BLADDERS

We're inside the bladder room, trying to find the bladder that controls the flow of the client's blood. We take meticulous inventory: the bladder for blinking, the bladder for making love, the bladders for mourning, fear and uncertainty… Confusingly to the nonprofessionals, there are bladders that suppress, bladders that repress, bladders that conflate… But we are the professionals. You can tell by our hands. We soften them with exfoliating scrubs, strengthen them to just the right grip. There's order to our operations. Upon entering a bladder room, we isolate the bladder for dying and the bladder for not waking up. The nonprofessionals don't understand these aren't the same thing and isolate one or the other and call it good. In this state, you don't need to be one of the professionals to enter a bladder room. Most of our work is correcting the work performed by the nonprofessionals and DIY Daves. The client thinks he's been swindled by a nonprofessional. Ever since a routine servicing of the bladders, his blood flows different and uncomfortable. We're not surprised. We've seen bladders misplaced or outright stolen and brazenly replaced with non-bladder devices such as produce bags, balloons, latex gloves… We warn the client's daughter to expect the unexpected inside the bladder room. She insists on coming with us to ensure we do right by her father. She is at a loss when we discover the children manipulating the bladder for the flow of blood. This isn't the same bladder as for the heart or for bleeding. The nonprofessionals don't understand this, can't understand this, won't understand this… The children don't acknowledge us. They don't appear to be blood relations or to belong to the neighbors or on any footage from the doorbell camera at the entrance of the bladder room. The client's daughter tries pushing past us to do the work she thinks we should be doing. We can't let her remove the children. The children may be naturally occurring. We mustn't disrupt the ecosystem. Our work is neither to disrupt the ecosystem nor for us to explain. We isolate the client and the client's daughter into another room far from the bladder room. We tell the client he must explain. We manipulate the bladder for explaining.

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BOXES

The cat can transport to different parts of the house by jumping into one cardboard box, then out of another. I don't try this trick myself. I ask my brother over. I don't remember why it's been so long since we last talked. In the living room, neither of us sits. It's silly how guardedly we behave. It's been so long we ought to have gotten over whatever happened. I introduce the cat to break the tension. The cat emerges from one of the boxes. My brother says he got married, has children. Since we were boys, he could grow our father's beard. Our mother would make him shave it off. She's dead. Our father's dead. It's as strange to see him with our father's beard as it was to see our father without it, which we didn't until his funeral. I would have made it through the whole thing without crying if not for this. My brother had this habit of picking at his face until it bled. I want to ask if there are scars under our father's beard. I tell him the cat's trick instead. He'll try it, sure, but he gets stuck halfway. His legs are kicking in the kitchen. The cat's upset we're using the boxes. Sitting next to the box containing my brother's upper half, I suppose this is our chance to hash things out. I think of the children—my nieces and nephews. There are certain ways nobody should see their father. I tape up the boxes. Bulk pickup day is someday soon. What gets me is I'm my brother's older brother. My halves should be in these boxes, my wife and children waiting for me to come home. Or something like that. My mother used to say to me: will you just look at you? Maybe I'll grow a beard, even if it won't be our father's. I bring the cat's stuff downstairs. He's gotten too used to the boxes. I don't know if he can find his way around without them.

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These are both ideas for picture books.