The Brink by Austin Bunn

under their shared fence and barkingneurotically at squirrels. Graham and Marlena moved in when Em was just two, when the area was up and coming. But it never quite came. An alarm company had come through and he’d noticed their neighbors all had the signs jabbed into their front flower beds. Every window, every door, wired. Marlena had refused. “I don’t want to live in a terrified world,” she’d said.
    But the window, Graham saw, was intact, the screen in place. So the bag had been placed there from inside.
    Graham picked it up. Something inside was dense and jointed and uncocaine-like. He set it on the tool table, and undid a knot in the plastic. A fetid smell gusted out, enough to make him recoil.
    Later, that dark bloom of plastic, opening in his hands, was what he could not stop thinking of: the moment before , when he had the choice to stop, to tie it up and fling it into the trash, and never see the corpse. Inside the bag, the baby was facing down, almost deferentially, its back to him. It was a mercy to have not seen its face. The skin was still speckled with birth. Graham would remember the ashen color and the scale of it, six months along, too small to be full-term, for the rest of his godforsaken life.
    He walked over to the slop sink and heaved. His hands closed the bag, shaking convulsively, and cinched it with a contractor tie. His thoughts spiraled into thinking about Em, this stranger who was his daughter. How could they have missed the months of her showing or the sickness—Marlena had been bedridden for months with her—or the advances of one of her pierced suitors, these friends with benefits?
    Graham couldn’t leave the bag on the table, or the basement floor. He didn’t want it to touch anything in the house, to deposit a residue of itself on their lives. He gathered himself, by some ancient instinct, and walked out into the backyard.
    The air was frigid, biting, even at noon. He could see the top of their neighbor’s white plumbing van over the fence. Graham stepped into the shadow of his garage, out of view, and laid the bag softly (how else?) on the hard-packed ground. It seemed vital to get the bag in the ground before Graham thought too hard or too much. He needed a shovel. If he dug deep and quick, the fact of it wouldn’t take hold. Before Em, back when Graham and Marlena traveled the country—they were hoboes for a couple of years there—they had a running joke: when things got bad, when they’d left some shameful evidence of themselves somewhere, he would rush into the car and say, “ Go , go , go! ” like a getaway, like the end of a heist, because you recalled a place less the faster you left it.
    He left the bag and stepped into the garage. The wall had one empty spot for the shovel, next to the rake and the broken rake and the pitchfork that was a prop in some life he would never live. Then Graham remembered Aaron at his back door over the weekend, his presidential face, dressed in a thermal shirt and grimy jeans, shovel pieces in his hands. He said his shovel had snapped when he’d tried to attack a tree root. So he’d come through the door in the fence between their yards—installed by their prior neighbors, who imagineda community on the block and then promptly relocated to Houston—to ask to borrow theirs. Facing him on the back stairs, Aaron peeked around behind Graham, at the kitchen interior, and said, “Hey, Emma,” and Emma, at the island, smiled, and Graham wondered which men earned her attention and which her dismissal. In the yard, Aaron’s German shepherd, improbably named Schatzi, ran around, sniffing, pissing on the sapling Marlena had planted. Graham recalled the swell of masculine provisioning he felt escorting him to the garage, where he handed over his own shovel. Keep it as long as you need it, Graham said, while Aaron surveyed his wall of tools, his whole garage, as though he