Emily Mitchell

HER FACE I CANNOT SEE

Who is this Woman who for some Months has followed me up and down?
Her face I cannot see for she keeps ever behind me.
—Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis

Simon first sees the woman in the big bookstore on the corner of Thirteenth and Broadway. He is browsing the table of new releases in the middle of the long high-ceilinged room when he suddenly has the sense of someone watching him. He puts down the book he’s holding, a new biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, and scans the room, and there she is. She’s wearing a teal-colored coat, a shifting, unusual shade. He can’t think when he’s seen anyone else wear it in this city where people favor blacks and grays. She has thick, streaky blonde hair that is chopped abruptly at her jaw and which is falling forward now, as she leans over her book, so it obscures her face. She’s standing in front of a set of shelves further back into the store. She seems to be engrossed in what she’s reading. But despite this, Simon has the distinct feeling she was looking at him just a moment earlier.

Does he know her? He doesn’t think so. Since he moved to the city, he has only met a few people and she’s not one of them. And yet she seems familiar. Is she someone he had known back home in England? Someone from university or afterward, the years he lived in London? An acquaintance who made enough of an impression that he recognizes her after all this time, even though he can’t recall her name?

He is about to move so he can get a surreptitious peek at her face when a group of teenagers, heading for the section where they sell old record albums and compact discs, push past him in the opposite direction. One of them clips Simon with an elbow.

“Oy, watch where you’re going,” Simon says between his teeth. The boy, a pallid, greasy person with what looks like a self-inflicted haircut, mumbles something that could be sorry or could just as easily be suck it, then carries on after his friends. Simon glares at them. When he finally decides to let it go and turns back to where the woman had been standing, he finds that she is gone.

Oh, well, he thinks, I probably don’t know her after all. It’s probably just an effect of homesickness. He’s been suffering a bad bout of it these past few days as he’d been warned he would by other ex-pats, his friends David and Julia mainly, once the initial excitement and novelty of being in New York started to wear off. His brain is conjuring familiarity to comfort him in this place where, after four months, he still knows hardly anyone. It must have just been that and nothing more, though this doesn’t stop him from continuing to think about the woman on his way home, trying to remember where he might have known her from, what chapter of his life. Nor does it prevent him from wondering why, if this is his mind trying to comfort him, her presence has left him feeling not consoled but mildly unsettled, as if he is about to let himself down into a pool of water that’s too deep and turbid for him to see the bottom.

The second time he sees the woman is on the subway coming home from an excursion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Out of the corner of his eye, he gets a glimpse of that particular, odd color he has seen on her and nowhere else. He turns. Through the forest of bent backs, hands grasping poles, heads bowed over screens, he can just see a patch of blue-green and a few waves of yellow hair. He sways back and forth, but from no angle can he get a clear sight of her. Not, at least, until the train begins to empty as it gets further into the outer boroughs. Then he can see her sitting on one of the molded plastic benches with her back to him. The feeling that he knows her is still just as strong. He wants to go over and ask her, but he hesitates to do it here. In the bookstore, at least, they would have had some basis of connection: the slightly archaic and eccentric habit of buying and reading printed books. Here he’s just a strange man coming up to talk to her for no apparent reason.

He reminds himself why he is here in New York in the first place: To break out of old ways of doing things. To take some risks for once in his life. To overcome the implacable British reserve he dislikes so much in himself. Maybe seeing this woman twice is a sign he’s meant to talk to her. As far as he can tell, she’s young; something in the way she carries herself makes him think she could be pretty, too; pretty enough, anyway. So what if he doesn’t know her? How will he ever get to if he doesn’t introduce himself?

He begins to make his way down the now less-than-packed car, maneuvering past the passengers standing in the aisles, sorry, sorry, excuse me, sorry. He almost gets all the way down to where the woman is sitting. But then the train slows into a station and he has to find something to hold onto so he doesn’t fall. The train stops. The woman rises from her seat. The doors hush open and she glides out through them without even once turning around.

