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possible?”
    “Don’t ask him that,” Felt said. “I don’t want him to talk about that. Less he talks about it less I’ll think about it.”
    “I’m only a few days old.”
    “There he goes,” Felt said, breaking the rigidity of the chairs. “Goddamn it, I said—”
    “Shhh,” the old man said, holding up a single finger. “You are all coal miners, so you are all family. Let no one make you forget how much it means to be a coal miner.”
    “I never do.”
    The old man got three water buckets and started to wash our feet. I was still restless, and his hands were unfamiliar. It reminded me of a different time when we spent the whole day walking barefoot on pinecones to pull bird nests out of trees. By the afternoon my feet were bloody and by evening each step sent shocks like hornet stings up my body to ring in my skull. I sat down on a log to cradle them and the small dogs found me there.
    No matter how much I pleaded or showed them my cuts, they kept barking. “But look,” I said, “I can’t stand up, I’m going to faint!” One of them bit into the new wounds and I could see my flesh quiver automatically around his teeth like a poked earthworm. Then I stood, and walked to the nearest nest.
    That night most got in bed immediately to give their wounds as much sleep as possible to recover. But Lilly stayed up to wash my feet. And it was like all the hurt in them rinsed out into the bucket where we could see it on the surface like pond scum. I loved her then. I love her now, but have forgotten. The master came down and beat her for doing this and I just sat there, with my feet numbing in the bucket, and watched.
    The old man led us into the next compartment of the submarine and told us to disrobe; there were already two men in there naked under the gas showers, leaning back and gripping the showerhead like breastfed infants. “Get out!” the old man shouted. “I told you to get out ten minutes ago!”
    “I don’t wanna go…”
    “That’s too much! Get out!” and I was still thinking about Lilly, how she tried to keep her shouts muffled so the ones that escaped hurt even more to hear, and all I did when I got in bed was sleep and pretend things happened differently.
    Once he was able to get the others out we each had our own showerhead to be under. The gas on us felt like radiator steam and smelled like clean clothes and soon I forgot. Soon the tiles on the opposite wall resembled dislocated teeth and I dreamt of building a home inside a still-living polar bear so its heartbeat could rest over my head like headphones and I could see the colder world, where I was not, through the un-shuttered windows of its eyes.
    It came to be that I got used to ending days like this.

The next day things repeated themselves; the dull thud of work building up like a migraine and released in the gas showers and the old man washing my feet. Like filling a glass box with pigeons and breaking the box before it gets so tight inside none of them can breathe. Then sitting down, and watching their wings silhouette in the sky. Each day it felt like this; there are many men who could explain to you who they are by recounting one day’s worth of events; because they repeat.
    We walked away from the submarine and all of us were soundproofed to each other. The sun was like a lime in the distance as it began its hiding behind the mountains’ ice cubes; my teeth were chattering loud enough that I held my hand over my mouth to shut them up. I was fooled by the chemicals decompressing my mind—I believed I bit into my finger accidentally and felt all the pain rush through my body like an immediately growing seed and then it all retracted back, all the pain like a gone splinter and my finger newly healed or never injured. It took time to understand what I could believe and took less time to figure out it didn’t matter, that what you see is what you saw.
    When I looked at Felt and Dirt and my undamaged hands they were all made