Marked Down
Part One: Lubec, Maine
David started putting Day-Glo dots on himself because a guy named Jeremy from Burlington said it would help, and also because it was February in Lubec and what the hell else was there to do.
"You look like produce," Carol said. She was eating scrambled eggs that had gone watery. The dots covered his forearms—construction orange, the kind they used on I-95 when someone died.
"It's therapeutic."
"It's weird, David."
Jeremy had found him, actually. Comment on a Reddit thread about "depression alternatives that aren't just more pills." Jeremy's profile said he'd gone to art school, the Rhode Island one. His website looked like he'd made it during a manic episode—fonts that looked like he'd picked them at random. Or drunk. Probably drunk. A photo of him staring at a brick wall.
Their Skype call had been mostly frozen pixels. Jeremy's face kept breaking into squares.
"You mark where the pain lives," Jeremy had said. Or maybe "leaves." The connection was shit.
"Physical pain?"
"No, the other kind. The kind that doesn't show up on x-rays."
Staples sold them in sheets of 500. $19.99. David bought two packs because they were having a sale.
First dot: left shoulder. That's where Diane used to put her head when they watched TV. Second: base of his throat. Third: the inside of his right wrist, but he couldn't explain that one.
By week three he had forty-something dots. They glowed through his white shirt at the fish plant.
Dale, his supervisor, stared for a full minute before saying, "You contagious?"
"No."
"Good. We're behind on the halibut."
Dale had worked there since 1989. His fingers bent in directions fingers shouldn't bend. He didn't mention the dots again until lunch, when he said, "My daughter puts stickers on the toilet seat. We can't get them off. Have to sit on Dora the Explorer now."
David wasn't sure what to do with that information.
Part Two: Kaikōura, New Zealand
The woman from New Zealand found him through Jeremy's newsletter, which David didn't remember subscribing to. Her email just said: "I'm doing this too but with all the colors. You should see."
Attached was a photo that looked medical—a woman's arm covered in green dots, leg covered in blue. Standing against white walls like evidence.
David wrote back: "Why different colors?"
"Different kinds of damage require different markers. Obviously."
Her name was Miriam. Sixty-three. Started after the 2016 earthquake that rearranged the whole coast. She included a plane ticket confirmation before he'd even agreed to come. "I already bought it," she wrote. "Nonrefundable. Waste it if you want."
Two days of airports. The bus from Christchurch to Kaikōura smelled like wet wool and someone's forgotten lunch.
Miriam looked like someone had built her from mismatched parts—long arms, short legs, hands that belonged to someone else entirely.
"The green is for growth," she said immediately, like they were continuing a conversation from before. "Blue for washing away. Yellow for fear. Purple for my mother because she's dead and purple was her thing."
Her house had gaps between the walls and floor. You could see straight through to dirt. She made instant coffee that tasted like burnt water and showed him three years of documentation—weekly photos of herself getting progressively more colorful.
"People think I've lost it," she said.
"Have you?"
"Probably. But I was losing it anyway. This way there's evidence."
She photographed him against her bathroom wall, which had water stains that looked like continents. Made charts. Gave him pink dots for his shoulder blades without asking.
"Pink is for embarrassment," she explained.
"I'm not embarrassed."
"You should be. We both should be. Look at us."
They looked ridiculous. Like kindergarten art projects. Like medical diagrams drawn by someone who'd never seen a body.
Her neighbor brought food on day two, left it on the porch, backed away like they had something catching.
"She thinks it's a breakdown," Miriam said, eating lasagna cold with her fingers.
"Is it?"
"Everything's a breakdown if you look close enough."
Back in Lubec, the dots had smeared into orange smudges. When he peeled them off, they left perfect circles of cleaner skin, like inverse bruises or spots where something had protected him from himself. David reapplied them. Different spots now—the body changed, or maybe he was just running out of unmarked skin.
Carol watched him putting new ones on at 5 AM, standing in his boxers in the kitchen.
"You're going to run out of space," she said.
"Miriam in New Zealand started using her face."
"Jesus."
"She says it's just more real estate."
Carol held out her hand. The one that shook since the accident with the logging truck. "Give me one."
He gave her orange. She stuck it on the back of her hand, studied it.
"Now I look stupid too," she said.
"Welcome."
A week later she had five dots. Then twelve. Stopped at thirteen because that felt like enough, she said.
Dale noticed at work. "You're spreading."
"Yeah."
"Like a rash."
"Yeah."
"My wife does crosswords but only fills in the across clues. Never the down ones. Says it helps her brain. Makes no goddamn sense but she stopped crying at insurance commercials, so."
Jeremy's newsletter that month had the subject line "Global Brightness Update." There were forty-three people doing dots now. Someone in Tokyo was using gold stars. Someone in Detroit was using actual paint, which seemed to defeat the purpose but whatever.
David stood in the mirror counting. Hundred and thirty-something dots. He looked like a disease or maybe the cure for one.
Miriam texted: "Started on my face. Chin and forehead so far. Saving cheeks for something special."
He put one on his jaw. Right where Bobby Mackenzie had punched him in sixth grade for reading during recess. The orange made him look like he had a glowing zit.
"You look like you're on clearance," Carol said at breakfast. "Marked down for quick sale."
"Mom would have said the same thing."
"Mom would have said worse."
They ate eggs in silence. Outside, Lubec was doing what it did—existing despite everything suggesting it shouldn't.
The dot on his jaw caught the light from the window.
In the right light. Or the wrong light.
Didn't matter.