Simon curses silently. Typical of him to be just a moment too late. But now he knows. She got off at the stop just before his own. Which means she might live in this part of town. Which means he might see her again somewhere in the neighborhood they share. He goes home feeling pleased rather than downcast and takes the dog that came with his house-sitting gig out for a walk in the big park just a few blocks north of where he’s staying. He usually likes this task. He’s never had a dog of his own, and he is surprised to find how soothing the evening walk can be. This dog is named Jasper, and he’s a big, soppy mixture of breeds that might include Labrador, Alsatian, some variety of spaniel. Today Simon feels more alert and awake than he has in some time, because who knows? Perhaps he will turn a corner and see a shimmer of aquamarine and have his chance.

Simon came to New York because he could not seem to pull himself together to do much of anything at home. The summer before, his mother had died after a long struggle with cancer, during which he’d moved back from London to the south coast to take care of her.

She was his only relevant parent—he’d met his dad only a few times in his teens and they hadn’t really liked each other much. His mother had raised him by herself on her librarian’s salary. Before she got ill, she was a funny, energetic woman who celebrated her fiftieth birthday by bungee jumping off Tower Bridge. She and Simon had been close, more like friends much of the time than like parent and child.

During her illness, though, her personality underwent a striking change. It was almost as if her body was inhabited by a different being altogether, one which took over more and more as illness whittled her away. She became peevish and suspicious. She said cruel things she’d never said before about how she hadn’t wanted a child at all, how her life would have been much better without him. Sometimes, he’d catch her looking at him with intense resentment, as though he was making her sick, somehow, on purpose. Then she would come back to herself for a while and cry and say she was sorry, and she didn’t mean any of it. These lucid intervals became less and less frequent as time went on.

More than once, over the last months before her death, she accused him of wanting her to hurry up and die so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore, and the worst thing about this was that it became, gradually but inevitably, true. The angrier and more embittered she became, the less she seemed like the person he had known all of his life. The more unkind things she said, the more he could not help longing for this to be over in the only way possible. The first few times she made her accusation, he was able to deny it, to say what he knew was required of him under the circumstances: she was his mother, and he loved her, and he would care for her as long as she needed him to. But there came a day when, instead of contradicting her, he just sat there, staring back at her and saying nothing. He can still recall this scene precisely: both of them in her living room, her lying on the couch propped up on pillows, him in the armchair next to it, the TV tuned to some program neither of them was really watching. She had said, loudly and apropos of nothing, that she knew he just wanted her out of the way so he could go back to his posh life and snooty London friends. Then she looked over at him like she was waiting to see what he would do. And he just sat there, staring back at her and saying nothing, until eventually she had quailed and looked away.

Soon after this, she stopped taking the antibiotics she’d been given to treat her recurring pneumonia and, over the course of weeks, allowed herself to succumb to it. Basically, he watched her drown, slowly, painfully, gasping for air as her lungs filled up with fluid. He remembers begging the nurses for more morphine and being told they were already administering the maximum amount allowed. He remembers waking in the middle of the night in a panic, thinking: she is doing this because of me.

After she died, he had intended to move back in up to London, to the flat he’d shared in Shoreditch with a friend from university. But months passed and he was still staying in his mother’s little house in Hastings, unable to quite take the steps required to move out. He doesn’t now have an especially clear memory of that time. Each day was a lot like the one before it. He knows he drank too much and watched a lot of Sky TV and had bad dreams. The truth was that nothing about going back to London appealed to him: not the dinginess, not the gob-smacking expense, not the sense that everything had been set up in the exactly the same way, already, for hundreds of years. He was still working remotely, graphic design, for the company where he’d been employed before. As long as he continued doing that, he could live more or less anywhere he liked. His mum had left him a little money, and her house, which he could use to cover the costs of setting up in a new place. His French was okay. He could try Paris. Or he could try somewhere more adventurous and different. Brazil, maybe. Or perhaps Japan.

He might have continued mulling over these options endlessly, unable to choose between them, but around this time, his friend David got in touch. David and his wife Julia had relocated to New York the previous year. Julia has a job in finance, and her firm had brought her over for a five-year posting, and David, a freelance writer, had gone along quite happily. He could do his work from anywhere and being in the center of the US publishing world couldn’t be too bad for his career. Now they had an acquaintance who was looking to sublet his apartment for a year for cheap to someone who didn’t mind taking care of a large but very friendly dog. Why, David asked, didn’t Simon come to America? He could try it out and see if he liked it without any big commitment of money or effort. At the end of the year, he could stay or go home or go on to somewhere else, whatever he preferred.

