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Tim usually left Jonas, the mutt Jacky had brought home six months earlier, outside during the day while she was at work. Fresh air and sunshine, he’d tell himself over the top of a bottle.

“He’s in the yard,” Tim said. He’d joined Jacky by the apartment door and was pulling on a ratty fleece sweatshirt. Tim stood and blinked, first one eye, then the other, then both. He picked at a crust that had formed in the corner of one.

“No, he’s not. He’s gone,” Jacky said. “Let’s go. We need to find him.” 

An exclusive excerpt from When We Were Locusts, the latest novel from our March 2015 Writer of the Month, Nathan Graziano. 

I was obsessed with ferreting out the sequence of events. How did all those socks fit into the story told by the rest of the house? Did his subterranean masturbation drive her to leave? Or was the utility room his refuge from an already broken home? Did she wonder about his penchant for changing the furnace filter while barefoot? What was his annual sock expenditure? These were the questions that haunted me. 

Nyla’s mother told her about the slave trade when she turned seven. The bodies stacked high like wrapped wads of cash, the piss and shit and vomit in the hull of the ship. Suffocating. So much dying. Nyla could hear the sway of the ocean beyond the wooden planks of the bow; she heard the moans; she saw the darkness; she imagined being inside a beer barrel for weeks, months. Forgotten. Infrequent food and too little water, despite the waves crashing against the wall that imprisoned her. She imagined it while being held in her mother’s arms. 

God is my Personal Trainer. He watches over me as I do my power squats and my abdominal holds, my bear crawls and my box jumps. He blesses my push-ups. He sanctifies my sit-ups. He is always by my side. 

It has been six months since you left her apartment with a bag of clothes and the cat, six months since you’ve spoken to her. But what could you have done differently? The red panties on the bedroom floor didn’t belong to her, and you both knew it. But she looks great now; she has lost weight since you dated. In fact, in a gray hooded sweatshirt and black yoga pants, her dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, it is reasonable to assume she has just come from the gym. 

The suicides didn’t surprise me. I’d vaguely listened to the news that morning. Some kids had locked a garage door, freebased and let the Pinto run. I didn’t know anything about the departed until my mom called, asking, Did you hear? Did you know H and W from town? I knew them, recalled their pimply, not yet man faces from middle school. Wasn’t friends with them, I told her, they ran with a different crowd. I tapped on the counter, staring at the clock until she finished talking. It was my freshman year of college. I had to do library research before meeting underage friends for margaritas. I didn’t care about dead boys who, while living, had humiliated me. I wanted to get her off the phone. 

She first met Stanley on a lovely June morning when he came on the Feast of Saint Anthony.  His dark business suit, plain tie and shined shoes announced that he would spend the rest of the day at a well-paid job in some office, but she read in his face the need for something money could not buy. 

Even as a kid I knew Mom was different than Dad, and not just because she had these heavy bags pulling down off her chest. I mean, something in the way she thought her way through the world, the way she interacted with others, was vastly different.