At the Edge of the Known World
2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Fiction
When the gods showed up—when the two of them puckered the sky like a cancerous breast, then split it apart, descending halfway between my house and Connecticut—I felt a familiar confusion. It was how I’d felt on 9/11, when I was fifteen-almost-sixteen, my junior year of high school. Was this actually a big deal? Would this actually change the world? Or was this more like when everyone said that Blu-Ray disks were the media of the future? Or—to put it back in terms of 9/11—how big was the plane, anyway?
My sister was over with her two younger kids, in my little house on the harbor. Well, I mean, it was a little house on the harbor with a squirrel scratching in the attic, but I’m humblebragging: I lived at the Lab. It had taken years, but something else you should know about me is that I am only good at one thing at a time, and for the past two decades that one thing has been studying pancreatic cell growth. In the decade before that it had been going on a diet, and in the decade before that it had been ballet. My arched feet made it into American Girl magazine. Now I am sort of fat. Our kids were inside playing together, because my sister, unlike me, is good at more than one thing at the same time; unlike me, she is a good mom.
We are both terrible wives.
“I guess they wanted to come to the edge of the known world,” I said, looking up at the gods. The thick one looked like a postdoc; the other one had the air of a PI.
Kate was more practical than me. “Or they’re here for the retrovirus conference?”
“Just in time for the lobster dinner,” I said.
And at first that’s where the two gods seemed to be going: in the direction of the lobster dinner. We were on my front steps, and reflexively I glanced in the direction of the beach, where the visiting researchers congregated, looking for horseshoe crabs and secretly hoping to spot James Watson, who still lived at the Lab. But then the gods turned and looped back to us.
The one that looked like a postdoc extended his hand. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Simon.”
“Uh huh,” I said, my hand lost in his grip. My life is full of magical things. Cells that reproduce infinitely, stolen from a woman with cervical cancer a hundred years ago. My favorite sculpture, outside of Dolan Hall, showing the birth of a B-lymphocyte stimulator protein. The Waltz of the Peptides. And Kate and I somehow not hating each other anymore: that was magic too. I knew he was Thor.
“I’m sorry to bother you—” said Thor. He didn’t look sorry at all. He looked like we should be happy that he was talking to us. The PI, Loki, stood behind him, transforming. The clouds moved across his face and as they did, he shifted from a horse to a woman to himself to a giant to Death to a salmon. I wanted to fuck him. Thor continued. “Do you know where we can find Blackford Hall?”
“The bar?” I asked. “You’re looking for the bar.”
“We’re here for the conference,” said Loki.
“Uh huh.” He loved lying. “Are you going to kill Watson or something?” I turned to Kate.
“Aren’t the gods always trying to kill the older gods or something?”
Kate brightened. “Please kill Watson,” she said. “I can point his house out to you.”
Watson was literally the worst. I was just about to explain to Thor and Loki that Watson was the human equivalent of a poisonous mushroom: his mycelial network, invisible to the human eye, threaded underground throughout the Lab. They’d have to do more than chop his head off. But just then, one of our kids inside screamed.
It was mine who came out. “Jefferson won’t stop touching my Legos.”
Jefferson followed. “I want to play with it.”
“You okay, sweetie?” Kate asked Jefferson. “You look upset.”
“C’mon,” I said to my kid, Teddy. He sat on my lap and leaned into me. The parenting books all said to name the feelings, but I had no idea what Teddy was feeling, the world of five-year-olds being foreign to me. Was “pissed off” a feeling that you were supposed to teach your kid to name? And so—bad mom that I was—I didn’t say anything, just smelled his hair and started grooming him. Kate gave Jefferson a kiss and he went back inside.
Loki cleared his throat. “We’re on our way from this—” he searched for the word, “conference to another conference. We’re stopping over, ironing out a few details before we move on.”
Teddy leaped to his feet. “What does that mean? Ironing out?”
We didn’t have an iron. Like I said: I am a terrible wife.
Thor knelt down on one knee. “It means that my friend and I have some questions to answer before we go on to our next place.”
“How do you spell it?”
“You’ll need either Lab ID or conference ID to get into Blackford Hall,” I said, ignoring Teddy and his incessant need to learn how every word was spelled. I’d already bought him a children’s dictionary and he faithfully copied the whole thing in his incorrect pencil grip. Kate tried to shoot me a glance; she’d been hinting strongly about delays in social communication and gross motor delays and fine motor delays and an abysmal score on something called the M-CHAT.
“Then we will drink here,” declared Thor, looking at me and Kate. God, who would ever fuck Thor? He looked like a refrigerator.
“Is it spelled I-U-R-N?”