Simon had never been to New York. He liked the Americans he’d met: their informality, the way they didn’t try to hide what they were feeling. Perhaps being in the big, vibrant, brash city would bring him out of the shell he had retreated into. He cleared his mother’s house, rented it to a family from Greece and four weeks later was on a plane for JFK, hoping that this was what he needed to restart his life.

David and Julia live on the other side of the park from Simon; the good side; the expensive side. They have him over to supper at least once a week. Recently, Simon has been trying to turn down at least some of the many invitations David issues. He has a feeling that Julia would prefer it if he were around a bit less frequently. She’s never said this to him, but she works long hours and when she comes home it seems reasonable that she might like to spend time with her husband, especially now that they are expecting their first child in just a few months’ time.

Still, Simon looks forward to their evenings together more than he likes to admit. One of the problems of working remotely from home is that he doesn’t have a job through which to meet new people. Plus, he feels comfortable around David and Jules, able to talk to them. A few days after he has seen the woman for the second time, they are sitting together after dinner, Simon and David finishing a bottle of red wine, Julia sipping seltzer water and watching them jealously.

“It’s strange,” Simon says. “This city has how many million people in it? But I’ve seen this same woman twice in a week in completely different, unrelated places.” And he tells them about the woman he saw in the bookstore and on the train.

“I don’t think it is really very odd,” David says.

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s true there are millions of people here. But this city is pretty rigorously sorted, not just by class and race, but also by age, profession, even taste. Think about it. You and I are, broadly speaking, artsy, literary types.”

“Okay, let’s say that I accept that.”

“When we go out to drink, we go to that bar on Piper Street which has six hundred different imported beers, each with origins more obscure than the last. They have poetry readings in the back, for god’s sake. Do you think we’d ever see any of Julia’s banking mates there? Not a chance.”

“Don’t stereotype, David,” Julia says. “Not everyone I work with is a soulless corporate drone.”

“I’m not stereotyping. I’m just saying: New York is a series of interlocking circuits. If you see someone in one place, you are more, not less, likely to see them in another.”

“What happens,” Simon asks, “if you don’t stay in your own circuit? If fall out of yours into someone else’s?”

“Oh, terrible, catastrophic things beyond your imagination, obviously.” They are silent for a moment before David goes on: “Anyway, my point is that you’ve probably crossed paths more than once with lots of people. They just weren’t beautiful girls dressed in turquoise or whatever.”

Simon thinks about this.

“Actually,” he says at last, “I don’t know if she is beautiful. I still haven’t gotten a clear look at her face.”

“Maybe she’s your destined true love,” Julia says. “Maybe you’ll be telling this story at your wedding in a few years’ time. Maybe it will be a story that you’ll tell your grandchildren.” And she grins at him in a way that is not altogether kind.

After this, as though Julia’s taunting prediction has summoned her, he sees, or thinks he sees, the woman again and then again. She’s a flash of cerulean disappearing down the steps of the subway station near his house. She’s walking ahead of him on a busy street where he loses sight of her at last among the crowd. She’s never quite close enough for him to get a really good look at her or speak to her. She is always turned away from him. During one of these sightings, he notices there’s also something distinctive about the way she moves, which is curiously graceful and evenly paced, as if she had planned all her motions in advance and was executing them from memory.

Then one evening he’s out walking Jasper in the park. He has a route he takes around the boating lake that lies roughly in the middle of the green expanse of lawns. He’s just approaching the point where the asphalt path loops around the water when he sees, up ahead of him, a now-familiar figure. It’s starting to get dark, the lamps along the paths throughout the park haloing to life one by one, but he can still tell it’s her.

Should he go up and try to talk to her? He looks around, and there are other people within sight. There’s no reason she should feel particularly worried about him. He’s just about to pick up his pace so he can catch up with her, thinking about what he’ll say, when suddenly by his side he hears a low growling and feels a sharp tug on the leash he’s holding. He looks down and sees Jasper, ears back, teeth bared, and poised in a forward-leaning, wary stance, like he might be about to give chase. Simon has never seen Jasper exhibit this behavior. Other dogs sometimes make him bark and leap around, but not people. Now he looks up at Simon and whines, tugging again on his leash, lunging in the direction of the woman on the path, and it requires a considerable amount of Simon’s strength to hold him back. This doesn’t stop until the woman has drifted further ahead and finally disappeared from view. Then, abruptly, Jasper is quiet, calm, lolling his tongue and gazing up at Simon in wide-eyed, innocent expectancy.

