruised ribs. Instead I nodded. That’s what the Quiet taught us: outrage is a luxury. You dose it or you go feral and end up on a video that makes people applaud. 

The Garden went on. The donors slept. The donors ate. The donors learned to want again, in small, measurable ways that we wrote on clipboards, that we confessed to digital systems that chewed our data and spit out graphs with polite colors. Aurelia trucks came at night without license plates, carrying boxes of reagents and sometimes things that were not reagents, if you looked too long and then knew to stop looking. We traded with an efficiency that tasted like sin. We imagined we were subverting and they were consolidating and perhaps both were true. 

I started to take more than my allotment. Not on purpose. An extra grain of Orchard on the tongue when my fingers shook. A thin smear of Field at noon when the market sang too loudly. Two drops of Snow on a night when the air felt serrated. The body learns new altars with terrifying speed. Once you kneel well, the act becomes its own prayer. I told myself: I work here, I’m paid in kind, this is the arrangement. The braided woman said nothing. It is worse, sometimes, when the person you respect does not reprimand you. It means they have

calculated the cost of the scolding against the cost of the product and decided you are cheaper if you continue functioning without a scene. 

There was a day—no, a shift—when a man came down the stairs who was not a donor and not a buyer. He had a badge that covered the whole chest of his jacket. The badge said COMPLIANCE the way a brand says mercy. He looked at the Grotto and said nothing. He looked at the Sleep Hall and put a note into his phone that someone above us and outside of us would read, parse, file and use like a knife. He turned and saw me, a mop in my hand, a vial in my pocket. He smiled. 

“You were at the Plant,” he said. 

“I mop,” I said. 

“I know,” he said. “A good cleaner is a better resource than a bad chemist.” He was not wrong. 

Two days later, on shift, the braided woman called us into the Orchard. The screens were dark. The chairs looked like animals lying down. 

“We’ve received a request,” she said. “Large. Impossible to fill without hurting the Garden.” 

“We say no,” someone said from the back. His voice was the hopeful tone of men who believe in votes. 

“We don’t say no,” she said, cool and tired. “We can’t say no to the people who know the names of our mothers. We will negotiate terms. We will choose who can go Fallow without… without cruelty.” 

She swallowed. She never stuttered. It terrified me. 

After the meeting, I went to the Sleep Hall. The donor from Waste was awake, barely. He looked at me with that shoreline expression and moved his fingers. I took his hand. He squeezed once, hard enough to leave my palm humming. He mouthed a word. 

“Home,” I said, guessing. “You’ll go home.” 

He closed his eyes. His breath steadied. He slept. 

The order came. It always comes. We bottled till our wrists burned. We added secrecy to the process the way a cook adds salt. Men carried boxes up the elevator, their faces arranged into the mask you wear when you do not want to have a face. The compliance badge visited again, counted with his mouth, left with a nod. We watched a city move past a cliff without noticing.

On my way out, I passed the Grotto. The braided woman stood by the vats, arms folded as if holding something inside her chest in place. She looked older. She looked like a clay pot that has been fired and cooled too abruptly. 

“You’re using more,” she said without turning. 

“I can stop,” I lied. 

“You won’t,” she said. “It’s all right. No one does. That’s the point.” 

“The point of the Garden?” 

“The point of the world,” she said. 

I wanted to ask her whether she had ever slept without Snow, whether when she closed her eyes darkness came or something else. I wanted to ask her whether she remembered laughter from before the Quiet, whether it had texture and weight, whether it warmed or seared. I wanted to ask her if the rumors were true and Aurelia wrote her a check every quarter and she burned it for light. I wanted to ask her if any of this was a revolution or just the part they outsource so their legal filings are cleaner. 

Instead I said: “I’ll stay late.” 

She nodded. “Hold hands,” she said. “That’s the only instruction.” 

I went to the Sleep Hall. The donors lay like moons at different phases. I sat beside the Waste donor and let his fingers find mine. He slept. If I listened hard, I could hear the body talk to itself: breath, pulse, the roots of hair. I counted the seconds between his exhales until the numbers blurred and I realized, in a shock like a small clean wound, that I was drowsy without Snow. The room held me like a language I had forgotten I knew. 

There is a rumor I keep to myself—a fourth one. It says the Quiet will not last forever. The body knows how to go on strike. It might also know the opposite. A gland might wake like an old machine and shake itself and then purr. A gut colony might decide to reseed barren fields. The rumor says it will begin with a single donor: something small, a yeast rising. It says the system will collapse because no one can patent forgiveness. It says laughter will return indecently, at funerals and at forklift accidents and during the minister’s speech. It says we will be sick with it for months, like commuters learning to walk again after the buses have been taken away. 

The rumor might be a prayer. Prayer is cheap, but sometimes it is also a cup of water pressed into your hand by a stranger with brass screws around his neck. Sometimes it gets you to next morning.

Aurelia put out a new campaign last month: a dove turning into a dollar sign and then back, and a tagline about freedom of choice. The government unfurled a banner on the capital that said SELF-RELIANCE in letters taller than most houses. The Garden’s labels remain hand-written. The donors sleep. The donors play card games with machines. The donors eat bowls of sour and bitter until their tongues learn the story. We siphon, we mix, we bottle, we clean. We pay each other in drops. We keep each other from tearing the city down. 

I stand in the hall that smells like rain. I put my palm against a wrist that will not hold mine back. I breathe. Chemical or not, the breath is mine. The night rolls in, thin but real. Somewhere a siren drills a line through the dark, and somewhere someone laughs at the wrong time, then again, startled by the sound. I close my eyes and do not dream. I keep watch over the garden and try not to think about the price of seeds.

By Salem Youngblood