It began innocently enough. A man from El Salvador was tortured by fire. A man from Haiti fell from the sky in a big red weather balloon. A homeless woman in Santa Monica was run down by a Rolls. A twelve-year-old New Jersey boy died of leukemia. When Misha worked in television news, she became so overwhelmed with the sadness of the world that she wept in front of the cameras.

Exactly sixty-three days ago, thirty days after she lost her job for weeping, Misha began collecting tragedies like baseball cards.

She wrote the tragedies down, wrapped them in tiny Ziplock bags, and slipped the plastic packages into small jars of rose water, which she then placed on the mantelpiece under a painting of God. She surrounded her bottled tragedies with bouquets of wild sage she found on nearby mountaintops. She gave each bottle a name she had borrowed from the Bible: Peter for El Salvador; Paul for the man from Haiti; Mary for the woman run down; Matthew for the boy in New Jersey. On Saturdays she burned the sage and cooked turkeys for the dead, malnourished, exploited, and unemployed.

For every sadness that Misha bottled, a red spot appeared on her skin. In places where it had been white and smooth, small explosions erupted in peculiar patterns. One morning she examined her body in a mirror and saw that her spots held shapes, as if foreign countries had imprinted themselves on her breasts, her belly, her wrists, her ankles, the inner parts of her thighs.

“My arm looks like Germany before the war,” she told a doctor in the city. “And, look, there, down on my ankle, that is Vietnam, and here on the back of my neck, that is Nicaragua, and over here on my forehead, those bumps that you see are the Himalayas. And what about this on my wrist, it looks like Japan. But tell me, I’m concerned about the mountains. Are there mountains you know to be having trouble, political or otherwise?”

The doctor didn’t think much of Misha and her suffering continents of skin, but Misha became convinced of something then: she was sadder beyond what she imagined sadness could be.

“Look at my tongue,” she said, sticking it out. “Isn’t that Bangladesh?”

“You have hives,” the doctor said.

“But how do you know they are hives and not something else?”

“I’m a dermatologist.”

Oh, she thought.

I collect tragedies in bottles and on my skin.

There was a night not too long ago. After the moon had gone away, Misha was left watching her television tragedies with a medium-size dog who wore an expression that always seemed to say this: I am perplexed by the state of the world and where I fi t in it. I am a little nervous about it all, too.

That night, when Misha saw people’s pictures on the news, her imagination flooded with their long faces and sad eyes. To make matters worse, she was homesick for snow, and it seemed to be snowing everywhere but where she was. It was snowing in New York, and in Moscow, and in places like that.

The news had been particularly stressful. A Hmong woman from Laos killed her five-year-old daughter and then jumped off a bridge onto the Hollywood Freeway. Misha bottled the woman and her daughter and placed them near the other recycled mustard and ketchup containers she had collected for Indochina. She reviewed her index cards on the issue but found only a question.

The question was this:

If you kill one million people in fi ve years, how many people are killed each hour, assuming the killers work a typical eight-hour day, Monday through Friday, with no time for lunch?

Misha named the woman Gloria and wrote down what she remembered from the news: the woman lived in North Hollywood with her husband, Wangy, and her daughter, Sara. They were very happy to be out of Laos. The Communists were still murdering the Hmong and others in Laos. That is why, the news said, no one for the life of them could understand why Gloria would kill herself, given she was living the good life in L.A. Cause of death Misha wrote at the bottom of the index card: Gloria was sad. Her daughter was blind.

The news said Gloria had taken her daughter to a sandbox in a nearby park. They showed pictures of the park so people like Misha could get a sense of what Gloria saw those few moments before she shot her little girl in the head with a .38. The camera lingered on the sandbox and shook slightly in the hands of the television cameraman who held it. Misha noticed it was a public sandbox and thought she saw a decapitated Ninja Turtle and splatters of the child’s blood where the child must have fallen as she imagined how Gloria must have sat there thinking about how she would do anything to spare this child the pain of being blind in the world.

Then the camera moved across the park, climbed the fence at its edge, and looked out over the freeway just as Gloria must have done earlier that evening, carrying her dead little girl over one shoulder. Misha focused on the steady flow of traffic below, the dripping headlights painting long flashing lines in the blackness, with road reflectors glittering here and there as she imagined Gloria jumping off the bridge with her daughter in her arms, falling into the middle of the freeway, the traffic moving a steady stream of light all the way from Hollywood to the ocean, the lights unrelenting and lonely, the car engines purring steady, careful to stay in their lanes. They stopped for nothing. The dog groaned slightly as he rolled over, and Misha felt a large hot spot move into her belly. When she lifted her shirt, she saw a shape that resembled a leaning palm tree, a perfect island on her flesh that looked like Laos.

Lee Montgomery is the author of The Things Between Us: A Memoir. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is editorial director of Tin House Books and the executive editor of Tin House magazine.

photo credit: Gregory Zabilski