“What the hell was that about?” Simon asks. The dog of course does not answer, his good-natured, open face looking like he feels he deserves some kind of reward. It’s difficult to be angry with him, but Simon is perplexed. He sets off again, walking, and they make their way through the growing gloom, out of the park, through the streets and back towards the apartment.

As they go, Simon wonders: What on earth made Jasper act that way? There is nothing threatening about the woman. Although, now that he thinks about it, there are some odd things about her, things beyond her attire that make her stand out. There’s the strangely calm and controlled way she moves, which he observed before. And it occurs to him now that each time he’s seen her, not only has she been wearing the exact same coat, regardless of the weather or the time of day, but she’s also been completely by herself, no friends or family or partner. That might just mean she’s a newcomer like him. But she seems, compared to other people in this generally frantic city, to be almost uniquely detached from her surroundings. He’s never seen her so much as glance at anyone or anything around her. The thought pops into his head that her placidity is the automatic tranquility of something that is not alive.

What is wrong with him? He shakes his head at himself, at this ridiculous idea. He doesn’t even know this woman beyond a few sightings in public. He has no idea what she is really like. His mind is building things out of shadows, playing tricks on him. In spite of being outside in the open air, he feels all at once a sense of claustrophobic closeness, of being weighted down and pressed in on from all sides. It reminds him of how he used to feel all the time when he lived at home. He shudders. It was this sensation that he had hoped he had escaped by coming to a totally new, unknown place and now, suddenly, after all these months, here it is again.

Back in his apartment, he feeds the dog and sits down on the couch. He intends to get up in a minute, make himself some dinner, but he remains sitting there for a long time. He had thought he was doing better, getting back to normal. Clearly, he is wobblier than he’d understood. This thought depresses him, but it won’t do any good to pretend everything is fine when it’s not. He thinks perhaps it’s better that he didn’t manage to speak to the woman after all if this is how she makes him feel. His interest in her—he wouldn’t call it an obsession, exactly, but it is a little strange. He doesn’t need anything upsetting in his life right now. What he needs is ordinariness, balance. What he needs is to get out more, find more things to do to fill his time, meet some people, besides David, he can talk to and spend time with, people with discernible faces, who don’t seem to be perpetually just out of reach. Tomorrow, he promises himself, he will take some concrete steps to make that happen.

He does try to follow through on this resolution. He signs up for an online dating service, starts chatting to a few women, and makes plans to meet up with one of them. He goes to play football in the park the following Saturday afternoon. He tells himself that he will ignore the woman if he sees her around the neighborhood. They both live here. So what? That doesn’t mean they have to have anything to do with each other.

Interestingly, after encountering her so often, he doesn’t see her again for a while. Perhaps, after all, she was only visiting the city. Or perhaps she’s traded in the tell-tale coat for something else now that the weather is starting to get colder.

Then one evening, David and another friend of his, Roy, are over at Simon’s apartment. Simon doesn’t have very many guests, but they wanted a place to drink and smoke a bit of weed Roy has, and Julia has banished them because she can’t partake and doesn’t want to have to sit there while they become sillier and less interesting as the night goes on. They are passing around a nice, large joint and drinking bottles of IPA. David and Roy are debating the relative merits of different strains of marijuana. Simon is just starting to feel the pleasant, swimmy sensation he gets when he smokes. He lets his gaze wander around the room and over to his living room window, which looks out onto an airshaft and an identical window on the opposite side.

In all the time he’s lived here, he’s never seen that other window lit up, or any sign that the apartment across the airshaft from his own is occupied. Today, however, it is illuminated by a low, watery light. And framed in its rectangle of glass, he sees the outline of a figure looking out, looking, in fact, back at him. It takes a moment for the image to resolve amid the little spirals of his frayed attention. But when it does, he starts back and lets out an involuntary, wordless squawk.

David and Roy fall silent and turn to look at him, astonished and confused.

“Simon, what the…?” David says after a moment, laughing nervously.

Simon keeps his eyes fixed on the floor and tries to get hold of himself. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “At that window over there…”

“Which window? What?”

“The one across from mine.”

David gets up and goes over to look. He turns back to Simon, a puzzled expression on his face.