“No, sweetie,” said Kate. “I-R-O-N.”
“I-R-O-N,” Teddy repeated. “I-R-O-N. I-R-O-N.” He went back into the house.
“You can have a beer,” I lied, “if you promise to kill Watson.”
“He’s never going to die,” said Kate. “You gods are our only hope.”
Loki and Thor looked at each other and started murmuring in low Icelandic tones. I leaned my head on Kate’s shoulder. Friday afternoons were for this: no nannies, no afterschool, just the promise and dread of a weekend and the ease of another mother to mother with. We mothered each other. We mothered each other’s children. We mothered our mother, who only remembered us sometimes.
Loki turned back to us. “If you show us the home of Watson, we will visit him and learn the tales of his deeds and misdeeds.” Loki’s robes were embroidered with golden-threaded DNA, the structure that Watson, with Crick, had discovered, or stolen, the pattern that freckled the grounds of the Lab. DNA statues, DNA photographs, ladders that always stopped too soon, before they reached the sky. On Loki, they never ended.
Kate shrugged my head off her shoulder. “We’re just kidding,” she said. “Please don’t murder him.”
“I’m not kidding,” I said.
“Annie, please.”
Thor looked relieved. “He’s very old.”
I hated when other people were right.
“And he’s not in good health,” Thor continued.
“I know,” I grumbled.
“Death comes for all of us, whether by the gates of Valhalla, or—”
“Oh my god.” I rolled my eyes. “This is why the MAGA-ts are in love with you two.”
“The maggots?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. She stood and pointed. “You’ll need your conference ID for Blackford Hall. If you go to Grace Auditorium, near 25A, and go downstairs, kind of near the gift shop, they should be able to print your ID there.”
Loki bowed low. “What we need is a drink.”
I shrugged. Now they’d know my lie. “We don’t have any alcohol in the house.”
Thor looked surprised. It registered on his face like a refrigerator door opening: a lifting, cold, humming. “No mead for travelers.”
“I can try to sneak you into the farewell reception? They always serve wine and lobster for the last night.” There was a side door near the bottom level of the cafeteria. I tilted my head, examining him. “No, you’re too conspicuous.”
Teddy was apparently right inside the door. “What’s conspicuous? How do you spell it?”
“If no mead is to be found here, I’ll make mead.” Thor reached up to the sky and pulled down the cloud that he and Loki had ridden in on. It was damp; he pulled and pulled with his fingers until the condensation became fibrous, and then he knitted the fibers with his fingers. Loki, the first inventor of a net, looked pleased. The two men knotted the net between their fingers and together, pulling, until one drop of sunlight squeezed out into—
“Conspicuous.” Teddy had found his dictionary. He marched outside. “C-O-N-S-P—”
“Teddy? Teddy honey?” I turned. “Can you go back inside, please?”
He dropped the dictionary onto my lap with a thud, and the mead shimmered, then disappeared. Thor looked pissed. Loki, again, looked pleased. “Why?” asked Teddy.
“Yes,” said Loki. “Why?”
“Why what?” I said it to Teddy, not Loki.
“Why do I have to go inside?”
“We’re doing grown-up stuff,” I said.
“What grown-up stuff?” He sniffed around like a German shepherd at an airport.
“Nothing. Never mind,” I backtracked.
“I want to see the grown-up stuff.”
Kate saved me. “I heard you have grown-up stuff inside,” she said to Teddy.
“Oh, yeah! Mommy, come see what I made.”
“Fine. Kate, you good out here?”
She brushed her long grey hair out of her face. “All good!”
Inside, I stepped over a number of sculptures made of tiny hard plastic parts and one toddler, Jefferson’s little sister, who was eating a bag of fruit snacks. “We made a booby trap,” Teddy explained. “We got Francie.”
Francie looked up at me, a yellow fruit snack caught in her curls. “Hi.”
“Hi!” Francie was very cute. Should I try to get the fruit snack out of her hair? It looked … sticky. Outside, Loki was whispering to Kate as they watched Thor’s mead shimmer. She was laughing. Loki looked like he wanted to eat her, his big mouth open wide, his scarred lips another kind of net. Maybe the fruit snack would fall out on its own.
“Francie is in the trap,” Teddy explained. “I have to poop.”
“You go poop,” I said, sitting down at the sofa that looked out the window. I knew how this story goes. Kate eats the fruit, or sucks the marrow from the bone, or drinks the mead, and for that, she’s punished. Eve banished to the wilderness, Persephone to the underworld, Thialfi, hungry boy, enslaved to Thor and Loki, though it always felt to me that Loki wanted not a bondservant but a lover. “Don’t drink the mead!” I yelled out the window.
