In 2017 Estella was throwing out some old papers when she came upon that 27-year-old envelope. Inside was the certificate. She called out to Johnny: “This is what I got for putting an innocent person in jail for life.” 

She was 75 now. For a generation she had suppressed the shame, the guilt. She had gone through a lot in that time. She’d become more engaged in the world around her. She had seen her children and grandchildren become active citizens. Most important, she’d become more assertive. “I found that you have more power if you talk,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong if you say what you think.” 

She knew how hard it was to take a stand. She knew how hard it was to do the right thing. And now she was going to do it. 

If you dropped a needle on Joni Mitchell’s brand-new LP in January of 1974, you might have expected yet another hour of her signature elegies. On her two previous records, 1971’s Blue and 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell excavated arresting songs from deep within her psyche. They are complex but accessible, often pairing Mitchell’s lithe voice with her own accompaniment on sombre piano or supple dulcimer. They are melancholy and sparse. And they aren’t very fun.

Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.

Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.

As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.

He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.

And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool.

Her own research and collaborative spirit continue to push the boundaries of forensic entomology. In a paper published in June 2023 in the scientific journal Insects, she and her co-authors outlined protocols for best practices in bug-based crime-solving—for example, routinely obtaining temperature readings from meteorological stations near crime scenes, to accurately factor weather considerations into analyses, and inspecting soil surrounding a corpse for insects rather than strictly on the body itself. In another study, also published in Insects, in July, she and her colleagues wrapped cotton and other common fabrics around 99 stillborn piglets, to simulate human remains, and examined how blowflies, carrion beetles and other unsavory beings ate through the clothing over several weeks. The results showed that bugs can modify existing cuts and tears in fabric or even introduce new cuts and tears that investigators could easily assume are caused by bullets or knives; the paper illustrated how easily police and medical examiners might be led astray by assumptions about analyses that don’t incorporate cutting-edge research about bugs. And in September, she was a co-author of another study, published in the journal Forensic Sciences and produced in cooperation with police in India, that showed how studying ant activity and resultant bloodstain patterns can provide clues about the circumstances surrounding a person’s death, including whether the body has been moved.

Over the years, I have often wondered why I so urgently want to be my doctors’ favourite. The most obvious reason is that if doctors like me, they’ll treat me better. There is an undeniable truth to this: doctors’ biases and prejudices often show up in differential treatment. Even if I tell myself it isn’t true for my doctors, surely at some level I know it could be.

At first, my leading theory was that I’m an A+ student, in this as everything else. My doctors give me balance exercises, so I do them religiously. They propose a gluten-free diet, and I ferry beetroot pasta from Bombay to Goa. When there’s homework, I look for extra credit. But if I’ve substituted doctors for teachers, the conjecture falls apart. I was never invested in being the teacher’s pet. I always wanted to be at the top of the class—not the favourite so much as the best.

My partner’s theory is that I have Stockholm syndrome, doctors edition. I’m trapped in their world, and instead of resenting and mistrusting them, I’ve become obsessed with them. There’s some truth to this, too: if I weren’t perpetually stuck in their clinics, in their waiting rooms, at their mercy, I would be free. Instead of freedom, I’ve found love. It helps that like true kidnappers, they keep me oriented toward a hopeful future where—if I follow all their rules—I may one day be liberated.

After a childhood spent observing my father’s moods, I had come to believe something fixed about violence: that fury alone was its precursor. I had grown too familiar with his penchant for threats, the flash of a flat palm contacting a wall. His footfall, like thunder, moving over the floor.

Although once in a while the doe came to mind, and I found myself pausing. I would consider the wings in my closet, the bones in brown bags. The rough contours of a contradiction emerging, yet to be named. When he dragged the doe’s slack body behind him that day, something in my father’s behavior had given me pause. He was moving more slowly than usual — brows furrowed, mouth bowed and nearly forlorn. He had lifted the corpse with a reverent gentleness and eased it to the ground. He had even murmured a prayer.