“You mean the window across here?” he says. “What about it?”

Simon makes himself stand up and goes to look as well. The window is dark and vacant, just as usual. He turns his back on it and leans against the windowsill and covers his face with his hands.

“I…” he starts but can’t think how to explain himself. “I had, I mean, there was this optical illusion like someone was there, looking over at us. Sorry. Sorry. Go on. What were you just saying?”

“Wow,” David says. “Well. No more of this stuff for you tonight.” He indicates the joint between his fingers.

“Yeah, right,” Simon says. “I guess it’s a bit stronger than I thought…”

He sits back down where he was before, and the conversation resumes, though there’s a tension in the room now that fades but doesn’t completely disappear. David and Roy stay for a few more drinks, and that whole time Simon avoids looking in the direction of the window. Eventually, David stands up and says he’d better make his way home and Roy says he should too. Simon tells them thanks for coming and shows them out.

After they leave, Simon, still keeping his eyes averted, goes over and pulls down the blind. The world beyond is blotted out. But instead of bringing him relief, a sense of comfort, it brings the image of what he saw, or thought he saw, back to him vividly: a figure in cyan with its familiar bluntly chopped hair. In the dim light, for the brief time he examined it, he could not make out the features of the face with any great amount of clarity. But he felt then, and he still feels, first that the face was naggingly familiar to him, and then that, for some entirely unknown reason, the mouth on it was grinning.

Simon leaves that blind drawn even in the middle of the day, but it doesn’t really help. Because now he starts to see the woman again when he goes out. And now, instead of being turned away, she’s watching him. He sees her outlined in the doorway of a darkened grocery store. He’s pretty sure sees her underneath the trees on the far side of the lake in the park. He glimpses her on the opposite platform in the subway for just a moment, before the train careens into the station and cuts off his view. She’s always at a distance or in shadows, so sometimes he isn’t even sure whether she’s actually there or not. Sometimes he sees her in the corner of his eye, but when he looks in that direction, there is no one. He still hasn’t seen what her face looks like with any clarity. But he no longer has any interest in doing that. He only wants her to leave him alone.

Without actually deciding to, he changes the way he goes about his daily activities. He moves more slowly, deliberately controlling where his eyes go. He goes out of his way to avoid places where he’s seen her, which becomes more difficult as time passes and those places multiply. Still, whenever he relaxes and forgets about her, even for a short while, suddenly, she’s there. At first, she’s just standing, waiting and observing. But then, one night, he’s walking home along a poorly lit residential street a few blocks from his apartment, and he sees her step out of the shadow of a building in the direction he is going and start to come towards him. He is, briefly, paralyzed. Then he turns and walks as fast as he can in the opposite direction. When he reaches the main road and dares to look behind him, the sidewalk is empty.

He stops leaving his apartment very much. David and Julia’s daughter has been born, so they are too busy now to see him often. He cancels the dates he set up with the women he met online: he can’t imagine being able to sit in a restaurant and make small talk in his current state. He goes out to walk the dog and to buy groceries, the minimum that is required to sustain his life. He can do his work without leaving the apartment. For a while he keeps up with it adequately, but then he starts to slip behind with that as well.

What does he do with his hours? He hardly knows. He sleeps in until noon, then can’t get to sleep at night and stays up watching television until early morning. It occurs to him that he’s managed to replicate his living situation in his mother’s house very nicely, the glazed days that slur into each other, the too much drinking. It’s only the presence of the dog Jasper that keeps him from sinking into complete lassitude again. Someone is depending on him for food and exercise. He tells himself that if he holds onto this, perhaps he can use it to pull himself out of this downward spiral.