“I won’t!” she yelled back, even though we were only like three feet away from each other.
And then there’s this story: the gods appear as strangers, as hungry travelers, and they’re fed. The hosts become trees, or saints, or angels. What would my reward be? I listened to the attic squirrel scratching above me. Teddy burst out of the bathroom, flapping his wet hands. “I pooped!” he said.
“Good job!” You weren’t supposed to say good job to your kid because it would make them… I couldn’t remember the reasoning. I tried again. “You worked really hard on that poop!”
“You pooped!” Francie repeated, and dropped the wrapper on the floor.
“Don’t leave your trap,” Teddy ordered Francie, then raced upstairs to Jefferson.
Francie and I looked at each other. Third-born, she seemed content to be in her trap full of another kid’s toys—truly, the best toys of all.
I wondered what to offer the gods, who wanted mead, and maybe wanted my sister. I would prefer not to offer them my first-born and only son, Teddy. Jefferson and Francie weren’t really mine to offer. Even the house wasn’t mine; it was the Lab’s. And Francie had eaten all the fruit snacks. I went back outside to the adults. Loki was telling Kate about his lab, how he played the violin for his cells, which grew in dishes overlooking the fjord. Thor was trying to get a word in about infectious disease and the difference between a treatment and a cure.
The words multiplied and multiplied like the knowledge in the world. Thor stopped for breath, then dove back in. “You live here, at the edge of the known world.”
“Oh,” said Kate. “He’s here.” She opened the door of my yellow house and James Watson tottered out, led by Jefferson. Teddy stayed back, taking grim shelter behind the trap he’d made for Francie and eyeing us. Francie didn’t notice. She was trying to put a Lego inside her shoe.
“I found him in the attic,” said Jefferson. “He was scratching loud.”
“I found him!” yelled Teddy. “The sound was hurting my ears.”
The front of Watson’s pants was dark with urine. He stooped, his hands drawn into his chest, his fingernails torn. I was afraid that if he sat down on the step he wouldn’t be able to get back up. I looked for Thor and Loki for guidance, but I blinked and they were gone; I blinked again and they reappeared, jaws twisted in surprise at the presence of age.
Kate looped her arm through Watson’s and I stood and looped my arm through the other arm. I could feel his bones. His clothes hung off of him. “How long have you been in the attic?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I didn’t trust Thor and Loki to watch the kids in the house. I didn’t trust Thor and Loki to bring Watson to his house. I didn’t trust Thor and Loki with anything. So Teddy, for probably the first time in his life, listened to me and brought me my phone from inside. We called 911, and soon the EMTs folded Watson gently into a patient transport chair, and then into the back of the ambulance. The doors closed as though he was swallowed into the belly of a great whale.
Thor and Loki hung back, then followed the ambulance, walking slowly, but somehow at the same pace that the ambulance drove.
That night, the attic was quiet. Who knows how long Watson had been scratching around up there?
The squirrel Ratatoskr runs up and down the world-tree, just as Teddy and Jefferson sprint up and down the stairs carrying Legos and books and the words tumbling from their mouths.
The gods aren’t good or bad. They just are.
I tried to go to sleep in the silence, but whenever I closed my eyes I saw a bloodied Odin handing over his own eye for knowledge, or a piss-soaked Watson. Neither made it easy to fall asleep. Finally I slithered out of bed and walked down to the harbor. The night air was cool, and the trees were quiet. Over in Blackford Hall, the retrovirus researchers were drinking in the basement. The way DNA unzips and recombines; the ladders Watson climbed. I wondered how Thor and Loki liked their lobsters.
I sat down on the rack line. A horseshoe crab glided in the shallow water. He’d swum since before people, before gods, before even the continent that I was on the edge of.
I could see the glaciers that had dug out this harbor, the glaciers that had built this island, and they flooded me with their cold milk. Up above, the sky was whole. Healed. I pressed my fingers to my c-section scar. I thought of one-eyed Odin, drinking from the well at the base of the world-tree, and of course I thought of Eve, eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Francie had sat on my lap while Kate cut the fruit snack out of her hair, and then Francie had cried when we said she wasn’t allowed to eat it because it was dirty. Teddy had opened up the dictionary and tried to explain germ theory to Francie. He was probably going to spend his whole life explaining things that no one asked him to explain. I wondered if, to our children, we were the gods, and I kneeled down and drank from the harbor at the edge of the known world.
About the Author
Monica Wendel is Professor of Composition and Creative Writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College. She earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she held Goldwater and Starworks teaching fellowships. Her writing has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, Ploughshares, and other journals.