It seems to have worked: it’s difficult to square Wiman’s history of aggression and dysfunction with the man he is today. Still, he retains some of the intensity of his youth, especially in his sky-blue eyes, which he sometimes closes to think. His childhood wasn’t all violence, he feels the need to say—there was beauty, too. The beauty of language; dialects he pocketed like coins, then spent in poems about home like “Five Houses Down,” with a neighborhood junk collector whose “barklike earthquake curses / were not curses, for he could goddam / a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch.” And the beauty of mesquite trees, tumbleweeds, and dust devils, the last of which he re-creates in a narrow wisp of a poem:

of flourishing
vanishing

wherein to live
is to move

cohesion
illusion

wild untouchable toy
called by a boy

God’s top

Michael is one of dozens of material handlers—the official job title—at the Inmar Intelligence returns-processing center in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania. Inmar is a returns liquidator, which means that popular clothing brands and all kinds of other retailers contract with the company to figure out what to do with the stuff that customers end up not wanting. Much of that process involves complex machinery and data analysis, but the more than 40 million returned products that the facility sifts through annually still must pass in front of human eyes. Material handlers are charged with determining a return’s ultimate fate—whether it goes back to the retailer to be sold anew, gets destroyed, or something in between.

Beyond the behemoths—Amazon, Walmart—very few retailers undertake the messy, fiddly work of evaluating the deluge of products themselves. Instead, the prepaid shipping labels you print out guide most of your returns to third-party facilities like Inmar, where they’re stacked six feet tall in palletized bins known as gaylords, along with thousands of other retaped cardboard boxes and poly mailers, all waiting to be ripped open, eyeballed, and searched by hand.

I loved that we could get batteries and gizzards. I loved that we could get biscuits and Super Glue. I loved that we could get dishwashing soap, which was also bubble bath, which was also the soap we used to wash Grandmama’s Impala, and the good hot sauce in the same aisle. I was 8 years old. I never knew, or cared, that my favorite restaurant served gas. My Grandmama and Ofa D were deep into their 50s. They seemed to never know or care that our favorite restaurant served gas, either.

I suppose there were choices of where you’d eat out in Forest. There was a Pizza Inn. There was a McDonald’s. There was Penn’s Fishhouse. There was Kentucky Fried Chicken. But there were no choices in what we’d eat on Friday. Ofa D would order a box of dark meat, a Styrofoam container of fried fish, and a brown bag filled with ’tato logs. Grandmama would grab a box of a dozen donuts. Grandmama and Ofa D would let me pick my own cold drank. I picked the six-pack Nehi Peach or RC Cola every single time.

Maybe 35 minutes later, I’d eat myself into a lightweight coma while Grandmama and Ofa D lightly petted and pecked each other on the couch with the week’s greasiest lips. This was our practice.

This was their romance.

After a few minutes she told us he had passed his hearing screen. That’s when I heard the sound of crying. Not the infant kind. Across the dark room, Seth’s breathing was ragged. A few sobs escaped before he could dry his eyes and compose himself back into stoicism.

Sure, we were all tired and running on raw emotion. But his tears were my first, my only, clue that Seth had worried our child might inherit the hearing loss that had demarcated so much of his life.

Every other year, Seth visits his doctor for routine hearing tests. They measure the difference between his hearing and that of a typical ear. They also record whether that hearing has diminished since his last visit. So far both right and left are holding steady at the same levels as when we met. Still, I lie awake sometimes, imagining how we would conduct our lives if Seth’s hearing went away entirely. Would we set up some sort of marital Slack channel? Could witty text messages sustain our closeness? They already get us through the workday. When we hug, if I get too close to his ear, it squeals with feedback, like someone adjusting a microphone as their band comes onstage for its set. The sound used to make me retreat. But after all these years I know to tilt my head the other way, and just keep on holding tight.