Since the woman appears more often at night, he tries to walk the dog during daylight hours. But as the days get shorter and colder, this becomes more difficult. He finds himself having to go out into the streets at dusk, into the park when it is still or already shadowy and dim. Winter arrives, his first in the northeastern US, and along with it, a bitter and tenacious cold that is different from anything he’s ever experienced before. People disappear inside enormous winter coats, layers of scarves and hats and hoods, their faces only visible in gaps. Now when Simon catches sight of the woman, who is still wearing the same azure coat, he can’t bring himself to look at her directly. As a result, she starts to change shape in his mind. Where before she was an average-looking human being, now she becomes gauntly elongated and stooped, that distinctive coat she wears no longer seeming to be made of cloth but rather of some other substance, like the clammy, rough skin of something that spends its life submerged. He is certain if he were to scrutinize her, he would see that same expression on her face he’d glimpsed before, that look of mean triumph. Only now he understands why it was so familiar to him. He’d never seen it before, and yet he knows it intimately. That final time his mother said to him she knew he wanted her to die, the time when he said nothing? What he recalls about it now is this: it wasn’t only that he failed to comfort her. As he sat there, staring her down, he experienced a sense of intense satisfaction, even pleasure, which grew the longer he refused to speak. He saw her falter, cringe, try to move away from him, discover she was much too weak to stand. He remembers what he made himself forget, the vengeful contentment he felt as he watched her, and how the corners of his mouth crept up, a slow smile spreading on his face and staying there until his mother covered her face with her hands so she would not have to see it anymore.

This is what the woman in the cobalt-colored coat has brought back to him, what she threatens to make him witness each time he encounters her.

His mind splits. There is the part of him that knows the things that are happening to him can’t be true. He is having some kind of a break with reality, and he ought to do something, get out of here, get help, go home. Then there is another part that believes with absolute conviction that something is following him that is not human and has never been.

The first big snowfall of the year arrives. For a whole night and day, the sky drops a barrage of swirling flakes onto the city below, covering everything in white. By the end of the long day the dog is restless, whining to go out, and the snow shows no sign of stopping. Simon wraps himself against the cold, puts Jasper on his leash, and goes out. The streets are almost deserted, just a few dark figures moving here and there at the edges of his vision. Under the low clouds the streetlights are already coming on. The pavements and the side streets are buried almost completely.

Simon had expected to go around the block and then head back inside. But once he’s out, he finds he has no desire to go back inside his cramped apartment again. He feels surprisingly at ease in the softened, hushed streets, which he has never seen so calm or empty. The draining away, the canceling of color makes him feel relaxed, too, as he has not been in ages. Perhaps the chilly air is helping clear his head a little of the built-up nonsense of the past few months. He decides he will stay out a little longer, go and see how the park has been transformed. He turns and heads in that direction.

At the park entrance he stops and glances around furtively, but he sees nothing, no swatch of color to make his heart contract. He steps through the gates into the fields of blankness beyond. Through the falling flakes, the ground and sky are the same color, broken up only by the black scribbles of trees further into the park. He descends carefully along the path that is still just about visible, his boots taking bites of the snow with each step. He reaches the fork that leads to the boating lake and takes it, thinking he’ll loop around and then head home before it gets too dark to find his way. He has gone just a short distance down this path when he realizes there is someone standing out there, right in the center of the frozen lake. Beside him, Jasper starts to growl and strain against his leash. Simon gazes through the falling snow. He sees the figure on the lake is encased, of course, in a long swath of blue.

It must be the low light because the figure does seem to be smaller than the last time he saw it and hooded so that there is no differentiating the head from the body. And the coat no long looks like fabric but something else, clinging and weighing down the figure it is draped around. Simon stares at the figure, absorbed in how its outline shifts against the light, how he cannot make it resolve into a solid and consistent form no matter how much he tries to focus. He is so absorbed in this that, without thinking, he loosens his grip on the leash in his right hand.

In a moment, Jasper has bounded out onto the ice and is sprinting towards the figure. Simon groans. He understands he doesn’t have a choice. He steps quickly down the bank and out onto the frozen surface. Jasper is still pelting towards the figure which has seen him now and is moving over the surface, but whether it is going towards him or away from him Simon cannot tell. He starts to run towards the dog, towards the retreating or advancing being beyond it, his footfalls creaking with each step as the ice grows thinner away from the shore, and it is almost a relief when he hears the crack and feels his foot slip and the world give way beneath him. He is floundering then for a moment, trying to grasp onto something firm, but everything he lays ahold of breaks away and leaves him thrashing and falling into frigid, dense darkness that he fights against, keeps at bay for as long as he can. Then he gives in and lets the darkness surge inside him, filling up the space where he used to be until there is finally nothing else left.

EMILY MITCHELL is the author of a novel, The Last Summer of the World (Norton), and a collection of short fiction, Viral (Norton). Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Sun, and TriQuarterly. She teaches at the University of Maryland and serves as fiction editor of New England Review.